An abridgement of A Man Without A Country
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I used to be the owner and manager of an
automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, called Saab
Cape Cod. It and I went out of business thirty-three years ago. The
Saab then, as now, was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure
as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep
mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for
Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: “Swedes have short dicks but long
memories.” Listen: The Saab back then had only one model, a bug like
a VW, a two-door sedan, but with the engine in front. It had suicide
doors opening into the slipstream. Unlike all other cars, but like
your lawnmower and your outboard, it had a two-stroke rather than a
four-stroke engine. So every time you filled your tank with gas, you
had to pour in a can of oil as well. For whatever reason, straight
women did not want to do this. The chief selling point was that a
Saab could drag a VW at a stoplight. But if you or your significant
other had failed to add oil to the last tank of gas, you and the car
would then become fireworks. It also had front-wheel drive, of some
help on slippery pavements or when accelerating into curves. There
was this as well: As one prospective customer said to me, “They make
the best watches. Why wouldn’t they make the best cars, too?” I was
bound to agree.
The Saab back then was a far cry from the sleek, powerful,
four-stroke yuppie uniform it is today. It was the wet dream, if you
like, of engineers in an airplane factory who’d never made a car
before. Wet dream, did I say? Get a load of this: There was a ring
on the dashboard, connected to a chain running over pulleys in the
engine compartment. Pull on it, and at the far end it would raise a
sort of window shade on a springloaded roller behind the front
grill. That was to keep the engine warm while you went off
somewhere. So, when you came back, if you hadn’t stayed away too
long, the engine would start right up again.
But if you stayed away too long, window shade or not, the oil would
separate from the gas and sink like molasses to the bottom of the
tank. So when you started up again, you would lay down a smokescreen
like a destroyer in a naval engagement. And I actually blacked out
the whole town of Woods Hole at high noon that way, having left a
Saab in a parking lot there for about a week. I am told old timers
there still wonder out loud about where all that smoke could have
come from.
I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself
out of a Nobel Prize. It’s damn hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s
Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one
of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were
writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time
it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a
tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if all the right elements are
present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You
have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed
to snap.
I still listen to comedy, and there’s not much of that sort around.
The closest thing is the reruns of Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet
Your Life. I’ve known funny writers who stopped being funny, who
became serious persons and could no longer make jokes. I’m thinking
of Michael Frayn, the British author who wrote The Tin Men. He
became a very serious person. Something happened in his head.
Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect
yourself. Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too
awful, and humor doesn’t work anymore. Somebody like Mark Twain
thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with
jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn’t do it anymore. His wife,
his best friend, and two of his daughters had died. If you live long
enough, a lot of people close to you are going to die.
It may be that I am no longer able to joke—that it is no longer a
satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny, and some are
not. I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not anymore. There may have
been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no
longer works. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because
I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal
with in terms of laughter.
This may have happened already. I really don’t know what I’m going
to become from now on. I’m simply along for the ride to see what
happens to this body and this brain of mine. I’m startled that I
became a writer. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing.
Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t
have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply
becoming. All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of
laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. If a
hundred years from now people are still laughing, I’d certainly be
pleased. I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my
grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same
age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted
and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government. Yes,
this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess.
There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been
days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me. I just
got here.”
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up
until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity—
the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever.
Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say
suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible
mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman.
Today I am a man. The end.” When I got home from the Second World
War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man
now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing
it. Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can’t be a man
unless he’d gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid
brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest
life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise.
And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they
so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking
lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily
about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would
suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t
nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge
you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or
think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” We
are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers,
by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important
because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you
were a seven-year-old, you’d read a story—just a very simple
one—about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn’t that make you want to
cry? Don’t you know how that little girl feels? And you’d read
another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn’t
that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being
built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here’s just a
square with daubs of paint on it that haven’t moved in hundreds of
years. No sound comes out of it.
The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of
cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten
numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast
their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or
the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers
and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally
produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound,
music. Now there’s the information highway. We don’t need the
circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of
us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone’s face and
see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face. And
there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you
never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is:
Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
Who was the wisest person I ever met in my entire life? It was a
man, but of course it needn’t have been. It was the graphic artist
Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could
ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give
me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in
Romania, in a house where, according to him, “the geese looked in
the windows.”
I said, “Saul, how should I feel about Picasso?” Six seconds passed,
and then he said, “God put him on Earth to show us what it’s like to
be really rich.”
I said, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists
and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very
different businesses. What makes me feel that way?” Six seconds
passed, and then he said, “It’s very simple. There are two sorts of
artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one
responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other
responds to life itself.”
I said, “Saul, are you gifted?”
Six seconds passed, and then he growled, “No, but what you respond
to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her
limitations.”
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