Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Immediately behind the door … stood a rickety upright with keys the color of unbrushed teeth. A pair of drooping candlesticks screwed directly into the piano’s bosom sported a pair of red, golden-flecked, white-wicked, spiral candles which, since the openings in the candlesticks were too large, pointed off in different directions.

  My fingers tightened as they grasped the hot roots of his hair, and pulling his head out of the shell of his palms, I brought it up to mine, eye to eye. I peered into his small gray orbs. They were oddly distorted by the skin being drawn back to the point where I was holding his hair. For a moment they peered back into mine with a look of sullen suffering, but then, obviously unable to master the harsh male tears welling up inside them, they disappeared behind their lids on either side of the fierce cleft that had dug its way between his brows.

  And there is a sentimental excess, too, that the dispassionate, ironic young Nabokov would have disdained. Vadim, having financially exhausted his mother, turns and shamelessly borrows from their faithful old servant, Nanny: “I knew she had accumulated that money through years of toil and was saving it for the almshouse to assure herself a corner in her old age when she could no longer work for a living—yet still I took it. As she handed me the money, she sniffled and blinked, ashamed of showing me her joyful tears of love and self-abnegation.”

  If there are many passages that even the immature Nabokov would never have let his pen slip into, there are some that lie outside his vision. Ageyev was at home in depths of suffering that Nabokov saw in aloof overview, reduced to a pattern. Novel with Cocaine is one of those youthful works wherein we can feel the writer getting better as he goes along. Its first and longest chapter, “School,” seems labored and puffed-up compared with, say, the schoolboy parts of Bend Sinister. The next, “Sonya,” rather more successfully diagrams the intricate vanity of an adolescent offered an adult love experience. Vadim refuses to tell Sonya he loves her, on this fancy reasoning:

  My experience in matters of love seemed to have convinced me that no one could talk eloquently of love unless his love was only a memory, that no one could talk persuasively of love unless his sensuality was aroused, and no one whose heart was actually in the throes of love could say a word.

  Sonya’s farewell letter to him couches with epigrammatic force a number of bleak truths about relationships. Theirs, she writes, has reached that point where “all one of the parties has to do is tell the other the truth—the whole truth, do you understand? the utter truth—for that truth to turn into an indictment.” The longer such a relationship lasts, “the more persistently both parties simulate their former intimacy and the more strongly they feel that terrible enmity which never develops between strangers but often between people very close to each other.” She ends, “Your relationship to me is a kind of unending fall, a constant impoverishment of the emotions, which, like all forms of impoverishment, humiliates more the more the riches it supplants.”

  The affair thus eloquently dismissed, and school over, the stage is bare for the astonishing chapter, “Cocaine,” that gives this long-forgotten novel its modern relevance and enduring interest. The strained, gaudy style seems stripped to a new vividness even before Vadim encounters the drug: “The frost was hard and dry. Everything felt ready to crack. As the sleigh pulled up to the arcade, I heard high-pitched metallic steps on all sides and saw smoke rising in white columns from all the roofs. The city seemed to hang in the sky like a gigantic icon-lamp.” When he comes to take cocaine, every detail—the purchase, the distribution among the party of users, the snorting, and the sensations—is rendered with a cool and edgy clarity:

  The bitter taste in my mouth was almost gone, and all that remained was an ice-cold feeling in my throat and gums, the kind of feeling that comes when, during a frost, one closes one’s mouth after breathing with it open and the warm saliva makes it even colder. My teeth were completely frozen, and if I put pressure on any one of them, I felt the others follow painlessly, as if they were all soldered together.

  The ups, the downs, the exhilaration and despair, and the brutal plunge into abject addiction follow in masterly fashion, capped by a fully developed theory on the psychology of self-ruin:

  During the long nights and long days I spent under the influence of cocaine … I came to see that what counts in life is not the events that surround one but the reflection of those events in one’s consciousness.… All of a man’s life—his work, his deeds, his will, his physical and mental prowess—is completely and utterly devoted to, fixed on bringing about one or another event in the external world, though not so much to experience the event in itself as to experience the reflection of the event on his consciousness.

  Cocaine so affects the consciousness that “the need for any event whatever disappeared and, with it, the need for expending great amounts of work, time, and energy to bring it about.” Slavic mysticism here shows a sinister anarchic face, and we are almost relieved to discover that, while Vadim hurries to his inevitable end, the Revolution has occurred, bringing its enforced order.

