Revenge

       Short and sweet.

       The novel LETTERS took a considerable beating from U.S. book reviewers, a number of whom found the story too complicated and difficult for their enjoyment and too dependent upon the reader's familiarity with the author's earlier fiction. Against the former charge there is no defense: The story is complicated, but difficulty is in the mind of the beholder. The latter charge I understand but respectfully disagree with, it being a rule in our house that one may echo or reprise one's former fiction, but must not presume that any reader knows that fiction even slightly. I believe that LETTERS meets that rule.

       More tongue-tiskish than the reviewers' reservations about the novel was a recurring note of impatience, in a few cases even of sweeping anger, directed less at the work in hand than at the author himself, who seemed to have become in the minds of some critics the embodiment of an avant-garde literary experimentalism which they deplored.

       Tant pis. By the fall of 1981 I had finished a new novel, Sabbatical: A Romance, to be published in June of the following year. Though it is a shorter and altogether simpler story, which I hoped might recoup some of my publisher's investment in LETTERS, I suspected that it too would get banged on the head not solely for whatever its own demerits but for its author's having been generally badmouthed, along with other American "postmodernist" writers, by the likes of John Gardner (in his treatise On Moral Fiction) and Gore Vidal (in the essay "American Plastic," in The New York Review of Books). Even a little blood will sometimes fetch the sharks -- and the sharks in turn fetch rescuers -- when all the swimmer has in mind is to go on swimming.

       That suspicion must account for my agreeing to Rust Hills's merry proposal that I contribute to an Esquire Magazine "Revenge Symposium," in which a number of writers would settle scores with some particularly scathing reviewer. Payment was to be six bottles of one's favorite booze, with which to toast one's sweet revenge upon the son- or daughterofabitch.

       But it is another shop rule hereabouts that one does not reply to critics of one's work, and so when the Friday came to take revenge, I found myself taking it upon a reviewer who (so far as I can remember) has never reviewed a book of mine, but whose attacks upon some authors I admire had had that familiar ad hominem tone.

       The Revenge Symposium project was set aside by its conceivers, revived, set aside again, and finally published two years later, in the June 1983 number of Esquire. By the time it appeared, Sabbatical: A Romance had had its drubbing -- and its praise -- from the reviewers, and I was at work upon its successor and this Friday Book.

      My favorite booze? I asked for a half-dozen bottles of 1970 Château Pauillac, on sale just then at about $65 the bottle: better Bordeaux by a factor of ten than anything in our cellar. There was an embarrassed shuffling of feet in New York City. Okay, then: Make it six bottles of Dom Perignon (then about $50 the bottle), a champagne particularly admired in our house, where it has almost never appeared. More shuffling of feet: What they'd had in mind was, um, Jack Daniel's bourbon, J & B Scotch -- like that. But unless guests are in for cocktails, nearly no hard liquor is drunk chez nous. Who, I wondered, is taking revenge upon whom? I settled finally for six quarts of Mount Gay Sugar Cane rum in memory of my first romantic Caribbean visit, twelve years earlier, when Shelly and I had run off from Boston to Barbados. Six quarts of Mount Gay Sugar Cane, I reckoned, would make six summersworth of nostalgic rum punches at Langford Creek, and I feared that further dickering might leave me with a six-pack of Miller Lite. What the liquor store finally delivered was six fifths of Mount Gay Eclipse (not the same rum at all as Sugar Cane): presumably neither Esquire's fault nor the subtle revenge of the critic here criticized. Whom I have never met; against whom I have no personal grudge; and who, I learned after the piece appeared (minus its final sentence, here reappended), is my present editor's brother-in-law.

       Eclipse, anyone?

       My fiction has so excited the spleen of so many and various reviewers over the past quarter-century that while I can still be instructed by intelligent criticism, I am proof against invective. My revenge is to forget who it was, say, who dismissed The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy as "mere inflated spoofs" -- though the word spoof, which anyhow sounds like an imperfectly suppressed fart, retains its malodor in my house. And who was that other imperfectly suppressed fart who, in the columns of The New York Review of Books, called the author of Chimera a "narrative chauvinist pig"? Gone from my memory, though I relish the phrase.

       There are worse; I have forgot them. The dogs bark, says the Arabian proverb, but the caravan moves on.

       About splenetic assaults upon the art of other writers whom I admire, however, I remain thin-skinned. I neither forget nor forgive, e.g., Roger Sale's savaging, ten years ago -- also in The New York Review of Books -- of John Hawkes's novel The Blood Oranges: an attack which opened with the sentence "The Blood Oranges fails because it is the work of a contemptible imagination." There are earlier and later novels of Hawkes's which I myself prefer, but in The Blood Oranges, as in all his fiction, John Hawkes is one of our purest and most memorable verbal artists, whereas Roger Sale is a mere inflated spoof. There is a reviewer whom I will not shrive until he recants by writing of some future Hawkes novel, "Whatever its apparent flaws (and they are only apparent), this is a luminous, transcendent work of art, not least because it proceeds from a luminous, transcendent imagination. . ."

 << PrevPage  [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40]  ... NextPage  >>