Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Lost Among the Romantics

  MARY SHELLEY, by Muriel Spark. 248 pp. Dutton, 1987.

  Muriel Spark’s first book, published in England in 1951 as Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley, is now at last, retitled and thoroughly revised, published here. Mary Shelley, not quite seventeen when she eloped with the twenty-one-year-old poet (who had eloped with his first wife, Harriet, when she was sixteen and he three years older), was the daughter of intellectually eminent parents—the political philosopher William Godwin and the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—and herself proved to be a considerable author, writing Frankenstein before she turned twenty and a good deal of fiction and non-fiction afterward. Her biographer sees her as a fundamentally intellectual, eighteenth-century, “classical” personality in conflict with the Romantic turmoil of teen-age romance, illegitimate children, ménages à trois, fantastical idealism, Alps, sailboats, scandal, blackmail, and premature dying. Mrs. Spark picks her way through the tangle of domestic and literary history with her usual unblinking firmness. Part of the book’s pleasure lies in its shrewd and sympathetic reëvaluation of a shadowy reputation; another part lies in the sweet sting of such epigrammatic Sparkian judgments as

  Her [Mary’s] infatuation, her jealousy, her panic, her remorse, and her childish pleasure at the happy issue of the affair—all might resound the experience of any woman at any time; no social accent of Godwin’s, no spiritual effluvium of Shelley’s, no choice literary dish, adulterates, as it were, the purity of the situation

  and

  Ladore (successful in its time) represents … an effort to fit the unorthodox facts into an orthodox moral system; and as a creative work it has no health.

  A Romp with Job

  THE ONLY PROBLEM, by Muriel Spark. 179 pp. Putnam, 1984.

  Muriel Spark’s writing always gives delight; the sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity. Her new novel, The Only Problem, begins:

  He was driving along the road in France from St. Dié to Nancy in the district of Meurthe; it was straight and almost white, through thick woods of fir and birch. He came to the grass track on the right that he was looking for. It wasn’t what he had expected. Nothing ever is, he thought.

  The thinker is an English clergyman-turned-actor, Edward Jansen; he is going to visit his brother-in-law, Harvey Gotham, a very rich Canadian who has left his elegant wife, Effie, in order to live in a shabby stone cottage in France and compose a monograph upon the Book of Job and the problem of suffering:

  For he could not face that a benevolent Creator, one whose charming and delicious light descended and spread over the world, and being powerful everywhere, could condone the unspeakable sufferings of the world; that God did permit all suffering and was therefore, by logic of his omnipotence, the actual author of it, he was at a loss how to square with the existence of God, given the premise that God is good. “It is the only problem,” Harvey had always said. Now, Harvey believed in God, and this was what tormented him. “It’s the only problem, in fact, worth discussing.”

  Mrs. Spark, she has confided to interviewers, composes her novels in small lined notebooks that she orders from Edinburgh, where she was once a schoolgirl. A scholastic mood of nicety and stricture controls her sentences; notice, for instance, in the long sentence above, how the second half manages to parse, “he was at a loss how to square” picking up the earlier “that God did permit.” Unlike all but a few modern writers, Mrs. Spark uses the verb “comprise” correctly, as synonymous with “comprehend” rather than, as often supposed, with “constitute”—“Love comprises among other things a desire for the well-being and spiritual freedom of the one who is loved.” Sentiments so firmly phrased issue steadily from the mouths of her characters, who yet never sound pedantic—merely concerned with main things, and efficient in expressing this concern. It is Harvey who tells Edward about love: “If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a love-hate relationship.… The element of love in such a relation simply isn’t worthy of the name. It boils down to hatred pure and simple in the end. Love comprises …” etc. The author herself can put a moral paradox in a nutshell of an image. A flashback recalls the critical moment, a year before the opening events of The Only Problem, when Effie offended Harvey by stealing two chocolate bars from a snack-bar on an Italian autostrada:

  Effie said, “Why shouldn’t we help ourselves? These multinationals and monopolies are capitalizing on us, and two-thirds of the world is suffering.” She tore open the second slab, crammed more chocolate angrily into her mouth, and, with her mouth gluttonously full of stolen chocolate, went on raving about how two-thirds of the world was starving.

  The problem, perhaps the only problem, with Mrs. Spark’s novel is that her habit of pithiness squeezes all softness of feeling from her story, and leaves us with a skeleton of plot that dances to little but comic effect. Harvey Gotham is meant to be a modern Job, but he doesn’t seem to suffer. He has no boils; his wealth never departs; and his feelings toward Effie, though indicated as belatedly fond (“Are you still in love with Effie?” “Yes.” “Then you’re an unhappy man. Why did you leave her?” “I couldn’t stand her sociological clap-trap”), do not affect the rather sulky waiting game he plays. While ensconced in his cottage with his research materials on Job, he is visited by a number of comforters, beginning with Edward Jansen in April, and including by August Edward’s estranged wife, Ruth, and an infant, called Clara, whom Effie, while away from Harvey, conceived with a lover named Ernie Howe, “an electronics expert.” Ruth persuades Harvey to buy the château on whose property the cottage sits, and by Christmas they are visited there by Nathan Fox, a young, educated, and unemployed man previously attached to the Jansens. As Effie’s offstage activities heat up, policemen and a policewoman join the throng, not to mention Harvey’s London lawyer and his Auntie Pet, all the way from Canada.

  Yet, somehow, nothing builds. For instance, Nathan Fox is carefully described at the outset (“He was a good-looking boy, tall, with an oval face, very smooth and rather silvery-green in color—really olive.… He had a mouth like a Michelangelo angel and teeth so good, clear, strong and shapely it seemed to Edward, secretly, that they were the sexiest thing about him”), and one expects he will blossom into one of this author’s great leeches, along the lines of Hubert Mallindaine in The Takeover and Patrick Seton in The Bachelors; but Nathan manifests few machinations and little presence, and quickly becomes, with Effie, an offstage character. Again, Harvey is said to have developed a fondness for the baby Clara, but she is never shown as anything other than a background squalling, a tiny bundle of greed and noise. Most of Mrs. Spark’s characters tend to be such bundles, in varying sizes, and perhaps her overriding message is—to quote Harvey—“the futility of friendship in times of trouble.” Her comforters do not comfort, her lovers do not love. And her actors, though she suggests that much of life is “putting on an act,” do not, in this book, often act. A number of characters are intently described only to drop utterly from sight: “a lean-faced man with a dark skin gone to muddy grey, bright small eyes and fine features” in “a black suit, shiny with wear; a very white shirt open at the neck; brown, very pointed shoes” is studied by Harvey in a police station, but “Who he was, where he came from and why, Harvey was never to know.” On the other hand, many pages are consumed by stark and repetitive police grilling. So gappy a narrative fabric allows Mrs. Spark’s supernatural to peek through; a reality so diminished proves the existence of a great Diminisher. Modern Catholic novelists—Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, François Mauriac—commonly present human interplay as unrewarding: as arid, desultory, futile, and frequently farcical. One answer to “the only problem” which lurks unstated in Mrs. Spark’s novel of ideas is that we human reeds are such flimsy, dirty bits of straw we deserve all the suffering we get.

  Another answer is offered by Harvey, when he asks himself, “Is it only by recogn
izing how flat would be the world without the sufferings of others that we know how desperately becalmed our own lives would be without suffering? Do I suffer on Effie’s account? Yes, and perhaps I can live by that experience. We all need something to suffer about.” This insight comes late in the novel, and presumably represents an advance over his earlier proposal that “the only logical answer to the problem of suffering is that the individual soul has made a pact with God before he is born, that he will suffer during his lifetime. We are born forgetful of this pact, of course; but we have made it. Sufferers would, in this hypothesis, be pre-conscious volunteers.” Harvey jeers at the solution to the problem apparently advanced by the Book of Job: “God as a character comes out badly, very badly. Thunder and bluster and I’m Me, who are you? Putting on an act.” Harvey ignores what seems to me God’s crucial challenge, presented in verse 40:8: “wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?” That is, God, the creator of Leviathan and Behemoth, Who laid the foundations of the earth and each day shows the dawn its place, will not accept moral subordination to Man; He declines to take instruction from His creature and to be graded by him (A+ for sunsets and flowers, C– for insects and deserts, F for plagues and earthquakes). Expressed non-theologically: existence, including our own, is a mystery, and a critical attitude toward it is not fruitful. The immense notion of Atonement, foreshadowed in Isaiah and enacted in the New Testament, whereby the Creator involves Himself in suffering, does not intrude upon the speculations in The Only Problem, nor does the possibility that an afterlife rights all earthly imbalances. The world, for Mrs. Spark as for the whirlwind God of Job, is somewhat bigger than hypothetical balances of justice. Harvey and Ruth have this exchange:

  “A matter of justice. A balancing of accounts.” This was how Ruth put it to Harvey. “I’m passionate about justice,” she said.

  “People who want justice,” Harvey said, “generally want so little when it comes to the actuality. There is more to be had from the world than a balancing of accounts.”

  And Effie is specifically linked—by way of a painting by Georges de La Tour, Job visité par sa femme, which Harvey studies in the museum at Épinal—to Job’s wife; Effie strikingly resembles de La Tour’s representation of the Biblical woman, who advised her husband, “Curse God, and die.”† Social protest, whose extreme form is terrorism, is equated thus with cursing God. The opposite, the holier alternative, is acceptance, even when affluence—the curious state of being rich, more central to Mrs. Spark’s later novels than the state of grace—is what must be accepted. Harvey might be speaking of himself when he says of Job, “His tragedy was that of the happy ending.”

  A good and profound novel lies scattered among the inklings of The Only Problem, but the author seems distracted and abrupt and to be gazing, often, at other problems. Her first novel, The Comforters, alluded to Job in its title and was about distraction and the need to write. The heroine heard a typewriter clacking in her head; so does this novel’s closest approach to a heroine, Ruth. “Ruth’s mother was a free-lance typist and always had some work in hand.… Ruth used to go to sleep on a summer night hearing the tap-tapping of the typewriter below, and wake to the almost identical sound of the woodpecker in the tree outside her window. Ruth supposed this was Effie’s experience too, but when she reminded her sister of it many years later Effie couldn’t recall any sound effects.” Such differences in hearing make the difference between a terrorist and an artist. Mrs. Spark’s last novel, Loitering with Intent, focused on the heroine’s literary vocation; the religious issue of vocation underlies much of her fiction, more so than the problems of suffering and belief. Suffering and belief are settled matters; vocation requires an active search. Ruth seduces Harvey into buying the château because a woodpecker outside a bedroom window reminds her of a typewriter. To its happy sound she wakes every morning. We are never out of touch, in a Spark novel, with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of image and epigram, the cunning tautness of suspense, the beautifully firm modulations from passage to passage, the blunt yet dignified dialogues all remind us of the author, the superintending intelligent mind. Though her characters are often odious, and given so parsimonious a portion of sympathy as to barely exist, the web they are caught in is invariably tense and alive.

  Spark but No Spark

  A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON, by Muriel Spark. 189 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

  In her eighteenth chiselled and quizzical novel, Mrs. Spark returns to that drab, homey, and somewhat spooky postwar London that figured in such early tales as The Comforters, The Bachelors, Memento Mori, and The Girls of Slender Means, and that she nostalgically revisited in her recent Loitering with Intent. The nostalgia, however, seems less warm this time, and the spookiness perhaps a bit threadbare. Her narrator, Nancy (a.k.a. Agnes) Hawkins—desultorily involved in publishing, on the verge of conversion to Roman Catholicism, and given to an aphoristic certainty of pronouncement—is a heroine from the Sparkian mold, but the eccentric and weakly creative spirits among whom she so decisively moves seem perfunctorily limned. Her lover, William, is a brilliant young medical student raised in such dire poverty that he never learned any nursery rhymes, and her enemy, Hector Bartlett, a grubby literary operator whom she scornfully dismisses as a “pisseur de copie.” One thing leads to another with the usual snap and aplomb, and Mrs. Spark’s prose is as always intensely composed, but it all seems a bit cut and dried. Mrs. Hawkins complacently states, “It is enough for me to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God”; one wishes that Mrs. Spark, as a novelist, might leave a little less to God and be a bit more indiscriminate in what she chooses to animate. However, she remains sui generis, with an aloof, factual rigor that anticipates the Last Judgment.

  Bad Neighbors

  THE HANDYMAN, by Penelope Mortimer. 199 pp. St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

  NOTHING HAPPENS IN CARMINCROSS, by Benedict Kiely. 279 pp. Godine, 1985.

  Penelope Mortimer’s new novel is, to make no bones about it, a superb book—fierce in its disillusion, poetic and carefree in its language, comic and horrifying and deeply familiar all at once. Concerning three years of widowhood as experienced by sixtyish, conventional Phyllis Muspratt, who must cope with two grown children, two grandchildren, an oddly bouncy handyman, and a handful of churlish neighbors in the sinister village of Cryck, the novel shows the deft social weave at which English fiction excels, but presents its events with a terse fury the opposite of sociable complacence. An undercurrent of desperation presses against every harsh, droll detail. Phyllis’s husband dies in the first paragraph with a stunning lack of fuss: “Gerald Muspratt gave no indication of what he was about to do. He walked over to the french windows in the dining room to inspect the weather and, without even turning round, died.” Saki or Evelyn Waugh might have begun with such icy inconsequence; but neither could have so impressionistically given us, a few sentences on, the churn of a distraught woman:

  At first she trembled with shock, all of a dither; swivelled on her haunches, not knowing which way to turn, panting little gasps which sounded like oh dear, oh dear God, oh; her hands fluttered, patting, pulling at his hairy tweed jacket then flying away as though stung. She saw the table from an unknown angle, the packet of Bran Flakes blocking the ceiling, the heavy arches of the toast-rack tarnished on the inside, the shadow beneath the rim of the plate over which the dead man’s marmalade oozed. What to do?

  At this height of distress and dishevelment, the cleaning lady arrives, and impartially tidies up. “Mrs. Rodburn took over. By lunchtime Gerald had been removed, the table cleared, the breakfast things washed up and put away.” Life goes on, in an atmosphere of harrowing triviality.

  The light-handed speed and offhand knowingness of the prose could have been achieved only by a highly skilled writer impatient with mere skill. From such exquisite, charmingly placed phrases as “swivelled on her haunches” and “flying away as though stung,” the prose can descend into the telegraphic, as when Phyl
lis’s daughter encounters marital trouble:

  The impossible had happened. Sophia and Bron had talked about his affair. About all his affairs. She had left him. Walked out on Selina and Jasper. That was it. That was the end.

  These fragmentary and breathless sentences tell us all we need to know, and the grim comedy of Sophia’s violent reaction (she runs to her mother, who unbeknownst to her has plenty of her own troubles) lies in the prodigious importance this standard, casebook event has for her, to whom it appears unique. Sobbing into paper towels, she spills to her distracted mother all day long the young wife’s classic litany of wrongs:

  Bron had been having these affairs, these things, for some time. Well, Sophia didn’t blame him. It wasn’t that. She knew she wasn’t, well, perhaps she wasn’t much fun in bed but she was so worried all the time, it was all right for men but of course she wouldn’t take the pill—you didn’t go out of your way to get cancer, did you?—and she hated the idea of having some foreign body inside her, she meant the coil of course, and she was terrified of getting pregnant again, terrified.… No, what she couldn’t stand, what really upset her, wasn’t the actual sex, it was—well, she didn’t know how to explain it—it was the nice time he had with these women, it was the fact that he talked to them and went to discos with them and took them to the movies, and they had no children to worry about, they could go out any time they liked, they could spend hours over their hair and their—well, it was all that. It was so bitterly unfair.… Well, she had put up with it so long as it didn’t interfere. She had settled for it. That was the way things had to be, she had told herself, and so long as he kept quiet about it she could manage. But he had actually expected her to discuss the situation, as though it were, as though it were something else he expected her to deal with.