Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  In the same bedded situation where these magical sentences evoke the drifting Tristan and his underage Iseult, The Enchanter has its cruel, obscene, and cacophonous climax. The transformation is one of the miracles of modern fiction.

  VN Again and Again

  THE MAN FROM THE U.S.S.R. and Other Plays, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov. 342 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

  SELECTED LETTERS 1940–1977, by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. 582 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

  The Nabokov estate continues to come up with treasures; The Man from the U.S.S.R., following the three posthumously published volumes of lectures by the great novelist, poet, and lepidopterist, contains two full-length plays, two short plays, two lectures upon the drama, and two introductions by the translator. All make entertaining reading; the elder Nabokov’s famed trickiness, which often threatened to burst the bounds of prose fiction, fits nicely on the stage, where a high level of artifice is already established. The Event, a three-act play composed in 1938 and successfully produced in Paris that same year (and given subsequent performances, all in Russian, in such unthinkable locales as the Prague and Warsaw of 1941), with particular brilliance teases theatrical commonplaces like the unities of time and place, stage asides, “character” parts, twins played by the same actor, and melodramatic audience expectations.* Three years after writing The Event, Nabokov, lecturing in the Palo Alto of 1941, at Stanford University, set forth his shrewd criticisms of conventional stagecraft and his wish to see the “secret rhythm of chance … pulsating in the veins of the tragic muse.” His farces flirt with desolation; his abiding sense of the deceptions of art within nature give a curious power to the fragile illusions of theatre. The Pole and The Grand-dad, one-act verse plays both written in 1923, poetically present terminal historical moments—the end of Scott’s ill-fated polar expedition and the encounter of an intended victim of the guillotine with his now-senile would-be executioner. The title play, dating from 1925–26 and set in Berlin’s émigré community, displays in five acts a jumble of actions from which nothing more clearly emerges than the young playwright’s hopeless longing to be back in Russia.

  The epistolary trove begins with a letter written in 1923, to his mother; it contains the lustrous paragraph (as translated by Dmitri Nabokov) “It is evening now, with touching cloudlets in the sky. I took a walk around the plantation, behind the grove of cork oaks, ate peaches and apricots, admired the sunset, listening to a nightingale’s twees and whistles, and both its song and the sunset tasted of apricot and peach.” The last letter, written shortly before his death, to his son, begins, “My dearest, your roses, your fragrant rubies, glow red against a background of spring rain.” In general the letters are businesslike, as, from 1940 on, the American immigrant sets about reconstructing and surpassing in English the artistic achievements he had amassed in over twenty years as a Russian émigré in Europe. We find him tenaciously engaged in the awkward authorial tasks of seeking publication, bickering with editors, pursuing academic appointments, listing typos, and taking the properly aloof tone with uncomprehending readers, reviewers, and interviewers. Above all, Lolita, its gingerly rise to masterpiece status by way of a Paris pornography publisher and its heady aftermath of notoriety, wealth, and film adaptation, queens it over these communications. Not so continuously interesting as the previously published correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, and rather wearing in its eventually dominant tone of offended hauteur, this volume nevertheless holds many glints of pure verbal gold, sprinkled in spendthrift fashion by a diabolically (as he might say) vivacious and poetic mind.

  Nice Tries

  LATECOMERS, by Anita Brookner. 248 pp. Pantheon, 1989.

  A THEFT, by Saul Bellow. 108 pp. Penguin Books, 1989.

  In a decade when the differences between the sexes are on the one hand being minimized (equal pay for equal work, males should learn to dust and cook, females are scoring better in spatial-relations tests all the time) and on the other schematized (women want relationships, men want achievements, their wavelengths are so different the signals pass right through), it takes some nerve for an author to attempt a protagonist of the opposite sex. Tolstoy did it, George Eliot did it, but that was long ago, when classics walked the earth and women and men were simpler mechanisms, as their hoop skirts and stovepipe hats signified. Yet here, right on my bedside table, two bright, brave, bay-laden novelists whose names begin with “B” have boldly barrelled into the territory beyond the gender barrier. Anita Brookner’s Latecomers concerns the enduring friendship of two men who as solitary boys escaped to England from Germany, and Saul Bellow’s A Theft seizes upon the psyche of a middle-aged, four-times-married New York fashion editor from the Christian wilds of Indiana. The first sentence of each novel defiantly stakes its claim in alien turf: Latecomers begins, “Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette,” and A Theft announces, “Clara Velde, to begin with what was conspicuous about her, had short blond hair, fashionably cut, growing upon a head unusually big.” We get a decided picture, and although in the end both novelists appear more solicitous and knowing in regard to characters of their own sex, the novels have nevertheless gained the liveliness of exploration, and an energized scope.

  Anita Brookner, who teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art, has published seven other novels as well as four books on such artists as Watteau, Greuze, and David. She writes thrillingly well, in lucid, balanced sentences that owe something to the scrupulous qualifications and dry moral vigilance of Henry James. She sees human beings, if one may generalize, as most active in their own behalfs, and the ruthless drive of her characters, as filtered through the rueful sensibility of one of her female observers, can shock us into laughter. She is, in the English tradition, a thoroughly social novelist, for whom there lies beyond the human spectacle nothing but death and scenery, yet she brings to the English scene an outsider’s precise eye. Her parents were born in Central Europe, and her characters tend to be, with the most delicate of exotic shadings, immigrants. Thomas Hartmann, our voluptuary, was sent as “a frightened boy” from Munich to London before the war, “to live with his father’s sister, Marie, who had providently married an Englishman named Jessop.” At a bleak boarding school in Surrey he encounters Thomas Fibich, who was even more abruptly severed from his past; Fibich has no childhood memories except of himself—very plump, though he has become a slender man—sitting in a large wing chair called “the Voltaire,” and of his mother fainting in his father’s arms as they see him off at a Berlin railroad station. The two war orphans, forbidden to speak German to each other at school, form a lifelong bond, “although their temperaments were diametrically opposed and they rarely thought alike on any matter.” Hartmann’s Aunt Marie informally adopts Fibich as well. Both young men enter the printing trade after the war and then, under Hartmann’s inspiration, found a company producing “greeting cards, of a cruel and tasteless nature, which did very nicely for about twenty years, until Hartmann, who did little work but was valued for his Fingerspitzengefühl, his flair, his sixth sense, suggested that the market in this commodity was self-limited, and that there were fortunes to be made in photocopying machines.” The prospering partners find mates who reinforce their aura of orphanhood: Hartmann marries an inept secretary for the company, Yvette, whose father met a mysterious end in occupied France and whose mother, to escape destitution at the end of the war, married in Bordeaux the representative of an English wine shipper; and Fibich, after considerable prompting from Hartmann, takes to wife Christine Hardy, whose mother, before her early death, had been Mr. Jessop’s sister and thus established for Christine a tenuous link with Aunt Marie’s household and its two young Germans named Thomas. The couples come to occupy two flats, one above the other, in Ashley Gardens; the Hartmanns
are blessed with a beautiful daughter, Marianne, and, six years later, the Fibichs with a robust son, called Toto, for Thomas. If it has taken this reviewer a while to spell out these arrangements, rest assured that the book takes even longer, and that, indeed, their stately and witty spelling-out composes most of the plot.

  The novel spans more than fifty years, and gently moves through an atmosphere thick with inertia and melancholy. Much is told, little is shown. Not until page 85 do we begin to get runs of dialogue, though an earlier brief spurt comically dramatizes Christine’s brusque abandonment by her stepmother after her father dies:

  One day Christine came home to find four suitcases in the hall, and beside them Mrs. Hardy, in a fur coat that had belonged to Christine’s mother, waiting for her.

  “Well, Christine, I’m off,” she said. “You can stay here. He left you the flat. You’ll have enough to manage on for life if you’re careful.”

  “But where will you be?” asked Christine.

  “I’m off to Bournemouth. I’ll leave you my address, although I can’t promise to be in touch. I’m going into the hotel business with my brother-in-law. My first husband’s brother, that is. He’s on his own, like me.” The light of remarriage was already kindling in her eye.

  The four principals’ childhoods, just sufficiently populated with adults to keep them from being wards of the state, equip them with suppressed memories and an ineradicable desolation; the London they inhabit, despite Ms. Brookner’s gift for lively visual details, feels like a ghost town. World War II, with its millions of severances, spared their lives but left them not much ability to live, except by forced hedonism (the Hartmanns) and wan stoicism (the Fibichs). The latter’s state is analyzed in a passage not untypical of the heavily expository prose:

  Both had been so deprived of childhood that in a sense they were both still waiting in the wings, unaware that, happy or unhappy, this state must be passed, that all beginnings are to a certain extent situated in limbo, and are only an introduction to the definitive actions to which they are a prologue. What, in [Fibich’s] view, incapacitated both Christine and himself and constituted their inalienable but unwelcome bond, was that they had been deprived of their childhood through the involuntary absence of adults, that his own parents and Christine’s mother had vanished without a trace, spirited away by a turn of events that wholly excluded their offspring, without being known, and that they had been left in the charge of strangers who, though tolerably well disposed, were uninvolved, uninterested. They had grown up, therefore, without true instruction, without the saws and homilies, the customs and idiosyncrasies, that, for children, constitute a philosophy.

  “Definitive actions” are what don’t forthcome, though the second half of the book abounds with aborted possibilities. Christine dreams of leaving and going to a land of sun, but doesn’t. The couples talk of acquiring in common a Mediterranean retreat, and in the end don’t bother. The possibility that their two children, of opposite sexes though of inconvenient ages, might unite their lines comes to naught; the Don Juanish Toto does try a little date rape on Marianne two days before her wedding, but the bruising moment does not save her from a frumpy marriage or himself from an isolated life of film stardom and self-centered celibacy. Climactically, Fibich at last dares his long-meditated return to Berlin, but he pursues no search for his lost family’s identity or home, and experiences no revelation until back in Heathrow Airport, where a strange woman faints. In Berlin, he remembers afterwards, he felt “on the verge of a great discovery. But perhaps that was the discovery, quite simply that life brings revelations, supplies all the material we need. And if it does not supply it in the right order, then we must simply wait for more to come to light.” A modest moral for a loving and expert but eerily tentative fiction. Like many excellent modern novels, Latecomers supplies everything but a catharsis.

  Perhaps a more intrinsic moral is, as Fibich perceives during his five aimless days in Berlin, that “nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact.” Ms. Brookner sensitively measures out emotional deprivation and traces its results in subtle bereavements and disappointments. She, as author, seems to set herself to give the characters the love they cannot give each other. The two male heroes are coddled to the point of remaining rather milky; their fussy self-regard and essential passivity begin to exasperate us, and we feel less spark between them than we would like to. They would seem to be Jewish, but this is never stated or used to illuminate their melancholy and grateful wonder at being alive. It is the women who really brighten the author’s eye and pen: flashy and chattery and yet frigid Yvette; “shadowy” yet deeply feeling Christine; Hartmann’s too-perfect mistress, Elizabeth, through whose ministrations both parties come “into contact with their lesser selves”; Aunt Marie, with her Germanic tweed cape and “pheasant feathers in the band of her brown felt hat”; Yvette’s aged mother with “that hardy appearance of French women past the age of pleasure, still flushed, thin-lipped, the head held high, dour, unsmiling”; and even a passing monster like Rita Hardy on her way to Bournemouth, or Fibich’s psychoanalyst, “Mrs. Gebhardt, with her transfixing but fallacious maternal aura and the kindly smile built on a foundation of indifference.” The heroine of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, a writer of romances, at one point thinks, “I have been too harsh on women … because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchfulness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful.” The world of the novel is usually a world of relationships and in this world women do star. Ms. Brookner’s female characters glow by the light of her wry knowing, and fill the pages of Latecomers with a mood of helpless sympathy.

  Saul Bellow’s A Theft also bestows more love than the recipients seem to earn. A novella of scarcely a hundred pages, it is a curious work in several respects, not least the manner of its publication—in quality paperback, forgoing the hardcover profits that even a minor offering by our preëminent fiction writer would blamelessly generate. Bellow, at this point of his career, has sat atop the American literary heap longer than anyone else since William Dean Howells; it has been over thirty-five years since the publication of The Adventures of Augie March established him as our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist, and as the most viable combination of redskin and paleface in our specialized, academized era. Street-smart and book-smart with an equal intensity, he has displayed, in a salty, rapid, and giddily expressive idiom, heroes grappling with, and being thrown by, the great ideas of Western man. Until A Theft, he has not presented a woman as an autonomous seeker rather than as a paradise sought; his women have tended to be powerfully tangible and distressingly audible apparitions warping his heroes’ already cluttered intellectual horizons. This venture into the female soul has made both the redskin and paleface jumpy, the idiom becoming gruff and the great ideas sinking into a peculiar form of celebrity-consciousness.

  For gruffness, take these sentences from the opening page, introducing Clara Velde: “So there she was, a rawboned American woman. She had very good legs—who knows what you would have seen if pioneer women had worn shorter skirts. She bought her clothes in the best shops and was knowledgeable about cosmetics; nevertheless the backcountry look never left her.” Got that backcountry look? I’m not sure I did, nor did the hurried case history at the end of the paragraph fill my mental dossier: “A disappointing love affair in Cambridge led to a suicide attempt. The family decided not to bring her back to Indiana. When she threatened to swallow more sleeping pills they allowed her to attend Columbia University, and she lived in New York under close supervision—the regimen organized by her parents. She, however, found ways to do exactly as she pleased. She feared hellfire but she did it just the same.” She has had, we are told, quite a life—four husbands and three daughters by the age of forty, and a meteoric career in journalism that has left her high and rich: “In the boardroom she was referred to by some as ‘a good corporate person,’ by others as ‘the czar
ina of fashion writing.’ ” Who is confiding all this, with such aggressive breathlessness? A curious tone has been adopted, a gossipy tone, as if fictional characters were a subdivision of the rich and famous. These certainly keep fast company—for instance, Clara’s third husband, Spontini, “Spontini the oil tycoon, a close friend of the billionaire leftist and terrorist Giangiacomo F., who blew himself up in the seventies.” F. for Feltrinelli, in case you missed the news that day.

  The celebrity parade doesn’t begin to roll, however, until we meet Clara’s true love, who bears the name, fit for an angel, of Ithiel Regler. “Ithiel Regler stood much higher with Clara than any of the husbands. ‘On a scale of ten,’ she liked to say to Laura, ‘he was ten.’ ” He never got around to marrying her, we presume, partly because there’s nothing, as the Princess of Cleves perceived long ago, like marriage to spoil a perfect love, and partly because he had been too busy chasing around in his curious profession of free-lance big shot, “a wunderkind in nuclear strategy,” based in Washington but treasured and telegenic wherever he goes. “People of great power set a high value on his smarts. Well, you only had to look at the size and the evenness of his dark eyes.” For all his “classic level look,” Ithiel is, like Bellow heroes before him, subject to “brainstorms” and fitful explosions of geopolitical opinion. He jets about sharing his wisdom with Henry Kissinger, Anatoly Dobrynin, the late Shah of Iran, “Betancourt in Venezuela,” and “Mr. Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge.” To Clara, at least, there appears no limit to Ithiel’s abilities. She reflects, while doting upon him in a Washington restaurant: