We Need More Writers We'd Miss

By LANCE MORROW

Books everywhere are falling apart. Acids in the ink and the pulp devour the pages. The paper crumbles, powdered words in a few generations will blow away like dandelion fluff. Some computer-literate great-grandchild will hold the empty, mortal binding in his hands as if it were Yorick's skull.

And yet sometimes we harbor a subversive suspicion that it doesn't really matter. Once, we think, we were a people of the book. Now we begin to seem, perhaps irreparably, a people of the tube. The race of literary giants, the tyrant genius founders (Homer, Tolstoi, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and so-on), will of course be safely stowed away on microfilm:literature freeze-dried, the Great Books kept as curios of the culture, like shrunken heads. But the writing we tend to get now, books milling around aimlessly at the dead end of the post modern (or wherever we technically find ourselves), seem somehow . . .inadequate. Our literature paces like an un-happy animal in a small cage. On the whole, we learn no more about the meaning of things from our "creative" writers than a child learns about wildlife by watching the disconsolate, paranoid polar bear in the Central Park Zoo. The brute scowls and flips a beer keg around his stagnant pool and dreams of killing someone: a perfect model of the literary life.

The English critic Cyril Connolly once suggested: "Let us reflect whether there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster." At work here may be the old harrumphing delusion of perspective: a Miniver Cheevy trick of eye and time Up close, most writers tend to look minor, to look like transient scribblers: aphids, small potatoes, twerps. One imagines a golden age long gone and a gray, leaden trivial present. effect is only heightened by the undiscriminating hype. One has to listen hard to hear any real thunder in the books.

John Cheever died last month. A loss to American writing, but not really a disaster. The parlor game of ranking is seductive. We like to wonder if the Darwinian selections of Posterity will confirm our prejudices. The briefly Celebrated poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote, with a weather eye on his own coming obscurity: "No reputation is more than snowfall. It vanishes."

But play the game anyway: Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were suddenly to fall silent? Easy: No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea. What if John Updike were to stop writing? A shame, but not a duster for American culture. Walker Percy? Joyce Carol Gates? Donald Barthelme? No. Philip Roth? Joseph Heller? William Styron? Truman Capote? John Gardner? John Irving? Norman Mailer? Stop It gets to be a pogrom. The mind flips through its card catalogue. Very few disastrous silences loom.

The conjectural game tangles the mind in difficulties antiworld speculations on the classics that an infinite number of monkeys might have composed on an infinite number of type writers. J.D. Salinger years ago enforced Connolly's game upon himself, vanishing into a weird silence that for those who love his work has always felt like a small, sharp loss. Thomas Pynchon dwells somewhere in an aloof privacy in deep cover making metaphysical devices in his basement, like a terrorist who has gone into the fireworks business.

V.S. Naipaul? More than possible. Any poets? The blood of that race is getting awfully thin. The late Robert Lowell seems the last who would have qualified.

The game grows handsomely solemn when the Nobel Prize committee files into the mental boardroom. Literature degenerates into a responsibility. The Nobel Prize for Literature has of ten been set aside for the writer of greatest geopolitical obscurity (Yugoslavia's Ivo Andric, 1961). But the prize need not be a disgrace: a writer can rise above it. Saul Bellow (Nobel, 1976) has managed. Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) has done what the greatest and liveliest usually do: he has made a world, a lost, magic place fall of God and demons and strange, tumbling life.

Who else is ready for beatification? Some think Robert Penn Warren. Ralph Ellison, for one book, Invisible Man (1952). J B. Priestley? Alberto Moravia? Doris Lessing? Graham Greene? Jorge Luis Borges? The morally imposing Alexander Sofehenitsyn? Yes Certainly Samuel Beckett, the muttering old codger of modernism, who changed the spiritual and theatrical decor of the 20th century.

The appearance of real writing in the world is a miracle. Sociology cannot predict it. But certain patterns appear. Perhaps great writers arrive only at certain stages of a civilization. Great writing may be conjured by great injustice, for example, and a peculiar receptivity in the audience, not gullibility exactly but a kind of craving, a deep need for moral definition. One detects tremors of both the talent and the need in Latin America. That part of the world is breeding up unexpected, wonderful writers the way Russia did in the 19th century Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, has huge extravagant resources.

The imagination in the U.S. and Western Europe seems otherwise occupied: television, bypassing the old catastrophe of Babel, pours the world directly into the mind and provides it with an intense, though passive, planetary public life. The consciousness teems with wars and disasters and space shots and pageants. It has become difficult for the solitary writer wringing his psyche over the Smith-Corona to compete with all that bounces down from the satellite. Besides, reality in the late 20th century is somehow more inventive than the literary imagination Its plots (Jonestown, for example) are weirdly fertile, fatally ingenious. The idly speculative Connolly list, in any case, is Premature. It requires death and time to complete the writers myth. The Japanese have a macabre genius for the process. Their best writers--Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima, for example--have established a tradition of committing suicide some time before nature forces its inevitable silence upon them.

The writers on the list of the Great are rarely those whom one simply loves. Great writers are often interminable bores. D.H Lawrence once said that reading Proust was like trying to till a field with knitting needles. Cyril Connolly would not have made his own list. He wrote his line about writers we might miss in a minor book called The Unquiet Grave (1944). He died in 1974. But open the book now, in 1982, and his mordant, elegant light pours out of the volume, alive, into the eye, the waiting, conscious mind.

The vital transmission occurs. You can pass books across time across death, like fire, and have them catch. The process averts the disaster of unawareness. Of silence.

--By Lance Morrow

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