PARTISAN REVIEW
413
stories by writers as good, and as serious, as Isaac Rosenfeld and
J.
F.
Powers ) a certain snobbishness about the material held my own
imagination in check.
What changed your mind?
The point I had reached in my own career: the confidence I
had developed in my literary impulses, combined with the experience
of the sixties, the "demythologizing" decade.
This confidence expressed itself partly in a greater willingness
to be deliberately, programmatically, perverse - subversive not merely
of the "serious" values of official literary culture (such subversion,
after
all,
is the standard stuff of our era, if not the new convention)
but subversive of my own considerable investment (witness this inter–
view ) in seriousness. Gradually the
least
promising material began to
seem to me the most attractive, material unlike, say, what Malamud
may have had in mind when, upon accepting the National Book
Award for
The Fixer,
he quoted from Melville to the effect that
"a great book demands a great subject." It was a hard notion to take
at face value anyway from a writer as perverse as Melville, who after
all wrote
his
great book on the subject of whaling. From the evidence
of
Moby Dick
(and works such as
Ulysses, Dead Souls,
and
The
Castle )
a great book seemed to require that the least likely subject
be converted into a marvelous one by a singular act of imagination
that had nothing to do with the general estimate of the subject's worth.
But as unappealing for me as the idea of "a great subject" was
the idea of "a great book." Just think of the writers who had ruined
perfectly good books, odd books, eccentric books,
interesting
books,
trying to make them into "great books." Think of the careers, some
in our very midst, stunted, or stultified, even wrecked, by that kind
of aspiration. Suppose, instead, a writer set himself the task of
not
writing a great book. Well, chances were he couldn't miss, for one
thing; there was that to recommend it. But for someone like me,
with his strong allegiance to universities
and
to
the
great books, a
writer well indoctrinated in the great fictional tradition of moral
seriousness, whose own early sense of his vocation was not without its
priestly (and princely) side, there might be something to
be
gained
by working against the grain of his own awe - and pretensions–
and, as it were, demythologizing his own notions of what constituted
literary "greatness."
I had been at something like this now for a while - particularly
