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Difficult Art, In a Hard Light

By Tim Page

The late Truman Capote was notoriously dismissive of other writers. is withering putdown of Jack Kerouac -- "That's not writing; that's typing" - has entered literary folklore, and he was not much kinder to Saul Bellow, John Updike or Philip Roth. He did, however, acknowledge a certain admiration for Tom Wolfe, and particularly for "Radical Chic," Wolfe's gleeful sendup of Leonard Bernstein's flirtation with the Black Panther Party. Still, he added a warning: "Tom Wolfe is not going to last. I love some of the things he's done, they're just terrific, but you won't think so in years to come. Because of his style."

It is possible that Capote, who died in 1984, might have changed his mind had he lived to confront the vast satires "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987) and "A Man in Full" (1998), which are cooler, calmer and altogether more collected than Wolfe's early work. But his point was well taken, for nothing loses its edge more quickly than yesterday's radicalism. "That's why, myself, I always stick to a strictly classic writing style, where everything is timeless," Capote affirmed, perhaps a little smugly. "Nothing is going to date it -- not the quality of the writing, not the subject."

Capote's distinction strikes me as a profound one, and it applies to many of the arts. The 20th century placed a high premium on Making Things New -- on innovations and shocks and determinedly eccentric perspectives -- and much of that "newness" has grown mighty old. In 1927, for example, composer George Antheil's "Ballet Mecanique" appalled traditionalists with its use of sirens, car horns and multiple pianos. It was hailed as the apogee of modernism. But today, in the era of computer sampling, it seems little more than a collection of gimmicks and barely holds our attention.

A much greater work, Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (1913) was so influential in its time that listeners, hearing itco-opted and recycled again and again by composers of every stripe, have long since become accustomed to its brutallanguage. Indeed, it could be argued that what strikes us as most valuable today in "Rite" is its celebration of ancient rituals and the fiercest, most primeval elements in music.

Since "Rite" we have had almost a century of so-called "modern" music, a good deal of it outstanding. Yet very little has been taken to heart by the general public. The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg used to say that the day would come when his wispy, ethereally creepy-crawly song cycle "Pierrot Lunaire" (1913) would be sung in the streets, such was his belief in collective cognitive development. It never happened, of course; indeed, one of Schoenberg's great admirers, the American composer Charles Wuorinen, recently acknowledged that coming to terms with "Pierrot" was still"a little like befriending a porcupine."

I happen to enjoy befriending an occasional porcupine myself, and I revere our modernist heritage. But there are reasons for the present reaction against musical modernism, the most profound of which is its intrinsic lack of ease. By "ease," I don't mean "easiness," exactly, although that enters into it. Rather, the works of even the greatest musical modernists - Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ralph Shapey, to choose some of my own favorites - offer fury, daring, complexity, intensity and, above all, a passionate creative integrity, but they don't quite give us ease. It is difficult to express something so uncomplicated as a sense of well-being in complicated language. Even an operatic masterpiece such as Berg's "Lulu," with its 57 varieties of sophisticated eroticism, shies away from expressions of simple affection.

This is not to call for some headlong flight into the past, for modernism -- in all the arts -- has expanded our understanding, adding to what the critic R.P. Blackmur called "our stock of available reality." Still, it is important to remember that great works of art, past, present and future, are not necessarily radical. Indeed, the whole idea of empirical "progress" should be buried with the rest of the Marxian detritus. Bach's last works look back toward the Renaissance, Mozart broke little "new ground," and Richard Strauss's nostalgic, deeply reflective and immaculately retrospective "Four Last Songs" (1949) speak just as profoundly to our time as his manic, off-the-wall "Elektra" (1908).

Beethoven and Wagner, on the other hand, were constantly in flux, fashioning new forms, raising them to a level ofperfection, then moving on to something new. The point is not to judge Beethoven or Wagner "greater" or "lesser" than Bach and Mozart, but rather to recognize that different temperaments will explore different territories, and that stylistic innovation should be only one criterion in the judgment of a work of art.

The same applies to many of the other arts -- to film, to theater and certainly to literature. A few years ago, ModernLibrary put out a highly subjective and much-criticized list of the "100 Best Novels of the 20th Century." Topping the list were two books finished within three years of each other -- James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925). It is instructive to read them now, for they represent distinctly differentapproaches to the art of fiction, and offer distinctly different rewards to a contemporary reader.

"Ulysses" is the determinedly subjective summary of a single day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) as a motley of townspeople talk, eat, drink, quarrel, sing songs, invent private jokes, go to the bathroom, and make love, not necessarily in that -- or any -- order. There is not much of a plot and, by design, very little "happens" to the characters; the novel embraces the messiness of life itself. In the past, authors had aspired to use ordinary language to say extraordinary things; Joyce ingeniously turned that maxim on its head.

"Ulysses" is filled with glorious wordplay, and although deeply rooted in the classics (particularly "The Odyssey"), it is the definitive modernist novel, as Joyce explodes sentences, invents words, explores new manners of narrative and concludes with a rapt, 40-page reverie couched in a single open-ended sentence. "Ulysses" was recognized immediately as a masterpiece and has been extraordinarily influential from the time it was published.

By comparison, "The Great Gatsby" was greeted as a stirring but fundamentally conventional work by a popular author, one among many; Fitzgerald was long dead by the time his book was admitted to any pantheon. "The Great Gatsby" needs no explication; a single narrator tells a definite story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. There are no textual innovations; Fitzgerald's use of language, while marvelously eloquent, is hardly path-breaking. Indeed, the book is read without difficulty by many high school students although, like all classics, it will repay multiple readings and seem a very different book when read at age 45 than it did at 15.

It would be fatuous to judge either of these books as "better" than the other. Still, "The Great Gatsby" has probably datedmore gracefully, for the seemingly paradoxical reason that it never aspired to the up-to-the-moment modernity of "Ulysses." With the exception of the final soliloquy, which contains some of the most transcendent writing in literature, "Ulysses" is strongest when it is most grounded, when Joyce's intrinsic poetry is operating within a clearly delineated framework. His experiments, for the most part, now seem exactly that: experiments -- audacious, admirable in their execution, remarkably inventive for their time and place, but not especially fertile or affecting. "The Great Gatsby" - direct, succinct, unified in its utterance throughout - might have been written yesterday.

Great films come on all levels of complication, whether "Bambi," "The Bank Dick" or "Chinatown" (the last of which features a plot so intricate that if you miss more than a minute or two, you'll be left hopelessly confused). Here again, it may be enlightening to revisit a totemic modernist masterpiece and see how it holds up.

For years, Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (1966) was generally hailed as the Swedish filmmaker's most significant accomplishment. It was a film that was not only "about" its ostensible subject -- the nervous breakdown (or possibly an obscure<em> breakthrough?)</em> of an actress -- but about itself as a motion picture, complete with fragments of cartoons, the sound of celluloid rattling through p