Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Damp and Dull

  SAILING THROUGH CHINA, BY Paul Theroux, with illustrations by Patrick Procktor. 64 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

  Mr. Theroux, whose last travel book was a long and dour walk around the coast of the United Kingdom, here sails down the Yangtze with a group of American millionaires, with much less effort to himself. His account seems more a set of notes than a finished work, and has the charm of fragments. The millionaires played cards to win, and the famous gorges on the river lived up to their billing. The Chinese cities, however, were “poisonous-looking,” and “the air of pollution gives China the look of existing in a permanent sunset,” and “the land looked scraped—no trees, only tiny houses, or huts, and cultivation everywhere.” Waxing apocalyptic, the Anglo-American traveller concludes that threadbare, overused, birdless China is everybody’s future: “In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and oldfangled.… Our future is this mildly poisoned earth and its smoky air. We are in for hunger and hard work, the highest stage of poverty—no starvation, but crudeness everywhere, clumsy art, simple language, bad books, brutal laws, plain vegetables, and clothes of one colour. It will be damp and dull, like this.” Enough to make one nostalgic for 1984.

  Empire’s End

  THE EMPEROR: Downfall of an Autocrat, by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. 164 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

  In September of 1974 the Emperor Haile Selassie I was deposed as ruler of Ethiopia by a committee of young Army officers called the Dergue; at that time the monarch had reigned for forty-four of his eighty-two years. The nature of his long rule and the circumstances of his deposition are enchantingly illuminated in The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat. Ryszard Kapuściński, who for many years covered the Third World for the Polish Press Agency, visited Ethiopia in 1963, when Haile Selassie was playing host to a conference of African leaders in Addis Ababa, “then a large village of a few hundred thousand inhabitants, situated on hills, amid eucalyptus groves.” On this occasion the Polish reporter befriended a member of the Imperial Ministry of Information, “a tall, handsome, usually silent and reserved Amhara” named Teferra Gebrewold. Not long after the Emperor’s fall, Mr. Kapuściński returned to Addis Ababa and with Teferra’s help sought out in their hiding places surviving members of the Emperor’s circle and interviewed them. “We were a couple of collectors out to recover pictures doomed to destruction: we wanted to make an exhibition of the old art of governing.”

  A stunning exhibit it is; the interviewed subjects, while the turbulent aftermath of the revolution and its frenzied nationwide fetasha (Amharic for “search”) raged about them, enunciated their memories of the days of Haile Selassie in a magical reverie that frequently achieves poetry and aphorism:

  The Emperor slept in a roomy bed made of light walnut. He was so slight and frail that you couldn’t see him—he was lost among the sheets. In old age, he became even smaller.… He had the habit of sleeping little and rising early, when it was still dark outside. He treated sleep as a dire necessity that purposelessly robbed him of time he would rather have spent ruling or at Imperial functions. Sleep was a private, intimate interval in a life meant to be passed amid decorations and lights. That’s why he woke up seeming discontented with having slept, impatient with the very fact of sleep. Only the subsequent activities of the day restored his inner balance.

  The first of his activities, having risen at four or five, was to walk within the Palace grounds while a scheduled series of high-ranking informers poured news of the night’s conspiracies into his ear. They walked a step behind the Emperor, who never made a comment or took a note: “Our monarch not only never used his ability to read, but he also never wrote anything and never signed anything in his own hand. Though he ruled for half a century, not even those closest to him knew what his signature looked like.” During imperial audiences, a Minister of the Pen, when the Emperor spoke, “moved his ear as close as a microphone” and “transcribed his ruler’s scant and foggy mutterings. All the rest was interpretation.” In hourly segments rather picturesquely named—the Hour of the Cashbox, the Hour of the Supreme Court of Final Appeal—Haile Selassie moved through his day, expressionless, virtually inaudible, his every move framed by slavish attendance. One employee of the court had the sole job of wiping from the shoes of respectfully immobile dignitaries the urine deposited there by the Emperor’s pet lapdog, Lulu; another was for twenty-six years “His Most Virtuous Highness’s pillow bearer”:

  His Majesty would take his place on the throne, and when he had seated himself I would slide a pillow under his feet. This had to be done like lightning so as not to leave Our Distinguished Monarch’s legs hanging in the air for even a moment.… I had mastered the special protocol of this specialty, and even possessed an extremely useful, expert knowledge: the height of various thrones. This allowed me quickly to choose a pillow of just the right size, so that a shocking ill fit, allowing a gap to appear between the pillow and the Emperor’s shoes, would not occur. In my storeroom I had fifty-two pillows of various sizes, thicknesses, materials, and colors.

