"Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread."
—Thomas Steward
It's official, no doubt about it. We have returned to Homeric times, when writers had to recite, and recite well, or risk being buried in flung tableware and beef bones. Swelling legions of authors exhaust their vitality behind the public podium. And if you've been exposed to the regular plague of such literary burlesques lately, you will understand the need for a bit of judicious advice on how to go about it properly.
R.V. Cassill, editor of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, reviewed one of my novels not too long ago. He said that he read the thing in a "state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage." The question is how you can elicit and sustain such reactions from mobs of rowdy listeners, and whether you should.
Truman Capote gave the best performance I ever attended. Believe it or not, he was superb. It took place in the Far West, where the men are big and the podia proportional. You could only see the upper half of this little old man's head as he read strictly from his very early stuff, the nice lyrical things about being reared by crazy aunties and grannies in the Deep South.
At the end of every selection, he would stride out from behind the podium, raise his book over his head, and give it one good shake. It was a gesture which even his detractors would have to call mighty, or manly (to use an impermissible word). He waved his work high in the air, as if to say, "Think what you will about me and my life. This is the only thing that matters."
Everyone in the room was moved, especially the scribblers—the majority of whom had only shown up to be obnoxious during the questions-and-answers part, and to jeer at this "little lap dog of the rich and famous." We gave Truman Capote a standing ovation that night.
If you love somebody's work, you'll find uncanny enhancements in the most affected delivery, the reediest voice, the plainest face. Capote demonstrated that to the satisfaction of thousands. On the other hand, one wonders how Gerard Manley Hopkins rendered his own "sprung rhythm," and whether it would have been possible to sit through a couple hours watching him do it.
In a strictly technical sense, Jorge Luis Borges was the worst I've ever seen (besides James Baldwin—but that's a different story). The great Argentinean was deep in his dotage, and arrived on the arm of this academic type, a self-proclaimed Custodian of the Author's Immortality Before the Fact. Whenever somebody asked Borges a question about his artistic development, or his childhood, or anything more complicated than "How do you like the weather in these parts?" he said, "I'll let my esteemed colleague answer that one," and slipped off into dreamland. And this colleague would simper, "Well, you know, it's only a theory of mine. I haven't published it yet, but—" and proceed to psychoanalyze the human being seated on stage next to him as if he was already dead. It was more surreal than anything in a Borges story.
The one we came to see didn't actually read anything. But at one point his blind old eyes lit up, and he interrupted his colleague, and started talking about the stroll across the tree-lined park that had brought him to us that night. He said it was already reconstituting itself in his memory as more fictional than real. Everybody in the place was a Borges fan, and we all knew exactly what he meant, or thought we did, and that one short utterance gave us everything we had come for.
We supplied the magic from our recollections of his books, which are all that matter now that he's dead, anyway. Which brings us to the question of recordings.
Dylan Thomas set the eternal unattainable standard for everybody. Basil Rathbone doing Poe is second on the honor roll. Third is Nabokov growling out his own Russian rendering of the jailbait chronicle. My personal list also includes Lenny Bruce before he became a forensic homilist. But, in the current competitive atmosphere, where it is nearly impossible to be heard over the din, the recordings that can teach us the most are Ezra Pound's. Listen to him go insane and beat his big bass drum like an evil seductress.
I don't know if every single one of my physical performances ascends to Poundian mania. But I do like to come on as broadly as I can. I'm six foot nine, and weigh more than three hundred pounds. (Can't help it: basketball family, you know. My father holds a plausible claim to having invented the hook shot when he was a pro in a cage in Chicago, way back in the olden days; my second-cousin Bill Bradley played for the Toledo Twats or whoever, and then went on to become one of the next presidents of our nation; and my Mormon nephew Shawn Bradley is currently the NBA's premier shot blocker or something. I have no idea what team he plays for, but he's seven-foot-six, so he gets to be in Bugs Bunny movies. It's not fair.)
It doesn't come naturally for big guys like us to assert ourselves overmuch in public. It's not necessary to do more than simply exist inside such a frame, in order to get more attention than you could ever want on the street. But being on the stage is different. You've placed your person at the service of the characters and situations in your novels, and you must do whatever's required, even if it means scaring hell out of people in the front row.
The question always arises whether you should be scary under all circumstances. Should you perfect a method and adhere to it religiously, or whore yourself out a little bit, and adjust your behavior to suit the circumstances?
Of course, certain audiences and venues don't deserve tailoring to. We all know the type: the fruit of Thatcher and Reagan's dumbing down of the English-speaking world, the kind who find literary novels "difficult" and are quick to admit it, who aren't even aware that they should be ashamed, or at least sheepish and silent, about their own subliteracy, and are even proud of it—once it's called to their attention, that is. To adjust for them would be to recite rock lyrics, which a jazz snob like me will refuse to do. (Admittedly, jazz lyrics are even worse: "We won't say goodbye until the last minute/ I'll hold out my hand, and my heart will be in it.")
Back in my days as an itinerant harpist in America, I'm afraid that I became altogether too adept at tailoring my act to suit the circumstances—whoring myself out, to put it another way. It was always easy to get hired at pretentious restaurants and patrician ski lounges, because I learned to give the managers exactly what they wanted at that all-important first audition.
Suppose, as was often the case with those specializing in European foods, the prospective employer appeared to harbor ambitions toward being "cultured." Say he had an unclipped mustache and a toupeeless bald spot, and every other clause was "as they say" or even "as it were," and the television in his office was always tuned to something Edwardian on the Public Broadcating System. Well then, it was best to give him the Injured Young Artiste in Dire Need of a Highly Refined Patron. I centered my beetled brow right where the guy would notice it most, and grunted occasionally while scraping out something raucous by Hindemith or Luciano Berio.
On the other hand, say a certain resort manager was a hopeless hormone case, but tried to cover it under grubby cable-knit sweaters and bumptious, ultra-Western speech patterns. The canny harpist will perceive that such a man likes to be on top in life. So it is necessary to play him a teensy-weensy Mozart transcription, and be all breathless from fluttery-buttery nerves. As a musician, I was somehow able to make myself appear small. A precise, almost painterly touch of morbidezza-blush and a falsetto titter hidden behind a flustered wrist can shrink an elephant.
However, once I got a gig through this second, more degrading approach, I usually couldn't help but try to regain a portion of my manly pride by cutting as preposterous a figure as I could while performing, and generally ended with my precious ass canned, anyway. In other words, I was becoming a writer.
