Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  BETWEEN A WEDDING AND A FUNERAL

  THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS, by Muriel Spark. 176 pp. Knopf, 1963.

  The fiction of Muriel Spark, which burst upon English literature as something supernaturally impersonal and coolly fantastic, has taken a turn toward autobiography and history. Her last novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, concerned the female students of an inwardly Fascistic Scots schoolmarm in the middle nineteen-thirties—the era when Mrs. Spark herself was a schoolgirl in Edinburgh. Her new novel, The Girls of Slender Means, again concerns a group of young women, this time ten years older and resident, like the authoress herself, in London in 1945. The historical and physical context is firmly set in the first, characteristically beautiful paragraph:

  Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye.

  Those familiar with Mrs. Spark’s severe economy of method will not be surprised to know that, at the unspecified destination the reader reaches on page 176 of this short novel, unusual demands are made on the mind’s eye, and almost every phrase in these first sentences can be seen in retrospect as an omen.

  “Ominous,” indeed, is the adjective at the heart of Mrs. Spark’s witchcraft, though she rarely deigns to use it. The undercurrents of destruction, cruelty, madness, and—ever more insistently—sexual repression are allowed to run unspoken, welling up here and there, as they do in life, with an unexpectedness that would be comic if we could laugh. An unfettered laugh implies release, however fleeting, from reality, and Mrs. Spark, for all her surface prankishness and verbal shrugging, never quite relinquishes her claim that the farcical world of her portrayal is the real world, contingent on an actual doom. The catastrophe that climaxes The Girls of Slender Means is all the more vivid and believable for being rather casually rendered.

  I will refrain from revealing the catastrophe. Though the lax manners that currently obtain in book reviews condone plot-blabbing, the discourtesy seems double in the case of a writer whose plots are so pure. There is little in Mrs. Spark’s books that is not plot. Virtually fanatic is her adherence to Chekhov’s dictum that a gun mentioned on the first page must be discharged by the last. But she is less interested in the shot than in the subtler action of the recoil. Her plots are as luxuriant and mysterious as her style is spare and clear; her deliberate clarity, like Kafka’s, ironically underlines the mysteriousness of what is being said. She is mysterious as both Agatha Christie and Isak Dinesen are mysterious; like the former, she is utterly at home in the many-roomed mansion of English society, and, like the latter, she has nourished her vision on the inhuman landscape of Africa. Her people suggest tropical flora and fauna in their grotesque specialization; like giraffes and flower-imitating insects, they have no second thoughts. The palpable darkness that lurks behind her social friezes, truncating a figure here and swallowing one whole there, is an African darkness—that is, the darkness of what is not known in the universe; this merges with the social darkness, what is not known in people, the darkness wherein murders are planned, legacies coveted, and love affairs and religious conversions hatched. Like detective stories, her novels pose puzzles temporarily; like parables, they pose puzzles finally.

  In general, The Girls of Slender Means is about being young and female and poor in London in 1945, that supremely eventful year when the Hitlerian holocaust ended and the Balance of Terror began. In England, Churchill was defeated by Labour, and in London undetonated bombs sometimes tardily exploded in the rubble. On V-E Day, and again on V-J Day, the Royal Family, “four small straight digits,” punctually appeared upon the floodlit balcony of Buckingham Palace every half hour and dutifully waved to the monstrous crowd below, whose “huge organic murmur” was “different from anything like the voice of animate matter but rather more a cataract or a geological disturbance”—“something,” as one character observes, “between a wedding and a funeral on a world scale.” In this historical hesitation between a wedding and a funeral, amid the precarious ruins of London, live and thrive the girls of the May of Teck Club, a tall brick house in Kensington devoted, since “some remote and innocent Edwardian date,” to “the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.”

  As they realized themselves in varying degrees, few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.

  The innocent savagery of youth would appear to be the theme; the girls “were not greatly given to scruples and consideration for others, by virtue of their unblighted spirits.” The loveliest of these unblighted spirits, Selina Redwood (“Selina’s long unsurpassable legs arranged themselves diagonally from the deep chair where she lolled in the distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to loll”), undertakes an affair with a young anarchist, Nicholas Farringdon: “In the meantime she looked at Nicholas … and thought she could use him.” Nicholas, who eventually will die as a Christian martyr in Haiti, delightedly agrees to be used, while keeping his spiritual eye on Joanna Childe, “large, with light shiny hair, blue eyes and deep-pink cheeks.” Joanna, a minister’s daughter, having loved a curate in vain, has “decided to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven,” and, rather than defile her first love by falling in love again, has declined to respond to another curate, a clerical gallant who loves her and who is immortalized in a sentence:

  His wide mouth suggested to Joanna generosity and humour, that type of generosity and humour special to the bishop sprouting within him.

  Having denied herself this vegetable treat, Joanna diverts her sexual energy into elocution lessons, which involve the declamation aloud of much anthology poetry, skillfully chosen by Mrs. Spark to give her dormitory halls a weird and ominous clangor.

