Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The reader’s laughter at this long winding plaint isn’t altogether heartless; it is congratulatory, honoring the author for the prototypical perfection of the imagined discourse, and the virtuosa deftness with which the requisite notes are played. Mrs. Mortimer’s ear is as keen as her eye; again and again the distances behind ordinary banal exchanges open up, and all our troubles are put in the withering perspective of human repetitiveness—of authentic sorrow seen as chronic cliché: “Isabel [Broune] watched her mother approach with a familiar sense of doom. When she finally arrived after this arduous journey up the path, she would certainly inflict some punishment. ‘How did you sleep?’ she might ask, inferring that it was Isabel’s duty to sleep soundly; ‘Have you had breakfast?’, implying that if she hadn’t, she was deliberately starving herself to annoy; worst of all would be ‘How do you feel?’, a question so unanswerable that to ask it was a deliberate gibe.”

  Rebecca Broune, an antisocial, burnt-out writer, is the only even remotely companionable neighbor for the widow Muspratt in her lonely Cryck cottage. Rebecca is lovingly described, in sentences of breezy compression and verve. “Her three marriages and countless love affairs had all ended in disaster; so, on numerous occasions, had she herself, or very nearly, snatched back by stomach-pumps, blood transfusions, electric current, medications of the most dubious kind and enough psychiatrists to set up a small symposium. All this had not made her the happiest of women, but had given her insight of a kind.” The kind of insight, we may infer, that enables Mrs. Mortimer to cover so much psychological terrain with such rasping authority, from the menace grandchildren hold for a grandmother (“their merciless eyes, which weren’t turned inwards, like Sophia’s, their greed, their ruthless clamping on to her old love”) to the bachelor blankness of a son who has loved his father too well, and from the jaunty effrontery of a country con-man and pervert to the style in which a prospering Jewish banker husband shines in the eyes of his former, and now sadly deteriorated, wife:

  Ralph had always been a handsome man, but uxoriousness had perfected him. As he came out from behind his desk and glided rather than walked across the enormous drawing room of his private office toward her, Rebecca felt a spasm of admiration and regret, cruel as a wet winter.… He was tall, and had never been slim; she knew that a considerable belly must be contained somewhere between the massive chest and spare hips, but there was little sign of it—his dark suit gave him the line and grace of an old racehorse, lovingly groomed.… They were not just an old divorced couple. He had moved back to his Hebrew origins, entrenched himself in law and legend; from this inviolable position he saw her, she felt, at a great distance, a trivial, despicable creature, physically repulsive and morally unsound.

  Rebecca’s physical ugliness is rather doted upon: “Her ugliness gave her a curious satisfaction. It protected her against upstarts and repelled nuisances. In case anyone should see through it she reinforced it with wild, greying hair, baggy denim, shapeless clod-hopping shoes; what remained of her fingernails were ridged with earth; through constantly holding a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, one eye had become smaller and redder than the other.” Her daughter, timid, suicidal Isabel, has an even more fearful view: “Isabel, thinking herself camouflaged in the shade of the plum tree, imagined her mother as an old dog, scarred and moth-eaten, its yellow teeth still able to tear flesh, its hydrophobic little eyes like red-hot cinders in dark places.” Rebecca has ceased to write, is rude to everyone, and gives all her love and energy to her roses. In the end, she returns to the typewriter, to tell the story of Phyllis Mustrapp, as if to atone for having been an indifferent neighbor; Rebecca’s revival as a writer turns out to be the hidden thread of this many-sided, relentless chronicle of the way in which parents and children, husbands and wives fail, frustrate, and fascinate one another. We are all indifferent neighbors. I don’t know when I have last read fiction that gave me such an exhilarating sensation of being scoured by the brisk, bleak truth of our human condition and human interrelations. The long-silent Penelope Mortimer (whose last novel, the equally remarkable but quite different Long Distance, appeared in 1974) has made a brilliant return to print.

  The Irishman Benedict Kiely, a year younger than Mrs. Mortimer, has also produced a novel tinged by the bitter wisdom of late middle age and raked by sore disenchantment; but his book, Nothing Happens in Carmincross, is lamentably diffuse, as muddied and meandering in its execution as the Englishwoman’s is crisp and direct. Mr. Kiely has always been a garrulous writer, most winningly so in such lilting short stories as “A Journey to the Seven Streams,” where the easy, talking prose tumbles along as brightly as a mountain brook. He has, Thomas Flanagan informed us in his introduction to Kiely’s collection of stories The State of Ireland (1980), a mind spectacularly stocked with quotations and songs; echoes drawn from this mental treasure have often deepened the run of his heroes’ meditations and enriched our awareness of Ireland’s complicated, incessantly verbalized history. But through his present hero, the historian and college teacher Mervyn Kavanagh, Mr. Kiely has provided himself with too smooth a conduit to his own erudition and has drowned his tale in recollected words.

  The tale is a slight one: in the summer of 1973, Professor Kavanagh, who has been teaching at a girls’ college in Virginia, returns to Ireland to attend his favorite niece’s wedding; accompanied by an overweight and complaisant barmaid named Deborah, and pursued by phone calls from his estranged wife in New York City, he drives north from the vicinity of Shannon Airport to his home village of Carmincross, in Northern Ireland, where terrorist mischief mars the wedding. On this journey I clocked the literary allusions at two and a half per page, and braced myself every time the dialogue veered into the thudding rhymes of Celtic balladry:

  —Up from the south, Deborah, at break of day bringing to Winchester fresh dismay. The affrighted air … what’s after that?

  —You’re asking the right woman.

  —Was it with a shudder or like a shudder bore, like a herald in haste to the chieftain’s door, the terrible grumble and rumble and roar.…

  —Rhymes with whore.

  —… telling the battle was on once more and Sheridan so many miles away. Deborah, how many miles away was Sheridan?

  —Don’t know, Merlin. Don’t care, Merlin.

  She calls him Merlin and her pursuing husband Mandrake, and Mervyn repeatedly indulges the fancy that the three of them parallel the legendary triangle of King Fionn, Queen Gráinne, and her lover, Diarmuid. Another character, helpfully called Jeremiah, wields Biblical verses with a vengeance. “Quotations. Quotations,” Mervyn’s wife complains to him over the phone, and he himself reflects that “the mind of a reading man cursed with a plastic memory, who also goes to the movies, and watches television, is a jumble sale, a lumber-room.” Irish history is discussed by the board foot, and a whole scrapbook of terrorist atrocities, Irish and other, is presented by way of conversation, rumination, and daily newspaper reading. Several long letters to the absent Mrs. Kavanagh are indited in a style quite as leisurely and farraginous as the narrative method itself. Italics are never used to distinguish levels of reality; third person and first swing back and forth from sentence to sentence in Mervyn’s stream of consciousness; and Mr. Kiely’s Joycean loyalty to the dash as the means of signifying speech (a typographical preference whose only conceivable utility is to brand the work at a glance as stubbornly, honorably avant-garde) further clouds the raddled flow. When the author does have an immediate, potentially affecting event to relate—and he has several, toward the end—he tends, Faulknerishly, to skim right past it and then reel it in by flashback. Though not quite incoherent, the novel appears to place coherence low on the list of aesthetic virtues. References to the Falklands War, Karmal’s Afghanistan, and the Ayatollah’s Iran dot the 1973 scene, and an afterword blithely acknowledges such anachronisms with the question “Does it matter?”

  Not that Mr. Kiely’s fine native style is altogether suppressed. Individual sentenc
es flash out smartly:

  The plane shudders, shakes him out of the brandy torpor, and Ireland is there below him, flat and marked in fields, green and brown, bog and marsh by the silver estuary. One small cloud, cast out of the herd, limps and melts away toward the northeast.

  He is blocky in build and low to the ground: with a tonsure of hair of no particular color, a ruddy, pear-shaped face with the plump end of the pear to the top, billiard-ball eyes, and a slow sinister smile.

  The sun is shining. The river now and again spits silver into the air.

  But the narrator’s eye rather rarely focuses on external appearances. An extended wayward process of self-recrimination and consolation takes that eye inward and backward. The private aspect of Mervyn’s journey, his sexual fling with Deborah, feels wishful and recalls Colonel Cantwell’s amour with the Contessa in Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees even in its cadences: “She stands close beside him, breathing like a young girl. It is a lovely morning over the glen. She is with a man she likes to love with.” “Tell me about Ninon who made love until she was ninety,” Deborah begs, in much the same tone in which the Contessa requested, “Kiss me once again and make the buttons of your uniform hurt me but not too much.” The barmaid assures her erudite lover, “I like how you look. Old and fat and bald and all … Your fabulous face. It’s like a sunset seen from the clifftops.” The lady, indeed, is so purely the servant of Mervyn’s desires and echo of his thoughts that when, late in their travels, she develops an individual decisiveness and a misfortune of her own the author and the hero both hurry, unchivalrously, to drop her.

  The public aspect of Nothing Happens in Carmincross is of course the Ulster wars, the vicious pollution that Northern Ireland’s competing terrorist factions have worked upon the beautiful land where Mervyn was reared, as a Catholic with Protestant neighbors. Carmincross is another version of Mr. Kiely’s native town of Omagh, in County Tyrone. The bucolic scenes of his early fiction, to which war and violence travelled only as rumor and as legends spun by Ireland’s adventuring sons, now are given over to the “Bombomb Yahoos” of both religious persuasions, whose explosives, home-made (a new cottage industry) of gelignite, fuel oil, and ammonium nitrate, are thrown into pub doors, dropped into letter boxes, delivered by teen-age girls pushing baby prams. The gangs, whether IRA (Irish Republican Army) or UDF (Ulster Defence Force), extract “black rent”—protection money—from shops and businesses, pour appropriately colored paint (orange or green) over the shaved heads of girls suspected of collaboration with the opposite side, and murder farmers in their fields and children in their beds. The centuries of Irish struggle against British rule have come, in Mervyn’s view, to the triumph of “thuggery and blaggery” and the destruction of mutual trust and of every decent institution from the neighborhood pub to the public schools.

  This is a somber and mighty theme. And no living writer is better equipped than Benedict Kiely, out of the depth of his feeling and knowledge, to dramatize it. But Mervyn Kavanagh offers a poor handle on the situation. He has always been, he tells us, an odd man out among his own fellow Irishmen: “Coming home to his own people he realises with a more painful intensity what he is always conscious of: his oddity, the éan corr, the one bird that slipped out of the nest.” Our empathy with Mervyn feels obstructed; we want to like him better than he likes himself. Even as he visits the old sites and drives along the old ways his heart hangs back in America, with his unhappy, tenacious wife and “dogwood visions of slim girls like white fish in a blue pool.” “They’re a happy people,” he says, of Americans. To the unhappiness of his own people he has returned as a tourist. Grieve though he does, Mervyn is merely visiting the distressed areas of Ireland; he does not have to live there, and the end of the novel sees him safely tucked back into the anesthesia of the New World. Having drunk thirteen brandy alexanders before boarding the plane to Ireland, he rejoins New York by having several more.

  One would feel more diffident in expressing reservations about this novel’s treatment of a topic so momentous and heartfelt had not Mr. Kiely, in the short story “Proxopera” (1979), already handled it consummately. In that fifty-page story, which concludes The State of Ireland and is dedicated “In Memory of the Innocent Dead,” the hero, Granda Binchey, like Mervyn a teacher with a mind full of quotations, is, unlike him, a lifelong resident of his tormented village and has achieved all his ambitions there. Also unlike him, he is the protagonist of a dramatic action: with his son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren held hostage, the elder Binchey is forced to drive a car laden with a time bomb into the heart of town. This action, shown entirely through the old man’s fluctuating observations and resolves, better conveys the agony of Northern Ireland than all the news items, horrific and deplorable though they are, that are strung on the crooked line of Mervyn’s boozy peregrinations. At its most effective, Nothing Happens in Carmincross shocks us as a newspaper does: this happens out there. In “Proxopera,” it happens within us, as fiction makes things happen. Compared with the circumstantial, suspenseful flight of the shorter work, the novel rushes ponderously about, feathered in quotations and wildly glowing, like an angel beating its wings but not quite getting off the ground. In this failure to rise we feel the heaviness of its theme.

  The Jones Boys

  ON THE BLACK HILL, by Bruce Chatwin. 249 pp. Viking, 1983.

  Bruce Chatwin, an Englishman who worked some years for Sotheby & Company, as auctioneer and director of the Impressionist department, and who then became a traveller into such outré lands as Patagonia, writes a clipped, lapidary prose that compresses worlds into pages. In Patagonia, an account of his wanderings in southern Argentina, won high praise five years ago for its witty obliquity, suavely economical descriptions, wealth of curious historical and paleontological data, and perky word portraits of the drunken gauchos and homesick Scotsmen he encountered in this vast, raw region. The one virtue In Patagonia did not conspicuously possess was momentum; the traveller so deliberately minimized his personality and obscured his motives that the prose seemed to move on ghostly legs of its own, snacking on scenery and bits of dialogue where it pleased, and hopping about so airily between past and present, between experienced incident and researched document, that the exotic reality was half eclipsed by the willful manners of the invisible guide. Mr. Chatwin writes in such short paragraphs that he seems to be constantly interrupting himself. His narratives must be savored in short takes, like collections of short stories. His third book and second novel, On the Black Hill, also skips, scintillatingly, across a vast terrain—a stretch of time: the eighty years that the Jones twins, Lewis and Benjamin, have lived in Radnorshire, a rural county of Wales bordering that of Hereford, in England.

  Amos Jones, the twins’ father, is a red-haired Welshman, the son of a “garrulous old cider-drinker, known round the pubs of Radnorshire as Sam the Waggon.” Their mother, Amos’s second wife, was Mary Latimer, the only child of “the Reverend Latimer, an Old Testament scholar, who had retired from mission work in India and settled in this remote hill parish to be alone with his daughter and his books.” This clergyman drowns one day in a peat bog (the first of many violent deaths that stud Mr. Chatwin’s bucolic chronicle), and, Amos having been smitten by the sight of Mary in church, a courtship ensues which overcomes their awkward differences of education, class, and race—for she is English, or as they say in Wales “Saxon.” They marry in the year 1899 and lease, with money realized from the sale of some of her father’s books, a farm named The Vision, where “in 1737 an ailing girl called Alice Morgan saw the Virgin hovering over a patch of rhubarb, and ran back to the kitchen, cured.” Mary Jones is pregnant “by the time of the first frosts,” and twin boys are born in August of the new century. The boys never leave, for long, The Vision. Two global wars rumble by at a distance, and new machinery enters the world, from airplanes and automobiles to video games, but the important events of the twins’ lives are strictly local, if not familial—the deaths of thei
r grandparents, the birth and eventual flight of their sister Rebecca, the feud with their neighbors the Watkinses, the financial flurry when the Joneses must buy their farm from their aristocratic landlords. Benjamin is carted off to Hereford Detention Barracks for refusing to fight in World War I, and is cruelly treated there, and Lewis makes several attempts to find a woman for himself; yet both return always to the same house, the same chores, the same land. Weather, labor, loyalty, and other people’s scandals make up the fabric of these two lives so intertwined as to be one life. They both live to be eighty, and Benjamin is last seen staring at his own reflection in his brother’s shiny black tombstone.

  The author lays out this tale of country narrowness in a mosaic of sharp and knowing small scenes. Though Mr. Chatwin was born in 1940, the details of daily life early in the century seem an open book to him. Here is how a sleeping farmer looks to his young wife in 1900:

  Amos was asleep in his calico nightshirt. The buttons had come undone, and his chest was bare. Squinting sideways, she glanced at the heaving ribcage, the red hairs round his nipples, the pink dimple left by his shirtstud, and the line where the sunburned neck met the milky thorax.