Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  He is best known, of course, for the exquisite assemblage of village testimony called Akenfield (1969); a somewhat lumpier but still remarkable set of interviews with the elderly, The View in Winter (1979), has followed. As well as a good listener he is a keen reader, not so much a critic as a connoisseur, whose fresh enthusiasm would send us warmly back to the classics. In this volume, the essays on Hazlitt, on John Clare, on Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and on Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes and Far from the Madding Crowd are superb appreciations. Hazlitt he portrays as the unreconstructed radical among the Romantics, “cursed with everlasting youth,” his writing marked by “ultimate defencelessness.” Mr. Blythe does some writing of his own to describe Hazlitt’s:

  The exposition of an idea would start out on the page in light, happy phrases which threatened no man’s complacency, and then the skilful strengthening would begin, and intellectual involvement would bind the reader. Each essay shows the build-up of numerous small climaxes, such as are sometimes employed in the novel. Excitement and expectation mount. Hazlitt is the word-juggler who never misses; his almost casual use of ornament, epigram and fancy is hypnotic.

  Hardy touches Mr. Blythe most deeply and touches off his highest praise. Of Far from the Madding Crowd, he writes:

  There is often a wonderful moment towards the beginning of a literary career after the pump has been substantially primed with “early works” when a book appears which is all morning brightness, inspiration and possibility, and no English novel so completely fulfils these fresh conditions than [sic] does this one. In it the big recurring themes of mortal existence, love, power, treachery, happiness, toil and transcendence, are played out on the farm. The rural scene isn’t limited and hedged; on the contrary it is sumptuous. We are not looking into a midden or even to the stretching headlands, but at a landscape which satisfies every stir of the imagination and which ravishes the senses.

  The word “sumptuous” recurs, in connection with the novel’s sheep-shearing scene:

  It is a form of sumptuous reality. It challenges every view of the quaint and simple task, as Chardin did, and directs us towards a vision of fundamental labour that contains within it satisfactions that are usually searched for in poetry and religion. Scenes such as this are the permanent cliffs in his writing, stalwart headlands against which melodrama and suspense can fret and dash without any danger of their becoming a merely sensational movement.

  Mr. Blythe is a partisan of those writers who have let the English countryside speak, Hardy foremost: “No one before or since has given the full village picture with such original authority, no writer conceded less to what it was generally held to contain, either socially or spiritually.” The cultural assumptions that muffled the countryside and its villages in silence are sketched in the essay “The Dangerous Idyll,” which begins, “Extreme though it may sound, any literary undertaking by an English villager has until quite recently, by which I mean the late nineteenth century, been received with much the same suspicion as novels and poetry written by English women. Each, by daring to produce literature, had broken through ancient orderly concepts of their functions.” First cited, and fondly referred to throughout this book, is the unhappy case of John Clare—a ploughman of Helpston (“a gloomy village in Northamptonshire,” in Clare’s own description) whose poetic efforts were negligently destroyed by his mother and loudly ridiculed by his fellow villagers. “From about twelve years onward, Clare lived a furtive, aberrant existence, hiding in woods with his books, hoarding old sugar-bags to write on, muttering behind the plough.” Yet, when literary London opened to him in 1820, upon publication of his first book of poems, Clare stuck to Helpston for his residence as well as his inspiration, and, according to Mr. Blythe, found the forced move to a village three miles away so traumatic he became mentally ill. Such sensitive attachment to the land was rare; the rural reality was grimmer than the bucolic poems of Pope and Thomson indicated, and a former bumpkin like George Crabbe, when once accepted in urban circles, quickly and totally severed all connection with the Suffolk farm-laboring class into which he was born. Robert Burns, we are told, published his ploughman’s poems “not to celebrate his oneness with the village of Mossgiel but to make enough money to get off the land altogether and sail to Jamaica and work on a plantation.”

  Our author is so interesting on this subject of land and literature, and so clearly well informed, that one wishes he had abandoned his usual slanting, quotation-laden manner and written a systematic study. Taking as his clue the skittish attitude of the characters in Jane Austen’s Emma toward venturing out of their own parks into the “ordinary agricultural background,” he points up the gulf between what the Wiltshire diarist Francis Kilvert distinguished as the “gentle” and the “simple.” Mr. Blythe explains, “When the long peace between the gentlemen and the peasants was broken by the rationalisation of what remained of the manorial system, the contrast between the two rural cultures was often so extreme that the baronet in his park could feel that he was surrounded, not so much by his countrymen as by savages.” The agricultural laborers were from the genteel point of view not merely lowly but invisible: “ ‘Osbert,’ remarked Sir George Sitwell, staring across Sheffield, ‘do you realise that there is nobody between us and the Locker-Lampsons?’ ” A certain comedy of inattention attaches to Romantic celebrations of the countryside: Constable’s “marvellous series of Stour Valley landscapes, each with its sprinkling of minuscule boatmen and field-workers,” was serenely produced while “labourers rioted and were lighting bonfires on the hills.” The intensified enclosures and the famine of 1815 had brought new waves of misery to the shires; Constable sent blankets from Soho but inveighed against the rural laborers’ forming protective unions. Even Hazlitt, that champion of the downtrodden, despised country life in its particulars: “There is a perpetual round of mischiefmaking and backbiting for want of any better amusement.… There are no shops, no taverns, no theatres, no opera, no concerts, no pictures … no books or knowledge of books. Vanity and luxury are the civilisers of the world, and sweeteners of human life. Without objects either of pleasure or action, it grows harsh and crabbed. The mind becomes stagnant, the affections callous.…” As Sherwood Anderson said of the nineteenth-century farmers of Ohio, “Men labored too hard and were too tired to read.” Or, as Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale observed while engaged in field work, “The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish.”

  Pastoral illusions found little nurture in America; almost everybody was a farmer, and the Nebraska wheat fields were not dotted with manor houses and deer parks. The British situation combined an ancient feudal hold on land by the aristocracy with the existence of overseas colonies that for a time made domestic agriculture seem dispensable. From the Napoleonic Wars to World War II a state of depression hovered over British agriculture, descending with especial severity in the last third of the nineteenth century, as grain poured in from Canada, frozen mutton from New Zealand, and frozen beef from Argentina. The farm laborers, then, were not only culturally despised but politically slighted in a way that helps account for Mr. Blythe’s sympathetic interest in Socialism. Two of his more enigmatic, though animated, essays deal with two forgotten stars of “alternative politics” in the 1880s, the American economist Henry George and the Scots Utopian Thomas Davidson. Both men are seen en route. “The Voyager” shows George as the foremast boy on a clipper ship bumping its way up a corpse-clogged branch of the River Ganges and then as steward of a steamer being chased around Montevideo Harbor by the bobbing casket of a shipmate who had ardently asked to be buried on land and not at sea. Mr. Blythe draws a moral from this spooky tale: “An ordinary man had demanded and finally claimed his elemental right and the steward … had been involved in a parable and had listened to a sermon.” From here, the implication is, it was a quick step to George’s once-famous “single tax”
proposal. Thomas Davidson’s pilgrimage is even obscurer; the young radicals of London, Havelock Ellis foremost, rather rapidly grew disillusioned with the inspirational Scotsman, who had a way of wandering off, and indeed wandered off to America, to found a commune of “New Lifers” in the Adirondacks, leaving behind in England the seeds, somehow, of the Fabian Society, which he disowned.

  Mr. Blythe’s anecdotes tend to raise more questions than they illuminate, e.g., “Lamb, for whom Hazlitt’s sex life was the only thing about his friend he could never take seriously, laughed so much during [Hazlitt’s] wedding that he was nearly turned out of church.” Oh? The reader is addressed as an old chum who knows pretty much the same things the author does: “But, as we know, Sweet Auburn was Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire.” Mr. Blythe writes, “Lear said, ‘At Christmas I no more desire a rose than wish a snow in May,’ ” without indicating whether this is Edward, King, or a third Lear speaking.* He flips startling specificities at us archly—“William Cory’s own phot[ograph] shows a pale, rather formidable person. He has big thin ears like the emperor Augustus”—and cozily overloads a few of his polished sentences to the point of babble:

  Not perp and dec but the all but rubbed from history creatures, human and divine, which they housed. A holy romance world, in its way, in which Felix, Gobban, Dicuil, Fursey, Foillan, Mindred (whose well at Newmarket is now in the possession of the Jockey Club), the Pied, White, Grey and Black friars, Tobias, Sir John Shorne (a medieval Dr Scholl who conjured the devil from a boot), Edmund, of course, Apollonia, cherubyn, sarafyn, potestate, principatus, Michael Arkeangelus et al, still faintly crowd.

  Like the patient flint-pickers of his beloved East Anglian fields, this author collects and arranges; his receptive intelligence and his virtually angelic tenderness toward the anonymous and overlookable are well displayed in his first and last essays, the last, “Reading Other People’s Diaries,” a roughly chronological wandering through the private journals of Englishmen from the boy-king Edward VI to Virginia Woolf, and the first, “An Inherited Perspective,” a celebration of “the local view” in art and life. Unlike all but a few modern writers, Ronald Blythe has worked and matured where he was born, and if he sometimes seems to speak in the code of local dialect, his words have the weight of things firmly fixed in his mind’s eye. He remembers his childhood impressions of “the aged village relations who sat four-square in their lush gardens like monuments, as if growing out of the Suffolk clay itself, their bodies wooden and still, their eyes glittering and endlessly scanning leaves and birds and crops, their work done and their end near.” Pinned to a certain space, he has witnessed the effects of time: “When I was writing Akenfield, and thinking of the old and new farming generations, it struck me that I was seeing the last of those who made landscapes with their faces hanging down, like those of beasts, over the soil.” For all of his sometimes pawky historical knowingness, he affectingly communicates a sense of what lies beyond history’s edge—our daily, animal lives persisting in their chronic cycles.

  Hymn to Tilth

  THE GARDENER’S YEAR, by Karel Ōapek, translated from the Czech by Robert and Maria Weatherall. 160 pp. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

  Cooking up a calendar is one of the first things men do on the road to civilization, and literary celebration of the year’s cycle is at least as old as lines 383–616 of Hesiod’s Works and Days, from the eighth century B.C. Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, with a bow to the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, ushered in the heyday of Elizabethan poetry; it takes the months and seasons, however, less as matters for description than as points de départ for a series of delightfully artificial rhymed dialogues. Similarly, The Twelve Seasons, by Joseph Wood Krutch, consists of a dozen essays very loosely linked to the turning year. The ties are much closer in Hal Borland’s Sundial of the Seasons, a collection of three hundred sixty-five of his “outdoor editorials” from the Times, and in Mikhail Prishvin’s Nature’s Diary. Both Borland and Prishvin begin their years with spring, and both pleasantly roam in recording the anecdotes and observations that trace what Borland calls “the oldest continuing story known to man, the story of man and his natural surroundings.” Prishvin’s surroundings were central Russia, with its peasant lore (he began as an ethnographer), bears, lakes, forests, and immense winters; Borland’s, the tamer but still woodsy southern Berkshires of Connecticut. Still another form of environment—European, damp, mild, domesticated—is lovingly chronicled in Karel Ōapek’s The Gardener’s Year, a charming and curiously majestic survey, from January to December, of the writer’s backyard garden and his activity therein.

  The book was first published in 1929, and this English translation followed two years later, with an American edition by G. P. Putnam. It has not been reprinted here until now. Its Gluyas Williams–like illustrations by Ōapek’s brother, Josef, at first glance suggest a Benchleyesque account of comic bumbling and entrapment:

  One would think that watering a little garden is quite a simple thing, especially if one has a hose. It will soon be clear that until it has been tamed a hose is an extraordinarily evasive and dangerous beast, for it contorts itself, it jumps, it wriggles, it makes puddles of water, and dives with delight into the mess it has made; then it goes for the man who is going to use it and coils itself round his legs.

  A tone of agricultural exasperation, as in S. J. Perelman’s Acres and Pains, is struck: “This is one of Nature’s mysteries—how from the best grass seed most luxuriant and hairy weeds come up; perhaps weed seed ought to be sown and then a nice lawn would result.”

  But we soon realize that Ōapek comes not only to complain but to rhapsodize; his basic theme, however light his manner, is the primordial one of Man’s reabsorption into nature. “Your relation towards things has changed. If it rains you say that it rains on the garden; if the sun shines, it does not shine just anyhow, but it shines on the garden; in the evening you rejoice that the garden will rest.” In the plays which had made him famous (R.U.R., The Insect Play), (Ōapek dealt with the mechanized horrors of modernity; through his garden, modern man relearns the ancient lessons of attentiveness. “If I ran as far as Beněsov, I should see less of the spring than if I sat in my little garden. You must stand still; and then … you will hear the infinite march of buds faintly roaring.”

  Nor is this revelation of roaring confined to the growing season. In dark November, the gardener digs, and finds a teeming world:

  Every year we say that Nature lies down to her winter sleep; but we have not yet looked closely at this sleep; or, to be more precise, we have not looked at it yet from below. You must turn things upside down to know them better; Nature must be turned upside down so that you can look into it; turn her roots up. Good Lord, is this sleep? You call this a rest? It would be better to say that vegetation has ceased to grow upwards, because it has no time for it now; for it has turned its sleeves up and grows downwards, it spits in its hands and digs itself into the ground. Look, this pale thing here in the earth is a mass of new roots; look how they push; heave-ho! heave-ho! Can’t you hear how the earth is crackling under this enraged and collective charge?

  Ōapek, who was to die within a decade of writing this, at the youthful age of forty-eight, rhapsodically extols the ceaseless activity of Nature’s year: “I tell you, there is no death; not even sleep. We only pass from one season to another. We must be patient with life, for it is eternal.” Beginning like Benchley, he ends like Emerson.

  Expert witnesses to wild nature such as Borland and Prishvin interact with it mostly on the plane of investigation or in the contest of hunting and fishing. The backyard gardener with his few square feet of Prague soil engages himself more intimately. He delves, and inventories the farraginous contents of the soil: “The garden—or cultivated soil, also called humus, or mould—consists mainly of special ingredients, such as earth, manure, leafmould, peat, stones, pieces of glass, mugs, broken dishes, nails, wire, bones, Hussite arrows, silver paper from slabs of c
hocolate, bricks, old coins, old pipes, plate-glass, tiny mirrors, old labels, tins, bits of string, buttons, soles, dog droppings, coal, pot-handles, wash-basins, dishcloths, bottles, sleepers, milkcans, buckles, horseshoes, jam tins, insulating material, scraps of newspapers, and innumerable other components which the astonished gardener digs up at every stirring of his beds.” He observes how stones apparently “grow from some kind of seeds or eggs, or continually rise out of the mysterious interior of the earth.” He enriches this earth with all his improvised means: “he hunts about at home for eggshells, burns bones after lunch, collects his nail-cuttings, sweeps soot from the chimney, takes sand from the sink, scrapes up in the street beautiful horse-droppings, and all these he carefully digs into the soil; for all these are lightening, warm, and nutritious substances.” The proper gardener adores manure: “A cartload of manure is most beautiful when it is brought on a frosty day, so that it steams like a sacrificial altar.” He is a connoisseur of earth: “it should crumble, but not break into lumps; under the spade it ought to crack, but not to squelch; it must not make slabs, or blocks, or honeycombs, or dumplings; but, when you turn it over with a full spade, it ought to breathe with pleasure and fall into a fine and puffy tilth.”

  Enough has been quoted, perhaps, to indicate the rhapsodic quality of the prose, and the felicity of its translation. The Weatheralls (she was herself Czech) had not only to produce a bouncy and flexible version of Ōapek’s style but to locate the English equivalents of hundreds of botanical names. Celebrant as he was of Nature’s diversity, Ōapek loved lists; I counted fifty flower names in a single, not untypical sentence. The catalogue, that definitive naming of names, is the gardener’s hymnal, whose music can be played all winter long. In its torrential† specificity and devoted tone The Gardener’s Year asks a place on the shelf near the embowering books of Eleanor Perényi, Katharine White, Thalassa Cruso, Ann Leighton, and Vita Sackville-West. Graceful words grow readily around garden subjects; the name of the rose has something of the rose’s essence, and the arrangement of a bed and the timing of its blooms are somewhat syntactical. Much of the gardener’s pleasure is in the head, in organization and anticipation. “We gardeners live somehow for the future; if roses are in flower, we think that next year will flower better.… The right, the best is in front of us. Each successive year will add growth and beauty.” A deathless thought, from the last page of a gallant little book republished after half a century, in a cover as green as your thumb.