Essay: We Need More Writers We'd Miss

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Books everywhere are falling apart. Acids in the ink and the pulp devour the pages. The paper crumbles, powdered words in a few generations will blow away like dandelion fluff. Some computer-literate great-grandchild will hold the empty, mortal binding in his hands as if it were Yorick's skull.

And yet sometimes we harbor a subversive suspicion that it doesn't really matter. Once, we think, we were a people of the book. Now we begin to seem, perhaps irreparably, a people of the tube. The race of literary giants, the tyrant genius founders (Homer, Tolstoi, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and so-on), will of course be safely stowed away on microfilm:literature freeze-dried, the Great Books kept as curios of the culture, like shrunken heads. But the writing we tend to get now, books milling around aimlessly at the dead end of the post modern (or wherever we technically find ourselves), seem somehow . . .inadequate. Our literature paces like an un-happy animal in a small cage. On the whole, we learn no more about the meaning of things from our "creative" writers than a child learns about wildlife by watching the disconsolate, paranoid polar bear in the Central Park Zoo. The brute scowls and flips a beer keg around his stagnant pool and dreams of killing someone: a perfect model of the literary life.

The English critic Cyril Connolly once suggested: "Let us reflect whether there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster." At work here may be the old harrumphing delusion of perspective: a Miniver Cheevy trick of eye and time Up close, most writers tend to look minor, to look like transient scribblers: aphids, small potatoes, twerps. One imagines a golden age long gone and a gray, leaden trivial present. effect is only heightened by the undiscriminating hype. One has to listen hard to hear any real thunder in the books.

John Cheever died last month. A loss to American writing, but not really a disaster. The parlor game of ranking is seductive. We like to wonder if the Darwinian selections of Posterity will confirm our prejudices. The briefly Celebrated poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote, with a weather eye on his own coming obscurity: "No reputation is more than snowfall. It vanishes."

But play the game anyway: Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were suddenly to fall silent? Easy: No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea. What if John Updike were to stop writing? A shame, but not a duster for American culture. Walker Percy? Joyce Carol Gates? Donald Barthelme? No. Philip Roth? Joseph Heller? William Styron? Truman Capote? John Gardner? John Irving? Norman Mailer? Stop It gets to be a pogrom. The mind flips through its card catalogue. Very few disastrous silences loom.

The conjectural game tangles the mind in difficulties antiworld speculations on the classics that an infinite number of monkeys might have composed on an infinite number of type writers. J.D. Salinger years ago enforced Connolly's game upon himself, vanishing into a weird silence that for those who love his work has always felt like a small, sharp loss. Thomas Pynchon dwells somewhere in an aloof privacy in deep cover making metaphysical devices in his basement, like a terrorist who has gone into the fireworks business.