Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  May this judgment, which we have delivered with extreme caution, and after consulting with a great number of other ladies, be for you a constant and unassailable truth.

  * Another internationally minded Latin sensitive to the poetry of national character is the noble Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. On page 142 of Labyrinths (New Directions; 1964) one finds, in a footnote: “Other nations live innocently, in themselves and for themselves, like minerals or meteors; Germany is the universal mirror which receives all, the consciousness of the world (das Welthewusstsein). Goethe is the prototype of that ecumenic comprehension.” And, a few pages further on: “… the Spanish land, where there are few things, but where each seems to exist in a substantive and eternal way.”

  † Translated by Nancy Mitford.

  A FOREWORD FOR YOUNG READERS

  Introduction to THE YOUNG KING AND OTHER FAIRY TALES, by Oscar Wilde. 42 pp. Macmillan, 1962.

  These are called fairy stories. Why? The word “fairy” comes from the Latin word fata, which means “one of the Fates.” The Fates were the supreme gods of the Roman world whose architecture survives in post offices and railroad stations, whose language lingers in mottoes, and whose soldiers and officials may be glimpsed in the background of the New Testament. In fact, fairies and all such spirits and tiny forest presences are what is left of the gods who were worshipped before Christ.

  Imagine a forest, and imagine the forest overswept by an ocean. The forest is drowned; but along the shore twigs and sticks, dwindled and worn and soaked with salty water, are washed up. These bits are fairy stories, and the ocean is the Christian faith that in a thousand years swept over Europe, and the forest is the world of pagan belief that existed before it. So, when you pick up a fairy story, the substance is pagan wood, but the taste and glisten is of Christian salt.

  Understand that once upon a time there really were palaces, and young princes and princesses, and deep dark forests where it seemed very possible that elves lived and animals talked. This time is called the Middle Ages. When the Middle Ages were over, writers like Charles Perrault, a Frenchman, and Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane, collected the fairy stories that people remembered, and even made up some of their own. The three stories in this book were made up by an Irishman, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, less than a hundred years ago. Yet they are true fairy stories and not just imitations; they are serious.

  They are serious for two reasons. One is that Ireland, where Oscar Wilde was a child, remained a magical country long after magic had fled other countries. People believe in fairies there, or half believe in them, to this day. When, in “The Happy Prince,” a swallow and a statue talk, they talk naturally, without fuss, as birds sing.

  The second reason for this seriousness is that Oscar Wilde wrote in a time when grown men wrote very seriously for young readers. For instance, Hawthorne and Longfellow in America, and in England Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling all wrote stories and poems for children to read. They did not do it offhand, or with a sly smile, but in earnest, with all the skill and wisdom they had, as if their lives depended upon it, which in a way they did. For if men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. This danger was not so clear until machines entered the world in force and began to make men resemble them.

  In “The Young King” you can read a description of a factory where the people and the machines have become horribly intertwined. It is not “made up”; many factories were like this, and some still are. It was when factories appeared, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that adult writers like William Blake and William Wordsworth began to address children not as miniature persons to be shaped into grown-ups but as the possessors of a secret that grown-ups had lost. This secret might be called faith or trust or the capacity for wonder or the belief that wishing matters.

  The world of fairy stories is one where wishing matters, where the motions of the heart move the “real” world. Beauty in her heart at last crosses the bridge of love, and Beast becomes a handsome prince. And it is not to some extent so, that things become what we wish them to be? But only “to some extent,” for the resistance of the “real” world is very real. To win from Beauty the magic word of acceptance, Beast must travel through pain to the edge of death. Do not think that, like so many modern books for children, fairy tales skip the subject of suffering. On the contrary: suffering is exactly what they are about.

  “Dear little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there.”

  So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets.

  You will find this passage in the last story, and in the middle story you will read how a good-natured man was cruelly abused by a hypocritical friend, and in the first story you will learn how all beautiful things are “fashioned by Grief.” I do not want to spoil the stories by telling you more than this. Perhaps you should take these hints as a warning, and turn to something safer; for, as I said, the author was writing in earnest, as if his own life depended upon it, and he did not seek to spare the feelings of his readers, however young. The sadness of a man and the sadness of a century are in these tales.

  But if you dare read them, you will enter a rich and precious world. You do not need me to tell you that the account of the Swallow courting the Reed is witty, or that the Miller is very comic in his smug wickedness, or that the words used to describe the Young King’s jewels are themselves polished and set in place like jewels. You do need me, perhaps, to tell you that Oscar Wilde, that nineteenth-century Irishman, was in his own life, like the Young King, “one who was seeking to find in beauty an anodyne from pain, a sort of restoration from sickness”; and that a criticism,1 or indictment,2 of beauty lies like a thorn at the heart of these stories.

  Two palaces are named in the following pages: Sans-Souci, which means Without Sorrow, and Joyeuse, whose meaning you can guess. Such palaces are built not to live in but to leave; our lives from their first cry are a leaving. Can we ever return? These stories say so. Beauty is overwhelmed by Evil, but her sister Goodness conquers everything. If wishing matters, however little, it offers a lever whereby the world can be moved and indeed, turned upside-down. Through these stories you will enter a world where a king properly wears a beggar’s rags and where a cracked heart of lead and a dead bird are the most precious things in the city. Is this too strange? Or have you, in fact, always known it to be true?

  1 You can look up these words in the dictionary, along with “anodyne.”

  2 You can look up these words in the dictionary, along with “anodyne.”

  CREATURES OF THE AIR

  THE BACHELORS, by Muriel Spark. 219 pp. Lippincott, 1961.

  The dust jacket of Muriel Spark’s fifth novel in five years displays a new picture of the authoress. The broad-faced young sphinx, one hand clapped over an apparent earache, who rather fiercely frowned out from the previous jacket flaps has yielded to a pert and, indeed, bonny lass who studies her potential reader with a relaxed acuteness and a fraction of a smile. The graceful chins-up pose is so strongly reminiscent of a college yearbook that I take this photograph to signify Mrs. Spark’s graduation to the title of master. Not that The Bachelors is her best novel. Her masterpiece, for the moment, remains Memento Mori; the clairvoyance is easier, the humor keener, the compassion less embarrassed. But The Bachelors does seem her second-best, and a distinct improvement over its predecessor, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, wherein her most obvious singularities—a swift complication of plot and a curt diffidence of style—reached, perhaps, the threshold of diminishing returns; the camera was
so speeded up that the flicker fatigued the eye. I have no such complaint about The Bachelors; it is packed but alive in every detail, and convinces me, at least, that Mrs. Spark is one of the few writers of the language on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine.

  The theme of The Bachelors is bachelordom considered as a territory of damnation. Its plot concerns the ripples stirred in a set of unmarried London men and women by the legal prosecution of a villainous, but genuine, spiritualist medium. Among the principals, I count ten bachelors and, on the female side, three maidens, two widows, and one divorcée. That in the space of a work little more than two hundred pages long all these persons are set in motion and made not merely distinct from one another but individually memorable illustrates Mrs. Spark’s remarkable gifts of draftsmanship. Her psychology is penetrating but unassuming; her descriptive strokes are few but they cut deep. Once in a while, she offers a sentence that indicates the power of elaboration she keeps in reserve:

  She was crying, and it satisfied him to see her cry and to think that he had brought about this drooping of her stately neck, the leaning of her head on her hand, the tremor of her jade earrings, the resigned dabbing of her eyes with her handkerchief, and the final offended sniff.

  In general, she writes the prose of a poet who has decided that prose is something else again. Her determinedly declarative sentences at moments feel, in their very tautness, close to exhaustion and exasperation. The sentences of Henry Green reach, with an eagerness that blurs grammar and punctuation out of them, to touch the surface of the thing described. Mrs. Spark’s simplicity is diagrammatic rather than sensual; her hard, unflecked prose seems laid on from a calculated distance that this admirer, sometimes, would be relieved to see reduced.

  But detachment is the genius of her fiction. We are lifted above her characters, and though they are reduced in size and cryptically foreshortened, they are all seen at once, and their busy interactions are as plain and pleasing as a solved puzzle. The use by a serious author of fun-house plots, full of trapdoors, abrupt apparitions, and smartly clicking secret panels, may strike American readers as incongruous. We are accustomed to honest autobiographical shapelessness. Ishmael and Huck Finn are alike adrift on vessels whose course they cannot control, through waters whose depths are revealed with a shudder. We remain somewhat aghast at a world that has never been tamed, by either a consecrated social order or an exhaustive natural theology. Our novels tend to be about education rather than products of it; they are soul-searching rather than worldly-wise. English fiction, for all the social and philosophical earthquakes since Chaucer, continues to aspire, with the serenity of a treatise, to a certain dispassionate elevation above the human scene. Hence its greater gaiety and ease of contrivance, its (on the whole) superior finish, and its flattering air of speaking to the reader who, himself presumably educated, may be spared the obvious. But in the last analysis human experience is mired in a solipsism to which America’s strenuous confessional exercises are faithful, and authors who rise above the accidents of autobiography are at the mercy of the accidents of knowledgeability.

  Mrs. Spark knows a great deal. She knows how people act and talk. She has a surprising fund of specific information; her medical, legal, and otherwise technical terms are employed with an air of being authentic without having been “worked up.” How she gathered the fascinating material on séances in modern London, I can’t imagine. She knows her London as Defoe knew his and Dickens his. She ranges with aplomb through all varieties of social modes, from teashop waitresses to convolutely neurotic intellectuals; she knows how epileptics feel as the fit approaches, what women say when they put on lawyers’ wigs (they say, “The quality of mercy is not strained”), how the London underworld does its drab business, how a would-be murderer can rationalize his crime into a vision of tenderness. Jane Austen, that angel, never trod into a scene where men were talking without a lady present; The Bachelors consists almost entirely of such conversations, and though an Englishman might detect more false notes than I, there seem uncannily few. With maximum terseness, ten bachelors are given a spectrum of motives for their lonely state; not even the shades of homosexuality, from shadowy latency to painted blatancy, are safe from Mrs. Spark’s remorseless insight. She seems able to derive artistic nourishment from the homogenized sophistication of the urban intelligentsia. One surmises that her sombre tapestry of “London, the great city of bachelors,” is woven from the conversational lint of parties and casual meetings.

  Since Hawthorne praised Trollope’s novels as “solid, substantial … as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case,” American writers have coveted the assurance that enables their British counterparts to build persuasively and at length upon the overheard, the glimpsed, and the guessed. When, however, like Henry James, they boldly attempt to appropriate to themselves this ability, strange things result; James’ novels, for all their lovely furniture, remain pilgrim’s progresses whose substance thins gaseously beyond the edges of the moral issue. There is intrinsic in the novel of knowledgeability a crisis that no refinement of form can avoid: How does all this information add up? The crisis is not acute if the author believes that life adds up to nothing. But Mrs. Spark surely does not believe this. She writes as a Roman Catholic—very much so. Catholic converts dot her casts of characters, and theological questions nag on all sides. Yet the effect of all this evident concern is to form a shell of hints around a hollow center; our sense of Mrs. Spark, for all she tells, not telling all she knows, becomes unnerving. Her God seems neither the dreadful deus absconditus of Pascal and Greene nor the sunny lux mundi who illumines the broad optimism of Aquinas and Chesterton. As in a photograph of a solar eclipse, a corona of heresy and anxiety surrounds a perfectly black, blank disc. To be fair, this probably is, through Mrs. Spark’s eyes, an accurate photograph. Then why does she bother to shock our materialist credulity with so much casual, trivial supernaturalism? In this book Patrick Seton indubitably does make contact with the dead; in Memento Mori it apparently really is Death itself on the telephone; in The Ballad of Peckham Rye Dougal Douglas may or may not be a devil; in The Comforters the heroine hears the author’s typewriter clacking as it writes the book. In one short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” Mrs. Spark entirely drops the reins on her otherworldliness. A heavenly seraph inexplicably interrupts the performance of an African Christmas pageant, and the marvel is described in an intense flight of what I can only call comic mysticism:

  This was a living body. The most noticeable thing was its constancy; it seemed not to conform to the law of perspective, but remained the same size when I approached as when I withdrew. And altogether unlike other forms of life, it had a completed look. No part was undergoing a process; the outline lacked the signs of confusion and ferment which are commonly the signs of living things, and this was also the principle of its beauty. The eyes took up nearly the whole of the head, extending far over the cheekbones. From the back of the head came two muscular wings which from time to time folded themselves over the eyes, making a draught of scorching air. There was hardly any neck. Another pair of wings, tough and supple, spread from below the shoulders, and a third pair extended from the calves of the legs, appearing to sustain the body. The feet looked too fragile to bear up such a concentrated degree of being.

  This is gorgeous medieval illumination, but the text it adorns remains dreary and unimpressed. A little later, this astonishing creature is prosaically observed skimming along the highway “at about seventy miles an hour.” Perhaps this is the way it would be. The spiritual fatigue of the West has proceeded so far that the distinction between reality and unreality is no longer one to which much passion can attach. Miracles are now and again reported in the middle pages of newspapers, and no one bothers to disprove them.

  Mrs. Spark, following Firbank and Waugh, carries on that traditional bemusement with which English
converts to Catholicism seem to regard the church of their choice. A character in her first novel remarks that “the True Church was awful, though unfortunately, one couldn’t deny, true.” Our impression is less that the Church has an overpowering case than that the world is too flimsy and foolish to offer much resistance to the leap of faith. Nor is it very heartily suggested that being a Christian improves or comforts one; Mrs. Spark’s Catholic characters differ from the others only in having the articles of an ancient creed built into their grids of reflexes, predispositions, and quirks. The possibility of redemption hovers over Sparkland rather bleakly. The people have neither much body nor much soul; they are bundles of nerves. The unimpeachable triumph of Memento Mori may spring from the fact that old people actually have, by and large, shrivelled to such neural skeletons, which twitch uninhibited by the claims of flesh, sense, or the future. But her young people seem thin; perhaps, more materially realized, they would repel the incursions of her impudent witchcraft. I do not mean to complain; it is just the metaphysical ambiance, vaguely earnest and wryly grim, that gives Mrs. Spark’s fiction its final fillip of interest. Her books narrow, through the lucid complications of incident, toward a culminating focus, in a sentence or two, of virtually total obscurity. In The Bachelors, the sentences are:

  It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others beside ourselves, he thought, who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.

  Thus Mrs. Spark adds it all up; and such irrational numbers, which can never be carried to their final terms, perhaps do compose the true sum. If I, for my part, resist consignment to the ranks of demons, it is because a convincing depiction of evil needs somewhere in it a glimmer of the good. This Mrs. Spark does not provide; her moral cosmos is limited by a certain personal impatience. But her sharp invention and austere style have in them something of Dante, and there are signs in The Bachelors that she is preparing to leave the sulphuric and antic scene she has mastered for the more familiar terraces of purgatory.