Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  The old man had a Buick. He liked to wheel it up our brick drive, which was bordered by a dense cane patch. He was one of these magazine handsomes who was turning gray in the hair at forty-five; the gray strands were flames from a hot and ancient mental life, or so he thought. His mental life was always the great fake of the household. He had three years at L.S.U., makes sixty thousand a year, has the name of a bayou poet—Ode Elann Monroe—and has read a book or two over above what he was assigned as a sophomore. So he’s a snob, and goes about faking an abundant mental life. He always had this special kind of bewrenched and evaporated tiredness when he came home from the factory.

  With the verve of the young Bellow but with little of Bellow’s love, Mr. Hannah can seize a person and hurl him into print:

  Perrino, still sporting his horseshoe beard and instructing trumpets, was odd. Eastman had given him license. He came to us wailing; he had his hands over his head, and you could see written back in his eyes that he had obtained some ruinous Ph.D. from somewhere. His tie knot waggled down on his open collar, and his clothes were like bandages coming apart over a horrid wound to his chest and soul. He wore sandals over black socks, which seemed to represent the same anguish at his feet. He was slightly chubby, with bags under his eyes like rotting bananas, and behaved as if he were the last gasp of Italianism in America.

  The author does not shy from pushing an image into absurdity, and pulling it out on the other side:

  [My father] engaged me in a sort of contest at milk-drinking while we waited for the answers to come out. It all ended with our drinking so much milk we were ready to puke; the old man churning himself into a dull butter of meditation about my life.

  Some of the metaphors carry the shock of real poetry:

  My youth was an old sick pirate; there was a boy back there lying on the reefs, bleeding. The lad’s throat had been cut. I had cut it.

  All this energy of expression, however, adorns a listless and ugly tale whose dominant mood is funk. “He wondered … if he could get over this period, this hump, which was not a hump really but a whole range of dismal mountains of funk.” Harry’s father is the third-richest man in Dream of Pines, a Louisiana papermaking town with a pervasive miasma and the cultural scope of a broom closet. Off-hours from the mattress factory he owns, he doodles in his study with the fantasy of being an author; his son flavors boredom with raptures over music. The Dream of Pines Colored High School has funnelled its meagre resources into a crack marching band, “that played Sousa marches and made the sky bang together”; this flare of excellence lights up the sodden mediocrity of all else. Dream of Pines public education is detailed with morbid zest, and the Mississippi college that enrolls Harry seems even more ill-tuned to his inner melody. Nothing links up; Harry keeps dropping things halfway through, including an inspired jazz solo and several instances of sexual intercourse. He tends to see all women as “roaches.” The males he knows are possessed of isolating visions: Harley Butte, his mulatto friend, by a passion for John Philip Sousa; Bobby Dove Fleece, his roommate, by a lavishly verbalized obsession with sex; Whitfield Peter Lepoyster, his enemy, by a demented racism; Dr. Lariat, his professor, by a sterile cynicism. And in his own head Harry is Geronimo, the savage Indian rebel, at war with all society.

  The youth of the fifties were not, as is sometimes implied, complacent; their contempt for the institutions around them was paralyzingly thorough. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar saw right through everything, and were too savvy to believe things could ever be otherwise. The vision of becoming as gods, of a neo-primitivist life style alternative to an ironical conformism, of a hot connection between private emotion and public policy, had to wait for a wave of desperation prefigured in Geronimo Rex by an unconvincing turn toward violence. This caustic small-town boyhood becomes, finally, a hollow shootout, with real bullets and blood if not real reverberations. Granted, guns seem standard equipment down South, and craziness does sometimes out. But—as in another Louisiana novel with a humid flamboyance, Robert Stone’s A Hall of Mirrors—the violence feels dreamy, and too much the author’s; the plot does not produce the violence as a tree produces fruit, but ends in it as a car ride sometimes ends in an accident. The author loses empathy with the hero. Harry’s boyish infatuation with a sluttish millworker is movingly explored, but his later affair with Lepoyster’s niece Catherine is nearly inexplicable, and his abrupt marriage to sixteen-year-old Prissy Lombardo totally so. The book ends on a sour note of putdown; Dr. Lariat, the professor of literature, tells Harry Monroe, the budding practitioner of it, that they’re in the “wrong field.” Music is the one.

  Still, after Divine Right’s Trip, in which America and its general populace form a backdrop for young tourists trailing their roots in some nirvana between here and Mars, it is salutary to read a novel in which the young and the middle-aged are interlocked, albeit in gruesome struggle. To judge by Geronimo Rex, young men like Bobby Dove Fleece still writhe and tremble under the old religious taboos; girls like Sylvia Wyche still struggle to save their hymens for their fiancés; instructors like Dr. Perrino still think they have something to teach; and all generations are mired equally in the squalid but substantial provincial ambience. Father and son, in this novel, lust after the same slut and the same muse. Mr. Hannah is nowhere better than he is in showing the complex currents of parent-child sympathy that swirl around acts of overt rebellion. Perhaps the South has a certain retarded solidarity; certainly Gurney Norman’s pageant of reconciliation occurs more plausibly in Kentucky than on an Iowa corn farm or in a California orchard. Perhaps, too, the art of fiction is intrinsically mediating and anti-propagandistic; it reduces general issues to the faceted confusion of private lives, with their undoctrinaire mixing of personal quirk, conscious intention, and elementary biology. Of these two novels, Mr. Norman’s is winged with surer purpose and Mr. Hannah’s has the richer sense of circumstance. One rather skims, the other wallows; both give a fresh angle on the great American subject of Growing Up, and both offer the same American advice: Don’t do it until you must.

  Jong Love

  FEAR OF FLYING, by Erica Jong. 340 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.

  Erica Jong’s first novel feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose. Mrs. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, surveying the “shy, shrinking, schizoid” array of women writers in English, asks, “Where was the female Chaucer?” and the Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this. Fear of Flying not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint—that of the New York voice on the couch, the smart kid’s lament. Though Isadora Wing, as shamelessly and obsessively as Alexander Portnoy, rubs the reader’s nose in the fantasies and phobias and family slapstick of growing up, and masturbates as often, she avoids the solipsism that turns Roth’s hero unwittingly cruel; nor does she, like Holden Caulfield, though no less sensitive to phoniness, make of innocence an ideal. She remains alert to this world.

  How little our happiness depends on: an open drugstore, an unstolen suitcase, a cup of cappuccino! Suddenly I was acutely aware of all the small pleasures of being alive. The superb taste of the coffee, the sunlight streaming down, the people posing on street corners for you to admire them.

  Admiring she is even of the impotence, madness, and defective hygiene of her many awful lovers. A feminist since birth (she says), radicalized at the age of thirteen “on the I.R.T. subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary,” Isadora Wing nevertheless has more kind words for the male body than any author
since the penning of Fanny Hill:

  He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds.… That was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky.

  Her account of her travails among these silken creatures, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations.

  The second of four daughters of a would-be paintress and a father who designed “ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets,” Isadora grew up in a fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. She heavy-pets (let’s call it) at thirteen, remorsefully tries to starve herself at fourteen, embarks upon a series of psychiatrists (the first is Dr. Schrift; he’s short, of course, and tells her, “Ackzept being a vohman”), enters Barnard at seventeen, meets the brilliant Brian Stollerman when she is a freshman, seduces him and puts her virginity out of its misery, marries Brian after graduation, endures his swelling madness while she attends graduate school, commits and divorces him at twenty-two, takes up with an unwashed, musical loser called Charlie Fielding, is betrayed by him, embarks upon a swinging tour of Europe with a girl friend at the age of twenty-three, returns to New York, meets a silent thirty-one-year-old Chinese Freudian named Bennett Wing, marries him, and now, five years later, at the age of twenty-nine in 1971, attends with her husband an international congress of psychoanalysts in Vienna, where she meets, loves at first sight, and runs away with an English Laingian psychiatrist called (yes) Adrian Goodlove. This life history is scattered carefreely backward and forward throughout three hundred and forty pages that should be read, one sometimes suspects, in fifty-minute sessions. A pattern and a person emerge, amid the wisecracks, postcards (“Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed”), and reflections upon the hard and curious lot of Woman. Intellectual condescension, physical intimidation, deodorant-selling insinuation—women suffer them all. The case for marriage is nailed in a sentence: “Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better.” Motherhood is another distrusted institution: “Basically, I think, I was furious with my mother for not teaching me how to be a woman, for not teaching me how to make peace between the raging hunger in my cunt and the hunger in my head.” Her mother, a frustrated artist, is full of “misplaced artistic aggression,” and Isadora thinks sadly of young wives “making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why.” The smaller discomforts of femininity are vividly, comically detailed, from the presence of a heavy suitcase to the absence of a needed Tampax; females, we are told, are even at a disadvantage making water by the roadside, tending to piss in their shoes. The one female complaint not registered, surprisingly, is the one most conspicuous in seriously sexy male fiction, such as Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time.” However adverse her circumstances, Isadora Wing seems to have no trouble attaining orgasm. And maybe this is what makes her saga so uncranky, for all its intelligent pain, and lends its prose a spun-sugar halo of wonder and fun, and gives its conclusion the smug snap of a shopping expedition satisfactorily completed:

  I looked down at my body. The same. The pink V of my thighs, the triangle of curly hair, the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero, the white belly, the breasts half floating, the nipples flushed and rosy from the steamy water. A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it.

  The male reviewer, grateful to be served this lovable, delicious novel (each chapter garnished with epigraphs), embarrasses himself with digestive rumblings. While intimacy with Isadora Wing is maintained, the reader accepts the value she puts on her own story: a reconciliation of the hunger at the poles of her being, a triumph, if precarious, over aerophobia and the socially conditioned guilt and slavishness that lie beneath it. At a little remove, however, the story can be viewed as that of a spoiled young woman who after some adventures firmly resolves to keep on spoiling herself. She bounces about on a ubiquitous padding of money: her parents were well-to-do; her first husband’s parents were able to pay for private treatment of his madness “fees [of] about $2,000 a month,” Charlie Fielding lived on a trust fund, both her present lover and husband are psychiatrists, with the subliminal affluence of that priestly profession. To be sure, the middle class has problems, too, and most novels are written about them, but as an instance of sexist oppression Isadora Wing should be recognized as a privileged case, with no substantial economic barriers between her and liberation, and—by her own choice—no children, either. Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s elegiac novel of female revolt, The Awakening, was a mother as well as a wife, and drowned herself to escape the impasse between her personal, artistic identity and her maternal obligations. Childless, with an American Express card as escort on her pilgrimage, and with a professional forgiver as a husband, Isadora Wing, for all her terrors, is the heroine of a comedy.

  On the back jacket flap, Mrs. Jong, with perfect teeth and cascading blond hair, is magnificently laughing, in contrast to the sombre portrait that adorns her two collections of poetry. Rather disconcertingly, not only does Isadora Wing, like Erica Jong, write poetry but she writes Mrs. Jong’s poetry, two samples of which are included in this book. And the reader of Fruits & Vegetables (1971) and Half-Lives (1973) has already encountered Isadora Wing’s fractured leg and her burgeoning crow’s-feet, her multi-colored notes to herself and the trail of sequins one of her gowns leaves, her mother’s avocado tree behind her mother’s avocado-colored couch, her mad first husband and her fondness for likening human cheeks to willow tips for softness, her irritated observation of Braque and Utrillo prints in psychiatrists’ offices, and her quotation of Sylvia Plath’s question “Is there no way out of the mind?” In some of the poems of Half-Lives, the husband and the lover of Fear of Flying are distinctly silhouetted, and in the earlier collection the sequence entitled “Flying You Home” presents the removal of “Brian Stollerman” to a California hospital in a slightly different light—more moving and ominous than what we find in the corresponding chapter of the novel, where the incident seems one more of the long string of zany mishaps that comprise Isadora Wing’s amorous education. Fear of Flying wears its gossamer disguise as fiction with a breathtaking impudence; the difference between “The Green Hornet” and the “Blue Wasp series for radio” appears about the thickness of it. Adrian and Isadora playfully discuss how he will be portrayed in the book she will presumably write about their affair, and the sister whose husband later attempts sodomy on Isadora screams at her, “Well, I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing—do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all.” The disinterested reader, of course, need not tremble, but the flashback sections about romances past do feel more spilled than told, and there is something a shade archetypical about the heroine: for all the times she looks at herself nude, she remains visually misty, and the author’s nimble recourse to cultural and psychoanalytical tags verges on nervous patter. As a creator of scenes and characters, Mrs. Jong is at her best in the present—that is, at the Vienna Congress of 1971, with Isadora running back and forth between her husband and her new lover, getting their inexhaustible and incompatible analyses of what is happening. Here, comedy becomes satire and distress becomes drama. The prose flies. Throughout, the poet’s verbal keenness rarely snags the flow of breathy vernacular; a few false shifts of tone, an occasional automatism of phrase (“intensely interested,” “poring over books,” “clutching my baby” within six lines), a few clammy touches of jargon insignificantly mar a joyously extended performance. The novel is so full, indeed, that one wonders whether the author has enough leftover life for another novel. Fearless and fresh, tender and exact, Mrs. Jong has arrived nonstop at the point of being a literary personality; may s
he now travel on, toward Canterbury.

  * Which they were, by a landslide. Only to resign, separately, in a devastating self-defeat. Of recent American mysteries, none more needfully awaits its sensitive biochemist than, in the years 1972–1974, the simultaneous and evidently symbiotic extermination of all honor in the highest places and the drying-up of the counter-culture, as if astonished to death by the super-vindication of its protests.

  OLDER AMERICANS

  Indifference

  MORNING NOON AND NIGHT, by James Gould Cozzens. 408 pp. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

  Beginning, forty years ago, with a style of sober purity, James Gould Cozzens has purposefully evolved a prose unique in its mannered ugliness, a monstrous mix of Sir Thomas Browne, legalese, and Best-Remembered Quotations. The opening chapter of his new novel, Morning Noon and Night, cloudy as a polluted pond, swarms with verbal organisms of his strange engendering. As Cozzensologists before me have discovered, there is no substitute for the tabulated list. We have the Unresisted Cliché:

  Here are clouds of witnesses, faces and forms in serried ranks …

  I don’t intend here any telling in mournful numbers.

  Simply, the wood is not to be seen for the trees.

  The Lame Echo:

  To be sure, in this distraction of the mind, as through a glass darkly …

  You have not world enough and time.…

  I feel it leaves man as much as before the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.