'I Now Can Read Only the True Fanatics'

The blackest pessimism can be invigorating, especially if salted with wit. I think of the late Terry Teachout calling himself an "ebullient pessimist." True, there are comic writers whose sensibilities are nearly Edenic. Think of P.G. Wodehouse, one of nature’s innocents. Charles Portis, perhaps the funniest mortal ever to write a novel, is an ambiguous case. People do terrible things in his books, but I never think of them as dark or grim. The same is true in most of Peter De Vries’ novels, with the obvious exception of The Blood of the Lamb (1961).

Thomas Berger (1924-2014) is utterly unforgiving of human foolishness, greed and general bestiality. He’s a rare writer without illusions, though he never preaches and lets his characters do the dirty work. Of all the novelists at work during my lifetime, Berger is the one who most inspired my loyalty, starting when I read his third novel, Little Big Man (1964), in high school, then read retroactively back to his first, Crazy in Berlin (1958), and forward as subsequent books appeared, beginning with Vital Parts in 1970 and concluding with Adventures of the Artificial Woman in 2004. Berger always insisted he was not a humorist.

 

In 1963, Berger befriended the Pakistani-American novelist and poet Zulfikar Ghose, who died in June at age eighty-seven. Ghose had reviewed Berger’s second novel, Reinhart in Love (1962), and the two remained frequent correspondents. In a 1983 issue of Studies in American Humor devoted to Berger’s work, Ghose published a selection of excerpts from Berger’s letters, dated but with little further context. This is from January 28, 1971:

 

“My feeling that not just America but the West is finished is based on a conviction that when a civilization becomes obsessed with its deficiencies, it is degenerating.”

 

Berger is never a joke-teller. He’s not the funny guy at the party. His tone is usually straightforward, never overheated.

 

June 2, 1971: “For some reason, a wonderful legal phrase occurs to me at this point. It is the finishing touch to a statement given in writing by a witness, I believe: ‘Further the deponent sayeth not.’ I intend to have that carved on my tombstone.”

 

I subscribed to Esquire in 1972-73 when Berger reviewed movies for the magazine. I wish some enterprising publisher would collect them and bring them back into print. Here Berger writes to Ghose on February 16, 1973:

 

“I have loathed doing the Esquire column since the second or third number. I'm simply not a critic by nature, at least not that sort, and I resent having to look at a work of art or entertainment and then write about it. If it’s good, it is sufficient in itself. If bad, not worth talking about.”

 

Three months later, on a related theme: “We live in an age of narcissistic exhibitionists, Ghose, cheap little entertainers who bare their arses to great applause and masturbate publicly for an encore.” 

 

Berger was a private guy, not a confessional writer or exhibitionist, so some of his personal observations come as revelations even to longtime readers. November 7, 1973:

 

“My trouble is that, unlike you, I enjoy very little in reality, except that which I usually cannot afford. I generally go back to writing because only my own fantasies interest me for long. More and more I believe my work is futile, but it bores me less than what I would do in my leisure.”

 

Literary criticism, on March 26, 1975, which I can’t agree with but find amusing:

 

“Henry James. He is someone to contend with, but an awful lot is missing -- how much can be seen by comparing him with Proust. His sexual sensibility is that of a Victorian maiden of the upper class: he seems to ache to be deflowered. And I think it was Chesterton who said something to the effect that James’s work was too well-written and therefore slightly vulgar.”

 

And the same goes for this, from April 5, 1975:

 

“I have been reading in a collection of De Quincey. . . . Quite a marvelous writer, a wild, mad fellow, who apparently was seldom able to gather enough effort to sustain an entire book. . . . Hazlitt, more or less a contemporary of his, and extravagantly admired ever since, I have always felt somewhat overrated: he writes beautifully, but his matter is rather banal to my mind. But DeQ is forever surprising. His famous ‘On Murder as One of the Fine Arts’ is genuinely witty, and its appendix, an account of some multiple murders in London, is a superb work of journalism. His is an unfettered spirit.”

 

From the same letter: “I find that I now can read only the true fanatics with any feeling of affinity: those who in courage or desperation abandon any attempt to address an audience of cretins and speak exclusively to themselves.”

 

Many passages praise Proust. Here’s one, from July 7, 1976:

 

“But even in English Proust is a universe. His seems to me without question the greatest novel ever written, almost the only  in prose fiction which would be admitted to the summit of Olympus, where Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe and of course our Will sit in congress.”

 

Do yourself a favor: read Thomas Berger’s novels, starting with Little Big Man, moving on to the four Rinehart books and The Feud, and then go grazing. He wrote twenty-three of them.