Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The halo crowning his head is the heart of a masterly composition in which each extended line at an equal distance from the other joins the ecliptic of the heavenly body that governs the system.

  Iris Murdoch, too, toys with a classical model in her new book. Acastos binds together two Platonic dialogues, one of which has actually been produced in London as a short play. Miss Murdoch has taught philosophy at Oxford and published a book, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists; her own Platonism informs the intellectual and erotic seethe of her tireless novels, whose characters reside half in a solidly realized England and half in a translucent realm of immaterial passions and ideas. “Yes,” she and her favorite characters seem to keep saying, “the Good and the True and the Beautiful do exist, compellingly, bafflingly, absolutely.” Plato himself, as a somewhat minor character in these two dialogues, asserts, “People know that good is real and absolute, not optional and relative, all their life proves it,” and, when challenged by Alcibiades, gets quite sputtery about it: “Good must be pure and separate and—absolute—and—only what’s completely good can—save us—”

  Alcibiades scoffs, “But your perfectly pure good thing does not exist, that’s the trouble, dear, all the world proves that!” And Plato cries, “It does, it must—it’s more real—I can’t explain—” Plato, here a callow youth of only twenty, has already developed a lot of bullying mental maneuvers. God, too, must exist: “Religion isn’t a feeling, it isn’t just a hypothesis, it’s not like something we happen not to know, a God who might perhaps be there isn’t a God, it’s got to be necessary, it’s got to be certain, it’s got to be proved by the whole of life, it’s got to be the magnetic centre of everything—” Miss Murdoch is the philosopher, and knows better than I how true to Plato’s mature thought is this rather Kantian or Kierkegaardian sense of God’s stern obligation to exist. Socrates gently says, “Then your ‘ground of things’, your ‘it must be so’, is really ‘I want it to be so’, it’s a cry of fear?” Plato begs off, and even Socrates seems to concede more than a strictly materialistic and relativist standpoint would warrant: “The most important thing in life is virtue, and virtue isn’t a mystery, it’s truthfulness and justice and kindness and courage, things we understand. Anybody can try to be good, it’s not obscure!”

  Yet of course goodness is obscure, to an age that has heard it said that the state is organized violence, that humility and submission help perpetuate the powerful in their crimes, that altruism is a kind of neuroticism, that a repressed “drive” (Freud) becomes self-destructive, and that “slave morality” (Nietzsche) should be despised and supplanted. Miss Murdoch has the aesthetic problem, in contriving these new Platonic dialogues, of how many of modern thought’s dark chaotic voices to admit to the forum: to stay entirely within the intellectual frame of Periclean Athens would be a pointless tour de force, and yet her exercises would be hopelessly campy did they feel any more up-to-date than they do. “Public morality … is breaking down” no doubt expresses a timeless complaint, but “love is energy” seems more a contemporary formulation, put into Plato’s mouth: “You see, love is energy. The soul is a huge vast place, and lots of it is dark, and it’s full of energy and power, and this can be bad, but it can be good, and that’s the work, to change bad energy into good.… All right, it’s sex, or sex is it—it’s the whole drive of our being and that includes sex.” A distinctly modern view of the evangelized lower classes as well as a West Indian accent creep into a servant’s refreshing testimony on these great matters: “Like little fish in sea am I in God’s love! All I eat, sleep, work, do, inside his love.… I am not good man, I have many sin, many fault, many, many. I need my God. I am all bad, he is all good. I have bad thoughts—”

  But religion and its conundrums are enduring enough to straddle epochs, and the dialogue on religion is much the livelier one. The dialogue on art, which was the one to enjoy performance (in the National Theatre, in 1980), seems relatively insipid, in part because its argumentation is confined to examples of art no later than the fifth century B.C. Even as a provisional definition, Miss Murdoch’s Callistos could never, had he seen a single Rauschenberg construct or Pollock painting (or read a Pinget novel), have described art as “copying into a world where everything looks different and clearer, and there’s no muddle and no horrid accidental things like in life.” After Céline and Kafka, can we still, as Socrates urges, “thank the gods for great artists who draw away the veil of anxiety and selfishness”? Plato is made to say, “Art softens the demand of the gods. It puts an attractive veil over that final awful demand, that final transformation into goodness, the almost impossible last step which is what human life is really all about.” This is thrillingly put, and in tune with the relevant chapters of The Republic—but is, say, a fur-lined teacup or a latrine displayed on a museum wall such an attractive veil? The phrase hardly seems true even of Oedipus Rex, or of the satyrical activities painted onto Greek vases.

  When we turn to The Republic or to any of the authentic Platonic dialogues, we realize how much a novelist and sentimental Neoplatonist Miss Murdoch is in her adroit and charming imitations. The original atmosphere was much more Spartan: in The Republic, Socrates proposed to ban poets because human emotion, which poetry indulges, is “irrational, useless, and cowardly.” Poetry “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.” Dry reason and manly endurance should rule “the sympathetic element.” Callistos’s babbling suggestion that art is “exciting and sexy” would have fallen on stony ground in the fifth century. The element of homoerotic byplay§ pervades Miss Murdoch’s dialogues and verges on making them farcical playlets. As if in one of her irrepressible novels, each character strains to rattle off in his own direction; Socrates is a kindly presiding tutor but a shadow of the remorseless logical engine who bulldozes his way through Plato’s dialogues, reducing all others to yes-men. Plato wrote in a time when truth was thought to be attainable, when permanent conclusions could be achieved and built upon; this live possibility, so near the beginnings of reasoned thought, throws a white light upon the stylized figures of his debates. Miss Murdoch writes in a time of multiplying shadows, of built-in indeterminacy and ambiguity, when Eros is the only apprehensible god. Her animated but highly inconclusive dialogue on art ends with Socrates claiming, “In truly loving each other we learn more perhaps than in all our other study.” The excitable young Plato tells his teacher, “I’m so happy. I don’t know why. I love you so much,” and, runs the stage direction, “Socrates puts his arm round him and leads him off.” This note of affectionate fellowship among high-minded men and boys also ended Miss Murdoch’s last novel, The Good Apprentice, and seems strangely satisfying to her. She and Pinget are almost exactly the same age, and in their different ways show a high tolerance for ambiguity. Models of creative integrity in a slack age, they sing perversely rapturous hymns to muddle.

  * The Latin source, I have learned from Jay Laughlin, is a twelfth-century poem, De Contemptu Mundi, by the monk Bernard of Cluny—not to be confused with the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, or with the scholastic Bernard of Chartres. The line gathers intelligibility from those that precede it, a catalogue of the bygone like some of Villon’s ballades:

  Nunc ubi Marius atque Fabricius inscius auri?

  Mors ubi nobilis et memorabilis actio Pauli?

  Diva Philippica, vox ubi coelica nunc Ciceronis?

  Pax ubi civibus atque rebellibus ira Catonis?

  Nunc ubi Regulus? aut ubi Romulus? aut ubi Remus?

  Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

  † She is wearing a feathered costume he has offered her for an illicit night out on the town: “He brings his hand out from behind his back. He’s holding a handful, it seems, of feathers, mauve and pink. Now he shakes this out. It’s a garment, apparently, and for a woman: there are the cups for the breasts, covered in purple se
quins. The sequins are tiny stars. The feathers are around the thigh holes, and along the top.… I wonder where he found it. All such clothing was supposed to have been destroyed.… He must have come by this in the same way he came by the magazines, not honestly: it reeks of black market. And it’s not new, it’s been worn before, the cloth under the arms is crumpled and slightly stained, with some other woman’s sweat.” She is not entirely repelled: “Yet there’s an enticement in this thing, it carries with it the childish allure of dressing up. And it would be so flaunting, such a sneer at the Aunts, so sinful, so free. Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”

  A fetishistic intensity clings to this bootlegged garment, with its old sweat stains and outlawed naughtiness; nothing is more winning about Offred than her willingness, with a mixture of curiosity, squeamishness, and Moll Flanderish good nature, to put it on: “I take off my shoes and stockings and my cotton underpants and slide the feathers on, under the tent of my dress. Then I take off the dress itself and slip the thin sequined straps over my shoulders. There are shoes, too, mauve ones with absurdly high heels. Nothing quite fits; the shoes are a little too big, the waist on the costume is too tight, but it will do.” And, so costumed, she accompanies the Commander to the city bordello, which seems to occupy what is now the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The reader, having known her so long in her nunlike condition, feels as prickly as she in her exposed, hypersensitive skin: “He puts an arm around my shoulders. The fabric is raspy against my skin, so unaccustomed lately to being touched.” She is paraded and ogled; she encounters her old friend Moira, who though enrolled in whoredom can still give the feminist line: “They [men] like to see you all painted up. Just another crummy power trip.” But the costume, and the sexiness of which it is the sweat-stained symbol, deepens when, with her true lover, Offred thinks, “For this one I’d wear feathers, purple stars, if that were what he wanted: or anything else, even the tail of a rabbit.” The trashy and absurd costume, then, without being absolved of its sexist and mechanical aspect, also represents something tender—the female (and, differently costumed, the male) willingness to amuse the love object, to actualize the opposite other’s erotic whims and fantasies. Iris Murdoch’s love-obsessed novels suffer, I think, in the rareness, for all their talk, with which they present sexual images as concrete and redolent as this “garment, apparently, and for a woman.”

  ‡ Both founded, too, upon global stalemate and formalized spheres of influence: “the splitting up of the world into three great superstates [that] prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn” (Orwell); “the superpower arms stalemate and the signing of the classified Spheres of Influence Accord, which left the superpowers free to deal, unhampered by interference, with the growing number of rebellions within their own empires” (Atwood). Odd, that this peaceable idea, the idea now called “détente,” appears so distasteful to progressive minds.

  § Not entirely absent from the originals: in the Phaedo, Phaedo relates how Socrates “gathered the hair on my neck” and stroked his young disciple’s head while discussing his own imminent death.

  BRITISHERS

  Genius Without a Cause

  CYRIL CONNOLLY: Journal and Memoir, by David Pryce-Jones. 304 pp. Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

  THE SELECTED ESSAYS OF CYRIL CONNOLLY, edited by Peter Quennell. 307 pp. Persea Books, 1984.

  The aura of disappointment, of failed promise, that surrounded Cyril Connolly was to a large degree his own creation. It was he who, in Enemies of Promise (1938), capped adverse diagnoses in all the sickrooms of contemporary literary endeavor with a ruthless self-portrait of his schoolboy self—a study in callow cleverness, romantic dither, permanent adolescence, cowardice, snobbery, and sloth. Though this least flattering of autobiographical sketches ends with Connolly’s leaving Eton at the age of eighteen in 1922, his subsequent career is adumbrated as a continued “useless assignment, falling in love, going to Spain and being promising indefinitely.” It was Connolly who began his other book of note, the suavely melancholy “word cycle” called The Unquiet Grave (1944), with the famous assertion “that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” By the bald light of this harsh lantern readers would have no trouble perceiving that the little Diogenes holding it on high, at that time editor of the magazine Horizon and afterwards to become the lead reviewer of the London Sunday Times, was himself engaged in inconsequent tasks and, according to language farther down the page (“Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes”), was his own dupe. Any subsequent critic wishing to write earnestly of Connolly finds himself, therefore, somewhat disarmed, facing a choice between sheepish agreement with these low opinions and disagreement that might seem merely mulish.

  David Pryce-Jones, assigned the awkward task of presenting for publication a dishevelled, abjectly self-critical, and at the same time insufferably self-absorbed journal that Connolly kept between 1928 and 1937, seems on balance to agree that Connolly disappointed, while finding something successfully strategic in the pose of maître manqué: “The depiction of himself as some sort of royal failure was the foundation of his success.… Playing the leading part in this comedy of his own devising, he was imitating failure. Advantage came from it. Here was the way to avoid making hard choices or sacrifices, here was the way to have everything all at once and all the time, to be artist and critic, powerfully realising ambition while claiming not to be doing so.” In the long biographical sketch that follows these judgments, Mr. Pryce-Jones tends to side with the school authorities so deftly mocked by Connolly in his memoir. The Wilkeses, who under the nicknames of “Flip” (Mrs.) and “Sambo” (Mr.) ran St. Cyprian’s school, had been, we are told, “consistently well-disposed towards Cyril.… Within their capacities, they had done their best for a boy much cleverer and more sophisticated than usual.”* At Eton, we are told, the Master in College, J. F. Crace, wrote with “some prescience” of the sixteen-year-old Cyril, “He is in danger of achieving nothing more than a journalistic ability to write rather well about many things.” Connolly’s “A Georgian Boyhood,” in Enemies of Promise, is concerned for most of its pages with Etonian social and political intrigues; of these Mr. Pryce-Jones sniffs, “What had actually been storms in College tea-cups were exaggerated into grandeurs and miseries.”

  In the journal itself, the little storms pitter-patter on. Of Robert Longden, an Oxford crush of Connolly’s with whom he continued to correspond and travel, the diarist breathily confided:

  My sadism is very subtle with regard to Bobbie, I do not want to cause him any kind of pain or to hurt him, but I should like to storm him unprepared by a fire and sympathy of conversation, to glow right into his personality by a kind of corrosive imaginative beauty so that he feels he has never lived nor understood anything before as he has on this wild probing caress of words—to give him vitality that is greater than his vitality, to teach him a sensibility finer and surer than his own, to send an intolerable current down to light his heart’s globe and to lap him all the time in a gentle warmth of tenderness, humour and understanding, that is my ambition, for if I succeed nothing else that he does will give him back his honeydew, nor will he taste the milk of paradise from other cups than mine.

  Though now well into his twenties and not entirely innocent of post-graduate reality and of heterosexual contacts, Connolly continued schoolboyishly to draw up graded lists of his acquaintances (“Friends,” “In storage,” “The old,” and “à la carte” are the categories of one such inventory), to set questionnaires for himself and others (“Are you a sadist or a masochist?” “Are there as many grades of lesbians as of womanisers?” “What are the oddest circumstances in which you have made love?” “Would you drink a pint of blood to save your sister?”), and to pen self-admonishments like “Be more ruthless, and less flabby, cease being influenced by charmers and gentlemen.” Though Connolly himself had little money, “on all branches of his family t
ree were large houses and private incomes,” as Mr. Pryce-Jones puts it. His taste for the soft life was full-blown and cheerfully confessed: “O the joy of lingering over port and brandy with men in red coats telling dirty stories while it snows outside.” A not untypically posh entry runs, “Enjoyed the rich patina of the Cunard soirée, the lovely women, the vacant faces of the extroverts, the expression of envy on Clarence Marjoribanks and the incredible stupid air of luxurious abandon on Lady Cunard’s face as she danced with the Prince of Wales.” The young would-be writer rarely dined alone, and his stratagems were directed less toward accomplishing work than toward making a social impression. In Enemies of Promise he was parenthetically to observe how “all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.” To his journal in 1928 he confided, “There is no finer sense of power than the power of one’s own imagination over that of other men, no more exciting and impossible task than that of making oneself indispensable to one’s best friend.” In Zagreb, having spent the night mostly under the stars with a teen-age prostitute, he wondered as he walked home in the dawn “how my friends would see me.” Of another occasion, when he had taken a gramophone onto a Channel-bound train, Connolly noted, “I played slow foxtrots in my empty carriage and felt that at last I had become an interesting person again.” His obsession with his own image, whether as “an interesting person” or as “the most unlovable mug in England,” certainly got in his way as a writer, and gets in our way as we try to read these youthful jottings, both pompous and plaintive, with sympathetic attention.