The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [13]
I sat almost directly facing Kit Nickerson, however: a much less formidable figure than the black-and-white portraits on his book flaps, a tall and thin man with a boxer’s mashed nose, a prominent Adam’s apple, and kind, watery eyes. He had a bit of a stutter. But it went away as he began arguing with a young author who sat across the table and a couple of places down, so that their exchange roped in a small audience of several others of us. It was hard not to feel slightly embarrassed for the other fellow, a guest teacher in the English Department here, as Kit himself had been two years before, when he’d hooked up with Kelly Stein—a prodigy of sorts, this much younger man, still in his twenties, half lost in his baggy clothing, with shoulder-length hair and a sweet face that cleared him of any suspicion, at least it seemed to me, that he liked to pick fights. “Do you want me to lie?” Kit asked him. “Because I could certainly manage it. Lying is sort of my vocation.” That was the first audible remark.
Apparently the younger man had accused the famous novelist of betraying his early promise. How he’d reached such a point in the middle of a lot of small talk would have been hard to trace, but having found himself out here past the glow of the party’s lights, so to speak, out in the dark with the great man, he wasn’t backing down, give him that much. I saw his fingers trembling as he touched his water glass. He succeeded in keeping his gaze direct. “The people in your early books were all different from each other. You really sampled the world. I mean, those characters, like in Quest for Tears, or any of the early ones, really…they have some commonalities, they’re people who all have at least some education, and real passion, but outside of that, they can belong to any class, any walk of life. I mean, you got around, put it that way. Now it’s just people covered in jewels, people on yachts, people at state dinners…I’m sorry, I mean I say this as an admirer, a follower, an emulator even—but don’t you think you’re turning into sort of a lapdog for the privileged?”
“But Seth,” Kit said, “you’re just being a snob in reverse. Don’t privileged people have feelings, too? Don’t they have inner lives? Can’t their passion be real?”
“There’s more to it than their material circumstances. Nowadays—in your books nowadays—somehow they’re kind of morally—uh.” He was wilting. “Morally aloof.”
“Uh-oh! Wait a minute!”
“That sounds stupid. Maybe I don’t know what I mean.” Seth shook his head, embarrassed.
“No. No. Please. Don’t chicken out. What do you mean? Why should this accusation prick me?”
“Or, okay, I’ll say the characters are morally uninstructive—”
“Hey, come on, Seth. They’re fictional. Do you really hope to get your moral lessons from people who don’t exist?”
“You don’t challenge them to get down in the muck of themselves and find out what’s right and what’s wrong. Not like you used to—like you once did.”
Kit, who seemed in general a charming man, became at this moment, while his admirer tried to explain himself, suddenly very unattractive, somehow elongated and parsonlike. One corner of his mouth twitched with cartoonish villainy, I have to say, as if he’d arrived first all by himself at this dinner party and set traps around the place and Seth had just sprung one. And the kid did have the nauseated look of someone dangling upside down.
“Look,” Kit said. “You talk about my books as if they’re artifacts. Maybe yours are. Maybe your books are artifacts and maybe for you they serve as currency in various transactions I can’t guess about because I don’t know you. It’s up to you to decide whether those transactions are corrupt or not. I can’t accuse you.” But he said this as if he was in fact leveling some sort of accusation that none of us, nobody other than Seth himself, could understand. I think it was just a conversational ploy, and I don’t think Seth understood the charge any more than the rest of us. It was just that Kit had been in this corner before and he knew how to duel