Now for the Age of Psst!

By Melvin Maddocks

On a wall of John Ehrlichman's home in Santa Fe hangs a framed piece of stationery imprinted "Aboard Air Force One" and signed by Henry Kissinger. Upon this official sheet, dated May 22,1971, are recorded two games of ticktacktoe between Ehrlichman and the Secretary of State. One game is a draw. The other game shows Ehrlichman a winner. In the shade of this trophy -this fun-and-games scalp -Ehrlichman wrote his roman `a clef, The Company, in which Kissinger, under the thinnest of disguises, has taken a second clobbering that the old ticktacktoe loser could hardly have dreamed of five years ago.

What exactly is a roman `a clef? There is no equivalent in English for this phrase that literally means novel with a key -a story whose characters are modeled on real people. The roman `a clef, a reader is tempted to answer, is ticktacktoe with a one-move handicap. Naturally there is more to it than that, and the question deserves a sober -but not too sober -answer. For, thanks to Ehrlichman and The Company, Truman Capote and Answered Prayers, and Elizabeth Ray and The Washington Fringe Benefit, the roman `a clef may become not only the form the bestselling novel takes in 1976 but the symbol of a rather shoddy year that could just possibly go down in history as the Age of Psst! -Have-You-Heard?

The roman `a clef as a genre cannot be blamed. It holds an eminent position in literary history. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), the villainous seducer, Lovelace, happened to be the Duke of Wharton. Robinson Crusoe was based on the desert-island experiences of one Alexander Selkirk off the coast of Chile, and Tristram Shandy caused not-always-comic shocks of recognition among the York neighbors of the puckish Laurence Sterne.

To novelists with a satirical bent, basing characters on enemies, rivals and unfaithful lovers has provided an accepted tool of revenge. Ernest Hemingway scored in The Sun Also Rises (Harold Loeb, the now-forgotten model for Robert Cohen, was satisfactorily furious, and one of the minor real-life woman characters took to bed for a week). Aldous Huxley did a number on D.H. Lawrence as the brilliantly insufferable crank, Mark Rampion, in Point Counter Point. Political debts have been paid too. One of the first romans `a clef, Madeleine de Scudery's Artamene; ou Le Grand Cyrus (1649), encoded in fiction the court of Louis XIV. H.G. Wells savaged Winston Churchill under the cover of Rupert Catskill in Men Like Gods.

What, then, sets apart the roman `a clef of 1976? Hardly the quality of its malice. In the first installment of Answered Prayers, set at Manhattan's La Cote Basque restaurant during lunchtime, Capote was out to make his readers throw up while his characters ate. But he is merely a sniggering Boy Scout compared with Jonathan Swift, who, in A Tale of a Tub, had a character kneel in the street to pray, then void his bladder in the eyes of the passersby leaning over to investigate.

The complaint the contemporary reader can and must make is that never has there been so little roman and so much clef. Who would read The Washington Fringe Benefit if Wayne Hays did not exist? And, despite Capote's habit of rubbing his shoulders against Proust, is there not at least as much accuracy to Columnist Jack O'Brian's characterization of him as "Jackie Susann with an education."

The late Miss Susann cannot respond to that characterization, although Dolores, her newly published posthumous novel, includes a bitchy artist and vicious gossip named Horatio Capon. Dolores itself is the roman `a clef in its most preposterous incarnation. It is about Dolores Ryan, the beautiful widow of an assassinated U.S. President, who marries one of the world's richest men for his money. Is this truly the story of the fabulous Jackie O? Yes but no, since Susann was careful in her novel to mention the existence of the real Jackie and Jack. Somehow the reader is supposed to believe that the incredible saga of the Kennedys was repeated. In effect, reading the book is like watching a TV soap with transmission ghosts.

Sputtering wit and hot rage were once indigenous to the roman `a clef. The one thing that is shared by the 1976 models is cold calculation. The artist's self-contradiction, indifference, attaches equally to Susann's brazen knockoff, to Ray's sleazy expose, to Capote's imitation of a fly on the La Cote Basque wall, and to Ehrlichman's recitation of other men's crimes.

Can this be coincidence? More instances will be needed to generalize from, and -no fear -they will be provided. But so far, the '70s roman `a clef seems to fit all too neatly into the '70s style of unimpassioned corruption. That is, the genre promises to be to '70s literature what dirty tricks have been to '70s politics -a simple, practical, self-serving way of getting even, making a buck, saving your own skin or doing all three.

"A report, an account. Yes, I'll call it a novel," says Capote's alter ego in Answered Prayers, and the sequence tells all. But if the current authors of romans `a clef are, in effect, only posing as novelists, the strategy remains masterly. In the first place, "novelist" makes a superb disguise: the politician, so to speak, laundering himself as artist, to take the case of Ehrlichman.

The new John Ehrlichman grows a beard, slips into chinos and desert boots, retreats in a VW "Thing" to his adobe hut up that dirt road, stacks Mozart on the stereo, and on notebook paper white as virgin sand produces ... what? A novel -the quasi-religious American act that digests experience and judges it by the most scrupulous standards known.

Holy Hawthorne! Holy Melville! Holy Henry James! Holy John Ehrlichman! Out of can-do performance, into sensitivity -and, at the same tune, into even more of a power game. The Rosencrantz of the Oval Office, the matey voice on the tape, is now metamorphosed into this all-comprehending recording angel who, in fact, records when and as he sees fit, with all the gaps he wants on the tapes, or no tapes at all.

What power beyond Washington's lustiest fantasy the roman `a clef novelist possesses over his flesh-and-blood puppets! He is saviour and redeemer. He is hit man. Technically speaking, he is God. Morally speaking, he has the edge on God, if one assumes that God cannot play it both ways. To put it mildly, there is no equal time in the world of the roman a clef. And if one of the characters -say, a professor from Harvard and Vienna with thick glasses, a deep voice, three chins and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East, who plays ticktacktoe - -should complain, the au thor need only reply: "You are not real. Didn't I say so in my preface?"

Such tightrope walking may have tragic consequences. In Answered Prayers, Capote implies that a character named Ann Hopkins murdered her husband in cold blood. Just be fore the installment containing this suggestion appeared in Esquire, a society woman named Ann Woodward committed suicide. Her friends charged -however unjustly -that Capote's story had driven her to take her life. In 1955 Mrs. Woodward was acquitted of the accidental shooting of her husband, Sportsman William Woodward Jr., but what retribution is ever available to the victims of literary sensationalism? Exile. The duel. Anathema. Adjectives like "dastardly." Alas, the only recourse may be another roman `a clef.

Art, like life, is unfair, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, an other of Ehrlichman's victims. So the final argument cannot be one of pain or injustice. For those gored, it has always been the wrong time for the roman `a clef. But now may be the wrong time not only for the victims but for the authors, for the readers -for everybody. The mid-'70s guess-who novel is ingeniously designed to feed our particular malaise even while symbolizing it. Fhinching at the very word "issue," exhausted by the ultimatums implicit in a hundred "problems" (that other dirty word!) that we do not understand, we are all too ready to reduce not only the novel but history, to its lowest common denominator: gossip.

But does not the Age of Psst! declare the bankruptcy of politics and art, pronounce the impotence of both one's capacity to behave well and to imagine passionately? It is enough to make a reader devoutly wish, at last, for the death of the novel. Or, if one is a cockeyed optimist, he can indulge in a little science fiction and predict a world -say, 2076 -in which the novel, if not the White House, has returned to what Henry James defined it as: a "sacred office." Then the roman `a clef of 1976 can be imagined ending up as a footnote in a Tricentennial history of America under W:

Washington Novel: Known in its more general and international form as "the Beautiful Bastards" novel. A subgenre that flourished, not by mere co incidence, along with fantasizing manuals on power (see Korda, Michael). Writers and readers, haunted by the fear of World War III and what was called "the energy crisis," perversely conspired to trivialize their times -and to end the world not with a bang but a titter. When (circa 1978) one of the authors -an alleged "Truman Capote" -was discovered to be fictitious himself, the "trend," as it was termed in those days, came to an abrupt end.

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