Odd Jobs (59 page)

An uncharacteristic ambivalence of feeling is also expressed about hunting. Drawing upon the African safaris whose carnage is so matter-of-factly extolled in
Green Hills of Africa
(1935), Hemingway shows David Bourne writing about an elephant hunt he experienced as a child with his father. The fictional episodes, which come to occupy a place at the outset of each hag-ridden day and chapter, develop a momentum and an interest of their own. The boy and his dog Kibo spot the old elephant,
with his fabulously big tusks, by moonlight, and this starts his father, a hunter, and his father’s African sidekick, Juma, on the trail. As the days of tracking go by, the tired child comes to love the doomed elephant and dislike his father and Juma: “They would kill me and they would kill Kibo too if we had ivory.” The description of the shooting of the elephant is horrendous and moving and also a fall from innocence. “Fuck elephant hunting,” the boy tells his father, and thinks: “He will never ever trust me again. That’s good. I don’t want him to because I’ll never tell him or anybody anything again never anything again. Never ever never.” The splicing and counterpoint of the African story-within-a-story are managed quite brilliantly—by the author himself, Mr. Jenks assured this reviewer. Some of the pages in
The Garden of Eden
, as the elephant lumbers toward death and Catherine dips in and out of madness and David speaks his goodbyes in his heart, are among Hemingway’s best, and the whole rounded fragment leaves us with a better feeling about the author’s humanity and essential sanity—complex as sanity must be—than anything else published since his death.

G
OD
’
S
G
RACE
, by Bernard Malamud. 223 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.

God’s Grace
may seem a surprising book for Bernard Malamud to have written; but each of his novels, beginning with that intensely stylized baseball myth
The Natural
, has been surprising, a departure achieved, the reader is made to feel, after considerable contemplative effort and calculation of risk. Malamud is among the more ascetic and self-controlled of postwar American novelists—controlled not by shifts of literary fashion or vicissitudes either personal or national but by a dedication bordering on severity, an artistic intent palpable on every resilient and economical page of prose, a comic sense rooted in sorrow, and a capacity for passion that, transferred to his characters, shocks even his most studied and seemingly flat narratives into sudden life. His earnestness leads him into parable but never more than reaching distance away
from the spontaneously, helplessly true emotion. His heroes, for instance, fall in love with a tender wonderment that neither age (as in
Dubin’s Lives
) nor unlikelihood (in
God’s Grace
the beloved is a chimpanzee) diminishes. The tension in his fiction between naturalistic instinct and symbolizing tendency seems to give an alternating texture to his well-spaced succession of novels: following the interracial fantasy of
The Tenants, Dubin’s Lives
was all too generously domestic and earthbound, and now
God’s Grace
swings higher than ever toward abstraction, toward the indubitably big but dubiously real subject.

Calvin Cohn, a paleontologist studying microfossils at the bottom of the sea during the nuclear holocaust, is the only human being left on earth. Son and grandson of rabbis, he holds some direct discourse with God, drifts on the “swollen seas” (God has seen fit to inflict a second Flood on the scorched and depopulated earth) in a hundred-and-fifty-two-foot oceanography vessel with no other company than the laboratory chimpanzee, and lands on an island where more primates (eight chimpanzees, a single gorilla, eight baboons, an albino ape or two) mysteriously appear. Cohn proceeds to re-create civilization as best he can, lecturing to the unevenly receptive chimps on history, art, science, and religion. The book reminds us of
Lord of the Flies
and
Robinson Crusoe
and Pat Frank’s
Mr. Adam
, whose hero was deep in a lead mine during a nuclear catastrophe. But Malamud makes the terrain his own, mostly by uncannily humanizing, with touches both humorous and sinister, the primates. Among the chimpanzees, there is Buz, the original companion of Cohn and an acolyte to the memory of Dr. Walther Bünder, who taught him to speak and converted him to Christianity; Mary Madelyn, a lissome young female with silken hair and a heart-shaped face, whose arrival at sexual maturity predictably causes trouble; Esau, a bully (“His face was large, his teeth unsettled and wandering in the mouth”) who boasts of being “the Alpha Ape”; two oldsters, Melchior and Hattie; a pair of young twins, Luke and Saul of Tarsus; and two supporting actors named Esterhazy and Bromberg. If this sounds cute, it is, and the phonetic transcription of chimp English imparts a further frivolity to the proceedings; yet Malamud’s curious sensual searchingness bestows upon the apes such individuality that soon the reader can almost tell them apart by smell. When the restraints of Cohn’s civilizing efforts fall away, the chimpanzees’ savagery is sickeningly believable—sickening from the human point of view, liberating from theirs. In a note of acknowledgment, Malamud mentions Jane Goodall’s
In the Shadow of Man;
he has well benefited from her field studies of primate behavior.

God’s Grace
, however, as its title conveys, is less primatological than theological. It contains God as a character, speaking in quadruple quotation marks and a kind of vers libre:

Cohn quarrels with God but also says kaddish and observes seder and promulgates a set of seven commandments, of which the second reads, “Note: God is not Love, God is God. Remember Him.” The fatal schism in Cohn’s island community stems not only from sexual rivalry but from doctrinal dispute; Buz alters this admonition to read “God is love.” The chimpanzees end as barbaric Christians, making a blood sacrifice; only the gorilla, wearing a yarmulke he has found in the forest, is left to chant the ancient words of Judaism. God’s (rather parsimonious) grace also surfaces in Cohn’s sudden awareness of his own long white beard—“ ‘Merciful God,’ he said, ‘I am an old man. The Lord has let me live my life out’ ”—and in the many signs that the Creator, for all His wrath, is regenerating the world, with new kinds of vegetation and, it may eventually be, with a new form of primate civilization. Not that Malamud’s fable is not bitter and pessimistic; but its darkness remains, as it were, orthodox, and does not spill out of those presumptions which tend to be, for Malamud characters, coterminous with their own identities. Jewishness, he and other fiction writers (Singer and Ozick more than Bellow and Roth) seem to say, is in part a religious condition but is not negated by irreligion, as, say, a disavowal of faith removes a person from the lists of Christianity or Islam. A Jew does not merely choose, he is chosen; like Jehovah Himself, Jewishness sticks in some realm beyond argument and dethronement. Adversity merely confirms the Jew’s distinctive condition.
Leo Finkle, the hero of “The Magic Barrel,” draws from his misery “the consolation that he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered.” In
The Assistant
, Frankie Alpine takes up Morris Bober’s ordeal by grocery store and seeks out the pain of circumcision: “The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew.” The customary round of dutifulness, abasement, failure, and obdurate ritual with which Malamud’s Jews define themselves in a world of woe rattles a little loosely, however, in a world swept clean: a gigantic stage of desolation in one corner of which Cohn plays his old 78s of a cantor’s melodious lamentations and chimpanzees lisp answers to the seder’s Four Questions. The allegory, with its random sprinkling of Biblical names and with Buz doubling as Jesus and Judas, seems confused, and our reaction to it is further confused by the historical Holocaust that did occur and that has attached itself to the very meaning of Jewishness. A Jew reasserting his faith in the wake of Hitler’s Holocaust is a Judaic hero, a son of Abraham; Cohn in the context of global annihilation seems no more or less brave and quixotic than a Mormon or a devout animist in the same dire circumstances.

An instructive contrast with the eschatology of
God’s Grace
is provided by Stanley Elkin’s supernatural triptych
The Living End
(1979). The writers are in many ways similar; Elkin’s cadences often remind us strikingly of Malamud’s, at a slightly tougher pitch, corresponding perhaps to a generation’s deterioration in the inner cities where both are most at home. Elkin has chosen to burlesque, by taking it literally, a specifically Christian version of heaven and hell: eternal fire is rendered with savage verve; the delights of heaven are mercilessly trivialized in the cataloguing; the sacred intimacies of the Holy Trinity are served up as family comedy. The cosmic indictment—Why is there suffering? Why is Creation such a cruel botch?—is delivered, not once but often, against a flip, side-of-the-mouth Creator who could be played by George Burns. The indictment, of course, has already appeared in the Book of Job, and God replies to Malamud’s Cohn and Elkin’s protagonist, Ellerbee, in the gist of the reply Job received: “Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth … Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days?” Job responded docilely, “Behold, I am vile.” Ellerbee stridently keeps demanding “an
explanation!
None of this what-was-I-doing-when-You-pissed-the-oceans stuff, where I was when You colored the nigger and ignited Hell.” Even Cohn shakes his fist and demands, “You have destroyed mankind. Our children are all dead. Where are justice and mercy?” Yet Cohn continues to be a Jew, idealistic and pious, leaving behind him
the ragged start of a new world, while Elkin’s characters cannot rest until they have goaded God into annihilating “
everything
” (author’s italics).

Elkin, drawing on some deep heat of indignation, has composed the purer protest, a litany of scorn and incredulity directed against the images of conventional popular Christianity. None of his sufferers confess to any religious experience prior to their afterlives; we guess they are Jews—some of them—only from the way they talk. Perhaps in Elkin’s Midwest (he teaches in St. Louis;
The Living End
is set in Minneapolis–St. Paul) Christian evangels are less ignorable than in Malamud’s Manhattan and Bennington haunts. Christians and apes seem about equally remote from the essential humanity of Calvin Cohn. Yet he wishes the world well. Small miracles surround him. Begun, one guesses, in a fury at a world that can include the possibility of its own destruction,
God’s Grace
goes on to sing such precarious pleasures as intercourse with a chimpanzee: “There was an instant electric connection and Cohn parted with his seed as she possessed it. He felt himself happily drawn clean of sperm.” Happiness, usually sexual, peeks through the tatters that Malamud’s humble sufferers wear and is often what we remember best—Frank Alpine’s glimpse of Helen Bober naked through the bathroom window of
The Assistant;
in
A New Life
Levin’s lovemaking with Pauline “in the open forest, nothing less, what triumph!” As a cosmic fable,
God’s Grace
—a tender retelling of Noah’s or Lot’s shame and a comic sketch of final horror—is a muddle; but therein lies its mercy.

A S
UMMONS TO
M
EMPHIS
, by Peter Taylor. 209 pp. Knopf, 1986.

Peter Taylor’s
A Summons to Memphis
is not quite the distinguished short-story writer’s first novel; thirty-six years ago he published
A Woman of Means
, which, little more than forty thousand words long, might be called a novella. The two books have much in common: a narrator who was moved from a bucolic Tennessee childhood to a big house in a river
city (Memphis, St. Louis), a handsome and strong-willed father recovering from a business setback, a witty but somehow incapacitated and mentally fragile mother-figure (a mother, a stepmother), two older and wearingly vivacious sisters or stepsisters, a psychological core of ambivalent and ruminative passivity, and a lovingly detailed (architecturally, sociologically) portrait of life in the upper classes of the Upper South between the two world wars. This last is Mr. Taylor’s terrain, and he rarely strays from it. The narrator of
A Summons to Memphis
, Phillip Carver, lives in Manhattan, on West 82nd Street (“one of the safer neighborhoods on the Upper West Side, but still we have to be very careful”), with a woman fifteen years younger, Holly Kaplan. New York, that raucous plenitude, is felt as a kind of blissfully blank limbo, and the principal charm of his mistress seems to be that she, from a prosperous Jewish family in Cleveland, shares with the forty-nine-year-old Southern refugee a rueful, guilty obsession with the tribal reality left behind. “She felt they had a real life out there in Cleveland that she didn’t have, had never had, would never have now.” Both Holly and Phillip are in publishing, and their consuming activities seem to be reading galley proofs and discussing their families:

So worn out, indeed, that in the course of the novel they separate, only to be reunited on the firm basis of more family talk: “During the days and weeks that followed Holly and I talked of almost nothing but our two families.… And we sat there in the twilight and sipped our drinks while we talked our own combined nonsense together, each his or her own brand of inconclusive nonsense about the reconciliation of fathers and children, talked on and on until total darkness fell.…”