The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  The villagers were swarming over the melon fields and over the vineyards that lay in the stifling shade, clusters of ripe black grapes shimmering among broad translucent leaves. Creaking carts heaped high with grapes made their way along the road leading from the vineyards, and grapes crushed by the wheels lay everywhere in the dust. Little boys and girls, their arms and mouths filled with grapes and their shirts stained with grape juice, ran after their mothers. Tattered laborers carried filled baskets on powerful shoulders. Village girls, kerchiefs wound tightly across their faces, drove bullocks harnessed to local carts. Soldiers by the roadside asked for grapes, and the women climbed into the rolling carts and threw bunches down, the men holding out their shirt flaps to catch them. In some courtyards the grapes were already being pressed, and the aroma of grape-skin leavings filled the air.... Laughter, song, and the happy voices of women came from within a sea of shadowy green vines, through which their smocks and kerchiefs peeked.

  The scene is Edenic, bursting with fecundity, almost biblical in its overflowingness. Scents and juices spill out of every phrase: it is Tolstoy's sensuous genius at its ripest. Olenin will return to Moscow, yes; but his eyes have been dyed by the grape harvest, and he will never again see as he once saw, before the Caucasus, before Maryanka, before the mountains. The novel's hero is the primordial earth itself, civilization's dream of the pastoral. The old Tolstoy—that crabbed puritanical sermonizing septuagenarian who wrote What Is Art?, a tract condemning the pleasures of the senses—might wish to excoriate the twenty-something author of The Cossacks. The old Tolstoy is the apostle of renunciation. But the young Tolstoy, who opens Olenin to the intoxica-tions of the natural world, and to the longings of love, means to become, at least for a time, an apostle of desire.

  John Updike: Eros and God

  JOHN UPDIKE: the name is graven. It stands, by now, alongside Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, those older masters who lay claim to territory previously untrafficked, and who make of it common American ground. So enduringly stamped and ineradicably renowned is Updike, that it was more tribute than gaucherie when, only the other day, someone (a demographer, as it happens, with wider views of the shiftings of lives) asked, "Is he still alive?" The very question canonizes—and for readers of Updike's generation, it instructs even as it startles. We have grown old in the company of this always new-leaved evergreen writer. Updike's earliest fiction was published fifty years ago; his output (an industrial term suggestive of powerful engines)—novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poems, children's books, a play, a memoir—comes to more than fifty-five volumes, with who knows what lavishness lies ahead. The essay collections alone are physically thick and weighty; their literary and scholarly range is equal to libraries of doctoral dissertations. As for the plenitude of stories and novels: think of Balzac, Dickens, George Sand, Trollope, Chekhov, and all the nineteenth-century rest. It scarcely seemed likely that the distracted and impatient twentieth could throw up such prodigious abundance.

  From 1953, when he was twenty-one, to 1975, at forty-three, Updike saw into print one hundred and seven short stories. Four, he reports in a foreword to his ambitiously—or nostalgically—assembled Early Stories, have been omitted, leaving one hundred and three. During this same period he published seven novels and five books of poetry. But to marvel at copiousness would be to misconceive achievement: all that arithmetic is, however impressive, beside the point. The stories, after all, came to us quietly, one by one, not in the roaring and multitudinous cascade that is this justifiably prideful collection.

  And read one by one, as they first appeared in the pages of a magazine (The New Yorker, chiefly), what the stories revealed was the mind of an artist on whom nothing is lost, for whom seeing is fused with the most filigreed turns of language. Updike is a potent stylist, but of a particular kind—less psychological (though he is psychological too), less analytical (though he is frequently that), than visual and painterly. His effects are of sheen and shadow, color and form, spine and splay, hair and haunch. "My main debt," he oddly insists, "which may not be evident, is to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates." One takes this in re-sistingly. Updike's dialogue is spare and unerring, but nuance and image ride his nouns and verbs in consciously intricate dress; he is far closer to baroque Nabokov than to stripped Hemingway.

  The themes that absorb him above all others are eros and God; or the mysteries of women and death. This is quickly manifest, even in the earliest narratives of childhood and youth, set in Updike's native small-town Pennsylvania, with its poignant intimacies of Depression-era families whose autobiographical phases, like elusive moons, are only partly veiled. There is, repeatedly, the impressionable boy, an only child; the affectionate and winning father; the restless, thwarted mother; the mother's aging parents; the move from town to farm—Updike's modestly magical surround, illumined half by memory, half by the maker's craft. But already here, at a New Year's party in "The Happiest I've Been," the nineteen-year-old John Nordholm will learn how the back of a young man's thumb can fit against the curve of a girl's breast, while Updike's scrupulously magnifying notice measures "her two lush eyebrows and then the spaces of skin between the rough curls, some black and some bleached, that fringed her forehead." This preoccupation with the contours of femaleness evolves from story to story, until the arrival, in 1973, of the gentle pornography of "Transaction," wherein a prostitute is accorded the sexual dignity of a wife. Elliptically, the narrator concludes: "What she had given him, delicately, was death."

  Some seventy pages before this revelation, David, the much younger protagonist of "Pigeon Feathers," a boy in theological anguish over the inevitability of his own extinction, is coerced into shooting some pigeons in a barn. As they fall lifeless, he observes "the somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers ... no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture," while Updike rises to one of his most remarked-on sentences—or call it the sentence that confirmed his precocious fame: "He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever."

  Like many of these fictions, both early and late, "Pigeon Feathers" is structured on an arc: from the commonplace (the birds in the barn) to a crisis of realization (the promise of an afterlife). The trajectory may be predictable, but the juxtapositions are not. In "The Music School," for example, the flow is from the material consistency of the eucharistic wafer to the murder of a computer expert; from a daughter's piano lessons to an intimation of adultery; from the plot of an abandoned novel to a visit to a psychiatrist, and finally to a communal confession at a worship service. In this contrapuntal narrative stream, there is more than one coda to decode; but one note is struck more deliberately than any other: "We are all pilgrims, faltering toward divorce." And where there is divorce, there is marriage; and where there is marriage, there are children. The everyday seizes Updike's tireless gaze—babies, adolescents, couples, sometimes in stasis, as in genre painting, sometimes kinetic, like the swoop of a thought. As his heroes age, the hot empathy that flooded the boy and the youth grows objectively cool. In "Solitaire," a man on the verge of divorce ricochets between two women: "His mistress cried big: with thrilling swiftness her face dissolved and, her mouth smeared all out of shape, she lurched against him with an awkward bump and soaked his throat in abusive sobs. Whereas his wife wept like a miraculous icon, her face immobile while the tears ran." Portraits inscribed in ice.

  What is notable, and curious, in Updike is that his sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian's meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders, whether of exaltation or distress. In "The Deacon," a decaying old wooden church—rotted wiring, warped boards, leaky ceiling, worn hymnals, superannuated remnants of congregants—is nevertheless instinct with holy ardor
, and with a kind of intergalactic loneliness. "Lifeguard," a celebrated fiction written by a young man still in his twenties, is an extended, if lyrical, religious pun: crosses abound, the red cross on the lifeguard's tall chair, "the pale X on the back of the overall-wearing mason or carpenter." The lifeguard is a divinity student; his task is to be saved, and to save. "Women," he reflects, observing the "breeding swarm" half-naked in bathing suits, "are an alien race of pagans set down among us. Every seduction is a conversion." His mission is to "lift the whole mass into immortality." The story's symptomatic crossover is this overlapping of flesh and redemption, so that one may be induced to permeate the other. It is how Updike reconciles the social bustle of ordinary lives with the rapturous aloneness of faith.

  His is not a social faith. Though "Lifeguard" closes with an exhortation to "be joyful," the Kierkegaardian singleness of the God-possessed, quivering among the darker stars, predominates. This singleness, this historyless aloneness, turns up in the essayistic aperçus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the daily vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts. The acts are tremendously variegated; in the spacious precincts of eight hundred and more pages, human faces teem, landscapes and interiors are elegiacally documented, a thousand three-dimensional objects cast realistic shadows, time is phosphorescent, moods coagulate and dissolve. Updike owns the omnivorous faculty of seeing the telltale flame in every mundane gesture. Despite this busy Brueghelian amplitude, the concluding soliloquy of the unsettled young husband in "The Astronomer," who is befuddled by an atheistic sophist, carries a recognizable Updikean signature: "What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?"

  But the past, so defined, is not the same as history. Only compare the early fiction of Saul Bellow, where history infiltrates nearly every thought or movement—which is perhaps why Bellow has been called our most "European" novelist. Among contemporary fiction writers, Updike is the most rootedly American (though of German, not WASP, stock), and the most self-consciously Protestant: the individual in singular engagement with God. The Protestant idea of God, which nurtured and shaped America, is the narrowed Lord of persons, not of hosts; He is not conspicuously the Lord of history. This may be the reason the Nobel literary committee, afloat on the turbulent waves of vast historical grievances, has so far overlooked Updike. (At the 1986 International PEN Congress, presided over by Norman Mailer and tided "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State," while angry literary politicos stormed against the perfidies of governments, America's in particular, Updike spoke in quiet praise of his own relation to the state: the dependable USA mailbox.)

  It may be that the absence of a brooding and burdensome history in these stories accounts for the luxuriance of their lyrical andantes. Here are lives essentially tranquil, unharried by turmoil and threat beyond the extrusions of plaintively aspiring passions. There may be local and topical distractions, but by and large Updike's scenes and characters express a propitious America, mottled only by metaphysical ruminations. If, as Adorno tells us, there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, possibly the converse is true: poetry belongs to the trustful calm that is the negation of Auschwitz—and which, at its bountiful heart, is Updike's witty and incandescent America. Two generations of readers and writers have been awed by Updike's rhapsodic powers and the opulent resources of his language; still, there are occasional complaints of excess, of bedizened satiety. "A seigneurial gratuity," James Wood calls it, "as if language were a meaningless bill to a very rich man." Updike is assuredly rich in language (its dazzle is tempered by colloquial rushes of dialogue), and if his fictive world is poor in the sorrows of history, if the only conflagrations his characters must witness are picnic fires, it is no wonder, and mainly a pleasure, that he turns to the elaborations of imagery. Bech, Updike's alter ego in "The Bulgarian Poetess," remarks to an enchanting woman fettered by Communism—the closest this collection comes to a tyrannical age—"It is a matter of earnest regret that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world." In light of the imperial craft of Updike's ambitious twenties and thirties, it must be, rather, a matter of felicitous relief. The America of these early stories may be the mostly untrammeled land we remember; but language in all its fecundity is Updike's native country, and he is its patriot.

  Throwing Away the Clef: Saul Bellow's Ravelstein

  ROMAN À CLEF? Never mind. When it comes to novels, the author's life is nobody's business. A novel, even when it is autobiographical, is not an autobiography. If the writer himself leaks the news that such-and-such a character is actually so-and-so in real life, readers nevertheless have an obligation—fiction's enchanted obligation—to shut their ears and turn away. A biographer may legitimately wish to look to Buddenbrooks, say, to catch certain tonalities of Thomas Mann's early years; a reader is liberated from the matching game. Fiction is subterranean, not terrestrial. Or it is like Tao: say what it is, and that is what it is not. One reason to read imaginative literature is to be carried off into the strangeness of an unknown planet, not to be dogged by the verifiable facts of this one. Why should we care for blunt information—for those ephemeral figures fictional creatures are "based on"? The originals vanish; their simulacra, powerful marvels, endure. Does it matter that "The Rape of the Lock" makes sport of one Arabella Fermor and of the eminent Lord Petre? Fermor and Petre are bones. Belinda and Sir Plume go on frolicking from line to frothy line of Pope's comic ode. Who lives forever—Flimnap, the all-important treasurer of the Kingdom of Lilliput, or his sent-up model, Sir Robert Walpole, gone to dust two and a half centuries ago? Why should Philip Roth's "Philip Roth" be Philip Roth?

  And why should Saul Bellow's Ravelstein be Allan Bloom? Or, to turn the question around (the better to get at an answer), why should Saul Bellow's Ravelstein not be Allan Bloom? It might be argued that Bellow has a fat track record of insinuating into his fiction the frenziedly brilliant men he has known, intellectuals given to complications: in Humboldt's Gift, Delmore Schwartz; in "Zetland: By a Character Witness," Isaac Rosenfeld; in "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," Harold Rosenberg. And in Ravelstein, Allan Bloom, Bellow's longtime colleague at the University of Chicago's School of Social Thought. But Bloom and Bellow were more entangled—more raveled—than academic colleagues usually are: they were cognitive companions, mutual brain-pickers, and, in Bloom's Platonic lingo, true friends. For Bloom especially, friendship was a calling, "the community of those who seek the truth, the potential knowers." In 1987, Bellow supplied a foreword to The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom's startling bestseller—startling because it was a bestseller, despite its countless invocations of Socrates, Herodotus, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Bacon, Newton, and all the other denizens of the philosophical mind. Summing up Bloom, Bellow faithfully reported, "Professor Bloom is neither a debunker nor a satirist, and his conception of seriousness carries him far beyond the positions of academia"—and then ran off the Bloomian rails to tumble into engaging self-clarification. With familiar antic Bellovian bounce, Bellow wrote, "There was not a chance in the world that Chicago, with the agreement of my eagerly Americanizing extended family, would make me in its image. Before I was capable of thinking clearly, my resistance to its material weight took the form of obstinacy. I couldn't say why I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment. But gainfulness, utility, prudence, business, had no hold on me. My mother wanted me to be a fiddler, or, failing that, a rabbi." (He became, in a way, both: a fiddler with the sharps and flats of American prose, and a metaphysical ruminator.) Bloom, too, in the final pages of his book, spoke of living "independent of accidents, of circumstance"—a view, Bellow affirmed, that was "the seed from which my life grew."

  Two self-propelled thinkers, freed from predictive forces. They had in common an innate longing, revealed in youth, for the bliss of Idea. Bloom, under the head "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede": "When I
was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life." The university, he early came to understand, "provided an atmosphere of free inquiry, and therefore excluded what is not conducive to or is inimical to such inquiry. It made a distinction between what is important and not important. It protected the tradition, not because tradition is tradition but because tradition provides models of discussion on a uniquely high level. It contained marvels and made possible friendships consisting in shared experiences of those marvels." And Bellow, spilling the beans among the wayward paragraphs of his foreword: "Reluctantly my father allowed me at seventeen to enter the university, where I was an enthusiastic (wildly excited) but erratic and contrary student. If I signed up for Economics 201, I was sure to spend all my time reading Ibsen and Shaw. Registering for a poetry course, I was soon bored by meter and stanzas, and shifted my attention to Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Lenin's What Is to Be Done? ... I preferred to read poetry on my own without the benefit of lectures on the caesura." Both young men are "wildly excited" by this opening into the seductions of ultimate meaning. One becomes an extraordinary teacher. The other becomes Saul Bellow. One writes the cardboard sentences, workmanlike and often mentally exhilarating, of the intellectual nonwriter. The other writes. For years, until Bloom's death, the two are true friends—a friendship bred in Chicago, with robust tendrils stretching toward ancient Athens and the dustiness of upper Broadway. Bloom, like the Ravelstein of Bellow's novel, is in thrall to Socrates. Like Ravelstein, he publishes a volume critical of the displacement of humanist liberal culture by the pieties of political cant. Like Ravelstein, he earns a fortune from his book and feels the venom of the radical left. Like Ravelstein, he is a homosexual who reveres eros and scorns gay rights; again like Ravelstein, he has a Chinese lover. This ought to be more than enough to make the case for Ravelstein as román á clef. But there is no case. Or: to make the case in so literal a fashion, one on one (on all fours, as lawyers put it), is to despise the idea of the novel—the principle of what a novel is—and to harbor a private lust to destroy it.