by John Updike
The initials SHO, we slowly discover, are those of three intertwined aristocratic families, the Stocklinches, the Hestercombes, and the Oxenholmes, members of which are dotted throughout the book. This glint of silver in the lowly, gloomy house, together with the many brisk socio-economic biographies offered in these pages, informs the novel’s noblest attempt at interconnection: the attempt to show, in the manner of, say, Bleak House, that no Englishman is an island, that the classes and regions are so woven together that manor house and palace impinge on rural hovel and urban slum, and the fates of a junkman like Krook and an orphaned street-sweeper like Jo can touch and alter those of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. Alix Bowen gropes after a democratic unity when she reflects, “sometimes she had a sense … that there was a pattern, if only one could discern it, a pattern that linked these semi-detached houses of Wanley with those in Leeds and Northam, a pattern that linked Liz’s vast house in Harley Street with the Garfield Centre towards which she herself now drove.” But in the grand attempt to illustrate the pattern Miss Drabble labors under a certain artistic embarrassment, which has set in since Dickens, about melodramatic coincidence and two-dimensional psychologies. For all the talk of connection, her novel portrays disconnection—between husbands and wives, parents and children, government and governed.
The Radiant Way is exasperatingly diffuse. Scores of characters are named and never recur; dozens of scenes we would like to witness are relayed second-hand or tersely alluded to; a modernist jumpiness and diffidence undermine the panoramic ambition. The novel feels both scattered and boiled-down—as if an editor had stepped in to speed things up when its first twenty-four hours took over eighty pages to recount. The marriage of Charles and the woman he leaves Liz for, the aristocratic Henrietta, is left almost entirely to our imagination. The Headleands’ adult children are evoked but not, as it were, set in motion. Charming lively apparitions like the bosomy Irish cook Deirdre Kavanagh are not followed into any further adventures. A number of London characters seem to exist for no more urgent reason than that Miss Drabble knows people like them. Liz and Alix have suitors who are carefully groomed for leaps that never come; Alix’s marriage heads for a crisis and veers away. Even Liz’s cunningly foreshadowed confrontation with her mother’s secret, when it occurs, seems cursory, ambiguous, and sour: the long agony of Rita Ablewhite is laughed off as the bad smell from a jar of old pickles, while her daughters clean her house:
Shirley laughed. “I must say,” said Shirley, “I do think you behaved appallingly to Mother.” She opened a jar of pickles, sniffed.
“She behaved appallingly to us,” said Liz.
“Smell that,” said Shirley, handing over the jar.
Liz sniffed. “Jesus,” said Liz.
More than once in the novel, the banality of the human adventure, its every crisis so repeatedly charted and analyzed by novelists and psychoanalysts, dulls passion: “And as Liz spoke and listened she was aware of a simultaneous conviction that this was the most shocking, the most painful hour of her entire life, and also that it was profoundly dull, profoundly trivial, profoundly irrelevant, a mere routine.”
Well, a creatrix must be true to her bent, and Miss Drabble’s is for the deft hint, the impulsive surge, the shrugging surrender to shapeless life. Her novel has a luxurious texture and wears a thousand beauties of expression and insight. Charles’s relation to the British establishment is thus encapsulated: “First he had mocked it, then he had exposed it, then he had joined it, and now he represented it. A normal progression.” Progression of another sort afflicts the British soil:
No one had lived on that hillside for nineteen centuries. The Brigantes had held it once, against the Romans, but they had retreated to the mountains and left it to gorse and the bracken. And so it had remained until the scoops and cranes and bulldozers of 1970s Post-Industrial Man had moved in to uproot the scrub and to build the suburb known as Greystone Edge.
Liz’s reaction to Charles’s desertion warrants the novel’s most extended and exploratory treatment; the interplay of her psychic and social and physical selves elicits details of a startling intimacy. “Ivan [a bearer of bad tidings] at last cornered her, and even before he opened his mouth she felt the smell of fear from herself: her pores broke open, she stood there panting slightly, her hair rising on the back of her neck in terror, her heated skin covered in icy sweat.”
Miss Drabble is formidably bright: she received a double first at Cambridge and, in the five years coincidental with the era of this novel, edited and revised The Oxford Companion to English Literature. The Radiant Way makes self-conscious bows toward Great Expectations and the novels of Jane Austen (“three or four families in a country village,” “a few families in a small, densely populated, parochial, insecure country”). Miss Drabble can be as chummy as Trollope with the reader: “But that is another part of this story, and not to be pursued here, for Brian is not a woman and reflections on his prospects … would at this juncture muddy the narrative tendency. Forget I mentioned him. Let us return to Liz, Alix, and Esther.” All this would be coy and brittle were it not for her earthiness—her love of our species and its habitat, and her ability to focus on the small, sweaty intersections of mind and body, past and present. This latter gift is so much hers that she takes it a shade too casually. The maze of human interaction she creates has many paths she declines to explore, or explores with a peek. The Radiant Way is a rare thing—a long novel we would wish longer.
P.S.: In fact, it turns out to have been the first novel of a trilogy, still in progress. Of two other novels reviewed herein—Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat (553–56) and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (563–67)—did this also turn out to be true. In each case, I felt cheated; part of a novel’s job, and not the least part, is to end.
* St. Cyprian’s, under the pseudonym of Crossgates, was also the subject of George Orwell’s scathing “Such, Such Were the Joys …” Mr. Pryce-Jones blandly assures us that “Actually nothing outside the normal run of schoolboy experience happened to either of them”—as if the horrors of the “normal run” weren’t what they were protesting.
† What she actually says in Hebrew, I have learned from Frank Kermode’s sermon “The Uses of Error,” is “Bless God and die.” Kermode explains, “But it has long been understood that ‘bless’ is a euphemism. It would have been improper for the author or a scribe to write the words ‘curse God’, and so here, as in the first chapter of the book, the difficulty is avoided by using the exactly opposite word, ‘bless’.” However, St. Jerome, who should have known better, in The Vulgate translated the command as “benedic Deo.” You figure it out.
THE OTHER AMERICANS
Living Death
COLLECTED STORIES, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein. 311 pp. Harper & Row, 1984.
Harper and Row, which published Gabriel García Márquez in the United States until his most recent book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, have now issued the Nobel Prize winner’s collected stories. The publicational history of these twenty-six tales is not made abundantly clear, though a stab of sorts is attempted in a “Publisher’s Note” that breathlessly lets us know “They are now published in one volume in the chronological order of their original publication in Spanish from the three volumes of short stories Eyes of a Blue Dog, Big Mama’s Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.” Confusingly, the first two collections were translated and published here in reverse order, and under quite different titles, the stories of Eyes of a Blue Dog appearing with the novella Leaf Storm as Leaf Storm and Other Stories in 1972, and those of Big Mama’s Funeral with the long story “No One Writes to the Colonel” under that latter title in 1968. These two title pieces are not present in Collected Stories, and though the stories that are have been each assigned a date at their end, we are not totally persuaded; one, “One Day After Saturday,” which the jacket of No One Write
s to the Colonel identified as winning a Colombian literary prize in 1955, is here dated 1962, as are all the eight stories of the Big Mama’s Funeral section.
In any case: the stories are rich and startling in their matter and confident and elegant in their manner. For the reader who has exhausted the wonders of García Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, they probably constitute (along with its fine precursor, Leaf Storm) the next best place to turn. They are—the word cannot be avoided—magical, though for this reader the magic sparkled unevenly through the spread of tricks, and was blacker than he had expected. García Márquez did not begin, as some of his interviews have suggested, as a realist who then broke through to a new, matter-of-fact method of fantasy. Interviewed by Peter Stone in 1981, for The Paris Review, he described the breakthrough:
I had an idea of what I always wanted to do, but there was something missing and I was not sure what it was until one day I discovered the right tone—the tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for eighteen months and worked every day.
The tone was brick-faced:
In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.
Yet the first story collected here, composed when García Márquez was a mere nineteen, with quite characteristic aplomb details the thoughts of a young man’s corpse as it lies in the coffin:
His body rested heavily, but peacefully, with no discomfort whatever, as if the world had suddenly stopped and no one would break the silence, as if all the lungs of the earth had ceased breathing so as not to break the soft silence of the air. He felt as happy as a child face up on the thick, cool grass contemplating a high cloud flying off in the afternoon sky. He was happy, even though he knew he was dead, that he would rest forever in the box lined with artificial silk.
The mature García Márquez’s gift of linkage, his way of letting implausible threads intertwine and thicken into a substantial braid, already flourishes in these stories composed when he was a student and a youthful journalist in Colombia. The next in order of composition takes up the thoughts of the dead boy’s twin: “The idea of his twin brother’s corpse had been firmly stuck in the whole center of his life.” There is so much spiralling Faulknerian indirection that it is hard to know who is dead and who is merely imagining it; pronouns float in and out of embodiments and a host of creepy sensations flicker by—“Death began to flow through his bones like a river of ashes.… The cold of his hands intensified, making him feel the presence of the formaldehyde in his arteries.” Perhaps the parent of all these coffined boys is the corpse seen by the ten-year-old child at the beginning of Leaf Storm:
I’ve seen a corpse for the first time.… I always thought that dead people should have hats on. Now I can see that they shouldn’t. I can see that they have a head like wax and a handkerchief tied around their jawbone. I can see that they have their mouth open a little and that behind the purple lips you can see the stained and irregular teeth.… I can see that they have their eyes open much wider than a man’s, anxious and wild, and that their skin seems to be made of tight damp earth. I thought that a dead man would look like somebody quiet and asleep and now I can see that it’s just the opposite. I can see that he looks like someone awake and in a rage after a fight.… When I discover that there are flies in the room I begin to be tortured by the idea that the [now-closed] coffin’s become full of flies.… I feel as if someone is telling me: That’s the way you’ll be. You’ll be inside a coffin filled with flies. You’re only a little under eleven years old, but someday you’ll be like that, left to the flies inside of a closed box.
The ideas of living death, of a consciousness travelling within an immobilized body, of piecemeal dying within the garish trappings of Latin American burial, of “chemical adventure,” of “that somnambulism where the senses lose their value,” of “an easier, uncomplicated world, where all dimensions had been eliminated,” dominate these early stories, with their disagreeable sweetish stench of precocity, of adolescent terror turned outward. Though this spectral field will be extended into a sociological realm of closed houses and frozen lives, a geographical limbo where only the bitter past animates thought, García Márquez’s great theme of suspended motion is announced here at the outset, along with a smooth and dandified indifference to the conventions of realism.
He is not sure he had read Faulkner at the time of his first fictions; he told his interviewer, “Critics have spoken of the literary influence of Faulkner, but I see it as a coincidence: I had simply found material that had to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar material.” The similarities are remarkable, not only in the climate of class-ridden, aggrieved torpor but in the music of obsessive circling, of a trapped yet unquenchably fascinated sensibility; Faulkner even, in such stories as “Beyond” and “Carcassonne,” drones into the life beyond the grave. The author the young Colombian did read was Kafka: “At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed.… I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.” One story in this first collection moves out of the surreal into the orbit of Hemingway. “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” gives us a nearly empty restaurant, a lot of unadorned dialogue, a woman of shady habits, a courteous barman, a whiff of criminal violence. But even here, the sluggish tide of semi-death sweeps in, drowning reality: “Across the counter she couldn’t hear the noise that the raw meat made when it fell into the burning grease.… She remained like that, concentrated, reconcentrated, until she raised her head again, blinking as if she were coming back out of a momentary death.” Nonsense, of a somber sort, nibbles at the edge of many a sentence, the rereading of which threatens to plunge us into a hopeless world of glutinous, twisted time:
That’s the way she’s been for twenty years, in the rocker, darning her things, rocking, looking at the chair as if now she weren’t taking care of the boy with whom she had shared her childhood afternoons but the invalid grandson who has been sitting here in the corner ever since the time his grandmother was five years old.
Spatial disorientation also occurs within the unpredictable prose:
Then the three of us looked for ourselves in the darkness and found ourselves there, in the joints of the thirty fingers piled up on the counter.
These three have just been rendered blind, so their disorientation has some rationale. Elsewhere, a woman’s consciousness inexplicably wanders into that of a cat and hangs for no less than three thousand years over the desire to eat an orange, and a black stableboy kicked by a horse lies interminably in the straw while the death angels wait and a “little dead and lonely girl,” who seems also to be mute and over thirty, keeps recranking a gramophone. The story about the stableboy, “Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait,” ends with a monstrous run-on sentence in which García Márquez, at the age of twenty-three, in bravura fashion lays claim to his authorial power. A method of centrifugal revelation, whereby a set of images at first glance absurd or frivolous gradually cohere into a frozen, hovering world that we can recognize as the site of an emotion, of dread and pity: this is to become the method of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The second, middle set of stories, all dated 1962, are more naturalistic, and but for the title piece and “One Day After Saturday”* are located no
t in Macondo but in El Pueblo—“the town,” and a town differing from Macondo mostly in the relatively straightforward, staccato style with which it is described. Evidently García Márquez’s lush early style had been chastised by his fellow leftists. In his Paris Review interview he said of this period of his writing, “This was the time when the relationship between literature and politics was very much discussed. I kept trying to close the gap between the two. My influence had been Faulkner; now it was Hemingway. I wrote No One Writes to the Colonel, The Evil Hour, and The Funeral of Mama Grand, which were all written at more or less the same time and have many things in common. These stories take place in a different village from the one in which Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude occur. It is a village in which there is no magic. It is a journalistic literature.” He lived, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, abroad, in Europe, Mexico, and Venezuela; for a time he worked for Castro’s news agency, Prensa Latina, in its New York bureau. Though his involvement with radical causes was enthusiastic, the stories of Big Mama’s Funeral seem scarcely political, but for their convincing rendition of stagnation and poverty, and the rather farcical condemnation of Big Mama’s empire. They are brighter-humored, with more comic touches, than the earlier stories; unreality breaks into squalor like the chickens of this tinted sentence: “It was a green, tranquil town, where chickens with ashen long legs entered the schoolroom in order to lay their eggs under the washstand.” There is a new epigrammatic loftiness: “She bore the conscientious serenity of someone accustomed to poverty”; “She was older than he, with very pale skin, and her movements had the gentle efficiency of people who are used to reality.” García Márquez, by now a well-travelled man of the world, is contemplating his remembered Caribbean backwater with a certain urbanity, preparing to make a totally enclosed microcosm, a metaphor, of it. The young author’s eerie muddling of the concrete and the abstract, his will to catch hold of a terrible vagueness at the back of things, now works within single polished sentences: “But this morning, with the memories of the night before floating in the swamp of his headache, he could not find where to begin to live”; “When she finished the stems, Mina turned toward Trinidad with a face that seemed to end in something immaterial.”