Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  Nor is the attitude toward the basic issue, the sexual core of romantic maneuver and plot, the same. James regards sex as a force, all right, and concedes it its power to inspire betrayal and social disruption, but he shows little interest in sex itself and little pleasure in tracing its living currents and contradictions; whereas Howells, in spite of the prudery that led him to deplore Chaucer and disdain Dreiser, is fascinated and truthful. The attraction between the forty-one-year-old Colville and the twenty-year-old Imogene is not purely a misunderstanding or piece of folly. Such matings were common enough in an age when men were expected to offer their brides an achieved social substance, and when for respectable women the only permissible sexual experience occurred within marriage. The former could hardly come to the altar too late, or the latter too early.

  When Colville, renewing old acquaintance and attending Mrs. Bowen’s soirée, first sees Imogene, dressed in ivory white, he asks his hostess, “Who is that Junoian young person at the end of the room?” Imogene, as their shadow-engagement takes hold, becomes indeed Junoian. She adopts an undeviating stance of cold enmity to her sexual rival, Mrs. Bowen, so recently her surrogate mother, and she begins to explore her new sexual rights with a speed that alarms Colville: “She pulled him to the sofa, and put his arm about her waist, with a simple fearlessness and matter-of-course promptness that made him shudder.” At the basic biological level, a girl of twenty can be a match for a man of over forty. Only Colville’s fastidious, facetious distancing and the fortuitous appearance of the attractive young Reverend Morton dampen the spark. Society’s complicity—Imogene’s mother, it turns out, is prepared to approve the match—combines with Colville’s instincts: “He felt sure, if anything were sure, that something in him, in spite of their wide disparity of years, had captured her fancy, and now in his abasement he felt again the charm of his own power over her. They were no farther apart in years than many a husband and wife; they would grow more and more together; there was youth enough in his heart yet; and who was pushing him away from her, forbidding him this treasure that he had but to put out his hand and make his own.” To an extent of which the author is perhaps unaware, Mrs. Bowen, heaped high though she is with tender epithets, has Juno’s place as the jealous wife forbidding her consort (no Zeus, but a Theodore) his death-defying conquest of a younger woman.

  Howells excelled in his portrayals of men in their normal moral indolence. Colville is shown “struggling stupidly with a confusion of desires which every man but no woman will understand.” He passively wallows in polymorphous sexuality as not two but three females compete in lavishing love upon him. The triangle has a fourth corner, the child Effie, whose wish to make him her father exerts the force that tips the balance. The vividness with which this ten-year-old makes her presence felt may be traced to the presence of an actual ten-year-old girl, Howells’s younger daughter, Mildred, on the European trip, of 1882–83, that gave him the refreshed Italian background of Indian Summer. If Imogene usurps the consortial love to which Mrs. Bowen feels entitled, Effie seizes the paternal attention for which Imogene pleads when she says: “If I am wrong in the least thing, criticise me, and I will try to be better.… Wouldn’t you like me to improve?”

  Colville’s evasive banter is least jarringly tuned to Effie’s prepubescent mentality. An unaccountable gap exists in his masculine make-up—the seventeen celibate and apparently chaste years spent in Des Vaches, with not a whisper of heterosexual involvement, leaving him free to take up his Florentine romance right where he left it, only this time with the alter ego of the original inamorata. Imogene, naïve or not, seems right in divining that Colville’s real love-object is his own youth, and shrewd in offering herself as an embodiment of it: “I want you to feel that I am your youth—the youth you were robbed of—given back to you.” Her “sentimental mission” is not misconceived, except in her estimate of Colville’s robustness. She is a match for him, but not he for her.

  With all his energy and breadth of interest, there was a nervous delicacy in Howells, a tendency toward depression and breakdown. His novels invite us to dabble in psychological waters because they are his chosen element, where only partly disclosed elements of his own unresolved psychology float. There is something in process, something not precisely formed about his characters, like—as Dorothy Parker said of the men and women drawn by Howells’s fellow Ohioan James Thurber—“unbaked cookies.” Here the contrast with Henry James tends to be in the other man’s favor, for James’s characters are nothing if not baked—finished, angular, crisp. They jab and scrape against one another where Howells’s characters tend to slide around their oppositions. James had a judgmental sharpness that readily becomes satire. The run-on chatter of his Daisy Miller, for instance, is startling and caricatural and coolly observed and in the end touching. She is full of herself, which makes her courted doom poignant, while Imogene Graham, not quite full and not quite empty, is created to be rescued and consigned to a vague future. Howells’s world may be more lifelike in its ambiguity and inconclusiveness, but James’s feels livelier, for being more aggressively imagined, with more than a glint of snobbery.

  Howells’s first imitative enthusiasm was for Heine, and he broke into print—aside from his youthful journalism—as a poet, in The Atlantic Monthly. A poet’s light touch and trust in the vagaries of rendering was ever to flavor his approach as a novelist, along with a prose style that remained lucid, nimble, and youthful. Again and again in Indian Summer, the felicity of the writing makes us pause in admiration: the brimful inventory of Florentine “traits and facts” at the end of the first chapter; the complex activity of adverbs in such a social image as “some English ladies entered, faintly acknowledging, provisionally ignoring, his presence”; the charming period detail of how the two heroines “stood pressing their hands against the warm fronts of their dresses, as the fashion of women is before a fire”; Colville’s first appraisal of Mrs. Bowen with its culminating simile: “She had, with all her flexibility, a certain charming stiffness, like the stiffness of a very tall feather.” The ubiquitous horses of this premotorized Italy are observed with a sympathy that readies us for the novel’s only incident of physical violence. Colville, having just appraised Mrs. Bowen, notices how the cab that takes her away is pulled by a “broken-kneed, tremulous little horse, gay in brass-mounted harness, and with a stiff turkey feather stuck upright at one ear in his headstall.” In the line of cabs at Madame Uccelli’s, “the horses had let their weary heads droop, and were easing their broken knees by extending their forelegs while they drowsed.” When the horses bringing them back from their tense journey to Fiesole bolt at the sight of a herd of black pigs, and drag the carriage off the road, it is as if the abused equine species at last claims its revenge.

  The natural world with its animal surges is not far from these prim drawing rooms. In the aftermath of a heated exchange between Imogene and Mrs. Bowen, “They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl’s vigil seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird that has beat itself all night against its cage, and still from time to time feebly strikes the bars with its wings.” In contrast, “Mrs. Bowen was simply worn to apathy.” The moods of these two competing women, caught in the entangling wraps of genteel late-Victorian propriety and social duty, are beautifully searched out, and their differences in social wisdom and natural vitality scrupulously kept in account. Howells feels sufficiently master of the feminine heart to dare present, as in the fine tenth chapter, conversation between the two of them, in female intimacy. On the level of manners, Imogene is a Mrs. Bowen in bud, an apprentice society woman, and Colville, as a specimen man, the somewhat erratic instrument of her education:

  He got himself another cup of tea, and coming back to her, allowed her to make the efforts to keep up the conversation, and was not without a malicious pleasure in her struggles. They interested him as social exercises which, however abrupt and undexterous now, were destined, with time and practice, to become the finesse
of a woman of society.

  These expatriate gentry have little to do but talk and improve their finesse as they drift across a Europe whose exchange rate favors the Gilded Age American dollar, and this leisure, this exclusive labor in human relationships, supplies a stately languor to the developments—to the exquisitely modulated evolution, conversation by conversation, of the characters toward their proper romantic fate. As subjects for a novel, they are rather too ideal, too complacently and volubly self-concerned. Howells would not write about Americans abroad again, turning to New York and a more muscular, Tolstoyan, socially challenging, economically panoramic style of fiction. James, on the other hand, never wearied of his Americans freed of the vacuous coarseness of America, and refined their scruples and disappointments into fictions so spectacularly finespun as to be modernist. No such late blooming awaited Howells; he never wrote better than in Indian Summer, though he wrote much more, and for decades admirably acted the part of Foremost American Man of Letters. His talent was very American in needing an injection of youth, of youth’s suppleness and careless rapture; his casual charm and vivacious accuracy of observation were definitively displayed in his very first novels, Their Wedding Journey and A Chance Acquaintance, not so much novels as elaborations of trips he and Mrs. Howells had taken.

  Indian Summer, too, has a trip at its heart, a return to Italy, and its hero, at the age of forty-one, is saying goodbye, on behalf of an author in his mid-forties, to youth. A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy, or more gracious acceptance of life’s irreversibility. This comedy’s curious Virgil, godless old Mr. Waters from Haddam East Village, states the optimistic, Emersonian principle that makes Howells’s novels so strangely delicious and diffident: “the wonderful degree of amelioration that any given difficulty finds in the realization.” Elsewhere, Mr. Waters avows that “men fail, but man succeeds.” Colville, amid the “illogical processes” of amorous tendency, somehow fails to evade an “affection he could not check without a degree of brutality for which only a better man would have the courage.” But mankind, in the form of a predominantly feminine polite society, succeeds in straightening out the tangle. Howells’s tropism toward “the smiling aspects of life” finds, in the microcosm of these few amiable tourists in Florence, a world where smiling does not deny the deeper intuitions of his realism.

  To Nature’s Diary, by Mikhail Prishvin

  THE RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE surprises the American visitor with an impression of feminine gentleness. Rollingly flat and most conspicuously marked by the wavering white verticals of the ubiquitous birches, it lacks the shaggy, rocky assertiveness a North American is used to. It seems a young and tender landscape, without defenses. When the single-station radio in the hotel room croons and wails its state-approved folk song, there is no mistaking what the song is about: the motherland. In the fall of 1964 I spent a month in the Soviet Union, and at the end of it my constant companion and weariless interpreter, Frieda Lurie, presented me with a copy of Prishvin’s Nature’s Diary. The volume, printed in slightly ragged type by Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House, was small enough to fit into a coat pocket and decorated with a few line drawings in the innocent Soviet style. Frieda could have chosen no nicer souvenir of her country. From its first pages—from Prishvin’s sighting of the first cloud of spring, “huge and warm, smooth and gleaming, also like the unruffled breast of a swan”—I felt drawn back into that maternal immensity, into a stately progress of weather and vital cycle upon a colossal stage, as related in a prose now limpidly transparent and now almost gruff, a foxy prose glistening with alert specifics and with joie de vivre.

  Nature’s Diary records a Russian’s love of his land, particularly of the swampy, almost featureless, virtually endless taiga that stretches, south of the tundra, from the Gulf of Finland to the Sea of Okhotsk. Most of Siberia is taiga, but great tracts of European Russia also hold these sub-arctic forests of spruce and fir and birch and aspen, abounding in wildlife; the observations and adventures recorded in Prishvin’s Diary stem from a year, the author’s fiftieth, spent in deliberate nature study at a rudimentary research station near Lake Pleshcheyevo, less than a hundred miles northeast of Moscow. This was the time of Lenin’s dying and the murderous struggles for power from which Stalin emerged triumphant and Trotsky an exile; but Communism intrudes rarely into the texture of life by Lake Pleshcheyevo, and when it does it takes the innocuous form of some raggle-taggle and self-important young Komsomol members. The youthful Socialist republic was still a world where one could get away from it all. “My love for nature,” Prishvin boasts, “has never prevented me from liking beautiful cities and their complex and fascinating world. But when I tire of city life I take a tram and within twenty minutes am out in the open again. I must have been cut out for a free existence. I can live for years in the huts of fishermen, hunters and peasants.”

  Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin, the son of a rich merchant, was born in 1873 on the family estate in the north of Russia. While a student at Riga, he was arrested for revolutionary activity. After his release, he studied in Leipzig and in 1902 received a degree in agronomy. As young gentlemen were in those years, Prishvin was free to indulge his interests, and he travelled throughout Russia, Central Asia, and the Far East, educating himself in ornithology, linguistics, folklore, and ethnography. His first two books—In the Land of Unfrightened Birds and Animals (1907) and Small, Round Loaf (1908)—dealt with northern Russia and the customs and legends of its peasants. According to the literary historian D. S. Mirsky, “These studies taught Prishvin to value the originality of the uneducated Russian and the native force of ‘unlatinized’ Russian speech.” Mirsky claims Prishvin to have been further influenced along these lines by a younger writer, the Symbolist Alexey Remizov, whose greatly varied production was “unified by one purpose—which is to delatinize and defrenchify the Russian literary language and to restore to it its natural Russian raciness.” While such linguistic nuances can scarcely be conveyed in translation, this rendering by Lev Navrozov does permit us to feel a raciness in the highly informal organization—an impulsiveness of movement that keeps the reader constantly and pleasantly off-balance as he moves with Prishvin through the year. Almost half the book, for instance, is taken up with spring, and the summer section is monopolized by the author’s hunting dogs, and the final pages are concerned with a bear hunt that took place nowhere near Lake Pleshcheyevo. Nature’s Diary, and Prishvin’s other rural sketches, achieved considerable popularity with an increasingly urbanized Soviet public; he maintained, we are told, his artistic independence throughout the Stalin era, and died in 1954, at the age of eighty-one.

  The nature he contributes to the Penguin Nature Library seems familiar; we have already met it in the scenery of Turgenev and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Nabokov. The continental cold is slow to relinquish the land—we read of frost in May—and quick to reclaim it, with flurries of snow and a film of morning ice on the autumnal marshes. But the fauna, above all the birds, begins its cycles of procreation in the depths of winter, and Prishvin’s swift eye sees life everywhere. Carrion crows somersault in their love frenzy, the blackcocks sing and mate as the icy creeks thaw into song, the cranes and kestrels return, and ducks fill the air with noise. Man, too, is active in the cold landscape: “The snow was frozen hard and powdered by the latest fall. The going was pure joy whichever way we turned.” And then, gradually, the frogs stir, the finches arrive, grass appears, and the first mushrooms and the early flowers, the blossoms of aspen and lungwort; the first cuckoo is heard, and then the first nightingale. These manifestations of thaw and revival are intermixed, in Prishvin’s diary entries, with the comings and goings of men—with local gossip and the lore of pike fishermen, with an archaeological expedition and an ethnological excursion to see a pre-Christian village rite, the Nettle Feast. Nature, which to an American instinct looms as purely and grandly inhuman as an Ansel Adams photograph, is for the Russian interwoven with hum
anity; this North Russia is a vast and forbidding but long-inhabited terrain, warmed in its remotest corners by the traces of men. In the dead cold of a winter night, a hunter in pursuit of a marten burns an anthill to make himself a warm bed of ashes, and the charred ruins remember him. On a desolate marsh, Prishvin (to his annoyance) suddenly spots another man walking. He participates in an archaeological dig, which finds evidence of long habitation, the skull of a prehistoric predecessor—“more impressive” than he had expected, the skull’s color “not the colour of bone but almost that of copper or burnt clay,” the teeth and forehead perfectly white. Everywhere in this wild landscape, people pop up, more than we can keep track of. The peasantry seems ubiquitous, like walking tummocks or another species of animal, part of the land’s furniture and casually included in this inventory: