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

by Bloom, Harold

  “Yes,” I said, dabbing my mouth with my handkerchief. They were motherly old women of the southern type and I suddenly felt a nameless despair. I wanted to tell them that Rinehart was a fraud, but now there came a shout from inside the church and I heard a burst of music.

  “Just lissen to it, Sister Harris. That’s the new kind of guitar music I told you Rever’n Rinehart got for us. Ain’t it heavenly?”

  “Praise God,” Sister Harris said. “Praise God!”

  “Excuse us, Rever’n, I have to see Sister Judkins about the money she collected for the building fund. And, Rever’n, last night I sold ten recordings of your inspiring sermon. Even sold one to the white lady I work for.”

  “Bless you,” I found myself saying in a voice heavy with despair, “bless you, bless you.”

  Then the door opened and I looked past their heads into a small crowded room of men and women sitting in folding chairs, to the front where a slender woman in a rusty black robe played passionate boogie-woogie on an upright piano along with a young man wearing a skull cap who struck righteous riffs from an electric guitar which was connected to an amplifier that hung from the ceiling above a gleaming white and gold pulpit. A man in an elegant red cardinal’s robe and a high lace collar stood resting against an enormous Bible and now began to lead a hard-driving hymn which the congregation shouted in the unknown tongue. And back and high on the wall above him there arched the words in letters of gold:

  LET THERE BE LIGHT!

  Ellison’s novel is replete with eloquent climaxes, but this may be my favorite. The heightened prose is worthy of the metamorphic Rinehart, who is as much of an answer as Invisible Man can give us:

  It was too much for me. I removed my glasses and tucked the white hat carefully beneath my arm and walked away. Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? And I knew that it was. I had heard of it before but I’d never come so close. Still, could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway? But how could I doubt it? He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

  Are we persuaded by this? My former acquaintance the journalist Michael Anderson, whom I have not seen for many years, once argued with me about Ellison, whom he regarded as an aesthetic failure. Anderson himself is African American, and wrote a brief essay with this severe judgment:

  …a man for whom paradox too often has been mistaken for profundity: a writer who did not write, the expositor of “complexity” whose ideas were simple when not simplistic, the delineator of “chaos” whose commentary was a compendium of complacency, the advocate of social fluidity whose vision was frozen in times past, the proponent of aesthetic discipline whose work is marked by formlessness and lack of control, a “race man” who disdained his race, the critic of sociology whose own novel has been distorted into a sociological cliché, the proponent of individualism whose career was propelled at every step by an astonishing array of selfless supporters, an artist all the more honored the less he produced, a public presence as an invisible man…

  I am still fond of Michael Anderson, but this is simply not so. Ellison left two thousand manuscript pages which were edited into an unfortunate novel he would never have published: Juneteenth (1999). Ralph was a perfectionist, and his sorrow was that he could not again write an Invisible Man. It is dreadfully inaccurate to say that Ellison disdained his race. Anderson concluded by saying: “That Ellison was not fitted for the art he professed to admire is his pathos. He sought to be the black T. S. Eliot when he could have been the black Beckett.”

  It would be truer to say that Ellison sought to be the black Dostoevsky, whose Underground Man he resurrected in his Invisible Man. Why Anderson invokes Samuel Beckett is beyond my surmise. I will end this tribute to a permanent novel with its conclusion, in which we are invited into its universalism:

  “Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:

  Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

  CHAPTER 43

  The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  I NEVER MET Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight in Portland, Oregon, her home for many years. And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life, entirely by way of e-mail. I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21, 2017, and she replied on November 24. After that we exchanged letters sixteen times, until her final letter of January 16, 2018, which concluded:

  One of the things I like least about being very old is the unreliability of my energy. Up one day, down the next, bleh! Working at poetry or a story is, always has been, the job I want to be doing, the work that keeps me steady and content. But too often there just isn’t the wherewithal. I suspect your work is central to your wellbeing in much this way, and hope you aren’t suffering such periods of enforced idleness.

  I value our friendship.

  Ursula

  I replied after an interval, during which I was very ill, on January 23, 2018, not yet knowing that Ursula had died the day before. I hope, in tribute to her, that I live to edit her poems for the Library of America, thinking she might have wanted me to do that. For now, I turn to her two strongest novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974).

  Though I have written about The Left Hand of Darkness before, in 1987 and again in 2000, I have forgotten what I said and do not want to consult it now, but, rather, make a fresh start on this marvelous romance. In one of her letters Ursula remarked that writing The Dispossessed was liberating for her, and she seemed to prefer it to The Left Hand of Darkness. Rereading both, I find myself torn between the two. The protagonist Shevek in The Dispossessed is far more interesting than anyone in the earlier book, and yet he and his story manifest something of the ambivalence of Le Guin’s subtitle: An Ambiguous Utopia.

  In a fierce introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin charmingly remarks, “A novelist’s business is lying.” She adumbrates:

  I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

  The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

  Always in Le Guin we hear reverberations of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which she translated, with J. P. Seaton, as A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way (1997). We corresponded about her understanding of the Tao, yet I had to confess my permanent difficulty in absorbing this way that is not a way. I myself always keep to hand a copy of The Bhagavad-Gita as rendered by Barbara Stoler Miller, which I purchased in the autumn of 1986, the year of its publication. After hundreds of readings, I think I know what Krishna means by “dark opacity,” “passion,” and “lucidity,” but a dozen readings of the Le Guin–Seaton Tao Te Ching have left me muttering that I do not apprehend the water and stone of the Way. Is it that I am not enough open to my own female component? That seems not right. I am more my late mother than my late father. What moves me most in Ursula is the serenity. I lack it utterly.

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  Commenting upon the fascinating vision of sexuality in Left Hand, Le Guin continues in gusto:

  This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490–97,” but surely you don’t believe that?

  Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

  The burden of Left Hand is whether Genly Ai can persuade the king of Karhide on the planet Gethen or Winter to join the Ekumen or union of many planets in exchanges of trade and culture. Genly Ai speaks much of the book, but frequently Le Guin moves into third-person narration. Though Ai is a man of goodwill and adequate intelligence, he can never quite understand the consciousness of the androgynes whom he seeks to win over. Here Le Guin is admirably subtle. She tended to distrust Freud, since her heart and mind were with the Tao, and yet she shows what he meant in observing that for almost all of us thought could not be liberated from its sexual past.

  Rather wickedly, Le Guin devotes Chapter 7 to the field notes of one Ong Tot Oppong, a woman investigator on behalf of the Ekumen who lands on Gethen/Winter to study “The Question of Sex.” Oppong speculates that whoever colonized this odd planet practiced human genetic manipulation in order to produce Gethenian sexual physiology:

  The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days (they tend to speak of it as 26 days, approximating it to the lunar cycle). For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pituitary control and on the 22nd or 23rd day the individual enters kemmer, estrus. In this first phase of kemmer (Karh. secher) he remains completely androgynous. Gender, and potency, are not attained in isolation. A Gethenian in first-phase kemmer, if kept alone or with others not in kemmer, remains incapable of coitus. Yet the sexual impulse is tremendously strong in this phase, controlling the entire personality, subjecting all other drives to its imperative. When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated (most importantly by touch—secretion? scent?) until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, foreplay intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the change, takes on the other sexual role (? without exception? If there are exceptions, resulting in kemmer-partners of the same sex, they are so rare as to be ignored). This second phase of kemmer (Karh. thorharmen), the mutual process of establishing sexuality and potency, apparently occurs within a timespan of two to twenty hours. If one of the partners is already in full kemmer, the phase for the newer partner is liable to be quite short; if the two are entering kemmer together, it is likely to take longer. Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or the female, and have no choice in the matter. (Otie Nim wrote that in the Orgoreyn region the use of hormone derivatives to establish a preferred sexuality is quite common; I haven’t seen this done in rural Karhide.) Once the sex is determined it cannot change during the kemmer-period. The culminant phase of kemmer (Karh. thokemmer) lasts from two to five days, during which sexual drive and capacity are at maximum. It ends fairly abruptly, and if conception has not taken place, the individual returns to the somer phase within a few hours (note: Otie Nim thinks this “fourth phase” is the equivalent of the menstrual cycle) and the cycle begins anew. If the individual was in the female role and was impregnated, hormonal activity of course continues, and for the 8.4-month gestation period and the 6- to 8-month lactation period this individual remains female. The male sexual organs remain retracted (as they are in somer), the breasts enlarge somewhat, and the pelvic girdle widens. With the cessation of lactation the female reenters somer and becomes once more a perfect adrogyne. No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more.

  That last sentence must have delighted Ursula K. Le Guin, whose capacity for amiable irony is almost unsurpassed. It certainly pleases me! Going on eighty-eight, I am beyond all this, but even if I were twenty-eight it might send me to the nearest bar. Since King Argaven of Karhide is both crazy and pregnant, Genly Ai’s quest seems foolish yet it is earned by a sacrifice of the book’s hero, Harth rem ir Estraven.

  Estraven is introduced to us at the close of the first chapter, but we see and hear him only through the misconceptions of Genly Ai. The noble Estraven is a prime minister on the way out—no surprise to him, because he candidly remarks that King Argaven is both crazy and stupid. But he is in some danger from rivals and has concern that Ai may be in danger also. Gethen is an absolute monarchy, itself an entity totally unknown to Genly Ai. No wars are fought on the planet Winter, but assassinations, blood feuds, sudden outbursts of violence are common.

  The patriotism of Estraven has modulated into a realization that Karhide is outmoded and needs to join the interplanetary union of worlds. In the eyes of King Argaven and his more duplicitous servitors, Estraven’s desire is treasonable, and in time he will suffer death for it. He flees into exile and a ban is proclaimed:

  “…Let all countrymen of Karhide know and say that the crime for which Harth rem ir Estraven is exiled is the crime of Treason: he having urged privily and openly in Assembly and Palace, under pretense of loyal service to the king, that the Nation-Dominion of Karhide cast away its sovereignty and surrender up its power in order to become an inferior and subject nation in a certain Union of Peoples, concerning which let all men know and say that no such Union does exist, being a device and baseless fiction of certain conspiring traitors who seek to weaken the Authority of Karhide in the king, to the profit of the real and present enemies of the land. Odguyrny Tuwa, Eighth Hour, in the Palace in Erhenrang: ARGAVEN HARGE.”

  After a rather frightening meeting with the king, Genly Ai begins to understand Estraven’s concern for him and vows to leave Karhide for Orgoreyn, Karhide’s rival and neighbor. He goes east to seek information from the Foretellers. My favorite chapter in Left Hand is 5, “The Domestication of Hunch,” the chapter of the Foretellers. Their leader is Faxe, a benign follower of the Negative Way, who eventually will attain power in Karhide. Faxe is a weaver, a craft associated with the preternatural throughout human history. I always think of the delightful Bottom the Weaver in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who is the only human who can see and apprehend the faerie world of Titania, Puck, Oberon, Mustardseed, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Moth.

  Faxe the Foreteller centers an amazing scene, in a high hall surrounded by eight other proleptic figures, two of them being quite insane and one a curious male pervert. In return for two rubies, Genly Ai asks the question: will Karhide join the Ekumen and when? Suddenly a woman appears merged with Faxe, bathed in silver light, encased in silver armor, and bearing a sword. She screams aloud, in pain and terror, a triple yes! She vanishes. The answer is that five years hence Gethen will be a member of the Ekumen.

  The ultimate wisdom of Faxe the Foreteller seems to me Ursula’s eloquent evasion of the Freudian maxim that we must make friends with the necessity of dying:

  “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion….Tell me, Genry, what is k
nown? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”

  “That we shall die.”

  “Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer….The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

  To me that seems an aesthetic formulation: the only thing that makes it possible to read and reread the best novels is not knowing what comes next, even though we have read them before. In Le Guin, as much the novelist as poet as were Victor Hugo and Emily Brontë, the poetry itself becomes Foretelling. We don’t have to pay her two rubies; we need only read and reread. Directly after the foreboding by Faxe of the uncertainty of mortality, Le Guin changes the narrator into Estraven, who has to flee into Orgoreyn, scarcely an easy purpose. He has to steal a boat and row it, though wounded by a sonic gun. Picked up by a patrol ship, he is taken to a safe port in Orgoreyn.

  The novel’s plot begins with fresh intensity when Estraven seeks out Genly Ai in Orgoreyn and warns him not to be used by any faction in that country. Later, Estraven rescues Genly from a prison farm, and their escape takes them on a tremendous trek across the ice, pulling a sledge together. In that adventure they become overwhelmingly close friends and develop a poignance in their mutual understanding that takes them to the border of sexual love, where they pause. At that moment Le Guin creates a remarkable excursus:

  Since we came up out of the volcano-murk our spirit is not all spent in work and worry, and we talk again in the tent after our dinner. As I am in kemmer I would find it easier to ignore Ai’s presence, but this is difficult in a two-man tent. The trouble is of course that he is, in his curious fashion, also in kemmer: always in kemmer. A strange lowgrade sort of desire it must be, to be spread out over every day of the year and never to know the choice of sex, but there it is; and here am I. Tonight my extreme physical awareness of him was rather hard to ignore, and I was too tired to divert it into untrance or any other channel of the discipline. Finally he asked, had he offended me? I explained my silence, with some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am: up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. There is no world full of other Gethenians here to explain and support my existence. We are equals at last, equal, alien, alone. He did not laugh, of course. Rather he spoke with a gentleness that I did not know was in him. After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.