Sea crashing, retreating with shuffle of pebbles, Juan and beloved young whore — is her name, as they say, Adora? is she Italian, Roumanian, Irish? — asleep in his lap, his opera cloak pulled over her, candle messily burning in its tin cup, next to it a paperwrapped bunch of long roses, his silk hat on the stone floor near a patch of moonlight, all this in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus, on a rocky Mediterranean coast, a door standing ajar gives on what seems to be a moonlit gallery but is really a half-demolished reception room with a broken outer wall, through a great rip in tt the naked sea is heard as a panting space separated from time, it dully booms, dully withdraws dragging its platter of wet pebbles.
This I jotted down one morning at the very end of 1965, a couple of months before the novel began to flow. What I give above is its first throb, the strange nucleus of the book that was to grow around it in the course of the next three years. Much of that growth obviously differs in coloration and lighting from the foreglimpsed scene, whose structural centrality, however, is emphasized, with a kind of pleasing neatness, by the fact that it now exists as an insetscene right in the middle of the novel (which was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada.
Reverting to a more generalized account, one sees inspiration accompanying the author in his actual work at the new book. She accompanies him (for by now we are at presence of a nubile muse) by means of successive flashes to which the writer may grow so accustomed that a sudden fizzle in the domestic illumination may strike him as an act of betrayal.
One and the same person can compose parts of one and the same story or poem, either in his head or on paper, pencil or pen in hand (I am told there exist fantastic performers who actually type out their immediate product or, still more incredibly, dictate it, warm and bubbly, to a typist or to a machine!). Some prefer the bathtub to the study and the bed to the windy moor — the place does not matter much, it is the relationship between the brain and the (hand that poses some odd problems. As John Shade says somewhere: «I am puzzled by the difference between two methods of composing: A, the kind which goes on solely in the poet's mind, a testing of performing words, while he is soaping a third time one leg, and B, the other kind, milch more decorous, when he's in his study writing with a pen.
In method B the hand supports the thought, the abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in midair, then swoops to bar a canceled sunset or restore a star thus it physically guides the phrase toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method A is agony! The pain is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the rill which grinds, and which no effort Mil can interrupt, while the automaton is taking off has just put on or walking briskly to the corner store to buy the paper he has read before. Why is it so? Is it, is because in penless work there is no pen-poised pause.
Or is the process deeper, with no desk to propse and hoist the picturesque? For there are those lous moments when, too weary to delete, I drop my 'ambulate — and by some mute command the right on my hand.
This is, of course, where inspiration comes in. The words which on various occasions, during some fifty years of composing prose, I have put together and then canceled may have formed by now in the Realm of Rejection (a foggy but not quite unlikely land north of nowhere) a huge library of scrapped phrases, characterized and concorded only by their wanting the benison of inspiration.
No wonder, then, that a writer who is not afraid to confess that he has known inspiration and can readily distinguish it from the froth of a fit, as well as from the humdrum comfort of the «right word», should seek the bright trace of that thrill in the work of fellow authors. The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer's article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know — but people who are creative artists in their own right, such as, say, Trilling (with his critical opinions I am not concerned), or Thurber (e.g. in Voices of Revolution. «Art does not rush to the barricades»).
In recent years numerous publishers have had the pleasure of sending me their anthologies — homing pigeons really, for all of them contain samples of the recipient's writings. Amongst the thirty or so of those collections, some flaunt pretentious labels («Fables of Our Time» or «Themes and Targets»); others are presented more soberly («Great Tales») and their blurbs promise the reader that he will meet cranberry pickers and hunkies; but almost in each of them there are at least two or three first-rate stories.
Age is chary, but it is also forgetful, and in order to choose instantly what to reread on a night of Orphic thirst and what to reject for ever, I am careful to put an A, or a C, or a D-minus, against this or that item in the anthology. The profusion of high marks reconfirms me every time in the exhilarating belief that at the present time (say, for the last fifty years) the greatest short stories have been produced not in England, not in Russia, and certainly not in France, but in this country.
Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage — or one of the passages — in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.
John Cheever's «The Country Husband» («Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth». The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.)
John Updike's «The Happiest I've Been» («The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone». I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.)
J. D. Salinger's «A Perfect Day for Bananafish» («Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle ..». This is a great story, too famous and fragile to be measured here by a casual conchometrist.)
Herbert Gold's «Death in Miami Beach» («Finally we die, opposable thumbs and all». Or to do even better justice to this admirable piece: «Barbados turtles as large as children . . . crucified like thieves . . . the tough leather of their skin does not disguise their present helplessness and pain». )
John Barth's «Lost in the Funhouse» («What is the story's point? Ambrose is ill. He perspires in the dark passages; candied apples-on-a-stick, delicious-looking, disappointing to eat. Funhouses need men's and ladies' rooms at interval». I had some trouble in pinning down what I needed amidst the lovely swift speckled imagery.)