Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Or imagine any other writer since the beginning of time providing such a blend of sensation, metaphysics, and comedy.

  Oh, yes, the title. Vadim’s great-aunt, when he is an impressionable seven or eight, cries out to him, “Stop moping! … Look at the harlequins!”

  “What harlequins? Where?”

  “Oh, everywhere, all around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

  Throughout the invented reality of this novel, harlequins recur, as a butterfly glimpsed with Annette and as an Iranian circus troupe that boards a Soviet plane, as the “motley of madness” the hero wears and as a cunning multiplicity of lozenge-shapes, some as small as a “sequence of suspension dots in diamond type.” As the jacket design reminds us, a harlequin’s traditional lozenge-pattern is a chessboard made oblique. Beside him on the hospital bedside table, as Vadim/Vladimir, “paralyzed in symmetrical patches,” slowly reassembles the world, he notices “a pair of harlequin sunglasses, which for some reason suggested not protection from a harsh light but the masking of tear-swollen lids.” Which hint of masked grief suggests, more strongly than is his wont, why our author has so insistently harlequinized the world and tweaked the chessboard of reality awry.

  A Tribute

  Contributed to the Triquarterly, Winter 1970, Issue, Celebrating Nabokov’s Seventieth Birthday

  YOUR INVITATION to Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday party reaches me in England, and it was in England, nearly fifteen years ago, in Oxford, that I first read this great man: in The New Yorker, the Pnin story where the pencil sharpener says ticonderoga, ticonderoga and Pnin bursts into tears during a flickering Russian film. It was another fictional universe, or at least a stunning intensification of the ordinary one, and it has been one of the steadier pleasures of the fifteen years since to catch up on the considerable amount of Nabokov then in English and to keep up with the ample installments of reincarnated Russian and newly spawned American that have been issued through an untidy assortment of publishers, ranging from the elegant Bollingen Press to a miserable little bindery called, I think, Phaedra.‡ Though I may have nodded here and there among the two volumes of notes to Onegin, I have not knowingly missed any of the rest; for Nabokov is never lazy, never ungenerous with his jewels and flourishes, and his oeuvre is of sufficient majesty to afford interesting perspectives even from the closets and back hallways. I have expressed in print my opinion that he is now an American writer and the best living; I have also expressed my doubt that his aesthetic models—chess puzzles and protective colorations in lepidoptera—can be very helpful ideals for the rest of us. His importance for me as a writer has been his holding high, in an age when the phrase “artistic integrity” has a somewhat paradoxical if not reactionary ring, the stony image of his self-sufficiency: perverse he can be, but not abject; prankish but not hasty; sterile but not impotent. Even the least warming aspects of his image—the implacable hatreds, the reflexive contempt—testify, like fortress walls, to the reality of the siege this strange century lays against our privacy and pride.

  As a reader, I want to register my impression that Nabokov does not (as Philip Toynbee, and other critics, have claimed) lack heart. Speak, Memory and Lolita fairly bulge with heart, and even the less ingratiating works, such as King, Queen, Knave, show, in the interstices of their rigorous designs, a plenitude of human understanding. The ability to animate into memorability minor, disagreeable characters bespeaks a kind of love. The little prostitute that Humbert Humbert recalls undressing herself so quickly, the fatally homely daughter of John Shade, the intolerably pretentious and sloppy-minded woman whom Pnin undyingly loves, the German street figures in The Gift, the extras momentarily onscreen in the American novels—all make a nick in the mind. Even characters Nabokov himself was plainly prejudiced against, like the toadlike heroine of King, Queen, Knave, linger vividly, with the outlines of the case they must plead on Judgment Day etched in the air; how fully we feel, for example, her descent into fever at the end. And only an artist full of emotion could make us hate the way we hate Axel Rex in Laughter in the Dark. If we feel that Nabokov is keeping, for all his expenditure of verbal small coin, some treasure in reserve, it is because of the riches he has revealed. Far from cold, he has access to European vaults of sentiment sealed to Americans; if he feasts the mind like a prodigal son, it is because the heart’s patrimony is assured.

  * “Oh, I am well aware of those commentators: slow minds, hasty typewriters! They would do better to link Beckett with Maeterlinck and Borges with Anatole France.”—N., interviewed by Aliene Talmey, of Vogue, on June 26, 1969.

  † Though not quite so explicitly in the finished book as in the bound galley proofs, wherein the last sentence, “Easy, you know, does it, son,” indented like the valediction of a letter, is followed by “Vladimir Nabokov” flush right and, flush left, “Montreaux/April 1, 1972.” The novel as published omits these prankish proofs or spoor bestowed by the author’s passing.

  ‡ The great man, in his peppery supplement to Triquarterly’s fat (371 pp.) bundle of paeans, bridled at this “harsh and contemptuous reference to a small publishing house, which brought out excellent editions of four books of mine.” I have seen only three of these volumes, but they are miserably bound, in the sleazy pseudo-cloth of high-school yearbooks; the signature on the covers has Nabokov dotting his i’s with circles like Walt Disney. Of course, nichyvo, if the text is right. But I wish for him and his works the best of everything, from the integument in.

  ENGLISH LIVES

  A Short Life

  A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD, by Denton Welch. 254 pp. University of Texas Press, 1966.

  “Promising” is a pale term of praise reviewers customarily employ to excuse themselves from reading closely the work at hand. But the term applies with some force to Denton Welch, an Englishman born in 1917, severely injured in a highway accident at the age of eighteen, and dead by 1948. In his thirteen years of pain and invalidism, Welch composed three novels, of which the last, entitled A Voice Through a Cloud, was left uncompleted at his death. While not quite a masterpiece (not only does it not end, it gives no sign of knowing how to end), the book is, especially in its first half, masterly: a fine intelligence, a brave candor, a voracious eye, and a sweet, fresh prose are exercised. Possibly these gifts, liberated to wider use by a healthy life, would have proved equal to many subjects. It is also possible that Welch’s gifts were best realized by the one subject he had—the effects of his absurd and savage accident—and that nothing else would have burnt away so much of his dilettantism or turned his somewhat sinister detachment to such good artistic account. Again, it could be argued that save for his accident he would have outgrown the distrustful and diffident brilliance of a schoolboy. But in the end a man is what happens to him plus what he does. In a world aswarm with might-have-beens, Welch took his shortened life, his remittances of pain and fever, and delivered a unique account of shattered flesh and refracted spirit.

  This “novel,” in which Welch rechristened himself Maurice and presumably used the convenience of fiction to change some names and fake a few details, begins with the hero, a London art student, setting out on his bicycle for his uncle’s vicarage in Surrey. The landscape and a tea shoppe are rather adjectivally evoked; the hero resumes his pleasant ride; then

  I heard a voice through a great cloud of agony and sickness. The voice was asking questions. It seemed to be opening and closing like a concertina. The words were loud, as the swelling notes of an organ, then they melted to the tiniest wiry tinkle of water in a glass.

  I knew that I was lying on my back on the grass; I could feel the shiny blades on my neck. I was staring at the sky and I could not move. Everything about me seemed to be reeling and breaking up. My whole body was screaming with pain, filling my head with its roaring, and my eyes were swimming in a sort of gum mucilage.… Bright littl
e points glittered all down the front of the liquid man kneeling beside me. I knew at once that he was a policeman, and I thought that, in his official capacity, he was performing some ritual operation on me. There was a confusion in my mind between being brought to life—forceps, navel-cords, midwives—and being put to death—ropes, axes, and black masks; but whatever it was that was happening, I felt that all men came to this at last.

  In spite of certain lazy, boyish locutions (“the tiniest,” “screaming with pain,” “swimming in a sort of”), a private apocalypse is rendered with icy exactness, and throughout the succeeding pages of hospital ordeal Welch does not funk his essential task—the portrayal of “the savage change from fair to dark”:

  In the middle of the furnace inside me there was a clear thought like a text in cross-stitch. I wanted to warn the nurses, to tell them that nothing was real but torture. Nobody seemed to realize that this was the only thing on earth.

