Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Publishers love to call books novels. Wittgenstein’s Nephew has been labelled as one by Knopf, but really it is an undisguised memoir. Exactly one hundred pages long, it wanderingly describes, without much of the heat of Gathering Evidence, Bernhard’s friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the famous philosopher’s nephew and a mentally unbalanced dandy once conspicuous around Vienna. Like Correction (whose fictional Roithamer, with his aristocratic background and English residence, is plainly patterned on the philosopher), it concerns a verbose and fascinated narrator’s entwinement with a Wittgenstein. The entwinement in the memoir is based upon a shared fondness for opera and music, for Schopenhauer and Novalis and Pascal and Velásquez and Goya, for sitting in the Sacher coffeehouse caustically observing the other customers, for sweeping castigations and “cosmopolitan fooleries.” Bernhard and Paul Wittgenstein also shared, we are told, “the counting disease”—a compulsion to count windows and doors from a vantage like that of a moving streetcar—and a habit of stepping on paving stones not randomly but according to “a carefully thought-out system.” They both suffered from the “disease” of “always travelling, simply in order to get away from one place and go to another [without] finding happiness on arrival.” To their more serious diseases Bernhard gives a romantic coloring of willed rebellion:

  Paul went mad because he suddenly pitted himself against everything and lost his balance, just as one day I too lost my balance through pitting myself against everything—the only difference being that he went mad, whereas I, for the selfsame reason, contracted lung disease. But Paul was no madder than I am.… The only difference between us is that Paul allowed himself to be utterly dominated by his madness, whereas I have never let myself be utterly dominated by my equally serious madness; one might say that he was taken over by his madness, whereas I have always exploited mine.

  Similarly, the narrator of Correction deems himself “probably somewhat more of a survivor than Roithamer, for I always seem to find a way out, while Roithamer could no longer find a way out.”

  As Paul became madder, Bernhard distanced himself; the reminiscence undergoes a rueful turn: “Quite deliberately, out of a base instinct for self-preservation, I shunned my friend in the last months of his life, and for this I cannot forgive myself.” Remembering Paul’s grotesque, emaciated, deathly appearance in his last days leads the author to some perversely complacent self-condemnation: “Watching him, I felt ashamed. I felt it shameful that I was not yet finished, as my friend already was. I am not a good character. I am quite simply not a good person.” Paul had predicted to Bernhard, “Two hundred friends will come to my funeral and you must make a speech at the graveside.” In fact, only eight or nine attended the funeral, and his friend Thomas Bernhard stayed in Crete, writing a play which, he tells us, “I destroyed as soon as it was finished.” He additionally confides, “To this day I have not visited his grave.”

  The memoir, which takes Paul’s mortuary prediction as its epigraph, has been delivered instead of the graveside speech. It offers no moral save the one that, as Bernhard stated on another occasion, man is a wretched creature and death a certainty. Its most vivid episodes reveal the author engaged in some display of reflexive irascibility; relatively little of poor, elegant, underemployed Paul shows through the domineering personality of the bad-tempered prose, which as it runs along blasts the “unbearable” German press, the “unspeakably perfidious thespians” who performed one of Bernhard’s plays, literary coffeehouses whose “foul atmosphere [is] irritating to the nerves and deadening to the mind,” psychiatrists, who are “the real demons of our age,” and, at some length, the “gross self-degradation” of fashionably moving to the country and smoke-curing pork and growing your own vegetables. Bernhard’s curmudgeonliness here comes close to being as droll a shtik as W. C. Fields’s; his ferocious misanthropy, capable of generating nightmares in the fiction, almost sinks to the lovable.

  Martin Walser (not to be confused with the Swiss novelist, feuilletonist, Kafka precursor, and mental patient, Robert Walser [1878–1956]) is described, among the jacket quotes on his novel No Man’s Land, as “the closest thing the West Germans have to John Updike.” Really? No Man’s Land seemed to this naturally expectant reader a joyless, terse, efficient small novel that manages an unforced flowering toward the end, in the inevitably theatrical milieu of a courtroom. Until then, the novel conscientiously occupies the heavily trafficked gray area between the two Germanys, wherein spying, conflicted loyalties, and domestic discontent are local industries. We have been there before, with John Le Carré and other jaded singers of the Cold War blues, and Walser’s intellectualized spy story, infused with generous quotations from Schiller’s poetry and Schumann’s lieder, doesn’t, for all its earnestness and compassion, quite shake the feeling of a slumming expedition. A lot of the details seem to enter the narrative backwards, with their symbolic import foremost, and the action is so telescoped as to rebuke rather than satisfy our appetite for suspense.

  The hero, Wolf Zeiger, is an East German would-be pianist who gave his piano teacher a concussion and, before heading west in the wake of this gaffe, was enlisted by the Ministry of State Security for six weeks’ training in spy school at Potsdam-Eiche. He is not too unhappily married to Dorle, who works at the West German Foreign Ministry. She doesn’t have access to the NATO protocols, so Wolf sleeps with the secretary who does, Sylvia Wellershoff. Sylvia—“not fat, but fleshy. She had a bit too much of everything. Her mouth always hung open, as if the lips were too heavy”—is as giving erotically as she is intelligence-wise. Meanwhile, Dorle, approaching forty, wants a baby; and her superior at the office, smarmy Dr. Meissner, is casting a fond eye her way; and the Hungarian mathematician who lives in the apartment below has deduced, from the way Wolf plays Schumann only one hand at a time, that he is a spy; and Wolf is cooling on the idea of returning east at the end of his perfidious career.

  If this exposition of the plot seems hasty, so is the book’s: all the elements, including opaque bits of the West’s high-tech electronics and metallurgy and some plausible quick portraits of spymasters from the Communist side, are in place, but packed too tight to move. The novel seems neither a parody of a thriller, like Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes or Queneau’s We Always Treat Women Too Well, nor the real, grim-lipped thing. Perhaps one difficulty, for an American reader, is that Wolf’s justification to himself for treason against the West German state is the selfless aim of eroding the boundary between the two Germanys and thus helping to heal “this unhappily divided country.” The cause of reuniting the pieces of Hitler’s Reich, however dear to the German Volksgeist, is not one to touch heartstrings universally. Our President’s§ rhetorical call to tear down the Berlin Wall is one thing, and the living memory of Deutschland über Alles another. In the absence of a motivation easier to empathize with, Wolf’s fretful ambivalence seems scarcely to deserve such portentous pondering as “To what extent may one’s thoughts contradict one’s actions? How much irreconcilability can one bear within oneself?” His self-scorn—in the actual unsparing style, I believe, of contemporary younger Germans—is so withering as to leave the reader small space where sympathy can grab hold: “Now he felt that he was perceiving himself with a kind of disapproval of which he couldn’t get enough.”

  However, a number of scenes where geopolitical unease is translated into intimate behavior—a vacation that Dorle and Wolf take to the South of France, and certain hotel moments between Sylvia and Wolf—leap free of the plot’s mechanism, and in the book’s last third the terse, elliptic manner pays off in a rapid, no-fuss denouement, brimming with surprises, including, if I read it right, the sly revelation that Dorle is pregnant but not by Wolf. Only the last pages, in which the Zeigers’ suspended but not destroyed marriage is presented as a metaphor for the temporarily divided German condition, does Mr. Walser’s fondness for larger issues again crowd out the characters’ vital tendencies. The novel is studied to a fault, and even a minor, contemptuously casual offe
ring of Thomas Bernhard’s like Wittgenstein’s Nephew seems to come closer to literature, to breathe the air of freedom that permits epiphany. Bernhard is stingy with images and generous with repetitions, but once in a while he dives deep into the appearance of things. While he and Paul Wittgenstein are patients in different pavilions of the same hospital, he tries to walk to see him, runs out of breath, and sits on a seat outside and watches the squirrels:

  They appeared to have one consuming passion—to snatch up the paper tissues that the chest patients had dropped all over the ground and race up into the trees with them. They ran in all directions and from all directions, carrying paper tissues in their mouths, until in the gathering dusk all one could see were the paper tissues, a multitude of white dots darting hither and thither. I sat there enjoying the sight and naturally linking it with the thoughts that it seemed to conjure up automatically.

