Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  John once said to me that a psychiatrist he was then seeing told him he was fascinated by criminality. He volunteered in 1971 to teach a course on the short story to inmates at Sing Sing. He befriended some of the inmates, especially a “pale, emaciated white man” and “serious loser” (son Fred’s term) named Donald Lang, whom Cheever continued to associate with after his release. It was Lang who, hostilely, wondered “where a little shit like you gets the balls to come in here”: even at the time of the prisoner riots at Attica, Cheever remained blithe, and later told an interviewer, “If the cons and I were lined up against a guard, I was all with the cons.” The sinister power of many of his early stories entails an identification with criminality. In “Goodbye, My Brother,” a story that ends with the idyllic vision of two women emerging from the sea, “naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace,” the protagonist clubs his brother unconscious with a saltwater-soaked root. In “The Enormous Radio,” the wife of a Sutton Place couple introduced as “the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins” turns out, in her husband’s furious accusations, to be guilty of stealing her sister’s inheritance and going off to have an abortion as coolly as if she were going to Nassau. The central character of “Torch Song” feeds her morbid soul on a series of ailing, abusive lovers; the wronged secretary in “The Five-Forty-eight” boards a commuter train with her former employer and pulls a gun on him, forcing him, at his station, to kneel down and put his face in the dirt; the hero of “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” enters an affluent neighbor’s house and steals his fat wallet. All these depths open up in conventional social scenery, sketched with a fond and lively eye for realistic detail.

  Like Kafka and Kierkegaard, Cheever felt his own existence as a kind of mistake, a sin. His homosexuality, furtively explored in his boyhood but then suppressed in an apparently perfect marriage to bright, pretty Mary Winternitz (she was even the perfect size for him), seemed criminal; in his last years, he marvelled at the insouciance with which younger men, among them Allan Gurganus, accepted their own. Cheever’s father, Frederick, a crusty Yankee shoe salesman, was—like his namesake, John’s older brother—a vigorous participant in virile sports; he feared that with John he had “sired a fruit.” As an adult, John “flung himself into icy pools and skated with a masculine swagger,” and cultivated the reputation of a womanizer. In turn, he worried at Ben with suspicions that the boy had homosexual tendencies. Yet, in one of the least coherent of Cheever’s late stories, “The Leaves, the Lion-Fish, and the Bear” (published in Esquire in 1974, and in a limited edition, by Sylvester & Orphanos, in 1980), he most nakedly sought to convince himself, and the reader, that male homosexuality is innocent, of a piece with his beloved world of light and air and female beauty. Two men, Estabrook and Stark, are brought together in a motel room in a snowstorm, drink four whiskeys each, and make love: “They were both inexperienced but they reverted passionately to the sexual horseplay of adolescence.” In the morning,

  The ungainliness of two grown, drunken and naked men in one another’s arms was manifest but Estabrook felt that he looked wonderfully on to some revelation of how lonely and unnatural man is and how deep and well-concealed are his confusions. Estabrook knew that he had done that, which by his lights he should not have done but he felt no remorse at all—he felt instead a kind of joy at seeing this much of himself and of another. There were no concealments at that hour. These men were what they were—bewildered, naked, carnal and content—and instead of freeing himself from Stark’s embrace he put both arms around the stranger and drew him closer.… Estabrook was astonished to find that he could convince himself he had merely discovered something about himself and his kind. When he returned home at the end of the week, his wife looked as lovely as ever—lovelier—and lovely were the landscapes he beheld.

  “How lonely and unnatural man is and how deep and well-concealed are his confusions”—no wonder Cheever’s fiction is slighted in academia while Fitzgerald’s collegiate romanticism is assigned. Cheever’s characters are adult, full of adult darkness, corruption, and confusion. They are desirous, conflicted, alone, adrift. They do not achieve the crystalline stoicism, the defiant willed courage, of Hemingway’s. Cheever was not a stoic; he was for most of his adult life a regular, indeed compulsive, communicant at Episcopal morning Mass. His errant protagonists move, in their fragile suburban simulacra of paradise, from one island of momentary happiness to the imperilled next. Johnny Hake, the housebreaker of Shady Hill, confides before revealing his turn to crime, “We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in heaven, I am as thrilled as I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.” That is about as good as it gets in Cheeverland, and such glimmers of grace and well-being are all but smothered in Blake Bailey’s painstaking chronology of a tormented man’s daily struggle with himself.

  FICTION NOW

  Hugger-Mugger

  THE MISSION SONG, by John le Carré. 339 pp. Little, Brown, 2006.

  FORGETFULNESS, by Ward Just. 258 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

  Hugger-mugger is part of life, especially under modern political conditions. For decades, it had its capital in the Kremlin and the inner councils of Beijing; now it gathers thickly but elusively in the alleys of Baghdad and the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many outside the borders of the United States, and many within those borders, place its originating center in Washington, D.C.; there, as Robert Lowell wrote decades ago in his poem “July in Washington,” “The stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth.” John le Carré, the leading fictional dramatizer of the clandestine struggle between the capitalist West and the Communist bloc, maintains a brisk trade in hugger-mugger, searching in each new novel for a fresh locale, a newly sore spot. In Our Game (1995), it was the small, mostly Muslim republic of Ingushetia, striving for freedom from Russia, that huge remnant of the defunct Soviet Union; in The Tailor of Panama (1996), it was the bedevilled isthmus to our south; in Single & Single (1999), the financial underworld of the new Russian states; in The Constant Gardener (2000), perfidy in Kenya by the pharmaceutical industry. In Absolute Friends (2003), the sore spot became le Carré’s fury at the American and British intervention in Iraq. Now, in The Mission Song, he has turned to Joseph Conrad’s old heart of darkness itself, upriver on the Congo. The genocidal ethnic strife in neighboring Rwanda has spilled over the flagrantly porous eastern borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a murderous mixture of refugee Rwandan génocidaires, warlord armies, meddlers from Uganda and Burundi, and mercenaries of many stripes prolongs and complicates a conflict that has claimed, since its commencement, in 1998, four million Congolese lives, most of them women and children, from war-related violence, hunger, and disease. At stake is eastern Congo’s mineral wealth—copper, gold, diamonds, uranium, potential oil, and coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, described in The Mission Song as “a highly precious metal once found exclusively in the Eastern Congo.” The definition, provided by the novel’s narrator, colloquially continues, “If you were unwise enough to dismantle your cell phone, you would find an essential speck of it among the debris. For decades the United States has held strategic stockpiles of the stuff, a fact my clients learned to their cost when the Pentagon dumped tons of it on the world market.” There’s hugger-mugger for you.

  Into the miserable chaos of eastern Congo le Carré’s imagination projects the Syndicate, a neo-colonial group of capitalist entrepreneurs, headed by one Lord Brinkley and, though ostensibly multinational, English in its visible functionaries; it intends to enlist three leading warlords, colorfully sketched, in a coup that will establish in power, before destabilizing elect
ions take place, a “self-proclaimed Congolese saviour chap, an ex-professor of something,” called the Mwangaza. To this purpose—benign, mind you, “democracy at the end of a gun barrel” designed to “give the People a fair slice of the cake for once, and let peace break out,” as well as assure the Syndicate its own more than fair slice—a conference is held on a nameless island in a northern sea. An interpreter is needed, and that brings in our narrator, Bruno Salvador, Salvo for short, the Congolese love child of an amorous mission priest of Irish-Norman descent and a village headman’s beautiful daughter. She, a few months after giving birth to Salvo, “crept back to her kin and family, who weeks afterwards were massacred in their entirety by an aberrant tribe, right down to my last grandparent, uncle, cousin, distant aunt and half-brother or sister.”

  Salvo’s voice is jaunty, as well it might be, since, thanks to his irregular upbringing in the care of missionaries, he learned not just Swahili and French but Lingala, Bemba, Shi, Kinyarwanda, and sundry other languages of Central Africa. Many of these come into play at the conference, which takes up about half of the novel. The Syndicate hosts plant electronic eavesdropping equipment in their guests’ quarters, enriching the hugger-mugger. Salvo later explains it to Lord Brinkley, who seems as much in the dark as he is:

  “The whole island was bugged, sir. Even the gazebo on the hilltop was bugged. Whenever Philip reckoned we’d reached a critical moment in negotiations, he’d call a recess, and I’d dive down to the boiler room and listen in, and relay the gist to Sam upstairs so that Philip and Maxie would be ahead of the game next time we convened. And take advice from the Syndicate and Philip’s friends over the sat-phone when they needed it. Which was how we focussed on Haj. He did. Philip. Well, with Tabizi’s help, I suppose. I was the unwitting instrument.”

  Hugger-mugger takes a lot of explaining, a lot of diagramming. An additional trouble with it, which keeps the suspense thriller, however skillful and polished, a subgenre, is that the novelist, manipulating his human counters on the board, must keep them somewhat blank, with selective disclosure of their inner lives, lest the killer or mole or whatever be prematurely unmasked. Even the most intimate human matters are turned into diagrams. Salvo’s love, Hannah (not to be confused with his wife, Penelope), is thus addressed by an Americanized friend, Baptiste:

  “Let’s do facts. Here are the facts. Your friend here fucks you, right? Your friend’s friend knows he fucks you, so he comes to your friend. And he tells your friend a story, which your friend repeats to you because he’s fucking you. You are rightly incensed by this story, so you bring your friend who is fucking you to me, so that he can tell it all over again, which is what your friend’s friend reckoned would happen all along. We call that disinformation.”

  Between information and disinformation, characters don’t have much breathing room. We like Salvo well enough. He is humorous, for one thing, which is rare in this solemn shadow world of closed mouths and gritted teeth. With his interpreter’s ear, he discriminates among varieties of spoken English, from “your Blairite wannabe-classless slur or your high-Tory curdled cockney” to “your Caribbean melody” and “the gone-away vowels” of his late father’s Irish brogue. Finding himself thinking licentiously of another female hours after his inaugural orgy with Hannah, he excuses himself with the poetic thought “When Hannah has lit your lamp for you, it’s natural to see other women in its rays.” The reader in a mild way wants him, married to a faithless and ambitious white journalist, to find happiness with his pure-black1 Hannah, an idealistic nurse and fellow-native of eastern Congo. The dandified, French-educated Haj, another such native, calls Salvo a “zebra,” and The Mission Song neatly resolves for the biracial interpreter the quandary, in his half-English condition, of which stripe to settle on.

  But the novel’s resolutions, romantic and political, are achieved at an emotional distance, behind a thick protective layer of thriller awareness and thriller expectations. Le Carré has researched his chosen venue diligently (his acknowledgments thank “Jason Stearns of the International Crisis Group for his unique expertise and guidance during my brief visit to the Eastern Congo”) and delivered an entertainment whose foremost passion is a commendable indignation over the sufferings of a large African population at the hands of berserk militias, corrupt if not altogether absent government, and, from the West, cold corporate greed. The Mission Song illuminates with animated personifications a portion of the globe’s daily misery that tends to be, in American news, at least, murky and abstract. We are pleasantly surprised to learn, in a letter written by Haj to our hero from his flowery estate in Bukavu, on Lake Kivu, that the heart of darkness is not altogether dark: “The Goma cheese is still okay, the lights go out for three hours a day, but nobody puts out the lights on the fishing boats at night.”

  Forgetfulness, Ward Just’s fifteenth novel, from its first pages drops the reader into a level deeper than animated news reports, into the wandering mind of a middle-aged Frenchwoman while she lies freezing and disabled by a broken ankle on the darkening slope of a mountain in the Pyrenees. Not that Just, a former war correspondent who has lived in many countries and at present divides his time between Paris and Martha’s Vineyard, is unaware of the news: his publisher advertises that the novel “mixes the immediacy of the headlines with the moral and emotional intricacy of a le Carré novel.” His immobilized heroine, Florette, who is married to an American painter, Thomas Railles, and lives with him in an Aquitaine village, St. Michel du Valcabrère, at the base of the mountain, allows her thoughts, “blown this way and that,” to touch on overheard conversations between Thomas and two old American friends as they excitedly talk politics:

  Capitalism’s responsibility for the turbulence of the modern world, its heedlessness and chaos, its savagery, its utter self-absorption, capitalism the canary in the mine-shaft. But it’s what we have, isn’t it? No turning the clocks back. Against the jihadists, we have capitalism. Will money trump faith?

  It is Florette’s misfortune, on a walk undertaken to get away for an hour from the conversation of these men, not only to have broken her ankle but to have fallen into the hands of four strangers, “dubious men who did not belong here.” For a time, they carry her, with difficulty, down the slick, winding trail in a handy stretcher, but, as darkness closes in and snowflakes begin to fall, they change their minds, put her down on the cold ground, and, smoking many Gitanes, debate their situation in their inscrutable language. The author gives not only her interior monologue but some of the thoughts of the men as well—“None of this—the weather, their slow progress—was to their advantage. The rescue of the American woman was an error2 and they would pay for it.” While Florette speculates, dozes, and dreamily entertains memories, the reality of her worsening situation bears down upon the reader. Her mind keeps touching on the fact that she needs to pee, and when, as she euphorically pictures her rescue by Thomas and the villagers, her bladder lets go—“She peed and peed some more, such a strange sensation lying on her back but so welcome”—the release signals an end. It is a terrific scene, and Just’s novel throughout, as it wanders and even maunders, has the electric potential of being terrific, with the kind of terrific that sneaks up out of the mundane. Compared with le Carré’s, its slower, thicker prose seeks to drag visceral recognitions from us, keeping us alert and tense.

  The fatal mountain, its lower slopes continuous with the Railleses’ back yard, is called Big Papa, and Hemingway’s influence on Just is hard to miss. The flatly declarative tone, both burnt-out and faintly pugnacious, has sudden recourse to the second person, like a jabbing finger: “Thomas … tried to remember the exact spot on the mountain where they had had their picnic but he could not; it was so long ago and all mountains looked the same when you were on them.” Clauses are strung together bluntly, without fear of contradiction: “The mountain would always be in his vision when he was working unless he chose to turn his easel to the wall, and still he would be unable to forget, and he was a man who forgot
things all the time.” Thomas shares Hemingway’s café vision of Europe, a sense that the restless American search for a good place finds its ease here: