by John Updike
The mountains mobbed into a jumble of slopes and pitches, gun-metal heights and gunstock-colored gorges which didn’t separate into isolated cones but ran together in multiple masses connected by short, cloud-stuffed plateaus as cold as the snow in the saddles not far above or the blade-edged crestlines that were an icy blue.
This jumble is good; at times the mimetic effort becomes perhaps too muscular and colorful, as in this version of northern lights:
These were as pink in the night sky as the salmon she was splitting open by firelight, and glowed like antler tines, vibrated like a dozen tuning forks, fanned high into an arch of organ-pipe columns, and blanketed the sky with orange sheets that turned to a diaphanous white chiffon before sweeping upward into instant oblivion.
We are given, in any case, a great deal to visualize, and relatively little to hear and to feel. The travellers are laconic with one another, though some pungent things are said. The motives of the central two, Cecil and Sutton, are rather lightly indicated. Both, as if escaped from the author’s youthful circus novel, Cat Man, are circus-minded, with stunts they now and then perform. Cecil hopes to catch a bear, a squaw, and a Big Foot in these Rockies, and Sutton to settle down and mine gold, but rather fantastically: their quests don’t communicate excitement, and in the end Cecil’s bear seems to be both captured and forgotten. Perhaps this thinness of sympathetic motive holds a truth: the men of the far frontier were more concerned with getting away than going to, and the trip to the edge was its own mystical purpose. The foreground figures stand in this lovingly wrought homage to a stupendous terrain much as the little figures are planted in a great wilderness canvas by Frederick Church or Albert Bierstadt, to supply a sense of scale. Mr. Hoagland is better at “characters” than character; walk-ons like Ouddo, a deaf and affable old killer ensconced in eremetic luxury, and Switzer, an unarmed, Bible-quoting pilgrim carrying a bag of appleseeds, crackle with an authentic American crankiness. Among these vital, humanoid eccentrics should be included Big Foot, or Sasquatch, who turns out to be an apparition of hypnotic reality, smelling of “a mustardly piquancy or the vanilla scent of joe-pye weed” and after a while becoming just one more of the fauna in this remoteness, with “its peacock or parroty scream,… its baboon muzzle and bearish set of teeth, its body haired all over like a shaggy pony’s, its hands like a giant man’s or an ominous ape’s, its forehead and face more spiritual than intelligent but more human than animal.” Like Moby-Dick, this creature (whose presence makes Cecil feel woozy) reifies the murky and ominous meaning that gazes at man out of the external world in all its impervious magnificence. By setting himself in pursuit of this meaning, Mr. Hoagland joins cause with the Transcendentalists, and wilderness mystics like John Muir (in whose praise he has written a rapturous essay), and that long line of American novelists who have attempted in one gorgeous grab to say it all. He has come closer than most.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s Reindeer Moon has the one thing missing from Seven Rivers West—a lovable protagonist, whose travels and travails we follow with continuous concern. Her heroine, Yanan, tells her story in a limpid, unassuming voice that engages us from the start:
My story isn’t big like the stories some of the mammoth hunter men could tell. Mine doesn’t end with a huge pile of meat. My story has no captured women, only the gifts of a marriage exchange, and no battles, only arguments about the gifts. My story isn’t very long, and perhaps lacks wisdom, since the beginning was told me by other people and the end came sooner than I wanted. I was still a young woman when I left the world of the living and became a spirit of the dead.
Such a voice—firm and direct yet afloat in an indeterminate subjective space—avoids the two aesthetic perils of third-person ventures into the Paleolithic like Jean Auel’s best-selling volumes: the peril of sounding like animated anthropology, and that of sounding like one more querulous, ego-ridden modern novel. Yanan’s people feel, as do we, anger, fear, love, and jealousy. But their sense of personal possessiveness is qualified by a clan solidarity more intense than ours; they know hunger as a constant companion; their relationship with animals is close and murderous; and their religion is interwoven with earthly survival.
On the earthly level, Reindeer Moon tells of Yanan’s maturation, from a child to mother, in the space of perhaps four years. The years are harrowing but typical, for these semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers of the sub-arctic steppes, save for the winter when the cruel deaths of her mother and then her father isolate the still-girlish Yanan, with her little sister, Meri, in a wild world bare of clan protection. In the tale’s most compelling and alarming episode, the two children manage to survive with the help of a similarly isolated female wolf and her one cub, and eventually make their way, living like animals in burrows and crevices, off roots and frogs, to a lodge of their kin. On the unearthly level, Yanan, as her opening sentences announce, dies young; yet she continues, as “a spirit of the dead,” to experience and to function in the life of her clan, as a guardian of her people’s lodge. In its matter-of-fact interlarding of a brief life with its wide-ranging afterlife Reindeer Moon is something of a tour de force, but rarely feels strained, or cute. Partly under her own volition and partly under the magical influence of the tribal shamans, Yanan as spirit takes the form of a number of creatures—a wolf, a deer, a raven, an owl, a bustard, a lion, even a mammoth—and re-enters reality from their angles. The novel gains thereby an entrancing variety and airiness of texture, while deepening its basic theme, which I took to be the terms upon which we human animals enjoy our place in nature.
Mrs. Thomas’s writing runs smooth and almost colorless and rarely thickens into one of Mr. Hoagland’s poetic knots. But our awareness of such a basic comfort as shelter is exquisitely sharpened by a simple sentence like “As we reached the middle of the woods in the early evening, tiny, grainy snowflakes began to fall.” Yanan and Meri have that day abandoned the lodge where their father’s corpse lies—he has died, after days of delirium and coma, of an infected wolverine bite—and the tiny, grainy snowflakes, falling into their hopeless trudge through this vast inhuman wilderness, have the weight of terror, of our young species’ terrible frail loneliness. Food, too—what it means to be a carnivore—is comprehended anew, through the dozens of pitiless killings described in the novel with a coolly detailed accuracy. And the necessary tightness of the social weave that holds hunger and cold and predators at bay is illustrated by the cunning shape of the plot: Yanan’s fatal sin, her break with the clan, comes during a fight precipitated by her stealing and destroying, to spare her sister’s feelings, what she takes to be the pelt of the wolf cub who became a brother to her sister during the winter they were forced to live with wolves. And they had come to that pass, really, through an impetuous decision of their father’s to remove his family from the larger clan because of an imagined slight. From one breach of order, others flow; no violation of taboo or mutual trust goes without its disruptive effect, and all must be repaired.
The incessant mending of the tribal consensus includes placatory rites directed at the gods—the Bear and the Woman Ohun. Man has extended his social net upward into the air, and rising smoke carries offerings of blood and meat to the spirits. The urgency of these natural and supernatural interconnections lends Reindeer Moon an intrinsic coherence and suspensefulness that modern novels, describing a world where the social unit is relatively loose and diffuse, must grope for. In Seven Rivers West, the deaths and matings, as set down by Mr. Hoagland’s modern male sensibility, have a disjunct abruptness, as if to point up the cosmic indifference that frames such dramatic animal moments; in Reindeer Moon, the pace feels softer—each crisis rounded in the telling so that we can follow its curve, each event a fruit held and pulled from the tree of life.
As Yanan tells us at the outset, hers is a woman’s tale. Its feminist overtones are audible but not strident. Since, from the pharaohs on, women have been assigned a back seat in history, there is a tendency to claim prehistory as their turf. “M
en own the meat,” Yanan tells us, but “Women own the families, the lineages.” Her cousin Teal instructs her, “You came from a strong lineage, a Fire River lineage. If you’re afraid of initiation or coitus, you mustn’t show it.” The implied moral of Yanan’s heroic trek with Meri is that women can do it. Wielding the heavy spear taken from beside her father’s corpse, she hunts with the men. She fights being beaten by her husband and, when the time comes, proudly attempts to give birth to her child away from the lodge, with only little Meri in attendance. She overreaches: women in the time of Reindeer Moon still must be creatures of endurance and submission. They less make things happen than have things happen to them. “What is happening to me?” Yanan asks herself when she first makes love, echoing the exact words her mother uttered when she found herself dying of a hemorrhage. Teal tells Yanan, “These women’s things—menstruation, initiation, childbirth—they aren’t very difficult and don’t need skill or knowledge.… They just happen. You need only to keep quiet.” When Yanan asks, “Why must I?” Teal answers grimly, “We must. It’s the Woman Ohun’s plan.” Yanan’s, and Mrs. Thomas’s, vision of triumphant femininity is endearingly embodied in the hulk of an old female mammoth, the leader of a herd that Yanan joins in her spirit form—the most remarkable in a delightful, humorous, and scrupulous series of empathetic animal portraits:
The elderly leader waited for me to come near. With her head high and her eyes squinting, her chin tight, her cheeks sucked in, and her lips pressed firmly together, the large mammoth seemed strong-minded. Her ears were small and tattered as if they had been frozen when she was young. Her tusks were long, sweeping out and down, then curving inward and upward, with grooves and scratches on them—tusks far older than mine, which were still growing into their downward curve. By the early light her shedding, patchy hair looked black; it was matted on her flanks but sleek on her chest where her summer coat parted over her breasts, which showed behind her forelegs as the breasts of a woman on her hands and knees show behind her arms. When the gathering light shone through this mammoth’s hair, I saw its red color.
This monstrous yet not unfriendly vision, with its womanly breasts and blood-colored tint, corresponds to Mr. Hoagland’s affecting, quizzical portrait of Sasquatch and to Melville’s great picture, in the eighty-seventh chapter of Moby-Dick, of “The Grand Armada,” the whale society, complete with nursing mothers and amorous couples, “suspended in those watery vaults”: a vision, that is, of something quite other in nature, beyond the confines of human culture, that yet gazes back at us with eyes not so unlike our own.
* Both, as it happened, distinctly prompted by European models: Masters’s poems by Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, which the editor of the St. Louis publication Reedy’s Mirror gave him in 1913, and Miss Stein’s trilogy, written in Paris, by Flaubert’s Three Lives, which her brother Leo had urged her to translate.
† For an indignant account of the complete text, by someone who has perused the manuscripts at the Kennedy Library in Boston, see “Ernest Hemingway’s Real Garden of Eden” in Barbara Probst Solomon’s Horse-Trading and Ecstasy (North Point, 1989).
‡ In another regard, the cast of characters has been simplified; the summer of 1926 was complicated by young Bumby Hemingway’s persistent whooping cough, which led to the family’s being placed in quarantine by Sara and Gerald Murphy’s British doctor (for this was also the fabled Riviera summer of the Murphys, the MacLeishes, and the Fitzgeralds at Cap d’Antibes, memorialized at the outset of Tender Is the Night; it was this summer when Hemingway showed Fitzgerald the carbon copy of The Sun Also Rises and received the criticisms that decisively improved the text). Pauline wrote from Paris that she had had whooping cough and invaded the quarantine, joining the little family first at the rented villa, Villa Paquita at Juan-les-Pins, borrowed from the Fitzgeralds, and then in the rooms at the nearby Hôtel de la Pinède. The fourth and fifth members of the ménage à trois, the Hemingways’ ailing two-year-old Bumby and the so-called femme de ménage Madame Rohrbach, lived in a separate bungalow and presumably joined them on the beach. The sensations of a father about to desert his toddling son were understandably not added to David Bourne’s welter of mixed feelings. Hadley’s own nice description, as of 1967, to Baker of this interval (which ended in July, when the Hemingways, Pauline, and the Murphys went to Pamplona) perhaps should be given in her words, as they appear in Bernice Kert’s The Hemingway Women (1983): “Here it was that the three breakfast trays, three wet bathing suits on the line, three bicycles were to be found. Pauline tried to teach me to dive, but I was not a success. Ernest wanted us to play bridge but I found it hard to concentrate. We spent all morning on the beach sunning or swimming, lunched in our little garden. After siesta time there were long bicycle rides along the Golfe de Juan.”
§ Whereas the heroine of Marya goes to college in Port Oriskany, from a city “two hundred-odd miles to the west,” Enid Maria leaves Port Oriskany for the Westcott School of Music in Rochester. Higher education, not marriage, constitutes the post-feminist novel’s absolving fadeout and happy ending. Enid walks the paths of her campus as if treading Heaven’s golden streets: “Did she deserve this, any of it, this place of cobblestone paths and green quadrangles, Gothic buildings, soaring arches …? Wave upon wave of happiness washed over her. You don’t deserve it, she knew but she didn’t care.”
‖ A novel in many ways similar, and in some ways superior, to the work under discussion—more boldly ranging in its characters, and with a livelier ambivalence in its attitude toward home and homeboundness. Its Emerson family, like the Learys, enjoys comfortable wealth and the rapport of conspirators, but it is a quarrelsome rapport, and the mother, like the one in Homesick Restaurant, is husbandless and regarded by the children as tyrannical and tiresome. Mrs. Emerson and her son Andrew are among the author’s most notable domestic monsters. Her gifts as a carver of gargoyles have been perhaps underindulged.
a Anne Tyler’s Macon Leary came to the same conclusion: “Who you are when you are with somebody may matter more than whether you love her.”
b I did wonder, though, if “hog heaven” and “zoo” in the slang sense of mass confusion were in the language a century ago, and if one could speak of a “Czechoslovak” language before Czechoslovakia was founded, in 1918.
PHILIP ROTH
Doing His Thing
ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND, by Philip Roth. 225 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.
In this episodic sequel to The Ghost Writer, the fledgling writer Nathan Zuckerman now struggles with the wealth, fame, intrusions, and estrangements bestowed upon him by the enormous success of his fourth novel, Carnovsky. Zuckerman’s parents, his thoroughly Jewish Newark, his discardable shiksa consorts, his pangs of guilt and impatience, his love for the classics of Western thought, and his fondness for Forties trivia may be already familiar to chronic readers of Mr. Roth, who has evolved from the broad-shouldered realist of Letting Go, the frenzied fantasist of The Great American Novel, and the unbuttoned psychodramatist of Portnoy’s Complaint into something of an exquisitist, moving, in his last four novels, among his by now highly polished themes with ever more expertness and care. The comic diatribes seem almost engraved, they are so finely tuned, and the polarities between id and superego, Jew and goy, artistic honesty and human decency are as beautifully played upon as the themes in a Bach fugue. Always one of the most intelligent and energetic of American authors, Roth has now become one of the most scrupulous, and the grateful, amused, enlightened reader would be a churl indeed if he complained at the narrowing, almost miniaturized, scope of Roth’s bejewelled and frisky world.
Warning: this short work, already thoroughly pre-published by a trio of magazines, bears on its jacket flaps a plot summary almost as long and gratuitous as a master’s thesis. Ignore it or forfeit all surprises, pleasant and unpleasant.
Yahweh over Dionysus, in Disputed Decision
THE ANATOMY LESSON, by Philip Roth. 291 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.
Aside from the financial gain to yourself, what benefit do you think publishing this story in a national magazine will have for (a) your family; (b) your community; (c) the Jewish religion; (d) the well-being of the Jewish people?
And:
Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?
Lonoff (who died in 1961; this episode occurred in the Fifties) had his own hands full with a frolicsome houseguest who may have been really Anne Frank. But he took a moment to reassure Zuckerman that niceness is not of the essence in being a writer, and, demonstrating the social embarrassments of creativity, galloped off in pursuit of his wife, Hope, who had just decamped “in search of a less noble calling.” By the time of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), our ethically troubled young writer had suppressed his desire to please the respectable Jewish citizens of Newark long enough to produce an uninhibited novel, Carnovsky, which in the scope of its success and scandal can be compared only to Mr. Roth’s own Portnoy’s Complaint. Success brought its misadventures, of which the most distressing was Zuckerman’s father, on his deathbed, calling his son a “bastard.” Nathan’s younger brother, Henry, confirmed the epithet in a sudden diatribe as they, having buried their father, parted at the Newark airport: