The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick

Author:Cynthia Ozick [Ozick, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Henry James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was assassinated, I wrote the last words of Trust, my first novel. I had begun it while still in my twenties, and finished it seven years later. In actuality there had been two "first" novels before then—the earlier one never completed, though it had already accumulated three hundred thousand words. I had planned it as a "philosophical" fiction; in graduate school I had come under the influence of Eliseo Vivas, at the time a well-known professor of philosophy, and with his character and views in mind, I named my protagonist Rafael Caritas. His antagonist, as I conceived it (the metaphysical versus the pragmatic), was a man of the type of Sidney Hook, a legendary figure in my undergraduate days at New York University: in my aborted novel he was called Seymour Karp. It never occurred to me—I learned it painfully years afterward—that it might be perilous to import real persons into fiction. My idea was to confront Passion with Reason. Of course I sided with Passion (I was twenty-two), which explained why a stanza from one of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" supplied the title: Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. ("For Mercy has a human heart,/Pity a human face,/And Love, the human form divine,/And Peace, the human dress.")

Rafael Caritas consumed years before he, or I, ran out of philosophical steam. Vivas's devotion to what he termed Neo-Thomism had befuddled me; so did his lectures on Aristode's Nicomachean Ethics. What was even more confounding, though, was his fury at the Nuremberg trials. The men in the dock were wicked beyond wicked, he raged—but the Allied tribunal was wicked too: it stood for victors' justice. Then what should be done with these murderous miscreants? Punish them, Vivas said, according to a practice not unknown in certain parts of his native South America: bury each man up to his neck in earth, and send riders at a gallop to trample the exposed heads. It was an argument worthy of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Vivas, even when he was jovially avuncular, as he sometimes was, intimidated me: his black hair, slicked back, gleamed like shoe polish; his foreign rasp had a demonic twist; his classroom manner was a roar. Rafael Caritas was far tamer.

Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love was slowly proceeding (though without the horsemen), pullulating with new characters I could hardly fathom or control. No resolution was anywhere in sight when I came, one afternoon, on a seductive announcement in one of the serious literary quarterlies. A publisher was soliciting short novels. Short! The word—the idea—captivated. Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love was winding on and on, like a Möbius strip: where was its end? As a kind of interim project, I set out to write a short novel. It turned out to be a long one. It turned out to be Trust.

But Trust too wound on and on. All around me writers of my generation were publishing; I was not.

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