Herself Read Free Page A

eighteenth century, and had died some fifty years before my birth, but I could listen to echoes of Civil-War Richmond—and 1850 Dresden and 1888 New York—from his much younger widow, who was still only ninety-seven when I was twelve. I didn’t much want to, being understandably more in love with my father’s dashing youth, which had taken place years before his marriage to my much younger mother, and in a decade the whole world already called the belle époque. Less than half a century gone, in our family it seemed still at hand. A decade? That was nothing. Instead of being timebound by access to such a stretch of it, within the usual terms of the human bondage I seemed to have been set free to wander as a citizen of time’s kind of time.
    By now, I am old enough to have seen clothing repeat itself, even on me, and to enjoy it. In Hollywood, I have just sported a jacket saved for its marvels since 1947, and once more so much the height of avant-garde fashion that the Fairmont in San Francisco had got into the papers for trying to bar me from the dining room—now that I was wearing pants with it.
    But I still know that the history of the imagination never repeats itself that knowingly. In art, you can die for love of an epoch—and die of it. Maybe in life, too. When I was first writing I had a friend so much in love with the ’20s that he admitted he would have preferred to have been young then , along with the writers he admired. Sad, I thought, for I was somehow sure they would never have given up their time for another—I would never want to give up mine. (And I still recall a remark heard at a play of his: “How can so young a man be so modern in such an old fashioned way!”)
    The Big Apple, as you may know from heritage or even experience, was a dance. It came after the Charleston, which came after the Bunny Hug (well after), and was followed by all those others it resembles. It was one of those dances—maybe all of them one spastic version of the Lebentanz—which leap up in America like crops. I never danced it. But I was there.
    What is the history of a writer, as a writer, outside the books? Is there an internal history, as a writer, which goes on alongside them? Is it worth talking about? I was never sure.
    Not yet published, a writer lies in the womb, marvelously private as one looks back on it, but not yet born, waiting for the privilege to breathe. Outside is the great, exhaling company of those who have expressed.
    First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is light. The spirit stands exposed, in what it at first takes to be the family circle of confreres. Everybody, shaped to one ear, is listening … but after that—one must live.
    What is a writer’s innocence? In my work, I begin early to ask what innocence is for anyone, to examine it.
    “I wanted my conviction—no, that is not the word— themes perhaps, to rise pure of themselves. In the uncontaminated country that I could sometimes glimpse in the depth of myself, there was another kind of knowledge that sometimes turned its dark fin and disappeared again, that I must fight to keep,” the young hero of my first novel, False Entry says. “Compromise has no taste, no muscle; one day it is merely there, in the bogged ankle, the webbed tongue.”
    I myself fear that logic will overtake the dream, and extinguish it. “The young act from a pure, breathless logic still ignorant of the conventional barrier between dream and possibility,” he wrote, under my hand. “When a man begins to act logically according to others. … then he has left his youth behind.”
    In heaven, there must occasionally be recording angels who can’t be as objective as required. They won’t go along with the theology that everything is known; they know better than that. Yet why has that supra-knowledge, so full of the abyss, been planted on dubious guys like them? It worries them. Even so, whenever one of them is kicked out and over