Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  ‡ Who, in any case, discusses and quotes Barth’s essay in his elegant little Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984). Eco seems to agree that the postmodernist is free to offer the reader simple enjoyment and to revisit the past—“but with irony, not innocently.” More interesting, to me, was Eco’s parenthetical aside: “I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as a metahistorical category.”

  § This habit of tracing the later career of schoolmates—could it relate to the opening of Vargas Llosa’s favorite novel, Madame Bovary, in which the ill-fated Charles Bovary appears as a shy “new boy”?

  LANDSCAPES AND CHARACTERS

  A Long Way Home

  BLUE HIGHWAYS: A Journey into America, by William Least Heat Moon. 421 pp. Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1983.

  Hurling oneself more or less blindly at the highways of America would not seem a very efficient method of producing a book; but a surprising number of people have tried it. In recent memory, there have been John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Erskine Caldwell’s Around About America, Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory: An American Voyage, and Richard Reeves’s American Journey. To be sure, the author puts some spin on himself as he hurls; there has to be an angle. Mr. Reeves had the excellent idea, which he carried out with purposeful, prearranged interviews, of following in the nineteenth-century footsteps of the supreme American-travel impressionist, Alexis de Tocqueville. Mr. Raban, with that brave English willingness to act out childhood fantasies, went down the Mississippi in a boat because he had read Huckleberry Finn at the impressionable age of seven—much as Bruce Chatwin journeyed to Patagonia because of a bit of Mylodon skin in his grandmother’s dining-room cabinet. Steinbeck and Caldwell, native men of letters mature in age and rich in distinction, went forth to investigate their national turf. Steinbeck, for twenty-five years marooned by success in New York City, had come to feel that, as he wrote, “I did not know my own country”:

  I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years.

  What he had been feeling, and smelling and hearing, in the terrain between his apartment in New York and his summer home in Sag Harbor is left undescribed. Steinbeck was a Westerner and his soul breathed best in the wide open; in Travels with Charley he extolled the North Dakota Badlands and wrote, “I am in love with Montana.” He travelled, with a poodle called Charles le Chien, in a small truck called Rocinante and fitted up like “a little house,” with facilities for sleeping and cooking. William Least Heat Moon, author of Blue Highways: A Journey into America, also used a truck rigged like a camper, and gave it a fanciful name—Ghost Dancing, in salute to the “desperate resurrection rituals” whereby the Plains Indians tried to bring back the bison and the old warrior life—not unlike Steinbeck’s allusion to the quixotic. The resemblance does not go much further. Heat Moon (Least seems to be his middle name) is an unknown, a mixed-blood Sioux who, when he was thirty-eight years old, was propelled outward from Columbia, Missouri, by a marital break-up and the sudden loss of his job teaching English at Stephens College. His Christian name is, or has been, William Trogdon. This is his first book. It has been launched toward success by kind words from Annie Dillard, Farley Mowat, and Robert Penn Warren. Mr. Warren not only has obliged with an ideal puff for the front of the jacket—“A masterpiece”—but has written the front-flap copy as well. It is he, and not the author, who tells us that William Least Heat Moon “set out to … write a book about America.”

  Heat Moon’s own explanation is

  With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.

  This seems disingenuously high-minded—self-dramatizing but not self-revealing. The author could, I think, have confided a bit more of his curriculum vitae to the reader in the course of over four hundred big pages. His third chapter, less than two pages long, announces, “I give this chapter to myself. When done with it, I will shut up about that topic.” He does not tell us where he is from, where he has been, or what he has done. He does not tell us that, set adrift by spouse and employer, he has embarked on an odyssey determined to redeem his life with a literary feat, though this would appear, from the determined manner of his peregrinations and his prose, and from the tape recorder, journal, and cameras he took with him, a plausible conjecture. It is a shortcoming of his adventure that, though an immense thirteen-thousand-mile itinerary develops—a rough clockwise circuit of the boundaries of the forty-eight contiguous states along mostly back roads—no inner curve of feeling tells us if this grandly invoked search reaches or fails to reach its objective. Instead, thousands of miles and hundreds of incidents, conversations, and pieces of scenery bear in upon the reader with the numbing, glittering muchness of a very long car ride. Since Heat Moon writes a thoughtful, sharp-eyed, and evocative if not exactly dancing prose, and since he is a benign and shrewd though somewhat taciturn companion, one reads on, and on, out of a kind of courtesy to the author. But no Moby-Dick of an envisioned thesis surfaces on the horizon to pull the worlds of detail toward some gravitational center; the venture never quite becomes an adventure.

  There are, it is true, encounters along the way: the pilgrim blunders mistakenly into a whorehouse in Nevada, nearly freezes while stuck on a snowy mountain pass in Utah, is hassled by police in Alabama and New York State, has his water pump replaced in North Dakota, gives a Seventh-Day Adventist vagabond missionary a ride across Idaho and into Montana, and goes out on a trawler from the coast of Maine. And there are facts: the former college instructor knows how to use local libraries as well as strike up local conversations, and the blue highways (“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue”) yield much odd information by the way. The Mississippi carries forty tons of topsoil every hour to the Louisiana delta. The word “turnpike” arose because the early toll roads were barred by revolving poles. Martin Van Buren’s autobiography never mentions his wife, and he, Charles Dickens, Andrew Johnson, and James Polk all spent a night in Jonesboro, Tennessee, which was once the capital of a state called Franklin. The first Mason jar was made near Millville, New Jersey. Since 1930, while automobile traffic has gone up fifty percent, the miles of American streets and roads have increased only eighteen percent. The phrase “skid row” comes from Portland, Oregon, where the seedy wharf area was known as Skidroad, a logger’s term for “a timber track to drag logs over.” All this is interesting, and perhaps even more germane to his announced themes of change and connectedness are such incidental data as that the mine workers of Hachita, New Mexico, wouldn’t move into a new company town because the location didn’t get good TV reception, and that the slaves of old Kentucky built miles of precisely fitted limestone fences that now, when a car knocks down a section, are heaped back haphazardly: “Like the slaves, the skill and time necessary to build a good stone fence were gone.”

  We could have used more generalization. In de Tocqueville, the proportion of incident to generalized assertion and description is no more than one to ten; Blue Highways reverses the ratio. We hope for more from a travel book—especially when its terrain is the land where we live, and whose news we see nightly on television—than a heap of piquant facts, however nicely chiselled and arranged. “Reading my notes of the trip—images, bits of conversations, ideas—I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule.” Heat Moon’s inner quest keeps sinking out of sight; his Weltschmerz merges with road weariness, his muffled marital grief—his wife, also of mixed blood, is identified simply as the Cherokee—is relegated to a single long-distance phone call, which leads nowh
ere. His intermittent wish to pump significance into his material drives him toward tangled rhetoric like

  Maybe it was the place or maybe a slow turning in the mind about how a man cannot entirely disconnect from the past. To try to is the American impulse, but to look at the steady continuance of the past is to watch time get emptied of its bluster because time bears down less on the continuum than on the components.

  He is a great believer in bars as forums of opinion, and we hear a good deal about café cuisine. Some of the conversations he has are good; others feel stagy and forced—forced by his need to produce them for his unacknowledged companion, this book in embryo. It seems bookishness that tugs him toward towns bearing quaint names—Nameless, Looking-glass, Dime Box, Othello. His regional descriptions can be magical—such as that of the Palouse, a weirdly fertile area, in Washington State, of hills so steep that special machinery has to be built to harvest the crops—but sometimes feel as obligatory as postcards. There are too many pushed metaphors, including a peculiar type of pathetic fallacy, highway personification:

  Highway 260, winding through the pine forests of central Arizona, let the mountains be boss as it followed whatever avenues they left open.

  Utah 56 went at the sagebrush flats seriously, taking up big stretches before turning away from anything.

  More might have been done with the author’s partial Indianness; this was meant, perhaps, to provide the angle of vision, the spin on the pitch. Few stretches of land and pages pass without a reminder of some past battle or treaty whereby the first Americans were deprived of their continental domain. Heat Moon takes along with him as literary companions Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and J. G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. Black Elk even has some words on “the blue road”: it is the route for “one who is distracted, who is ruled by his senses, and who lives for himself rather than for his people.” There is something Indian, too, about the ordeal of Spartan travel that Heat Moon has imposed upon himself; James Ferry, another Native American, has written in a recent short story, “My grandfather once told me that there was a certain pain that purified. Because of the pain, some Indian ceremonies may seem like mere torture to outsiders. But beyond the pain there is something else, if only one can get beyond the pain. The inside is reduced to ash, as the sun has touched you, sanctified you.” Yet William Least Heat Moon’s actual encounters with Indians, and his long drives through old Indian territory, fall rather flat. In Texas, he picks up an elderly hitchhiker who turns out to be the offspring of a vaquero (cowboy) and an Apache mother, and, though “he was the only Apache, mestizo or otherwise,” the author had ever talked to, neither man can find much to say: “When the silence got noticeably long, he said, ‘Pretty good country.’ ” Driving on west, Heat Moon sagely observes that “there’s something about the desert that doesn’t like man.” Visiting the Hopi reservation in Arizona, he has “no luck in striking up a conversation,” and among the Navajo is bluntly snubbed:

  Intimidated by my ignorance of Navajo and by fear of the contempt that full-bloods often show lesser bloods, I again failed to stir a conversation. After the storm blew on east, I followed the old men back outside, where they squatted to watch the day take up the weather of an hour earlier. To one with a great round head like an earthen pot, I said, “Is the storm finished now?” He looked at me then slowly turned his head, while the others examined before them things in the air invisible to me.

  The old pothead has sensed, no doubt, that his interlocutor is part paleface—a literary man, an educator, an instinctive alluder to Henry Miller and H. L. Mencken, Calvin Trillin and John McPhee. Heat Moon is a fractional brave well enough assimilated to worry winningly about being eaten by a bear while he sleeps in his steel truck. “I lay a long time, waiting for the beast, shaggy and immense, to claw through the metal, its hot breath on my head, to devour me like a gumdrop.” Though he does get a Hopi student at Southern Utah State College to talk about being Indian, and to explicate the maze at the heart of Hopi philosophy, when the author climbs back into his truck and drones through the monotonous immensity east of where Sitting Bull at last surrendered it is not Whitman or Black Elk that comes to his mind for quotation but one of Gertrude Stein’s incomparable epigrams: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.” Farther east still, he is insulted as “Tonto” and a “freak” by a businessman in Michigan, though the photograph on the back of the jacket shows a pale, fine-featured man with a studiously shaped haircut and beard. The only things that look Indian about Heat Moon are his dark eyes and his enviably flat stomach.

  After being called “Tonto,” the author seems to wake up, and to cease wishing to see the invisible things that full-blooded Indians see, and to exercise his eye more satirically, especially as upper-class Northeasterners hove into view: “In the piney taproom I sat near a table of two men and their wives who wore the colors for that spring: pink and Kelly green touched up with white. The women were in perfect trim like mortuary lawns, and the husbands wore clothes for the man who knows where he’s going.… The conversation was about suitable gifts to take the children at home with grandmothers. The decision: volleyballs for the boys, stuffed kangaroos for the girls, brandied apricot cakes for grandmothers.” And in Kennebunkport, Maine:

  The summer season was coming on, and already middle [sic] matrons in nonskid-soled shoes and wraparound skirts were leading middle-level husbands into shops rigged out in macramé and down counters of perfumed candles, stained-glass mobiles, Snoopy beach towels, brass trivets, ceramic coffee mugs from Japan, music box cheeseboards, ladybug jewelry. Clerks, a generation younger, watched with expressions stuck on like decals.

  Smile though he will, Northeasterners, from Cheshire, New York, to Smith Island, Maryland, were the warmest people Heat Moon met—the most amusing and the least wary, the most giving. He was invited to eat dandelion salad and fried venison with an Italian family in the vineyard country of New York State, to tramp through an old-timer’s sugar-maple farm in New Hampshire, to join a fishing expedition in Maine, to sing the praises of atomic submarines (“They’re longer than the Washington Monument”) in Connecticut, to have drinks and dinner in southern New Jersey, and to go on a private tour of a six-by-four-mile island in Maryland. The author has a few friends in this region, and some memories: he was once a sailor stationed at Newport. He walks Thames Street, sanitized and commercialized since the Sixties, when it was “still a dark little guttery thing filled with the odor of beer and fried food and dime-store perfume,” and remembers an old fisherman he met in a tavern where a parking lot now exists:

  He’d lost a thumb to a kink in a line, but he believed he’d had a good life. Around his neck hung a small scrimshaw, showing a crude yet detailed image of the Holy Virgin, carved from the knuckle of his thumb. “Your own bone,” he had said, “she’s the best luck.”

  That carved bit of your own bone might have served better than the Hopi maze as the ruling metaphor for this book. By sticking to the back roads, Heat Moon by and large met Americans who have stayed put, where fate set them, gradually gathering dignity to their lives from the continuing history of places like Shelbyville, Kentucky, and Melvin Village, New Hampshire. Their talk, where they do not grudge it, is firm and, within the tiny given periphery, authoritative. One doubts if life has many lessons they would have learned better by moving around. And one doubts, when Blue Highways and all its passing sights have been traversed, if William Least Heat Moon learned much about himself or about America that he could not have discovered in Columbia, Missouri.

  The Local View

  CHARACTERS AND THEIR LANDSCAPES, by Ronald Blythe. 208 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

  This book in its original English publication was called From the Headlands—a more suitably diffident title for a collection of essays, some quite brief, written over the years for various occasions. What the occasions were we are left to guess. Some, to judge from the acknowl
edgments, were introductions to paperback reissues of classics (Hazlitt, Tolstoy, Hardy); others have the tone of radio talks and were previously published in The Listener. Though Mr. Blythe’s introduction, which naturally emphasizes the something heaven-sent and unifying in his sundry inspirations, claims, “A few of these essays have been previously published in the scattered way of such things, and quite a few of them have not,” only three of the fourteen, in fact, escaped prior publication. One would be grateful to know what prompted the delivery of such relatively offhand and inconclusive accounts as “Dinner with Dr. Stopes” and “Interpreting the Shades.” What has dictated their preservation in this volume, we are told, is “the native element,” “a linkage of mood, thought and autobiographical facts,” “writing which ‘doubles’ certain literary and personal reactions to readings and events.” Mr. Blythe protests too much; he is a distinctive writer with a pervasive passion for rural England, and any collection by him would have unity enough.