  The mind-quickening atomatism of this odd “multitude of white dots” is approached by Walser’s low-affect prose here and there: Wolf feels peculiarly at ease on buses, where “everyone … lacked something. Perhaps they all lacked the same thing”; he and Dorle together feel happy and free on a desolate stretch of French beach at the mouth of the Rhône, beyond an industrial sump, with fishermen tending their rods and the mistral driving “the sand in sharp jets against every unprotected particle of skin.” Back home, as Wolf’s bus crosses the Rhine, “it gave him a good feeling to see the Rhine churning along there so powerfully, as if it were being paid by the ton for mass transportation of water.” In such unexpected feelings and details, life breaks through; we feel in touch with real people, whose dilemmas are only a part of their substance, and with real sensations, whose significance is not imposed but arises automatically.

  Rational Faith

  A LATE FRIENDSHIP: The Letters of Karl Barth and Carl Zuckmayer, translated from the German by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 72 pp. Eerdmans, 1983.

  Zuckmayer, a German dramatist and the author of, among other film scripts, that for The Blue Angel, in the spring of 1967 received, amid much mail apropos of his recently published memoirs, a fan letter from the great Swiss theologian. “Much more than you,” Barth wrote disarmingly, “I am a child of the nineteenth century; and the modern world of letters, the theatre, the cinema and—how shall I put it—noble Bohemianism, has certainly affected me but never grasped or touched me closely.” As disarmingly, Zuckmayer wrote back, “I am one of those for whom God is not dead and Christianity, when properly experienced and lived, is still the message of salvation.” A remarkably lively and affectionate correspondence ensued between the two elderly and ailing men until Barth, by ten years the older, died in late 1968. Zuckmayer, a Catholic, received mildly admonitory lectures on the dangers of “worshiping God in the bark of a tree,” on the low intelligence of King Frederick William IV, and even on how to write a play, but proclaimed in a subsequent essay on this “late friendship” that he had “found once again what all of us most need if we are to know ourselves: a father figure.” He also wrote: “Never has any person in our day, with the possible exception of Albert Einstein, so convinced me by his mere existence that faith in God is rational.” Zuckmayer died in 1979, making possible the publication of this slim but affecting record of a meeting of minds. Both men’s letters show, as Zuckmayer said of Barth, “the intellectual vitality of one who is aging but by no means finished with himself.”

  Mutability and Gloire

  THE EUROPEANS, by Luigi Barzini. 267 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1983.

  The author of The Italians and O America here takes on the Continent; this book of wide-ranging observations and dazzling aperçus is given its focus by the theme of European unification, which Mr. Barzini believes to be highly desirable and far from imminent. Drawing upon fifty years’ experience as an Italian journalist and world traveller, he presents in successive chapters vivid historical and psychological portraits of the major members of NATO and the EEC—England, Germany, France, Italy, and Benelux—with a fond and shrewd sketch of the United States added for good measure. He has little to say of Scandinavia, Iberia, or Eastern Europe, to the reader’s loss, for he is a master geopolitical essayist. By his account, the immense British prestige of the nineteenth century changed the color of male dress to black, which percolated down from the continental aristocracy through all classes in homage to England’s supremacy in the age of coal and iron and empire; this success, Mr. Barzini suggests, derived from the convenient circumstance that all Englishmen had a mere “seven ideas” in their interchangeable heads. The resilience of the constantly teetering Italian state is linked to an underlying longing for buongoverno; in recent decades the economically disastrous creation, at American urging, of a center-left coalition, was stopped short of collapse into Communism by prodigies of private enterprise: “Naples exported five million pairs of gloves a year, in spite of the fact that there was not one glove factory in the city.” Smaller nations, like the Dutch, tend to favor a United States of Europe, but have grown unrealistically pacific under the American nuclear umbrella. The key to European unity, as Mr. Barzini sees it, is “the mutable Germans,” who have shown their neighbors so bewilderingly many faces in the century since Bismarck; the central obstacle is the French insistence on living by the light of a vanished gloire. Whatever the author’s conclusions, getting there, by a route mixed of personal reminiscence, historical learning, and debonair generalization, is a delight made all the more palatable by his elegant adopted English.

  Dutchmen and Turks

  THE ASSAULT, by Harry Mulisch, translated from the Dutch by Claire Nicolas White. 185 pp. Pantheon, 1985.

  THE SEA-CROSSED FISHERMAN, by Yashar Kemal, translated from the Turkish by Thilda Kemal. 288 pp. Braziller, 1985.

  The chance of birth gives a writer his language; if the language is a small one, like Dutch, which is spoken by scarcely more than twenty million people and sits squeezed between its big brothers English and German, the writer must be more than merely good to receive international attention. Though the Dutch are a busily literary people, the modern writer in their language whom Americans know best is a fourteen-year-old diarist, Anne Frank. Harry Mulisch was born in 1927 and is, we are assured flatly (and not without bias) by his jacket-flap biographer, “Holland’s most important postwar writer”; but he has waited until now to be published in the United States. His debut, a short novel called The Assault, is a brilliant one. A kind of detective story emanating from a violent incident in World War II, the novel combines the fascination of its swift, skillfully unfolded plot with that of a study in the psychology of repressed memory. Its hero, Anton Steenwijk, is twelve years old when, in January of 1945 (Holland, we may need to be reminded, continued to be occupied by the Germans until their final surrender, in May), a collaborationist Dutch policeman is shot on the street where Anton lives in Haarlem with his parents and his older brother, Peter. The body falls in front of their neighbors’ house, but these neighbors, mindful of the German tactics of reprisal, quickly move the body so it lies in front of the Steenwijks’, and before it can be moved again the Steenwijks are taken prisoner and their home is burned down. The house was one of four in an isolated row on a quay, surrounded by vacant lots; the qualities and secrets of all four sets of inhabitants figure in the sudden events of that nightmarish night, which Anton, soon safely moved to Amsterdam in the care of his uncle, tries to forget. He attends Gymnasium and medical school and becomes—fittingly enough—an anesthesiologist; he marries twice, has two children, and acquires no fewer than four homes. But the postwar decades fitfully bring him reminders of “the assault” and cast new light on that night’s confusion; not until a day in November of 1981, when all Amsterdam is demonstrating against nuclear arms, does Anton, now gray-haired and about to be a grandfather, at last come, through a chance encounter, to understand exactly what happened on the quay in 1945, when he was twelve.

  Mr. Mulisch is identified, in reference works, as an “absurdist”; but there is nothing absurd about
this economically and thoughtfully worked-out novel except, perhaps, the wartime reality that serves as its premise. The surreal abruptness with which fateful events develop is stunningly rendered. The family are sitting quietly in their cold, blacked-out house at seven-thirty in the evening: Anton is reading about the time capsule buried at the New York World’s Fair; Peter is translating from the Greek; the father, a court clerk and an amateur classicist, is helping him; the mother is unravelling a sweater and soothing a toothache with a clove. Shortly before the eight o’clock curfew, they sit down to a board game, and while they are rolling dice six shots ring out. The tame little details of this last moment of domestic peace—the dice, the clove—reverberate throughout Anton’s life, awakening the trauma. About ten years later, for instance, he becomes sick, “overcome by a sense of something dreadful,” while attending a performance of Chekhov, “during a scene where a man sat at a table with bowed head while a woman outside on a terrace shouted at someone.” He has repressed the memory, but a parallel configuration on a terrace was impressed upon him in the jagged, out-of-control sequence of images that followed the shots: