After she propositions him (“Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead, it hampers my walking”), the centaur turns back into Caldwell and returns to his classroom, where the kids throw BBs at him. Three days later, Caldwell-Chiron dies and becomes a constellation right up there with Uranus. The book ends with a quotation in classical Greek.
To find out what it all meant, I consulted another lit. crit. monograph. This is what Joyce Markle said: “Thus, the overt use of myth in this manner allows Updike to control the extent and direction of his ambiguity.”
Isn’t “controlled ambiguity” like “Lebanese government” or “Mexican economy”? I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.
Florence
Dear Florence:
Last night at a literary cocktail party I met an Updike scholar who has a theory you might find useful. He said: “Unlike Hemingway and Mailer, Updike doesn’t transpose the military experience to the monads of his imaginary cosmos.”
I didn’t ask him what it meant because I was afraid he might tell me, but it has something to do with the fact that Updike was never in the service. I hope this will inspire you.
Mel
Dear Mel:
All right, you parseheads, I wanna see some sensitivity around here. You came here to Camp Jejune as full-blooded readers, but we’re gonna turn you into Sublimes!
I got somethin’ here I want you plot-suckin’ denouements to listen to. It’s from General John “Chesty” Updike’s novel A Month of Sundays: “Dear Tillich, that great amorous jellyfish, whose faith was a recession of beyonds with these two flecks in one or another pane: a sense of the world as ‘theonomous,’ and a sense of something ‘unconditional’ within the mind. Kant’s saving ledge pared finer than a fingernail.”
That oughta show you pudendas what happens when the Sublimes waft ashore and hit the imaginary cosmos. Chesty Updike refracts hell out of those monads and secures Fragmentary Hill quicker than you can say trompe l’oeil. That’s why the Sublime motto is Semper Vortex! Now get ur-anuses over to the monograph range on the double!
Florence
Dear Florence:
While thumbing through my Articles Due file, your Lear’s card reared up before me. In the suddenly opaque air a mantle of fear descended upon me, dappling my flanks with rivulets of sweat as I saw that Time’s winged Chevy is running out on the Updike piece.
Mel
Dear Mel:
Call me Ishkabibble.
I’m now reading Couples. It’s about ten couples in a suburb named Tarbox and they’re all searching. Twenty—count ’em—twenty dedicated seekers after Truth, saying things like “Maybe he is because I am, because we are” and “Death excites me. Death is being screwed by God.”
The theme is sex ‘n’ death: the thinking man’s jiggly. The protagonist is named Piet, which is Dutch for Pete. His problem, according to lit. crit. author Burchard, is his inability to separate agape from passion. He ought to watch Julia Child—she can do it with one hand.
Florence
Dear Florence:
The Lear’s lady called. She wants to know if you think deadlines are an illusion of reality.
Mel
Dear Mel:
I’m sorry to be so slow but I’ve been reading Rabbit Is Rich and all those references to damp-dark-dank secret places between women’s thighs got to me. I have come down with a mysterious bladder infection. The doctor said it’s tant pis.
I’ve also been busy around the house. Having read detailed descriptions of approximately six bushels of pubic hair, nameless forces drove me to go seeking and questing through my kitchen drawer to gather up all the Twisties I’ve saved and arrange them by color.
I found myself haunted by inexorable visions of all the motes, fragments, mists, films, filigrees, and blackish embryos of cumulus I’ve been reading about, so I cleaned and scrubbed like a Dutch goodwife. I even covered toothpicks with gauze to get the dirt out of those narrow places between Scylla and Charybdis. It took me four days, but now you could eat off my floor. My apartment is a shining city on a hill and I am a potted plant.
Can’t you imagine what Updike could do with Elvis Memorial Day? “The long underbelly of the line reared up with deathly life and a silt of caring fell from worshipper to worshipper as they filtered past the crotch-high statue of a hound dog made of roses. Teenage girls holding soaked yearning between their thighs turn the incipient blisters of their pouty lips toward the crypt as the air fills with the smell of between-breasts gummy with cheap powder … .”
Florence
Dear Florence:
The Lear’s lady called again. Can’t you please write something, anything? I persuaded her to extend the deadline for two weeks. Can you manage something of intrinsic significance? Please advise.
Dear Mel:
BERGER, BUT
BY FLORENCE KING
Berger stared at the bruise and dung colors of his office. Voices mossy-thick as a tree where it comes out of the grass scrabbled at him through a hollow blur. There was a boom box stuck on his shoulder. Some street kid had thrown it at him, and now it was embedded in his flesh, locked forever on a hard rock station, turning him into a dedicated seeker after truth who couldn’t hear himself seek.
He opened the drawer of his crotch-high file cabinet. The hang files on their tracks reminded him of claws on the guard-rails of transcendence suspended over a primordial pit. Withdrawing a letter, he took it to Father Xerox and pressed the print button. The technological monster transluced into life with a chuffling sound of dolorous vigor like children rollerskating in hell.
The events of Berger’s life arranged themselves gummily in his mind like the shoe polish caught in the drilled eyes of his wingtips. He saw himself as a baby, lying in his scabrous crib and playing with his toy contract while Flatus, that great bubbler, sent resounding fanfaronades into the damp, dark, dank depths of his diaper.
He was Berger, but he was someone else.
Suddenly he knows. His stomach slides and a wave of certainty scoops at his chest. He was Bergerion, condemned by Zeus to balance a lyre on his shoulder until Venus got her maidenhead back.
He was a prisoner in the thin-stretched shadows of earthly wilderness now, but someday he would be a constellation in the sky, right up there next to Your Anus.
Florence
Dear Florence:
The Lear’s lady said she knows exactly what she’s seeking after: your Updike piece. Please advise.
Mel
Dear Mel:
When Samuel Johnson was asked to comment on the plot of Cymbeline he refused, saying, “It is impossible to criticize unresisting imbecility.”
I am at brain-death’s door. I can’t finish any of Updike’s books. I keep putting one down and going on to another, thinking it’ll be better, but it never is. His last one, Roger’s Version, is about a divinity professor and a computer expert who team up to prove the existence of God. Part of it is written in computerese and part in medieval Latin. The lit. crit. crowd called it “a novel of ideas.” How can they tell?
For the past month I’ve been hoping that Lear’s would self-destruct so I wouldn’t have to read John Updike. Last week while deep-frying softshell crabs I got the oil too hot and the pan ignited. It was a Freudian slip—I was trying to burn the house down so I wouldn’t have to read John Updike.
I’d rather be a human mine sweeper in the Strait of Hormuz than read John Updike. I’d rather run away and join the ladies auxiliary of the French Foreign Legion than read John Updike. Tell the Lear’s lady I’m dead—it’s more or less true. I’ve been throwing up, grinding my teeth, and twisting a strand of hair like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit.
Florence
Dear Florence:
I’ve tried to call you several times but there was no answer. I’ve persuaded the Lear’s lady to accept a substitute for the Updike piece. Do you happen to have something suitable in the primordial depths of your screeching hang files? Please advise.
Mel Berger
William Morris Agency
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
Dear Mr. Berger:
You don’t know me, but I’m Florence King’s neighbor here in Virginia.
Now don’t you worry, everything’s all right. The good news is that Florence will be back home real soon. There’s nothing wrong with her mind, she was just a little run down.
The bad news is that she doesn’t have a “piece” (I don’t know what that means but she said you would), so while we were waiting for the men to come, she asked me to tell you to “send the Lear’s lady the letters.” I don’t know what that means either. I don’t know what any of this is all about, except that it has something to do with dikes. That’s not my cup of tea, but live and let live, I always say.
If you’re ever down this way, come see me.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Lou Carmichael Monroe
(Mrs. Stuart Madison Monroe III)
18
WOMEN’S LITTER
Once upon a time, female tractability melded exquisitely with the rules of literary structure to produce some of the most controlled prose in the English language.
Captives of that old devil “niceness,” women writers of the past paid close attention to critical admonitions because they sounded so much like the maxims of ladylike behavior that governed their lives. Horace’s “Remember always never to bringla tame in union with a savage thing” means don’t include a love theme in your murder mystery; but to the well-reared Victorian girl it also meant “Take a chaperon with you.”
Boileau’s “Polish, repolish, every color lay/sometimes add, but oftener take away” means cut, cut, cut until there’s not one unnecessary word left; but when woman’s place was in the home, it also suggested compliments like “You could eat off her floor.”
The result of this happy alliance was the goodwife sentence; a model of order and restraint, with every word subjected to the literary housekeeper’s acid test: “You could eat off her manuscript.” Classicism joined forces with the etiquette book and the scrub bucket to give us the shining rigor of Ethan Frome.
It’s all over now. Free at last to write “like women,” today’s goodwives are doing just that. In the last fifteen years or so, the woman’s novel has turned into the Amtrak of American literature; crashing through the gates at Aristotle, jumping the tracks at Horace, ignoring the flashing red lights at Boileau, and scooping up Alexander Pope in the cowcatcher. The rules are down and it’s every stylist for herself in this best of all Tupperware parties, where plot and characterization have been replaced by the kind of non-stop chatter that enabled the French Foreign Legion to meet its enlistment quota for a hundred and fifty years. In the unlikely event that future scholars will bother to give our era a cultural tag, it will be called the Age of Women’s Litter.
Everything that goes into a novel should advance either the plot or the characterization. Ruth Harris’s 1970 novel Decades contains a glaring example of an extraneous passage:
She bought French bikinis, chic terry beach robes, jeans for deep-sea fishing and white pants for freeport shopping, forty-dollar cotton tops to go with the pants, long dresses of voile for dinner and dancing and cashmere sweaters (they had been revived from the fifties) to throw over them. She bought new underwear and new nightgowns, sneakers and thong sandals (revived from the forties) for evening. She bought new luggage at T. Anthony, had her legs waxed at Arden’s and her hair put into condition at Don Lee’s. She ordered new makeup in darker shades to go with her suntan, après-sun moisturizing lotion and a portable hair dryer that worked on American and European current.
This is not creative writing, it’s a checklist for That Cosmo Girl and it belongs in an article called “What to Pack for Vacation.”
A much longer description of clothes appears in Gone With the Wind but it bows to Henry James’s dictum, “Dramatize, dramatize,” by advancing both plot and characterization through its subtle infusion of tension. Because the reader has not yet met Melanie, this passage holds our interest:
What dress would best set off her charms and make her most irresistible to Ashley? … . The rose organdie with the long pink sash was becoming, but she had worn it last summer when Melanie visited Twelve Oaks and she’d be sure to remember it. And might be catty enough to mention it. The black bombazine … made her look a trifle elderly … . It would never do to appear sedate and elderly before Melanie’s sweet youthfulness. The lavender-barred muslin … made her look like a schoolgirl. It would never do to appear schoolgirlish beside Melanie’s poised self. The green plaid taffeta was her favorite dress … . But there was unmistakably a grease spot on the basque. Of course, her brooch could be pinned over the spot, but perhaps Melanie had sharp eyes.
Another favorite area for pointless inventory is home decor. Alice Adams does it in Superior Women (1984).
They all live on the upper East Side; their rooms all are filled with family antiques, plus a few bold “contemporary” touches, here a Noguchi lamp, there an Eames chair. And everywhere a similar weight of wedding presents, the silver or crystal ashtrays, Paul Revere bowls, pewter cocktail shakers … . Hers is the most truly elegant apartment of them all; the graceful effect of her (real) Louis Seize chairs is not marred by anything clumsy, Jacobean. And she and Potter are the only couple to have a Robsjohn-Gibbings dining room table.
We learn nothing about Adam’s characters from their furniture. By contrast, Nancy Hale’s 1942 novel The Prodigal Women turns a description of a young society couple’s first apartment into a breathtaking description of a frigid woman:
It showed that the novels were wrong; that commonsense was right; that happy marriages were not made from great love. Great love, on the contrary, could not possibly be fitted into such a chic apartment as this; it would knock over all the little tables.
No longer chained to the stove but feeling perhaps that they ought to be, ostensibly liberated women novelists chain themselves to their typewriters and compose endless grocery lists without purpose as if they were in the grip of a guilty compulsion to fill up a page as women once filled up the stomachs of their loved ones: with food.
The cover price of The Women’s Room could have been reduced if only somebody had cleared the table. After their first four-legged frolic, Mira and Ben raid the icebox and put together:
… a feast of Jewish salami and feta cheese and hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and black bread and sweet butter and half-sour pickles and big black Greek olives and raw Spanish onions and beer, and trotted all of it back to bed with them and sat there gorging … .
We know what magazine would excerpt this and call it “Sexy Foods to Eat in Bed.” The sensual allusions conveyed by the eating scene in the movie Tom Jones do not work in print, but a few pages later Mira and Ben have at it again, this time with commas on the side:
They had guacamole, and Szechuan shrimp, and vegetable curries, and Greek lamb with artichokes and egg lemon sauce; they tried a variety of pastas, bab ganoush, hot and sour soup, sauerbraten, quiche, rabbit stew, and one special night, supremes de volaille avec champignons.
At least French keeps her listmaking well within the gourmet range. In Smart Women Judy Blume takes us to a fast food joint and force-feeds us one of the dreariest paragraphs ever penned:
Stuart ate a whole pizza by himself, with pepperoni and extra cheese. Margo, Michelle and Sara shared a large vegie supreme with whole wheat crust. Sara picked the onions and mushrooms off her slice and Michelle picked off the olives. Margo said, “Maybe vegie supreme was the wrong choice.”
Food has its uses to writers who understand the principles of a balanced literary diet. In her 1941 murder mystery Laura, Vera Caspary used it to characterize one of the hardest types to pin down in print: the heterosexual but overcivilized epicene male known in the South as “an old maid in britches.”
Waldo Lydecker had to have his plate arranged jus
t so, pork on this side, duck over there, noodles under the chicken-almond, sweet and pungent spareribs next to the lobster, Chinese ravioli on a separate plate because there might be a conflict in sauces. Until he had tried each dish with and without beetle juice, there was no more talk at our table … . He snapped his fingers. Two waiters came running. It seems they had forgotten the fried rice. There was more talk than necessary, and he had to rearrange his plate. Between giving orders to the Chinese and moaning because the ritual (his word) of his dinner was upset, he talked about well-known murder cases.
This is known as “foreshadowing,” a writer’s way of hinting about something to come. Waldo Lydecker was as fastidious about Laura as he was about his food. Unable to bear the thought of her pristine perfection subjected to the runny messes of the marital bed, he decided to murder her on the weekend before her wedding.
Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Page 16