The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  He is also a genius. One says this with some confidence: he makes Beckett look pedestrian, Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless. Throughout the course of his oeuvre one watches Joyce steadily washing his hands of mere talent: the entirely approachable stories of Dubliners, the more or less comprehensible Portrait, then Ulysses, before Joyce girds himself for the ultimately reader-hostile, reader-nuking immolation of Finnegans Wake, where every word is a multilingual pun. The exemplary genius, he is also the exemplary Modern, fanatically prolix, innovative and recondite, and free of any obligation to please a reading public (in place of government grants or protective universities, Joyce had patronage). Unreined, unbound, he soared off to fulfil the destiny of his genius; or, if you prefer, he wrote to please himself. All writers do this, or want to do this, or would do this if they dared. Only Joyce did it with such crazed superbity.

  It is both comic and appropriate that Ulysses started out as a short story, to be added to Dubliners. In a way, that is how Ulysses ended up: a short story of a third of a million words, a short story into which Joyce put everything he knew. The mad inclusiveness of the novel is offered as an ironic sacrament, a human version of divine knowledge: Joyce really is the Omniscient Narrator. Still, one can imagine how the original tale might have gone, recounted with the decorous obliquity of the early work. Gentle, fortyish Jew strolls the streets of Dublin, tormented by prospective sexual jealousy as his wife prepares for a fresh infidelity; reckless, twentyish Catholic takes a parallel route, tormented by retrospective guilt about his dead mother; they meet; they talk; they part. End of story. In the quietness and austerity of the tale, in its constrictions of time and place, Joyce saw – or willed into being – the frame of epic: degraded epic, modern epic.

  There is only one event in Ulysses: the meeting between Bloom and Stephen. (It is a hundred-page anticlimax; but then this is an anti-novel.) All the rest is ‘Life, life’, in Bloom’s phrase. ‘Every life is many days, day after day,’ as Stephen puts it: ‘We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.’ The presiding life-force of the book is traditionally thought to be Molly – crooning, yearning, bleeding, squirming, two-timing Molly Bloom. Yet the real superanimator is Joyce’s prose, this incredible instrument, half wand, half weapon. In fact the prose and the heroine have a good deal in common, equally fickle, headstrong and vain. One moment she is readied for the tryst, primped and prinked, all lilt and tease, bristling with bedroom know-how and can-do; the next she is immersed in a sour and impenetrable sulk. We know only this: she will have her way.

  Let us look at this prose and its scales of intensity. First, the yellow pages. The gardener: ‘aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold’s face, he pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms’. The barmaid: ‘She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable a woman’s warmhosed thigh.’ The dairywoman: ‘Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle.’

  On into the animal world. A bat: ‘Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands. Weeny bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white.’ A rat: ‘An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wiggled itself in under it.’ A cat: ‘– Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly. She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones.’

  Until we reach the inanimate, the lifeless. Smoke: ‘Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown.’ Dust: ‘Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.’ Water: ‘White breast of the sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords.’ Space – and the book’s most ravishing sentence: ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’

  The Joyce corpus maps a journey into language and away from life – life, which never stays put or holds still for quite long enough. Ulysses was his consummation of the human world, a loving and languid farewell; no one has written more entrancingly about the rhythms and the furniture of daily life. But Joyce wanted more: he wanted the dream world, the word world of Finnegans Wake, his own Book of the Dead. We watch him crystallizing.

  Beautiful prose came so naturally to Joyce that he often indulged a perverse attraction to its opposite: to hideous prose, to mirror-cracking, clock-stopping prose. Ulysses parodies everything from the Cursor Mundi to the tabloid headline. There are jewels: ‘All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!’ But most of the parodies feel like a deliberate strain on the reader’s patience. What fun – at least in theory – when the exquisite stylist starts sounding like a bailiff or a telephone directory or a drunk or a scripture. The scene in the cabman’s shelter is said to be a parody of dud journalism; but it is more like a parody of writing, a nightmare of repetitions, tautologies, double negatives, elegant variations, howlers, danglers: ‘Mozart’s Twelfth Mass he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat.’ And so on: the tour de force of lugubrious cliché is ten times longer than this review. It is as if Joyce used dead prose and swingeing tedium – epic boredom, biblical boredom – as a counterweight to all that is fresh and vital elsewhere. Structural cliché, structural boredom: Joyce is a stern master.

  It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations, fossilized metaphors – most notably those of Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds. How devastatingly Joyce combines his themes when, in the citizen’s chapter, the debt-collector staggers out of the bar to the latrine, convinced that Bloom has secretively made a killing on the day’s big horse race. It is a mark of Joyce’s modernity that he follows his creations not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom:

  … gob says I to myself I knew he was uneasy … in his mind to get off the mark to (hundred shillings is five quid) and when they were in the (dark horse) pisser Burke was telling me card party and letting on the child was sick … all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if he won or (Jesus, full up I was) trading without a licence (ow!) Ireland my nation says he (hoik! phthook!) never be up to those bloody (there’s the last of it) Jerusalem (ah!) cuckoos.

  ‘There’s a jew for you!’ he later reflects. ‘All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat.’ But we have already seen the shithouse rat, hoiking and phthooking his bitterness and mediocrity into the drowned urinal. In the next chapter (one of the greatest passages in all literature) we see the citizen’s granddaughter, Gerty MacDowell, disintegrating beneath her legacy of stock-response: she is herself a beautiful slum of clichés. Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence. When he says, of a gloomy building, ‘Whole place gone to hell’, we remind ourselves that it once housed a murderer.

  Ulysses takes about a week to read, if you do nothing else. There is much laughter; there is, for many a stretch, the steady smile of envious admiration; there is the authentic shiver, the sense of pregnant arrest, at the close. There is also much swearing and shouting and shuddering. The book has two main presences, Stephen and Bloom. Like his creator, Stephen is a virtuoso earbender, a coruscating pedant:

  It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests heihooping round David’s that is Circe’s or what am I saying Ceres’ altar and David’s tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his almightin
ess.

  Enough! Even if he knew when to stop, Stephen would keep going; Stephen would hang in there. Throughout you long for Bloom, for the logical and lyrical Joycean music. This writer has the power to take you anywhere (nothing is beyond him); but he keeps taking you where you don’t want to go.

  The scholars have assured us that Ulysses, like Finnegans Wake, ‘works out’. Which is good to know. We like difficult books, said Lionel Trilling, and the remark became one of the slogans of modernism. Yet who are we, exactly? Academics and explicators like difficult books, and Joyce helped create the industry they serve; with modern geniuses, you must have the middlemen. The reader, I submit, remains unconsulted on the matter. Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns – cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit. This showed fantastic courage, and fantastic introversion. The truth is Joyce didn’t love the reader, as you need to do. Well, he gave us Ulysses, incontestably the central modernist masterpiece; it is impossible to conceive of any future novel that might give the form such a violent evolutionary lurch. You can’t help wondering, though. Joyce could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.

  Atlantic Monthly September 1986

  The American Eagle

  The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

  The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold forty-two years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do: it ended.

  But what was that quest, anyway – itself so essentially American? No literary masterpiece or federal epic is mentioned in the Constitution, as one of the privileges and treats actually guaranteed to the populace, along with things like liberty and life and the right to bear computerized machine-guns. Still, it is easy enough to imagine how such an aspiration might have developed. As its culture was evolving, and as cultural self-consciousness dawned, America found itself to be a youthful, vast and various land, peopled by non-Americans. So how about this place? Was it a continental holding-camp of Greeks, Jews, Brits, Italians, Scandinavians and Lithuanians, together with the remaining Amerindians from ice-age Mongolia? Or was it a nation, with an identity – with a soul? Who could begin to give the answers? Among such diversity, who could crystallize the American experience?

  Like most quests, the quest for the Great American Novel seemed destined to be endless. You won’t find that mythical beast, that holy grail, that earthly Eden – though you have to keep looking. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit was the thing; you were never going to catch up. It was very American to insist on having a Great American Novel, thus rounding out all the other benefits Americans enjoy. Nobody has ever worried about the Great French Novel or the Great Russian Novel (though it is entirely intelligible that there should be some cautious talk about the Great Australian Novel). Trying to find the Great American Novel, rolling up your sleeves and trying to write it: this was American. And so it would go on, for ever, just as literature never progresses or improves but simply evolves and provides the model. The Great American Novel was a chimera; this mythical beast was a pig with wings. Miraculously, however, and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home. He dedicated the book to his father and published it in 1953 and then settled down to write Seize the Day.

  Literary criticism, as normally practised, will tend to get in the way of a novel like Augie March. Shaped (loosely) as an odyssey, and well stocked with (unsystematic) erudition – with invocations and incantations – the book is very vulnerable to the kind of glossarial jigsaw-solver who must find form: pattern, decor, lamination, colour-scheme. But that isn’t how the novel works on you. Books are partly about life, and partly about other books. Some books are largely about other books, and spawn yet other books. Augie March is all about life: it brings you up against the dead-end of life. Bellow’s third novel, following the somewhat straitened performances of Dangling Man and The Victim, is above all free – without inhibition. An epic about the so-called ordinary, it is a marvel of remorseless spontaneity. As a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself. Your job is to work your way round to the bits you want to quote. You are a guide in a gallery where the signs say Silence Please; you are shepherding your group from spectacle to spectacle – awed, humbled, and trying, so far as possible, to keep your mouth shut.

  A brief outline. The Adventures of Augie March is about the formation of an identity, of a soul – that of a parentless and penniless boy growing up in pre- and post-Depression Chicago. Augie’s mother is ‘simple-minded’ and so is his younger brother Georgie, who ‘was born an idiot’. Simon, his older brother, is hard-headed; and Simon is all he’s got. The domestic configuration is established early on, with typical pathos and truthfulness:

  Never but at such times, by necessity, was my father mentioned. I claimed to remember him; Simon denied that I did, and Simon was right. I liked to imagine it.

  ‘He wore a uniform,’ I said. ‘Sure I remember. He was a soldier.’

  ‘Like hell he was. You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Maybe a sailor.’

  ‘Like hell. He drove a truck for Hall Brothers laundry on Marshfield, that’s what he did. I said he used to wear a uniform. Monkey sees, monkey does; monkey hears, monkey says.’

  His mother sewed buttonholes at a coat factory in a Wells Street loft and his father was a laundry driver; and Augie is simply ‘the byblow of a travelling man’.

  What comes across in these early pages – the novel’s first act – is the depth of the human divide between the hard and the soft. The home, with its closed circle, tries to be soft. The outside world is all hard – isn’t it? (It certainly looks hard.) Georgie is soft. He puts ‘his underlip forward’ in search of a kiss, ‘chaste, lummoxy, caressing, gentle and diligent’. Given his chicken gizzard at noon, he ‘blew at the ridgy thing more to cherish than to cool it’. Later, Georgie sits at the kitchen table ‘with one foot stepping on the other’ while his grim future is grimly discussed. This leads to the famously unbearable scene where Augie accompanies his brother to the institution:

  We were about an hour getting to the Home – wired windows, dog-proof cyclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom … We were allowed to go up to the dormitory with him, where other kids stood around under the radiator high on the wall and watched us. Mama took of Georgie’s coat and the manly hat, and in his shirt of large buttons, with whitish head and big white, chill fingers – it was troubling they were so man-sized – he kept by me beside the bed while I again showed him the simple little stunt of the satchel lock. But I failed to distract him from the terror of the place and of boys like himself around – he had never met such before. And now he realized that we would leave him and he began to do with his soul, that is, to let out his moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below the pitch of weeping. Then Mama slumped down and gave in utterly. It was when she had the bristles of his special head between her hands and was kissing him that she began to cry. When I started after a while to draw her away he tried to follow. I cried also. I took him back to the bed and said, ‘Sit here.’ So he sat and moaned. We went down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits.

  Mama, too, simple, abandoned, a fool for love, is soft. As with Georgie, when Augie evokes his mother he accords her the beauty and mystery of a child. Family disruptions (of which there are many) frighten her: ‘she was upright in her posture and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called by a conductor’. But her distress is also adult, intimidating, unreachable. After the decision is made to commit Georgie, Mama

  made no fuss or noise nor was seen weeping, but in an extreme and terrible way seemed to be watching out the kitchen window, until you came close and saw the tear-strengthened color of her green eyes and of her
pink face, her gap-toothed mouth … she lay herself dumbly on the outcome of forces, without any work of mind …

  In Augie’s childhood world, with its hesitancy and its raw senses, it is as if everybody is too delicate to be touched. Too soft, or too hard – like Simon. Simon is Augie’s parallel self the road not travelled. All Simon ever does is set himself the task of becoming a high-grade American barbarian; but on the page he becomes a figure of Shakespearean solidity, rendered with Dickensian force. And there is a kind of supercharged logic here. To the younger brother, the older brother fills the sky, and will assume these unholy dimensions. Simon sweats and fumes over the novel. Even when he is absent he is always there.

  Parentless and penniless: the basic human material. Penniless, Augie needs employment. If the novels of another great Chicagoan, Theodore Dreiser, sometimes feel like a long succession of job interviews, then Augie March often resembles a surrealist catalogue of apprenticeships. During the course of the novel Augie becomes (in order) a handbill-distributor, a paperboy, a dimestore packer, a news-vendor, a Christmas extra in a toy department, a flower-deliverer, a butler, a shoe-salesman, a saddle-shop floorwalker, a hawker of rubberized paint, a dog-washer, a book-swiper, a coal-yard helper, a housing surveyor, a union organizer, an animal-trainer, a gambler, a literary researcher, a salesman of business machines, a sailor, and a middleman of a war profiteer. As late as page 218 Augie is still poring over magazines in search of ‘vocational hints’.