  The “keeper of the third door” also had his heavy responsibilities and his pride of expertise: “It was an art to open the door at the right moment, the exact instant. To open the door too early would have been reprehensible, as if I were hurrying the Emperor out. If I opened it too late, on the other hand, His Sublime Highness would have to slow down, or perhaps even stop, which would detract from his lordly dignity, a dignity that meant getting around without collisions or obstacles.” And a high ceremonial official rejoiced in being called “His Distinguished Majesty’s cuckoo”; his duty was, when the moment came “for the Emperor, in accordance with official protocol, to pass from one activity to another,” to stand before him and rapidly bow several times, as a signal.

  At the center of all this clockworklike apparatus of absolutism, the Emperor maintained, according to the testimony of these voices (identified simply by initials, for their own protection), an inscrutable poise, a trance of power that let scarcely an appointment or an expenditure take place within the entirety of the empire without his approval. His objective was peace, obtained by balancing factions: “The Palace divided itself into factions and coteries that fought incessant wars, weakening and destroying each other. That is exactly what His Benevolent Majesty wanted. Such a balance assured his blessed peace.” He distrusted activists and fanatic enforcers of order: “Desirous of His Majesty’s approbation, they tried to introduce absolute order, whereas His Supreme Majesty wanted basic order with a margin of disorder on which his monarchical gentleness could exert itself.” What power he shared he shared on one basis: loyalty. “It didn’t matter if a given dignitary measured up or not, as long as he showed unshakable loyalty.” “I don’t remember His Magnanimous Highness’s ever demoting someone and pressing his head to the cobblestones because of corruption. Let him enjoy his corruption, as long as he shows his loyalty!” A certain Prince Imru “began to smell of reform, and without asking the Emperor’s permission he gave some of his lands to the peasants. Thus, having kept something secret from the Emperor, in an irritating and even provocative way he violated the principle of loyalty. His Benevolent Highness, who had been preparing a supremely honorable office for the prince, had to exile him from the country for twenty years.” The underlying rationale is expressed by one former courtier in a celestial metaphor:

  I’ll come right out and say it: the King of Kings preferred bad ministers. And the King of Kings preferred them because he liked to appear in a favorable light by contrast. How could he show himself favorably if he were surrounded by good ministers? The people would be disoriented. Where would they look for help? On whose wisdom and kindness would they depend? Everyone would have been good and wise. What disorder would have broken out in the Empire then! Instead of one sun, fifty would be shining, and ever
yone would pay homage to a privately chosen planet.

  One wonders how much of the elegant style of Abyssinian testimony—beautifully caught by this supple English translation—was smuggled in by way of Mr. Kapuścińskis Polish. Certainly the editing and sequencing of these interviews is highly artistic, and creates a more than documentary effect, a Kafkaesque poetry and mystery. The events that led to the Emperor’s downfall are, but for an occasional italicized interpolation, seen entirely from within the court, with the moist eyes of injured innocence:

  I also took care of another bag, a large one that was filled with small coins on the eve of national holidays.… On such occasions our august ruler went to the most crowded and lively quarter of Addis Ababa, Mercato, where on a specially constructed platform I would place the heavy, jingling bag from which His Benevolent Majesty would scoop the handfuls of coppers that he threw into the crowd of beggars and other such greedy riffraff. The rapacious mob would create such a hubbub, however, that this charitable action always had to end in a shower of police batons against the heads of the frenzied, pushy rabble. Saddened, His Highness would have to walk away from the platform. Often he was unable to empty even half the bag.

