Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The most bloodless of the three heroes is Diotallevi, a Piedmontese who thinks he is a Jew, and who exists only to waste away, infected by the terrible sacrilege of the plot he has joined in concocting. He sees in the cancer that afflicts him the product of their intellectual tampering, a transposition in the DNA alphabet generated by the mock-conspiracy’s devilishly clever transpositions of fact: “To manipulate the letters of the Book takes great piety, and we didn’t have it.… If you alter the Book, you alter the world; if you alter the world, you alter the body.… I’m dying because we were imaginative beyond bounds.” But Diotallevi at his liveliest has little vital presence, and Belbo, the most active of the pseudo-occultists, has a fitful and strained one. He is a generation older than Casaubon but draws what fictional life he has from the same roots: Milanese bohemia and an obsession with texts. He is an unpublished writer, and fills a word processor called Abulafia with abortive confessions and stories that add up to a psychohistory of avoidance and non-participation relieved only by a childhood love for the trumpet and what becomes an obsession with the Templar conspiracy he has helped embroider. His character is spelled out but doesn’t quite read convincingly. His lady love, the flighty, promiscuous, pinball-playing Lorenza, exists only to symbolize the Gnostic goddess Sophia, and his word-processed effusions, brilliant jumble though they are, just add to the novel’s crushing burden of textuality. Words, words: “You write using the alibi of a machine, telling yourself you are a spectator, because you read yourself on the screen as if the words belonged to another, but you have fallen into the trap: you, too, are trying to leave footprints on the sands of time. You have dared to change the text of the romance of the world, and the romance of the world has taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a plot not of your making.” Though Belbo is shown as rising to a certain heroism before his demise, and his rustic boyhood is intently scanned for an epiphany, he becomes in the end just a toy on a string, and our patience with the novel’s plethora of symbols snaps at the point where we are told, of his eccentrically twitching body, that “Belbo hanged from the Pendulum would have drawn, in space, the tree of the Sefirot, summing up in his final moment the vicissitude of all universes, fixing forever in his motion the ten stages of the mortal exhalation and defecation of the divine in the world.”

  Some rather sweet morals are extracted from this papery honeycomb. The “real secret,” the dying Diotallevi avers, is “to let the cells proceed according to their own instinctive wisdom.” “It’s wrong,” Lia tells the inventive Casaubon, “to add to the inventings that already exist.” “Truth is brief,” Casaubon tells the reader, near the conclusion of more than two hundred thousand words supposedly somehow confided to paper in the space of two days. He remembers the childhood bliss of biting into a peach, and says, “Like Belbo when he played the trumpet, when I bit into the peach I understood the Kingdom and was one with it. The rest is only cleverness.”

  Eco’s tower of cleverness, which melts in the mind as it is climbed, is a remarkable intellectual phenomenon, however flimsy and lopsided as an imitation of human actions. One has to think back to the Brothers Grimm and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to find an academic turning from scholarship to achieve such popular success. Eco is an initiate and an adept in the critical mysteries, whose magus is Jacques Derrida, that have deconstructed the hidden constructions of literature, revealing every page to have a conspiratorial dimension. Derrida-ism, however liberating its effect upon university English faculties, does not offer much encouragement to creative writing. Indeed, insofar as it has revealed the once-revered canon of literary classics to be largely a bag of dirty tricks played by imperialist white males upon minorities and women, it might be supposed to exert a depressive effect. For who wants to add to a bag of dirty tricks? And Eco’s novel does come burdened by a complicated, if not downright guilty, conscience. His practical answer to the difficulties of making literature is to appropriate what he calls “dime novel” plots and pump them full to bursting of professorial learning. Belbo and Casaubon, those two faces of one post-structuralist coin, argue the case for “cheap fiction”: “Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality.… Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis.… The dime novel … pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become.… History is closer to what [Eugène] Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.” The inclusion of the canonical names muddles what I take to be the basic point: popular romantic narration, by seizing upon our dreams and manipulating our passions, presents the forces that shape the world—“the world as it will become”—as opposed to relatively inert and backward-looking highbrow realism. In this Eco echoes Borges’s distrust of the modernist mandarins, his reiterated preference of Wells and Chesterton over Henry James and James Joyce. But of course mandarins distrust themselves, at least in the role of hero: Joyce’s triumph was to move from the mind of Stephen Dedalus into that of Leopold Bloom—to put a dime-novel mentality in a narrative frame of Thomistic rigor and Homeric grandeur. Eco’s strategy in Foucault’s Pendulum is the reverse: to put his three Milanese bibliophilic polymaths in a dime-novel plot. The novel gothically begins with Casaubon hiding for hours in a kind of periscope inside a darkened museum, and ends with a scene of ritual revelry and sacrifice like something out of Salammbô. That cumbersome and punishing novel, indeed, is the nearest analogy I can think of for this de luxe cheap thrill, this million-dollar penny dreadful.

