For a Jew to say that is like saying to be a Jew is to be condemned.
That’s right. That’s as much as to say the West has nothing to offer Jews. But I wasn’t considering that question when I wrote the book. I wasn’t thinking about it at all. There’s no shadow of it in Augie March. It was later, when I myself went to Auschwitz in 1959, that the Holocaust landed its full weight on me. I never considered it a duty to write about the fate of the Jews. I didn’t need to make that my obligation. I felt no obligation except to write what I was really moved to write. It is nevertheless quite extraordinary that I was still so absorbed by my American life that I couldn’t turn away from it. I wasn’t ready to think about Jewish history. I don’t know why. There it is.
Perhaps your mind didn’t want to be limited.
Perhaps. At the same time, I can’t interpret it creditably to myself. I’m still wondering at it. I lost close relatives.
Perhaps such things can only become central at an appropriate time. The time wasn’t yet.
Yes, but even then, what would writing about it have altered? You wouldn’t know when you’re reading Kafka’s letters that a world war was raging in France and in the East. There’s no mention of war in Ulysses, which was written in the worst hours of World War I. Proust took it in, but that’s because Proust accepted his assignment as a historian of French life. He knew how to combine the aesthetic question with the historical one. This doesn’t often happen. Very few writers are able to keep the balance, because they feel they have to create a special aesthetic condition for themselves, which allows only as much present actuality as they can reconcile with their art. So Proust was not destroyed by the Dreyfus case and the war; he mastered them aesthetically. A great thing.
You said the Holocaust was missing. What else do you feel was missing in your formation?
Somehow I managed to miss the significance of some very great events. I didn’t take hold of them as I now see I might have done. Not until The Bellarosa Connection. So I have lived long enough to satisfy a few neglected demands.
A Second Half Life
(1991)
Bostonia magazine, January / February 1991.
[We left you in New York. We pick you up at Princeton. What part does the academy play in your life?]
At first Princeton was a relief from hack writing. I was supporting a wife and a small child. I took a few jobs at NYU, teaching evening courses in creative writing and literature. This was an amusing interlude. I was living in Queens then, and I was glad of the opportunity to bum around in the streets near Washington Square. The Village was jumping at the time. The jumpers who attracted me were Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Rosenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, William Barrett.
So the intellectual life in New York is where we were…
Entrenched? I wasn’t entrenched.
And you just got into the Partisan Review office. The critics were taking over and…
Oh, they were well entrenched.
Why is that?
The critics, the “thinkers,” were the organizers and promoters. Partisan Review in those days brought current European intellectual life to literate Americans and the university public. Rahv and Phillips were successful entrepreneurs in this line. As well as they could, they followed the example of The Dial, a magazine with a much higher literary standard. Of course, The Dial took little interest in the political crises of the twenties. The people attracted by Partisan Review were radicals who had been associated until the mid-thirties with the communist movement. They had literary tastes. They were, however, operators. Naturally, they cleaned up on both sides of the Atlantic. But they also performed an important cultural service here.
The European stars of those decades were glad to contribute to an American magazine: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, T. S. Eliot, Ignazio Silone, André Malraux, et al. If you were an American, a putative writer, you were lucky to be published in Partisan Review. You appeared in very good company. It was terribly exciting for a boy of twenty-three or -four, who had only seen Eliot, Silone, and André Gide on library tables. During the Spanish Civil War, even Picasso appeared in Partisan Review. Mighty exciting to sophomoric Midwesterners.
Whence came the despite of what neither of us likes to call the “creative” figure? What turned people against creation, against literature?
Well, the editors were interested in creative figures only insofar as they had some political interest. Partisan Review wanted the political glamour that surrounded these writers.
Did they think that you were a potential political figure?
They thought that I was a kid from the sticks, from Chicago, who showed some promise and might develop into something. They were very encouraging, especially Philip Rahv. I don’t think William Phillips had high expectations.
Was Dangling Man the first manuscript of fiction that they had of yours?
No. I had published some things earlier in PR. Sketches…
So you became one of their stable….
Yes, a young highbrow Midwestern Jew.
Did you enjoy your first serious teaching?
By “serious” do you refer to my year of teaching at Princeton? I met my classes and taught my pupils. Some of them seemed likable. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the Ivy League. I was curious about it. I had heard of these Ivy-college compounds for class and privilege. I didn’t assume a posture of slum-bred disaffection. Princeton was partly entertaining, partly touching, partly a scene of gloomy bravado. The Fitzgeraldian boozing was not associated with literary distinction. Except in the case of John Berryman, whose talent was genuine and powerful. Booze was not a primer of geniuses. Delmore became my friend there. R. P. Blackmur was and was not around. He was absent for most of that year. I never got to know him at all well. I observed that he liked to have an entourage sitting on the floor listening to his labyrinthine muttered monologues. I listed him as a brilliant court-holder.
Many people were attracted by the gathering of intellectuals and writers at Princeton in 1952. Ted Roethke turned up, and Ralph Ellison came down regularly to attend our parties. I had reviewed Ralph’s lavisele Man for Commentary in 1949 or ’50, but Ralph was not entirely satisfied with my highly favorable review. He complained gently that I had failed to find the mythic substructure of his novel. I took Ralph very seriously. He had the subject, the rhetoric—all the gifts.
I lived in Princeton with a man named Thomas Riggs, an assistant professor of English, whom I loved dearly. He was a heavy drinker—multiple personal defeats, a despairing character. He died in the next year—the year following—when I was no longer at Princeton. I was laid low by his death—by the circumstances of his life, leading to his death. I knew him well. In his big Princeton flat, he threw open-house parties in the old-fashioned Greenwich Village style. People in large numbers tramped in and out, noisily eating and drinking and smoking, looking for useful contacts, gabbing, putting on the make. R.W.B. Lewis lived across the hall from Riggs. In Riggs’s apartment I slept on a cot, stuffed bookcases towering over me.
Edmund Wilson was absolutely delighted by this Village revival; he adored Riggs’s parties. Wilson was wonderful, if you could interest him. If you failed to interest, you didn’t exist. You were wiped out—nothing. He was always in pursuit of particular items of knowledge. When he discovered that I knew some Hebrew, he was enthusiastic. He would come to my office with hard texts. And when I was stumped and said that I needed a Hebrew dictionary, he was off and away. He was a bit like Mr. Magoo. I don’t mean that he was literally shortsighted, but he had eyes only for what was useful in his projects. He also had the same gruff Magoo strained way of speaking. Partly colloquial, partly highbrow.
Was he the representative intellectual for those times?
He ranked very high. Aspirants like me were usually put down in those circles. But those who had made it stood very high. Like Matthew Arnold on Shakespeare: “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” Certain people were above criticis
m, like Wilson. Meyer Schapiro was another unchallenged eminence. Sidney Hook too, though Sidney confined himself entirely to politics. No literature for Sidney Hook. Lionel Trilling, in those days, carried himself like an Olympian. That was beautifully done. And you wanted to be one of those people no one could lay a glove on. Some managed to arrange this. Wilson was one who did not. He didn’t have to.
Were you one of the unassailables?
Me? Oh, no! I was boundlessly assailable!
But not often assailed.
I made no great impression on the Partisan Review heavy hitters.
Not all of the people were really seriously at work, were they?
Schwartz was and Berryman was. William Barrett was mastering existentialism—about to begin his book on the subject. In the early fifties, Berryman was writing the Bradstreet poem. I was finishing The Adventures of Augie March.
Where had the writing of that started?
I began it in Paris, on the Guggenheim grant. You leave the U.S.A. and from abroad you think of nothing else. I wrote in Paris, and later in Rome, at the Casino Valadier, in the Borghese Gardens. I went every morning with a notebook, drank Roman coffee, and poured out the words. Around noon, my friend Paolo Milano would appear—would mosey up. We’d go down to the Caffè Greco for more coffee.
Did you stay in Princeton?
I went up to New York as often as I could. I had an apartment in Forest Hills and kept a room in MacDougal Alley. In those days you could rent one for three or four dollars a week.
You must have felt on writing Augie that you were on some quite major departure.
I knew it was major for me. I couldn’t judge what it might be for anybody else. What I found was the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language. My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance. What you find in the best English writing of the twentieth century—in Joyce or E. E. Cummings. Street language combined with a high style. I don’t today take rhetorical effects so seriously, but at the time I was driven by a passion to invent.
I felt that American writing had enslaved itself without sufficient reason to English models—everybody trying to meet the dominant English standard. This was undoubtedly a very good thing, but not for me. It meant that one’s own habits of speech, daily speech, had to be abandoned. Leading the “correct” grammatical forces was The New Yorker. I used to say about Shawn that at The New Yorker he had traded the Talmud for Fowler’s Modern English Usage. … I’d like to mention, before we leave the subject of Princeton, that in 1952 Bill Arrowsmith was there, finishing his degree in Classics. I was very happy in his company. I had met him in Minneapolis when he was a GI studying Japanese. He’s even splendider now than he had been then.
This use of language you were talking about in Augie … It always seemed an inner necessity.
Paris in 1948 was a good year for this grisaille. Paris was depressed; I was depressed. I became aware that the book I had gone there to write had taken a stranglehold on me. Then I became aware one morning that I might break its grip, outwit depression, by writing about something for which I had a great deal of feeling—namely, life in Chicago as I had known it in my earliest years. And there was only one way to do that—reckless spontaneity.
Didn’t the book take off once you decided to do that?
It did. I took the opening I had found and immediately fell into an enthusiastic state. I began to write in all places, in all postures, at all times of the day and night. It rushed out of me. I was turned on like a hydrant in summer. The simile is not entirely satisfactory. Hydrants are not sexually excited. I was wildly excited.
Externally, I led the life of a good little bourgeois. Not that anybody was noticing. Once, I ran into Arthur Koestler on the boulevard Saint-Germain. I was leading my small son by the hand—Koestler and I had met briefly in Chicago. He said, “Is this your child?” I said, “Yes.” I was then reprimanded: a writer had no business to beget children. Hostages to fortune … the whole bit. I said, “Well, he’s here.” It wasn’t that I didn’t admire Koestler. I did. But he was as well furnished with platitudes as the next man, evidently.
The one thing that really shines out is your sheer prodigious energy.
I hadn’t read Blake then. I read him later. Coming upon “energy is delight,” I remembered how I had overcome the Parisian depression of 1948. That spoke to me.
When did it become fashionable that there should be an etiolation of this energy?
Writers in the 1950s arranged themselves, it seems to me, along the lines laid down by Yeats: the worst were full of passionate intensity. Such was the demand of history. Well, the Célines had the passionate intensity. The demonic figures on the right were all energy. The bien pensants were pallid. La vie quotidienne was something that prostrated and exhausted “good men,” “men of good will.” It put you in an honorific category to be able to display the ravages of this wasting disease of civilization. There was a nasty mournfulness in books written by the well-intentioned and the “ideologically correct” in the fifties. On the left, Sartre had great energy, but he was even more depressing than the bien pensants. I thought when he wrote his sponsoring essay on Frantz Fanon that Sartre was trying to do on the left what Céline had been doing on the right—Kill! Kill! Kill! With all his desperate outlawry, Sartre made me think of Peck’s Bad Boy.
Your inner nature is basically optimistic.
Well, what you call optimism may be nothing more than a mismanaged, misunderstood vitality.
We arrive at Annandale-on-Hudson and Bard College. A really curious place. It had already been celebrated in a novel by the then wife of a rather famous husband.
Mary McCarthy and The Groves of Academe. There was also Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, which I thought much more amusing. Mary was unquestionably a witty writer, but she had a taste for low sadism. She would brutally work over people it wasn’t really necessary to attack. She was by temperament combative and pugnacious. We were curious about her because she was, in her earlier years, a most beautiful woman, terribly attractive and apparently the repository of great sexual gifts. I never dreamed of sampling those—you might as well have been looking at sweets in Rumpelmayer’s window. They were there, but you didn’t want to eat them. I can remember her at Partisan Review parties. She was very elegant, the only elegant woman present. Her face was done up in a kind of porcelain makeup. Her look was dark—arched brows, a clear skin under the makeup. You’d run into her on the street, as Nicola Chiaromonte once told me he did. She was blooming, he said, and he asked, “Why are you looking so well, Mary?” She said, “I just finished a piece against So-and-so, and now I’m writing another, about such and such. Next, I’m going to tear You-know-who to pieces.” She was our tiger lady.
What brought you to Bard?
Princeton had only given me a one-year contract. I needed a place to lay my head. At the time, the Bard job sounded easy. Low pay, but the country air and pleasant surroundings would compensate me. I could entertain my little boy there—take him out of the city, keep him with me on holidays and long weekends. Much nicer than dragging him around to museums and zoos in New York. Nothing is more killing. To the divorced, the zoo can be a Via Crucis.
But then, I’ve had more metamorphoses than I can count. It was a time of plunging into things, attractive-looking things, which quickly became unattractive. I went through a period of psychiatry. Everybody was immersed in “personal” difficulties. Later, all this would fall away, and you would feel you’d squandered your time in “relationships” and that there was no way in which you could understand your contemporaries and their sexual or therapeutic ideas. Seeking stability, you hunted for clues, looked them over, cast them aside. I would read up on a subject, discard it, and try again. I let myself in for a course of Reichian the
rapy. Curious. A violent attack upon the physical symptoms of your character neuroses.
To what degree was Henderson under way then?
I started to write Henderson after I left Bard. I had bought a house in Tivoli, New York, a few miles north of Bard. I poured my life’s blood into that place: hammering and sawing, scraping and painting, digging and planting and weeding until I felt like a caretaker in my own cemetery. So that as I mowed the grass I would think: Here I will be buried by the fall. At this rate. Under that tree. But Bard wasn’t entirely a negative experience. I learned certain things there. Don’t forget I’d gone from an Ivy League environment to a progressive one, to Bard, where there were numerous castaways from ships that had foundered en route to Harvard or characters who had fallen from grace at Yale. Some of the faculty were still refining the airs they had acquired in the great Ivy League centers. Bard was like Greenwich-Village-in-the-Pines. The students came from small, wealthy New York families. Many of the kids were troubled, some were being psychoanalyzed. Then there were the “great” families of the locality. It was useful to get to know them. Not at first hand, because they wouldn’t invite me for drinks. Indirectly, however, I learned a lot about them.
My neighbors and acquaintances were Dick Rovere, Fred Dupee, Gore Vidal. My colleagues, some of them friends, were Keith Botsford, Ted Hoffman, made up to resemble a cocky Brechtian, and Tony Hecht. I loved the company of Heinrich Blücher. Occasionally I met his wife, Hannah Arendt, in New York, and she would set me straight about William Faulkner—tell me what I needed to know about American literature. I remember her in red dancing shoes.