  It is strange to realize how incidentally narrative fiction treats the physical base of human existence; food is an occasion for conversation, sleep an interval of action, elimination a joke. Bodies are felt as mobile scaffoldings for conversing sensibilities, and pain, that sensation of ultimate priority, is almost never (Tolstoy and Samuel Beckett are exceptions) rendered solidly. In Welch’s narrative, agony precedes psychology; introspection takes place only as pain’s monopoly loosens. The mind worms in the chinks of suffering.

  I tried to lull myself to sleep.… but all the pleasant things that only yesterday I liked so much rose up to haunt me. I thought of eating delicious food, wearing good clothes, feeling proud and gay, going for walks, singing and dancing alone, fencing and swimming and painting pictures with other people, reading books. And everything seemed horrible and thin and nasty as soiled paper. I wondered how I could ever have believed in these things, how I could even for a moment have thought they were real. Now I knew nothing was real but pain, heat, blood, tingling, loneliness, and sweat. I began almost to gloat on the horror of my situation and surroundings. I felt paid out, dragged down, punished finally. Never again would my own good fortune make me feel guilty. I could look any beggars, blind people in the face now. Everything I had loved was disgusting; and I was disgusting, too.

  As this terrible gloating unhappiness flooded over me, my head began to swim; the pain sucked me under and I wanted to die and not be tortured any more.

  The action of this narrative is the narrator’s recovery of the world, a recovery effected without much assistance from other people. Welch, though he can do a sketch of a doomed eccentric as well as the next literate hospital patient, is not a creator of characters. All the persons he meets are depicted flatly, on the inner walls of a neurasthenia that probably existed before his catastrophe. At the worst, other people outrage and torture him—most of the hospital attendants he met struck him as sadists—and at best they merely disappoint and irritate, like static obstructing a delicate tuning-in. Welch/Maurice seeks rapport not with any other person but with the world at large, and it is remarkable, considering that more than ten years had passed since his accident, how fully, how delicately he can conjure up the sense impressions that make this search credible:

  The bare walls [of the hospital corridor] seemed to be waiting for just another human sight or sound or smell to be swallowed up in them. They had sucked in so much hope and fear and boredom; but nothing showed. Their blank faces stared back and sinister little draughts struck against my face and ears and hair.

  As he ventures into the outer world, everything is hungrily snapped up—“the leathery gray spread of the sea,” “the faint gunpowdery smell of new stone,” “the broad leaves in the gutter, splendid, decaying, rich, like some rare food.” Returning from the verge of oblivion, he writes of familiar sights as might a visitor from another planet:

  I had not been in a night street scene for a long time. I watched the people’s faces as they pushed through the theatre doors. The faces changed when they passed from the street into the building. Outside they were more hardened, more scoured and flinty, tragic too from all they had withstood. Inside they grew more cushiony and fluid; they lost the vagrant haunted look. The look of anxiety melted into the sparkling monkey, or the soft bear look. And people undid belts and buttons, loosened their hair, patted, polished, breathed out their warm breath, like animals penned together in a farmyard.

  In an age quick to label any sufficiently bleak and sententious novel “existential,” here is a work, by an author born again out of agony into the world, that seems to reconstitute human existence particle by particle.

  Fiction captures and holds our interest with two kinds of suspense: circumstantial suspense—the lowly appetite, aroused by even comic strips, to know the outcome of an unresolved situation—and what might be called gnostic suspense, the expectation that at any moment an illumination will occur. Bald plot caters to the first; style, wit of expression, truth of observation, vivid painterliness, brooding musicality, and all the commendable rest pay court to the second. Gnostic suspense is not negligible—almost alone it moves us through those many volumes of Proust—but it stands to the other rather like charm to sex in a woman. We hope for both, and can even be more durably satisfied by charm than by sex (all animals are sad after coitus and after reading a detective story); but charm remains the ancillary and dispensable quality.

  Toward the end of A Voice Through a Cloud, the hero acquires some use of his legs, and the plane of concern shifts from the struggle with oblivion to a search for suitable housing. The writing, though more polished than before, begins to feel aimless. Detail becomes obsessive. Maurice walks up an ordinary road of two-family dwellings: “There was something monstrous about the long avenue of coupled pink brick boxes. I felt that I was climbing up between gigantic naked Siamese twins with eyes all over their bodies.” Circumstantial suspense is deliberately generated; old characters reappear and are skillfully “used.” The book, as the dying author wearies, begins to act like a conventional novel. Though Welch had the abilities of a novelist, misfortune made him a kind of prophet, and it is as a prophetic document, a proclamation of our terrible fragility, that his book possesses value.

  Ayrton Fecit

  FABRICATIONS, by Michael Ayrton. 224 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972.

  In 1967, the English painter and sculptor Michael Ayrton published The Maze Maker, one of the best of the many mythological novels written in English since 1955, when Robert Graves offered, in his two-volume Penguin Greek Myths, a handy compendium with-it and far-out enough to make the Hellenic legends interesting again. Mr. Ayrton’s tale of Daedalus, supposedly written by Daedalus himself, picks its way nimbly among the scattered and conflicting classical references to its hero, ingeniously exploits Graves’s jumbled treasure of semantic and anthropological explications, and—though the narrative turns rather mazy amid a welter of mysticism and interlocked symbols—repeatedly draws energy from the author’s excitement over the art, business, and mystery of fabrication. The primitive craftsman’s careful magic comes to life in a dozen procedural descriptions—how to cast bronze, how to make wings, how to counterfeit a honeycomb in gold, how to construct an artificial cow in which a real woman may enjoy intercourse with a god who has assumed the form of a bull. Daedalus gives us the book’s thematic core: “Poets have much in common with heroes. They are neither of them aware of the world, of its true appearance nor its real consequence, its structure nor its marvellous imperfection. They are blind to that, and because my methods of gaining experience have been observation, deduction, and experiment, I have been no worse off and much better instructed than any poets or heroes known to me.… I am involved in matters which I do not wish disturbed nor interrupted by eloquent activities, the facile assumption of power, speculation on immeasurable phenomena, nor any apotheosis. What I make exists.”

  Fittingly, then, Mr. Ayrton’s next, and present, volume of fiction is entitled Fabrications. Twenty-seven short prose pieces, fashioned in a variety of st
yles and with a variety of pictographic devices, propose to insert into the packed and stacked reality of documented history various shims of speculation and fantasy. Imaginary pages of actual memoirs are supplied. Gilles de Rais takes his part in a performance of Shaw’s Saint Joan in wartime Southampton, and enlarges the part with a stirring self-defense. An invented Scots artist, “John Calder of Kelty,” is plausibly intertwined with known facts and surviving works of 16th-century Italy. An extant 12th-century manuscript illustration is explained by a fable involving one of Mr. Ayrton’s favorite themes, taurophilia. The man whose ear St. Peter sliced off lends the other to the mendacities of Flavius Josephus. And so on. The stories presuppose a reader able to delight in pedantry, with enough sense of history to find enchantment in its odd nooks and corners—Rome in 1001, Jotapata in 67. Embroidery of the archival texts is not, in this eclectic era, an unfamiliar form of art: witness the stories of Borges and Barthelme, the poems of Richard Howard and, a century ago, Robert Browning. As a cherisher of old oddities, Mr. Ayrton shows much erudition, wit, and spirit. He tells us about John Philip Sousa’s novels, about the curious cookery (flourishing in the dyspeptic reign of Charles I) that incorporated consenting dwarves into large pies called “surprise pastries,” and about the eerie heroic statuary of the Saluvii, a Celtic tribe that dominated the valley of the Rhone in pre-Christian times. He is especially vivid, predictably, when he deals with art. Brunelleschi and Giacometti are seen interfering with the space of their time, and Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio deliver monologues that startle with their intensity—for Mr. Ayrton, not predictably, is an excellent mimic of dead styles.

  Yet, though Fabrications pulls us willingly along from one conceit to the next, and a number seem perfect, something makes resistance all the way, and we emerge feeling that we have left the shop not of an artist but of a hobbyist. Why is this? For one, Mr. Ayrton’s voice, when not engaged in a work of impersonation, gravitates toward an off-putting archness: