Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  In his other novels, Hemingway seems to me hobbled by his need to have a hero in the obsolete sense, a central male figure who always acts right and looks good, even when, as in the cases of Harry Morgan and Jake Barnes, the cruel world has externally mutilated him. David Bourne, as initially presented, is an oddity, an inwardly vulnerable Hemingway hero, mated with a woman who, very upsettingly in this narrow stoic universe, wants. “I’m how you want but I’m how I want too and it isn’t as though it wasn’t for us both.” Catherine is David’s three weeks’ bride of twenty-one; like Eve, she has long hair and is generally naked. They are honeymooning at Le Grau-du-Roi, a Mediterranean town on a canal that runs to the sea; they bicycle and swim and eat and drink, everything they consume and do described with that liturgical gravity which Hemingway invented. “It had been wonderful and they had been truly happy and he had not known that you could love anyone so much that you cared about nothing else and other things seemed inexistent.… Now when they had made love they would eat and drink and make love again. It was a very simple world and he had never been truly happy in any other.” She begins her wanting by wanting a haircut; she has her luxurious long dark hair cut short as a boy’s. David is taken aback yet has no choice but to acquiesce. Also, she wants to get a very dark tan. “Why do you want to be so dark?” he asks. Her excited answer is “I don’t know. Why do you want anything? Right now it’s the thing that I want most. That we don’t have I mean. Doesn’t it make you excited to have me getting so dark?” “Uh-huh,” he answers. “I love it.” She wants the two of them to travel through Europe for months and months on her money; she does not much want, it develops, David to read his clippings or to work dutifully on his stories. To dramatize her tan she gets her short hair dyed as pale as ivory, and to dramatize their marriage she seduces David into also dyeing his hair and parading about Cannes with her. Penetrating more deeply into his feminine side, she does unspeakable “devil things” in bed that actualize the sex change she wants, whereby she becomes a boy called Peter and he a girl called Catherine. “You’re my wonderful Catherine,” Catherine tells David. “You’re my beautiful lovely Catherine. You were so good to change. Oh thank you, Catherine, so much. Please understand. Please know and understand. I’m going to make love to you forever.”

  It is possibly a pity that Hemingway’s own inhibitions, if not those of the changing postwar times, prevented him from telling us exactly what is going on here. How casually specific fiction has become about polymorphous sex we can estimate from a new novel like Carolyn See’s Golden Days, where it is recounted of a typical contemporary woman, “Husband number three had been a Jamaican musician named Prince Le Boeuf who dressed all in white. He too had been great in the sack, at first, but liked, Lorna found out, to bugger his gentleman friends—all in the spirit of fun. Lorna found out there were limits to her tolerance: ‘I told him, bugger me! I’ve got an asshole like everyone else in this great democracy! I’ll speak in a deep voice, you shut your eyes, and who’ll know the difference?’ ” For Hemingway, there is no spirit of fun; the “devil things” lead David to call his wife “Devil,” and poison their Eden even before Catherine decides, in her rampage of wanting, to introduce another, bisexual woman, called Marita, into their honeymoon household. When it comes to having men turned into women, or being overrun with them, Hemingway is a moralist of the old school; quaint words like “sin” and “right” and “wrong” and “remorse” and “perversion” come into earnest play. Evil is, evidently, feminine in gender: David reflects of his father, “He treated evil like an old entrusted friend … and evil, when she poxed him, never knew she’d scored.” Having feminized David in bed, Catherine now seeks to unman him as a writer. “Why should I shut up? Just because you wrote this morning? Do you think I married you because you’re a writer? You and your clippings.” It gets worse: she scornfully tells Marita, “He writes in those ridiculous child’s notebooks and he doesn’t throw anything away. He just crosses things out and writes along the sides of the pages. The whole business is a fraud really. He makes mistakes in spelling and grammar too.”

  “Poor David. What women do to you,” commiserates Marita, who as Catherine’s feminine perversity blooms into madness turns increasingly sympathetic and heterosexual. Having begun as a hardened, though attractively blushing, lesbian, she rather incredibly becomes a perfect man’s woman, who adores David’s writing and his lovemaking and wants only what he wants—that is, escape from women into the salubrious companionship of other men: “I want you to have men friends and friends from the war and [sic] to shoot with and to play cards at the club.”

  Though The Garden of Eden, like the other Hemingway remnants, has its psychopathological aspect, the pathology is caught up into a successful artistic design. The author’s heartfelt sense of women as the root of evil enforces and energizes the allegory. Catherine’s transformation from sexually docile Eve into caustic and destructive bitch makes her the most interesting of his heroines; unlike the martyred Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms, she does things instead of having them done to her, the perpetrator rather than the victim of “a dirty trick.” Her advancing derangement, with its abrupt backslidings into affection and docility, produces some of Hemingway’s sharpest pages of dialogue; like Bellow’s feral females, she becomes vivid and flashing in antagonism. And Hemingway’s pristine prose furnishes a natural innocence to fall from. What is his style if not Edenic, an early-morning style wherein things still have the dew of their naming on them?

  The waiter brought them glasses of manzanilla from the lowland near Cádiz called the Marismas with thin slices of jamón serrano, a smoky, hard cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns, and bright red spicy salchichón, another even spicier dark sausage from a town called Vich and anchovies and garlic olives.

  In the Buen Retiro in the morning it was as fresh as though it was a forest. It was green and the trunks of the trees were dark and the distances were all new.

  … when he had finished for the day he shut up the room and went out and found the two girls playing chess at a table in the garden. They both looked fresh and young and as attractive as the wind-washed morning sky.

  This same notation of simple large elements, with its curious surging undercurrent—“the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath”—also serves to evoke the tidal mystery of matedness, the strangeness of sharing our sleep:

  In the night he woke and heard the wind high and wild and turned and pulled the sheet over his shoulder and shut his eyes again. He felt her breathing and shut his eyes again. He felt her breathing softly and regularly and then he went back to sleep.

  Hemingway’s own innocence, surviving decades of aggressively courted experience, enabled him to reach back from his workroom in Cuba, through all the battles and bottles and injuries and interviews, into his youth on another continent and to make mythic material out of his discovery that sex could be complicated. He is able, he who so thoroughly hid behind assertiveness and expertise, to express sexual ambivalence, to touch upon the feminine within himself, the seducibility from which only his writing (for a time) was safe, and to conjure up, if only to exorcise, the independent, masculine will within women, of which he doubtless knew more than his typical heroes let him express. The mannered, scarcely articulate exchanges of Maria (a name echoed in The Garden of Eden) and Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Dorothy Hollis’s masturbatory monologue in To Have and Have Not are Hemingway’s nearest previous approaches, in a novel, to sexual realism. Lesbianism, or at least a male view of a woman deserting him for lesbianism, was the subject of the short story “The Sea Change,” which takes place in one of the sparsely occupied cafés, with its typical angelic bartender, that dot the tasteful hedonist paradise of Hemingway’s Europe. The story’s nameless heroine, like Catherine Bourne, is well tanned, with pale and short-cut hair; like the Bournes, she and “Phil” are “a handsome young couple” being destroyed by a d
evilish tug of desire, of wanting, within the woman, whose exterior is impeccable: “He was looking at her, at the way her mouth went and the curve of her cheek bones, at her eyes and at the way her hair grew on her forehead and at the edge of her ear and at her neck.” The story is intense and strange and one wonders, reading it, if the woman really existed in Hemingway’s life. Asked about it, he explained, according to Baker, “that the prototypes of his people were a couple he had once overheard in the Bar Basque in St.-Jean-de-Luz.”

  But the woman has returned in The Garden of Eden, with her tan and her so fascinating hair. The story dates from 1931, and in the summer of 1929, in Spain, to celebrate her thirty-fourth birthday, Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline, Baker tells us in a footnote, “had her hair dyed blond as a gesture of sexual independence and a surprise for EH.… Much is made of this gesture in EH’s later unpublished novel, The Garden of Eden.” It was in the summer of 1926 that Hemingway lived, more or less, with two women: his first wife, Hadley, and the hotly pursuing Pauline Pfeiffer, who had befriended Hadley. In A Moveable Feast he tells it thus:

  Before these rich had come we [he and Hadley and their son, Bumby] had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both.

  In Carlos Baker’s description of the weeks that the ménage à trois spent living in two rented rooms at the Hôtel de la Pinède in Juan-les-Pins, the routine is much like that in The Garden of Eden:

  Each morning they spent on the beach, swimming and taking the sun. After lunch in the garden and a long siesta, they took long bicycle rides along the Golfe de Juan, returning at evening yardarm time for cocktails.… At the hotel there were three of everything: breakfast trays, bicycles, bathing suits drying on the line.…

  Pauline was smaller and darker than Hadley, as Marita is relative to Catherine; and Hemingway lays on Catherine a malevolent version of the famous incident in which Hadley, with the best of wifely intentions, lost a suitcase of his early manuscripts. In the memoir version of the triangle composed toward the end of Hemingway’s life, the wife is blameless and the mistress “innocently” tricky and unrelenting; in The Garden of Eden, the wife turns bad and the mistress good—i.e., an acolyte to the writer and his writing.

  All thirteen years of Hemingway’s marriage to Pauline (and most of his briefer marriage to Martha Gelhorn) were behind him when he sat down in 1946 to write a version of that traumatic period, twenty years earlier, when, as The Sun Also Rises set the seal on his celebrity, he was seduced away from his first wife. Hemingway, only twenty-seven at the time, felt with his desertion a remorse and grief nothing personal would give him again, and he remembered it as a fall, the end of an idyll he and Hadley had created in Austria and Spain and Paris. Pauline, then, provides the evil that undermines his Eden; her ghost is both Eve and serpent, and she contributes elements both to Catherine (her bleached hair and her Catholicism, which is lightly mentioned at the outset) and to Marita (her petiteness and her money; Marita’s nickname is “Heiress,” though Catherine, too, is tainted with independent wealth). The slow disenchantment of a longish marriage, plus Hemingway’s constant battle, which extended through the boozy Key West years, to combine the labor of writing with what he once called his “fiesta concept of life,” is compressed into a fictional honeymoon—as well as much else both imagined and recalled. In one regard, Hemingway’s actual situation in 1926 is conspicuously falsified: Catherine is a mere twenty-one, and Marita no older, whereas Hadley and Pauline were both in their thirties, older than he by eight and four years respectively.‡ A liking for older women is not part of David Bourne’s vulnerability as he lets himself be led into the “devil things”—into the possibility that male and female are less than absolute conditions.

  An uncharacteristic ambivalence of feeling is also expressed about hunting. Drawing upon the African safaris whose carnage is so matter-of-factly extolled in Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway shows David Bourne writing about an elephant hunt he experienced as a child with his father. The fictional episodes, which come to occupy a place at the outset of each hag-ridden day and chapter, develop a momentum and an interest of their own. The boy and his dog Kibo spot the old elephant, with his fabulously big tusks, by moonlight, and this starts his father, a hunter, and his father’s African sidekick, Juma, on the trail. As the days of tracking go by, the tired child comes to love the doomed elephant and dislike his father and Juma: “They would kill me and they would kill Kibo too if we had ivory.” The description of the shooting of the elephant is horrendous and moving and also a fall from innocence. “Fuck elephant hunting,” the boy tells his father, and thinks: “He will never ever trust me again. That’s good. I don’t want him to because I’ll never tell him or anybody anything again never anything again. Never ever never.” The splicing and counterpoint of the African story-within-a-story are managed quite brilliantly—by the author himself, Mr. Jenks assured this reviewer. Some of the pages in The Garden of Eden, as the elephant lumbers toward death and Catherine dips in and out of madness and David speaks his goodbyes in his heart, are among Hemingway’s best, and the whole rounded fragment leaves us with a better feeling about the author’s humanity and essential sanity—complex as sanity must be—than anything else published since his death.

  Cohn’s Doom

  GOD’S GRACE, by Bernard Malamud. 223 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.

  God’s Grace may seem a surprising book for Bernard Malamud to have written; but each of his novels, beginning with that intensely stylized baseball myth The Natural, has been surprising, a departure achieved, the reader is made to feel, after considerable contemplative effort and calculation of risk. Malamud is among the more ascetic and self-controlled of postwar American novelists—controlled not by shifts of literary fashion or vicissitudes either personal or national but by a dedication bordering on severity, an artistic intent palpable on every resilient and economical page of prose, a comic sense rooted in sorrow, and a capacity for passion that, transferred to his characters, shocks even his most studied and seemingly flat narratives into sudden life. His earnestness leads him into parable but never more than reaching distance away from the spontaneously, helplessly true emotion. His heroes, for instance, fall in love with a tender wonderment that neither age (as in Dubin’s Lives) nor unlikelihood (in God’s Grace the beloved is a chimpanzee) diminishes. The tension in his fiction between naturalistic instinct and symbolizing tendency seems to give an alternating texture to his well-spaced succession of novels: following the interracial fantasy of The Tenants, Dubin’s Lives was all too generously domestic and earthbound, and now God’s Grace swings higher than ever toward abstraction, toward the indubitably big but dubiously real subject.

  Calvin Cohn, a paleontologist studying microfossils at the bottom of the sea during the nuclear holocaust, is the only human being left on earth. Son and grandson of rabbis, he holds some direct discourse with God, drifts on the “swollen seas” (God has seen fit to inflict a second Flood on the scorched and depopulated earth) in a hundred-and-fifty-two-foot oceanography vessel with no other company than the laboratory chimpanzee, and lands on an island where more primates (eight chimpanzees, a single gorilla, eight baboons, an albino ape or two) mysteriously appear. Cohn proceeds to re-create civilization as best he can, lecturing to the unevenly receptive chimps on history, art, science, and religion. The book reminds us of Lord of the Flies and Robinson Crusoe and Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam, whose hero was deep in
a lead mine during a nuclear catastrophe. But Malamud makes the terrain his own, mostly by uncannily humanizing, with touches both humorous and sinister, the primates. Among the chimpanzees, there is Buz, the original companion of Cohn and an acolyte to the memory of Dr. Walther Bünder, who taught him to speak and converted him to Christianity; Mary Madelyn, a lissome young female with silken hair and a heart-shaped face, whose arrival at sexual maturity predictably causes trouble; Esau, a bully (“His face was large, his teeth unsettled and wandering in the mouth”) who boasts of being “the Alpha Ape”; two oldsters, Melchior and Hattie; a pair of young twins, Luke and Saul of Tarsus; and two supporting actors named Esterhazy and Bromberg. If this sounds cute, it is, and the phonetic transcription of chimp English imparts a further frivolity to the proceedings; yet Malamud’s curious sensual searchingness bestows upon the apes such individuality that soon the reader can almost tell them apart by smell. When the restraints of Cohn’s civilizing efforts fall away, the chimpanzees’ savagery is sickeningly believable—sickening from the human point of view, liberating from theirs. In a note of acknowledgment, Malamud mentions Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man; he has well benefited from her field studies of primate behavior.