Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  Iris Murdoch cannot be accused of writing “women’s novels”; her portly fictions, in later years, lean heavily toward male protagonists, while the female characters become ever more fey and glimmery will-o’-the-wisps—sex objects, or quest objects, of an ethereal sort. Or else they are brisk masculine professionals, who matter-of-factly say things like “I can’t stand these prophets of doom, gloating over the collapse of civilisation, they’re almost always anti-women. I think Harry despises women, well I suppose most men do.” Thus speaks Dr. Ursula Brightwalton, without indignation and on the verbal run like most Murdoch characters, in this prodigious author’s latest epic of England’s educated classes, The Good Apprentice. It seemed to me to be, though nearly as long, considerably less spacious and vigorous than its predecessor, The Philosopher’s Pupil. The earlier novel’s fictional spa of Ennistone gave the author’s imagination room to roam amusingly through the social scale and met it, at many turns, with the stimulating physicality of public baths, underground pipes, and canals winding through a thoroughly mapped town plan. In The Good Apprentice (a title I never came to understand; who is apprenticed to what?), water takes the form of a vague-making fog, of flooded boggy fens, and of a sea that, like the moral of this book, seems near at hand but is rarely glimpsed.

  We must applaud the attempt to cross, in imagination, the sexual dividing line; but I do miss the certain edge Miss Murdoch’s books had when their protagonists were young women, with their harassed acuity and nimble irony. She has chosen here to locate the action of the novel all too exclusively in the minds and mental turmoil of two rather priggish and self-centered young men: Edward Baltram and his so-called brother, Stuart Cuno. Though they grew up in the same household, they are not blood brothers. Edward is the son of the famous painter Jesse Baltram and his mistress, Chloe Warriston, and Stuart of the famous writer Casimir Cuno’s son Harry, who married Chloe when she was pregnant with Edward, and Harry’s first wife, Teresa née O’Neill, a Catholic from New Zealand who, like Chloe, died young, having produced one male child. Both young men have put their education (Edward in French, Stuart in math) on hold while they puzzle through the spiritual crises brought about, respectively, by Edward’s feeding a friend, Mark Wilsden, a drug that caused him to jump out of a window, and by Stuart’s deciding to renounce sex and devote himself to goodness, a step considered all the more extraordinary because he does not believe in God. In Miss Murdoch’s long gallery of Godless saints and seekers, Stuart is one of the dimmest; he takes no significant actions and interacts with the other characters mostly by submitting to their astonishingly vehement abuse. His severest critic is his father, who is having a turbulent affair with Midge McCaskerville, Chloe’s sister and the wife of Thomas McCaskerville, a well-known psychiatrist, and the mother of Meredith, a dignified pubescent who goes jogging with Stuart. Edward, meanwhile, has sought surcease from his Marconian grief and guilt by trying to find his father, the recessive Jesse, in the castlelike place called Seegard, which turns out to be inhabited by an elfin trio of women in (perhaps Miss Atwood’s outfitter clothed them) pseudo-medieval dresses—Mother May, Jesse’s wife, and her two daughters, Bettina and Ilona. All of these characters seem to mean more than words can easily tell; their activity consists of talking at one another, falling suddenly in and out of love with one another, and now and then looming to one another as the answer to his or her problems. The enchanter-figures in Miss Murdoch’s work have so multiplied as to exist in hierarchies; Harry ranks lower than Thomas, and Thomas lower than Jesse, who is dying and deranged and has extraordinary “wet jelly-like … reddish brown” eyeballs that protrude far out of his head “as if … lightly resting upon the surface of the face.” Potency manifests itself as magic and grotesquerie; the novel festively abounds with visions, hallucinations, poltergeists, omens, coincidences, and other paranormal thrusts of mental energy.

  Miss Murdoch’s own energy, as ever, verges on the exhausting; her fluidity in dialogue, her luxuriant conjuring of excited emotional states, and her descriptive zeal rampage through these pages, as wistful, ruminative longueurs alternate with brilliantly realized scenes. She jumps into any consciousness that pleases her, even entertaining, as a very minor character, a plant that has been fed a liquid love potion and pines into a wilt of unrequited passion. Love batters the air from all directions and attaches to insane and frigid men more enthusiastically than to responsive, romantic ones. Homosexual attraction among young males seems a more considerable factor than formerly. Of the female characters only Midge is given much of an inside, and some—most distinctly, Elspeth Macran, a horsy and vindictive feminist—are spurned with a virtual harshness by this author of protean sympathy. Introducing her large cast of characters goads Miss Murdoch to a frenzy of specification, and as their eyes, noses, clothes, and hair speed by the art of the novel veers close to the method of the checklist. Hair! Edward has “limp dark straight hair which flopped across his face”; Harry has “thick lively hair, skilfully cut, which had only lately faded a little from being ‘golden,’ standing up in a crown above his unlined brow”; Stuart’s hair is “golden like his father’s used to be, but cut shorter”; Thomas has “a square-cut fringe of wiry light grey hair”; Meredith has “straight fairish brownish hair like his mother, which he wore combed down in neat lines to his collar, and with a fringe like his father”; Ursula’s “dark greying hair was cut in a sensible bob”; Willy, her husband, “continually, even in the middle of dinner, combed a long lock of his gingery hair over his bald patch, but as often the lock fell away, depending awkwardly over his ear, giving him a slightly mad look”; Midge’s “copious fairish brownish hair, which contained many tinges, including red here and there, disposed itself in a decorous graceful mop about her head, tossed mane-like from time to time.” Each description excellent, and no two heads and haircuts alike, but the very profusion, in less than a dozen pages, seems comically manic and overtaxes that part of the brain designed to retain visual images. And when we move away from London to Seegard the hair thickens yet again, in three kindred but differentiated shades and states of tidiness: Bettina’s “hair, of a rather disconcerting dark reddish colour, was elaborately pinned up, but trailing curly wisps drew attention to the transparent whiteness and smoothness of her neck”; Mother May’s “reddish-blonde hair, lighter in colour than Bettina’s, was more neatly piled”; and Ilona’s “red hair, even untidier than Bettina’s, had partly collapsed down her back.” One wonders whether Miss Murdoch’s narrative gifts, in the beginning so incisive and kinetic that her early novels read like scripts and one of them, A Severed Head, was made into a play, haven’t settled into the descriptive to the point that she asks primarily of her characters that they stand still and allow themselves to be groomed, and have their portraits painted. Painting has become, for Miss Murdoch, the enchanter’s true art; Jesse’s weird paintings are set before the mind’s eye one by one, and those of the characters here who turn to writing (Harry, Mother May, Thomas) do so, one feels, as a form less of art than of self-therapy. The painterly treatment extends to the characters’ psychologies, which are rich and colorful but stagnant. Edward’s decision, at the end of the novel and of all “the spiritual journeys, the redeeming ordeals, the healing draughts, reconciliation, salvation, new life” he has endured, to reread Proust, and Stuart’s to go into teaching at the elementary-school level, but feebly echo Faust’s resolution to drain the German swamps, or Stephen Dedalus’s to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.

  As a landscape painter Miss Murdoch is superb. The scenery of her novels often outlasts, in the memory, the characters—the heavy, shadowy suburban gardens of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, for instance, and the mucky riverside Thames of Bruno’s Dream are indelible in a way not true of the feverish passions enacted in their settings. In The Good Apprentice, the flooded flat fens around Seegard—“I’ve never seen such an utterly pointless landscape,” Harry exclaims—have a beckoning, eerie actuality. Thos
e solemn, numbing, wordless moments when landscape penetrates the human spirit speak for themselves:

  The sky had by now become quite dark and the stars were hidden by clouds. Great grey balls of mist, illumined by the torches, moved slowly by, nudging the walkers and obscuring the way ahead. Harry took Midge’s hand and pulled her along, keeping the torch-light fixed upon Sarah’s muddy shoes and the frayed ends of her jeans. Midge stumbled, trying to make out where to put her feet, her high-heeled shoes sticking in the thick moist grasses which the torches vividly revealed. A chill wind was blowing, there were a few spots of rain. Midge began quietly and surreptitiously to cry.

