Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  Why, Ithiel could be the Gibbon or the Tacitus of the American Empire.… If he wanted, he could do with Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy or Kissinger, with the Shah or de Gaulle, what Keynes had done with the Allies at Versailles. World figures had found Ithiel worth their while. Sometimes he let slip a comment or a judgment: “Neither the Russians nor the Americans can manage the world. Not capable of organizing the future.” When she came into her own, Clara thought, she’d set up a fund for him so he could write his views.

  If Ithiel’s brilliance fails to flash out in the judgment above, and Clara’s adoration boggles belief, we are persuaded beyond doubt that Bellow’s fascination with the seriocomic world of international power has not abandoned him in the years since he penned Herzog.

  Plot: The alleged countrywoman once upon a time induced the alleged wunderkind, at the height of their romance, to buy her an engagement ring, an emerald “conspicuously clear, color perfect, top of its class.” The engagement founders, but the sentimentally priceless ring remains in her care, is stolen once, recovered (though she doesn’t give the insurance money back), and then stolen again—by, Clara thinks, the sexy, slinky Haitian boyfriend of her solidly bourgeois but not unsexy au pair from Vienna, Gina Wegman, for whom she has strong motherly feelings. This is Bellow’s first fictional visit since Mr. Sammler’s Planet to New York City, which in A Theft he calls “Gogmagogsville”; in his updated view, Manhattan is still in the forefront of the decline of the West. “Unless heaven itself were to decree that Gogmagogsville had gone far enough, and checked the decline—time to lower the boom, send in the Atlantic to wash it away.” Gina understandably elects to sample the racially mixed local society. “The city has become the center, the symbol of worldwide adolescent revolt.” Clara comes into a party Gina is giving for her new friends: “The room was more like a car of the West Side subway. Lots of muscle on the boys, as if they did aerobics.” But Gottschalk, the “minimal sleaze” private detective whom Clara hires, sums up Frederic, the Haitian boyfriend, as “Casual criminal. Not enough muscle for street crime.” Frederic does do one plainly wicked thing, however: while petting on the sofa with Gina, he puts his combat boots up on Clara’s silk pillows.

  The simple story is told in a purposefully dishevelled way, much of it by means of Clara’s confidences to an ill-defined Manhattan neighbor, Laura Wang. We are often reminded of Ithiel’s rather abstract wonderfulness and of Clara’s loyalty, which she shares with her creator, to a theological perspective, but we learn almost nothing about Wilder, her present husband and the father of her three girls, nor about her job, which seems all glamour and no performance. The book is jumpy and skimpy, and feels like a set of signals to someone offstage. The clearest thing about Clara is her sparkling view of Ithiel; the murkiest, her maternal feeling toward Gina.

  For all this, A Theft holds a gallant intention and a great gift. Who else but Bellow can swoop in with a coinage like “Clara found Ithiel in a state of sick dignity” or unashamedly physicalize an emotion in such a trope as “She felt as if the life had been vacuumed out of her”? A Biblical spirit is in him, giving vitality a severe grandeur:

  Gina was shaken. Both women trembled. After all, thought Clara, a human being can be sketched in three or four lines, but then when the sockets are empty, no amount of ingenuity can refill them. Not her brown, not my blue.

  The brain fever that races through a Bellow narrative can always catch fire into poetry, a poetry present in the otherworldly names he bestows—Odo Fenger, Etta Wolfenstein, Wilder Velde, Bobby Steinsalz. Marginal characters suddenly flare into an arresting vividness: Clara, visiting her psychiatrist, Dr. Gladstone, notes his “samurai beard, the bared teeth it framed, the big fashionable specs,” and while visiting Ithiel’s lawyer, Steinsalz, she “could not help but look at the lawyer’s lap, where because he was obese his sex organ was outlined by the pressure of his fat.” The pressure of an overflowing sense of life keeps Bellow adding touches to his central characters—filling them in, adjusting old touches. In a taxi to her last tête-à-tête in the narrative, Clara leans “her long neck backward to relieve it of the weight of her head and control the wildness of her mind.” Her big head weighs on her; we hadn’t known this, we are still learning about her, she is still being created, she is unfinished, in process, and perhaps that is the point. “Won’t the dynamic ever let you go?” she asks herself. Evidently not, if her lover is to be believed when he tells her, “Well, people have to be done with disorder, finally, and by the time they’re done they’re also finished.”

  * It also contains the most serious attempt in Nabokov’s oeuvre to portray a marriage as a union neither laughable nor idyllic, and one of his few indications that the egoism of the artist is not an entirely sunny phenomenon. The painter-hero’s wife tells him, “Oh, Alyosha, if only you weren’t stuffed full of yourself to the exclusion of all air and light, you would probably be able to see what I’ve turned into during the past few years, and what a state I am in now.”

  HYPERREALITY

  The Flaming Chalice

  THE WORLD TREASURY OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by David G. Hartwell. 1077 pp. Little, Brown, 1989.

  So-called science fiction has been around long enough, abundantly and variously enough, to keep even a mega-anthology like this one from offering a launching platform broad enough for generalizations that will go into lasting orbit. David G. Hartwell, in assembling what his introduction calls “the largest and most ambitious collection of science fiction from all over the world ever compiled,” limited himself to “the modern period, 1939 to the present.” Even so, one doesn’t have to be an expert to notice omissions. Of the pre-World War II “Golden Age,” centered on the pulp magazines Amazing Stories (founded 1926) and Astounding Stories (founded 1930), selections by Astounding’s editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., and John Berryman (not the poet) are included, but nothing by A. E. Van Vogt, whom in one of his headnotes Mr. Hartwell calls “the wildest, least polished, and most aggressively creative of the 1940s Campbell writers.” Another writer alluded to often enough to pique our interest but not represented in the anthology is the “New Wave” fantasist Roger Zelazny. Kurt Vonnegut is present, but not William Burroughs. Calvino and Borges are here, but not, of those with international literary reputations who have been attracted to science fiction of a sort, Nabokov and Doris Lessing. Though Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, and Brian Aldiss are included, nothing is said of that vein of British dystopian prophecy that produced books famous far beyond the confines of SF devotees—Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. C. S. Lewis’s peculiar Christian strain of SF, which led to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and a whole galaxy of mystical never-never lands, receives mention but no space here. And the transition from the sacred ancestors Poe, Verne, and Wells to the state of the art in the late 1930s is left to our already overexercised imaginations.

  The fifty-two pieces chosen for inclusion range in date from 1937 (not 1939) to 1986; in length from brief gems by Calvino and Stanislaw Lem to a sixty-page saga by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; and in original language from English and French to Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Japanese. The order is not chronological, but describes a wandering course from the nuts-and-bolts adventure tales of the Campbell pre-computer era through assorted fancy software (transplanted consciousnesses, cloned identities, time travel, futures that look like the past, SF feminism, SF self-satire, etc.) back to nuts-and-bolts adventure, this time in Russian. One reads along, day after day, logging the light-years, noting the shifting angles of thrust, and curious as to the next coruscating comet to swing around the corner. There is some lumpy prose and strung-out dialogue in the penny-a-word pulp manner; see, for example, the tales by C. M. Kornbluth, Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, or savor such sentences as “A kind of glazed incredulity kneaded his face into a mask of shocked granite wearing a supercilious moustache” and “It was not only that patina of perfection that seem
ed to dwell in every line of their incredibly flawless garments.” The editor, however, has kept the overall literary quality respectable, and his knowledgeable headnotes convey enthusiasm. His categories—“Golden Age,” “New Wave,” “speculative fiction,” “alternate universe SF,” “post-New Wave,” and even “post-New Wave hard science fiction”—ramify a bit luxuriantly, and his critic-ese can overheat:

  In the late 1960s Larry Niven appeared and held the center ground in science fiction just as the excesses and excitement of the New Wave were dominating critical discourse.… [His] traits have made him in a sense the sea anchor of the field at a time when storms of change have ravaged the surfaces of SF and the demand for rounded characterization and stylistic play has tended to devalue traditional approaches.

  But we are in the hands of a loving expert, and his thousand-plus chosen pages constitute an excellent text to have in hand while asking oneself the crucial question: “What keeps science fiction a minor genre, for all the brilliance of its authors and apparent pertinence of its concerns?”

  The short answer is that each science-fiction story is so busy inventing its environment that little energy is left to be invested in the human subtleties. Ordinary, “mainstream” fiction snatches what it needs from the contemporary environment and concentrates upon surprising us with details of behavior; science fiction tends to reverse the priorities. The crew of the spaceship of John Berryman’s classic “Special Flight” could come from the mixed ethnic bag of the war movies that Hollywood, in 1939, was poised to crank out. Stoic, jokey, constantly puffing cigarettes, these spacemen seem to be in a rusty tough old tanker, dodging icebergs instead of meteors. They do not feel perilously poised within the extreme thinness of space; they never confront the real practical problem of space flight—weightlessness. Of course, we know from newspapers and television what space travel is like, and Berryman did not. The Soviet brothers Strugatsky, as of 1959, knew a thing or two, yet their space travellers in “The Way to Amalteia,” amid all the beautifully worked-out technicalities of extricating themselves from the grip of Jupiter’s gravity, and the titanic scenic effects its heavy atmosphere would likely make, are shopworn Socialist heroes, a touch too good to be true. Announcing their apparent doom, Captain Bykov bluntly tells them, “We’ve lived well, and we’ll die well.” They are heroes in a very special can—“a first-class photon freighter with a parabolic reflector that resembled a skirt, with a round living gondola and a disk-shaped freight section, with cigarlike emergency rockets on long supports”—but it is canned heroism nevertheless. The captain, our gruff but friendly Soviet superhero, will predictably pull us through, land the damaged ship, and save the population of J-Station on the planetoid Amalteia from famine, declaring with gallant understatement, “Comrade Kangren, the spaceship Takhmasib has arrived with its cargo.”

  Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947) and Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Lineman” (1957) offer American versions of good guys getting the dirty job done. It is perhaps not entirely accidental that a Czech, from a nation long subject to larger nations’ heroisms, contrived, in Josef Nesvadba’s “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” (1964), an ironical version of the rocket hero. This tender parody, whose central adventure has a giant spaceship of protozoalike extraterrestrials frantically demanding of our aging, hag-ridden hero an “answer to the fundamental question of life,” finds its resolution in poetry and music and an end of technical progress: rocketry and exploration are carried on in the new world by robots indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood heroes. It is true, many of the characters in science fiction might as well be robots.

  And, of course, many are. In this anthology, robots figure as servants (“The Golem,” by Avram Davidson), tutors (“The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” by Gene Wolfe), constant companions and enforcers of social order (“Codemus,” by Tor Åge Bringsvaerd), sexual partners (“Pairpuppets,” by Manuel van Loggem), and implacable warriors (“Second Variety,” by Philip K. Dick). Robots rebel against their human masters (“The Proud Robot,” by Lewis Padgett) and fall in love with them (“Stranger Station,” by Damon Knight). The uncertain line between men and machines, one of our century’s philosophical sore spots, fascinates science fiction. In Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” the hero is revealed to be a formerly human pilot so badly damaged in a crash that his body was almost entirely replaced with mechanical elements. In John Varley’s “The Phantom of Kansas,” human identities are preserved in recording cubes; an often-murdered woman is just as often reprogrammed into a new body and, discovering that her assailant is a male incarnation of herself, makes mad love with him: “We were made for each other, literally. It was the most astounding act of love imaginable. He knew what I liked to the tenth decimal place, and I was just as knowledgeable.… Call it masturbation orchestrated for two.” In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives,” workers are cloned in multiple teams, with sex differences only; they make love as part of their pooled activity, and can hardly function apart from one another. In “The New Prehistory,” by the Colombian René Rebetez-Cortes, a movie line becomes a kind of centipede, and urban clusters of people merge into giant organisms. The narrator protests in vain, “I don’t want to find myself transformed into something shapeless like an amoeba or a glob of spittle, nor to become the last segment of a gigantic worm. I cling to my human identity, my own individual and separate personality.” In Robert Bloch’s “I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell,” a press agent who feels his head invaded by others’ phrases—“I’m losing myself. There’s no real me left”—becomes, or already is, his own psychiatrist, a certain Doctor Fell.

  The alterations that psychiatry, geology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, anthropology, microscopy, theoretical physics, and computer technology have worked upon Man’s self-image: science fiction is willing to face these head-on. Man inhabits history; human nature changes. “Advancing technology, fashion, frontiers, taste, or morals can make the best of us obsolete overnight,” says the heroine of “The Phantom of Kansas.” If a number of these hypothetical tales seem populated by old-fashioned characters, other stories do attempt to show humanity transformed, as well as the furniture of technology. Joanna Russ’s “Nobody’s Home” makes the point, with a Chekhovian casualness, that in the improved future there may be no place for the ordinary human being. A stocky, self-confessedly “stupid” female called Leslie Smith is assigned to an ethereal, playful commune in the Himalayas, a heightened version of the counterculture still thriving in 1972, when the story was written. This outsider’s docile but unmistakable ordinariness is like a crack in a perfect crystal, leading the heroine, the lovely and brilliant Jannina, to tears:

  “This life!” gasped Jannina. “This awful life!” The thought of death became entwined somehow with Leslie Smith, in bed upstairs, and Jannina began to cry afresh.

  In “Vintage Season,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, the people of the future, clad in their “incredibly flawless” garments, have discovered the secret of time travel and become tourists in time, on a package that includes Chaucer’s Canterbury in 1347, a cataclysmic meteor in the United States any day now, and the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome at Christmastime in 800. Forbidden to tamper with the past and thus possibly spoil their own pleasure-seeking present, they are as basically vapid and cruelly removed as geographical tourists now. Two separate stories, C. M. Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms” and Keith Roberts’s “Weihnachtsabend,” portray a grim future in which the Axis powers triumphed in World War II. Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry” immerse us in futures of a medieval eeriness, of looming castles and riddling foreordinations. More regressive still, Boris Vian’s “The Dead Fish” presents a glutinous future so degraded that nothing makes sense, at least to me; Vian, a French translator of A. E. Van Vogt, is likened by the editor to William Burroughs, and seems to take us into the savage world of Jarryesque farce:

  Then she tucked up her lit
tle pleated skirt, and from where she stood she saw the boss’s face turn violet, then completely black, then begin to burn, and as he kept his eyes fixed on what she was showing him, he tripped over the garden hose that he used to drown the rats; he fell with his face against a large stone, which fitted itself precisely between his cheekbones, in place of his nose and jaws. His feet stayed behind on the ground and dug a double trench, where, little by little, according to the rate at which his shoes wore out, could be seen the trail of five clumsy toes, which served to keep his socks on.

  The hallucinatory transformations in Anthony Burgess’s “The Muse” are rooted, it would seem, in a slight unsteadiness whereby the past expresses its resentment at being invaded from the future. Paley, a Shakespeare scholar visiting the Elizabethan era, feels that even the stars “had done a sly job of refiguration, forming fresh constellations like a sand tray on top of a thumped piano.” Shakespeare himself is the Droeshout engraving, with moving lips and then worse: “The face grew an elephantine proboscis, wreathing, feeling; two or three suckers sprouted from its end and blindly waved towards Paley.”

  The presence in the volume of such thoroughly literary imaginers as Burgess, Calvino, and Borges, with the faintly but distinctly different flavor their contributions afford, points up a qualitative limitation. In confronting Man’s transformation by accumulating technology, and in enlarging upon such striking developments as the atomic bomb and computerization, science fiction makes us stop and reflect and identify theoretical issues but it rarely penetrates and involves us the way the quietest realistic fiction can. The writer of non-fantastic fiction, wishing to pique his reader’s interest, naturally gravitates to “news,” to incidents and details that seem novel. These details unprogrammatically trace the changes in the human condition from one generation to the next. The pieties that bind up the universe of Dickens and Trollope dissolve around the characters of Henry James, to their dismay and ours. Hemingway’s hero discovers that gloire and other patriotic catchwords mean nothing to him, and that after a loved one dies one merely walks back to the hotel in the rain. Conventional morality, conventional propriety, conventional feeling are always being outgrown, and, with them, artistic conventions. “The writer,” Edmund Wilson wrote, “must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered.” Those rhapsodies, for instance, which Proust delivered upon the then-fresh inventions of the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane point up the larger relativities and magical connections of his great novel, as well as show the new century breaking upon a fin-de-siècle sensibility. The modest increments of fictional “news,” of phenomena whose presentation is unprecedented, have the cumulative weight of true science—a nudging, inching fidelity to human change ultimately far more impressive and momentous than the great glittering leaps of science fiction.