Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  His narrator, again nameless, is persuaded, by the deceiving scoundrel John Divney, to commit robbery and murder so gradually (“Three further months passed before I could bring myself to agree to the proposal and three months more before I openly admitted to Divney that my misgivings were at an end”), and so ingenuously accepts the consequent terrors and perils, that he doesn’t seem a heel at all; he seems as innocent as Alice in Wonderland or one of Kafka’s heroes, gamely trying to puzzle through a bizarre and bewildering world. We identify with him, to a degree rarely permitted by O’Brien, who, even in his rambling, personal daily column, maintained a certain brusque distance from the reader. (Toward the end of The Dalkey Archive, a character delivers what feels like the author’s own credo of authorship: “One must write outside oneself. I’m fed up with writers who put a fictional gloss over their own squabbles and troubles. It’s a form of conceit, and usually it’s very tedious.”)

  The protagonist of The Third Policeman occupies the stage continuously, without the subplots and compounded fictions of At Swim-Two-Birds. His voice is confiding, making us privy to his musings as he moves through a rural landscape redolent of a prehistoric past:

  The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow. It ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way. It was possibly one of the oldest roads in the world. I found it hard to think of a time when there was no road there because the trees and the tall hills and the fine views of bogland had been arranged by wise hands for the pleasing picture they made when looked at from the road. Without a road to have them looked at from they would have a somewhat aimless if not a futile aspect.

  From this recurrent image of a road he drops into evoking the thought of his intellectual idol, the “physicist, ballistician, philosopher and psychologist” called de Selby. A number of footnotes quoting the de Selby scholars Le Fournier, Hatchjaw, Bassett, Kraus, Le Clerque, and Henderson reveal their subject to have been less a savant than an idiot, who fell asleep in meetings of learned societies and even “when walking in crowded thoroughfares,” who could not distinguish men from women, who believed that night comes because of the day’s accretions of dirty air, and who left behind a closely handwritten two-thousand-page Codex of which not one word is legible. De Selby is a vivid comic invention, perpetrated by O’Brien with pedantic gusto, and the narrator’s loyalty to this preposterous wizard adds to his sympathetic qualities.

  Policemen—courteous, overweight, and menacing—and bicycles figure prominently among the figments of The Third Policeman. Perhaps the most erotic passage in O’Brien’s fiction concerns a bicycle that nuzzles up to our hero in a moment of need:

  How can I convey the perfection of my comfort on the bicycle, the completeness of my union with her, the sweet responses she gave me at every particle of her frame?…She moved beneath me with agile sympathy in a swift, airy stride, finding smooth ways among the stony tracks, swaying and bending skilfully to match my changing attitudes, even accommodating her left pedal patiently to the awkward working of my wooden leg.

  The wooden leg attracts fourteen men with the same affliction; they try to rescue him from the policemen, who have led the narrator through a subterranean realm of circular corridors and metal doors not dissimilar to one of Beckett’s carefully mapped hells. Ovenlike cabinets produce objects that defy description (“I can only say that these objects, not one of which resembled the other, were of no known dimensions”), as well as a half-ton block of gold and a host of other wish fulfillments. Surreal though all this is, the reader cares about what happens next because it promises, unlike events in At Swim-Two-Birds, to be connected to what went before and what will come. Into this weird fable of guilt and flight O’Brien has inserted some curious truths (bicycles are never mounted from the right) and some ineffable sentences:

  Birds were audible in the secrecy of the bigger trees, changing branches and conversing not tumultuously.

  MacCruiskeen lit a match for our cigarettes and then threw it carelessly on the plate floor where it lay looking very much important and alone.

  The long evening had made its way into the barrack through the windows, creating mysteries everywhere, erasing the seam between one thing and another, lengthening out the floors and either thinning the air or putting some refinement on my ear enabling me to hear for the first time the clicking of a cheap clock from the kitchen.

  The rather systematic French absurdism of Jarry and Queneau takes on the twilit shimmer of a Celtic fairy tale. Yet the book, for all its shape-shifting comedy, has a heft of despair to it, an honest nihilism, as expressed by Martin Finnucane, an unrepentant robber. Asked by our narrator if he has any objections to life, he answers, “Is it life?…I would rather be without it … for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark.… It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.”

  O’Brien, who spoke Irish Gaelic in his childhood home, wrote his next extended fiction, An Béal Bocht, in Gaelic, in 1941; in 1973, it was translated, by Patrick C. Power, into a spirited imitation of O’Brien’s English as The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life. Less than a hundred pages long, the tale has the advantage of a relatively clear, if extravagant, story line and a distinct satiric point—i.e., that the Irish Republic’s official cherishing of the nearly extinct Gaelic language ignores the miserable poverty of its surviving speakers, the rain-battered peasantry of the countryside. In one episode, government orators at a Gaelic feis parrot and praise the venerable language while in their audience “many Gaels collapsed from hunger and from the strain of listening.” In another, a folklorist from Dublin, visiting O’Brien’s fictional Gaeltacht area of Corkadoragha, and frustrated by the drunken taciturnity of an assembly of local males, records the muttering of a pig under the impression that it is Gaelic: “He understood that good Gaelic is difficult but that the best Gaelic of all is well-nigh unintelligible.” Parodying sentimental novels and memoirs in modern Gaelic by such authors as Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Séamas Ó Grianna, O’Brien protests on behalf of a depressed Irish population: “In one way or another, life was passing us by and we were suffering misery, sometimes having a potato and at other times having nothing in our mouths but sweet words of Gaelic.” His hero, young Bonaparte O’Coonassa, does find, in an abysmal cave inhabited by a hermit, a hoard of gold coins, but the cave also holds a stream of yellow water that, in a scene of alcoholic revelation with counterparts in every novel by this author, turns out to be whiskey:

  Amazement surged up in my head until it injured me. I went to the well on my knees, to the place where the yellow water was bursting up, and consumed enough to set every bone a-tremble.

  Had The Third Policeman made its way to print in 1940, there is no telling what further novels O’Brien might have written. As it was, he devoted his contrarian instincts and bristling erudition (he knew a startling amount about steam engines, and could toss off sentences in Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian) to his column in the Irish Times, busying himself as well with plays and television scripts.

  Not until 1961 did he publish another novel, The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor. He dedicated “this misterpiece” to Graham Greene, “whose own forms of gloom I admire,” and chose as his epigraph the pensée of Pascal’s that blames all the trouble of the world on people ever leaving their rooms. Donohue’s introduction relates the novel’s Dublin milieu and its relatively conservative artistry to the author’s twenty-year stint of churning out newspaper copy as Myles na gCopaleen. He likens its humdrum setting and mood to Joyce’s Dubliners, and errs by claiming that the action ends in 1904, the year of Bloomsday—its climactic death comes in 1910. “Oddly oblique,” he concludes, “The Hard Life reads as … a rather mild attack on the pretenses of Catholic
ism and an already vanishing social order.”

  Oblique it is: there is nothing especially hard or squalid about the situation of the two orphaned brothers, Manus and Finbarr, who grow up under the care of their deceased mother’s half-brother Mr. Collopy and his daughter, Miss Annie. The boys are fed, sheltered, clothed, and sent to school. Mr. Collopy has for a friend an immigrant German Jesuit, Father Kurt Fahrt, and for a cause he leads a campaign to provide adequate public rest rooms for the good women of Dublin. In their evening conversations, he baits Father Fahrt about the Jesuits, but the priest makes peaceable replies and—a traditional Irish courtesy—accepts another drink. Possibly infuriated by his characters’ refusal to kindle a fire under the novel, O’Brien consigns them all to a flagrantly far-fetched encounter in Rome with the Pope, arranged by Manus, who has left Ireland to pursue, with some success, a host of elaborate and fraudulent schemes. The dialogue with the Pope, who speaks a scrupulously transcribed mixture of Latin and Italian, and the unwieldy decline of Mr. Collopy, who becomes prodigiously, fatally heavy through faithful ingestion of Gravid Water as prescribed and supplied by his former ward, do raise smiles and even laughter in the indulgent reader; yet the theme of being poisoned, proposed by an author whose health was sinking, in early middle age, into a morass of uremia, pleurisy, sycosis, neuralgia, anemia, and liver cancer, is not that funny. Like The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life drips with disgust, but it feels too autobiographical to direct the disgust outward onto objective correlatives. It ends when Finbarr, the relatively inert and passive narrator, abruptly undergoes a violent purge:

  In a daze I lifted my own glass and without knowing what I was doing did exactly what the brother did, drained the glass in one vast swallow. Then I walked quickly but did not run to the lavatory. There, everything inside me came up in a tidal surge of vomit.

  The Dalkey Archive, published in 1964, has lent its name to the avant-garde publishing house that keeps Flann O’Brien in print in this country. It is the only one of his novels (but for the unfinished Slattery’s Sago Saga) to be written in the third person. The opening pages, evoking the village of Dalkey, are promising (“It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open”), and, toward the end, a penetrating poignance colors the portrait of an imagined James Joyce who quietly tends bar south of Dublin and attends Mass daily, who did not die in Switzerland but lived on, disowning Ulysses as a “dirty book” and forgetting Finnegans Wake entirely. He has shed his voracious genius and emerged as a decent, mild old man with bad eyesight who timidly dreams of becoming a Jesuit. O’Brien had Oedipal feelings about Joyce, and this conjuration momentarily steals the show. The adventures of Mick Shaughnessy, a civil servant with a girlfriend called Mary and a self-assigned mission to save the world from a four-gallon metal cask of oxygen-eating chemicals, fail to engage both the writer and the reader. De Selby has been salvaged from the unpublished manuscript of The Third Policeman but is presented with nothing like the brio of that book’s footnotes. The rejected novel’s bicycle-mad policemen, and its “fine views of bogland,” are transplanted nearly intact. Even its road magic is remembered:

  The cracking of your feet on the road makes a certain amount of road come up into you. When a man dies they say he returns to clay funereally but too much walking fills you up with clay far sooner (or buries bits of you along the road) and brings your death halfway to meet you.

  However, as is said of one loquacious character, “his fancies were usually amusing but not so good when they were meaningless.” Whatever meaning O’Brien set out with on this particular road has been left scattered along the wayside. He said of The Dalkey Archive that it was “not a novel” but “really an essay in extreme derision of literary attitudes and people, and one pervasive fault is absence of emphasis, in certain places, to help the reader.” It was too late, perhaps, to think of helping the reader, though O’Brien provides passages of synopsis to keep the events, and non-events, straight. But orthodox narration was never his forte; at his best he went where he would, at a blithe speed, and carried the reader—a dazzle of verbal dust in his eyes—along.

  Imperishable Maxwell

  WILLIAM MAXWELL: Early Novels and Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff. 997 pp. The Library of America, 2008.

  WILLIAM MAXWELL: Later Novels and Stories, edited by Christopher Carduff. 994 pp. The Library of America, 2008.

  To those who knew him, William Maxwell as a person—soft-spoken yet incisive, moist-eyed yet dry-voiced, witty yet infallibly tactful—threatened to overshadow Maxwell as a writer. We aspiring authors who enjoyed his unstinting editorial attention and gracious company tended to forget that, for four days of the week, he stayed at home and wrote, reporting to the typewriter straight from breakfast, often clad in bathrobe and slippers. He had finished two novels, the second of them a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, before finding, in 1936, employment at The New Yorker, where he remained, with a few interruptions, as an editor until 1975; he continued as a contributor until 1999, when he was ninety-one years old and in his last year of life. Now his writing is what we still have of him, and it warms the heart to hold almost all of his fiction in two sizable, relatively imperishable Library of America volumes, timed to be published a hundred years after his birth, in Lincoln, Illinois. The books have been scrupulously edited by Christopher Carduff; his “Note on the Texts” is exceptionally full, tracing Maxwell’s earlier novels through their several revisions, and his twenty-nine pages labelled “Chronology” approach the intimacy and interest of a full-length biography. For the year 1945, for instance, we read:

  In June, Maxwell ends therapy with [Theodor] Reik, upon whose couch, he says, “the whole first part of my life fell away, and I had a feeling of starting again.”

  Three years later: “In fall 1948, Maxwell, dismayed by poor sales of new novel and by lack of enthusiasm at Harper’s, returns to The New Yorker on part-time basis.” Abrupt details supply, in Carduff’s notes, a sense of drama largely absent from Barbara Burkhardt’s stately, exegetical William Maxwell: A Literary Life (2005). Carduff’s Chronology entry for 1950 reads:

  Struggles to imagine opening scene of book about France, but is undecided whether material would be better treated in first or third person, as fiction or as straightforward travel memoir. In fall he and Emily, after five years’ trying to conceive a child, attempt to adopt, but Maxwell’s age, 42, presents bureaucratic difficulties.

  People already well acquainted with Maxwell’s work will be fascinated to read, at the outset of the first Library of America volume—Early Novels and Stories—the author’s first novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), which Maxwell, after a sold-out edition of a thousand volumes and a largely unsold second printing of another thousand, in effect suppressed. In 1958, when his new publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, undertook to reprint in its Vintage paperback line three earlier novels, Maxwell declined the offer to include Bright Center of Heaven, finding it, upon rereading, “hopelessly imitative” and “stuck fast in its period.” In a Paris Review interview, he said, “My first novel … is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.” Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, especially, is imitated in the drifting weave of action and interior reflection, and in the rhythms, paced by commas, of the long descriptive sentences. Ten years after the novel’s publication, he reread it and wrote, “I … discovered to my horror that I had lifted a character—the homesick servant girl—lock, stock, and barrel from To the Lighthouse.” But these borrowings do not taint the peculiarly American innocence of the setting—Meadowland, an informal artists’ colony in rural Wisconsin—or the indigenous ebullience borrowed from the Midwestern novelist Zona Gale. Meadowland was based upon Bonnie Oaks, a hospitable farm near Portage, Wisconsin, where Maxwell spent a number of summer months and one winter. Gale lived nearby, and, in many conversations, she shared with the young Maxwell her belie
f that artists should find “excitement in the presence of life” and bring out “the mysterious beauty of the commonplace” and the “brighter” aspect of reality.

  Brightness is everywhere, indoors and out, in his first novel. With a confident empathy the twenty-five-year-old author moves among a dozen residents and guests at the place. We partake of the interior sensations of the owner, a widow battling mental confusion, and of her two adolescent sons, and of a young woman sleeplessly coping with an unintended pregnancy, and of her oblivious, bookish lover, and of a crusty hired hand left over from the days when this was a serious farm, and of a concert pianist as she practices her drills, and of a painter wrestling with the abstract qualities of two oranges and an oil can, and of a “pestilential and garrulous youth” with no discernible artistic dedication, and of a homesick German cook, and of a sickly Southern spinster, and—the focus of the novel’s suspense—of a Harvard-educated black lecturer, an ardent advocate of racial equality. Though critics have found fault with the black character, he seemed to me plausible and complex enough—the earliest of Maxwell’s many honorable attempts to portray African-Americans.

  Bright Center of Heaven gives those of us who knew him as the mature master of a deliberately low-key prose a new Maxwell—bolder, more overtly poetical, more metaphysical, and frequently surreal. The book’s title comes from a bizarre vision entertained by Amelia, the racist Southern spinster, as she sits, stunned into muteness, at the dinner table with a black guest: “The candles soared toward a heaven of blue and white larkspur, and in the bright center of heaven Amelia saw a great black face with gold-rimmed glasses.” Her sense of outrage finds another expression in her suddenly hearty appetite, where she has previously been a picky, invalid eater. Nothing is predictable at this social occasion, which ends when the black visitor, Jefferson Carter, batters his way out of a screened tent where the postprandial discussion, despite the liberal dispositions of the white participants, has irritated him into a rage. “These seven people,” he thinks, “had no meaning beyond themselves, which was to say that they had no meaning at all. They did not express the life of the nation. They had no visible work. They were all drones and winter would find them dead.”