  The triangle of Selina, Nicholas, and Joanna is the book’s center, around which Mrs. Spark circumscribes other designs, using as her drawing implement one Jane Wright, a plump girl of slender means connected with “the world of books” and probably, like Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the writer’s modestly disguised stand-in. The rest is plot. The girls—a dozen or so are named—do and say this and that, often hilariously: Dorothy Markham, who talks like a debutante, opens Jane’s door and announces, “Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding.” Naked and slippery with rationed soap, the girls test their slenderness against a tiny bathroom window, seven inches by fourteen, which leads onto a roof whose uses are various. In the end, this window becomes a vital escape hatch, and the degrees of slenderness—But here I am, at the catastrophe again. Read the book in confidence that there is one, and in confidence that Mrs. Spark’s darkling imagination, playing across the concrete details of a remembered historical moment, is as phosphorescent as ever.

  HOW HOW IT IS WAS

  HOW IT IS, by Samuel Beckett, translated from the French by the author. 147 pp. Grove Press, 1964.

  how it is I quote and unquote by Samuel Beckett published by Grove Press translated from the French by the author Samuel Beckett

  in French how it is is comment c’est which is a pun id est commencez which means begin in English no pun simply how it is otherwise not much probably lost in translation

  begin beginning not so easy book is written how it is I quote
unquote in words like this unpunctuated clumps of words with spaces white between the I guess you’d call them paragraphs I write it as I read it

  word clumps no punctuation commas no periods colons no semi colons none of them ampersands and asterisks or even arse yes arsterisks not one but now and then in caps I said in ARE YOU LISTENING capitals to make it quite clear CAPITALS and there it is how how it is is written technically considered

  aesthetically considered

  something wrong here

  aesthetically considered quote how it is unquote can hardly be considered as it is deliberately antiaesthetic like graphic art of Dubuffet like plastic art of Giacometti whose figures cosmic vastness whittles to such a painful smallness style if style it is conveys effect of panting more or less for hero who is crawling face down in the mud and dragging sack of jute containing cans of food also something incantatory also makes of language something viscous which images push through with effort awful effort blue sky there was one blue did you see it sky

  plot faceless nameless hero crawling through the mud as mentioned dragging sack of cans as mentioned can opener not mentioned there is one nameless hero murmuring in the mud and dark alone

  when something other in the dark and mud called Pim the name is PIM comes lies beside or under difficult to gather precisely which and suffers being stabbed in many places inducing speech or yells when stabbed with the can opener just mentioned

  then departs or fades or sinks or was entirely imagined by hero faceless nameless who retrospectively divides his crawl through mud into three stages before Pim with Pim after Pim and that is plot of how it is

  delightfully retold and thank you

  welcome surely clearly hero faceless voice is us mankind you me brother and mud the earth or hell or both and sack the body dragged along and Pim is Christ name in Greek begins chi rho iota looks XPI take away X add M which is Sam SAM Beckett’s favorite letter and you have PIM whose name is also BOM to come the second coming of PIM is BOM mob spelled arsyversy also bomb also KRIM a scribe a tribe of scribes to follow PIM must be the Christian church apostles popes so that before Pim with Pim after Pim is human history how it is demarcated Christianly surely not sure not clear you’re welcome

  hero everyman not only Christianly but biologically for as with elementary organisms mouth and cloaca are confused and tongue and penis mud and merde and words the same somehow the panting wriggling struggle evokes the fish who out of water gasped to breathe evolving manwards incarnation felt as animal encounter analogy a worm encounters a pebble nibbles then must crawl around it

  Pim and hero cruelly copulate with graphic inexpertness a blasphemous analogy with buggery that Beckett LOUDLY underlines also analogy with any love affair I quote there wherewith to beguile a moment of this vast season end of quote

  the period after Pim full of numbers analogy with modern science the empty universe proliferates with the explicit mathematicism in which the author so boringly delights OKAY

  attempt to take the novel into bowels beneath society and circumstance COMMENDABLE obstinacy in producing novels each one of which is smaller than the one before ADMIRABLE with less furniture VERY WORTHY kind of fierce poetry YOU BET out of rancid Platonism WHY NOT but BUT

  something wrong here

  something undergraduate inert a neoclassicism in which one’s early works are taken as the classics a laziness in which young urgencies become old rhetoric hermetic avantgardism unviolated by the outer word the world beyond the skin except the customary almost automatic glimpse of rural maybe Irish bliss which bothers Beckett like a mote of blue sky in his eye

  this proud priest perfecting his forlorn ritual

  the plays OKAY very the stage an altar anyway the radio plays EVEN BETTER the ear rebuilds the actors foist existence on the words I remember the wonderful lavender sandals of the messenger boy in a certain production of Godot and his mystical haircut BUT

  in how it is where Joyce and Kafka intersect one misses now the one and now the other compare The Burrow compare Nighttown compare The Penal Colony and deplore the relative thinness the sterile stridency question is the novel no longer a fit vessel for Beckett’s noble sorrow and quote comedy of incapacity unquote Hugh Kenner

  unanswered but good the end of review the END of meditating upon this mud and subprimate sadism NO MORE no more thinking upon it few books have I read I will not reread sooner SORRY but that is how it is

  GRANDMASTER NABOKOV

  THE DEFENSE, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. 256 pp. Putnam, 1964.

  One hesitates to call him an “American writer”; the phrase fetches to mind Norman Mailer and James Jones and other homegrown cabbages loyally mistaken for roses. Say, rather, that Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship, the only writer, with the possible exception of the long-silent Thornton Wilder, whose books, considered as a whole, give the happy impression of an oeuvre, of a continuous task carried forward variously, of a solid personality, of a plenitude of gifts exploited knowingly. His works are an edifice whose every corner rewards inspection. Each book, including the super-slim Poems and the uproariously pedantic and copious commentaries to his translation of Eugene Onegin, yields delight and presents to the aesthetic sense the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant thing. His sentences are beautiful out of context and doubly beautiful in it. He writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically. In the intensity of its intelligence and reflective joy, his fiction is unique in this decade and scarcely precedented in American literature. Melville and James do not, oddly, offer themselves for comparison. Yet our literature, that scraggly association of hermits, cranks, and exiles, is strange enough to include this arrogant immigrant; as an expatriate Nabokov is squarely in the native tradition.

  Very curiously, his oeuvre is growing at both ends. At one end, the end pointed toward the future, are the works composed in English, beginning with the gentlest of his novels, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and terminating, for the time being, in his—the word must be—monumental translation of Onegin, a physically gorgeous, sumptuously erudite gift from one language to another; it is pleasant to think of Nabokov laboring in the libraries of his adopted land, the libraries fondly described in Pnin, laboring with Janus-faced patriotism on the filigreed guy-wires and piled buttresses of this bridge whereby the genius of Pushkin is to cross after him into America. The translation itself, so laconic compared to the footnotes, with its breathtaking gaps, pages long, of omitted stanzas whose lines are eerily numbered as if they were there, ranks with Horace Gregory’s Catullus and Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad as superb, quirky, and definitive: a permanent contribution to the demi-art of “Englishing” and a final refutation, let’s hope, of the fallacy of equivalent rhyme. In retrospect, Nabokov’s more recent novels—obviously Pale Fire but there are also Humbert Humbert’s mysterious “scholarly exertions” on a “manual of French literature for English-speaking students”—transparently reveal glimpses of the Pushkinian travail begun in 1950.

  At the other end (an end, as in earthworms, not immediately distinguishable), Nabokov’s oeuvre is growing backwards, into the past, as English versions appear of those novels he wrote in Russian, for a post-Revolutionary émigré audience concentrated in Paris and Berlin, during his twenty years of European residence (1919–40), under the pen name of “V. Sirin.” The Defense, originally Zashchita Luzhina, is the latest of these to be translated.* In the chronology of his eight Russian novels, The Luzhin Defense (this literal title was used by The New Yorker and seems better, in clearly suggesting a chess ploy, though the ghosts of “illusion” and “losin’ ” fluttering around the proper name perhaps were worth exorcising) comes third, after two untranslated ones and just before Laughter in the Dark. It is thus the earliest Nabokov work now available in English. An author’s foreword states that it was written in 1929—that is, whe
n Nabokov was thirty, which is the age of Luzhin, an ex-chess prodigy and international grandmaster. Like his hero, the author seems older; few Americans so young could write a novel wherein the autobiographical elements are so cunningly rearranged and transmuted by a fictional design, and the emotional content is so obedient to such cruelly ingenious commands, and the characterization shows so little of indignation or the shock of discovery. On this last point, it needs to be said—so much has been pointlessly said about Nabokov’s “virtuosity,” as if he is a verbal magician working with stuffed rabbits and hats nobody could wear—that Nabokov’s characters live. They “read” as art students say; their frames are loaded with bright color and twisted to fit abstract schemes but remain anatomically credible. The humanity that has come within Nabokov’s rather narrow field of vision has been illuminated by a guarded but genuine compassion. Two characters occur to me, randomly and vividly: Charlotte Haze of Lolita, with her blatant bourgeois Bohemianism, her cigarettes, her Mexican doodads, her touchingly clumsy sexuality, her utterly savage and believable war with her daughter; and Albinus Kretschmar of Laughter in the Dark, with his doll-like dignity, his bestial softness, his hobbies, his family feelings, his abject romanticism, his quaint competence. An American housewife and a German businessman, both observed, certainly, from well on the outside, yet animated from well within. How much more, then, can Nabokov do with characters who are Russian, and whose concerns circle close to his own aloof passions!