'ARTISAN REVIEW
-reach that vast audience which is the true creator's goal though not,
as
newspaper writers think (betraying their own interest), for money
or glory but for making connection. That is the passion which drives
the talent, and the larger the connection the greater the fulfillment.
Examining sales figures with a sharp eye, going into depression
ill
the slightest falling off, Dickens is typical of the artist who finds
in the people of his own time the self's true complement. It is per–
haps
significant that my generation was the last to think of the
novelist as central to the culture, with everyone potentially accessible
to our art. When this proved not to be true (our medium too
"hot"; our readers too "cold"), writers began to act very oddly
indeed, running for President, directing films, talking on television.
Fortunately, the rising generation is more modest than we.
They know that the novel at its
best
is for the few, like poetry,
and so they are able to survive reasonably content in universities,
while we -last of the great dinosaurs - sink into the electronic
swamp, our death agonies recorded on television with much fuss.
Beside the review from England, a letter from a Canadian aca–
demic saying that the only two characters in literature which no one
but an American could have created are Huckleberry Finn and
Myra Breckinridge (so much for the white whale!), and a cable
from Hollywood: would I like to adapt for the screen Kurt Von–
negut's
Slaughterhouse Five?
A nice irony. Vonnegut is, the press
tells us, the current favorite of the young, supplanting Golding and
Salinger and Tolkien. I think I know why. Though his style is easy
to the point of being imbecilic, his creative imagination is - what
is
the reviewer's phrase? - first rate and fills the need of the young
for fantasy, for alternative worlds to this one. Last year they were
Tolkien elves, this year they can learn not to fear death because it
is
simply a violet light and, as creatures from another planet assure
us,
since one is able to scan one's life at any point, if things are
bad in the present simply go backward or forward in time.
It is quite possible that the only fiction that is "necessary" in
this time is science fiction which extends a part of the imagination.
The pity of course is that the best writers are still involved with
the moral aspects of being when the young want only mind-bending
stories and - finally - hope of heaven. Yet on this last point serious
and popular writing may soon overlap before the game is up. I have
