Arts and Letters

By the standards of the learned profession in which he spent so much of his life, my friend Mark Schorer was a success. He published several notable books in biography and criticism; he held all the leading fellowships bestowed by robber barons of the nineteenth century on docile professors in the twentieth; he taught at many leading universities, was sought after by Texas moneybags, was chairman of the notable English Department at Berkeley; he even published four books of fiction and over fifty stories.

But everyone who knew Mark and loved him, as I did, for his natural literary intelligence, his savviness, his stoicism, his ability and inability to hold in check his temperamental impatience and despair, knows that like so many interesting American writers Mark often regarded himself as a failure and was as vulnerable as he was charming, as anguished as he could be the life of the party.

I have to speak here about that new and still special class—the imaginative writer who teaches for his inner as well as his outer living. The imaginative American writer who teaches because he loves teaching—perhaps there are not so many—and who still, despite everything, believes that the system can create a respect for learning (if not learning itself), knows that he is the prisoner of a system. He is a prisoner because he believes in that great American god education, respects the values of the classroom, and unlike the young of the 1960s, sees no easy alternative.

Mark was made self-conscious by this system, as many of us are, precisely because it is now so sophisticated. Mark was certainly that. But he was more intrinsically, like so many American writers from the Middle West, a romantic, a son of Gatsby, who without abandoning belief in the promise of American life, replaced this old political ideal with the promise and prophecies of modernism from Blake to D. H. Lawrence.

The book on Sinclair Lewis, Mark's best known achievement, was subtitled An American Life. Lewis's Sauk Center in Minnesota was also Mark's Sauk City in Wisconsin. The biography of Lewis is of the kind that only a very good writer can do on another. Yet the book is marked by an obvious paradox. Mark identifies with Lewis; he certainly knows how much raw talent that ungainly and difficult man showed in his superb early satires on American provincialism. But he does not really approve of Lewis, and the reader is uneasily aware that the compelling reason may be the academy's sophisticated disdain for a writer who is invisible in the company of what schoolmasters call "modern masters"—Joyce and Eliot, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Mark was so impatient with Sinclair Lewis, though obviously subject to his influence, that at one point his wife offered to bail him out. What actually brought the book to a dramatic and unforgettable conclusion was Mark's wild joy at being able to do it at all. The last word of the book is the Italian expletive Basta! Enough of what? Yet his spirit of contradiction is crucial to the good writing and passionate intelligence on every page of the book on Lewis.

The book on William Blake, my favorite, was subtitled The Politics of Vision. The book came out in 1946, before Blake got turned over to the computers and to those young men who no longer know that in Blake's mind poetry does make things happen. The book on Blake shows occasional signs of funny impatience with Blake's all too predictable costumes. But "politics" was as key a word to Blake's imagination as "vision" itself. The year after the most tragic war in history was a good time to remember that Blake had as fierce a vision of human possibility as Dante.

Mark's last, posthumous collection of stories, Pieces of Life, cleverly intersperses them with fragments of autobiography that say in every line, and especially between the lines, what Whitman so proudly said of his visions—I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

Mark's most famous contribution to criticism was an essay, "Technique as Discovery." It was certainly technique, but something more than technique, that made Mark alternate his stories with autobiographical fragments. The stories belong to a certain old-fashioned New Yorker tradition of affluent pathos. There was a time, mostly in the 1950s, when the suffering conscience seemed to reside mostly under a Brooks Brothers tweed jacket. That style was overcome by the events of our perpetually torn world. So it was resourceful of Mark to intersperse his stories with fragments torn from his honest personal suffering.

It was for this desperate honesty, a certain candor and openness of heart that he needed for the peace of his soul as well as for the task of describing so many writers and himself that I loved Mark. I learned from his literary intelligence; my wife and I had good reason to depend on his personal goodness and intellectual generosity to two writers. I loved him because, having to submit to many systems and institutions that are as hard on the writer's imaginative freedom as they are necessary to his appetite for knowledge and professional ambitions, Mark knew—how well he knew!—the gap between ourselves and the great shining world into which happiness escapes. Here in California I still look for him. I shall miss him to the end of my days.