Trust (94 page)

Of course none of this can be construed as Jamesian. Perhaps, after all, such passages carry, rather, the spirit of Ecclesiastes (or, as some may say, the Book of Fustian). In any case,
Trust
in its voraciousness went everywhere. It went into verses and puns; its population proliferated—lawyers, editors, diplomats, nannies, colonels, schoolgirls; it grew limbs of metaphor and Medusa-heads of dialogue; it wandered toward the lyrical-mystical in an apostrophe to a tree. It set out, in raw competitiveness, to rival the burgeoning sexual openness of the late fifties—and also to deride, twenty years in advance of it, William Gass's 1976 dictum that women "lack that blood-congested genital drive" that is at the root of style. An early reviewer, writing not in unstinting praise, nevertheless acknowledged "evidence of extraordinary ambition in the scope of the novel," and remarked that "the long visionary account of the love-making between the heroine's father and a young woman surpasses anything Mailer has ever done, indeed is managed with the ingenuity and resourcefulness of a French cineaste." To be fair, this same reviewer "frankly confessed] that the novel gave me little pleasure."

Recently I reread—for the first time since high school—William Dean Howells's
The Rise of Silas Lapham.
Here was a novel that gave me great pleasure: the prose plain and direct, the characters lifelike, engaging, trustworthy, the plotting realistically plausible and gratifyingly suspenseful. All the same, when you compare Howells with James, the disparity of mind and sensibility—what each man aspired to, or could attain—arouses a perplexity. How could these two have been, as they were, literary companions? Howells occupies a few well-spent hours; James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life. That seizure, I suppose, points to the kind of ambition I fastened on in my twenties. In those years my hungriest uncle (hungry in every sense: one of five, he was the only one who attempted to feed his family by means of his pen) was still living: he was a poet. Matchless in three languages, he chose to make his mark in Hebrew. His poetry was complex, imbricated, visionary, hugely erudite, with, here and there, noble biblical resonances and classical turns that recalled, to an eminent literary critic, Milton and Shelley. Some of my uncle's work he himself rendered into English; but when any eagerly willing translator approached him, he drove the hapless volunteer off with arrogant scorn; he recognized no peer; he had a consciousness of anointment. I will wait, he announced,
a thousand years
for the right translator! Today my uncle is unknown; his life's achievement is in blackest eclipse.

That superannuated consciousness of anointment is also in eclipse—to speak of it now is likely to induce derision. But surely Joyce had it, unalloyed, in writing
Ulysses,
and particularly in the esoteric labors of
Finnegans Wake;
and James had it, shadowed in his final years by the failure of his New York Edition, designed to consolidate his stature; and among contemporary American writers it can be descried in Updike, Roth, and Bellow—all of whom began in the penumbra of nineteenth-century literary ambition, which has long masqueraded as Modernism.

Trust
was written in that same penumbra, with that same consciousness of anointment, though its obscure fate, despite a handful of paperback reissues over the years, mostly resembles that of my uncle's grandly bedizened stanzas. Nearly forty years have passed since my first novel first saw print. Perhaps my style has grown plainer as I have grown older; perhaps not. But surely I have acquiesced in the alterations of the common literary culture.

And here it is needful to recall a hiatus—a cut that fell like an ax. Sometime in the seventies, the old ambition was routed by an invader called the
nouvelle vague.
Its name was French because its inventors and original practitioners were French: most prominently, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Their idea of the novel turned out to be nothing more than a fad, a brutalizing one, touted by a few influential American critics writing in advanced periodicals with the intention of shaming the traditional novel out of existence. I cannot now reconstruct or characterize this "new wave," except out of a wash of ebbing memory. It was icily detached; it was "objective" and unsentimental; it cared more for space and time than for stories or souls; its bloodless aesthetics was minutely deadpan; its dialogue tended to be expressed in arid aperçus; often it read like a stilted translation of Roland Barthes. And finally it was repudiated by its chief American promulgator, who, as if by imperial fiat, rehabilitated what had been, as if by imperial fiat, imposed. For fiction writers who resisted being drawn into the tide of literary pronouncements from above (or who were temperamentally alien to it), it was an enervating and marginalizing season.

Ephemeral though they were, these new pieties and prescriptions did throw a light on the nature of the old ambition. The
nouvelle vague
arrived as an extension of cultural power by a coterie of celebrated literary figures determined to wield it. The introduction of literary philosophies from abroad aimed to force an avant-garde: those who declined to follow were dismissed as either obsolete or mediocre. As God had been declared dead by certain theologians, so now was the novel—the novel as it had been understood and illumined from, say, Tolstoy to E. M. Forster, or from Virginia Woolf to Faulkner; or, in any event, before Robbe-Grillet. But the old ambition of the penumbra had been hammered out of the self, bare of any desire for social or cultural hegemony. It asserted its conviction of hard-won ownership, from which derived its authority; but it was the authority of innerness, of interior powers wrested out of language itself. By contrast, it was critical will alone that fueled the
nouvelle vague.
The novels of its fashionable American disciples were critics' novels. No one can say that they died with a whimper—even a whimper requires a pulse.

If I press on in homage to the old ambition, I intend more than praise for writers' limitless appetite. I am thinking of readers. Here, then, is a very long paragraph, written in 1909:

I was returning home by the fields. It was midsummer; the hay harvest was over, and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of flowers—red, white and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white oxeye daisies with their bright yellow centers and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms, tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow, red and pink scabious; plantains with faintly scented, neatly arranged purple, slightly pink-tinged blossoms; cornflowers, bright blue in the sunshine and while still young, but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate quickly withering almond-scented dodder flowers. I gathered a large nosegay of these different flowers, and was going home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a beautiful thistle plant of the crimson kind, which in our neighborhood they call "Tartar," and carefully avoid when mowing—and if they do happen to cut it down, throw out from among the grass from fear of pricking their hands. Thinking to pick this thistle and put it in the center of my nosegay, I climbed down into the ditch, and, after driving away a velvety humble-bee that had penetrated deep into one of the flowers and ...

But the paragraph, though it goes on well beyond this, must be interrupted. It is the start of Tolstoy's
Hadji Murad,
in Aylmer Maude's translation. (My uncle's poetry was composed rather in this vein.) I interrupt the paragraph for two reasons—first, because of what must appear to be gargantuan hubris: what is a passage from Tolstoy, the pinnacle of all novelists, doing here, in these ruminations on an emphatically inconspicuous work by an emphatically unnoticed young writer holed up almost half a century ago in a little house at the farthest margin of the Bronx? It is precisely for the sake of hubris that it is here. Without it, how can I lay out the untamed lustful graspingness, the secret tough-hearted avarice, of the old ambition?

More than twenty years ago, in an essay called "The Lesson of the Master," I bitterly excoriated that ambition:

The true Lesson of the Master, then, is, simply, never to venerate what is complete, burnished, whole, in its grand organic flowering or finish—never to look toward the admirable and dazzling end; never to be ravished by the goal; never to worship ripe Art or the ripened artist; but instead to seek to be young while young, primitive while primitive, ungainly while ungainly—to look for crudeness and rudeness, to husband one's own stupidity or ungenius.

There
is
this mixup most of us have between ourselves and what we admire or triumphantly cherish. We see this mixup, this mishap, this mishmash, most often in writers: the writer of a new generation ravished by the genius writer of a classical generation, who begins to dream herself, or himself, as powerful, vigorous and original—as if being filled up by the genius writer's images, scenes, and stratagems were the same as having the capacity to pull off the identical magic. ...If I were twenty-two now, I would not undertake a cannibalistically ambitious Jamesian novel to begin with; I would look into the eyes of Henry James at twenty-two.... It is not to the Master in his fullness I would give my awed, stricken, desperate fealty, but to the faltering, imperfect, dreaming youth.

All this I now repudiate and recant. There is too much humility in it—and humility is for the aging, not for the young. Obsequiousness at any age is an ugly thing, and ugliest in that early time of youthful hope. At twenty-two one
ought
to be a literary voluptuary; one
ought
to cannibalize the world.

Hence my second reason for breaking off a luxuriant Tolstoyan scene. It is because of the contemporary reader's impatience. The old ambition had reflected back to it readers who were equally covetous—but as the old ambition has faded, so has readers' craving: recognizable bookish voluptuaries and print-cannibals are rare. Readers nowadays will hardly tolerate long blocks of print unbroken by dialogue or action, and if there are to be long blocks of print at all, they must be in familiar, speedy, colloquial, undemanding prose. Are cinema and television to blame? In part. Novelists have learned much from visual technology, especially the skill of rapid juxtaposition. But film itself is heir to the more contemplative old ambition: what else is "panning," whether of a landscape or a human face? When film is on occasion gazeful, meticulous, attentive to the silent naming of things seen, its debt to the word is keenest.

Then exaltations and panegyrics for the altar and the sibyl! For consciousness of anointment (however mistaken or futile), for self-belief subversive of commerce (or call it arrogance defeated by commerce); and for
spectacle, dominion, energy and honor
—a glorifying phrase pinched from
Trust.
It was the novel of my prime; I will never again write with so hubristic a passion. It marked the crest of life, the old ambition's deepest bite—before doubt and diffidence set in, and the erosion of confidence, and the diminution of nerve. My loyalty to my first novel continues undiminished. If, in 1966, it gave no pleasure to a reviewer (except for the sex chapter), never mind. For the real right reader I am willing to wait a thousand years!—because it is not so much the novel that takes my praise as that archaic penumbra, that bottomless lordly overbearing ambition of long ago. Ambition as it once was.

Let Enoch Vand, chanting his imperious aphorisms in Chapter 22, speak for the author of
Trust
in her twenties, and a little beyond:

To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life.
There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces.
Who squanders talent praises death.

I was never again so heedlessly brave.

C
YNTHIA
O
ZICK
is one of America's most prominent women of letters. Acclaimed for her many works of fiction and criticism, she is the author, most recently, of the novel
Heir to the Glimmering World.
Ozick was a finalist for the National Book Award for her novel
The Puttermesser Papers,
which was named one of the top ten books of the year by the
New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly,
and the
Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Her essay collection
Quarrel & Quandary
received the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many other accolades are a Lannan Foundation Award for fiction and four O. Henry Prizes for the short story. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Westchester County, New York.