In contemplating confinement and space, Tillman considers Wharton’s style:
But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lushness, display, every embellishment. Rarely extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and it in it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman dangling the world on a rich string. And she wrote, perhaps explained, early on in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
As with any serious piece of critical writing, Tillman’s version of Wharton, while remaining true to the original, also tells us a great deal about Tillman’s own procedures as a novelist, her own scrupulousness, for example, her own refusal to take easy options, her knowledge that her characters are alone and that the style in which they are rendered arises from thought and strategy, from a willed and intelligent examination of the available possibilities, and the full knowledge, as Wharton writes, that “we are hampered at every turn by an artistic tradition of over two thousand years.”
— Colm Tóibín
September, 2013
A is for Andy
The Last Words Are Andy Warhol
I’m going to speculate about some of the issues raised and some of the ideas I found compelling and daunting in a: A Novel. a: A Novel is a narrative based on 24 audiotaped hours in the life of Warhol superstar Ondine, an articulate, funny, volatile man. When Pope Ondine acted in Chelsea Girls, his performance exceeded, crossed — even violated — the supposed boundary between life and art, a line Warhol wanted crossed. It’s blurred, if not effaced, in his only novel, a.
I’ve written this essay as a list, a shopping list in paragraphs. Warhol liked to shop. I don’t, but I like lists.
1. “A” is for Art, Andy, and Amphetamine — Ondine lived on speed, and the story is speed driven.
2. Reading a: A Novel, I sometimes felt like one of its participants: “Nine more hours to go,” said the Sugar Plum Fairy. Time was of the essence — actually it’s the essential element in the book. There are just so many tapes to fill, hours to stay awake, and so time’s on everyone’s mind. The tape recorder’s going, a book is being made. The Book is being made. In fact, the last words in the novel, spoken by Billy Name, are: “Out of the garbage, into THE BOOK.” In a way, Warhol through Name is claiming garbage — the minutiae and tedium of daily life, the unedited flow — for literature.
3. a: A Novel is a project of — and an exercise in — consciousness and self-consciousness. Ondine and most of the others recorded are not unwitting characters or subjects. They’re self-conscious even when they’re nearly unconscious.
4. Ondine, the protagonist, sometimes fought against the chains of the tape recorder, a new master, asking Warhol many times to stop it. But Ondine continued to let himself be recorded, as did all the others who questioned Drella’s demands in making this novel-book. Maybe they knew they were participating in something new, or interesting, maybe even worthwhile, simply because it was Warhol. Though they struggled with him, they complied. Others may now be horrified by this compliance, believe that everyone in the Factory was manipulated, taken advantage of. They used and were used, perhaps, in every possible sense. But another view is that, given the problems in their lives at the time and their insecurities, which A documents, Warhol offered them something — work or a feeling of significance for that moment or a way to fill time. The tape recorder is on. You are being recorded. Your voice is being heard, and this is history.
5. What about authorship in a: A Novel? In Part 2, there’s talk about the typists who are transcribing the tapes, and who, in a way, through errors, mis-hearings, and incorrect spellings, contribute to or create the book with the speakers. It’s the typists’ book. It’s the tape recorder’s book; it could not exist without it, just as the novel could not have been born without Gutenberg’s press. Or, it’s Ondine’s book, he’s the author of himself, and the protagonist, it’s his 24 hours. Or, and I think it is, it’s Warhol’s artwork, a conceptual and experimental book. Part of Warhol’s work was to regularly produce a blur around authorship.
6. Warhol dropped the mirror, let it crack into pieces, and instead held a tape recorder up to life. He saw a god in the machine and used as many as he could—a notes the arrival of video, a new toy, to the Factory — and Warhol didn’t fear the loss of authorship to machines, when his hand, literally, wasn’t in or on it; he constructed another kind of artist, who directs machines, people, uses technology, whose imprint was virtual.
7. a reveals realism as a form of writing, a type of fiction, a genre, not an unmediated, exact replica of life, not a mirror image. Books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing. Warhol’s novel is closer to life, reality, than a realist novel. It’s mediated by the elements I just mentioned — the apparatus, the speakers, the typists, and Warhol’s idea for it — and by the continuous 24-hour frame he wanted to use.
But Warhol was flummoxed by Ondine, who became exhausted or bored after just 12, so the book is not 24-hours straight. At the end of those 12 hours, Warhol asked Ondine for his last words, and he said, “My last words are Andy Warhol.” There’s a lot of reality in that — and self-consciousness and consciousness. In a, reality is gotten at differently, without any of the codes of realism.
8. If Warhol had recorded a continuous 24-hours, a: A Novel would have adhered to the classical idea of unity necessary for tragedy, compared with Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps, which may have been on his mind, since it stands as the 20th century’s representative or exemplary modernist novel. (Bob Colacello says Truman Capote’s singular, brilliant novel, In Cold Blood, was on Warhol’s mind.)
The second half of a, instead of being continuous time, is a series of fragments, more out of joint, more out of time — more timeless or against time — than Warhol originally planned, and what started as a modernist novel became a postmodernist one. Warhol taped Ondine’s life, whenever he could get it, in all its discontinuous and disjointed glory, or gory, as the wit Dorothy Dean — DoDo in the book — might have put it. He abandoned his original idea, a’s purity. But the words “pure” and “purity” appear often.