The Spooky Art (26 page)

About the time Beckett arrived on Broadway, therefore, I was certain, given the advance publicity, that he would be the worst of all. Seeing
Godot
, I had to recognize that something profound was going on, but I couldn’t like it. I felt all too familiar with such states of existence. Marriage, after all, is filled with comparable situations—the rigamarole of marriage, the routine, the dreadful repetitions—nothingness pitted against nothingness—except that Beckett added to it an acute sense of despair.
Godot
had dimension, resonance, vibrancy. Beckett’s despair was sinister and joyful at once, as if he were saying, “Once you feel this kind of woe, nothing will ever be that bad again.” Never as bad again.

There was, inarguably, this remarkably quality in Beckett. Nonetheless, he was putting the emphasis upon nothingness. My outrage became sententiousness: What if
being
is in trouble? We don’t have a clue any longer to what it might be—there is such misuse of
being.
For a daily example, every time you become interested in a narrative on television, a commercial comes on and you are jacked over abruptly from pleasure to nothingness. The impact is there even though the commercial may be lively, noisy, even on occasion amusing. But your concentration has been broken at an instant when you weren’t prepared for that.

Philosophically, Beckett seemed to be saying,
“Nothingness
is at least one half of existence, so let’s study it, let’s attempt to enjoy it.” The assumption that it could be enjoyed was the irritant. If fiction depends on how life moves from
being
to
nothingness
and back again, Beckett chooses to stay in
nothingness.
He’s Mozartian, however, in the variations he can play on the theme. He is one of the very few writers in the second half of the twentieth century who prompts you to speak of his genius. He took a deserted road and went far with it. But he never entered the dialectic between
nothingness
and
being.
Let me try to exemplify what I am saying.

I have always felt that
The Old Man and the Sea
was one of Hemingway’s failures. He wanted to bring off a short novel about a fine man who worked with his hands, a fisherman. Looking to write a novel of affirmation about just such a man, Hemingway had him row out to sea in his dinghy again and again. But after many days of poor fishing, the old man finally hooks into the biggest fish he’s ever had. He hangs on, and the contest goes for hour after hour after hour—the fish tows him for miles—yet the old man succeeds in wearing the beast out, and gaffs him. Since the catch is too heavy to bring on board, he lashes it to the side of his dinghy and starts to row back to shore. Then the sharks come and devour his prize. He’s left with nothing. The critics all agreed this was Hemingway’s view of the literary world—sharks out to destroy a beautiful work.

The critics, however, decided near unanimously (and Hemingway went along) that he had written a novel of human affirmation because the protagonist never gave up. But then there is never a moment in the telling when the man said to himself, “I’m suffering too severely. I’m going to cut the rope.” Because if the old fisherman had weakened, then Hemingway would have had to have a serious affirmation. Which is:
Why
doesn’t the fisherman cut the fish loose? What remains in him to war with that temptation? Instead, the old Cuban was never tempted. So Hemingway never had to find a reason for the fisherman to say, “I’ll hold on.” Not enough of a character had been created to answer such a question.

I think the same fault in considerably more elaborated form is present with Beckett. He never enters a situation where any of his people might try to break out of whatever trap they are in. They can be ensconced in garbage cans or talking to a tape recorder, which, speaking of traps, is no mean example. But there is never an arduous attempt to escape whatever trap they are in. Of course, one can argue that Beckett dared to try something no one else had ever attempted and so was reaffirming
being.
Daring is, after all, a vital element in
being.
But we are not able to enjoy this daring nearly so much as we are obliged to feel the ongoing possibilities of more
nothingness
, and so the final impact of his plays is obsessive rather than haunting.

In parallel, the essence of all that hubris in corporate advertising may be its well-founded fear of
nothingness.
For good cause. The
corporates are always pouring their presentations into our minds. To which I would reply that filling such essentially empty forms as commercials is a direct species of
nothingness.
Whenever you do not fill the aesthetic you set yourself, you are purveying just that. By now, many if not most television commercials, no matter how spiked with clash and color, give, nonetheless, little attention to the item they are there to sell. The intent of the advertisers comes down to the premise that if you entertain your audience, if you pay them, in effect, for the interruption by getting them to laugh during the commercial, it’s not inconceivable that a fraction of these viewers may even remember the name of the product—that’s all the advertiser needs. Far better than to have someone speak directly of the sterling virtues of the brand. Who would believe them? No, advertisers work to overcome the onus of
nothingness
that the TV commercial inserts into our nervous system.

I
can see some reasonably deep moral questions about whether people should be free to create hard-core pornography. I’d vote yes, but let’s not assume no damage is taking place. For some, it would be a curse; to others, a perverse blessing. But you could be playing with your soul. Let’s say the moral shadings are not without their parallel to men doing their best to take each other out in the ring while other men and women cheer them on. Note that I put it this way even though boxing is my favorite sport to watch.

You can tell a lot about every stage of sex—before, during, and after—by odor. One is often aware of one’s own spiritual condition through one’s scent. Just so, as one enters a house, one knows the happiness or the misery of its people by the smell one encounters. This faculty, therefore, can become unendurable at times. You walk in on old friends and realize that something’s going to go bust with them—not yet, maybe, but it’s there, maybe a month or two away, a year or two away. The odor speaks unmistakably of stale miseries that will yet exact their payment. Or, at least, all this was true in the years when I still had a vivid sense of smell.

One can say that if Picasso had been braver at certain points in his life, he might have been a more generous artist. Some of the cruelty might have gone out of his work. Something grand might have come in. He had enormous talent; he was, arguably, the greatest painter since Michelangelo. With generosity, maybe Picasso would have been nobler, but the odds are that he would have been less. Because the selfishness of the artist is often there to protect the part that is generous. To the degree that artists give of themselves to all people, they don’t want to give anything at all in other ways. There’s an economy to generosity. And very often, the people who are the most generous are not the most talented. I think the inner sanction that artists give themselves is that they’ve got to be selfish—absolutely!—or nothing will get done.

Such thoughts are not happy, but the evidence—if the biographies of artists and writers are at all reliable—does support the notion that it is best to revere painters, poets, and novelists for their talent rather than their character.

A great many artists are narcissists—certainly writers. In Picasso’s case, narcissism is too small a word. I think he saw himself as an intermediary between humankind and the forces that created the world and kept it in upheaval. I think he saw himself as a demiurge. That is, a demiurge with half of himself. The other half was a modest man who spoke French badly and was five feet three inches tall.

I’ve always felt that there was a good deal of compatibility between La Rochefoucauld and Gore Vidal. I say this critically. One of the largest arguments I have with Vidal and his mind and his work is that they represent the end of an intellectual tradition that began with La Rochefoucauld. Many of Vidal’s remarks stand up, I think, in comparison. He can put his finger on many a boil. For example: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” No one can accuse Gore of not being able to step forth with a good line. What I would argue, however, is that his particular tradition has become inadequate to our needs. The world is growing so genuinely complex (and perplexed) that it’s limiting to enclose it with aphorisms, no matter how brilliant. One has to qualify them.

For
example: Not everything wilts in me when another novelist succeeds. There is also admiration—unwanted, it is true, but then whoever insisted that we are absolutely without treachery to ourselves?

Which opens a useful exercise for novelists: It is to take on a few of the better maxims, adages, insights, and sayings of the celebrated, and see if you can work them further. There is that whole remark of Tolstoy’s:
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
Agreed. At the least, a temporary, if successful, collaboration between good and evil may well be going on—which could be why Tolstoy distrusted it so, and why we react with fear, wonder, avidity, and, yes, distrust when we encounter a beautiful woman.

But now that I have commenced this, I cannot stop:

Voltaire once said:
“Common sense is not so common.”
He could have gone on to remark that the greatest abuse of common sense is generally perpetrated by those people who are forever proclaiming the value of that virtue in themselves.

Abraham Lincoln:
“Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.”
Sometimes, one doesn’t decide to be happy, because the likelihood is that upcoming events will be dire. Which suggests that the fall will come from a greater height.

“
Merit envies success and success takes itself for merit.”
—Jean Rostand Success is so confident that it is possessed of merit that merit, to its horror, comes to respect success more than its own merit.

One good reason for indulging this exercise is to remind young writers never to hitch their minds to a wise saying. A wiser one can usually be built upon it, or, at least, one ought to make the attempt.

Example:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

—Bertrand Russell

This is because stupidity is not a liability but an asset if all you care about is getting your way. Before obstinate fools, we are all weak.

“
Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”
—Eric Hoffer

Half-true, no more. Rudeness can lead to a fight the rude man would be wise not to get into. Usually, however, the instigator of any harsh discourtesy has sensed already who is weaker at the moment than himself. Like many another foul art, rudeness has gifted practitioners.