Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  The next story, “The Health of the Sick,” supposes, far from incredibly, that a large family in Buenos Aires, to spare Mama the news that her son Alejandro has been killed in Montevideo, fabricates letters from him, and then invents an attendant string of lies and impostures as his absence lengthens into years, Mama’s expected death being slow to arrive. A situation that could be broadly comedic, or politically satirical about the self-delusions of the bourgeoisie, instead deepens in a rather poignant direction: Mama, dying at last, reveals, as the reader has guessed some pages before, that she knows the truth and has been herself protecting the protective perpetrators of the illusion. The survivors then, receiving the last of the forged letters from the phantom Alejandro, find themselves wondering how they can break to him the news that Mama is dead. So something rather tender as well as eerie has been said about the fond and prevalent deceits of family life. Cortázar, though his methods can be jagged, is not mordant. “Nurse Cora,” with its initially exasperating device of an interior monologue that shifts from person to person without so much as a paragraph indentation to signal transitions, in the end quite movingly portrays the death, in a hospital, of an adolescent boy as refracted through other minds (his nurse, his mother, his doctor) and reflected in the boy’s own subtly traced surrender of pride, desire, and vitality. Another kind of dying concerns “Meeting,” wherein the interior soliloquy of Che Guevara is imagined during the rebel invasion of Cuba; all seems lost, and the hopes of the revolution, the music of Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet, and the interweave of tree branches meet in the resigned mind of the exhausted revolutionary: “But it was enough to look at the treetop to feel that the will again put its chaos to order, imposed on it the sketch of the adagio that would someday pass into the final allegro and accede to a reality worthy of that name.”

  Juxtaposition is Sr. Cortázar’s creative habit, and perhaps he is most himself when the juxtaposition is most harsh and least explained; an abyss, narrow as a black knife, gleams in the schizoid split. In “The Other Heaven,” a man evidently walks back and forth between his stockbroker’s job in Buenos Aires and a sinister arcade district of Paris. In “All Fires the Fire” (and there must be a better way of translating this), without even the rationale of daydream, a Roman gladiatorial fight and the breakup of a modern affair are alternately, accurately described; both events involve a sexual triangle and the cool cruelty of hedonism, and both end in a conflagration, as if a spark had leaped from the striking together of these two flinty worlds. There is also a third world—a far-off voice overheard during the telephone conversation of the modern couple, a “distant, monotonous voice” dictating numbers to “someone who doesn’t speak.” This little cross-connection reaches our own inner ear with the penetration of a symbolic detail (numbers, minutes, time is the final consuming fire) that is first of all a recognizable, common experience. Cortázar, sparing with his imagery, can achieve masterstrokes of sensation, especially when the sensation involves a gulf. In “Instructions for John Howell,” a member of a theatre audience is suddenly enlisted as an actor in the play; a moment before he is pushed onstage, he feels to his left “the great cavern, something like a gigantic contained breath, which, after all, was the real world, where white shirt fronts and perhaps hats or upsweeps were gradually taking shape.” And in “The Island at Noon” an airline steward, Marini, every other day at noon on the Rome–Teheran run looks down upon a little Greek island, Xiros, shaped like “a turtle whose paws were barely out of the water.” The island becomes an obsession; “everything … was blurred and easy and stupid until it was time to lean toward the tail window, to feel the cold crystal like the boundary of an aquarium, where the golden turtle slowly moved in the thick blue.” The sensation of looking down from a jet cannot be more beautifully described than that; the serene terror of jet travel—a tubular sample of the cheerful, plasticized mundane floats apparently motionless above an actual mundus reduced to the scale of a map and viewed from the top of a towering transparency that is, potentially, death—finds its fable here. And at his most intense Cortázar floods the gaps and mysteries of his tricky structures with a potent negativity—death, that invisible possibility, made electric and palpable, like the atmosphere before lightning. Whereas a curious immortality, the eternal sprightliness of pure mind, fills the airy spaces of Queneau. Both men convince us that surrealism has been elicited from them by the extremity of their ardor for reality—“the reality,” Nathalie Sarraute has written, “to which we always return, in spite of our momentary betrayals and deviations, thus proving that, when all is said and done, we … prize it above all else.” Their games repay our playing.

  YOUNG AMERICANS

  If at First You Do Succeed, Try, Try Again

  DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP, by Marge Piercy. 232 pp. Doubleday, 1970.

  SINGLE FILE, by Norman Fruchter. 177 pp. Knopf, 1970.

  “First Novels” are almost a genre to themselves; Time used to refer solemnly to a “First Novelist” with the same capitalization it employed for “First Lady” and “First Baseman.” Second novels lack this irksome mystique; they are just supposed to be not as good—scrimped follow-ups of that first furious spending, strained variations on what came naturally. And, true, the two second novels at hand do seem less assured, less exuberantly annunciatory, than the first productions of their gifted young authors. Yet the flaws and deformities show stress in a direction and hint at why, in a historical moment when private concerns have lost moral priority to public awareness, it is difficult for an earnest spirit to write novels at all.

  Marge Piercy’s Dance the Eagle to Sleep describes—through the experiences of four major characters—the birth, short and somewhat blissful life, and violent death of a youth movement that one might call a nightmare version of S.D.S. The Piercy group is named the Indians, and early this year Bernardine Dohrn issued from the happy hunting ground of her hiding a proclamation “to express ourselves … as tribes at council.” Miss Piercy places her history in a futuristic time (there has been a government shelling of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a President called the King of Clubs has been succeeded by one called the White Knight, a compulsory period of national service called the Nineteenth Year of Servitude has ben initiated), but the styles and equipment and brand names are all of our time, and at one point the author specifies that for “twenty-five years” the American people “had been sold a crusader’s world of Armed Might Versus the Red Hordes.” Twenty-five plus 1945 equals 1970. No matter. The futuristic conceit frees her to work on a large scale, to set her characters in the context of armies and headlines and—crucial to public-spirited agonists—publicity. The novel as the saga of private lives, soul journeys invisibly pursued under the heel of power (a tradition that Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis sees originate in the anecdotes of the Gospels), does not suit our Roman times, when only kings and gods matter. Miss Piercy’s heroes would be kings; that attempt failing, she caricatures them as gods. “Shawn felt useless and yet full of energy and light, a turned-on bulb, a ridiculous helium-taut balloon.” “The blade hit [Corey] with its dull weight, making him fall. As it rolled over him smashing his bones, his heart burst free like a rising crow, and he fainted.”

  Shawn has been a member of a screamingly successful rock group. Corey is the part-Indian founder of the Indians; his pilgrimage begins with a vision of a buffalo who tells him (I drastically abridge this bisonian peroration):

  “I was the bread of your people.… Your people lived on me as on a mountain. The grass waved and I ate it as far as the clean fresh wind blew. Then I was burnt and left to rot.… I became garbage. It had been beautiful, the world made out of my flesh and my bone, my hide and my sinews. The people danced each season on my back.… The word was real, and every man had his own poem to connect him to himself. Now what is there? … Now there are people in boxes, their heads full of noise, their lungs full of smoke and poison, their bellies full, but their flesh sour. They do what they are told.… At the top are a handful of men wh
o buy and sell the mountains and the rivers, who pollute and explode and set aside as preserves all the lands of the earth. The people.… are chained together and crippled by shame. They cannot dance. Only the young are alive a little while to dance and feel and touch each other.”

  The movement thus inspired begins by seizing a high school somewhere in the Midwest and progresses to rioting in Manhattan. It achieves publicity: “The media discovered them … Esquire put Shawn’s face on the cover in feathered headdress, and inside had a snotty article heavily laden with psychoanalytical insights.” These insights, unlike the buffalo’s, are not quoted. Dance the Eagle to Sleep fails as a novel of ideas because “the system” is never allowed to have a cogent, let alone persuasive, spokesman. The policemen are uniformly faceless and brutal, the schoolteachers are all “frustrated, embittered lumps.” The adults in the book are either venal or oppressed—Brand X and Brand Y of the system, summarily dismissed in the very tone of presentation. “His father was a partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. His mother owned buildings, had studied psychology and been analyzed by Jung, and was still beautiful in a gaunt silvery way.” Or: “His father was a pale gray drag. Started out as a high-school math teacher and ended up as a middle-echelon man in a company specializing in auto insurance.” Anything genial in middle-class life is dismissed as “co-optative softness.” Fascinating suggestions pass unchallenged: research scientists have no alternative to participation in nerve-gas projects, Che and Mao will deliver us from toilet training, all people over twenty-five hate all people under twenty-five because television commercials present youthful beauty as an ideal. The actions of the government, as it blitzkriegs the movement into smithereens, pretend to no rationale beyond the author’s desire to allegorize the Vietnam war. Comic-book heroes like Captain Marvel and Plastic Man are frequently invoked, and the climactic chapters strongly savor of comic-book art; one can almost see BLAM and RATATATAT in jagged balloons, and (when Corey is hyper-symbolically crushed by a bulldozer) AEEIIII trailing off into the next panel. The government becomes one of those almost omnipotent syndicates of evil that Superman did battle with. No mitigating circumstances are allowed in the Piercy condemnation—no historical causality, no suspicion that the system is a self-admittedly imperfect patchwork of changeable human devices, no comparison with other systems, living or dead. The system is never seen in operation; nobody functioning within it has any reality. This is not true of Miss Piercy’s first novel, Going Down Fast, wherein some of the manipulators of an urban-renewal boondoggle are substantially, if unsympathetically, realized. It is even less true of—to cite a masterpiece, as magnanimous as it is devastating, of political disaffection—Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle; here the author’s compassion moves outward from the jailed to the jailers and does not exclude even the ultimate jailer, Stalin, as he scuttles through his suite of cells beneath the Kremlin, beset by dogma and paranoia.

  Yet, in another way, Miss Piercy’s second novel does reveal a (let us call it) Christian sense of human fallibility. As an anti-utopian novel, a study of the breakup of a visionary movement into doctrinaire factions, Dance the Eagle to Sleep has a credible complexity. It is Lord of the Flies with girls on the island. The warrior spirit is here embodied in the Piggy figure, the fat bright boy with glasses, now called Billy Batson. Corey, the Indian chief, remains a mystic theorist. The debates within the councils of the young are vigorous and subtle; Miss Piercy follows the cruel exigencies of the social contract as they arise in the tribe with just the sympathetic understanding she denies the enclosing society. “We were right and wrong,” Shawn admits in the end, without surrendering his faith that “the system is all wrong.”

  Where did the Indians go wrong? In a sense, by biting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. At first “there were almost no tools available in the tribe to communicate political values, but only to embody them. Which worked, sort of.” Then communication becomes all too practiced: “Councils tended to turn into sharp debates now between different sides gathered around leaders who could argue a position and put others down.… The louder got louder still.… But somehow they were not getting any better at talking to people who were not yet Indians.” Marcus, the Negro to whom the mantle of wisdom descends after Corey’s death, says, “We thought guns made us real, but it was people, and we didn’t have them.” (Bernardine Dohrn’s statement says, “We became aware that a group of outlaws … cannot develop strategies that grow to include large numbers of people.”) The delusion that better communication would win “the people” seems shared by the author; her novel leaves us with the impression that the movement’s only fault was not being strong enough. In the last chapter, a girl, Ginny, cries out in childbirth, “I thought I was stronger than I am.” Marcus’ answer comes back: “Human beings aren’t naturally strong enough or nasty enough to live in this world.” So even labor pains seem to be allied with the evils of “the system.” What did the Indians want? For a time they live in a New Jersey farm commune, and their idyll centers upon a brown hardness of body, which they gain through the outdoor labor that millions of their ancestors hastened to escape. Joanna, the heroine, is always “tough” and “skinny.” When she turns traitor and sides with the system, the first thing Corey notices is that she has put on weight. She is “a robot that looked a little like Joanna. A plastic doll with rubbery skin and a smell of plastics about it.” In short, the system—substitute “history” or “technology” or “overpopulation”—has alienated us from Nature. As in the original myth of Eden, there is in Dance the Eagle to Sleep a suggestion that sex is behind the Fall. Joanna, once a blithely promiscuous runaway, becomes Corey’s mate, then betrays him with Shawn. Yet this event, though much discussed, does not offend the sexual code of the tribe or bear upon its military defeat. Indeed, by this time the reader has become enough of an Indian himself, having witnessed so much random and inconsequential copulation, that he cannot give the incident the emotional significance it would have in a conventional, bourgeois novel. Shawn himself says it:

  “Don’t you think it’s strange. We’re running for our lives. There’s a battle going on down below. Maybe it’s all over for us. Our home is gone. Maybe our tribe is destroyed. And we’re analyzing the subtleties of a love affair.”

  This confessed awkwardness and the curious failure of Joanna, though she is the most vividly realized character, to be anything but a pendant upon the book’s essential action finger one crisis in the novel form. Is sex in the shape of “romantic interest” subject enough? If sexual “possession” is scorned as part of the hated private-property bag, fidelity becomes meaningless and betrayal impossible. Joanna tries to make it possible again; she tells Corey, “I’m not liberated.… I’m your private property.” And later, more wifely still: “I was trying to castrate you.” Corey despises her new psychoanalytical vocabulary as part of her sellout, but does not answer her questioning of the “freedom” he and his desperate revolution offer. “I’ve got a scholarship to a decent school. I’m going to be a teacher. I’m going to be something on my own”—is the reader meant to scorn, with Corey, her moderate hope? In this ambiguity Miss Piercy uncovers a private feminine theme within the mighty masculine one of social rebirth. Just as the old novels etched the tragedies of private persons within the gray revolution of industry and technology, new ones may trace the personal liabilities of the anti-Establishment Establishment.

  • • •

  Single File, by Norman Fruchter, presents a texture much different from Dance the Eagle to Sleep. Whereas Miss Piercy’s prose crackles like a comb being hastily pulled through rather tangled hair, Mr. Fruchter’s glints like fragments of a mirror. While Miss Piercy, in her haste to get on with it, is not fastidious about clichés, resorts to a hurried sociological tone, makes people talk like press handouts, and declines to linger upon sensual details, Mr. Fruchter deals in the exquisitely concrete:

  Wet white bones, glistening like licked fingernails. Tooth-white. Fleshy hunks that evad
ed Negrone’s knife, clung stubbornly to white bone. Tougher than chicken bone, sharp enough to cut and sting—cross-hatchings of scars creased Negrone’s wrist up to his elbow, a foot above the cuff of his rubber gloves. Carp skeletons stacked, moist rattles, in Negrone’s brine-soaked buckets.

  After Miss Piercy’s editorializing, it is a relief to read through the hard news Mr. Fruchter has assembled: mock documents, interior soliloquies, street sayings, descriptions clean as ice chips, dialogue better than tape-recorded, all of it smartly shuffled and laid before our eyes in a fancy typographic dress of ragged-right margins, italics, play format, and an intermittent left-hand hairline. The conceit is that all this heterogeneous material exists in a single file of welfare casework, but my one complaint about this book is that its excessive “interestingness,” its continual declaration of itself as a literary object, insulates the reader (whom Miss Piercy does engage in argument, however feverish) from the shocking substance. For this is a novel of the urban humiliated and oppressed, a novel rich far beyond its modest bulk with the sights and smells and processes of present-day city life. In content, indeed, it is more radical than Dance the Eagle to Sleep, which deals with middle-class teen-agers and ends with the hoariest of sentimental affirmations—the birth of a baby. Not since Steinbeck and Algren has a writer of Mr. Fruchter’s skill demonstrated such unforced love for the proletariat, entered so willingly into their cramped lives, and found so much room for drama and mystery in the cabins of desire, scruple, and frustration that confine their freedom of choice.