  Time and again reality does thus burn through the frightful talkiness of this novel, its breathless miasmic hurried (so to speak) series of adjectives—“that deep rhythmic heartbeat of perfect joy,” “in wild lonely very beautiful country,” “a universe of rich harmonious endlessly various and ever renewed happinesses”—and its helpless predilection for such witless modifiers as “awful,” “terrible,” and “wonderful.” Not that Miss Murdoch never rises to her own occasions: the long-delayed confrontation scene between Edward and Jesse is handsomely understated, and a brief two pages in which Edward watches Ilona do a striptease in Soho are quite, well, wonderful. And let it be additionally said, in fairness to this great-hearted author, that the questions with which she so persistently grapples in her fiction are the very ones upon which the interest of all fiction depends. Our lives are momentous: all of her tremendous novelistic energy is bent to sustaining that faith. Our lives have meaning, there is such a thing as goodness: the head supplies little evidence to support these traditional assumptions, but the heart keeps insisting. The question is phrased in The Good Apprentice as one of “depth.” Harry shouts at Stuart, “Modern science has abolished the difference between good and evil, there isn’t anything deep, that’s the message of the modern world.” His creator, unable to locate depth in the external cosmos where God once reigned, turns, in the paradoxical gesture of Christian humanism, toward Man himself to supply the depth that Man demands. The prose cries, “But oh how crazy the mind is, ingenious, histrionic, wicked and deep.” And Ursula flatly asserts, “The human mind is a bottomless mystery.”

  Bottomless? That seems extreme. And the bog of the quasi-supernatural a dubious proving ground. Miss Murdoch’s central male triangle of Harry, Edward, and Stuart, while treated at length, does not illustrate much in the way of depth, though it does show the endless self-dramatization and internal histrionics of which educated, financially comfortable English males are capable. The novel ends with its heroes only incrementally chastened and fortified, and with the author wildly chatty as she fusses at all her loose ends, her bundle of animated signifiers. Her tale has rarely, unlike Miss Atwood’s, outrun its proclaimed significances, and its moral (I have just glimpsed it) came in the middle: “Where there are people there’s mess.”

  Back to the Classics

  THE APOCRYPHA, by Robert Pinget, translated from the French by Barbara Wright. 143 pp. Red Dust, 1986.

  ACASTOS: Two Platonic Dialogues, by Iris Murdoch. 130 pp. Viking, 1987.

  The Summer 1983 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction was devoted dually to Jack Kerouac and Robert Pinget. Kerouac’s fame has reached all the way back to Lowell, Massachusetts, which is dedicating a downtown park next spring to its wandering native son, but Pinget remains, in the United States, the all-but-exclusive property of college French departments and fanatic buffs of literary pre-postmodernism. His recent slim works, faithfully translated by Barbara Wright and published by the way-out firm of Red Dust, are printed in American editions of a thousand copies. Nevertheless, Pinget bulks large in the present rather fey world literary scene—a determinedly experimental and unfettered writer whose education in music, painting, and the law help give his curious oeuvre range and penetration. A considerable delay attends the publication of his books in English; the most recent to appear, The Apocrypha, came out in France in 1980. Like its predecessors The Libera Me Domine (1968 in France; Red Dust, 1978), Passacaglia (1969; 1978), Fable (1971; 1980), and That Voice (1980; 1982), it is an extension or variation of an established though unsettlingly fluid world—a rural village world of circling gossip, moldering architecture, lurking atrocity, and (ever more centrally) botany, both in the wild and in the garden. From book to book, characters overlap—especially that of a reclusive “Master,” who inhabits a mansion with his servant and brother or nephews or uncle, depending on how the forgetful, restlessly revising dominant voice phrases it at the moment. An atmospheric reality emerges all the more forcefully for the vibrant uncertainty of details; the decay and banality of provincial rustic life blur, at their margins, into something hellish, and also something redeeming. Pinget has said, in a note to The Libera Me Domine, that “the interest of my work up to the present has been the quest for a tone of voice.” The voice of his books (never quite the same) mitigates the sudden incidents of murder and madness with a comedy of expression, a garrulous patience, an onrolling indifference, a kind of cheerfully brute communal transcendence.

  The Apocrypha seems to me not only an extension of Pinget’s world but a consummation of it, his best (if comparative terms can be applied within a created microcosm so consistently indeterminate) novel since his best-known and most popular work, The Inquisitory (1962; Grove Press, 1967). The Apocrypha (a plural term whose root sense of “hidden” was applied by the Church to non-canonical works, which in time became magical in the popular imagination) are being composed by the Master—tortuously annotated and revised notebooks that he is keeping, and that his heirs are trying to edit. “Unravel the intricacies of these chronicles which delight in getting in a tangle, there’s a secret plan somewhere there.… Upsurges of fervor which soon flag and leave him prostrate in his chair, his manuscript scattered all over the room, monologuing on the theme of the book to be written, of the adventure of art, and of the chaos in his mind.” The Apocrypha are, among other things, the pages we hold in our hands. Pinget’s recurrent method becomes a metaphor for its subject here: “The essential often seems to be brushed aside in favor of the adventitious as if some occult tyrant has adjured the scriptor only to approach the truth at a tangent.” The Master’s notes to himself become Pinget’s self-admonitions: “Beware literary tone”; “Clarify terms.” The elusiveness of the endlessly complicated text serves as a metaphor, too, for decay—the Master’s decaying mind, the erosions of anamnesis, the loss of circumstance within memory. His notebooks, often called “gramarye”—an archaic word associated not only with grammar but with necromancy—are, then, “secret wellsprings of this fight against nothingness.” And, as the book moves toward its climax, its texture merges with the revisions of the annual natural cycle, the variations from year to year: “The work would take shape according to the rhythm of the year, a forgotten arcanum.” The years are almost interchangeable: “Leafing through the book he finds that the words he’d underlined aren’t on the same pages, they’ve been displaced from where they were the previous year.… Convinced that in the country things barely change from one year to the next, the first memorialist out of either laziness or lassitude might have confined himself to copying some of the passages dealing with the June of the previous year.”

  The temporal structure of The Apocrypha is clear enough: the year, marked by its seasonal weather and flowers and holy days, goes by twice, revolving about the figure of a shepherd most vividly seen in December. Stephen Bann, in a critical article of thirteen pages appended to this novel of not quite one hundred thirty, explicates the pattern and also establishes clear textual links between The Apocrypha and Virgil’s Eclogues and the Psaltery. The figure of the Good Shepherd, of course, is where paganism and Christianity overlap; early statues of Christ show a beardless youth with a lamb on his shoulders, and lines from the Fourth Eclogue were interpreted throughout the Middle Ages as Virgil’s magic prophecy of Christ’s birth, out of a virgin, in the reign of Augustus. The pretti
fied shepherds of classic eclogues, the Good Shepherd, and the shepherds who came to the Nativity in Luke’s Gospel all blend into one another while the image of a shepherd, in the Master’s roving purview, migrates from a shattered cup to a zodiac-rimmed picture printed in an ancient book, “an old book he found at a junk dealer’s, a modern mind would be ill at ease with it the subject matter is so jumbled up, commentaries on this or that work of Virgil.” Mr. Bann, with his sometimes bristling critical vocabulary (“plunged in his pettifogging apocalypse … is a vivid example of this reiterated catachresis”), pounces on Pinget’s increasing use of Christian symbolism and sees the author as “anticipating the concerns of an important direction of French thought and criticism” and helping to establish “a claim for the seriousness of theological tradition in a post-psychoanalytic culture.” This comes too close to making of Pinget a kind of latter-day Bernanos. Pinget’s fiction has always been haunted and obsessed with the past, and Christianity is Europe’s crumbling past: “the whole shebang of the centuries which now they’re old project a terrifying shadow into their enfeebled hearts in what they’re looking for something that ought to be the soul, which was it exactly, a precious gift now confused with the fear of death.” On the other hand, the image of the shepherd does appear, in the course of The Apocrypha’s double annual round, to become whole. The imperfections repeatedly noted in both its ceramic and printed forms (“a tiny shard wrongly glued,” “a bit of mould obliterates the original contour of the face and hands, just look how clumsily this ink line has been drawn to try to restore it”) have by the last paragraph been, as if miraculously, absorbed into the perfection of an icon simultaneously Christian and humanist: