The Moon In Its Flight

IT’S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY

Whatever remnants of stylistic eccentricity peculiar and unique to Clifford’s fiction had long since been leached out of it by a dogged series of accommodations, emendations, compromises, and authorial, shall I say, understandings. His current editor was a reasonable man, so Clifford believed, and the suggestions that he made substantive and intelligent. And he had stuck by Clifford, despite the disappointment of his last book, patiently waiting for “his” writer to achieve that perfect blend of the conventionally literary and the cannily specious that would announce a breakthrough.

Now, reading the proofs of his fourth novel, Clifford saw, not with anything so dramatic as a shock, but saw with a kind of sudden, pleased candor, that not only had he, at last, quite thoroughly assassinated the prose that was once his, with its errors and tics and flourishes, its obsessions and syntactical aberrations; but that the staid, clean, undemanding — he thought of it as functional — prose within which his characters now suffered their warm and imperfect, their wonderfully human, oh so human! travails, was not only not his, but was, quite remarkably, nobody’s. It was an excruciatingly polished, forward-march prose, with suitable, occasional filigrees of clever simile and analogy, and splashes of the contemporary demotic; a prose that seemed happily familiar, as if it had been there all the time, waiting to be read, but just once. And, too, his characters, his flawed and fascinating people, were deployed as neat packages, their histories and quirks economically posited well before their thrust-and-parry colloquies. They looked, so Clifford thought, as if they had decided on things by themselves, sans authorial interference. “They more or less started doing what they wanted to do,” he could imagine himself saying to an interviewer.

This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers — well-written, with fully developed characters, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were — as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.

How did all this bad luck befall Clifford? He’d begun his dim career as a poet, one of minor, limited gifts. At unexpected moments, there had appeared to him (although “appeared” may be dramatizing such occasions) the notion of the poem that would invite him to venture beyond his given odds and ends of “talent,” that would invite him to give up his conception of the poem as a vector of sensitive thought concerning his own highly edited but sensitive life. But since he had a small reputation, a fear of the untried, and, most importantly, a terror of writing a poem that would not look like his poems (he had, he believed, a style), these realities conspired to keep him writing a constipated verse that was, at its best, as some friend cruelly said behind his back, “like Sylvia Plath without the rag on.” What to do?

Clifford wanted, not fame, he knew better than that, but some sort of recognition and respect, some applause, a little money! He wanted to know that his books of poems would be regularly reviewed in the Times Book Review, even if such reviews were by the Winchell Tremaines, Brooke Van Dolans, Samantha Gundersons, and the other haughty corporals of the racket. On a number of occasions, Clifford tried to write the poem that was, if you please, just out of his reach, a poem that refused his carefully “crafted” images (“blue gardenias, slices of a summer sky”), but by the second stanza or the twelfth line, he’d be nervously lost; the language that he read, in a nausea of dislocation, was one that he neither recognized nor had control over. He could not, to put it perhaps too simply, tolerate the evidence of his obliterated opinions. And so he “retired” from versifying, as one might quit a boring job, and decided to try his hand at fiction.

His first novel, rigorously and repeatedly reworked, was, nevertheless, somewhat shaggy and juvenile; yet it had phrases and even scenes in which Clifford seemed to overcome his minuscule talents, if I may be permitted a mystical turn. Perhaps it’s better to say that he surprised himself in that he permitted his prose to forgo, on occasion, its rigid professionalism, permitted it to break loose, a little, from the everyday world and its everyday people that the narrative drove relentlessly onward: A died, but B lived; C had a terrible accident, but D, her friend, had a baby by E, C’s former husband; and F’s son came home, addicted to heroin and suffering from AIDS, sullen and despairing, yet seeking love from G, his father, who, although compassionate, was emotionally distant, even from his second wife, the weaver, and her autistic daughter. And I’s alcoholism was destroying his sister, J’s life, even though she would not recognize this fact. These exhausted problems did not, I hope it goes without saying, present themselves as banalities of “mere” pop fiction, for Clifford, like any littérateur you can think of, knew how to disguise the sentimental as the poignant, even the tragic. Life! his novel said. Life! It was, of course, baloney.

Clifford’s editor at the time, who would be disappointed by Clifford, worried about the eruptions of, well, writing in the manuscript, and worked with Clifford to temper if not excise them. The book needed to be friendlier, more coherent, retaining its toughness and quirky insights, but not at the expense of a driving narrative. The book was about, was it not, the way we are now? Without a clear respect and compassion for the characters and their messy lives, just what is a novel? What, indeed? Look at Dickens, look at Hardy, look at Trollope, look at Bellow and Updike, look at them! The novel was published, got nine reviews, one of which called it “… carefully written and enjoyably quirky … somewhat difficult at times.. rich with compassion … characters who, by the book’s end, we feel we’ve … suffered with.” The book disappeared so completely that it never showed up on remainder tables or in catalogues.

There’s not much left to say. Clifford’s next two books were like dozens of others, literate if vulgar, “better than” kill-and-fuck trash, and of no account. They were much like the miles of thin, clankingly inadequate independent films that one can spend a lifetime watching blend into one another with an inevitability as depressing as it is foreseeable. Clifford, it must be said, did not “sell out,” for he had, as the old phrase puts it, “nothing that anybody wanted.” He wasn’t bad enough or smart enough to be a successful commercial hack, and he had absolutely none of the luck that would have enabled him to emerge from the slough of writhing literary hacks. Had he, when a poet, followed his Muse, as they say, into the brambles of language that were too formidable for him to contemplate, there is little doubt that he would have written bad poems; and it also seems clear that had he insisted on elaborating on the small eruptions of — art, let’s say, for want of a less generous word — in his first novel, it would have done nothing to ameliorate the zombielike qualities of the whole.

It’s a guess, one that pleases me, that as Clifford read the proofs of this fourth novel, as he battered his way through its dreary lines of prose, a prose that seemed manufactured by a language contraption with decorative abilities, he was relieved, even pleased. This is the McCoy! I’ll have him say, or something like it, Oh boy! perhaps. Maybe this book would do it. “Scintillating,” even “wise.” And with a pronounced “attention to scenes and their riveting details, not to mention their dialogue, that is almost cinematic.” You never know.