  Nowadays, all those who destroyed the monarchy point out that in each province His Most Worthy Majesty maintained a Palace always ready for his arrival. It is true that some excesses were committed. For instance, a great Palace was constructed in the heart of the Ogaden Desert and maintained for years, fully staffed with servants and its pantry kept full, and His Indefatigable Majesty spent only one day there. But what if His Distinguished Majesty’s itinerary were such that at some point he had to spend a night in the heart of the Desert? Unfortunately, our unenlightened people will never understand the Higher Reason that governs the actions of monarchs.

  The trivial event that set things off was a fashion show at the university, organized by the American Peace Corps even though all gatherings and meetings were forbidden. But His Distinguished Majesty could not forbid the Americans a show, could he? And so the students took advantage of this cheerful and carefree event to gather in an enormous crowd and set off for the Palace. And from that moment on they never again let themselves be driven back to their homes.

  There had been an unsuccessful rebellion in 1960, led by Germame Neway, an aristocrat who had returned at the age of thirty from the United States, where an imperial scholarship had financed a university education. Made governor of the southern province of Sidamo, Germame began to turn uncultivated land over to landless peasants; Haile Selassie’s characteristically mild reaction was to transfer the rash reformer to the governorship of Jijiga, where the only inhabitants were nomads uninterested in land. Germame’s attempted coup, when it came, was efficiently quelled by the Army; the common people, lacking radios, were slow to realize that a revolution was in progress and the Palace had been taken. When they became aware, they pursued the rebels with sticks and stones. Nevertheless, from 1960 on “a sort of negativism started to flood over us.… you noticed it everywhere on people’s faces, faces that seemed diminished and abandoned, without light or energy, in what people did and how they did it.… Even though the Emperor went on issuing decrees and striving to get things done, got up early and never rested, all the same the negativism was there, growing all the time.… People seemed unable to control things; things existed and ceased to exist in their own malicious ways, slipping through people’s hands.… The Palace was sinking, and we all felt it.… We could feel the temperature falling, life becoming more and more precisely framed by ritual but more and more cut-and-dried, banal, negative.”

  Haile Selassie was not bloodthirsty or unintelligent. He perpetrated many actual reforms in his anachronistic empire, and to the last was going through the motions of “development.” The fatal weakness of his rule—which he would not have outlived had he not lived so very long—was the rapacity of his officials, a rapacity he encouraged as a seal to their loyalty. As the collapse drew near, the corruption grew worse: “The closer it got to the end, the more horrible was the grabbing and the unrestrained snatching. Instead, my friend, of applying himself to the tiller or the sails as the boat started to sink, each one of our magnates stuffed his bag and looked around for a comfortable lifeboat.”

  The vessel sank, finally, under the weight of the Sahel drought, which had been afflicting northern Africa for a number of years. A British television journalist, Jonathan Dimbleby, who had previously made films flattering to the Emperor, in 1973 took cameras into the desolated north of the country and produced a film entitled Ethiopia: The Unknown Famine, “in which this unprincipled calumniator”—to quote the interview subject called “A. A.”—“pulled the demagogic trick of showing thousands of people dying of hunger, and next to that His Venerable Highness feasting with dignitaries. Then he showed roads on which scores of poor, famished skeletons were lying, and immediately afterward our airplanes bringing champagne and caviar from Europe. Here, whole fields of dying scrags; there, His Highness serving meat to his dogs from a silver platter.” An outcry greeted the film’s showing in England, and the empire reluctantly had to admit foreign aid with its attendant personnel, including “correspondents disguised as male nurses.”

  It’s never good to let so many foreigners in, since they are amazed at everything and they criticize everything.… When these missionaries, physicians, and so-called nurses reached the north, they saw a thing most amazing to them, namely, thousands dying of hunger right next door to markets and stores full of food. There is food, they say, only there was a bad harvest and the peasants had to give it all to the landowners and that’s why they’ve got nothing left and the speculators took advantage and raised the prices so high that hardly anyone could buy wheat and that’s where the misery comes from.

  More scandalous yet, the Emperor’s officials turned out to be appropriating the food shipments sent in aid. And with astonishing effrontery, the Finance Minister, Yelma Deresa, demanded high customs fees from the overseas donors; when they balked at payment, the loyal press hastened “to denounce the rebellious benefactors, saying that by suspending aid they condemn our nation to the cruelties of poverty and starvation.” And:

  Amid all the people starving, missionaries and nurses clamoring, students rioting, and police cracking heads, His Serene Majesty … summoned the wretched notables from the north [and] conferred high distinctions on them to prove that they were innocent and to curb the foreign gossip and slander.

  The well-placed Ethiopians had trouble understanding what the fuss was all about. “First of all,” A. A. told Mr. Kapuściński, “death from hunger had existed in our Empire for hundreds of years, an everyday, natural thing, and it never occurred to anyone to make any noise about it. Drought would come and the earth would dry up, the cattle would drop dead, the peasants would starve. Ordinary, in accordance with the laws of nature and the eternal order of things … Consider also, my dear friend, that—between you and me—it is not bad for national order and a sense of national humility that the subjects be rendered skinnier, thinned down a bit.” The Emperor, after all, had issued a statement upon the famine announcing that he “attached the utmost importance to this matter.”

  For the starvelings it had to suffice that His Munificent Highness personally attached the greatest importance to their fate, which was a very special kind of attachment, of an order higher than the highest. It provided the subjects with a soothing and uplifting hope that whenever there appeared in their lives an oppressive mischance, some tormenting difficulty, His Most Unrivaled Highness would hearten them—by attaching the greatest importance to that mischance or difficulty.

  Such celestial reassurances to the contrary, unrest and criticism continued to swell, there were riots and strikes, and the Army—the biggest in black Africa, and since the 1960 rebellion the mainstay of imperial power—began, in February of 1974, to mutiny. The Dergue came into being, and the Emperor consented to meet with it. The last surreal act of the drama was under way; acting in
the Emperor’s name, the Dergue gradully arrested all the Emperor’s officials and favorites, emptying the Palace around him. The grim farce was heightened by the arrival of some Swedish physicians who had been previously engaged to lead the court circle in calisthenics. “To prevent the rebels from capturing everyone at once, the grand chamberlain of the court pulled off a cunning trick by ordering that calisthenics be done in small groups.” The Dergue relentlessly continued its arrests, “cutting off great hunks of dignitaries, until in the end the Palace was picked clean, flushed out, and there was nobody left except for His Most Extraordinary Majesty and one servant.” This servant, like the Emperor, was an octogenarian. Through August the two old men held to routines of server and served in the vast void of the Palace: “It rained for days on end,” Mr. Kapuściński tells us. “Mornings were foggy and nights cold. H. S. still wore his uniform, over which he would throw a warm woolen cape. They got up as they had in the old days, as they had for years, at daybreak, and they went to the Palace chapel, where each day L. M. [the servant] read aloud different verses from the Book of Psalms.… Afterward, H. S. would go to his office and sit down at his desk, on which more than a dozen telephones were perched. All of them silent—perhaps they had been cut off. L. M. would sit by the door, waiting for the bell to ring, summoning him to receive orders from his monarch.” Delegations of young officers arrived, attempting to persuade Haile Selassie to yield up to them the millions of dollars he had secreted over the years in Swiss banks; he never did, though the Dergue did find the dollars he had hidden beneath his Persian carpet and in his great collection of Bibles. The night of September 11, 1974, was New Year’s Eve according to the Ethiopian calendar, and the two old men in the Palace did not sleep; in observance of the holiday the servant lit candles in chandeliers throughout the deserted rooms. The next morning, three officers in combat uniforms arrived, and one of them read to the Emperor an act of dethronement that stated, “Even though the people treated the throne in good faith as a symbol of unity, Haile Selassie I took advantage of its authority, dignity, and honor for his own personal ends. As a result, the country found itself in a state of poverty and disintegration.” They told the servant to pack his belongings and go home. The streets of Addis Ababa were still empty under a morning curfew; nevertheless, the Emperor waved his hand at the few people they passed as he was driven from the Palace in a green Volkswagen. He was held in rooms of the Menelik Palace on the hills above Addis Ababa, close to where his pet lions were caged.‡ According to a report from Agence France Presse, he was granted many signs of respect by his captors and on his side repeatedly proclaimed, “If the revolution is good for the people, then I am for the revolution.” He died, according to a terse announcement in the Ethiopian Herald, a little less than a year after his deposition, of circulatory failure.