by John Updike
God’s Grace, however, as its title conveys, is less primatological than theological. It contains God as a character, speaking in quadruple quotation marks and a kind of vers libre:
“ “Why do you contend
with Me, Mr. Cohn?…
Who are you
to understand
the Lord’s intention?
How can I explain
my mystery
to your mind?
Can a cripple ascend
a flaming of stars?” ”
Cohn quarrels with God but also says kaddish and observes seder and promulgates a set of seven commandments, of which the second reads, “Note: God is not Love, God is God. Remember Him.” The fatal schism in Cohn’s island community stems not only from sexual rivalry but from doctrinal dispute; Buz alters this admonition to read “God is love.” The chimpanzees end as barbaric Christians, making a blood sacrifice; only the gorilla, wearing a yarmulke he has found in the forest, is left to chant the ancient words of Judaism. God’s (rather parsimonious) grace also surfaces in Cohn’s sudden awareness of his own long white beard—“ ‘Merciful God,’ he said, ‘I am an old man. The Lord has let me live my life out’ ”—and in the many signs that the Creator, for all His wrath, is regenerating the world, with new kinds of vegetation and, it may eventually be, with a new form of primate civilization. Not that Malamud’s fable is not bitter and pessimistic; but its darkness remains, as it were, orthodox, and does not spill out of those presumptions which tend to be, for Malamud characters, coterminous with their own identities. Jewishness, he and other fiction writers (Singer and Ozick more than Bellow and Roth) seem to say, is in part a religious condition but is not negated by irreligion, as, say, a disavowal of faith removes a person from the lists of Christianity or Islam. A Jew does not merely choose, he is chosen; like Jehovah Himself, Jewishness sticks in some realm beyond argument and dethronement. Adversity merely confirms the Jew’s distinctive condition. Leo Finkle, the hero of “The Magic Barrel,” draws from his misery “the consolation that he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered.” In The Assistant, Frankie Alpine takes up Morris Bober’s ordeal by grocery store and seeks out the pain of circumcision: “The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew.” The customary round of dutifulness, abasement, failure, and obdurate ritual with which Malamud’s Jews define themselves in a world of woe rattles a little loosely, however, in a world swept clean: a gigantic stage of desolation in one corner of which Cohn plays his old 78s of a cantor’s melodious lamentations and chimpanzees lisp answers to the seder’s Four Questions. The allegory, with its random sprinkling of Biblical names and with Buz doubling as Jesus and Judas, seems confused, and our reaction to it is further confused by the historical Holocaust that did occur and that has attached itself to the very meaning of Jewishness. A Jew reasserting his faith in the wake of Hitler’s Holocaust is a Judaic hero, a son of Abraham; Cohn in the context of global annihilation seems no more or less brave and quixotic than a Mormon or a devout animist in the same dire circumstances.
An instructive contrast with the eschatology of God’s Grace is provided by Stanley Elkin’s supernatural triptych The Living End (1979). The writers are in many ways similar; Elkin’s cadences often remind us strikingly of Malamud’s, at a slightly tougher pitch, corresponding perhaps to a generation’s deterioration in the inner cities where both are most at home. Elkin has chosen to burlesque, by taking it literally, a specifically Christian version of heaven and hell: eternal fire is rendered with savage verve; the delights of heaven are mercilessly trivialized in the cataloguing; the sacred intimacies of the Holy Trinity are served up as family comedy. The cosmic indictment—Why is there suffering? Why is Creation such a cruel botch?—is delivered, not once but often, against a flip, side-of-the-mouth Creator who could be played by George Burns. The indictment, of course, has already appeared in the Book of Job, and God replies to Malamud’s Cohn and Elkin’s protagonist, Ellerbee, in the gist of the reply Job received: “Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth … Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days?” Job responded docilely, “Behold, I am vile.” Ellerbee stridently keeps demanding “an explanation! None of this what-was-I-doing-when-You-pissed-the-oceans stuff, where I was when You colored the nigger and ignited Hell.” Even Cohn shakes his fist and demands, “You have destroyed mankind. Our children are all dead. Where are justice and mercy?” Yet Cohn continues to be a Jew, idealistic and pious, leaving behind him the ragged start of a new world, while Elkin’s characters cannot rest until they have goaded God into annihilating “everything” (author’s italics).
Elkin, drawing on some deep heat of indignation, has composed the purer protest, a litany of scorn and incredulity directed against the images of conventional popular Christianity. None of his sufferers confess to any religious experience prior to their afterlives; we guess they are Jews—some of them—only from the way they talk. Perhaps in Elkin’s Midwest (he teaches in St. Louis; The Living End is set in Minneapolis–St. Paul) Christian evangels are less ignorable than in Malamud’s Manhattan and Bennington haunts. Christians and apes seem about equally remote from the essential humanity of Calvin Cohn. Yet he wishes the world well. Small miracles surround him. Begun, one guesses, in a fury at a world that can include the possibility of its own destruction, God’s Grace goes on to sing such precarious pleasures as intercourse with a chimpanzee: “There was an instant electric connection and Cohn parted with his seed as she possessed it. He felt himself happily drawn clean of sperm.” Happiness, usually sexual, peeks through the tatters that Malamud’s humble sufferers wear and is often what we remember best—Frank Alpine’s glimpse of Helen Bober naked through the bathroom window of The Assistant; in A New Life Levin’s lovemaking with Pauline “in the open forest, nothing less, what triumph!” As a cosmic fable, God’s Grace—a tender retelling of Noah’s or Lot’s shame and a comic sketch of final horror—is a muddle; but therein lies its mercy.
Summonses, Indictments, Extenuating Circumstances
A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS, by Peter Taylor. 209 pp. Knopf, 1986.
Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis is not quite the distinguished short-story writer’s first novel; thirty-six years ago he published A Woman of Means, which, little more than forty thousand words long, might be called a novella. The two books have much in common: a narrator who was moved from a bucolic Tennessee childhood to a big house in a river city (Memphis, St. Louis), a handsome and strong-willed father recovering from a business setback, a witty but somehow incapacitated and mentally fragile mother-figure (a mother, a stepmother), two older and wearingly vivacious sisters or stepsisters, a psychological core of ambivalent and ruminative passivity, and a lovingly detailed (architecturally, sociologically) portrait of life in the upper classes of the Upper South between the two world wars. This last is Mr. Taylor’s terrain, and he rarely strays from it. The narrator of A Summons to Memphis, Phillip Carver, lives in Manhattan, on West 82nd Street (“one of the safer neighborhoods on the Upper West Side, but still we have to be very careful”), with a woman fifteen years younger, Holly Kaplan. New York, that raucous plenitude, is felt as a kind of blissfully blank limbo, and the principal charm of his mistress seems to be that she, from a prosperous Jewish family in Cleveland, shares with the forty-nine-year-old Southern refugee a rueful, guilty obsession with the tribal reality left behind. “She felt they had a real life out there in Cleveland that she didn’t have, had never had, would never have now.” Both Holly and Phillip are in publishing, and their consuming activities seem to be reading galley proofs and discussing their families:
Suddenly, with a sigh, Holly blew out a great billow of smoke and said irritably that I was really absolutely obsessed with my family!
This was an accusation which Holly and I frequently hurled at each other. In the beginning our complaints about our families had been perhaps our deepest bond. We had long since, however, worn out the subject.
So worn out, indeed, that in t
he course of the novel they separate, only to be reunited on the firm basis of more family talk: “During the days and weeks that followed Holly and I talked of almost nothing but our two families.… And we sat there in the twilight and sipped our drinks while we talked our own combined nonsense together, each his or her own brand of inconclusive nonsense about the reconciliation of fathers and children, talked on and on until total darkness fell.…”
In the course of this meandering account it is possible to feel like Holly when she blew out the impatient billow of smoke. After a lifetime of tracing teacup-tempests among genteel Tennesseeans, Mr. Taylor retains an unslaked appetite for the local nuance. The rather subtle (to Yankees, at least) differences between the styles of Memphis and Nashville are thoroughly and repeatedly gone into, with instructive side-glances at Knoxville and Chattanooga. “Nashville,” an old social arbiter of that town explains, “is a city of schools and churches, whereas Memphis is—well, Memphis is something else again. Memphis is a place of steamboats and cotton gins, of card playing and hotel society.” The narrator puts it, “Memphis was today. Nashville was yesterday.” His own temperamental preference, as we could guess from his leisurely, laggard prose, is for yesterday: “As one walks or rides down any street in Nashville one can feel now and again that he has just glimpsed some pedestrian on the sidewalk who was not quite real somehow, who with a glance over his shoulder or with a look in his disenchanted eye has warned one not to believe too much in the plastic present and has given warning that the past is still real and present somehow and is demanding something of all men like me who happen to pass that way.” When Phillip moves to Memphis, just turned thirteen, he reports to school “in knee britches and wearing a sort of Buster Brown, highly starched collar” and discovers that (this is 1931), not only is his costume retrograde but his hair is cut too long, and he even fails to carry his books the Memphis way—“alongside my hip or thigh, with my arm hanging straight down from shoulder to wrist” rather than (evidently Nashville-style) “like a girl, in the crook of my arm.” The accents are different, and men play golf instead of ride to hounds and don’t wear cutaways downtown to the office: “Unlike other Memphis businessmen [George Carver, Phillip’s father] frequently went to his office wearing striped trousers and a cutaway jacket—a morning suit, no less—along with a starched wing collar and a gray four-in-hand silk tie.” He comes to adopt the Memphis way of dressing: “in Manhattan or even in Nashville or Knoxville or Chattanooga people on the street might have turned and stared at Father and remarked on the peculiar cut of his jacket and the width of his hat brim.” A hat alone will send Mr. Taylor into a rhapsody of Southern social history:
It seems that when a local gentleman was on the courthouse square of Thornton or when he was walking his own land in that part of the world, a hat was a very important item of apparel. Father’s father and his grandfather always ordered their hats from a manufacturer in St. Louis, and Father did so too, wherever he might be living. Even I can remember, as a small child, seeing my father and my paternal grandfather and greatgrandfather, for that matter, in their hats walking the farm roads on the Town Farm, as we called it, or crossing the wide, wooden blocks in the streets on the courthouse square. In their law practice and even in their wide-ranging farm dealings (they also owned cotton farms in western Kentucky as well as in southern Illinois and southeastern Missouri) there were various occasions in the year when it was necessary for them to visit St. Louis and Chicago. Whether those visits related to their law practice or their landowning I don’t know. Anyhow, it was always in St. Louis that they bought their hats and in Chicago whatsoever sporting equipment they owned. They shopped there in person for those articles or they ordered them through the mail from “houses” where they were known. They spoke of St. Louis as their “hat place,” and Father continued to do so always. I am sure it was in a St. Louis hat that he met me that near noonday when I arrived at the Memphis airport. On the other hand, his shoes would always be Nashville shoes.
Now, this is admirably circumstantial and, within the generous space demanded by the unhurried tone, elegantly turned; but it is talk, not action. Direct dialogue in A Summons to Memphis is sparse, and the plot feels skimped, even snubbed. Although Mr. Taylor tells us a great deal about costumes, furniture, and civic differences, there is much he avoids showing. Indeed, he almost cruelly teases, with his melodious divagations and his practiced skill at foreshadowing and delaying climaxes, the reader of this novel. Its kernel of action—Phillip Carver’s trip to Memphis at the summons of his sisters, in 1967—does not occur until well after midpoint. He at last boards the plane on page 132, arrives at the Memphis airport on page 135, and by page 153 is back on a plane, winging his way into more cloudy retrospect after having refused (implausibly, I think) to spend a single night with his father and sisters. And the events while he is briefly there seem oddly betranced; though his vital if elderly father has been frustrated in an attempt at marriage, the old man submits without a peep, and though his son has been summoned a thousand miles for a family conference, he says hardly a word. Concerning an earlier frustration, it is not made clear why or how the father covertly wrecks the romance between Phillip, who is a soldier and all of twenty-three, and Clara Price, who sounds lovely and, even if she does hail from far-off Chattanooga, would appear to be socially acceptable; she and her family live “in a splendid Tudor-style house atop Lookout Mountain”—presumably above bribery and bullying persuasion. Some nuance, no doubt, escaped me, just as, in trying to grasp the scarcely-to-be-forgiven trauma of being moved from Nashville to Memphis, I fastened on the tragic fact that the two girls thereby “came out” in the wrong city and wasted their debutante parties: “Young ladies in present-day Memphis and Nashville cannot possibly conceive the profound significance that the debutante season once held for their like or imagine the strict rules that it was death to disobey.” In any case, one might argue that the action of the novel is not so much the doings, past and present, of the Tennessee Carvers but the struggle by the self-exiled Phillip, staged in “these very irregular notebooks” of his which we are mysteriously reading, to come to terms with his past—the magnificent, crushing father, the “cluttered-up, bourgeois life,” the tenacious, static idyll of the South. As the boy rode behind his father, outside of Nashville, “the foliage of the black gums and maples and oaks often met overhead on those lanes, and it seems to me that every morning somewhere on our ride there would be an old Negro man bent down beside one of the walls, making repairs. It was a timeless scene. I could not imagine a past time when it had not been just so or a future time when it would not be the same.” From this South, with its omnipresent past, Mr. Taylor, like Faulkner, draws endless inspiration; he stirs and stirs the same waters, watching them darken and deepen, while abstaining from Faulkner’s violent modernist gestures. He stirs instead with a Jamesian sort of spoon.
In praise of A Woman of Means thirty-six years ago, Robert Penn Warren claimed for it “the excitement of being constantly on the verge of deep perceptions and deep interpretations.” Peter Taylor keeps us on the verge much of the time. A Woman of Means did plunge, with the empathy of a James Agee or a William Maxwell, into the frightening dark of boyhood, when one is able to observe so much and do so little. Its evocation of a child’s helpless, sensitive world seemed to close hastily, but not until our essential loneliness and the precariousness of even the best-appointed home were made painfully clear. In A Summons to Memphis, though the canvas is broader and adorned with fine comic splashes, some of the narrative churning brings up only what is already floating on the surface: “And I grasped at once that my not having other luggage meant to him that we would not be delayed by waiting at the baggage-claim window.” Or, a perception still more hard-won:
But as we turned between the boxwoods at the entrance to Father’s two-acre plot, I at once became aware of a large rectangular object, somehow inimical to the scene, drawn up to the house and visible at the end of the two rows of old ceda
rs that lined the driveway. The house was set back some three hundred feet from the road, and when we had traversed half that distance I recognized the unlikely object as a commercial moving van. I was able to identify it immediately then by the name of the local storage warehouse which was writ in large red letters on the side of the van.
James’s heavily mirrored halls of mutual regard seem but feebly imitated by reflections like “I knew always that the affair referred to was pure fantasy but I do not know even now whether or not they knew I knew.” The diction at times is so fastidious that a smile at the narrator’s expense must be intended: “If slit skirts were the fashion, then my sisters’ would be vented well above the knees, exposing fleshy thighs which by this time in my sisters’ lives were indeed of no inconsiderable size.” Some sentences can only be called portly: “But about Alex Mercer himself there was something that made him forever fascinated by and sympathetic to that which he perhaps yearned after in spirit but which practically speaking he did not wish himself to become.” Such measured verbal groping among the shadows of morality and good intention has suffered a diminishment since James; he had no commerce with God but had retained the religious sense. In Phillip Carver’s world, no religion remains, just an old-fashioned code of behavior, and its defense is hard to distinguish from snobbery or, to use a word he uses of himself, lethargy. He is so imbued with lethargy that he speaks of “debating the question of how many angels could sit on the head of a pin” when in the conventional image, of course, the angels dance. He registers for the draft as a conscientious objector (in peacetime, early in 1941), but when the draft-board clerk fails to understand and sends in his form with the others, “this was so like a certain type of Memphis mentality … I could not even bring myself to protest”; he indifferently puts on his uniform and goes off to Fort Oglethorpe. When, six years later, he flees Memphis for New York, “it was as though someone else were dressing me and packing for me or at least as though I had no will of my own.” And when, in 1967, he discovers himself in the same restaurant with his long-lost love, Clara Price, he doesn’t trouble to get up from his chair and present himself; like those angels on the pin, he just sits. During his visits home, the dynamism of his ambitious father and animated, vengeful sisters oppresses him; it seems that they don’t share his knowledge of “how consummately and irreversibly life had already passed us by.” His narrative can scarcely bring itself to describe present events, and comes to life only when recapturing some moment or fact from the buried past. The prissy, circuitous language (confided to “notebooks” yet elaborately explanatory and in one spot openly concerned about “the reader”) is flavored with anachronisms like “for the nonce” and “lad.”