Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  “So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon’s mother and Charles Bon’s grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen, dont it?” Quentin did not answer; evidently Shreve did not want an answer now; he continued almost without a pause: “Which is all right, it’s fine; it clears the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and burn them, except for one thing. And do you know what that is?” Perhaps he hoped for an answer this time, or perhaps he merely paused for emphasis, since he got no answer. “You’ve got one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you cant catch him and you dont even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you’ve got him there still. You still hear him at night sometimes. Dont you?”

  “Yes,” Quentin said.

  This comes just before the famous conclusion of Absalom, Absalom!, when Quentin Compson cries out, in desperate response to Shreve:

  “I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

  CHAPTER 41

  The Death of the Heart (1938)

  ELIZABETH BOWEN

  ELIZABETH BOWEN died in 1973 at the age of seventy-three. I recall meeting her once in London and once in the United States. She was intensely civilized, gracious, and emanated an aura of goodwill. I fear that she is not widely read at this time, and I find that to be a great loss. Her best works were the novels The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949), as well as a marvelous volume of short stories Ivy Gripped the Steps (1945). It may be that the shadows of Henry James and of Virginia Woolf, who befriended Bowen, are too heavy upon the novels, but the stories seem to me, after those of Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, as strong as any composed in Great Britain in the twentieth century.

  Bowen had a curious twenty-nine-year marriage to Alan Cameron, who worked as an educational administrator and later for the BBC. It seems to have been amiable, but like the marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, never consummated. Instead Bowen had a long relationship to a Canadian diplomat, Charles Ritchie, and briefer ones to other men and women, including the very minor American poet May Sarton.

  My friend the gifted American poet Mona Van Duyn, who died at eighty-three in 2004, wrote a pungent essay on The Death of the Heart in 1961, “Pattern and Pilgrimage.” It concludes with an acute apprehension of Bowen’s complex sensibility in regard to her protagonist, the sixteen-year-old Portia:

  We are not shown in the novel’s action whether Portia can “come back” to achieve the womanliness, intelligence and charm of her Shakespearian namesake, for whom traditional wisdom, to which she was bound in choosing a husband, so happily corroborated the heart’s spontaneous wish. (“But why was she called Portia?,” St. Quentin asks. Anna, surprised, said, “I don’t think we ever asked.”) Such a wound may turn her into an Anna who is tempted to toss Pidgeon’s letters at Portia and tell her, “This is all it comes to, you little fool.” First she must come back to Windsor Terrace, dependence, and later make a perhaps more fortunate re-beginning of her adult life. It is clear to the reader that the Quaynes have done the right thing by sending Matchett to fetch her, and that Matchett is the only remaining means of helping her.

  Matchett, treated through most of the novel as a looming and awe-inspiring figure, is given, in the final scene of the taxi ride to Karachi, the full weight of humorous and fallible humanity. This “downfall” sets limits on her power, though she opens the hotel door “with an air of authority.” Tradition, custom, the personal and communal past, the novel suggests, are supports only, not mystical or magical maps for the course of the grown-up life.

  Does innocence lead to the death of this particular, but representative, heart? The title is unequivocal. “Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it,” says the author, and Portia’s awareness was catastrophically premature.

  I have reread The Death of the Heart several times with increasing sadness. Poor Portia, the child of a brief affair that led to a catastrophic divorce and exile for her father and mother, has lived abroad, on the Continent, moving from one cheap hotel to another, or one blighted villa to yet another. First her father dies, and then her mother. There is no place for her to go except to her half-brother in London, whose wife, Anna, is hostile to the young girl from the start. Anna and her husband and their friend, a writer named St. Quentin, are brittle sophisticates and already dead at heart.

  Portia, who is puzzled by the strangeness of adults, keeps a diary honestly reflecting her dilemmas. Anna has the bad taste to find it and read it and is enraged at the portrait rendered of herself. Evidently, the portrait is merely accurate, since Portia is so innocent that she does not know how to absorb people’s not saying what they mean. Her heart is so pure that irony is beyond her.

  Eddie, a would-be novelist and a rather unpleasant young fellow, flirts with Anna to flatter her and becomes a semi-boyfriend of Portia, yet neither falls in love with the other. It is not just that Portia at sixteen is too young for a serious passion, but her cloistered life has given her no background for sorting out and mastering emotion. She may think she loves Eddie, but soon learns that there is no one there to love. Eddie is a blank. His true condition is an inward terror, and he cannot endure any actual exchange of affection.

  Bowen is not primarily an ironist. Her prevailing mode is a tentative compassion. And yet The Death of the Heart works because of the wise irony by which Portia’s innocence destroys the sophisticated pretensions of the Quaynes, of St. Quentin, and of Eddie. Her openness is a pure flame that singes every sleeve. That is certainly not her intention, and I sometimes wonder if it was Bowen’s.

  Aside from the book’s dark title, its three parts are “The World,” “The Flesh,” and “The Devil.” That world is brittle and valueless; there is little sign of any intimation of desire; but the devil is certainly present when Portia discovers that Anna has been reading her diary and divulging it to others. Portia flees the house and offers herself to Eddie for life, which terrifies him into reality:

  “But you used to talk a lot before you got to know me, didn’t you? Before you had said you loved me, or anything. I remember hearing you talking in the drawing-room, when I used to go up or down stairs, before I minded at all. Are you her lover?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I know it’s something you’re not with me. I wouldn’t mind what you did, but I cannot bear the things I think now that you say.”

  “Then why keep asking?”

  “Because I keep hoping you might tell me you were really saying something not that.”

  “Well, I am Anna’s lover.”

  “Oh…Are you?”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’ve got no way of telling.”

  “I thought it didn’t seem to make much impression. Why make such a fuss if you don’t know what you do want? As a matter of fact, I’m not: she’s far too cautious and smart, and I don’t think she’s got any passion at all. She likes to be far more trouble.”

  “Then why do you—I mean, why—?”

  “The trouble with you has been, from the very start, that you’ve been too anxious to get me taped.”

  “Have I? But you said we loved each other.”

  “You used to be much gentler, much more sweet. Yes, you used to be, as I once told you, the one person I could naturally love. But you’re different, lately, since Seale.”

  It is a remarkable dialogue, in which Portia’s now aggressive innocence is virtually daemonic and comes close to destroying the vapid Eddie. Bowen, like a hound on the sc
ent, closes in upon what has become Portia’s quarry:

  “You said everything was over,” Portia said, looking straight up into his eyes. They stayed locked in this incredulous look till Eddie flinched: he said: “Have I been unkind?”

  “I’ve got no way of telling.”

  “I wish you had.” Frowning, pulling his lip down in the familiar way, that made this the ghost of all their happier talks, he said: “Because I don’t know, do you know. I may be some kind of monster; I’ve really got no idea….The things I have to say seem never to have had to be said before. Is my life really so ghastly and so extraordinary? I’ve got no way to check up. I do wish you were older; I wish you knew more.”

  “You’re the only person I ever—”

  “That’s what’s the devil; that’s just what I mean. You don’t know what to expect.”

  Not taking her anxious eyes from his face—eyes as desperately concentrated as though she were trying to understand a lesson—she said: “But after all, Eddie, anything that happens has never happened before. What I mean is, you and I are the first people who have ever been us.”

  Eddie’s invocation of the devil is apposite and is massively answered by the strangely wise perplexity of what speaks out of Portia. They part with finality, and Portia runs off to the dilapidated hotel where Major Brutt lives. He is a tired and defeated pensioner who has never lived and relies upon Anna’s dubious hospitality:

  “There’s nothing to mess,” she [Portia] said in a very small voice that was implacable. “You are the other person that Anna laughs at,” she went on, raising her eyes. “I don’t think you understand: Anna’s always laughing at you. She says you are quite pathetic. She laughed at your carnations being the wrong colour, then gave them to me. And Thomas always thinks you must be after something. Whatever you do, even send me a puzzle, he thinks that more, and she laughs more. They groan at each other when you have gone away. You and I are the same.”

  The unfortunate Brutt is middle aged and afraid of women. In her now pragmatically daemonic mode, Portia all but destroys him:

  “…I’m not going home, Major Brutt.”

  He said, very reasonably: “Then what do you want to do?”

  “Stay here—” She stopped short, as though she felt she had said, too soon, something important enough to need care. Deliberately, with her lips tight shut, she got off the bed to come and stand by him—so that, she standing, he sitting, she could tower up at least a little way. She looked him all over, as though she meant to tug at him, to jerk him awake, and was only not certain where to catch hold of him. Her arms stayed at her sides, but looked rigid, at every moment, with their intention to move in unfeeling desperation. She was not able, or else did not wish, to inform herself with pleading grace; her sexlessness made her deliver a stern summons: he felt her knocking through him like another heart outside his own ribs. “Stay here with you,” she said. “You do like me,” she added. “You write to me; you send me puzzles; you say you think about me. Anna says you are sentimental, but that is what she says when people don’t feel nothing. I could do things for you: we could have a home; we would not have to live in a hotel. Tell Thomas you want to keep me and he could send you my money. I could cook; my mother cooked when she lived in Nottinghill Gate. Why could you not marry me? I could cheer you up. I would not get in your way, and we should not be half so lonely. Why should you be dumbfounded, Major Brutt?”

  “Because I suppose I am,” was all he could say.

  “I told Eddie you were a person I made happy.”

  “Good God, yes. But don’t you see—”

  “Do think it over, please,” she said calmly. “I’ll wait.”

  “It’s no good beginning to think, my dear.”

  “I’d like to wait, all the same.”

  “You’re shivering,” he said vaguely.

  “Yes, I am cold.” With a quite new, matter-of-fact air of possessing his room, she made small arrangements for comfort—peeled off his eiderdown, kicked her shoes off, lay down with her head into his pillow and pulled the eiderdown snugly up to her chin. By this series of acts she seemed at once to shelter, to plant here and to obliterate herself—most of all that last. Like a sick person, or someone who has decided by not getting up to take no part in a day, she at once seemed to inhabit a different world. Noncommittal, she sometimes shut her eyes, sometimes looked at the ceiling that took the slope of the roof. “I suppose,” she said, after some minutes, “you don’t know what to do.”

  She obliterates Brutt rather more than she does herself. All that he can know to do is to get her back to the only home she has, which she does not want, and which, except for Matchett, the strong-minded servant, does not want her. The book ends with Matchett collecting her and with the implicit hope that Matchett will complete the bringing up of Portia.

  After the short stories and The Death of the Heart, the Bowen I most care for is her World War II novel The Heat of the Day (1949), an intensely vivid portrayal of London under the Blitz. Its protagonist, Stella, is admirable but has to sustain the loss of what William Blake called “organized innocence,” which is demonstrated to be only another illusion. Bowen rather famously remarked, “No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” Blake would not have agreed, and I think I would go with him, despite my admiration for Bowen. Whatever good Matchett will do Portia, it is difficult to see how the young girl can prosper in the world of experience. Bowen was too honest to prophesy. When I asked her, in one of our two brief meetings, what hope we are to have for her Portia, she wisely smiled at me and said nothing.

  CHAPTER 42

  Invisible Man (1952)

  RALPH ELLISON

  MY FRIEND Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. To my grief he died in New York City in 1994 at the age of eighty. We had known each other a long time, having been introduced by R. W. B. Lewis and Kenneth Burke in the middle 1960s. During his final years, we lunched together once a week at the Century Club in New York and talked about literature and jazz. Sometimes Albert Murray made a third. Ellison was fierce on the issue of aesthetic merit. He chided me for having praised Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, though there we went on disagreeing. The major African American achievements in the arts certainly include Ellison’s Invisible Man, the poetry of Jay Wright, born in 1935, and the music essentially inaugurated by Louis Armstrong and then carried on by so many grand figures, including Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Max Roach, and others.

  Though Ellison declined to join my expeditions to the Blue Note in the Village and Minton’s in Harlem, he loved Louis Armstrong, Ellington, and Jimmy Rushing, and was captivated almost against his will by Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus. He could not abide John Coltrane, which mystified me. As Ellison aged into the author of a single great book, he sometimes seemed defensive in his vision of jazz as the African American outlaw protest against white America.

  Early in the 1980s, I was an overnight guest of Berndt and Jutta Ostendorf in Munich, introduced to them by my friend Miriam Hansen, a film historian who died in 2011 at the age of sixty-one. Berndt Ostendorf is probably the most noted German scholar of African American literature and of jazz. We talked about jazz and about Ellison. For Ostendorf, Louis Armstrong in particular mediated James Joyce, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner for Ellison, thus allowing him to reconcile aesthetic modernism with black American folklore.

  I have just finished another rereading of Invisible Man. It is sixty years since I first read it, and I have gone back and forth in it several times since. Perhaps Kenneth Burke overpraised it in saying that it made its own epoch rather than reflecting a particular time. You could say that of Proust or Joyce, Kafka or Beckett, but not of
Ellison. His only completed novel is a permanent work, akin say to Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960) or Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and American Pastoral (1997). These are all perpetually fresh, but none of them is of the eminence of William Faulkner on his heights: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). However I should mention Thomas Pynchon, whose permanent achievements include The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). It seems just to observe that Pynchon is the most considerable American writer of prose fiction since the death of Faulkner in 1962.

  Invisible Man is a difficult book to describe. In some ways it is naturalistic, in others symbolic, sometimes surrealistic, and concludes in an irrealism that possibly influenced Pynchon. Named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ellison had both pragmatic and transcendental impulses, like the Concord Sage. In flight from both the Brotherhood (the Communist Party) and Ras the Exhorter, a forerunner of the Black Panthers, the nameless narrator, Invisible Man, escapes from a Harlem race riot and goes underground. Down below, he meditates on self-reliance, after judiciously illuminating himself by 1,369 old-fashioned filament lightbulbs. He thus pays nothing to Monopolated Light & Power (Consolidated Edison).