Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  What thrilled us about her husband’s dicta, in the easy-to-thrill Fifties, was his regal power of vast exclusion. “The great English novelists,” his The Great Tradition begins, “are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.” Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, Meredith, Hardy, Joyce, Virginia Woolf—all excluded. It was thrilling to think that somewhere a principle of exclusion so decisive existed, that standards so exalted were being somehow maintained. In exactly what quality virtue so stingily distributed resided remained a bit general, a bit stiff-sounding—“the realized concreteness that speaks for itself and enacts its moral significance,” Leavis said. His wife, in her slightly less unbending criticism, offers clues to the Leavisite principle nowhere more emphatically than in the last piece in this collection, “The Italian Novel.”

  The Italian novel, to be frank about it, won’t do at all. Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, generally considered Italian fiction’s first classic, “belongs to the infancy of art.” It is a historical romance, but “the romanticism does not get, as in Scott’s better novels, a corrective in realistic sociological analysis.” It “really tells us nothing about Italy” in the course of a “picturesque melodrama with a happy ending provided by Providence and not achieved logically by events.” Giuseppe di Lampedusa, whose novel The Leopard was much admired, “spent goodness knows how many years on his one novel but he never even unified it in style and tone, much less integrated the parts.” He is a poor Proust spin-off, “a willing victim of nostalgia.” Svevo: “It is hard to understand Joyce’s enthusiasm for Svevo, who, though more Austrian than Italian in feeling, has none of the intellectual and imaginative power of Mann or Kafka” and, though dissatisfied with the petty bourgeois life he portrays, shows “no imaginative grasp of any other kind of life.” Most interestingly: “His Freudian preoccupation is a disability rather than a strength or a help—for psychoanalysis is inevitably reductive.” Moravia is a mere compiler of “clinical accounts of sexual experience, pathological rather than pornographic.” And so on, except for Verga, who writes about peasants without sentimentalizing them, in the way of George Sand and Tolstoy, and who in some novels at least is “possessed by a genuine sense of the tragic nature of the life of the poverty-stricken South of Italy.” Like the French, the Italians tend to be raised as Roman Catholics, and “having lost religious faith they have no positives, other than the hope that once lay, apparently, in Communism, soon lost by novelists like Silone and Vittorini.” To make matters worse, Italians go to too much opera: “One concludes the frequentation of opera as a national entertainment is inimical to the effort of grappling with and possessing a serious novel.” Another handicap is a national incapacity, noticed long ago by Stendhal, for moral reflection: “No one who reads Italian fiction of any period can fail to notice this absence of conscience or awareness of moral values, in the characters. It makes Italian fiction less interesting than that of every other country I know, giving its novels characteristically a heartlessness and meaninglessness that only the exceptional Italian writer avoids.” As if all this weren’t bad enough, in modern times Italian writers have read and even, in the cases of Vittorini and Pavese, translated “the American novelists who had such an unfortunate effect on post-war Italian writers … whose coarseness and crudity and their simplification of people and issues and brutalizing cult of violence made them undesirable and misleading models.” Oh, dear! No, what is needed is not Roman Catholicism and opera and American fiction but “firmly human values and outward-going sympathies.”

  Mrs. Leavis asserts, in connection with Edith Wharton, that a complete writer must offer something “in the way of positives.” Failure to do more than complain prevents Wharton from being, for all her talent, a great novelist like Jane Austen or George Eliot:

  She has none of that natural piety, that richness of feeling and sense of a moral order, of experience as a process of growth, in which George Eliot’s local criticisms are embedded and which give the latter her large stature. Between her [Wharton’s] conviction that the new society she grew up into was vicious and insecurely based on an ill-used working class and her conviction that her inherited mode of living represented a dead-end, she could find no foundation to build on.

  And where does one find such a foundation? Presumably by playing cricket with the blacksmith or, if one is a blacksmith, with the squire. The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel ends on a lofty admonitory note: “Unless men and women are capable of relationships which include loyalty, confidence, mutual interests, and there are people of integrity who can act disinterestedly sometimes, which of course requires courage and faith—people, in short, capable of respect for themselves and each other, I don’t see how one can expect that novels worth consideration could be written.”

  Mrs. Leavis does not entertain the possibility that even in a world thoroughly debased and unrelational novels might still be written, describing conditions. Or that authenticity in rendering the actual condition of mankind is the sine qua non; without it, fiction becomes mere escapism, mere castle-building in air. She devotes a page to Camus’s L’Étranger; complaining that the hero, Meursault, “has no feeling for his mother” (not quite the case, actually) and that “he refuses to admit that love is more than sex or that religion and morality are real.” Well, does this disqualify him from being a character in a novel? Suppose religion and morality, conventionally understood, are not real to the novelist, or real, as for young Camus, only in the moral stand that abstention from false pretense involves? Mrs. Leavis claims, “Meursault’s quarrel is really with the conditions for living as a human being anywhere and at any time.” Insofar as Meursault is condemned to death by society in the novel, L’Étranger does acknowledge the coercive power of a social consensus, and insofar as the novel is a child of Western bourgeois culture, it may be true that where that culture dissolves or has never penetrated the novel cannot be found. But to elevate its satisfying forms into an argument for social order and human decency (as the critic understands them) is to ask the cart to drag the horse.

  What is “moral”? The Leavises’ pet word derives from the same Latin root as “mores”—mos, meaning “custom.” Much of what we call moral is merely customary. Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and they are the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. Hawthorne and Camus both presented stripped-down prose forms to do justice to the diminished worlds they saw around them and felt within themselves. Middlemarch was situated, we might notice, in an English era when the author was a child, so that a sense of “experience as a process of growth” could be readily grafted onto nostalgia; the author is exultantly “on top of” her material, lavishing upon it an affection and analytical zeal the novel will scarcely see again until Proust. However much we admire Middlemarch, it cannot be written again, weighted by the same residue of Christian moral passion. As Borges showed with Don Quixote, the same words wouldn’t have the same meaning. Q. D. Leavis, in her engaging and invigorating desire to read a positive humanism into the novel, seems to ask that this art form exempt itself from the negative and desolating effects of the modern age and thus surrender its right to bear credible witness.

  * This and all subsequent translations are taken from E. V. Rieu’s 1952 translation The Four Gospels, for the Penguin Classics series.

  † In Greek the words are iota and keraia, the latter being small horns attached to some letters of Hebrew; the King James translation has it “one jot or one tittle,” and the Standard Revised “not a letter, not a stroke.”

  ‡ He relates how, during his first London sojourn, while working at the Watts’s Printing House, he “carried up & down Stairs a large Form of Types in each hand, when others carried but one in both Hands” and, to impress some acquaintances, he swam the Thames from near Chelsea to Blackfriars, a distance of five miles, “performing on the Way many Feats of Activity bo
th upon & under Water.” He considered opening a swimming school in London, and his thoughts on how to teach the skill, as confided in a letter to Oliver Neave, are typically ingenious and sound.

  § Charles Cotton (1630–87), whose Scarronides: or, Virgil Travestie has lines that might also apply to our journeying hero: “Long wander’d he thro’ thick and thin; / Half-roasted now, now wet to the Skin.”

  ‖ Mr. Paul B. Beers, Legislative Historian for the Pennsylvania General Assembly, House and Senate, has genially informed me that “Franklin did a bit more than doodle.” Exactly what is not easy to ascertain, however, since Franklin “might have been the most duplicitous lawmaker in 305 years of the General Assembly” and as chief clerk “edited the Legislative Journals, and edited references to himself out.” “It was he who printed the 3 volumes of ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Assembly’ ” and “he edited the journals so thoroughly that most years his name is mentioned once.” It seems clear, however, that his ability to retire in comfort at the age of forty-two was related to his activities as clerk; he himself wrote in his autobiography, “The Place gave me a better Opportunity of keeping up an Interest among the Members, which secur’d to me the Business of Printing the Votes, Laws, Paper Money, and other occasional Jobbs for the Public that, on the whole, were very profitable.” Though Franklin spoke against paying elected public officials, as President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania he—Mr. Beers avers—“took a damn good expense account.” At his death in 1790, the estate of Poor Richard was worth an estimated $500,000, not the largest fortune in the Commonwealth but twice the state’s 1791 budget of $249,538. Considerable elisions in the records, evidently, make a thorough financial history of the public Franklin a smiling mystery.

  a And through his writing in general, nowhere more rousingly than in the last sentence of “Sebastopol in May,” dated June 26, 1855: “No, the hero of my story, whom I love with all my heart and soul, whom I have attempted to portray in all his beauty and who has always been, is now and will always be supremely magnificent, is truth.”

  b Letter to Stanislaus from Trieste, September 18, 1905.

  c “Tolstoi,” in By Way of Sainte-Beuve (1908; English translation by Sylvia Townsend Warner).

  d Including a persistent tendency to spell “worldly” “worldy” and that typographical classic “See p. 000.”

  e In the preface to Buoyant Billions he hyperbolically reiterates the point, and casts a wondering glance back over his life:

  “There is nothing in my circumstances or personality to suggest that I differ from any other son of a downstart gentleman driven by lack of unearned income to become an incompetent merchant and harp on his gentility. When I take my pen or sit down to my typewriter, I am as much a medium as Browning’s Mr Sludge or Dunglas Home, or as Job or John of Patmos. When I write a play I do not foresee nor intend a page of it from one end to the other: the play writes itself. I may reason out every sentence until I have made it say exactly what it comes to me to say; but whence and how and why it comes to me, or why I persisted, through nine years of unrelieved market failure, in writing instead of in stockbroking or turf bookmaking or peddling, I do not know.”

  The play at hand (he claims) illustrates his lack of control over his own activity: “I commit this to print within a few weeks of completing my 92nd year. At such an age I should apologize for perpetrating another play or presuming to pontificate in any fashion. I can hardly walk through my garden without a tumble or two; and it seems out of all reason to believe that a man who cannot do a simple thing like that can practise the craft of Shakespear.… Well, I grant all this; yet I cannot hold my tongue nor my pen. As long as I live I must write.”

  Shaw kept remarkably busy in his nineties: he contributed several hundred articles, messages, and self-interviews to journals; kept up his correspondence of several thousand letters and postcards a year; expanded Geneva to four acts for the Standard Edition; with the help of F. E. Loewenstein compiled and edited and provided fresh matter for the autobiographical Sixteen Self Sketches; resurrected a play, The World Betterer, left incomplete in 1936 and finished it as Buoyant Billions in late 1946; cheerfully grappled with the issue of global annihilation in Farfetched Fables (1948); and accepted the Malvern Marionette Theatre’s invitation to write a puppet play about himself and Shakespeare, Shakes Versus Shav (1949)—“this in all actuarial probability is my last play and the climax of my eminence, such as it is.” In 1948 he described himself as “this poor old crock, overworked to the limit,” and on the verge of ninety wrote Sidney Webb: “The bachelor life with nobody to consult but myself—eat when I like, go to bed when I like, work when I like, order the house and garden as I fancy, and be solitary (or social) all to myself—suits me very well; it actually develops me at 90!”

  Lest, however, he be thought unaffected by Charlotte’s death in 1943, here is the description of her last hours that Shaw wrote to H. G. Wells: “Charlotte died this morning at 2.30. You saw what she had become when you last visited us: an old woman bowed and crippled, furrowed and wrinkled, and greatly distressed by hallucinations of crowds in the room, evil persons, and animals. Also by breathlessness, as the osteitis closed on her lungs … But on Friday evening a miracle began. Her troubles vanished. Her visions ceased. Her furrows and wrinkles smoothed out. Forty years fell off her like a garment. She had thirty hours of happiness and heaven. Even after her last breath she shed another twenty years, and now lies young and incredibly beautiful. I have to go in and look at her and talk affectionately to her. I did not know I could be so moved.”

  The tone takes us back to a letter he wrote Ellen Terry in 1897, evidently after making love to Charlotte: “And now, dear Ellen, she sleeps like a child, and her arms will be plump, and she is a free woman, and it has not cost her half a farthing, and she has fancied herself in love, and known secretly that she was only taking a prescription, and been relieved to find the lover at last laughing at her & reading her thoughts and confessing himself a mere bottle of nerve medicine, and riding gaily off.”

  AMERICANS

  Twisted Apples

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S Winesburg, Ohio is one of those books so well known by title that we imagine we know what is inside it: a sketch of the population, seen more or less in cross-section, of a small Midwestern town. It is this as much as Edvard Munch’s paintings are portraits of the Norwegian middle class around the turn of the century. The important thing, for Anderson and Munch, is not the costumes and the furniture or even the bodies but the howl they conceal—the psychic pressure and warp underneath the social scene. Matter-of-fact though it sounds, Winesburg, Ohio is feverish, phantasmal, dreamlike. Anderson had accurately called this collection of loosely linked short stories The Book of the Grotesque; his publisher, B. W. Huebsch, suggested the more appealing and neutral title. The book was published in 1919, when Anderson was forty-three; it made his fame and remains his masterpiece.

  “The Book of the Grotesque” is the name also of the opening story, which Anderson wrote first and which serves as a prologue. A writer, “an old man with a white mustache … who was past sixty,” has a dream in which “all the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.”

  The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering.

  Another writer, an “I” who is presumably Sherwood Anderson, breaks in and explains the old writer’s theory of grotesqueness:

  … in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.… It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became
a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

  Having so strangely doubled authorial personae, Anderson then offers twenty-one tales, one of them in four parts, all “concerning,” the table of contents specifies, one or another citizen of Winesburg; whether they come from the old writer’s book of grotesques or some different set to which the younger author had access is as unclear as their fit within the cranky and fey anthropological-metaphysical framework set forth with such ungainly solemnity.

  “Hands,” the first tale, “concerning Wing Biddlebaum,” introduces not only its hero, a pathetic shy old man on the edge of town whose hyperactive little white hands had once strayed to the bodies of too many schoolboys in the Pennsylvania town where he had been a teacher, but also George Willard, the eighteen-year-old son of the local hotelkeeper and a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle. He seems a young representative of the author; and there is also a “poet” suddenly invoked in flighty passages like:

  Let us look briefly into the story of the hands. Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but fluttering pennants of promise.

  A cloud of literary effort, then, attends the citizens of Winesburg, each of whom walks otherwise isolated, toward some inexpressible denouement of private revelation. Inexpressiveness, indeed, is what above all is expressed: the characters, often, talk only to George Willard; their attempts to talk with each other tend to culminate in a comedy of tongue-tied silence.