  Modernist, Postmodernist, What Will They Think of Next?

  FANCY GOODS/OPEN ALL NIGHT, by Paul Morand, translated from the French by Ezra Pound. 151 pp. New Directions, 1984.

  MARCOVALDO, or, The Seasons in the City, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 121 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

  John Barth, than whom there is no more aplomb-filled and equable theorist among contemporary practitioners of American fiction, five years ago tackled, in an address entitled “The Literature of Replenishment,” the super-delicate distinctions between modernism, postmodernism, premodernism, and none of the above. John Hawkes, for example, came out as “fine late modernism,” “most of” Saul Bellow as “comparatively premodernist,” Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, among Americans, as unimpeachably “great modernists,” and Barth himself, along with Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as bona-fide postmodernists. To this last club, women and British need not apply, being evidently incorrigibly concerned with “the eloquent issuance of what Richard Locke has called ‘secular news reports.’ ” So, whatever postmodernism is, it is not secular news reports. Nor is it, one may hazard, sacred news reports. It is not, really, news reports at all; it is, if I understand Professor Barth’s paraphrase of several other professors, a kind of cartoon-cat version of modernism—the cat keeps running even though he has only air beneath him. Modernism’s “self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness” keep “performing,” but in a “spirit … of anarchy.” The “anti-rationalist, anti-realist, anti-bourgeois program of modernism” is carried on, but without “a solid adversary,” the bourgeois “having now co-opted the trappings of modernism and turned its defiant principles into mass-media kitsch.” This may not be a totally bad thing, Mr. Barth concludes, since the postmodernist writer can now honorably appeal to a somewhat larger, more democratic audience than did the embattled hard-core modernists and can look back without contempt upon the nineteenth century and the novel’s gnarled old roots in “middle-class popular culture.” Mr. Barth cites, as both significantly appealing and adventurous, Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez; he might add Umberto Eco‡ were he giving the speech now.

  Such literary labelling is innocent fun, and helps not only us but, more to the point, college English majors t
o get a grip on things. Mr. Barth takes it no more seriously than he should. Categorization in these matters, of course, tends to excuse us from confronting each author in his or her intricate individuality, and to enlist artists in phantom armies—the modernists, for example, doing battle in a body with something called “the bourgeoisie.” But who were their patrons and early readers but bourgeoisie? Whence were they recruited but from bourgeois families? To what did they aspire, these artists, by and large, but bourgeois comforts and the dignity of bourgeois craftsmen? And was modernism, with its extensive reclamations of lived life—life freed from clichés of morality and artistic convention—really empty of “secular news”? Residents of Dublin saw in Dubliners and Ulysses all too much local news. Don’t even Mr. Barth’s anfractuous exercises in postmodernism tell us, amid their many self-reflexive turns, a great deal about at least academic life in America, not to mention Maryland marsh fauna and the procedures of sailing? And what does one do with a writer like Hemingway, so impeccably modernist in his short stories and so grossly popular as a novelist and cultural personality? He is, in Mr. Barth’s consideration of modernism and its aftermath, simply omitted, without even a “Terra Incognita” to mark his spot on the map of twentieth-century letters. Writers have awkwardly long lives, while artistic fashion swings in ever-quickening arcs, each swing needing a marketable label. I myself doubt whether “postmodernist” will acquire the canonical permanence of “Post-Impressionist” or “post-Kantian,” for the reason that Impressionism and Immanuel Kant were phenomena more distinct and limited than modernism was. We still live in modern (from the Latin modo, “just now”) times, and so will our descendants, until the dictionary falls to dust.

  • • •

  Two small books of recently published—though not recently written—short stories offer to impart some twists of specificity to these general considerations. Marcovaldo, or, The Seasons in the City, a set of twenty linked tales by Italo Calvino, must be postmodernist, if Calvino is all that Mr. Barth claims. And Fancy Goods/Open All Night, by Paul Morand, fairly drips with old-fashioned modernist credentials: the jacket lists New Directions as the publisher, Ezra Pound as the translator, and Marcel Proust as the author of a preface.

  What dark sun is this, who held such planets as Pound and Proust in his orbit? Morand had a long life, from 1888 to 1976, but his artistic celebrity rests upon the short stories he published in the first half of that classic modernist decade, the Twenties. A professional diplomat since 1912, he occupied a cosmopolitan variety of posts and served during World War II as minister at Bucharest and ambassador at Bern; in 1945 he was dismissed from the diplomatic service for collaboration with the Vichy government. For the same reason his candidacy for the Académie Française was opposed and defeated, though in 1968 he was at last elected a member. As Breon Mitchell sets forth in his excellent introduction—a model of clear and brisk elucidation of a bibliographical tangle—Morand was already known as a rising young writer when Pound arrived in Paris, in 1920. Before the year was out, Pound had taken upon himself the translation of a Morand story, “La Nuit turque,” which was published, as “Turkish Night,” in the September 1921 issue of The Dial. Pound’s “Paris Letter” in the next issue praised Morand, for “with buddhic eye contemplating the somewhat hysterical war and postwar world and rendering it with somewhat hasty justness.… And he has surely the first clear eye that has been able to wander about both ends of Europe looking at wreckage, and his present news value need not fail ultimately of historical validity.” By April of 1922, Pound and Morand had agreed that Pound would translate two of Morand’s highly praised collections, Tendre Stocks (1921) and Ouvert la Nuit (1922). In Pound’s first years after leaving London, then, while he was busily involved in such epochal middleman activities as the promotion and serial publication of Ulysses and the editing of Eliot’s diffuse and rather foppish Waste Land manuscript into a masterpiece, Pound was also translating Morand—his most ambitious effort, ever, at prose translation. He submitted drafts of his version to the author, who knew England and English well, and to Victor Llona, a professional translator; but he took few of their suggestions, where style was concerned. An agreement for the two titles was signed with the London firm of Chapman and Dodd. However, when Pound submitted Open All Night in June of 1922, right on schedule, Guy Chapman found the translations “quite appalling” and was confirmed by an independent reader, A. B. Walkley, who told him in August that “You certainly cannot with credit, or indeed without ridicule, publish this translation.” Pound responded to Chapman’s rejection with characteristic ill temper: “Your letter is an impertinent lie.… There was no question of a verbatim translation into stenographer’s pidgeon English.” Pound threatened legal action, and for a final settlement of twenty-five pounds the contract was cancelled; Morand’s work found other English translators, and Pound’s manuscript of Open All Night and the rougher but completed version of Fancy Goods found their way, when their author left Paris for Italy in 1924, into a trunk at the Paris office of William Bird’s Three Mountains Press, for whom Pound had done some editing. In 1926, Bird sold his publishing house to Nancy Cunard; he took Pound’s material with him in boxes as he moved to Chartres and then North Africa. He died in 1964, and twelve years later the boxes were finally opened, by Bird’s heirs in Fairfax, Virginia. After much negotiation, the letters to Pound from his wife, Dorothy, went to their son, Omar; other manuscript material was fitted into the already extensive Pound collection at Yale; and the Lilly Library at Indiana University acquired the rest, including the Morand translations. So here at last, sixty-two years late, they are, edited by Mr. Mitchell with a nice postmodern reverence.

  Fancy Goods contains three stories—“Clarissa,” “Delphine,” and “Aurora”—and Open All Night six—“Catalan Night,” “Turkish Night,” “The Roman Night,” “The Six-Day Night,” “Hungarian Night,” and “Borealis.” Each story has a woman at its center and indeed seems designed to display her, by means of a glittering succession of scenes and anecdotes that yet leave ambiguous, often, her relationship with the narrator. He, though unnamed and passive, is a continuous presence, and by virtue of his ardent voice an emphatic one. In Fancy Goods, whose episodes take place primarily in London, during World War I, the narrator is younger than in the stories of Open All Night, where he has become a man-about-Europe, if not a roué. The women flit through his life like large, gorgeous, inscrutable butterflies. Some achieve unhappy ends: Remedios, a Spanish revolutionary, sets off an explosion and is arrested; Isabel, a French coquette in Rome, is found strangled; Anna, a Russian aristocrat reduced to being a waitress in Constantinople, announces her intention of spending two weeks in Paris and then committing suicide; and Zaël, a Jewish dancer in Vienna, demands to be taken back to Hungary and is kidnapped and presumably murdered there. Others simply vanish from view, like Aurora in London: “She makes a sign. Number 19 bus comes docilely to curb at her feet. She ascends the stair like a frieze unrolling itself.”

  The writing is the thing. Whether the prose’s confident oddity derives from Morand’s original or from Pound’s translation scarcely matters; the effect is luxurious, sharp, compressed, startling:

  The caged sun went down between tree trunks, like a red slice of beetroot. The ferryboat came into dock. Two anchors fell from its nostrils.

  In the street the cold came against my cheeks like the charge from a gun loaded with rock salt. I felt light as a pigeon and wholly soaked with electricity.

  Her eye cast forth its scrutative beam to-me-ward, and it sank in like a grappling iron.

  Her face, smooth as a porcelain bowl, sloped away in an even curve, holding level in its surface her two flat liquid eyes, but my memory hesitated before the softened mouth, weary at its corners and showing no pleasure in possessing its even teeth.

  Irritated by the lights, the chandelier wallowed like a crystal porcupine in the midst of Venetian mirrors reflecting cerise damask hangings and rococo boxes copied from Schönbrunn.r />
  The conversation is pasty. I go to the feeding room. The plates still offer a few dried sandwiches turned up at the corners like ill-stuck postage stamps; cigarette ashes, corks; the liquid level is low in the bottles; the guests’ beards increase implacably. One’s hands are sticky, and one’s face is uncomfortable.

  Such richness of imagery, so quickly folded and superimposed, feels cubist. The issues are circled rather than faced. Not so much the people as the spaces between them are exactly drawn. The spurts of dialogue, where they occur, are elliptical and Firbankish. A certain deliberate Gallic wit presides; the humorous rhetorical device of syllepsis occurs perhaps too often: “freshly caulked keels flaming with red lead and the sunset,” “a small woman, excessively preserved by milk of cucumbers and egoism,” “I … arose with satisfaction and with bleeding hands.” The Zeitgeist is diagnosed in a kindred cadence: “It’s the sacrificed generation, ma’am. The men have gone off to be soldiers, and the women have all gone crazy.” The shattered, frenetic postwar Europe is described in language both jazzy and coldly detached; the scenes seem illumined by sliced moonlight: