The Friday Book

by John Barth

  In short, Roderick Random is a novel of nonsignificant surfaces—which is not to say it’s a superficial, insignificant novel, any more than the age that produced it, the age that invented the English novel, was superficial or insignificant.

  And while you’re not looking for implicit meanings, don’t look for niceties of structure, either. There is no structure to Roderick Random beyond the most official sort of long-range suspense, dutifully laid on. We know very well, and could hardly care less, that Roderick will wind up with Narcissa, who in any case doesn’t enter the tale until more than halfway through. As to the how of his getting her—the long-lost wealthy parent who turns up like Daddy Warbucks in the nick of time—perhaps the less said about that clanking device the better. The particular nature and order of Roderick’s encounters, unlike those of Candide or Don Quixote, are without consistent point, incremental meaning, “inevitability,” relevance to character, or cumulative force; they are—precisely—random, and could lightly be extended, abridged, or rearranged without much loss of effect. Moreover, Smollett never delays us with complexities (or beauties) of language, nor with very subtle insight into character, nor with subtle paradox, subtle ambivalence, subtle analysis, or subtle wit. There is no subtlety in the man, any more than there is breadth of vision, breathtaking artistry, masterful psychology, or dazzling invention. To the moral and metaphysical limitations of the eighteenth century he adds the artistic limitations of the picaresque mode at its most undisciplined, and flavors the mixture with various shortcomings of his own.

  Thus Roderick’s indignation at cruelty, hypocrisy, affectation, ingratitude, and dishonesty, for example, is unfailingly acute when he is their victim; otherwise it’s not to be counted on, despite the pious advertisement of the Preface, for he is himself capable of most of these vices—though he seldom approves of them, even while enjoying them. We see him at one moment stirred to compassion for hapless prostitutes, whose wretched lot is described by his fellow-gonorrhetic Miss Williams; at another his spirits are “so much elevated, that nothing [will] serve [him] but a wench,” and he looks on unmoved while the drunken Bragwell kicks “half a dozen hungry whores” in Moll King’s coffeehouse, just for the hell of it. He can be charitable to those who have injured him, if fortune has well punished them already—thus he cures Miss Williams of her venereal infection and forwards ten pistoles to Mackshane in prison—but more typically he’ll hold a grudge for sixty chapters, and as he himself cheerfully admits, he’s not above maltreating even the faithful Strap: “In spite of all the obligations I owed to this poor honest fellow, ingratitude is so natural to the heart of man, that I began to be tired of his acquaintance…”† He has no more interest in religion as such than does the Capuchin cocksman Balthazar, but is glibly anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. His service on Uncle Tom Bowling’s slave ship he finds merely “disagreeable”—and not on moral grounds at that, but because the Negroes have the bad grace to die in large numbers “of an epidemic fever, not unlike the jail distemper,” during their six weeks in the hold. The novel’s humor is mainly of the bedroom-and-chamberpot variety, running especially to more or less sadistic and unimaginative practical jokes. Money and sex Roderick values—enough at least to fawn, bribe, intrigue, smuggle, seduce, deceive, dissemble, and defraud to have them—but what he really gets his kicks from is revenge. To break a sycophantic tutor’s incisors and flog the bare buttocks of a tyrant schoolmaster give him at least as much satisfaction as his learning itself ever does (and Roderick’s, like Smollett’s, is not inconsiderable); one doubts, moreover, that his final good fortune would have been complete without the comeuppance of his old antagonists. Not enough that the “female cousins” be sent away envious, empty-handed, and muttering in the last chapter: Smollett must marry one to a pauper and sire a footman’s bastard on the other to perfect their ignominy.

  Now, peripeteia in the form of sheer revenge is as old as the narrative imagination; Routing the Pretenders is the bloody dénouement-work of Odysseus, Perseus, Aeneas, Watu Gunung, and a hundred other knockabout heroes. And prideful ire is a standard mainspring of adventure: the anger of Poseidon, the anger of Juno. But seldom does the wrath of the protagonist himself link episode to episode, and in the temperament of no other heroes that I know of does pure vindictiveness play quite so large a role as in Smollett’s. Heart, head, and hormones all have their influence on Roderick’s behavior, but his special organ is the spleen. I form cabals against the pedant —demolish the teeth of [a] tutor—form a project of revenge —concert a scheme of revenge —conceive a mortal hatred —revenge myself on my rival —In order to be revenged, learn the science of defence —resent their disdain —long to be revenged on Melinda —resolve to revenge myself on Strutwell —thus run the headings, chapter after chapter. What hunger is to Lazarillo de Tormes and lust to Don Juan Tenorio, resentment is to Roderick Random: more than a drive; almost an organizing principle. Odysseus wants to get home; Jason, to get the Fleece; Roderick, to get even.

  In this respect as in some others the creature is the image of his maker, a pugnacious and unforgiving soul in whose disposition, as in Roderick’s, “pride and resentment… were two chief ingredients…” Smollett’s father, like “Don Rodrigo,” married against his father’s will, and while old Sir James Smollett stopped short of disowning young Archibald, he limited his bounty to the tenancy of Dalquhurn, the little farm where Tobias was born and where Archibald died two years after siring him. Biographers remind us that there’s no factual evidence either to support or to refute the common assumption that Smollett’s childhood was as bitter as Roderick’s; the ferocious tone of those first five chapters rings awfully true, though, and Smollett hadn’t that gift of Hamlet’s player, so useful to any fictionist, “in a dream of passion, [to] force his soul… to his own conceit…” As Lewis Melville remarks, “He could not invent: he could only exaggerate.” We do know that the hard-luck story of Mr. Melopoyn, that tedious, ill-placed diversion near the end of Roderick Random, reflects young Tobias’s experience with his first literary effort, a play called The Regicide —more a catastrophe than a tragedy—as well as his own opinion of its merits and his imputation of stupidity or malice to any who disagreed. He lampooned and caricatured its critics at every opportunity, and as soon as he had funds enough—from Roderick Random —published The Regicide at his own expense, with a spiteful preface against its detractors.‡

  The incident is typical: Excepting possibly his youthful stint in the Royal Navy (of which the nautical portion of Roderick Random may be taken as a fair exaggeration) and the death at fifteen of his poetry-writing daughter Elizabeth, whom he adored, the external events of Smollett’s life seem not arduous enough to account for his sustained outrage. Sentimental biographers and fellow novelists like Disraeli and Walter Scott are inclined to overstate—as doubtless Smollett himself did—his vicissitudes and adversities, perhaps to justify his native bad temper; they are inclined to picture him as the impoverished artist, neglected by the public, exploited by the publishers, exhausted by obligatory hackwork, “perishing in a foreign land,” and all that. This is mostly nonsense, unless Scott’s own golden career is used as the standard; more artists than not have suffered greater hardship than Smollett ever did. Recognition as an author came early to him, if not early enough, and his productivity, while certainly of uneven excellence, was unimpaired to the year of his death. Both his medical practice (in Downing Street, Bath, and Chelsea) and his editorial ventures (with the Critical Review and The Briton) were for the most part moderately successful; his potboiling Travels, History of England, Compendium of Voyages, translations, and the rest, are no longer read, but seem after all to have boiled a pot which would have simmered even without them. His Creole wife, Anne Lascelles, evidently shared Narcissa’s “divinity”: the affectionate docility, the substantial dowry, the “angelic charms” above all. Not every man’s cup of tea, maybe, but, as some critic has observed, it is a type that many novelists are inclined to marry, even wi
thout the Jamaican estate, and one bets they have their reasons. Smollett, we’re told, was now and then bored with her, but affectionate and not unfaithful; and Anne, who had a great deal more to put up with than he did, stuck with him until his death and honored his memory until hers: better than par for the course, I’d say. His health, if less than robust, rarely cramped his style or otherwise much burdened him until his last year, when it gave out altogether. Most interesting, perhaps, his esteem for himself and his work never flagged; his critics remained invariably fools and knaves, and to anguish of the spirit he was a stranger. Finally, if he died in Italy it was because, always an ardent traveler, he happened to be living there at the time, and he had stopped there because he liked the place, not because of any enforced or voluntary exile. There are lots of worse places than Tuscany to die in. Much of what misfortune he did suffer was directly or indirectly his own doing, not that that ever made anything easier to take; the perennial chip on his shoulder led him into lawsuits, feuds, and fisticuffs—in one case actually into jail, for calling Vice Admiral Charles Knowles in effect and in print an ignorant, irresolute liar. Yet whether the conviction of libel was just or not, even his three months in the Kings Bench prison, as Saintsbury comments, “in the case of persons who could pay, merely meant confinement to a rather expensive and inconvenient lodging, with no other hardship or interference with business or pleasure.” Oliver Goldsmith, among other luminaries, dropped in to pay his respects, and John Newbery offered the prisoner the editorship of The British Magazine. Some season in hell!

  So if, as his physician in Livorno attests, Smollett died “without trying to help himself… suffering from the outrages of human life, almost a misanthrope,” it wasn’t that his own life was particularly misfortunate. He’d be a less interesting fellow if it were. The doctor’s diagnosis is good enough: “Was of a very choleric disposition,” he notes farther on, “but reflective.” It was the outrages of human life that Smollett’s “passionate and fiery temperament” could not reflect upon without resentment—outrages of which his own ordinary hardships were only, so to speak, illustrations—and this fact elevates the mood of his work beyond irascible self-pity or mere bad temper to a level of general pertinence. For I think that while Smollett’s epical resentment may be a less profound reaction to the human condition than Sophoclean pity-and-terror, say, and less inspiring than Dostoevskian compassion, it is as legitimate as either. “To what end was this world formed?” Candide inquires; as a translator of Voltaire, Smollett surely knew and concurred with Martin’s reply: “To infuriate us.” That being as likely a premise as another, to demolish your infuriator’s teeth may be as reasonable (and therapeutic!) a mode of coping as to cultivate your garden, not to mention turning your other cheek to the blackguard. However true it may be, in our time at least, that we must love our fellow man or perish, that fact in itself doesn’t make the wretch a bit more lovable; indeed, one failing of the Love-boys in our current literature is that they’re inclined to understand the phrase Love or perish as an ultimatum instead of a fair statement of alternatives. If Smollett chose to perish, he’s not the first or greatest man who ever did. If he found life mainly exasperating even when comfortable, and his neighbor generally tiresome even when pacific, we’re not likely to hug him for telling us so, or give him the Nobel Prize, but we might be impressed by his antisentimental candor. In fact, if one has had a bellyful of Erich Fromm and J. D. Salinger, one may find Roderick Random’s orneriness downright bracing, like the Rhine-wine cordial Smollett ordered on his deathbed and never got to drink.

  That’s one good reason for keeping Roderick Random in print: as a healthy, hard-nosed counteragent to the cult of love. A librarian acquaintance of mine grimaced when he saw the novel under my arm and allowed as how he’d never quite cottoned to Smollett: “All that cruelty! No warmth at all!” But how invigorating the cold Scotch air is in those opening pages, the exchange between Roderick’s father and grandfather—how mean and quick and counter to every sentimental expectation! How satisfying too (and more than justified, in this case) Roderick’s youthful ferocity, his settling of scores with bully and pedant. No wonder young David Copperfield, suffering the tyranny of the Murdstones, was able “[to sustain his] own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch”: Smollett surely helped him not only by “[keeping] alive [his] fancy, and [his] hope of something beyond that place and time,” but also by providing for his vicarious relief a splendid paradigm of revenge. If only the tormentors of all our tender years had had such comeuppance at our hands!

  And what refreshment, for an age when self-knowledge seems always bad news and self-despisal perforce a staple of our fiction, to holiday briefly in a world free from the curse of insight: where the wickedness lies for a change in all those other rascals instead of in oneself (hadn’t we suspected it all along, but dared not say so?), and the heads of malefactors get knocked instead of examined; where no one (except ourselves the hero) has to be loved unless he pleases us; where the hero regards himself and is by others regarded—unabashedly, unironically, and unselfconsciously—as the devil of a good chap, “some [of whose] situations… had been low, but none of them infamous… the crime not of [him], but of [his] fortune,” and who at the end wholeheartedly rejoices in a shower of blessings which he has done nothing whatever to deserve, except to be heedlessly, selfishly, exuberantly himself. The book is a tonic, a psychic energizer, and we whose self-esteem is suffering from overmuch awareness and responsibility may excuse its deficiencies as one puts up with the side-effects of amphetamine.

  There are of course literary as well as therapeutic rewards for the reader of Roderick Random: quite a few, above and beyond whatever “picture-of-an-age” interest it might have, or importance to university courses in the history of the novel.§ Its merits are, like Roderick’s own, for the most part the virtues of its vices: the energy, robustness, and indomitable extroversion which are the blessings of unsubtlety and insensitivity; the guileless candor and directness associated with artlessness, for better as well as worse—in a word, the animal, heathen innocence which graces the scapegrace even when he’s bribing or seducing, and which isn’t to be confused with either optimism or naïveté. What’s more, deep waters as often run still as conversely, and at least some of what Smollett lacks in depth he gains in bedazzling speed: not the economical, strategic velocity of Candide, but the tumbling, ad libitum exuberance of a Mack Sennett comedy. It’s inconsistent (Mr. Melopoyn’s two-chapter complaint and some of the tiresome hanky-panky at Bath are barely sufferable), and it’s not always effective (witness the blurred introduction of Miss Williams in the last sentences of Chapter XX—an inept, overhasty plant for her reappearance two chapters later), but when it goes it’s a dizzy ride, in the hands of a tough-minded, thin-skinned, ebullient twenty-six-year-old with an uncommon store of experience and energy.

  The ride is more exciting for the amplitude and pitch of its ups and downs. Smollett’s criticism of Gil Blas for too-quick transitions of fortune is as inappropriate as is the rest of that silly Preface; what we prize in a roller coaster is not plausibility but precipitateness. And it is the more diverting for the splendid variety of the passing scene. Smollett may lack breadth of vision, but width he has aplenty, in all directions, more than Richardson and Fielding combined. Sailors, soldiers, fine gentlemen and ladies, whores, homosexuals, cardsharpers, fortune hunters, tradesmen of all description, clerics, fops, scholars, lunatics, highwaymen, peasants, and poets both male and female—they crowd a stage that extends from Glasgow to Guinea, from Paris to Paraguay, and among themselves perpetrate battles, debaucheries, swindles, shanghais, duels, seductions, rescues, pranks, poems, shipwrecks, heroisms, murders, and marriages. They wail and guffaw, curse and sing, make love and foul their breeches: In short, they live, at a clip and with a brute joie de vivre that our modern spirits can scarcely comprehend. Having allowed as much as possible for exaggeration, we are still astonished, appalled, at the way they live—and maybe
a little envious, even if we wouldn’t swap our anxious comfort… for the world. “Don Rodrigo” summed up the esprit of the action when, after hearing his son’s hard history, he “blessed God for the adversity [Roderick] had undergone, which… enlarged the understanding, improved the heart, steeled the constitution, and qualified a young man for all the duties and enjoyments of life, much better than any education which affluence could bestow.” For the enjoyments as well as the duties: That’s the pregnant article in this manifesto of the literature of hard knocks.