112
MARY McCARTHY
(often rightly) some trick. In short, it is not all straight shooting,
as it was with the old novelists.
This
is
not a defect, yet it points to the defects of the
method, which can be summed up as a lack of straightforward–
ness. There
is
something burglarious about these silent entries
into a private and alien consciousness. Or so I feel when I do it
myself. It
is
exhilarating but not altogether honest to make
believe I am a devious red-haired man
prof~r
with bad breath
and bits of toilet paper on his face, to talk under my breath
his sibilant, vindictive thought-language and draw his pale lips
tightly across my teeth. "So
this
is how the world looks to a
man like that
I"~
I can say to myself, awestruck, and so, I expect,
John Updike, twenty-five years old, must have felt when he
discovered what it felt like to be an old pauper with loosened
eye-muscles sitting on a poorhouse porch. But I cannot know,
really, what it feels like to be a vindictive man professor, any
more than a young man can know what it
is
to be an old man
or Faulkner can know what it is to be a feeble-mind adult who
has had his balls cut off. All fictions, of course, are impersona–
tions, but it seems to me somehow less dubious to impersonate
the outside of a person, says Mrs. Micawber with her mysterious
"I
will
never leave Mr. Micawber," than to claim to know
what it feels like to
be
Mrs. Micawber. These impersonations,
moreover, are laborious; to come at a character circuitously, by
a tour de force, means spending great and sometimes dispropor–
tionate pains on the method of entry. I read somewhere that
Salinger spent ten years writing
The Catcher in the
Rye;
that
was eight years too long. Granted, the book is a feat, but it
compels admiration more as a feat than as a novel, like the
performance of a one-armed violinist or any other curiosity.
This could not be said of
Huckleberry Finn;
Mark Twain's
imitation of Huck's language is never, so to speak, the drawing–
card. In the cases of Salinger, Updike, myself, one wonders
whether the care expended on the mechanics of the imitation,
on getting the right detail, vocabulary, and so on, does not
