Lyle is enthralled and anoints himself as a double agent, initiating contact with the CIA and urging the girl to connect him to the bombers. “I’m out,” he tells her. “Let it all come down. Don’t you think everybody, nearly, feels that way about their work, where they work all those years?” The bombers take him in with vague talk about plans to bomb the stock exchange. Or do they take him in? It feels like a play to Lyle. Is J. Kinnear, who may have had connections to Oswald, a terrorist? A double agent himself? And what of Marina Vilar and her brother? Did they really dynamite the embassy in Brussels? And Burks, is he CIA, or what?
Lyle feels intelligent conning everybody, but he doesn’t know exactly what they are talking about. Again.
Pammy, to rid herself of the stench of up-to-date boredom, flies off to the pure air of Maine with a pair of homosexuals, one of whom she makes her lover. Pammy has no more awareness of what’s going on in her life than Lyle has of his, but it’s a nice change in Maine, the sex is different, and the talk is amusing. It is certainly some shock when her lover immolates himself at the garbage dump, a simulated Buddhist monk, self-sacrificing in protest against the war this life wages against vulnerable people like himself. Pammy comes back to the city and discovers the meaning of the word “transient.”
When we last see Lyle he is in a motel in Canada with the girl who connected him to the terrorists. She is sleeping and he is propped up in bed beside her, awaiting a call from J. Kinnear as to his next move. He has joined the players in the play, he has undergone a transformation. DeLillo writes: “The propped figure … is barely recognizable as male. Shedding capabilities and traits by the second, he can still be described (but quickly) as well-formed, sentient and fair. We know nothing else about him.”
DeLillo is a spectacular talent, supremely witty and a natural storyteller. (He has written four other novels: Americana, his first; End Zone; Great Jones Street; and Ratner’s Star.) From his first book it was also clear that his control of the language was of a high order. The difference between that first book and the latest is what he leaves out. Players is half the size of Americana, but just as dense with implication of the meaning of the lives it presents to us.
Lyle and Pammy are hastily defined, sketches really. But unforgettable sketches, like Lautrec’s. How did they get the way they are? Who cares? There they are. Dig them. The entropy of bumblebees. And the flowers are all poison.
1977
Something Happened:
Joseph Heller’s Great Monologue
Joseph Heller’s new book is exhaustive and exhausting, a major contemporary novel. It maintains him in the first rank of American writers, in the niche he never abandoned after Catch-22, but which skeptics were denying him, thinking him a one-book phenomenon. It’s been thirteen years since Catch-22 was published, but it was a worthy gestation period if Something Happened is the result. If it had turned out to be a mediocre work, Heller would have been kicked to death by the grasshoppers. But he leaps over multiple heads, let’s name no names, primarily because of the scope of the new book and the endlessly fascinating monologue he puts into the mouth of his main character, a son-of-a-bitch named Bob Slocum, a contemporary corporate cipher, a man incapable of producing Something Happened or anything so meaningful, but out of whose mouth it all rolls. The book is 569 pages long. I was often bored and exasperated by it, the way we are bored by so many of our unpleasant friends. But I would have kept reading for as long as he kept talking, the way we keep listening to those same awful people spill out their trouble and bile. The fascination of the abominator.
Bob Slocum is no true friend of anybody’s. He is a woefully lost figure with a profound emptiness, a sad, absurd, vicious, grasping, climbing, womanizing, cowardly, sadistic, groveling, loving, yearning, anxious, fearful victim of the indecipherable, indescribable malady of being born human. Heller goes the Beckett route (the novels) in creating Slocum. The book is a monologue with remembered dialogue, almost static in terms of time, but with some progressions eventually. It reads like a self-analysis and memoir dictated nonstop over a few weeks, but it covers a longer, not quite definable span in which Slocum has a family disaster at about the same time he is promoted in his job and gets to do what he wants most to do in life: make a three-minute speech at the company’s convention in Puerto Rico. His former boss, Jack Green, vicious and sadistic but without Slocum’s redeeming weaknesses, has denied him the chance to make the speech in previous years. But when Slocum is promoted and succeeds his best friend in the company, Andy Kagle, whose lame leg Slocum wants to kick and whom he immediately betrays, he has power independent of Green’s and he makes his speech. Nobody remembers what he said.
The speech is the metaphor for everybody’s immediate, pressing but meaningless goal, the way the company is the framework for the society we live in, the way the combat group in Catch-22 was the framework of the war society. Heller is a big metaphor man.
Slocum has a sizable metaphorical family also, an aging, unlovable wife, an insecure and nasty sixteen-year-old daughter whose shins he wants to kick, an idiot son he is sick of and would like to unload, another son, aged nine, who is the principal joy of his life and whom he ruins by allowing the company’s values (get to the top, don’t give your money away, compete, compete) to smother the boy’s wondrously selfless and noncompetitive good nature.
Slocum also has a mother whom he refused to bring into his home when she got old and feeble (“You’re no good” were her last words to him), a father who died young and whom he yearns to have known, twenty-three girls he periodically screws, a special mistress of long standing whose abortions he pays for whether he’s been responsible or not.
He also, and most remarkably of all, has the ever-fresh memory of the twenty-one-year-old secretary he knew when he was seventeen. Her name was Virginia Markowitz and she gassed herself while he was in service during the war. They used to talk dirty to each other and love each other in a frustrating way, meeting furtively and frantically for neurotically (her neurosis) brief sexual gropings in the stockroom or a back staircase at an automobile casualty company. That company was where Bobby Slocum was introduced to corporate life and values in the technological age, also to sexuality and sexual craziness, to desire, and to the chief delusion of innocence: the belief that what we want so badly now will come to pass one of these days. The days of innocence are the time of his life Slocum most fondly remembers, now that everything has come so anticlimactically to pass; everything, that is, except Virginia, whom he never made. Her name is the name of his virginity, not hers.
What he wants now is to want something the way he once wanted Virginia. “Is this really the most I can get from the few years left in this one life of mine?” The answer is yes. His job has no meaning that can nourish a man. He can’t find romance anymore. When he says things can’t get better for him and his wife he means not that things are great but that the low ceiling on their happiness will probably only get lower. He talks of divorce and imagines his wife’s suicide; but he can’t leave her.
He loved his wife. She was pretty and vital but now she drinks during the day and flirts embarrassingly at parties. We change, Slocum says, and we don’t know how to change back. Sad. Why can’t some things other than stone remain always as they used to be, he wonders. Sad. What happened is that something happened. To everybody; and Slocum knows how it is now, but he spends the whole book trying to re-create what was and what is, speculating endlessly on what caused the ruin of such glorious innocence, such exciting desire. He has no more desire, only a stale, processed lust.
The book is a baring of what Heller thinks is everybody’s soul: at least everybody who shares the values of the corporate state, the company scramble, the family debacle. It will be a rare man anywhere, but especially in America, who doesn’t see something of his own soul in Slocum’s disastrously honest confession. Egocentric, selfish, cruel, conniving, obsequious, hypocritical and cravenly intelligent, intermittently likeable, he never spares himself
in his tirade against the unfathomably dispiriting condition of his life. “I wish I were part of a large family circle and enjoyed it. I would like to fit in. I wish I believed in God.”
He admits he has adjusted “contemptibly” to his culture, environment, past. He knows he’s a cheap egotist. “I find it harder and harder to feel sorry for anyone but myself,” he says. “My wife is stronger than I am, and better, too,” he says, “but I must never let her find that out.” He admits he wants to be rid of her before her health fails.
As to the company, everyone there fears everyone else. “In my department,” he says, “there are six people who are afraid of me and one small secretary who is afraid of all of us. I have one other person working for me who is not afraid of anyone, not even me, and I would fire him quickly, but I’m afraid of him.”
Call reports are meaningless but must be filed by the staff. Andy Kagle is demoted because his name is only half right. Andrew is okay, but Kagle? Also his clothes are wrong. “He shows poor judgment in colors and styles as well as fabrics.… He moves to madras and paisley months after others have gone to linen or hopsack.…” Also, and most unforgivably, he wears “terrible brown shoes with fleur de lis perforations.” Says Slocum, “Kagle has ability and experience, but they don’t count anymore. What does count is that he has no tone.… I suspect it is no longer in his power (if it ever was in his power) to change himself to everyone’s satisfaction.”
Heller voluminously details Slocum’s attitudes on everything: whores, underwear, the female and male sex organs, divorce, men’s garters, his wife’s bad breath, his fear of death and aging, teenage drug habits, money (“I love money better than ice cream,” Slocum’s daughter says), jocks and faggots, incest and oedipal frenzy, the fear of losing as the key to so much trouble in the world. Slocum on America:
I am a broken waterlogged branch floating with my own crowd in this one nation of ours … with liberty and justice for all who are speedy enough to seize them first and hog them away from the rest. Some melting pot. If all of us in this vast, fabulous land of ours could come together and take time to exchange a few words with our neighbors and fellow countrymen, those words would be Bastard! Wop! Nigger! Whitey! Kike! Spic!
Perceiving decently, his actions are usually mean and obscene.
There is no way to sum up all Heller has put into this book. It is as rich in wit, social and psychological insight, American irony and memorable conversations as it is devoid of story, plot structure, tidy continuity and other accoutrements of the conventional novel. His chief stylistic tool is repetition. The Virginia Markowitz story, for instance, he seems to tell a dozen, maybe two or three dozen times. I lost count. But every retelling is from a different angle of memory, with another nuance. The accumulation makes the relationship between Bobby and Virginia a remarkably original fictional creation. It is peculiarly Heller’s and it echoes the repetition that gave Catch-22 such an original tone.
The new book will doubtlessly be compared to Catch-22. The double-bladed wit so peculiar to Heller (“She wants me to tell her I love her. I won’t. A reason I won’t is that I know she wants me to”) is here, but this work is so unlike the first that similarities are important only because of their irrelevance.
Heller has learned from Beckett, but he is clearly himself, one of the world’s most interesting writers.
1974
Ionesco’s Remarkable Irreducibility
I’m writing this not long after talking with C., a good friend and a newspaperman, on the value of the printed word. He argues that nobody reads, that literature has been passed by, the trend is to the visual, etc. He is coddling his own taste and presumes he is being hip. I explain I’m also a movie nut, but that if anybody thinks movies, or any visual media now available, can convey the complexities literature does, then they are mad. He says I’m print-oriented, which carries the onus of being passé. We are listening to long-playing records that he is taping. Billie Holiday comes on. Who can argue that she has been made obsolete by the Jefferson Airplane? Who can be that mad? C. reveals that he is leaving America for a European island, where he will open a bar, play jazz tapes for the customers and write a novel.
I have discovered the nontheatrical writings of Eugène Ionesco, the best thing that has happened to my reading in years; also a reinforcement of all I’ve said above. The new book is Present Past, Past Present (Grove Press), which appeared in France in 1968. It is a journal Ionesco wrote first in 1940–1941, then again in 1967, commenting on the early entries, with new perceptions, dreams, children’s stories added; an eclectic work that resembles the diaries of Franz Kafka, whom Ionesco reveres. I’ve also read Conversations with Eugène Ionesco (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) by the French critic Claude Bonnefoy. It is literarily informational, in an old-fashioned Paris Review—interview sort of way, but it has none of the memoir’s zap. The reason? It’s a transcription, a mechanical achievement that allows us to confront only a fragment of the artist. To reach any man, we must get past his public self, his speech, and reach his thoughts. With rare exceptions (a film like Bergman’s Persona, for instance), the visual media offer an exterior view of man. It’s not possible for any film to convey what Ionesco’s memoirs give us—the complex nature of one man in crisis for three decades with the same unchanging problem: how to keep his essential self intact.
Ionesco writes that “One must be oneself,” a hoary cliché, which, coming from the great cliché-exploder, is provocative and is the core of everything that he writes and is. Rhinoceros, his most popular play, was inspired by his resistance to the spread of Naziism in the 1940s, but stands also for resistance to any movement that destroys individuality. In the play, everyone but the hero turns into a rhinoceros. Ionesco today resists the political Left in the way he resisted the political Right in his youth. He likes to think of Jean-Paul Sartre as a petit bourgeois tyrant. “All armies are armies of rhinoceroses,” he wrote in 1940, long before he wrote the play. “All soldiers of just causes are rhinoceroses. All holy wars are the doings of rhinoceroses. Justice is the doing of rhinoceroses. Revolutions are the doing of rhinoceroses.… Humanity does not exist. There are men. Society does not exist. There are friends. It is not the same thing for a rhinoceros.”
These memoirs, as well as Ionesco’s earlier Fragments of a Journal, published here in 1968, prove to be inspirational works, for they demonstrate a lifelong commitment to discovering the point beyond which the self is irreducible. “One must look at things from a great height,” Ionesco writes. “One must not let oneself be caught in the trap of ideologies, the ephemeral clichés, the circumscribed truths of the day, those who would have it, for example, that individualist literature is out of date; that it is necessary to write in a ‘collectivist’ spirit.…” I read this soon after reading Jerry Rubin’s new book, We Are Everywhere (Harper & Row), in which he proclaims: “All great art today is revolutionary,” “Close down the universities” and other slogans of the moment. Rubin would like to be a great Yippie ideologue, but he is only a comic celebrity peddling iconoclastic clichés. Eric Hoffer, the Lawrence Welk of American philosophy, writes in a collective vein in First Things, Last Things (Harper & Row), a new essay collection: “We must deflate the pretensions of self-appointed elites.” His “elite” list includes intellectuals, the rich, the young, the militant poor and militant blacks. Hoffer dreams of the day when “the common people”—i.e., middle Americans with money—will “kick up their heels and trample would-be elitists in the dust.…” Rubin and Hoffer are both appealing to mobs. They are an unmatched pair of rhinos.
“Only those who have something to say should speak and write,” says Ionesco. “Everybody has something to say,” but: “those who are only everybody have nothing to say since everybody says the same thing they would say.” He concludes: “It is necessary to be personal. Myself is what is opposed to others; others are those who oppose my self. It is this opposition, this balance that constitutes the personal.” This is yet another Ionesco exp
loration of his own individuality, which he confronts everywhere. His authoritarian father turns him into an antimilitarist. But he also finds trained fleas instructive: “The fleas are put under glass. The fleas try to jump, bump against the glass, and fall back down again.… The glass can be taken away. And the stupid fleas now walk slowly around … they will no longer jump.” He writes of the chameleon who turns every color, one after the other, but remains a chameleon. He inquires: “What is the I? It is the consciousness of being me.” Every facet of the book reflects this man’s quest to be singular.
Ionesco in the Kennedy family: I took my daughters to a show of short films, one of which was the cartoon Rhinoceros, a short version of the story the play tells. When we came home, the younger one drew a cartoon about it, showing two men greeting one another. Both have identical hats. Both have green shirt buttons, green cuff buttons, green shoelaces, green eyes. One has a horn coming out of his head, one does not. My daughter said she didn’t understand the film, but that seems not to be true.
“We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten,” Ionesco writes. “I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.” He says he finds only “pale glimmers from a world that was once dense, intense, brightly colored.” Certain images now cause him pain, but he can no longer say why. He says he has the key to happiness: “Remember, be profoundly, profoundly, totally conscious that you are.” Yet he keeps losing the key. This book is a documentary of his continuing struggle to find it again, and guard it. It is not a casual struggle. Treating the idea of “being oneself” as a cliché can be perilous. A character in Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano comes to think of the week as consisting of three days: Tuesday, Thursday and Tuesday. The self can become equally unreal if not attended to. Ionesco, dreading this, tells himself: “I will not let myself dry up; I will not grow older. I will risk being vulnerable.”