Making Connections

The wonderful Chicago novelist Richard Stern is an embarrassment of gifts. Several of his novels – especially Stitch, Natural Shocks and Other Men’s Daughters – rank among the best from the last half-century, and his Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories, published last year, is a generous assemblage of unalloyed pleasure. His unruly nonfiction is a grab bag of journalism, reviews, essays and profiles, and is always interesting, smart and funny. He has read everything and seems to have met and in some cases befriended everyone worth knowing since the end of World War II – among them, Bellow, Roth, Borges, Pound, Edgar Bowers, Donald Justice, Flannery O’Connor and Samuel Beckett.

Collected in The Invention of the Real (1982) is an impossible-to-categorize piece titled “Sulzberger and Beckett: Sketch for a Diptych.” C.L. Sulzberger’s family owned the New York Times, and for decades he wrote news and a column devoted to foreign affairs. He also published four volumes of memoirs in the 60s and 70s, and Stern read them and another “50 or so volumes of memoirs” while researching his novel about a journalist, Natural Shocks. “I stole what my style could accommodate,” Stern admits, charmingly. In 1977, he wrote a “confession and fan letter” to Sulzberger, and the two met in Paris for “a wonderful four-hour luncheon.”

By happy coincidence, Stern had met Beckett for the first time two days earlier, also in Paris, and he explains: “I thought I’d do a double portrait: one would be of a man who’d spent forty-odd years reporting the world out there, the other a man who’d spent the same time inventing a world from inside.” Here’s how Stern spells out the similarities between such dissimilar men:

“Each was a native English speaker from the English periphery (Ireland, the United States) who’d spent most of his adult life in Paris. Both were excellent linguists, both men of conspicuous intellectual and physical energy. They even had similar grizzled, blue-eyed looks (though Beckett’s face is gaunt, his eyes huge). Neither is concerned much with appearance (except, perhaps, negatively). Beckett dresses like an urchin and carries a Woolworth-style briefcase. Sulzberger paid more for clothes, and there was a blue scheme, though it looked as if it had been worked out numerically.”

The piece is less than five pages long but I find it convincing. Stern writes:

“Beckett’s work, almost entirely severed from that world [the journalist’s], is an addition to it; a new mental color. In the little bar near the Luxembourg gardens, Beckett said that the only time he’s otherwise participated in the world’s affairs was when the Nazis began killing his friends. He joined an underground network: his job, condensing intelligence reports so that, photographed, they could be fitted into matchboxes. (`Reality favors symmetries,’ wrote Borges, another modern master of the laser and the remnant.)”

I like those rare polymathic writers who gather disparate people, books, facts, ideas and nuggets of language from diverse disciplines and bodies of information, and make plausible connections. They seem to operate under the assumption that everything, if you look hard enough, is related to everything else (one of the lessons, certainly, of modern science), that the world, to the alert and observant, is nothing but link upon link in an endless matrix of relations. Stern is like this, both in his fiction and nonfiction, and so are Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner, Aldo Buzzi and the rock critic Greil Marcus – itself a pretty unlikely linkage of writers.