Some say he’s cold, inhuman, overly intellectual. Some say he’s the greatest American writer of his generation.
Towards the end of last year, avid readers of Don DeLillo came to believe they were in on a secret. On the author’s fansites, visitors shared in an ”eerie” coincidence: on the cover of Underworld, DeLillo’s 11th novel, was an image of the World Trade Centre, with a not-to-scale bird flying spookily towards its upper floors. Aspects of the ”war on terror” were said to derive from Mao II, DeLillo’s 10th novel, and the anthrax scares that petrified New York and Florida in 2001, to echo loosely a chapter entitled ”The Airborne Toxic Event” in White Noise, (1985). By the time the Washington sniper started picking off pedestrians with a semi-automatic rifle last year, an act prefigured in Underworld by the Texas Highway Killer, the favourite joke on the message boards was that the US was not under siege from an international terror organisation but from the Medusa touch of Donald DeLillo (66) of Westchester County, New York.
The author finds these speculations depressing — ”I don’t look,” he says, ”I don’t want to know about it. Don’t tell.” But, in truth, it is just the people of his novels talking back to him. DeLillo populates his books with cranks, drop-outs, recluses, obsessives — in his latest novel, Cosmopolis (Picador), a suicidal billionaire named Eric Packer. Above all, these are people who live by the first principle of paranoia: that everything in the world is connected to everything else.
Since it is also a principle of the artist, there has been confusion over the years as to which category DeLillo falls into. ”History is the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us,” he wrote in Libra, his fictionalised account of the Kennedy assassination, although he is personally more in tune with this sentiment: ”A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.”
There is a widespread myth that his work has more to do with philosophy than literature. DeLillo lit-crit comes in nut-hard volumes with titles such as American Simulacra: DeLillo in Light of Postmodernism and How to Read Don DeLillo, as if he were writing in Latin. His popularity with a certain pedantic strain of male graduate has seen him characterised, unfairly, as a man who writes about men for men — not in the macho tradition of Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, but as distant and slick, dysfunctionally male, heartless. Reviewing Cosmopolis, Blake Morrison said that ”as the epitome of disengagement, cut off from common pursuits and recognisable feelings, Packer isn’t someone we’re meant to engage with.”
Oddly, though, for a writer whose characters are accused of being cold and impersonal, of spouting ”smart, swift essays at one another”, as John Updike put it, reviewing Cosmopolis in the New Yorker, DeLillo is identified with them as closely as if they were the props of memoir. Through David Bell, burned-out executive in Americana, creepy writer Bill Gray in Mao II, and of course, sad, mad Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, DeLillo has come to be regarded as a brilliant but shady Clare Quilty, paring through the American undergrowth, throwing out chunks of Confucian wisdom such as: ”The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.”
”He likes people to read him through his books,” says Peter Straus, former editor-in-chief at Picador. ”The books are so extraordinary and captivating they don’t necessarily give any sense of the personality [of] the author.” ”He’s brilliant, but quietly brilliant,” says Lois Wallace, DeLillo’s agent of more than 20 years.
DeLillo is not bothered about what people think of him personally. Long ago, like Thomas Pynchon, he resolved to keep himself out of the limelight. ”As my books began to be published I felt I was where I belonged: that is, in semi-obscurity. It seemed quite natural and comfortable to me.” Pynchon is still holding out, but the commercial success of White Noise and Underworld has forced DeLillo to relax his position and give polite interviews at the back of his agent’s New York office. ”In one sense of course it’s gratifying,” he says. ”But in another sense it has become a little uncomfortable.”
More irksome to him is the view of his books as unbreachable slabs of modern philosophy. DeLillo insists he works at ”street level” — ”This means I listen to people, I watch them walking, gesticulating. Everything stems from that. I am not sure whether I could or would like to give a theoretical abstract of my work.”
His critics are not so squeamish: DeLillo is at once praised for articulating a new theory of reality (that everything we see is mediated through images derived from popular culture); blamed for contributing to the death of sincerity (that the mediation theory is meaningless); and presented in countless PhDs as a writer in full control of the contradiction. Now he is being embraced as clairvoyant.
”When I first met him,” says Tom LeClair, academic and DeLillo’s friend for two decades, ”I thought, this is a very interesting guy, he has a kind of eccentric mind, but not a massive brain like Thomas Pynchon, for example. He’s modest about his achievements. Rather than brainy, he’s got very sensitive radar.”
DeLillo was still a child when he started positioning himself at what he describes in Underworld as ”an angle to the moment”. His parents moved separately from Italy to New York, where they met and in 1936 had a son. DeLillo supposes his parents’ foreignness gave him a sense of detachment, a grain of perspective on American cultural life. But that didn’t register until adulthood. As a child, there wasn’t room to cultivate a sense of separateness. ”We were in very crowded circumstances, in a skinny little house in the Bronx that still stands. There were five people upstairs — my uncle and aunt and my three male cousins; four of us and my grandparents, so there were 11 of us. No one ever complained, because it was what we knew.”
Books were not a part of this world. What DeLillo loved was ”getting out to play ball. The neighbourhood was densely populated, so there was always somebody, always something, and always some kind of turmoil, aggression, commotion going on.”
In 1975 DeLillo married Barbara Bennett, then a banker, now a landscape designer. They didn’t have children and during the writing of White Noise, DeLillo hung out with the boisterous LeClair clan for insights. ”My kids feel they’ve been quoted in White Noise,” says LeClair.
The literary world wasn’t part of his background. DeLillo grew up on comic books and the radio and he has been influenced, he says, as much by jazz music as by literature. ”I listen to the same jazz I listened to when I first discovered it existed. Coltraine and Miles Davis, and Charlie Mingus. You don’t know Mingus? Oh Gaaad.” A nasal, Bronx accent suddenly surfaces. ”There’s a piece he does, a 15-minute thing called Haitian Fight Song. I listen to it almost every day.”
Love of ball games, especially baseball, has been a constant in DeLillo’s life, surfacing in his books as a preoccupation with crowds, common moods, mass hysteria. ”I must say going to the ball game with Don was one of the great things,” said Salman Rushdie after attending a Yankees game with DeLillo, ”because he goes with his mitt. He’s up there for every fly ball.”
He didn’t get seriously into reading until he was 18, working at a summer job as a playground attendant. DeLillo’s brief was to patrol the park, but instead he sat on a bench and consumed Faulkner, Joyce and Hemingway, marvelling at the ”radiance” of language. He saw that words had a ”sculptural quality”, that arranging them was a ”sensuous pleasure”. In Mao II, DeLillo, writing as novelist-protagonist Bill Gray, says: ”I’ve always seen myself in sentences … The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.”
This is not hyperbole. Although he has a college degree in what he scathingly refers to as ”something called communication arts”, DeLillo is essentially self-taught. His books, he says, are not for academics but for ”an anonymous person somewhere in a small town”. And while White Noise is on the syllabus of most post-modernism courses, DeLillo’s combination of weight and flippancy makes him difficult to place in study courses on the modern novel. ”Underworld is not something you can really assign in college,” says Wallace, who says she will never represent a better novel. ”You need to take a week’s vacation to read it. I said, ‘Don, don’t you want a table of contents?’ and he said, ‘No. The reader can find what he wants.”’
After finishing his degree, he spent five years as a copywriter at the advertising agency Ogilvy Benson & Mather. DeLillo calls his career in advertising ”short and uninteresting”, but it gave him vital insights into the image business. Thirteen years before Jay McInerney wrote Bright Lights, Big City, DeLillo created Americana‘s David Bell, New York’s ”youngest TV executive”, sharper, funnier, more screwed up by ambition than his 1980s descendants.
It took DeLillo four years to produce Americana after he had quit the ad agency. ”I left advertising because I needed to leave. I had nothing to go to. But this is what I wanted: to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and look at the world.” He did exactly as he pleased. He was not, he says, ”ambitious in a professional sense and I was not ambitious as a writer. I was fairly certain [that the book] would not come to fruition. I don’t think I was panicking and it’s hard to explain why, because I should have been. I think I inherited from my father a certain stoicism. I was paying such little rent that it was possible to do that in New York. But there was an element of grimness, existential grimness.”
In 1971, when he was 35, Americana was published. It got mixed reviews, though Joyce Carol Oates called him ”a man of frightening perception”. Others complained that his prose was a stylistic hangover from his days as a copywriter, brilliant at the level of the individual sentence, but no good at the conventions of storytelling.
It is true that DeLillo’s narratives deliberately refuse the comforts of convention. And a DeLillo sentence can scan like an epigram from the self-help industry, but while the rhythm soothes, the sentiment is a malevolent fortune cookie. From Underworld: ”All waste aspires to the condition of shit.”
By using the language of advertising to undermine its principles, DeLillo has inspired a thousand theses, but he has also been accused of anti-Americanism. The Washington Post accused him of being ”a good writer and a bad influence”. In reply, DeLillo says wearily, ”I write about the culture we’re living in.”
The great rebuke to these criticisms is Underworld, DeLillo’s masterpiece. Gasping for air, critics described the novel as a ”big cluttered basement”, a ”cathedral”, a ”home-run”, a ”colossus” and a ”bible”, though Malcolm Bradbury thought it ”over-extended”. The typical Underworld reading experience is to consume the first section open-mouthed, then, unless one takes a week off work, to fall away at some point during the ensuing 827 pages. (Or to read it in chunks over a few months, an approach to which it lends itself.) But the book’s over-extension is rather its point; it is about connections, in the non- paranoid sense, an attempt to write country-wide the ”turmoil, aggression, commotion” that he first encountered and loved as a child in the streets of New York.
Given his love of the city and his take on public hysteria, after September 11 the voice every editor wanted to hear was DeLillo’s. He bided his time until December 2001, when an article appeared in Harper’s magazine, but he said it years ago in Mao II: ”I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.”
On the Bush administration, he says: ”I think it began with a kind of nostalgia for the Cold War. I think that we’ve been feeling a sort of homesickness for power in this country.”
Cosmopolis is set in 1999, when, says DeLillo, ”we were all living in the future”. It revisits familiar themes — the behaviour of crowds, in this case anti-globalisation protesters, and the way contemporary culture is so inured to trauma (a tycoon is assassinated ”live on the Money Channel’‘), and what the endless repetition of TV images does to encourage this — ”white hot consumption followed by instantaneous waste”.
What about his so-called presience? DeLillo’s aim, as he put it in Underworld, has always been ”to understand the hidden triggers of experience, the little delves and swerves that make a state of being”. He’s just looking at the world. —