  The dire results of that Revolution are, with the bewildering mixture of slapstick and rage that used to be called “black humor,” tumbled before us by the expatriate Yuz Aleshkovsky in his novel Kangaroo. Kangaroo has waited not fifty years but over ten for its presentation to American readers; it was finished, Mr. Aleshkovsky tells us in a brief autobiography supplied by his publishers, in 1975, whereupon he realized “quite clearly the impossibility of continuing this double life [that is, writing for samizdat] and that I longed to devote myself to writing without compromise.” He now lives in Middletown, Connecticut. His underground novel makes no compromise with the American reader, who is expected to know and care, without benefit of footnote or appendix, who or what Ordzhonikidze, the Chelyuskin, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Chekists, Ilya Ehrenburg, Ivan Pyriev, Radishchev, Zoya Fyodorova, Tukhachevsky, Kirov, Karatsupa, Kulaks, Zhdanov, Voznesensky, Yuri Levitan, Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Zelinsky-Nesmeyanov gas, Joseph Vissarionovich, and zeks are or were. Our daunted American reader is further expected to pick the serious satirical strands from a grotesque, scatological, backward-looping farrago involving the conviction of a Russian pickpocket and criminal by name of Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera, alias Cariton Ustinych Newton Tarkington, for “the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905.” The trial occurs in 1949; the charge was cooked up by a primitive computer and is substantiated by a film made of the reconstructed incident. KGB ruses of enormous complication seek to persuade Fan Fanych that he is (a) a kangaroo (b) in a spaceship. He spends six years in Siberia, killing rats with the aid of a third eye developed by sheer will power at the back of his head and enduring debates of Communist fine points with fervent Old Bolsheviks of whom the leader appears to be the famous Chernyshevsky (1828–89). Fan Fanych remembers while under durance or en route his earlier curious involvements with Hitler in 1929 and the Yalta Conference in 1945; he returns to a de-Stalinized Moscow in 1955, finds his apartment full of sparrow nests, and falls in love with a girl he glimpsed just before packing to go to the Lubyanka. Finally, he locates his old friend Kolya, to whom he is somehow telling all this, much as Portnoy is delivering his complaint to a psychiatrist. The analogy with Philip Roth’s exuberant demolition of bourgeois inhibitions may illuminate why Kangaroo struck me as so grindingly unfunny, albeit prankish: to relish unrepressed prose, we must have had some experience of the repression, and we must be able to hear the voice. Kangaroo is told in that heavily slangy Russian which drives translators to revive such stale English expressions as “mug,” “screwball,” “shoot the breeze,” and “off his [her, its] rocker.” While a patriotic citizen of the free West must be politically flattered by so detailed and vehement a blasphemy against the Soviet system, it makes deadly reading if you’ve never been a believer and don’t know the iconography.

  Only when Kangaroo floats free of its political burden does it stir
a smile. In inflation-plagued Germany, our down-and-out hero has his overcoat and suit “turned”—torn apart and resewn inside out, to show the unworn side of the cloth. His clothes take revenge, with an animation that recalls the bedevilled and bedevilling objects of the old Chaplin films: “For some reason my whole body’s twitching inside the suit, as if there’s a flea biting me, or a sharp little splinter scratching me.… I can tell my rotten jacket’s doing it on purpose, just to make me look like an idiot, and my pants are giving it moral support. They’re riding up my knees in creases, and keep rustling. And my pockets are moaning like seashells, ‘Oo-oo-oo.’ ” Here the referent—wearing clothes—is generally human, and the absurd can be measured against the actual and its degree of exaggeration appreciated. But in this Soviet system conceived as sheer demonism—“sucking people’s blood just for laughs, destroying innocent souls, wearing out their strength and keeping the human spirit humiliated for half a century”—we do not quite know where we are, and hardly dare laugh in the dark. Kangaroo translates a work whose intended readers can all read Russian.

  Visiting the Land of the Free

  ALONE TOGETHER, by Elena Bonner, translated from the Russian by Alexander Cook. 264 pp. Knopf, 1986.

  For a period of several months about a year ago, residents of New England were now and then treated to the sight, on television, of a small iron-haired lady, with thick eyeglasses and a wary smile, being ambushed by reporters and cameras while trying to mind her own business. Her name was Elena Bonner, and her business was a mixture of medical and familial matters: she was getting her ailing heart, eyes, and right leg attended to at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and she was visiting her aged mother, her daughter and son, and her three grandchildren in nearby Newton. Her husband would have liked to accompany her but could not; he is the Soviet Union’s foremost dissident, the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and was at that time held in internal exile in the Russian city of Gorky. It was extraordinary, indeed, that Bonner had received permission to visit this country, for she had recently been convicted of slander against the Soviet state and social system and been sentenced to five years of exile in Gorky. Her husband, believing that Soviet medicine could not be trusted with her drastic health problems, had several times undertaken a hunger strike to secure her permission to travel abroad. The couple had together staged a seventeen-day hunger strike in late 1981 which did secure the freedom of Liza Alexeyeva, the wife of Bonner’s son, Alexei Semyonov, to emigrate and join her husband, who had already left the U.S.S.R., in Massachusetts. But in 1984 and 1985 the Soviet authorities seemed determined to suppress both Sakharov’s hunger strike and all publicity concerning it. In the Gorky Regional Clinical Hospital, they force-fed him, sometimes with painful and humiliating violence, and forbade visits to him from his wife; at the same time they contrived a number of films, distributed to the West through the agency of the West German newspaper Bild, showing the Sakharovs apparently healthy and happy in Gorky. In 1985, however, Alexei staged his own hunger strike, in Washington, right next to the Soviet embassy, and the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was travelling in the West and promoting a fresh Soviet image. Word abruptly came down that Bonner could go abroad, provided she did not give interviews to the press. She was nevertheless an object of much interest to the television cameras; as it happened, she was usually shown smoking, with the unfiltered, reckless absorption of one to whom lung irritation is a relatively minor problem. Scandalized American viewers, no longer used to seeing even bad guys light up on the screen, wrote letters of concern and protest to the newspapers and the television stations. At least one of the many doctors ministering to her ills (she eventually underwent a six-bypass heart operation and an operation on the artery of her leg) felt obliged to make a public statement that she was being urged to stop. And I believe that, by the time her five-month stay in this country was over, she had given up smoking, to the satisfaction of many.

  During her visit here, amid her operations and travels and maternal and grandmaternal activities, she wrote a book about herself and, especially, her recent years as the persecuted, isolated wife of Sakharov. Alone Together is understandably a hurried, fragmentary production. Footnotes by the translator clear up many minor mysteries of cultural allusion and personal history. An appendix of nine documents, including reproductions of Elena Bonner’s father’s death certificate and her own service record as a nurse in “the Great Patriotic War,” sheds additional light—indeed, a reader might do well to begin this book with the eighth item, a letter from Sakharov to the president of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences on October 15, 1984, which sets out the history of Bonner’s health and the couple’s travails more consecutively than her own account. The steps that led Sakharov himself from a privileged position high within the Soviet scientific establishment to that of a determined public dissident are not discussed. His letter states in a brief paragraph:

  The authorities have been greatly annoyed by my public activities—my defense of prisoners of conscience and my articles and books on peace, the open society and human rights. (My fundamental ideas are contained in Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, 1968; My Country and the World, 1975, and “The Danger of Thermonuclear War,” 1983.)

  Nor does Bonner disclose much of the ideological journey that has placed her, at Sakharov’s side, in such a marginal and precarious position within her society.

  In refutation of a defamatory article that she quotes at length, she rather grudgingly offers a few pages of autobiography. She was born in 1923. Her father, Gevork Alikhanov, was a leading Armenian Communist, who was arrested and imprisoned as a traitor in 1937, officially died of pneumonia in 1939, and was rehabilitated in 1954, the same year that his death certificate was issued. Bonner’s mother, Ruth Grigorievna Bonner—who at the age of eighty-six lives in Newton with her grandchildren—was also arrested in 1937. Elena Bonner and her younger brother thereafter lived with their maternal grandmother in Leningrad. She writes, “Never did I believe—either as a child or as an adult—that my parents could have been enemies of the state. Their ideals and their internationalism had been lofty models for me, which was why I joined the army when war broke out.” She became a nurse; in 1941 she suffered a concussion and other wounds at the front and was hospitalized for some months before being reassigned. In 1945 she was promoted to lieutenant and demobilized as “a group 2 invalid,” with almost total loss of vision in the right eye and progressive blindness in the left, as a result of the concussion. Despite her eye problems, she enrolled in 1947 at the First Leningrad Medical Institute and graduated as a doctor in 1953. She worked as a district doctor and pediatrician and in Iraq on assignment for the Ministry of Health of the U.S.S.R. Along with her medical career, she was active as a writer, a journalist, and an editor. Though a member of the young people’s Komsomol, she did not join the Communist Party for many years. “Neither while in the army nor in subsequent years did I feel a psychological right to join the Party as long as my parents were listed as traitors to the homeland.… After the criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress, and especially the Twenty-second, I decided to join the CPSU, and in 1964 became a candidate and in 1965, a member. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 I considered this step a mistake and in 1972, in accordance with my convictions, I left the Communist Party.” She dissents, then, from deep within the system—the daughter of an Old Bolshevik who has paid her full dues as a Soviet citizen.

  She married Sakharov in 1971. Her love life up to the age of forty-eight had not been barren. She had had a girlhood romance with Vsevolod Bagritsky, who was killed in the war and whose poems and diaries she helped compile for a posthumous volume. One of her attackers accuses her, in print, of “a wanton life.” Her own book includes a rakish photograph taken of herself in 1949, wearing a broad-brimmed hat: “I decided to publish the picture in this book, even though I know it smacks of middle-aged coquettishness! ‘I was never beautiful, but I was always damned cute.’ ” At medical
school she met Ivan Semyonov, the father of her two children, Tatyana (born in 1950) and Alexei (born in 1956). Bonner and Semyonov separated in 1965. She does not describe when and how she met Sakharov, but Sakharov’s letter to the Academy president spells out a pattern of their marriage: