Lucking Out - James Wolcott [125]
I made enemies with my reviews but seldom ran into their gun-slit stares because my invitations to book parties were equally seldom, my one near altercation occurring when an innocent at a magazine fete asked someone whose book I had reviewed months earlier, “Do you know Jim Wolcott?” to which he snapped, “Yeah, I know the son of a bitch,” and revved off, which in the brusque seventies barely even registered as bad manners. In his shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted to say hi either, and if we ran into each other today, I’m sure we would amiably ignore each other, having amassed so many better enemies in the interim. I developed a reputation for being “a smart-ass” in print, but a smart-ass at least has some bounce to it, and my interest in literature was never liturgical. It was enthusiasm or forget it. Literature with a capital L, like a marble foot planted atop the reader’s head, didn’t interest me. I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe. As Kael wrote in “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best; it’s an inhuman position, and I don’t believe them.” I did believe them, having seen how high they could raise the Communion wafer. Especially in lit-crit, there were those who could be believed when they professed undying fidelity to only the highest and the best, not only Sontag (for whom “seriousness” was the purring word she most liked to pet, telling an interviewer, “Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness”), but The New Yorker’s supreme polymath and European curator George Steiner, and William H. Gass, who wrote in his essay “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World,” “It is the principal function of popular culture—though hardly its avowed purpose—to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men’s minds full, small, and careful.” Which is one weird slant on the slaughterhouse of history (those small, careful minds that waged the Crusades, set Montezuma in motion, and so forth), as if literature has its own pacifying lies to tell, a finer class of platitudes.
I was once sitting with Pauline in the last row of a literary panel discussion downtown starring Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates, who were trading honeydew compliments back and forth as if they expected Eudora Welty to show up with a wide-brimmed hat and a watering can. Ozick would compliment Oates on the dynamic fecundity of her bullet-train imagination and how it cowed her, confessing that she could only proceed to the next sentence in her own fiction after she had chipped and beveled the previous sentence to perfection, to which Oates would deftly respond, And that’s what I so admire and envy about your writing, Cynthia, the exquisite crystalline luminosity of each beautifully chosen, carefully arranged phrase and metaphor … Back and forth it fluttered, Ozick in her girlish voice (so incongruous with her tank-turret head) and Oates doing her shrinking-violet act, until Pauline side-whispered, “Can you believe this shit?” We had a movie later to go to uptown, and as Ozick and Oates appeared on the verge of singing a duet, I asked what time our screening started. Pauline said, “It can’t start soon enough,” and out we hastened, into the welcoming arms of liberty.