Picked-Up Pieces Read Free Page A

the back of a book jacket. Deferentially I moved closer. “Mr. O’Hara?” said I.
    O’Hara held out his hand. “Pull,” he said. I hesitated. “My back,” O’Hara explained. I pulled. He grunted in pain and did not budge. “Again,” said O’Hara.
    This time he made it, wincing, to his feet. Our laconic but characteristic dialogue continued. He, too, was attending the White House function. I offered him a ride in the limousine that had been sent for me, since I was one of the entertainers. I explained to the suspicious driver that this gentleman was John O’Hara, a very great writer and a guest of the President. The driver with maximum grudgingness made space for him in the front seat, while my wife and I settled regally in the back.
    Within the few seconds of this encounter I had been plunged into a cruel complex of stoic pain and social irony—a Negro chauffeur and a stammering light-verse writer had transformed a millionaire author into a front-seat hitchhiker. Mortified by the situation, feeling all its edges grating on O’Hara’s acute nerves, I fled conversationally to the state of Pennsylvania, which we had in common. O’Hara moved us to a plane both higher and more concrete—the number of Updikes in Princeton, New Jersey. At the White House he showed a distinct preference for the company of Marianne Moore, bending his big ear to her tiny precise voice like a schoolboy listening to a transistor radio he has smuggled into class.
    These not entirely fanciful reminiscences (which have omitted how I met Bernard Malamud in a museum lavatory, or how James Dickey entertained me one hungover 6 a.m. with a concert of country guitar music that fetched tears to my hillbilly eyes) mean to suggest that writers, like everyone else, see a world their personalities to some extent create. Denis de Rougemont claims that Chateaubriand could never have written Stendhal’s essays on seduction because seduction was simply no problem for Chateaubriand. The cosmos of delay and obfuscation rendered in
The Castle
surely in part reflects the special environment Kafka’s neurotic mannerisms spun around him. And we all recall how Hemingwayscouted the world for those marginal places where violence might feed his style.
    Also, as one who in a small way is himself now and then “met,” I suggest that forces within the writer-reader personal encounter foment unreality. The reader comes equipped with a vivid, fresh, outside impression of works the writer remembers wearily from the inside, as a blur of intention, a stretch of doubting drudgery, a tangle of memories and fabrications, a batch of nonsensical reviews, and a disappointed sigh from the publisher. The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer’s physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
    Evasive temperaments are drawn to the practice of fiction. Their work is done far behind the heat-shield of face and voice that advances against a room of strangers. The performance can be a shambling and ingratiating one as much as a cocksure and intimidating one, but performance it is: a pity, for these anonymous devoted readers who press affectionately toward a blind man are his lovers, who have accepted into themselves his most intimate and earnest thrusts. I would like to meet, I suppose, Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Green, but recognize the urge as superstitious, a seeking of a physical ritual to formalize the fact that we already are (I write as a reader) so well met.
Voznesensky Met

 
(A
New Yorker
Notes and Comment: August 1967)
    S EVERAL TIMES , a few years ago, we dined with Andrei Voznesensky in the dining hall of the Writers’ Union in Moscow. The Union’s building, on Vorovsky Street, was Tolstoy’s Moscow mansion, and the model for the home of the Rostovs in
War and Peace
. One drives in through the gates through which the Rostovs and a wagonload of possessions fled Napoleon’s approaching armies; straight ahead, past a bust of