‘Sorry . .. you’re an old bad habit.’
Those of you who have listened to this program want to stop smoking, otherwise you wouldn’t have listened. Buy Brean’s book How To Stop Smoking. Follow the Instructions in that book. And you will stop smoking.
The Maugham Curse
Notes on Ted Morgan’s book, Maugham, which is a great deal more interesting than Maugham himself. Robin Maugham thought that his uncle Willy had made a Devil’s bargain. The Devil’s Bargain is always a fool’s bargain and especially for the artist Because the Devil does not, in fact cannot, dispense quality merchandise. He can make you the most famous, the most widely read, the richest writer in the world, but he cannot make you the best writer. Or even a good writer.
And Maugham was acutely conscious of his failures as an artist. Maugham expected to be placed in the very first rank of the second-raters. Sorry, Mr Maugham, there is no such category. Even the position of the second-rater is earned by some first-rate work. A second-rater is an uneven or specialized performer. I can think of writers I read years ago and have forgotten the writers name and the title. But I can remember a chapter, a paragraph, maybe just a phrase, that really shines. Without such flashes a voluminous output of well written volumes counts for little. I have postulated that the function of art is to show us the way to space. Applying this touchstone to words, Maugham fails as an artist. He is competent but never magical. It is many years since I read Maugham and he does not reread well. I cannot bring myself to care about his characters because he obviously does not care himself. Contrast the loving care which Conrad dedicates to Lord Jim. And the way in which Genet transfigures his pimps and thieves. Genet said that the writer must assume a terrible responsibility for the characters he creates. It is obvious that Maugham felt no such responsibility. Conrad and Genet are writers for the space age. Maugham is not.
Robin Maugham says that Willie was haunted by something evil. He relates this incident which took place in Maugham’s last years. He (Willie) was staring towards the door. His face was contorted with fear and he was trembling violently. ‘Who’s that coming into the room?’ he asked. Willie’s face was ashen as he began to shriek ‘Go away! I’m not ready! I’m not dead yet I tell you!’
‘I looked around but the room was empty, said Robin.
Perhaps if Maugham could have written about that. . . But it wasn’t in the bargain. Shortly before his death, he asked Robin, ‘You don’t believe one can lose one’s soul so completely in this life that there is nothing left do you?’ Robin dutifully assured him that this was not possible, like reassuring a cancer victim that he will recover.
Conrad remarks in one of his illuminating introductory notes that the Devil’s Bargain is always a fool’s bargain. And especially a fool’s bargain for a writer since a writer deals in qualitative data. A man whose goals are solid and realizable — wealth, power, fame, position — may feel that he has gotten his soul’s worth at least until the fine print is spelled out on him. But an artist stands to gain nothing from such a bargain.
Maugham, one feels, sold out at birth. There is nothing that he might have done if he hadn’t made the Bargain. What I remember about Maugham, and I read them all as they came out, sometimes in the Taushnitz edition in my pension, are a few sentences . ..
‘If someone calls and leaves a message that it’s important you can be sure it is important to them and not to you.’
’ The way to eat well in England is to eat breakfast three times a day.’
Is this all? Well, almost all. To my mind what a novelist does is create characters. Look at Maugham’s characters . . . The hero of The Razor’s Edge, I can’t remember his name to start with ... a nothing, appropriately played by the nothing Tyrone Power in the film.
Blake in The Narrow Corner. They don’t live. They don’t engage our affection. We don’t like them. We feel nothing for them. The reason is very simple: no feeling, no love went into them. Compare these pale lifeless characters with Lord Jim and the Great Gatsby. Consider the care and love that went into these characters. They shine with the writer’s gift of life. Maugham had no such gift to give. He lost it in the bargain. Only his malicious vignettes come alive at all. . . Roy in Cakes and Ale for instance. The closest Maugham ever came to creating a character was with Sadie Thompson, who draws her strength from the actresses who portrayed her. Interesting that Maugham turned down Tallulah Bankhead for the part! Maybe it wasn’t in the Contract. She could have been too good.
Obviously Maugham regretted his bargain and sought to deny its implications. It would seem that he didn’t even read the large print. For he must have known that the Devil can’t make you a good writer. But he can make you a famous writer, a successful writer, a rich writer. And Maugham got his full soul’s worth there: the Villa Mauresque. Lunch with the queen. Had he jogged the Devil’s arm he could have gotten a Knighthood.
But every writer wants to be a good writer. He may want to be the best writer, not in a competitive sense, since writers cannot be compared except in general terms. I mean any writer who is a writer wants to do the best job of writing he can do. And Maugham was a writer. He never made his living in any other way. He chose to be a writer, not a doctor or a lawyer or a politician.
So he knew what he had done and consoled himself with his paltry prizes . . . the perfect martini at one . . . lunch. . . guests . . . nap. .. walk.. . cocktails at seven. . . dinner with guests, oh very distinguished guests like Noel Coward, Winston Churchill and the Duke of Windsor. The Villa Mauresque was the biggest closet on the Riviera in more ways than one.
And one by one back in the closet lays . . .
Jean Genet said of Julien Green. . . ‘I’l n’a pas le courage d’être ecrivain.’ He does not have the courage to be a writer. Parenthetically I do not agree with Genet. I think that Le Pelerin sur la terre and L’ autre sommeil represent first class work in a very difficult genre, the borderline supernatural.
What is the courage Genet refers to?: The courage to face the horrific perils of one of the most dangerous of all professions, involving penalties and exposing oneself to punishments worse than death, much worse.
Old Lady: ‘It must be very dangerous to be a writer.’
Writer: ‘It is madam and few survive it.’
You can bog down in your style like Mammerstein. You can spend 20 years writing the great book that nobody can read like Joyce. You can standardize a product until it slowly dies for the lack of any good reason to live: the bad Catholic on a mission he doesn’t really believe in, debating the desirability or even the feasability of ordering another beer he isn’t sure he really wants before the boat docks.
Mr Greene, I was once caught short in a flight diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather conditions. There we are grounded, we can’t leave the plane because we haven’t cleared customs .. . Three hours ... no drinks ... no smoking ... But I have, so I think, an ace in the hole put aside for just such an emergency . .. I reach for Travels With My Aunt to ease the horror of my position only to find I have been served a worthless placebo ... My God, it’s terrible thin and empty . .. Sipping champagne on his patio as flowers rain down and ‘Lotus Land’ I thought. . . He is going to marry a young Indian girl, buy a Dakota and start smuggling whiskey and cigarettes. Is this your heaven Mr Greene? Perhaps the best thing is write a few wowzers and quit like Genet. . . What you do then? Nobody except perhaps a washed-up intelligence agent is less able to survive without his purpose than a dedicated writer. The thought appalls me. Oh, I have other hobbies to ride: guns and weaponry ... but for that you need money, and I don’t have any money except what I make from writing. And that source can dry up at any time . .. Remember an old 1920 song from the early days of motoring:
You’re going fine/ Then you see a sign/ With the word sublime/ DETOUR...
WRITER’S BLOCK. It hits you heavy and cold as a cop’s blackjack on a winter night. Suddenly you can’t do anything. You shrink from the typewriter. You turn si
ck with the sight of your words on paper . . .
You sit around wondering what it’s all about
You don’t make some money going to put you out. . .
WRITER’S BLOCK. We don’t like to talk about it. . . ‘It just doesn’t come any more!’ Hemingway said and shot himself. You can’t even write a letter. You’d rather do anything else than write. Some people sharpen pencils ... In the country you can cut wood . . . Anything to put off the dreaded moment: sit down and write . . .
Well maybe it’s time to retire. How does a writer retire? Retire to what? Maugham: ‘I’m 86 and that’s an old party.’ A very old party. . . It is pleasant to sit in the sun is it not?’ Chilling is it not? Like the old men in St Petersburg looking forward to the next meal and the next shit and sitting on their favorite bench in the sun . ..
And what causes WB? Usually it’s overwriting. Your bad writing catching up to you ... I remember Mary MacCarthy saying about me . . . ‘He writes too much . ..’ But I wouldn’t listen. . . Went on writing and writing and a lot of it is terrible ... Then it hits. . . You just have to wait it out. . .
Yessa very dangerous profession. . . They bog down in religion. They become Communists, which is worse because of the basically spurious position of Communism/Progress towards what? Better living standards for a population of decorticated zombies . .. Why? Who cares?
One cannot be dubious of a writer who does too many other things . .. the Renaissance Man syndrome. I felt that if I lived for 300 years I might begin to learn something about writing. What a writer is actually doing.
Remembering Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote. Many people who call themselves writers and have their names on books are not writers and they can’t write, like a bullfighter who makes passes with no bull there. The writer has been there or he can’t write about it. And going there, he risks being gored. By that I mean what the Germans aptly call the Time Ghost. For example, such a fragile ghost world as Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age — all the sad young men, firefly evenings, winter dreams, fragile, fragile like his picture taken in his 23rd year — Fitzgerald, poet of the Jazz Age. He went there and wrote it and brought it back for a generation to read, but he never found his own way back. A whole migrant generation arose from Kerouac’s On the Road to Mexico, Tangier, Afghanistan, India.
What are writers, and I will confine the use of this term to writers of novels, trying to do? They are trying to create a universe in which they have lived or where they would like to live. To write it, they must go there and submit to conditions that they may not have bargained for. Sometimes, as in the case of Fitzgerald and Kerouac, the effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written. In other cases, there may be a time lag. Science fiction, for example, has a way of coming true. In any case, by writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible.
To what extent writers can and do act out their writing in so-called real life, and how useful it is for their craft, are open questions. That is, are you making your universe more like the real universe, or are you pulling the real one into yours? Winner take nothing. For example, Hemingway’s determination to act out the least interesting aspects of his own writing and to actually be his character, was, I feel, unfortunate for his writing. Quite simply, if a writer insists on being able to do and do well what his characters do, he limits the range of his characters.
However, writers profit from doing something even when done badly. I was, for one short week — brings on my ulcers to think about it — a very bad assistant pickpocket. I decided that a week was enough, and I didn’t have the touch, really.
Walking around the wilderness of outer Brooklyn with the Sailor after a mooch (as he called a drunk) came up on us at the end of Flatbush: ‘The cops’ll beat the shit out of us ... you have to expect that.’ I shuddered and didn’t want to expect that and decided right there-that I was going to turn in my copy of the Times, the one I would use to cover him when he put the hand out. We always used the same copy — he said people would try to read it and get confused when it was a month old, and this would keep them from seeing us. He was quite a philosopher, the Sailor was . . . but a week was enough before I got what I ‘had to expect. . .’
‘Here comes one. . . yellow lights, too.’’ We huddle in a vacant lot. . . Speaking for myself at least, who can always see what I look like from outside, I look like a frightened commuter clutching his briefcase as Hell’s Angels roar past.
Now if this might seem a cowardly way, cowering in a vacant lot when I should have given myself the experience of getting worked over by the skinny short cop with the acne-scarred face who looks out of that prowl car, his eyes brown and burning in his head — well, the Sailor wouldn’t have liked that, and neither would a White Hunter have liked a client there to get himself mauled by a lion.
Fitzgerald said once to Hemingway, ‘Rich people are different from you and me.’
‘Yes . . . they have more money.’ And writers are different from you and me. They write. You don’t bring back a story if you get yourself killed. So a writer need not be ashamed to hide in a vacant lot or a comer of the room for a few minutes. He is there as a writer and not as a character. There is nothing more elusive than a writer’s main character, the character that is assumed by the reader to be the writer himself, no less, actually doing the things he writes about. But this main character is simply a point of view interposed by the writer. The main character then becomes in fact another character in the book, but usually the most difficult to see, because he is mistaken for the writer himself. He is the writer’s observer, often very uneasy in this role and at a loss to account for his presence. He is an object of suspicion to the world of nonwriters, unless he manages to write them into his road.
Kerouac says in Vanity of Duluoz: ‘I am not “I am” but just a spy in someone’s body pretending these sandlot games, kids in the cow field near St. Rota’s Church . . .’ Jack Kerouac knew about writing when I first met him in 1944. He was 21; already he had written a million words and was completely dedicated to his chosen trade. It was Kerouac who kept telling me I should write and call the book I wrote Naked Lunch, I had never written anything after high school and did not think of myself as a writer, and I told him so.’’ I got no talent for writing. . .’ I had tried a few times, a page maybe. Reading it over always gave me a feeling of fatigue and disgust, an aversion towards this form of activity, such as a laboratory rat must experience when he chooses the wrong path and gets a sharp reprimand from a needle in his displeasure centers. Jack insisted quietly that I did have talent for writing and that I would write a book called Naked Lunch. To which I replied, ‘I don’t want to hear anything literary.’
Trying to remember just where and when this was said is like trying to remember a jumble of old films. The 1940’s seem centuries away. I see a bar on 116th Street here, and a scene five years later in another century: a sailor at the bar who reeled over on the cue of ‘Naked Lunch’ and accused us — I think Allen Ginsberg was there, and John Kingsland — of making a sneering reference to the Swiss Navy. Kerouac was good in these situations, since he was basically unhostile. Or was it in New Orleans or Algiers, to be more precise, where I lived in a frame house by the river, or was it later in Mexico by the lake in Chapultepec Park... there’s an island there where thousands of vultures roost apathetically. I was shocked at this sight, since I had always admired their aerial teamwork, some skimming a few feet off the ground, others wheeling way up, little black specks in the sky — and when they spot food they pour down in a black funnel. . .
We are sitting on the edge of the lake with tacos and bottles of beer. . . ‘Naked Lunch is the only title,’ Jack said. I pointed to the vultures.
‘They’ve given up, like old men in St. Petersburg, Florida ... Go out and hustle some carrion you lazy buzzards!’ Whipping out my pearlhandled .45, I killed six of them in showers of black feathers. The other vultures took to the sky ..
. I would act these out with Jack, and quite a few of the scenes that later appeared in Naked Lunch arose from these acts. When Jack came to Tangier in 1957, I had decided to use the title, and much of the book was already written.
In fact, during all those years i knew Kerouac, I can’t remember ever seeing him really angry or hostile. It was the sort of smile he gave in reply to my demurrers, in a way you get from a priest who knows you will come to Jesus sooner or later — you can’t walk out on the Shakespeare Squadron, Bill.
Now as a very young child I had wanted to be a writer. At the age of 9 I wrote something called Autobiography of a Wolf. This early literary essay was influenced by — so strongly as to smell of plagiarism — a little book I had just read called The Biography of a Grizzly Bear. There were various vicissitudes, including the loss of his beloved mate ... in the end this poor old bear slouches into a valley he knows is full of poison gases, about to die ... I can see the picture now, it’s all in sepia, the valley full of nitrous yellow fumes and the bear walking in like a resigned criminal to the gas chamber. Now I had to give my wolf a different twist, so, saddened by the loss of his entire family, he encounters a grizzly bear who kills him and eats him. Later there was something called Carl Cranbury in Egypt that never got off the ground, really ... a knife glinted in the dark valley. With lightning speed Carl V. Cranbury reached for the blue steel automatic . . .
These were written out painfully in longhand with great attention to the script. The actual process of writing became so painful that I couldn’t do anything more for Carl Cranbury, as the Dark Ages descended — the years in which I wanted to be anything else but a writer. A private detective, a bartender, a criminal. . . I failed miserably at all these callings, but a writer is not concerned with success or failure, but simply with observation and recall. At the time I was not gathering material for a book. I simply was not doing anything well enough to make a living at it. In this respect, Kerouac did better that I did. He didn’t like it, but he did it — work on railroads and in factories. My record time on a factory job was four weeks. And I had the distinction to be actually fired from a defense plant during the War.