No Time to Spare Read online

  But I think it does. Not with being a writer per se, but with my being a writer, my way of being a writer. When asked to talk about what I do, I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts—weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers—people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.

  Yet when I compare my craft with theirs, I feel slightly presumptuous. Woodworkers, potters, weavers engage with real materials, and the beauty of their work is profoundly and splendidly bodily. Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity! In its origin, it’s merely artful speech, and the spoken word is no more than breath. To write or otherwise record the word is to embody it, make it durable; and calligraphy and typesetting are material crafts that achieve great beauty. I appreciate them. But in fact they have little more to do with what I do than weaving or pot-making or woodworking does. It’s grand to see one’s poem beautifully printed, but the important thing to the poet, or anyhow to this poet, is merely to see it printed, however, wher­ever—so that readers can read it. So it can go from mind to mind.

  I work in my mind. What I do is done in my mind. And what my hands do with it in writing it down is not the same as what the hands of the weaver do with the yarn, or the potter’s hands with the clay, or the cabinetmaker’s with the wood. If what I do, what I make, is beautiful, it isn’t a physical beauty. It’s imaginary, it takes place in the mind—my mind, and my reader’s.

  You could say that I hear voices and believe the voices are real (which would mean I was schizophrenic, but the proverb test proves I’m not—I do, I do understand it, Doctor!). And that then by writing what I hear, I induce or compel readers to believe the voices are real too . . . That doesn’t describe it well, though. It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking.

  But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.

  I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.

  And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.

  Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.

  Papa H

  June 2013

  I WAS THINKING about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.

  I’m sure this has occurred to others. That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.

  Anyhow, so The Iliad is the War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and The Odyssey is the Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it).

  I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides.

  The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

  Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use, I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

  Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

  But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

  Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

  In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

  Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic—which is faking it. He faked it very well.

  Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

  After all, “Let the best man win” doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, “This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference—so the best fighter will win it.” If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

  But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

  Might does not make right—right?

  Therefore right does not make might. Right?

  But we want it to. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”

  If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land—wishful thinking country.

  Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

  Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter—even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms—kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts—a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

  The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the
virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

  And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

  I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial “noble” gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments.

  I don’t know any war story comparable to The Iliad except maybe the huge Indian epic the Mahabharata. Its five brother-heroes are certainly heroes, it’s their story—but it’s also the story of their enemies, also heroes, some of whom are really great guys—and it’s all so immense and complicated and full of rights and wrongs and implications and gods who interfere even more directly than the Greek gods do—and then, after all, is the end tragic or is it comic? The whole thing is like a giant cauldron of ever-replenished food you can dive your fork into and come out with whatever you need most to nourish you just then. But next time it may taste quite different.

  And the taste of the Mahabharata as a whole is very, very different from that of The Iliad, above all because The Iliad is (unjust divine intervention aside) appallingly realistic and bloodthirstily callous about what goes on in a war. The Mahabharata’s war is all dazzling fantasy, from the superhuman exploits to the super­duper weapons. It’s only in their spiritual suffering that the Indian heroes become suddenly, heartbreakingly, heart-changingly real.

  As for the Journey:

  The actual travel parts of The Odyssey are related or ancestral to all our fantasy tales of somebody setting off over sea or land, meeting marvels and horrors and temptations and adventures, possibly growing up along the way, and maybe coming back home at the end.

  Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important—but we’ve merely recognized it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

  Odysseus’s travels involve such a terrific set of adventures that I tend to forget how much of the book is actually about his wife and son—what goes on at home while he’s traveling, how his son goes looking for him, and all the complications of his homecoming. One of the things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s understanding of the importance of what goes on back on the farm while the Hero is taking his Thousand Faces all round the world. But till you get back there with Frodo and the others, Tolkien never takes you back home. Homer does. All through the ten-year voyage, the reader is alternately Odysseus trying desperately to get to Penelope and Penelope desperately waiting for Odysseus—both the voyager and the goal—a tremendous piece of narrative time-and-place interweaving.

  Homer and Tolkien are both also notably honest about the difficulty of being a far-traveled hero who comes home. Neither Odysseus nor Frodo is able to stay there long. I wish Homer had written something about how it was for King Menelaus when he got home, along with his wife Helen, whom he and the rest of the Greeks had fought for ten years to win back, while she, safe inside the walls of Troy, was prissing around with pretty Prince Paris (and then when he got bumped she married his brother). Apparently it never occurred to her to send Hubby #1, Menelaus, down there on the beach in the rain, an email, or even a text message. But then, Menelaus’s family, for a generation or two, had been rather impressively unfortunate or, as we would say, dysfunctional.

  Perhaps it isn’t only fantasy that you can trace right back to Homer?

  A Much-Needed Literary Award

  January 2013

  I FIRST LEARNED about the Sartre Prize from “NB,” the reliably enjoyable last page of the London Times Literary Supplement, signed by J.C. The fame of the award, named for the writer who refused the Nobel in 1964, is or anyhow should be growing fast. As J.C. wrote in the November 23, 2012, issue, “So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre.” He adds with modest pride, “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.”

  Newly shortlisted for the Sartre Prize is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned down a fifty-thousand-euro poetry award offered by the Hungarian division of PEN. The award is funded in part by the repressive Hungarian government. Ferlinghetti politely suggested that they use the prize money to set up a fund for “the publication of Hungarian authors whose writings support total freedom of speech.”

  I couldn’t help thinking how cool it would have been if Mo Yan had used some of his Nobel Prize money to set up a fund for the publication of Chinese authors whose writings support total freedom of speech. But this seems unlikely.

  Sartre’s reason for refusal was consistent with his refusal to join the Legion of Honor and other such organizations and characteristic of the gnarly and countersuggestible existentialist. He said, “It isn’t the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution.” He was, of course, already an “institution,” but he valued his personal autonomy. (How he reconciled that value with Maoism is not clear to me.) He didn’t let institutions own him, but he did join uprisings, and was arrested for civil disobedience in the street demos supporting the strikes of May 1968. President de Gaulle quickly pardoned him, with the magnificently Gallic observation that “you don’t arrest Voltaire.”

  I wish the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal could have been called the Boris Pasternak Prize for one of my true heroes. But it wouldn’t be appropriate, since Pasternak didn’t exactly choose to refuse his 1958 Nobel. He had to. If he’d tried to go accept it, the Soviet government would have promptly, enthusiastically arrested him and sent him to eternal silence in a gulag in Siberia.

  I refused a prize once. My reasons were mingier than Sartre’s, though not entirely unrelated. It was in the coldest, insanest days of the Cold War, when even the little planet Esseff was politically divided against itself. My novelette The Diary of the Rose was awarded the Nebula Prize by the Science Fiction Writers of America. At about the same time, the same organization deprived the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem of his honorary membership. There was a sizable contingent of Cold Warrior members who felt that a man who lived behind the iron curtain and was rude about American science fiction must be a Commie rat who had no business in the SFWA. They invoked a technicality to deprive him of his membership and insisted on applying it. Lem was a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man, but a courageous one and a first-rate author, writing with more independence of mind than would seem possible in Poland under the Soviet regime. I was very angry at the injustice of the crass and petty insult offered him by the SFWA. I dropped my membership and, feeling it would be shameless to accept an award for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance, took my entry out of Nebula competition shortly before the winners were to be announced. The SFWA called me to plead with me not to withdraw it, since it had, in fact, won. I couldn’t do that. So—with the perfect irony that awaits anybody who strikes a noble pose on high moral ground—my award went to the runner-up: Isaac Asimov, the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors.

  What relates my small refusal to Sartre’s big one is the sense that to accept an award from an institution is to be co-opted by, embodied as, the institution. Sartre refused this on general principle, while I acted in specific protest. But I do have sympathy for his distrust of allowing himself to be identified as something other than himself. He felt that the huge label “Success” that the Nobel sticks on an author’s forehead would, as it were, hide his face. His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre.

  Which is, of course, precisely what the commercial machinery of bestsellerdom and pri
zedom wants: the name as product. The guaranteed imprint of salable Success. Nobel Prize Winner So-and-so. Best-Selling Author Thus-and-such. Thirty Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List Whozit. Jane D. Wonthe­pulitzer . . . John Q. MacArthurgenius . . .

  It isn’t what the people who established the awards want them to do or to mean, but it’s how they’re used. As a way to honor a writer, an award has genuine value, but the use of prizes as a marketing ploy by corporate capitalism, and sometimes as a political gimmick by the awarders, has compromised their value. And the more prestigious and valued the prize, the more compromised it is.

  Still, I’m glad that José Saramago, a much tougher Marxist nut than Sartre, saw fit not to refuse the Nobel Prize. He knew nothing, not even Success, could compromise him, and no institution could turn him into itself. His face was his own face to the end. And despite the committee’s many bizarre selections and omissions, the Nobel Prize for Literature retains considerable value, precisely because it is identified with such writers as Pasternak, or Szymborska, or Saramago. It bears at least a glimmer reflected from their faces.

  All the same, I think the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal should be recognized as a valuable and timely award, and what’s more, one pretty safe to remain untainted by exploitation. I wish somebody really contemptible would award me a prize so I could be in the running for a Sartre.

  TGAN and TGOW

  September 2011

  WHEN I WAS a young novelist, fairly often a reviewer would get fervent and declare that an obscure book such as Call It Sleep, or a hugely successful one such as The Naked and the Dead, was The Great American Novel. By writers the phrase was used half jokingly—What are you writing these days? Oh, you know, The Great American Novel. I don’t think I’ve seen the phrase used at all for a couple of decades at least. Maybe we’ve given up on greatness, or anyhow on American greatness.