The Spooky Art (4 page)

It could not have seemed so bad a novel then as it does today. The politics of
A Transit to Narcissus
—during those war years when you went a long distance to the Right before you found a liberal who was not moving to the Left—were fashionable politics; its portrait of a mental hospital was without comparison, literally!—I cannot think of any other American novel, good or bad, written about an insane asylum before World War II. Moreover, the horror of the descriptions was accurate. In those years, before Thorazine and other tranquilizers changed the mood of our mental wards to the mood of our cancer wards, insane asylums, at least from the point of view of the inmates, had probably not improved significantly since the days of Hogarth. The beatings came every bit as frequently as they are portrayed in this novel, nor is the lack of medical care exaggerated. (That the real situation may not be better today—that Thorazine might do even less for a madman’s soul than a brutal beating is a discussion belonging to R. D. Laing and will not be entered here.)

At any rate, this early novel, holding to its virtues and staggering under its faults, went out to publishers with the blessing of my agent, Berta Kaslow, who was beginning at William Morris then and loved the book; before she was done it went to twenty publishing houses. I was in the Army by then, of course, at last! I went into the Army the week
A Transit to Narcissus
went out to the first publisher, and all through basic training and replacement depots and on troop transports and in Leyte and Luzon and Japan, I would receive letters from Berta. Another publisher or two had just turned the book down, but she had not lost faith. Nor had I. Maybe we burned longer in our hopes for that book because the first editor to read it, Robert Linscott of Random House, then comparable in distinction to Maxwell Perkins, had liked
A Transit to Narcissus
enough to think of publishing it. The
other editors at Random House did not agree with him, however, and since I was in the Army and would not be able to work with him on editing it (and, I’m certain, condensing it), Linscott rejected the book reluctantly, and with a splendid letter to me that I carried through the war.

Other readers were not to be as kind. Some editors thought the book more depressing than anything, others were aghast at the murkiness and/or depth of the sexual relations; the consensus suggested that the book had a power of a sort, and the author, considering his youth, might have yet a career, but the work itself was too unpleasant to see print.

Oddly enough, there was, as I recollect, praise for the style. Let us hope it was not a collective lack of taste so much as a collective hypocrisy of editors; if one can find nothing much good to say about a manuscript, praise the style at least: It was obvious I was proud of my style. But what awful stuff it is today! No little word is ever used in
A Transit to Narcissus
when a polysyllabic slab of jargon will do, and the meaning is not only fuzzy in the pages but in the sentences. Maybe there has never been another novel where as many characters take their psychic temperature after every little event—where as many actually go out for walks to think things through. One is even brought to remember that the book takes place in the late Depression years of the thirties, when the average American city and mill town was still interesting to walk around and nobody had money for more.

Yet if the style is monumentally bad, that is also a curiosity, for all through college I had been writing better stuff. A short story full of action and quick prose called “The Greatest Thing in the World” had won a nationwide college short-story contest two years before, and a short novel,
A Calculus at Heaven
, finished at the beginning of my Senior year (indeed, right after the play was written), had been far superior in style, if considerably less ambitious in theme. But then, in a couple of years, I would be writing simply again. The war squeezed more than a few ponderosities out of my fingers, and the lethargic dissonance of this prose is soon replaced by the more digestible stylistic flaws of
The Naked and the Dead
—the life of a soldier was good for one writer! What may be interesting now is that
A Transit to Narcissus
was done at a time when I was changing my literary gods, moving bag and borrowed baggage from Farrell, Hemingway, and Dos Passos to Faulkner, Proust, Mann, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, and an intense dose of F. O. Matthiessen’s
American
Renaissance
(which was the big book at Harvard my Junior and Senior years). So one’s sure taste for low life in literature had been temporarily overwhelmed by the cultural reflexes of a half-educated Harvard man. One senses a literary prig working at these pages. As is usually true of young writers and long novels, the prose suffers from every intellectual sloth of the author’s character. Indeed, without its operatic plot, the book would be close to unreadable.

Yet now I agree to publish it. True, it will appear in facsimile, and for a most limited audience. The general public will be protected (by the price of this work—$100!) from my youthful indulgences in prose.

But what is to be gained by showing it? My literary reputation is more likely to survive than be enhanced by this novel.

The answer is curious to myself. I do not recognize the young man who wrote this book, I do not even like him very much, and yet I know that he must be me because his themes are mine, his ambition is as large for his age as my ambition would ever become, and I am not even without an odd regard for him. If I understand what he is trying to say, then he is close to saying the unsayable. The most terrible themes of my own life—the nearness of violence to creation, and the whiff of murder just beyond every embrace of love—are his themes also. So I can recognize myself and realize that if I had not gone to war, I probably would have kept writing books like
A Transit to Narcissus
, although, in time, better, I hope, and with good fortune might have ended like Iris Murdoch, a writer I greatly admire.

Instead, my early talents, such as they were, went through the war, and the over-elaborated sinuosities and intercalations of that young man were hammered into shape by a crude anvil of American society—the American Army at war—and the social sense, lacking so conspicuously in
A Transit to Narcissus
, was now achieved. The writer would spend the rest of his working years in tension between two major themes rather than one, two mysteries to explore by literary means instead of a search for just one holy grail, and that, we may as well assume, was to his benefit. Maybe it is good to be aware early that society can be as much of a mystery as the individual, that Marx offers no more of a final answer than Freud, and that Satan is as profound an enigma as Jesus.

I stray, however. The point is that despite all its flaws, I am probably glad to see
A Transit to Narcissus
published. I cannot
pretend to like it, but curiously, I respect the profundity of its impulse. Like a badly twisted arthritic who nevertheless engages in rock-climbing, I respect the effort, the confidence, and the peculiar bravery (since I do not feel I am speaking about myself) of a young man who was living in some private depth of the psyche and so comprehended early, as some people never do, that the unsayable was indeed all that would save him. That can be a lot for a young man to know—that even in our chaos we are individual works of art, maybe even of design—it is, indeed, a theme to live with for your life, and I have lived with it, or tried to, and now feel, I suppose, that we may as well reveal where it all began.

Soon after finishing
A Transit to Narcissus
, I entered another existence. It lasted for hardly more than two years but felt like a decade. I was a private in the Army. That gave real experience as opposed to the too-quick experience I was searching for in the week I spent working in the mental hospital. It’s the life you can’t escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer.

I think I suffered more, however, from the reviews of
The Naked and the Dead
than any other of my books. I wanted to sit down and write a letter to each and every critic to tell how my work had been misinterpreted. I felt this way even when they enthused over the novel. It probably takes twenty years to appreciate book reviewing for what it is—a primitive rite. By then, you are able to ingest unkind reviews, provided they are well written. Sometimes, an off-the-wall review can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner. (And, by times, as indigestible.) I’d never dream, however, of not reading reviews. It would be like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window. Whether ugly or lovely, she is undeniably interesting under such circumstances.

Fifty years after its publication in 1948, and thirty-two years after the interview with Steven Marcus, I wrote the following as a foreword to a new edition of the book.