Walker Percy - The Message in the Bottle - How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

What about American novelists? One would exclude, again without prejudice, social critics and cultural satirists like Steinbeck and Lewis. The Okies were too hungry to have “identity crises.” Dodsworth was too interested in Italy and dolce far niente to worry about God or the death of God. The contemporary novel deals with the sequelae. What happens to Dodsworth after he lives happily ever after in Capri? What happens to the thousand Midwesterners who settle on the Riviera? What happens to the Okie who succeeds in Pomona and now spends his time watching Art Linkletter? Is all well with them or are they in deeper trouble than they were on Main Street and in the dust bowl? If so, what is the nature of the trouble?

We have a clue to the preoccupation of the American novelist in the recurring complaint of British critics. A review of a recent novel spoke of the Americans’ perennial disposition toward “philosophical megalomania.” Certainly one can agree that if British virtues lie in tidiness of style, clarity and concision, a respect for form, and a native embarrassment before “larger questions,” American failings include pretension, grandiosity, formlessness, Dionysian excess, and a kind of metaphysical omnivorousness. American novels tend to be about everything. Moreover, at the end, everything is disposed of, God, man, and the world. The most frequently used blurb on the dust jackets of the last ten thousand American novels is the sentence “This novel investigates the problem of evil and the essential loneliness of man.” A large order, that, but the American novelist usually feels up to it.

This congenital hypertrophy of the novelist’s appetites no doubt makes for a great number of very bad novels, especially in times when, unlike in nineteenth-century Russia, the talent is not commensurate with the ambition.

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Since true prophets, i.e., men called by God to communicate something urgent to other men, are currently in short supply, the novelist may perform a quasi-prophetic function. Like the prophet, his news is generally bad. Unlike the prophet, whose mouth has been purified by a burning coal, the novelist’s art is often bad, too. It is fitting that he should shock and therefore warn his readers by speaking of last things — if not the Last Day of the Gospels, then of a possible coming destruction, of a laying waste of cities, of vineyards reverting to the wilderness. Like the prophet, he may find himself in radical disagreement with his fellow countrymen. Unlike the prophet, he does not generally get killed. More often he is ignored. Or, if he writes a sufficiently dirty book, he might become a best seller or even be bought by the movies.

What concerns us here is his divergence from the usual views of the denizens of the secular city in general and in particular from the new theologians of the secular city.

While it is important to take note of this divergence, extreme care must be taken not to distort it and especially not to fall prey to the seduction of crepe-hanging for its own sake. Nothing comes easier than the sepulchral manifestoes of the old-style café existentialist and the new-style hippie who professes to despise the squares and the technology of the Western city while living on remittance checks from the same source and who would be the first to go for his shot of penicillin if he got meningitis.

Yet even after proper precautions are exercised, it is impossible to overlook a remarkable discrepancy. It would appear that most serious novelists, to say nothing of poets and artists, find themselves out of step with their counterparts in other walks of life in the modern city, doctor, lawyer, businessman, technician, laborer, and now the new theologian.

It’s an old story with novelists. People are always asking, Why don’t you write about pleasant things and normal people? Why all the neurosis and violence? There are many nice things in the world. The reader is offended. But if one replies, “Yes, it’s true; in fact there seem to be more nice people around now than ever before, but somehow as the world grows nicer it also grows more violent. The triumphant secular society of the Western world, the nicest of all worlds, killed more people in the first half of this century than have been killed in all history. Travelers to Germany before the last war reported that the Germans were the nicest people in Europe”—then the reader is even more offended.

If one were to take a Gallup poll of representative denizens of the megalopolis on this subject, responses to a question about the future might run something like this:

Liberal politician: If we use our wealth and energies constructively to provide greater opportunities for all men, there is unlimited hope for man’s well-being.

Conservative politician: If we defeat Communism and revive old-time religion and Americanism, we have nothing to worry about.

Businessman: Business is generally good; the war is not hurting much, but the Negroes and the unions and the government could ruin everything.

Laborer: All this country needs is an eight-hour week and a guaranteed minimum income.

City planner: If we could solve international problems and spend our yearly budget on education and housing, we could have a paradise on earth.

Etc., etc.

Each is probably right. That is to say, there is a context within which it is possible to agree with each response.

But suppose one were to ask the same question of a novelist who, say, was born and raised in a community which has gone far to satisfy the lists of city needs, where indeed housing, education, recreational and cultural facilities, are first class; say some such place as Shaker Heights, Pasadena, or Bronxville. How does he answer the poll? In the first place, if he was born in one of these places, he has probably left since. It might be noted in passing that such communities (plus Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and Vassar) have produced remarkably few good novelists lately, which latter are more likely to come from towns in south Georgia or the Jewish sections of New York and Chicago.

But how, in any case, is the refugee novelist from Shaker Heights likely to respond to the poll? I venture to say his response might be something like: Something is wrong here; I don’t feel good.

Now of course, if all generalizations are dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous of all is a generalization about novelists, who are a perverse lot and don’t even get along with each other, and who, moreover, speak an even more confused Babel nowadays than usual. But if there is a single strain that runs through the lot, whether Christian or atheist, black or white, Greek or Jew, it is a profound disquiet.

Is it too much to say that the novelist, unlike the new theologian, is one of the few remaining witnesses to the doctrine of original sin, the imminence of catastrophe in paradise?

If, anyhow, we accept this divergence as a fact, that the serious American artist is in dissent from the current American proposition, we are faced with some simple alternatives by way of explanation.

Either we must decide that the artist is mistaken and in what sense he is mistaken: whether he is a self-indulged maniac or a harmless eccentric or the culture’s court jester whom everyone expects to cut the fool and make scandalous sallies for which he is well paid.

Or the novelist in his confused Orphic way is trying to tell us something we would do well to listen to.

Again it is necessary to specify the dissent, the issue and the parties to it. One likes to pick the right enemies and unload the wrong allies.

The issue, one might say at the outset, is not at all the traditional confrontation between the “alienated” artist and the dominant business-technological community. For one thing, the novelist, even the serious novelist who doesn’t write dirty books, never had it so good. It is businessmen, or rather their wives, who are his best customers. Great business foundations compete to give him money. His own government awards him cash prizes. For another thing, the old self-image of the artist as an alien in a hostile society seems increasingly to have become the chic property of those writers who have no other visible claim to distinction. Nothing is easier than to set up as a two-bit hippie Cassandra crying havoc in bad verse.