Fiction of the ’sixties

John Williams’s Stoner has been getting a lot of buzz lately, with stories in the Independent (a “slow-burn sensation,” at least “Until now”) and at the Millions (“through each decade, the book continued to be remembered”). Earlier in the week Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times phoned to interview me about my essay on the novel for Commentary. I won’t say anything about the interview, except to predict that Appleyard, unlike most of the other literary journalists who have written on it in recent weeks, will not focus on the novel’s publication history and reception, but on Stoner itself.

Stoner was published in 1965. Another novel from the same decade, which is beginning to generate some buzz because his daughter Katherine Powers is publishing his letters in the form of a novel about family life later this summer (Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life), is J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban (1962). Not coincidentally, both it and Stoner have been reprinted in lovely NYRB Classics editions. The other thing the books have in common is that they are both one of a kind. Nothing else like them—not even their authors’ later books—was ever written again.

A strong case can be made that the ’sixties were the best decade for American fiction—better even than the ’twenties. There are the obvious classics (Rabbit, Run, Catch-22, The Moviegoer, Revolutionary Road, Pale Fire, V., Herzog, A Fan’s Notes, Portnoy’s Complaint), and the last of those titles suggests how important the ’sixties were as a transitional decade or even a fulcrum for prying open the sexual reticence of the American novel.

But I am thinking of the minor classics from the ’sixties, the underground classics, the amazing books that still hold up and repay reading and rereading:

1960
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times
Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree
Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
John Updike, Rabbit, Run

1961
R. V. Cassill, Clem Anderson
Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

1962
Bruce Jay Friedman, Stern
Norman Fruchter, Coat Upon a Stick
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur
J. F. Powers, Morte D’Urban
Clancy Sigal, Going Away
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave

1963
Wright Morris, Cause for Wonder
Thomas Pynchon, V.

1964
Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin
Saul Bellow, Herzog
Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me [Ed.: Later addition—see below.]
Thomas Berger, Little Big Man
Thomas Gallagher, Oona O’

1965
James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy
Maureen Howard, Bridgeport Bus
Richard G. Stern, Stitch
John Williams, Stoner

1966
Evan S. Connell Jr., The Diary of a Rapist
Ross Macdonald, Black Money
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
Charles Portis, Norwood
Wilfrid Sheed, Office Politics

1967
Stanley Elkin, A Bad Man
James B. Hall, Mayo Sergeant

1968
Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes
Brian Moore, I Am Mary Dunne
Charles Portis, True Grit

1969
Leonard Gardner, Fat City
Leo Litwak, Waiting for the News
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Thomas Williams, Whipple’s Castle

By any measure, that is an astonishing run of great and near-great fiction. What is fascinating is that several of the decade’s books which are now recognized as classics, including Revolutionary Road and A Fan’s Notes, were largely neglected during their own publishing season. They were elevated to agreed-upon greatness only later. Even The Moviegoer’s 1962 National Book Award was something a rediscovery. At the time, many critics complained that no one had ever heard of Percy’s first novel.

Such, perhaps, is the decade’s keynote. Not many readers of this blog, I would wager, have read Clem Anderson, Going Away, Cause for Wonder, Oona O’, Bridgeport Bus, Office Politics, I Am Mary Dunne, or Whipple’s Castle. And if I were to suggest that these books would be a better use of their reading time than the latest celebrated titles (Philipp Meyer’s The Son, for example, or Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic), I’d be dismissed with a condescending laugh. The pressure in the literary culture is to “keep up,” to “keep current.” Few will acknowledge that this pressure serves the business interests of the publishing houses, but not literature. Nine-tenths of what passes for literary discussion at any given time is merely book advertising under the pseudonym of literary criticism. The best critics, the best readers, are (in Rohan Maitzen’s wonderful phrase) fearlessly behind the curve.

A good place to start falling behind is with the fiction of the ’sixties.

Update: No sooner had I posted this list than the British novelist Linda Grant tweeted: “Did women not start writing fiction till the 70s?” What does it say about me that I never anticipate this objection, although it has become a routine of the literary life? What does it say: besides the fact that I don’t think about fiction in gender terms, I mean. Three of the names on the original list—Flannery O’Connor, Dawn Powell, Maureen Howard—are women’s names. I replied to Grant as I have taken to replying to such accusations: “[S]ince three women are too few, what percentage would be adequate?” This question is never answered. The implication is “more—no matter how many women you have included on whatever list, male critic.”

In plain fact, I’d considered and silently passed over several novels by women—Hortense Calisher’s False Entry, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, Mary McCarthy’s The Group—because they are not novels that, in my experience, repay rereading (the standard advanced above). In reply, Grant recommended that I consult the Virago backlist to see whom I had “missed.” I asked Grant which of the novels on Virago’s list was an American novel from the ’sixties. Instead of naming a single title, Grant shot back: “Just suggesting you refresh your own memory about the ‘woman's novel.’ ”

So in the end Grant simply wanted to change the subject—from American fiction of the ’sixties (my subject) to women’s writing (hers). Her insinuation that as a critic I am “forgetful” of women writers was a bit surprising, it seemed to me, coming from a writer whose novel When I Lived in Modern Times I had praised extravagantly, ten years or more after it was first published, in an effort to keep its reputation alive. Perhaps it is too much to expect that such a writer might familiarize herself with my other critical writings to see whether it is really true that my “memory” of women’s writing needs “refreshing.” And I won’t defend my record as a critic here. (I’m tired of doing so. I’m tired of being expected to do so.) Since Grant would not, however, I closely examined the Virago list and found one novel that I should have included on my list above. So I’ve added Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me, a novel that is delightful in its harsh and biting tone.

But Grant did not ask me to include a specific book. She was not really interested in books at all. She was interested in an abstract demand for literary equity, which might have been satisfied by any books, as long as their number was right.

Update, II: I’ve been thinking a lot, ever since Linda Grant obliged me to do so, about fiction by women during the ’sixties. My old friend Carol Sklenicka, who is writing her biography, makes a strong case for Alice Adams’s Careless Love (1966) in the comments section.

Jessamyn West published a “companion” to The Friendly Persuasion (a prequel, really, but the word was not yet in existence) entitled Except for Me and Thee in 1969. In the New York Times Book Review, Carlos Baker found it “paler” than the first book, but praised its picture of domestic life on the Indiana frontier—“thankful, satisfying, unsentimental.” He also identified himself as among those who “are always eager to begin a new book by Jessamyn West.”

Joy to Levine! (1962), Norma Rosen’s first novel, about a New York office worker being squeezed out by women and automation, was described by Harper’s as “beautifully poised between pathos and comedy.”

Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (1969), Judith Rossner’s second novel, is a striking and unusual study of three siblings who are voluntarily orphaned by their Communist parents and grow up alone on Long Island.

None of these novels is great, perhaps not even near-great, but they shouldn’t be entirely forgotten either—especially since they are not generic novels by women, but interesting books with interesting strengths and equally interesting flaws.

There was a genuine masterpiece by a woman that was published as a novel in 1963—Lore Segal’s Other People’s Houses. The trouble is that, as marvelous as it is (its prose is magical), the book is not really a novel; it is a memoir. It was published as a novel only because it was written before memoirs were all the rage. As another famous woman would later say, “What difference does it make?” Quite a lot, I think. Segal’s next books—Lucinella (1976), a comedy of the New York literary world, and the hilarious interracial immigrant romance Her First American (1985)—are wildly inventive.

Other People’s Houses doesn't require the aid of invention. It traces her Austrian Jewish family’s flight from the Nazis in 1938 ending in America and her marriage in 1961 to David Segal, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Much of the dialogue is “fictionalized,” I’m sure, but the book takes its structure from the Segal family’s rambling experience and does not transmute it into art, no matter how beautifully it is written. Does it belong on a list of great ’sixties fiction? Can we agree it belongs on any list of great writing from the ’sixties (along with, say, Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem), and leave it at that?