Odd Jobs (133 page)
Authors: John Updike
One morning, on opening her eyes, the phrase “I have won sovereignty” came to her. She felt fortunate and emancipated, but could not have said what it was that she had been freed from.
Of course, like Emma Bovary, she is punished for her overreaching, and so is her unsuspecting husband; our erotic fabulist is a realistic novelist as well, and he does not exclude, as does the true pornographer, the tragic dimension. Yet we feel that Doña Lucrecia, by succumbing to the perverse and the dangerous, is more human than her husband, with his
ridiculous, fussy, bowel-loving personal “utopia” of the body. She sins her way to sovereignty; he merely topples from paradise.
In Praise of the Stepmother
is, like the author’s other books, somewhat nasty. And its dramatization of corrupting innocence is not quite convincing—wicked little Alfonsito doesn’t have the undeniable, quirky, heartbreaking sociological reality of Lolita. Vargas Llosa’s moral—emphasized by an epigraph, from César Moro’s
Amour à mort
—seems to be that innocence and beauty intrinsically have something sinister about them. To become human we must make the descent into filth, into time. God Himself, Christianity claims, descended into Mary’s womb. The last painting Vargas Llosa weaves into his text is Fra Angelico’s
Annunciation;
he imagines the young Mary, confronted with a shimmering youth of an angel, asking herself, “Why did he call me queen? Why did I discover a gleam of tears in his eyes when he prophesied that I would suffer?” Love is a labyrinth we must enter even knowing it contains the Minotaur of destruction and loss. We leave much behind: “altruistic sentiments, metaphysics and history, neutral reasoning, good intentions and charitable deeds, solidarity with the species, civic idealism, sympathy toward one’s fellow.” It is a rare candidate for President who can put civic idealism in its place; rarer still one who could hearken, in so impish and delicate yet fiercely serious a fiction as this, to the rumbling epigastrium of love.
*
The Marxism of Western European intellectuals itself must be taken as a sign, a bit of plumage whereby they recognize one another, since surely with the dismal example of Eastern Europe next door they can’t really want to turn Italy into another Romania, or France into China.
†
The name, strange for an Italian, invites comment. Its most illustrious real possessor was Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), a classical scholar born in Geneva of Huguenot parents exiled from France. As with Eco’s hero, his intensely bookish life was beset by a certain international peril: the contest between Calvinism and Catholicism impoverished his youth in Geneva, and complicated his patronage first by Henri IV of France and then by James I of England. Reputed to be, after Scaliger, the most learned man of the age, he was sought as a prize by the Ultramontane Catholics and subjected to stern criticism by the anti-Papist Reformed theologians. His own taste was for a halfway position, which he read into the early church fathers and found in the Church of England; after the assassination of Henri IV, he went to England in 1610 at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, becoming a favorite conversational companion of the British monarch. He did not speak English, however, and encountered hostility from cockneys and Jesuits. In an age of violent religious contention, scholarship had no safe nook. Casaubon’s chief scholarly monuments are his editions of Athenaeus and Theophrastus, with profuse commentary; his diary, edited and published by his son under the title
Ephemerides
, provides an unequalled record of the daily life of a sixteenth-century scholar.
A scholar mustier still, and perhaps more present to Eco’s mind, is Edward Casaubon, the fictional cleric who marries Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
. A wealthy, prematurely aged man in his fifties, this Casaubon is engaged upon an interminable work of arcane research and learned controversy he calls the Key to all Mythologies. George Eliot, translator of Feuerbach and Strauss’s
Life of Jesus
and well versed in the religious controversies of her century, with eerily intense comedy conjures up the cobwebbed maze of Casaubon’s impossible endeavor to show “that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.” (Cf. page 580, the similar endeavor of Father Jean-François Foucquet.) Though Dorothea initially “listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments to be brought against Mr. Casaubon’s entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities,” the youthful bride rather soon comes to feel that it is all a “sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge” and half-scornfully to pity her husband’s “plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world.” In the end, she quails before the task, bequeathed to her by the dying scholar, of “sifting these mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful,” of “sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins.” This claustrophobic atmosphere, of littered labyrinths futilely searched for a key to “the tossed ruins of the world,” is of course exactly that of Eco’s Casaubon’s demonstration, on behalf of Tres, of history as one gigantic, shadowy conspiracy—scholarship as dementia.
‡
Who, in any case, discusses and quotes Barth’s essay in his elegant little
Postscript to The Name of the Rose
(1984). Eco seems to agree that the postmodernist is free to offer the reader simple enjoyment and to revisit the past—“but with irony, not innocently.” More interesting, to me, was Eco’s parenthetical aside: “I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as a metahistorical category.”
§
This habit of tracing the later career of schoolmates—could it relate to the opening of Vargas Llosa’s favorite novel,
Madame Bovary
, in which the ill-fated Charles Bovary appears as a shy “new boy”?
LANDSCAPES AND CHARACTERSA Long Way Home
B
LUE
H
IGHWAYS:
A Journey into America
, by William Least Heat Moon. 421 pp. Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1983.
Hurling oneself more or less blindly at the highways of America would not seem a very efficient method of producing a book; but a surprising number of people have tried it. In recent memory, there have been John Steinbeck’s
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
, Erskine Caldwell’s
Around About America
, Jonathan Raban’s
Old Glory: An American Voyage
, and Richard Reeves’s
American Journey
. To be sure, the author puts some spin on himself as he hurls; there has to be an angle. Mr. Reeves had the excellent idea, which he carried out with purposeful, prearranged interviews, of following in the nineteenth-century footsteps of the supreme American-travel impressionist, Alexis de Tocqueville. Mr. Raban, with that brave English willingness to act out childhood fantasies, went down the Mississippi in a boat because he had read
Huckleberry Finn
at the impressionable age of seven—much as Bruce Chatwin journeyed to Patagonia because of a bit of
Mylodon
skin in his grandmother’s dining-room cabinet. Steinbeck and Caldwell, native men of letters mature in age and rich in distinction, went forth to investigate their national turf. Steinbeck, for twenty-five years marooned by success in New York City, had come to feel that, as he wrote, “I did not know my own country”:
I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the
speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years.
What he
had
been feeling, and smelling and hearing, in the terrain between his apartment in New York and his summer home in Sag Harbor is left undescribed. Steinbeck was a Westerner and his soul breathed best in the wide open; in
Travels with Charley
he extolled the North Dakota Badlands and wrote, “I am in love with Montana.” He travelled, with a poodle called Charles le Chien, in a small truck called Rocinante and fitted up like “a little house,” with facilities for sleeping and cooking. William Least Heat Moon, author of
Blue Highways: A Journey into America
, also used a truck rigged like a camper, and gave it a fanciful name—Ghost Dancing, in salute to the “desperate resurrection rituals” whereby the Plains Indians tried to bring back the bison and the old warrior life—not unlike Steinbeck’s allusion to the quixotic. The resemblance does not go much further. Heat Moon (Least seems to be his middle name) is an unknown, a mixed-blood Sioux who, when he was thirty-eight years old, was propelled outward from Columbia, Missouri, by a marital break-up and the sudden loss of his job teaching English at Stephens College. His Christian name is, or has been, William Trogdon. This is his first book. It has been launched toward success by kind words from Annie Dillard, Farley Mowat, and Robert Penn Warren. Mr. Warren not only has obliged with an ideal puff for the front of the jacket—“A masterpiece”—but has written the front-flap copy as well. It is he, and not the author, who tells us that William Least Heat Moon “set out to … write a book about America.”
Heat Moon’s own explanation is
With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.
This seems disingenuously high-minded—self-dramatizing but not self-revealing. The author could, I think, have confided a bit more of his curriculum vitae to the reader in the course of over four hundred big pages. His third chapter, less than two pages long, announces, “I give this chapter to myself. When done with it, I will shut up about
that
topic.” He does not tell us where he is from, where he has been, or what he has done. He does not tell us that, set adrift by spouse and employer, he has embarked on an odyssey determined to redeem his life with a literary feat, though this would appear, from the determined manner of his peregrinations and his prose, and from the tape recorder, journal, and cameras he took with him, a plausible conjecture. It is a shortcoming of his adventure that, though an immense thirteen-thousand-mile itinerary develops—a rough clockwise circuit of the boundaries of the forty-eight contiguous states along mostly back roads—no inner curve of feeling tells us if this grandly invoked search reaches or fails to reach its objective. Instead, thousands of miles and hundreds of incidents, conversations, and pieces of scenery bear in upon the reader with the numbing, glittering muchness of a very long car ride. Since Heat Moon writes a thoughtful, sharp-eyed, and evocative if not exactly dancing prose, and since he is a benign and shrewd though somewhat taciturn companion, one reads on, and on, out of a kind of courtesy to the author. But no Moby-Dick of an envisioned thesis surfaces on the horizon to pull the worlds of detail toward some gravitational center; the venture never quite becomes an adventure.
There are, it is true, encounters along the way: the pilgrim blunders mistakenly into a whorehouse in Nevada, nearly freezes while stuck on a snowy mountain pass in Utah, is hassled by police in Alabama and New York State, has his water pump replaced in North Dakota, gives a Seventh-Day Adventist vagabond missionary a ride across Idaho and into Montana, and goes out on a trawler from the coast of Maine. And there are facts: the former college instructor knows how to use local libraries as well as strike up local conversations, and the blue highways (“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue”) yield much odd information by the way. The Mississippi carries forty tons of topsoil every hour to the Louisiana delta. The word “turnpike” arose because the early toll roads were barred by revolving poles. Martin Van Buren’s autobiography never mentions his wife, and he, Charles Dickens, Andrew Johnson, and James Polk all spent a night in Jonesboro, Tennessee, which was once the capital of a state called Franklin. The first Mason jar was made near Millville, New Jersey. Since 1930, while automobile traffic has gone up fifty percent, the miles of American streets and roads have increased only eighteen percent. The phrase “skid row” comes from Portland, Oregon, where
the seedy wharf area was known as Skidroad, a logger’s term for “a timber track to drag logs over.” All this is interesting, and perhaps even more germane to his announced themes of change and connectedness are such incidental data as that the mine workers of Hachita, New Mexico, wouldn’t move into a new company town because the location didn’t get good TV reception, and that the slaves of old Kentucky built miles of precisely fitted limestone fences that now, when a car knocks down a section, are heaped back haphazardly: “Like the slaves, the skill and time necessary to build a good stone fence were gone.”
