Baldwin’s characters maim themselves trying to smash through the wall of their imprisonment. William Burroughs gives what may be the finest record in our century of the complete psychic convict. Naked Lunch is a book of pieces and fragments, notes and nightmarish anecdotes, which he wrote—according to his preface—in various states of delirium, going in and out of a heroin addiction. It is not a novel in any conventional sense, but then there’s a question whether it’s a novel by any set of standards other than the dictum that prose about imaginary people put between book covers is a novel. At any rate, the distinction is not important except for the fact that Naked Lunch is next to impossible to read in consecutive fashion. I saw excerpts of it years ago, and thought enough of them to go on record that Burroughs “may conceivably be possessed by genius.” I still believe that, but it is one thing to be possessed by genius, it is another to be a genius, and Naked Lunch read from cover to cover is not as exciting as in its separate pieces. Quantity changes quality, as Karl Marx once put it, and fifty or sixty three-page bits about homosexual orgies, castration, surgeon-assassins, and junkie fuzz dissolving into a creeping green ooze leaves one feeling pretty tough. “Let’s put some blue-purple blood in the next rape,” says your jaded taste.
This is, however, quibbling. Some of the best prose in America is graffiti found on men’s-room walls. It is prose written in bone, etched by acid, it is the prose of harsh truth, the virulence of the criminal who never found his stone walls and so settles down on the walls of the john, it is the language of hatred unencumbered by guilt, hesitation, scruple, or complexity. Burroughs must be the greatest writer of graffiti who ever lived. His style has the snap of a whip, and it never relents. Every paragraph is quotable. Here’s a jewel among a thousand jewels:
Dr. Benway … looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets … “Make an incision, Doctor Limpf.… I’m going to massage the heart.” … Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.…
Dr. Limpf: “The incision is ready, doctor.”
Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.…
Nurse: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”
Dr. Benway: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”
Punch and Judy. Mr. Interlocutor and Mr. Bones. One, two, three, bam! Two, four, eight, bam! The drug addict lives with a charged wire so murderous he must hang his nervous system on a void. Burroughs’s achievement, his great achievement, is that he has brought back snowflakes from this murderous void.
Once, years ago in Chicago, I was coming down with a bad cold. By accident, a friend took me to hear a jazz musician named Sun Ra who played “space music.” The music was a little like the sound of Ornette Coleman, but further out, outer space music, close to the eeee of an electric drill at the center of a harsh trumpet. My cold cleared up in five minutes. I swear it. The anger of the sound penetrated into some sprung–up rage which was burning fuel for the cold. Burroughs’s pages have the same medicine. If a hundred patients on terminal cancer read Naked Lunch, one or two might find remission. Bet money on that. For Burroughs is the surgeon of the novel.
Yet he is something more. It is his last ability which entitles him to a purchase on genius. Through the fantasies runs a vision of a future world, a half-demented welfare state, an abattoir of science fiction with surgeons, bureaucrats, perverts, diplomats, a world not describable short of getting into the book. The ideas have pushed into the frontier of an all-electronic universe. One holds on to a computer in some man-eating machine of the future which has learned to use language. The words come out in squeaks, spiced with static, sex coiled up with technology like a scream on the radar. Bombarded by his language, the sensation is like being in a room where three radios, two television sets, stereo hi-fi, a pornographic movie, and two automatic dishwashers are working at once while a mad scientist conducts the dials to squeeze out the maximum disturbance. If this is a true picture of the world to come, and it may be, then Burroughs is a great writer. Yet there is sadness in reading him, for one gets intimations of a mind which might have come within distance of Joyce, except that a catastrophe has been visited on it, a blow by a sledgehammer, a junkie’s needle which left the crystalline brilliance crashed into bits.
Now beyond a doubt, of all the books discussed here, the one which most cheats evaluation is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. It was the book which took me longest to finish, and I almost gave it up. Yet I think that a year from now I may remember it more vividly than The Thin Red Line. Because it is an original. There’s no book like it anyone has read. Yet it’s maddening. It reminds one of a Jackson Pollock painting eight feet high, twenty feet long. Like yard goods, one could cut it anywhere. One could take out a hundred pages anywhere from the middle of Catch-22 and not even the author could be certain they were gone. Yet the length and similarity of one page to another gives a curious meat-and-potatoes to the madness; building upon itself the book becomes substantial until the last fifty pages grow suddenly and surprisingly powerful, only to be marred by an ending over the last five pages which is hysterical, sentimental, and wall-eyed for Hollywood.
This is the skin of the reaction. If I were a major critic, it would be a virtuoso performance to write a definitive piece on Catch-22. It would take ten thousand words or more. Because Heller is carrying his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him (except Burroughs who has already made the trip and now sells choice seats in the auditorium), and so the analysis of Joseph H.’s Hell would require a discussion of other varieties of inferno and whether they do more than this author’s tour.
Catch-22 is a nightmare about an American bomber squadron on a made-up island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian who has flown fifty missions and wants out. On this premise is tattooed the events of the novel, fifty characters, two thousand frustrations (an average of four or five to the page), and one simple motif: more frustration. Yossarian’s colonel wants to impress his general and so raises the number of missions to fifty-five. When the pilots have fifty-four, the figure is lifted to sixty. They are going for eighty by the time the book has been done. On the way every character goes through a routine on every page which is as formal as a little peasant figure in a folk dance. Back in school, we had a joke we used to repeat. It went:
“Whom are you talking about?”
“Herbert Hoover.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Never heard of whom?”
“Herbert Hoover.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the man you mentioned.”
“Never heard of Herbert Hoover.”
So it went. So goes Catch-22. It’s the rock and roll of novels. One finds its ancestor in basic training. We were ordered to have clean sheets for Saturday inspection. But one week we were given no clean sheets from the post laundry so we slept on our mattress covers, which got dirty. After inspection, the platoon was restricted to quarters. “You didn’t have clean sheets,” our sergeant said.
“How could we have clean sheets if the clean sheets didn’t come?”
“How do I know?” said the sergeant. “The regulations say you gotta have clean sheets.”
“But we can’t have clean sheets if there are no clean sheets.”
“That,” said the sergeant, “is tough shit.”
Which is what Catch-22 should have been called. The Army is a village of colliding bureaucracies whose colliding orders cook up impossibilities. Heller takes this one good joke and exploits it into two thousand variations of the same good joke, but in the act he somehow creates a rational vision of the modern world. Yet the crisis of reason is that it can no longer comprehend the modern world. Heller demonstrates that a rational man devoted to reason must arrive at the conclusion that either the world is mad and he is the only sane man in it, or (and this is the we
akness of Catch-22—it never explores this possibility) the sane man is not really sane because his rational propositions are without existential reason.
On page 178, there is a discussion about God.
“how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation.… Why in the world did He ever create pain?”
“Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”
… “Why couldn’t he have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs?”
Right there is planted the farthest advance of the flag of reason in his cosmology. Heller does not look for any answer, but there is an answer which might go that God gave us pain for the same reason the discovery of tranquilizers was undertaken by the Devil: if we have an immortal soul some of us come close to it only through pain. A season of sickness can be preferable to a flight from disease, for it discourages the onrush of a death which begins in the center of oneself.
Give talent its due. Catch-22 is the debut of a writer with merry gifts. Heller may yet become Gogol. But what makes one hesitate to call his first novel great or even major is that he has only grasped the inferior aspect of Hell. What is most unendurable is not the military world of total frustration so much as the midnight frustration of the half world, Baldwin’s other country, where a man may have time to hear his soul, and time to go deaf, even be forced to contemplate himself as he becomes deadened before his death. (Much as Hemingway may have been.) That is when one becomes aware of the anguish, the existential angst, which wars enable one to forget. It is that other death—without war—where one dies by a failure of nerve, which opens the bloodiest vents of Hell. And that is a novel none of us has yet come back alive to write.
With the exception of Another Country, the novels talked about up to now have been books written for men. Catch-22 was liked, I believe, by almost every man who read it. Women were puzzled. The world of a man is a world of surface slick and rock knowledge. A man must live by daily acts where he goes to work and works on the world some incremental bit, using the tools, instruments, and the techniques of the world. Thus a man cannot afford to go too deeply into the underlying meaning of a single subject. He prefers to become interested in quick proportions and contradictions, in the practical surface of things. A book like Catch-22 is written on the face of solemn events and their cockeyed contradictions. So it has a vast appeal: it relieves the frustration men feel at the idiocy of their work. Naked Lunch fries the surface in a witch’s skillet; the joy in reading is equal to the kick of watching a television announcer go insane before your eyes and start to croon obscenely about the president, First Lady, Barry Goldwater, Cardinal Spellman, J. Edgar. Somewhere in America somebody would take out his pistol and shoot the set. Burroughs shatters the surface and blasts its shards into the madness beneath. He rips the reader free of suffocation. Jones wrote a book which a dedicated corporation executive or an ambitious foreman would read with professional avidity because they would learn a bit about the men who work for them. The Thin Red Line brings detail to the surprises on the toughest part of the skin. So these three books are, as I say, books for men. Whereas Another Country, obsessed with that transcendental divide keeping sex from love, is a book more for women, or for men and women. So too is Set This House on Fire. And much the same can be said of Rabbit, Run and Letting Go.
On record are the opinions of a partisan. So it is necessary to admit that John Updike’s novel was approached with animus. His reputation has traveled in convoy up the Avenue of the Establishment, The New York Times Book Review blowing sirens like a motorcycle caravan, the professional muse of The New Yorker sitting in the Cadillac, membership cards to the right, fellowships in his pocket. The sort of critics who are rarely right about a book—Arthur Mizener and Granville Hicks, for example—ride on his flanks, literary bodyguards. Life magazine blew its kiss of death into the confetti. To my surprise, Rabbit, Run was therefore a better book than I thought it would be. The Literary Establishment was improving its taste. Updike was not simply a junior edition of James Gould Cozzens. But of course the Establishment cannot nominate a candidate coherently. Updike’s merits and vices were turned inside out. The good-girlish gentlemen of letters were shocked by the explicitness of the sex in Rabbit, Run, and slapped him gently for that with their fan, but his style they applauded. It is Updike’s misfortune that he is invariably honored for his style (which is atrocious—and smells like stale garlic) and is insufficiently recognized for his gifts. He could become the best of our literary novelists if he could forget about style and go deeper into the literature of sex. Rabbit, Run moves in well-modulated spurts at precisely those places where the style subsides to a ladylike murmur and the characters take over. The trouble is that young John, like many a good young writer before him, does not know exactly what to do when action lapses, and so he cultivates his private vice, he writes. And there are long overfingered descriptions in exacerbated syntax, airless crypts of four or five pages, huge inner exertions reminiscent of weight lifters; a stale sweet sweat clings to his phrases.
Example: Redbook, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s.
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six-three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname.
Example: True Confessions.
Outside in the air his fears condense. Globes of ether, pure nervousness, slide down his legs. The sense of outside space scoops at his chest.
Example: Elements of Grammar.
His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.
It’s the rare writer who cannot have sentences lifted from his work, but the first quotation is taken from the first five sentences of the book, the second is on the next-to-last page, and the third is nothing less than the last three sentences of the novel. The beginning and end of a novel are usually worked over. They are the index to taste in the writer. Besides, trust your local gangster. In the run of Updike’s pages are one thousand other imprecise, flatulent, wry-necked, precious, overpreened, self-indulgent, tortured sentences. It is the sort of prose which would be admired in a writing course overseen by a fussy old nance. And in Updike’s new book, The Centaur, which was only sampled, the style has gotten worse. Pietisms are congregating, affirmations à la Archibald MacLeish.