Great scholars may spend a lifetime in daily
investigation of Shakespeare or Dante, but few novelists are much like great
scholars, and even fewer are Shakespeare or Dante.

To read oneself every morning and afternoon
for more than a quarter of a century, as I have now done, is at best a strange
chore. As thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of one's own
sentences cross the page in front of one, they seem, each year, to move more
predictably. They may plod, or they may rush, but whatever pleasure one may
once have taken in their lilting rhythms or their little graces has long since
vanished.

At least, mine has. I rather enjoyed the daily
tramp of my sentences up until about the time that I wrote Terms of Endearment.
Midway through that book the endless parade of these sentences began to lose
its fascination for me; it was as if they were parading in a circle. I began to
have the distinct impression that sentences which ought to have been embedded
in earlier books had somehow wiggled free and were circling around again.

And not just sentences, either: paragraphs,
characters, relationships and motifs all seemed deadeningly familiar.

I have always had a horror of self-repetition,
the quicksand that swallows so many middle-aged novelists, and was not cheered
to find it swallowing me. I had no interest in recycling my own oeuvre a few
sentences at a time. And yet it seemed to me that that was more or less what I
was doing.

Cadillac Jack is a response to this dilemma. The
book's beginning was simple. I was standing on a street comer in
Washington
,
D.C.
, one day, waiting for the light to change. A black man was waiting,
too. Just as the light changed a Cadillac drew up in front of us, and a jolly
gentleman waved at the black man, who immediately brightened. "Ho, ho,
Cadillac Jack," he said, waving. The car passed on, and I crossed the
street a happier man. Life had just handed me a title; all I had to do was find
a book for it.

I decided to seek it in the world of the swap
meets, flea markets, junk dealers and small-time auctions, which I had haunted
for many years as a bookscout—it had always seemed to me an interesting and
somewhat neglected subculture. Maybe it could be made to yield some
fresh-seeming sentences, at least.

In the event, my sentences didn't hasten to
reform, but I wrote the book anyway, determined to hang in there, if only
because I really had no place else to hang.

The book that resulted seems a little odd. A
friend remarked that it reminded her of certain Diane Arbus photographs of
people with their love objects, which were sometimes, but not always, other
people. The friend thought the novel particularly resembled an Arbus photograph
of a woman who had dressed her monkey in a snow suit.

I am easily convinced by almost any
description of one of my books, and immediately began to think of Cadillac Jack
as the sort of book in which someone would dress a monkey in a snowsuit. Early
in the narrative someone does put two pugs on a dinner table, which is just as
bizarre.

I rarely think of my own books, once I finish
them, and don't welcome the opportunity, much less the necessity, of thinking
about them. The moving finger writes, and keeps moving; thinking about them
while I'm writing them is often hard enough. Writing a book that holds one's
own interest until it can be finished is, for the middle-aged and reasonably
prolific novelist, a heavier challenge than many would like to admit. I wrote
two drafts of this one, burdened the whole way by a sense that something was
lacking. I remain uncertain whether the lack was in the tale, or merely in the
main character, Cadillac Jack.

What's certain is that Jack is a very detached
man. I might have called the book Portrait of the Artist as a Detached Man,
except that Jack isn't an artist. He's a scout—a man who finds things, not a
man who makes things. Yet the character of mine he most reminds me of is Danny
Deck, a young writer who raced across the lawn of my imagination some twelve
years ago, in a book called All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. Both men
are constantly being reminded that they aren't
normal,
usually by women they're in bed with. Danny Deck becomes convinced that his
detachment is a by-product of the artistic vocation; he comes to resent that
vocation because it seems to him it deprives him of any hope of a settled
domestic life.

Jack doesn't resent his vocation—antique
scouting—and doesn't rage at his exile from the hearth and the bassinet, as
Danny does. The latter was a bruised optimist, convinced that he could love one
woman forever if he could just rid himself of the alienating demands of art.
Jack isn't so sanguine. When he yearns, he yearns for individuals, not for a
home. He recognizes that he is most at home when he is in motion, roaming the
country in his search for exceptional antiques.

As an antique scout.
Jack is a student, and a fairly acute one, of the way in which people relate to
their objects. He would like to hope, at first, that people are better at
loving other people than they are at loving objects, but his bleak conclusion
is that human love is unstable, whether directed at another human or at a Sung
vase. The people he meets are as fickle in regard to their objets as they are
with one another; they cling to a fine thing for years and then get rid of it
in an hour, much as they might a fine person. They become indifferent alike to
hall clocks and spouses. In Jack's world, only obsession seems to generate
tenacity; moderate love, whether between people and people or people and
things, seldom seems to last very long.

These dark pessimistic meats are stuffed in a
light pastry of social satire, most of it directed at the ways of
Washington
,
D.C.
I had been reading Pope and Waugh in the year I wrote the book; I had
also been pondering my twelve years in
Washington
. The city, as the old nest collector
observed, is a graveyard of styles. It is also a city of museums, and its
defining attitudes are curatorial. Indeed, its ponderous social life is not
unlike a museum exhibit, in which a good many of the major canvases have long
needed dusting. The book became a kind of exhibit of capitol portraits, done,
in so far as I was able, as Alexander Pope might have done them.

To the portraits in my capitol exhibit I added
a parallel sequence of Jack's women, done with perhaps a bit more charity.

The textures of the book are sometimes
appealing, but what of the aftertaste? Is detachment of the sort Jack manifests
a workable subject for fiction? Boringness, for example, is not a workable
subject; it only leaves the reader bored. Will Jack's detachment frustrate the
reader as much as Jack himself frustrates the various women he escapes? Do
readers, many of whom are women, resent detachment as much as women do?

Having raised that question, the teller is
happy to take refuge behind the tale.

—Larry McMurtry October 1984

BOOK: McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05

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