1971
Far Tortuga:
Peter Matthiessen’s Misteriosa
Peter Matthiessen says that he worked on this virtuoso novel about a sea turtle fishing voyage in the Caribbean for nine years, put it aside many times but never tired of it. He pared the work down, he said, made it “so simple that metaphors, stream-of-consciousness, even such ordinary conventions of the novel as ‘he said’ or ‘he thought,’ seemed intrusive, even offensive, and a great impediment, besides.…” The author opened the book up to white space, “more air around the words.” Some pages carry only one or two words. Small sentences sail across the page like flying fish. Men’s deaths are lonely splotches of ink at the bottom of a page. All this accumulates in a design that is handsome, unusual and welcome.
The writing style is that of a poetic screenplay. Characters have no thoughts, they only speak; and there are no quotation marks around the speech. Quotes are indented. Asides and whispers are printed in small type and there is no attribution of remarks to anyone by the author. The characters all speak in Caribbean dialects, which are presumably varied but sound similar on first reading, and which have a melodic and implicitly comedic element to them on the printed page:
So I’m telling you dat a bad memory is a disasterish thing to a person in life. With no remembrance, a mon cannot learn. To me—I’m not makin bragado or anything—but I know every rock out on de banks, like my own dooryard. It were Copm Andrew Avers dat taught me, and come to pilotin, he were the island’s best.
We must discover the identity of the speaker from internal evidence. Matthiessen helps us out by having his people call one another by name fairly often, but this is a substitute form that obtrudes more than would a phrase like “the captain said,” which we barely notice because of its familiarity.
Matthiessen, interviewed in The Paris Review briefly about this novel, admits that in the early pages (the first hundred at least), you are not always sure which man is speaking, but later on you are. This is true enough, but three-quarters through, though he has defined all his characters, there is still occasional confusion, and the method finally proves more vexing than Matthiessen suggests. Aesthetic consistency triumphs, but with a certain expense of comprehension.
The book’s form has impelled James Dickey to suggest that it points the way “that the English-speaking sensibility must and should go, from this book on … the way of passionate impressionism.” Matthiessen, says Dickey, “is creating our new vision.”
Dickey’s enthusiasm is shared by a slate of well-known writers who, taken together on the book’s jacket, surely comprise the heavyweight blurb round-up of the year. Eleanor Clark, Stephen Becker, Lillian Hellman, William Styron and even our foremost literary hermit, Thomas Pynchon, all wax rhapsodic over the novel—not, like Dickey, on innovative grounds, but about the power of the story.
Matthiessen’s writing and structural styles do set the book apart. But French experimenters in recent years have offered more radical stylistic departures from fictional conventions. Joyce did away with quotation marks an age ago. e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas and a whole generation of modern poets have diddled with linear irregularity, the line as sculpture, as impression. Steve Katz sculpted a novel with type. Ronald Sukenick was ahead of Matthiessen in the prodigal use of white space.
Where Matthiessen is truly strong and most original is in his command of detail. This is not a book that could have been written by a young man, not even a precocious one. It is the work of a mature writer with a poetic bent who has lived with the sea for much of a lifetime. He knows the nomenclatures and moods of its wave, its spray, its temper, its skies, its winds, its creatures, its birds. He knows the Caribbean sailor’s fears, superstitions, jokes and dreams. He knows the lore of turtle fishing, the stories of wrecks and wrong decisions by captains. His achievement is, foremost, in the realm of experience—vast experience—transformed.
He illuminates brilliantly the vanishing profession of turtle fishing as well as the land and sea life of the turtles themselves. The turtles have been so ravaged by greedy men, one of Matthiessen’s characters says, that they are going the way of crocodiles, seals, snipes and iguana, and are now a declining species in the sea off Nicaragua, where this doomed fishing expedition takes place.
The crumbling craft is the schooner Lillias Eden out of Grand Cayman, and it has a bent shaft, no running lights, no fire equipment, no chronometer, no life jackets. Its lines are frayed, its food is dismal and there is no cook. One of its two small boats leaks, its radio receives but cannot send messages. The nine-man crew, with the exception of one ambitiously good worker who yearns to work the land, not the sea, is ragtag: a garrulous drunk, a drifter in love with violence, a teenage innocent, a Jonah figure with second sight who reads the multiple omens and perceives the disasters to come, and other assorted lechers, thieves and malcontents of black, brown and white skins.
The captain is Raib Avers, the one truly complex figure in the story, who like Ahab is the reason the voyage is undertaken at all, and who will make many crucial decisions. But unlike Ahab, Raib is not questing but maniacally pursuing the only life he knows, refusing to be reduced to an anachronism.
Raib knows it is late in the season for turtles. He knows the craft is sick, the crew scum. But he says he will make a real crew of them and to a degree he does. Even the worst try to perform well when trouble strikes, and when the arduous turtling finally begins.
Through the boring sail south toward the turtle cays (the reader may follow the voyage on an endpaper map) the crew members tell one another tall tales of mirth and tragedy. They rag each other, complain about Raib, fight, sing sea songs, report on duppies and other ghosts, such as a notable talking hen with teeth, and, through the conflict this closeness generates, they all slowly individualize under Matthiessen’s hand.
None, however, achieves the personal density of Capt. Raib Avers, who is mercurial, intelligent, likeable, feared. He is partly mysterious. Was he a pirate? (The book is finally a superb pirate story.) Did he burn a ship once for insurance? Is his enemy—Desmond Eden—really his half-brother? The family relationships are a strong point of the story—Raib and his son Buddy, the teenage innocent who is always seasick; Raib and the vicious Desmond; Raib and his father, Captain Andrew, who comes aboard the Eden from Desmond’s boat in one of the book’s most memorable scenes—tied to a chair and swinging from a boom in midair between Raib’s and Desmond’s vessels. The old man has suffered a stroke, been struck silent, and Desmond no longer wants him. He presents a problem to Raib as well, since the voyage of the Eden has only half begun. And so old Captain Andrew spins in the chair, white hair flying, awaiting his fate.
Perhaps this is one of the passionate, impressionistic moments that so impressed Dickey. There are others: the refugees from Jamaican poverty who inhabit certain cays, going wild with hunger, rum and the absence of civilization (and who ultimately play such a significant role in the story), racing in skiffs toward the Eden as it passes, anxious to trade rum for food. But Raib, knowing what they’re like, slings their line away when they toss it to the Eden and screams at them:
“Pan-headed niggers! Get de hell away!”
Raib has already explained his coldness of heart in this matter:
Modern time, mon.
The people in this book are all victims of the modern time, whether they be headed for savagery or ruination, really two sides of the same coin; for the conflict is between the used-to-haves and the never-hads, a prevailing struggle in so much of the world; and in this sense the book is a modern parable.
There is also the deft, realistic delineation of the people, all very vivid. And yet there is a strange one-dimensionality about them all, except Raib. He alone makes the decisions, acts capriciously and is thrust into an internal conflict made truly visible—conflict with his father, son, crew, his enemy, with the sea, the winds, the aged ship. The other people are subordinate to him, but also victims, partially, of Matthiessen’s restri
ctive style of storytelling. However vivid the impressionistic strokes, the people exist, like the customers in Harry Hope’s bar in O’Neill’s Iceman, as types, each with diverse function, but never transcending that function the way Hickey transcends, or Raib transcends. What they are at the outset they remain at the end. There are hints of change, but since Matthiessen’s style is to enter no one’s head, we can see only behavior, the manifestation of internal conflict. The result is what even good cinema so often is—memorable but uncomplex.
Raib is different: Matthiessen gives us a long look at the man in transition and conflict and also lets him periodically explain himself with crude eloquence:
… I tellin you now, boy, dat I bitter. Dere are days when I very, very bitter. Cause I wore myself out to get to de place where I de best dey is in the main fishery of de island, and now dat fishery don’t mean nothin. No, mon. De schooners all gone and de green turtle goin. I got to set back and watch dem ones grow big on de Yankee tourist trade dat would not have amounted to a pile of hen shit in times gone back. I got to swaller dat.
And a crewman answers:
Modern time, mon.
The turtles are scarce for Raib and his crew, and so he heads his ship for the uncharted Misteriosa reefs, where, they say, the green turtle abounds. But it is far out to sea. Bad reef. Heavy tides. Far Tortuga, it is called, and maybe it doesn’t really exist, that abundance. Maybe Far Tortuga really is only a myth.
But Raib has a theory that it does exist, and so the story that had begun slowly, and in a seemingly disjointed way, finally comes together in a spectacular, fully earned finale at Far Tortuga, where the destiny of Raib Avers and the men of the schooner Lillias Eden is resolved, not by caprice but by dint of their own acts, their own needs, their own decrepit condition. And Matthiessen’s art prevails.
1975
O’Hara’s Letters:
A Quest for Celebrity
John O’Hara voted for Richard Nixon in 1960, which at first seemed to one reader to be hard-core proof that his previous seven years of sobriety, and three decades of success, had done him irreparable brain damage. But a reassessment of O’Hara’s life, as seen through the words that gush all but visibly out of his mouth in this collection of wonderful letters, reveals him to be a figure permanently warped by the untimely and all-but-penurious death of his father. The family’s subsequent insolvency frustrated John’s social and educational ambitions, made him a bellicose, vainglorious scrambler after celebrity and other emptiness, an Irishman who would always view himself as superior to other Irishmen (including Nixon’s 1960 opponent), and a compulsive writer of a high order who at times seemed to think that writing fast and fatly was as important as writing well.
Whatever his faults, O’Hara was a vital, witty maverick in twentieth-century American literature, a man whose writing talent was obvious even when he was fired from the New York Herald Tribune in 1928 for being drunk—and city editor Stanley Walker cried at having to show him the door. O’Hara by then had already connected himself to The New Yorker, and became one of that magazine’s most prolific contributors for the next four decades (except for the years 1949–1960 when he sulked after feuding with the editors).
He is inseparable really from the history of The New Yorker, having almost singlehandedly set the style for its elliptical short stories of the early years. And yet we don’t think of him as a permanent part of that New Yorker circle—Thurber, White, Gibbs, Benchley, Parker—even though he was; for he went on to write larger things: the novels and films and plays that made him internationally famous, a millionaire at his death, and appraised by some as the American Chekhov.
Reappraisal time is here for O’Hara, a new biography is under construction, and some critics are at work sifting the quick from the dead in his work. The odds offered from this corner are that his critical reputation will wing up from the grave now that he’s not around to demand from the world what it always refuses to give to importuners.
O’Hara’s own sifting of his work, as revealed in this collection of letters edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, put his novel From the Terrace at the top of his preferred list. Everybody else’s favorite, Appointment in Samarra, he placed in a favorite-but-flawed rank. He put himself on a level with Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Faulkner in 1949 (giving Faulkner the edge) but few others have ever rated him so high.
O’Hara had to contend with negative visions of himself and his work all his life. One in particular rankled. Alfred Kazin called him “a social sorehead from the other side of the tracks” in 1962. O’Hara retorted publicly and also said in letters to friends that his lineage in America predated the American Revolution, that his name in Ireland was one of a few that dated back to the tenth century, and that his father had graduated from an Ivy League school (Penn) “when the Ivy League was known as the Big Four.” He added: “I grow weary of the efforts of people like Kazin to squeeze all Irish-named people into a Studs Lonigan mold.”
Instead of viewing assaults as irrelevant to the artist in him, O’Hara let them curdle his days. He wrote obsessively and vituperatively, and probably accurately, about many of the critics who punished him for his popularity and overlooked his achievements. He was vitriolic about the way they turned on Steinbeck after he won the Nobel Prize. O’Hara himself yearned desperately for the Nobel and wrote often and candidly of how many times he’d been passed over for it.
His social climbing never ended. He assuaged its fury with club memberships. Scott Fitzgerald put him up for The Brook but he was blackballed and at the time of his death he was lobbying with insiders for membership in two English clubs, The Garrick and The Savile. His unrequited love for Yale (which he couldn’t afford) was a lifelong cliché he couldn’t abandon either. He preened when his daughter Wylie married a Yale man, and two years before his death in 1970 he thought of entering his newborn grandson into Yale’s class of 1992, but decided this was impertinent.
O’Hara’s refuge against isolation and rejection was his work, as he said over and over, which explains his compulsion but not his talent or imagination. He wrote much that is belabored and overstuffed, but at his best there was no one who could equal him in putting the spoken language of so many varying Americans on the printed page.
In a letter to John Hersey, when Hersey’s novel White Lotus was being panned, O’Hara explained his own record of literary Purple Hearts and pointed out to the freshly wounded Hersey that critics had destroyed James Gould Cozzens and Fitzgerald, had hurt many other writers, and that the only American writer who really escaped them was Faulkner.
“But he was made invulnerable by his genius,” O’Hara wrote Hersey. “You cannot hurt a genius, even with a silver bullet.”
O’Hara all but relished his own vulnerability: “To go through life as Faulkner [has], untouched, like Sunshine Biscuits, by human hands, is not my desire.”
And he always touched back. He touched his enemies, his critics, he touched his editors, his publishers, those who snubbed him and those he needed to snub in order to prove his own worth to his contentious and long-wounded self.
These letters form an epistolary novel which coalesces these and many other high and low truths of his life that O’Hara had put into the mouths of so many fictional people. The letters are wonderfully amusing and revealing, often shallow and oddly bumptious, deliciously vindictive, painfully wrongheaded and self-inflating, but thoroughly real and honest and intelligent in an anti-scholarly, wilfully bad-boyish way.
They are a record of a singular writer, a singular man, who tried to be aware of all his faults and almost made it. He wasn’t Faulkner’s equal in literature and he knew it. But he wrote better letters.
1978
The Grapes of Wrath at Fifty:
Steinbeck’s Journals
I told a friend of mine, a writer, that I was rereading John Steinbeck’s epic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, on the occasion of its golden anniversary—it was published April 14, 1939—and my friend said he wouldn’t dare rere
ad it. “That was my great book,” he explained. “I couldn’t bear to find that it doesn’t stand up.”
John Steinbeck had a similar problem. He was choking with trepidation about the novel as he was writing it: “No one else knows my lack of ability the way I do.… Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity”; “Got her done. And I’m afraid she’s a little dull”; “My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads”; “My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it … I’m slipping. I’ve been slipping all my life”; “Young man wants to talk, wants to be a writer. What could I tell him? Not a writer myself yet”; “I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do.”
He wrote the book in five months, beginning in May and ending in late October 1938, writing in longhand and producing two thousand words a day, the equivalent of seven double-spaced typed pages, an enormous output for any writer, and ultimately a daily tour de force. But he was flagellating himself for this also: “Vacillating and miserable.… I’m so lazy, so damned lazy”; “Where has my discipline gone? Have I lost control?”; “My laziness is overwhelming.” This novel would be his ninth work of fiction in ten years, and he would be thirty-seven years old at its publication.
These remarks of his are culled from the diary he kept daily while writing The Grapes of Wrath, that diary now published for the first time under the title Working Days, with a long, informative commentary and voluminous notes by Robert DeMott, a Steinbeck scholar who teaches English at Ohio University, and some newly discovered Steinbeck letters. It will provide a field day for Steinbeck aficionados, but for its insights into the creative mind it is also a valuable book for writers, aspiring or arrived. The struggle to create an original work is an everlasting one with most writers, and it is well anatomized here. “I’ve always had these travails,” Steinbeck reminds himself halfway through the book. “Never get used to them.”