In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  These are notes to photographs…It would be better to say that they began as notes but became something else, a description of what I conceive to be events. They were meant for me alone, but I no longer hide them. Those times are past.

  I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It’s a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness.

  More mysteriously,

  Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time…Most of the details, though, have been long since transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward…One alters the past to form the future.

  As Lolita is a kind of valentine to Nabokov’s adopted, gorgeously vulgar America, so A Sport and a Pastime is a valentine to Salter’s France, “not the great squares of Europe…but the myriad small towns closed tight against the traveler, towns as still as the countryside itself.” Obsessed with the young lovers whom he has befriended, the voyeur-narrator begins to imagine their lovemaking in the most exalted terms:

  Mythology has accepted [Dean, the young man], images he cannot really believe in, images brief as dreams. The sweat rolls down his arms. He tumbles into the damp leaves of love, he rises clean as air. There is nothing about her he does not adore. When they are finished, she lies quiet and limp, exhausted by it all. She has become entirely his, and they lie like drunkards, their bare limbs crossed. In the cold distance the bells begin, filling the darkness, clear as psalms.

  A Sport and a Pastime ends with the abrupt, accidental death of one of the lovers and the elegiac survival of the narrator as a kind of drifting ghost attached still to the small provincial French towns now closed to him.

  The experience of Light Years, like that of Virginia Woolf’s most characteristic novels, is tonal, musical; the novel’s plot, so to speak, seems to happen in the interstices of its characters’ lives, in a sequence of wave-like motions that appear unconnected to human volition, like the play of light, obsessively described, in the Hudson Valley household that is the novel’s primary setting:

  In the morning the light came in silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, infinite, the moist earth beneath—one could taste this earth, its richness, its density, bathe in the air like a stream. Not a sound. The rind of the cheese had dried like bread. The glasses held the stale aroma of vanished wine.

  In embryo, this is Light Years: an upper-middle-class suburban household touching upon infinity, irradiated with light, yet, if one looks closely, beginning to go stale as if with an excess of happiness.

  [Viri’s and Nedra’s] life was two things: it was a life, more or less—at least it was the preparation for one—and it was an illustration of life for their children…They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachieveable but in the sense of the pure…

  There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead. They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune of one, a failure, illness, would stagger them all. It was like a garment, this life. Its beauty was outside, its warmth within.

  Light Years moves airily, relentlessly, from an autumn in 1958 when Viri and Nedra are a young married couple in their late twenties, attractive, enviable, “beautiful” and “handsome” as characters in an American romance by F. Scott Fitzgerald, to a spring day decades later when Viri, divorced, returns to his former house, “an old man in the woods” who has outlived his wife and has seen his daughters drift from him: “It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.”

  Where novels of suburban-marital unrest at mid-century by such contemporaries of Salter’s as Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike are apt to be laced with a corrosive irony, Light Years is a more subtly modulated, Chekhovian testament to the passing of a way of life, or to the cultural elevation of that way of life: the sacred insularity of the American “nuclear family” in which adults live for, and through, their children. Viri’s love for Nedra is perceived as a kind of weakness: Viri is “a good father—that is to say, an ineffective man” eventually, he’s repudiated by Nedra for being a man who “had not wanted enough.” Nedra, the novel’s most enigmatic character, is at once an earth mother (“Her love for [her children] was the love to which she had devoted her life, the only one which would not be consumed or vanish”) entranced by the routines and rituals of her family, and a sexually restless, even predatory Mrs. Ramsey, who persists in adulterous love affairs even after her husband has found her out. Nedra insists upon a divorce, moves out of the idyllic Hudson Valley house to travel in Europe; no longer young, she embarks upon sexual adventures in anticipation of “entering the underground river” where “not even courage will help.” It isn’t banal happiness Nedra wants, but something more elusive and undefinable: “She meant to be free.”

  Like a riddle not readily solved, Light Years lingers in the memory. There is a melancholy enchantment in its pages redolent of Colette: prolonged happiness is a prison from which the self yearns to escape at any cost.

  Fittingly, Salter’s next novel, Solo Faces (1979), explores the search for the most extreme ecstatic freedom: solo mountain climbing in the French Alps. Where Light Years is a poetic meditation in prose interlarded with dramatic scenes, Solo Faces is an action film in prose interlarded with poetic passages. Its solitary protagonist, Rand, is a mountain climber of instinctive skill who becomes, over the course of the novel, a fanatic; a man for whom ordinary life, especially fatherhood, is terrifying. He’s a type not unlike certain of the ace pilots revered in Salter’s flying novels, for whom the compulsion to risk their lives is visceral; there’s the yearning, too, to make oneself “heroic” in the most literal, unironic sense of the word. The pure man of action is a suicide, William Carlos Williams once noted, and so it seems, in Solo Faces, the purest mountain climbers are men like Rand, driven to ever more dangerous exploits as he tests his courage repeatedly, one successful climb provoking the need for another, and yet another:

  He was happy, held there by the merest point of steel, above all difficulties, somehow above all fears. This is how it must feel at the end, he thought uneasily, a surge of joy before the final moment. He looked past his feet. The steepness was dazzling. Far above him was a great bulge of ice…

  In the morning he woke among peaks incredibly white against the muted sky. There is something greater than the life of the cities, greater than money and possessions; there is a manhood that can never be taken away. For this, one gives everything.

  Inevitably, Rand reaches the limit of his endurance, broken in spirit when he fails to complete a suicidal solo climb. Yet, even as he retreats in shame from the brotherhood of mountain climbers to an anonymous and posthumous life in Pensacola, Florida, he passes into legend:

  They talked of him, however, which was what he had always wanted. The acts themselves are surpassed but the singular figure lives on. The day finally came when they realized they would never know for certain. Rand had somehow succeeded. He had found the great river. He had gone.

  Dusk and Last Night are appropriate titles for Salter’s slender collections of stories, that unfold with dreamlike fluidity in an atmosphere of shadows and indistinct forms, like watercolors in a dark palette. As Salter’s novels are comprised of exquisite set pieces, often self-contained, so his short stories suggest novellas or novels compressed into a few pages. Both Dusk and Last Night contain memorable stories in a classic vein, yet a number of others (“Am Strande von Tanger,” “The Cinema,” “Lost Sons,” “Via Negativa,” “The Destruction of the Goetheanum,” from Dusk; “Comet,” “Eyes of the Stars,” “Platinum,” “Arlington,” from Last Night) move so swiftly and disjointedly as to arouse expectation in the way of trailers for intriguing films that turn out to be the films themselves, abruptly truncated. It’s
as if the writer’s imagination has leapt ahead of his capacity for, or interest in, the work of expression; an impatience with formal storytelling and chronological development:

  This film that he had written, this important work of the newest of the arts, already existed complete in his mind. Its power came from its chasteness, the discipline of its images. It was a film of indirection, the surface was calm with the calm of daily life. That was not to say still. Beneath the visible were emotions more potent for their concealment. Only occasionally, like the head of an iceberg ominously rising from nowhere and then dropping from sight did the terror come into view. (“The Cinema,” Dusk)

  Where narration is indirect and images are employed as a kind of emotional synecdoche, perspective tends to be coolly detached and retrospective, as in the great experimental European films of the mid-twentieth century, or the short fiction of Colette. This accounts for the protracted openings of a number of Salter’s stories, their abrupt and sometimes disconcerting leaps in time, sudden endings that bring the reader up short, like sudden steps in dreams, unforeseen:

  She has small breasts and large nipples. Also, as she herself says, a rather large behind. Her father has three secretaries. Hamburg is close to the sea.

  And, in a swift and somewhat desultory summing-up of a poignant story of marital betrayal:

  That was how she and Walter came to part, upon being discovered by his wife. They met two or three times afterward, at his insistence, but to no avail. Whatever holds people together was gone. She told him she could not help it. That was just the way it was.

  In Dusk there’s a perplexing story titled “Akhnilo” that tracks in microscopic detail what seems to be the mental disintegration of a man about whom we know little (“Eddie Fenn was a carpenter though he’d gone to Dartmouth and majored in history…He had thinning hair and a shy smile. Not much to say.”), a feat of writerly obscurity that repeated readings can’t decode. (In Burning the Days, Salter acknowledges having written a story about a man whose imagined life consumes his identity, about which Salter’s wife says she couldn’t “make head or tail of it.”) Enough material for a substantial novel is crammed into the seven small pages of “Arlington”: complicated marital relations, exotic locales, thumbnail sketches of characters, abrupt death:

  In his long, admired career, Westerveldt had been like a figure in a novel. In the elephant grass near Pleiku he’d gotten a wide scar through one eyebrow where a mortar fragment, half an inch lower and a little closer, would have blinded or killed him. If anything, it enhanced his appearance. He’d had a long love affair with a woman in Naples when he’d been stationed there, a marquesa, in fact…Women always liked him. In the end he married a woman from San Antonio, a divorcée with a child, and they had two more together. He was fifty-eight when he died from some kind of leukemia that began as a strange rash on his neck.

  Like the self-absorbed suburbanites of Light Years, the men and women of Salter’s short fiction tend to be individuals of privilege, worldly and yet vulnerable to hurt; individuals who perceive of themselves as passionate, or deserving of passion, though, in fact, like the rare book dealer of “Bangkok,” who has moved on to a domestic life of routine contentment (“You can’t have ecstasy daily”) they may have settled for “pretend” lives. Salter’s most powerful stories tend to be about women in extremis, for whom all pretense has vanished, sometimes in a moment’s revelation, sometimes in a protracted and horrific contemplation of mortality, as in “Twenty Minutes,” in Dusk, when a woman living alone, a divorcée, is thrown from her horse in a desolate area, lies broken and paralyzed waiting for someone to discover her as flashes of her life scroll past her:

  It was growing dark. Help me, someone, help me, she kept repeating. Someone would come, they had to. She tried not to be afraid. She thought of her father who could explain life in one sentence. “They knock you down and you get up. That’s what it’s all about.” He recognized only one virtue. He would hear what had happened, that she merely lay there. She had to try to get home, even if she went only a little way, even a few yards.

  The two most poignant stories in Last Night are about women who have been diagnosed with inoperable cancer: “Some Fun” reads like a dark episode of Sex and the City in which a woman can’t share news of her impending death with her closest women friends, who are bent upon having a good time getting drunk as they exchange revelations about former husbands, but only with a stranger driving a taxi; in the harrowing “Last Night,” a terminally ill woman named Marit hopes to appropriate her death by making it into a ritual involving her husband, who will inject her with a lethal amount of morphine:

  She no longer resembled herself. What she had been was gone: it had been taken from her. The change was fearful, especially in her face. She had a face now that was for the afterlife and those she would meet there. It was hard for Walter to remember how she had once been. She was almost a different woman from the one to whom he had made a solemn promise to help when the time came.

  Marit, anticipating death, longs for “certain memories” to take with her, but only memories from childhood: “The rest was a long novel so like your life; you were going through it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there were bloodstains.” But Marit’s plan for an easeful death brings unexpected results for her, her husband, and her husband’s appalled mistress.

  It’s a measure of James Salter’s writerly gifts that one wishes each of his stories longer, as, at the somewhat premature conclusion of Burning the Days, one of the most engaging and beautifully composed memoirs of our time, one wishes the life, thus the art, extended:

  It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time.

  MARGARET ATWOOD’S TALES

  Moral Disorder

  by Margaret Atwood

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  by Margaret Atwood

  Introduction by Valerie Martin

  The true story is vicious

  and multiple and untrue

  after all. Why do you

  need it? Don’t ever

  ask for the true story.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD, TRUE STORIES

  But what precisely is a “true story”?—one that reveals “truth,” or one that confirms the storyteller’s identity? Can “truth” be an objective matter, when human subjectivities are involved? Or is truth merely—or supremely—a “story”? Through her long, energetic, and productive career Margaret Atwood has been as much an anatomist of “telling” as of “truth”: the daughter of an entomologist at the University of Toronto, with a master’s degree in Victorian literature from Harvard (1962), Atwood would seem to have an instinct for taxonomy; for the casting of a cold yet not unsympathetic eye upon the stratagems by which individuals present themselves to others in narratives devised to confirm their identities or, simply, like the desperate captive “handmaid” (i.e., sexual/breeder-slave) Offred of Atwood’s most widely read novel, the dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, to survive. As Nell, the protagonist of the novel-in-linked-stories Moral Disorder thinks following the unexpected death of her husband’s eccentric, troublesome ex-wife:

  All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories.

  In a postmodernist sleight of hand in Atwood’s elaborately constructed Alias Grace (1996), the reader is beguiled by numerous competing variants of a central story (based upon the sensational Kinnear-Montgomery murders in Richmond Hill, Ontario, in 1843) that can never be fully resolved, as in an intricately plotted puzzle. Near the end of the lengthy novel the former defense attorney for the alleged murderess Grace Marks, whose innocence has come to seem highly likely to the reader, casually undercuts our expectations by remarking:

  Lying…A severe term, surely. Has [Grace] been lying to you, you ask? Let me put it this way—did Scheherazade lie?
Not in her own eyes; indeed, the stories she told ought never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and Falsehood. They belong in another realm altogether. Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end…To keep the Sultan amused. To keep the blow from falling.

  Still later, after Grace Marks has been pardoned and released from the penitentiary, and has married a man out of her scandalous past, she finds that she must “tell him some story or other about being in the Penitentiary, or else the Lunatic asylum in Toronto…He listens to all of that like a child listening to a fairy tale, as if it is something wonderful, and then he begs me to tell him yet more.”

  How like the author of such artful fictions, speaking of her role as storyteller! As Atwood acknowledged in a recent interview: “I’m one of the few literary writers who get lucky in their lifetimes.”1

  Author of twenty volumes of prose fiction including most notably the novels Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, as well as thirteen volumes of poetry, six works of non-fiction, and six children’s books, Margaret Atwood has an international reputation that differs considerably from her reputation in her native Canada, where she became, virtually overnight in 1972, at the age of thirty-one, the most celebrated/controversial Canadian writer of the era. Atwood’s first novel, a feminist “anti-comedy” (Atwood’s description) titled The Edible Woman, had appeared in 1969, to enthusiastic but limited press coverage, but Atwood was most known for her distinctive poetic voice in such early, acclaimed volumes as The Circle Game (1966), The Animals in That Country (1967), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Procedures for Underground (1970), and Power Politics (1971) with its wonderfully terse, mordant prefatory lines: