Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  At every start I found the pillow next to me swollen and cold and the boundless room lit only by the moon which an obliging mirror reflected into the dusty water of a fire-bucket.

  Mr. Mitchell’s introduction compares a few passages of Morand’s French with Pound’s and other translations in case we needed to be convinced that as a translator Pound was incomparably bold and energetic. Though linguistic scholars have always been pained by some of Pound’s liberties and etymological leaps, it was he above all others in the twentieth century who lifted translation to the status of an art. His translations are not transparent; they can be eccentric and flamboyant and more active than the original. “Dans une atmosphère de tabac” becomes “in this air freighted with tobacco,” “Atroce matin d’exécution” becomes “A good day for a hanging” (as opposed to another translator’s flat-footed “Atrocious morning for an excursion”), and “Voilà une curieuse rencontre” becomes, simply, “Mm.” Modernist translation came to the fore, a proclaimed artistic medium, like thick paint. Even if a dozen cavalier extensions of the literal French exist on every page, Morand was well served by Pound, and perhaps his English reputation would be less negligible if this translation had been published when delivered.

  Proust’s preface to Fancy Goods aimed to serve in a different way: by blessing Morand in full view of French readers, much as Anatole France had, a generation before, provided a preface for the young Proust’s Pleasures and Days. In 1921, Proust, like his hero Baldassare Silvande in that youthful collection, knew he was dying; his preface, in Pound’s translation—the least worked-over, we are told, of Pound’s manuscript—is a remarkable late efflorescence, an epic example of a gratuitous genre. Proust begins by telling the reader that “I should like to have undertaken the useless labor of doing a real preface for these charming brief romances”; but “a stranger has taken her abode in my mind.” He gives the stranger’s name: Death. “I was surprised at her lack of beauty. I had always thought Death beautiful. How otherwise should she get the better of us?” Then the invalid takes up the notion, once raised by his old patron Anatole France, that “singularity of style should be rejected,” and in a grandly irrelevant delirium of quotation from memory discusses the past styles of Baudelaire and Taine, Sainte-Beuve and Stendhal (“a great writer without knowing it”), Madame de Sévigné and Racine (“doubtless in Racine an hysteric of genius was struggling in the control of a superior intelligence”). It all suggests a prima donna’s fluttering farewells, though what Pound liked about the preface was how it “shoveled what one hopes is a final funeral clod upon the corpse of Sainte-Beuve.” Of young Morand there is scarcely a word, though Proust does drop a valuable warning: “This new writer is usually fatiguing to read and difficult to understand because he joins things by new relationships. One follows the first half of the phrase very well, and then one falls. One feels it is only because the new writer is more agile than we are.”

  Since the death of Vladimir Nabokov, no writer has been more agile than Italo Calvino—and there was something gruff and abrasive about Nabokov, something modern as it were, which the Italian postmodernist has smoothly shucked. Calvino’s prose, though ingenious, is never difficult; though colorful, never opaque. The reader is charmed, not challenged. True, Marcovaldo is a minor work, untranslated into English for twenty years. The author’s note tells us that the first of these twenty stories “were written in the early 1950s and thus are set in a very poor Italy, the Italy of neo-realistic movies. The last stories date from the mid-60s, when the illusions of an economic boom flourished.” The sardonic Marxist tone of this note reminds us that Calvino was for twelve years—up to the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956—a Communist. Marcovaldo is a member of the working class in an unnamed industrial city; he lives with his wife and six children in a half-basement, and later in an attic apartment. While in a park, he longs to sleep “in the midst of this cool green shade and not in my cramped, hot room; here amid the silence, not amid the snoring and sleep-talking of my whole family and the racing of trams down below in the street.” In another story, a snowfall mercifully masks the realities of his workday until a sneeze disperses the flakes; then “to his gaze there appeared the familiar courtyard, the gray walls, the boxes from the warehouse, the things of every day, sharp and hostile.” His family chops up roadside billboards for warmth, and wants to cook a pet rabbit he has brought home to them. But such grim proletarian realities are established primarily as the ground for merriment, for the repeated demonstration of Marcovaldo’s hopeful, generous, and dauntless spirit. He nurses a sallow potted plant into a flourishing tree; he develops a thriving clinic based upon the healing properties of wasp stings; he dresses up as Santa Claus and motorbikes about the city delivering presents. The stories, as they play across potentially sombre ground, reminded me of nothing so much as Giovanni Guareschi’s Little World of Don Camillo (1950) and its successor volumes of comic vignettes about the jockeying between the priest and the Communist mayor of a small Italian village—best-selling Cold War whimsy.

  Yet Marcovaldo shows not only Calvino’s fine fanciful hand and habit of mathematical rigor (the twenty stories make a fivefold cycle of the four seasons) but the concerns of his major fiction—Man in the universe, men in cities.

  This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horsefly on a horse’s back, no worm-hole in a plank, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence.

  Natural reality, for which natural man naturally hungers, emerges even in the cityscape, once men are eliminated. During the August holidays, when the streets are deserted,

  Marcovaldo’s eyes peered around seeking the emergence of a different city, a city of bark and scales and clots and nerve-systems under the city of paint and tar and glass and stucco. And there, the building which he passed every day was revealed to him, in its reality, as a quarry of porous gray sandstone.

  The little book carries a surprising message: Destroy. In the last story, a wealthy child smashes all his presents and burns down his house; the joy of the Destructive Gift dawns upon the spirit of Christmas Consumption, and the city in Marcovaldo’s vision is replaced by a wilderness, “an expanse of snow … white as this page.”

  But there is a qualitative difference between such envisioned simplification—the reduction of experience to the page, the word, the book—and the actual shattered aftermath sketched by Morand, the Europe of crazy women and of men who ask, “Who [will] console me for the anonymous farce of creation?” Calvino is as much a postwar writer as Morand; indeed, he fought, in the Italian resistance, whereas Morand merely witnessed World War I from within the diplomatic service. Yet Calvino’s work gives a consoling impression, of delectable self-entertainment in a world of deferred disaster. Whereas Morand’s prose texture prickles with a thousand little tenacious claws of extra precision, of “reaching,” Calvino’s (as rendered in William Weaver’s transparent translation) is smooth, even where its message is anarchic and subversive. One feels that personal outrage and bewilderment have been sublimated, that an insulating interface with the world has been developed. Calvino’s experiments, though copious and tireless, lack the sense of emergency that Morand’s nervous glimpses of café life convey. They are not, to use a term that has cropped up several times already, hysterical.

  A certain light on the modernist-postmodernist problem was slantingly cast by the recent small squabble over the new frames in the renovated Museum of Modern Art’s rehanging of its collection. The early “modern” paintings, from Cézanne to the Fauves, were shifted from their traditional bulky and ornate sculptured frames
to thin flat gilded frames marked to ape bamboo. The Museum, according to The New York Times, says the new framing saves space and reduces visual clutter. Mark Davis, a professional framer, observed of the new framing, “I think it’s silly, antiseptic, and somewhat hysterical.… The reductive idea is a tenet of hard-core Modernism, and we’re not so concerned with orthodox Modernism today. Now that we’ve arrived at post-Modernism, things are much looser, more eclectic. Tastes have broadened, a lot more is acceptable.” There are a number of adjectives that invite comment here, but “hysterical” is the striking one. Was modernism hysterical? In the dictionary sense of “emotional excitability” I suppose it was; and if you had inherited a century’s worth of Victorian furniture, of overstuffed thrones and rococo priedieux, of peacock feathers and elephant’s-foot umbrella stands, of ornate plaster picture frames and leatherbound uniform sets, of busts of Napoleon and Victor Hugo and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, of morals and rhymes and armor-plated pieties, you might be hysterical, too. The clutter of that compulsively accumulating nineteenth century goaded the modernists to great efforts of rejection and made them see reality, however bleak, as an invitingly open attic window. Webster’s dictionary, helpful as always, defines “modernism” as “the philosophy and practices of modern art; esp.: a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression.” A requisite of modernism was disenchantment with past masters—Proust wrote “contre Sainte-Beuve,” Pound trashed the Edwardians, etc. The good postmodernist, on the other hand, enjoys a respectful educated acquaintanceship with the moderns; indeed, he often makes his living by teaching them to students. As John Barth puts it, “He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back.” The moderns digested, the postmodernist looks relatively plump. He can go nimbly through motions that cost the moderns some agony. Instead of cleaning out an attic, he lives in one, among the smiling busts of Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Rilke and Pound. The window, for the time being, is closed.

  States of Mind

  MR. PALOMAR, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 130 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

  Italo Calvino, who began to write forty years ago in the shade of Italian neorealism, became in his fiction increasingly cerebral and schematic. But even in his early short stories, even in the grim little war anecdotes based on his youthful experiences as a Partisan in the Ligurian mountains, there was something fanciful and ideal, an underlying formalism. His new novel, Mr. Palomar, consists of twenty-seven small chapters, each describing observations by its hero, who is named after an observatory. Twenty-seven is three to the third power, and an afterword attached to an index of the chapters demonstrates that the possibilities for symmetry and modulation were lovingly weighed by the author:

  The numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index, whether they are in the first, second, or third position, besides having a purely ordinal value, correspond also to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and inquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book.

  Those marked “1” generally correspond to a visual experience, whose object is almost always some natural form; the text tends to the descriptive.

  Those marked “2” contain elements that are anthropological, or cultural in the broad sense; and the experience involves, besides visual data, also language, meaning, symbols. The text tends to take the form of a story.

  Those marked “3” involve more speculative experience, concerning the cosmos, time, infinity, the relationship between the self and the world, the dimensions of the mind. From description and narrative we move into meditation.

  Such a grid rivals Joyce’s intertwining schemata for Ulysses, which assigned each chapter not only a corresponding episode of The Odyssey but a particular color, an organ of the human body, an hour of the day, a dominant symbol, and a human science or art, and which furthermore carried forward this huge apparatus of multiple significance through a Thomistic system of contraries and coincidences, products and antidotes, not to mention parallels with various of Giambattista Vico’s ages of mankind and a presiding metaphysics of space and time.

  Joyce’s encyclopedic and abstractifying ambitions were incongruously but fruitfully wedded to his love of life’s small talk and petty grit, and to the passionate autobiography that his elaborate designs hold. Where the autobiographical, factual impulse is less powerful, schematization runs the risk of seeming playful and automatic; and Calvino did not always dodge this gentle danger. Invisible Cities (1974), amid all its airy machinery, was infused with his lively civic concern and cosmopolitan reach of imagination, but The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1977) seemed at times to be merely playing cards, to be filling in the scheme’s blank spaces, and in If on a winter’s night a traveler (1981) the overlays of cleverness and the charm of the literary parodies left an afterimage that melted in the mind like a Platonic pastille. Mr. Palomar, though short, is a more substantial and integrated book than these last two; it undertakes a description of existential man rather than literary man, and deals with issues of perception rather than of reading and narration.

  Mr. Palomar—a man, we learn, of middle age and no definite occupation, with a wife and an apartment both in Rome and in Paris—sets himself to look at things, and focuses until he arrives at a conclusion, however small. “A nervous man who lives in a frenzied and congested world, Mr. Palomar tends to reduce his relations with the outside world; and, to defend himself against the general neurasthenia, he tries to keep his sensations under control insofar as possible.” Chapter 1.1.1, for instance—the most intense dose, as we can gauge at a glance, of the visual, descriptive mode—finds our hero on the beach, viewing the waves with a determined precision:

  Mr. Palomar now tries to limit his field of observation; if he bears in mind a square zone of, say, ten meters of shore by ten meters of sea, he can carry out an inventory of all the wave movements that are repeated with varying frequency within a given time interval. The hard thing is to fix the boundaries of this zone, because if, for example, he considers as the side farthest from him the outstanding line of an advancing wave, as this line approaches him and rises it hides from his eyes everything behind it, and thus the space under examination is overturned and at the same time crushed.

  He tries to use the waves as an instrument wherewith “to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits,” feels “a slight dizziness” instead, and goes off along the beach “tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything.”

  With 1.1.2, we enter the anthropological mode: Mr. Palomar attempts to cope visually and socially with the sight of a naked bosom, “the bronze-pink cloud of a naked female torso,” on this same beach. To stare is wrong, yet not to stare is also wrong; his reactions to this provocative sight swing from an “indiscreet and reactionary” looking away that reinforces “the convention that declares illicit any sight of the breast” to a liberal attempt to convey “detached encouragement” with a gaze that, “giving the landscape a fickle glance, will linger on the breast with special consideration, but will quickly include it in an impulse of good will and gratitude for the whole, for the sun and the sky, for the bent pines and the dune and the beach and the rocks and the clouds and the seaweed, for the cosmos that rotates around those haloed cusps.” Thus he will signal that, “though he belongs to a human generation for whom nudity of the female bosom was associated with the idea of amorous intimacy, still he hails approvingly this change in customs.” But in walking back and forth trying to achieve just the right political adjustment in his gaze he finally succeeds in driving the possessor of the bosom off in an angry huff. It is all funny, familiar, and sociologically thoughtful. The next chapter, 1.1.3, takes us into cosmic and philosophical considerations as Palomar swims toward the swordlike reflection of the sun on the sea and ponders the dependence of this blazing phenomenon upon his own witnessing of it. Persuaded that “the sword will exist even without him,
” he “dries himself with a soft towel and goes home.”

  Such a cycle of three is repeated three times three times; we see Mr. Palomar on the beach, in the garden, and stargazing; on the terrace, shopping, and at the zoo; travelling, in society, and meditating. He ponders the lovemaking of tortoises, the composition of lawns, the moon in daytime, Rome’s plague of pigeons, Paris’s plethora of cheeses, an albino gorilla, a Zen sand garden, a Mexican ruin, and why we get so angry at the young. When the book heads into its last third and the 3’s pile up, the topics get increasingly heady: “The model of models,” “The universe as mirror,” “Learning to be dead.” We learn, in the bargain, a bit more about Mr. Palomar: He does not love himself, we are told, and therefore “has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face.” He thinks of death as benign insofar as it will eliminate “that patch of uneasiness that is our presence.” The middle section, under the anthropological sign of 2 and the general head of “Mr. Palomar in the City,” reads the easiest, and has a distinctly creaturely emphasis, from the colorful evocation of a butcher’s shop—“Vast ribs blaze up, round tournedos whose thickness is lined by a ribbon of lard, slender and agile contre-filets, steaks armed with their invincible bone.… Farther on some white tripe glows, a liver glistens blackly”—to the close scrutiny of a gecko, lit transparently from underneath, as it swallows a large, live butterfly: “Will it all fit? Will he spit it out? Will he explode? No, the butterfly is there in his throat: it flutters, in a sorry state but still itself, not touched by the insult of chewing teeth; now it passes the narrow limits of the neck; it is a shadow that begins its slow and troubled journey down along a swollen esophagus.”