Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  The False Precision, the Legal “Or”:

  … to inform yourself of any peculiarities or limitations of his that could have affected his observation or could now be coloring his report.

  … what they seem in our work or practice. I am not suggesting that I feel we are or ever could be ethically obligated.…

  … by elements of lust whether loving or unloving, a catalog longer or shorter of women …

  The Vapid Expansion:

  What used to be, not just well enough, but often very good indeed, must be left religiously alone.

  The Inversion Frightful, Capped by Cute Periphrasis:

  In eating employed now are partial dental prosthetic devices.

  Be that how it may, Nancy, as friends call her, will not refuse the rites mysterious of connubial love.

  The Gratuitous Scientism:

  Penetrated, the microscopic cell is fertilized (in accepted language of the process, two gametes fuse to form a zygote).

  The Infatuated Sonority:

  His course of ripe and ripe is running, and the rot and rot won’t fail to follow.…

  Multitudinous as these remembered works of Nature may be, more multitudinous still, and by far, must be remembered works of man.

  What Cozzens has set himself to achieve, and has, as he might say, so regrettably succeeded in achieving, is the literary equivalent for or capture of the all too veritably human quality of stuffiness. In tone and tedium, Morning Noon and Night is a four-hundred-page-long after-dinner speech.

  The speaker is Henry Dodd Worthington; the dinner has been his life. Born at the turn of the century as the son of a small-college English professor, the narrator of this novel, after an acceptable education at an unnamed prep school and Harvard, and after shrugging off both teaching and writing as possible careers, drifted into employment with a Boston collection agency, and from this indifferent beginning rose to found Henry Worthington Associates, a management-consultant firm of prestige so immense that both he and the reader find it implausible. He has been twice married: his first wife, Judith, cuckolded and divorced him; his second, Charlotte, committed suicide. Violence, indeed, has made rather free with his relatives; his parents were asphyxiated in a hotel fire, and his two grandchildren were killed in the crash of a plane. Henry (or “our Hank,” as he jocosely calls himself) is of genteel Protestant background, an indirect descendant of President Franklin Pierce; during the Second World War he served as an Air Forces major, mostly in the Pentagon; his present preoccupations are the unhappiness of his daughter Elaine, now on her third divorce, and the composition of this memoir. The events of his life are not related consecutively but emerge as his memory rambles over the past; he ruminates at length upon such diverse matters as his grandfather’s feud with the early Freudians, the tricks of management consultation, the technique of running an antiques shop, the sinking of the Titanic, the vagaries of chance, the nature of the Puritan heritage, the ups and downs and ins and outs of sexual “appetency,” and (an unexpected obsession) the shabbiness of the literary world. Many of these essays, once the muddled sonority of the style is tuned out, possess interest, even a certain surly brilliance, but as a life the book lacks what it must have—life.

  Elaine is the only character other than the narrator allowed to have any kind of a say; the novel’s keystone scene is an interview between the distressed daughter and the stiff but sorry father, held in the courtyard of H.W. Associates’ posh new suburban plant. But when, after seventy solid pages of authorial discourse, quotation marks appear amid the print and Elaine breaks into speech, she talks just like a little Henry, or (since without a doubt our Hank is pretty much our Jim) a little Cozzens. Listen to her:

  “So when Wilfred deflowered me I was pretty much, as the books say, unawakened.”

  “You know; lovely Sue makes like softly panting while the geranium tree is planting. And doesn’t that show what’s up for grabs here is love forever true, and oughtn’t he to latch onto it?”

  “You bet! Moving finger writes. Correct. And all my tears, or such as I’ve let drip, don’t wash out a word.”

  Embarrassed, apparently, by her own wealth of literary tags, she admonishes her father, “Don’t forget the expensive liberal-arts education you bought me. When it pays to, I can sound tolerably literate.” But it doesn’t pay; their conversation is lumpy with false wit and stilted slang and brittle with a supervisory knowingness—not a dramatization of her plight but an awkward exposition of it. So it is with the entire book. Henry’s marriage to Judith, by all indications the deepest relationship of his life, is represented by some mocking paragraphs on newlywed lust, a potentially poignant but skimped account of their courtship, an unskimped theory as to how her father’s anti-sexual High Anglicanism drove her decades later to promiscuity, a few cursory references to their divorce, a full exposition of Henry’s financial advice to the antiques business she sets up in, and a glancing admission that now she is dying. She hardly speaks a sentence; for her one moment onstage, she is seen through her daughter’s eyes distantly on a beach, coupling with a lover. Charlotte, the second wife, appears in Henry’s account as a suicide note, as a glimpse of her in the shower (heavily misted by panting references to David and Bathsheba), and as an equable compliment to her secretarial ability. All the characters—wives, friends, business associates, service colleagues—are immersed, mute and all but immobile, in the tyrannous flow of Henry Worthington’s disquisitional lava.

  Now, to what extent does the author stand apart from his persona, as, say, John Marquand does from George Apley? How much of Henry’s stuffiness is intentional caricature? Is his sluggish eclipse of the life he has lived a novelistic defect or an ironical comment? Mockery there is in abundance: Henry mocks his youthful ardor, his elderly dignity, his risk-less wartime career, the little shams and maneuvers of his trade. His memory seeks out low moments: “mean actions of mine; uglinesses of greed or lust; shameful exhibitions of ignorance; deserved humiliations; mortifying follies and defeats.” And the epigraph from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, describing those who, “moving others, are themselves as stone,” suggests that a self-portrait of a type of man and an implicit judgment were intended. But Marquand, even in his later novels, maintained an outsider’s perspective on his Brahmins, whereas Worthington’s voice and Cozzens’ are indistinguishable, and the opinions of author and character merge in a ponderous, pessimistic morass of self-distrust and weary puzzlement.

  Having troubled to invent a business profession for his alter ego, and having supplied a convincing amount of data and theory, Cozzens compulsively reverts throughout his narrative to the problems of the literary practitioner, to attacks upon “half-writer pretenders” and “liberal intellectuals.” He includes a coy reference to the minor American writer Frederick Cozzens. He gives Henry, the supposed author of a million memos and directives, his own preposterously pedantic style, including the obligatory exotic words—inappetency, erethism, furibund, condign, innominate, muliebrity, deontology. Frequently heard is the rumble of hobbyhorses being ridden by that ultra-conservative Cozzens displayed years ago in Time—a kind of male Ayn Rand who in this book must dote upon a fictional bank’s status “in the best financial circles” as being “better regarded than the latter-day not always prudent House of Morgan,” who speaks of Roosevelt’s “near-senile megalomania” and the Kremlin’s “dupes” and “expert perfidies and duplicities,” and who seems pleasurably smitten by the speculation that a typhoon would have wiped out our scheduled invasion of the Japanese home islands had not the war been ended by the atomic bombs, which in passing are viewed as the “means to right a ceaselessly growing imbalance in Nature, to solve quickly and easily theretofore insoluble problems of excess population.”

  Not that political conservatives should be barred from the halls of fiction; rather, they should be better represented there, to relieve the present rather shrill unanimity on the left. Nor is author/alter-ego closeness an intrinsic handicap; Herzog, for examp
le, is an excellent novel. Its superiority to Morning Noon and Night lies not only in Bellow’s far livelier gift for conjuring up personalities but in his, and Herzog’s, belief that a better world somewhere exists, that improvement can be sought and choices can be made. The illusion of free will, illusion or not, is necessary to a novel; excitement and import derive from the reality of human decision. As Henry Dodd Worthington describes himself, he has been always a product, a zygote formed by two fused gametes, in the grip, successively and simultaneously, of biology, heredity, social usage, sexual impulse, chance, and inertia. The turning points of his life—his marriage to Judith, his entry into the world of business, his enlistment in the Army Air Forces, his divorce and remarriage—are all seen as uncaused drift, “little governed by logic or demonstrable cause and effect.” Herzog, at the end, can stop writing letters and set the table for a tryst, whereas Henry can only conclude that he knows nothing, that his life has been a “wandering directionless,” a game of “blindman’s buff—now sightlessly bumping into things, now surprised by sportive unreturnable blows.” His memories—in the book’s last, best flight of imagery—are seen as ruined fragments and, far off, “a dozen or more aqueduct arches, commencing suddenly, suddenly ending, coming now from nowhere, now going nowhere.” There is “thin final sunlight,” and then “the child must soon be taken away to bed.” A child is someone who lacks responsibility and power of choice; Henry Dodd Worthington, adviser to big business, labels himself as one. This vision of helpless, pointless process is at the heart of the novel’s profound inaction, of its analyzed but unrealized events, and even of its reactionary style, seeping backward to include all those tired mottoes and phrases and clichés as if wryly to admit that nothing new can be said. Resigned pessimism is a defensible philosophy, and may be the natural end of American enterprise, but it makes for very dull fiction.

  Piqued by this book’s curious badness, I turned to Cozzens’ first full-length novel, The Last Adam. Though a trifle slick, with its climactic town meeting and its magnificent starring role for an aging screen idol (it was made into a movie, Dr. Bull, starring Will Rogers), it holds up well; the evocation of the Connecticut town of New Winton, the tight knit of weather and geography and people into a plot, the particularity and immediacy of every scene all show a mastery remarkable in a man of thirty. Cozzens then had more grasp of ordinary, middling America—or at least more willingness to transmute his grasp into art—than Hemingway and Fitzgerald ever showed. The hero of the novel, Dr. Bull, is sixty-seven, just about Henry Worthington’s age, and he remembers the sentence from the Psalmist with which Henry begins his memoir: “I have been young and now am old.” And cosmic nullity is present in both books: “Left to herself [a telephone operator in The Last Adam], and to what she could see of the universe, real and ideal were lost together in an indifference so colossal, so utterly indifferent, that there was no defining it.” This colossal indifference, this abyss beneath society and conventional success, has always been with Cozzens, but as a threat, as a defining darkness, not as an all-swallowing enemy. From The Last Adam to Morning Noon and Night, the broad social scene of New Winton, primarily Protestant, has dwindled to one member of the Puritan aristocracy; class consciousness has narrowed to class loyalty. Cozzens has become like a Yale undergraduate in the earlier book: “He knew by now that he and his more intimate friends were right; or, at any rate, he could easily see that people who differed conspicuously in dress or behavior, in ideals or attitudes, were, as far as his college was concerned, wrong. His gray eyes considered all those in error with a level, complete indifference.” Arthur Winner, of By Love Possessed, gave those not of his sort short shrift. Henry Worthington doesn’t see them at all, they are squeezed into the remotest margins of his memoir, and there is nowhere to stand to see him, to judge him. Only the bitter vacuity of his conclusions betrays the possibility that somewhere along the way he went wrong.

  Papa’s Sad Testament

  ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, by Ernest Hemingway 466 pp. Scribner’s, 1970.

  This book consists of material that the author during his lifetime did not see fit to publish; therefore it should not be held against him. That parts of it are good is entirely to his credit; that other parts are puerile and, in a pained way, aimless testifies to the odds against which Hemingway, in the last two decades of his life, brought anything to completion. It is, I think, to the discredit of his publishers that no introduction* offers to describe from what stage of Hemingway’s tormented later career Islands in the Stream was salvaged, or to estimate what its completed design might have been, or to confess what editorial choices were exercised in the preparation of this manuscript. Rather, a gallant wreck of a novel is paraded as the real thing, as if the public are such fools as to imagine a great writer’s ghost is handing down books intact from Heaven.

  So we are left to perform the elementary scholarly decencies ourselves. Carlos Baker’s biography speaks of a trilogy about the sea that Hemingway, amid the distractions of Cuba, the cockfights and double Daiquiris and proliferating hangers-on, carried forward with enthusiasm in late 1950 and early 1951. The third item of the trilogy, “The Sea in Being,” was separately, and triumphantly, published as The Old Man and the Sea. The first part, “The Sea When Young,” seems to have been an abridgment of an earlier, disastrously long and gauche novel called Garden of Eden. The middle section, “The Sea When Absent,” has for its hero an American painter named Thomas Hudson and, in the form that Hemingway announced as “finished” by Christmas of 1950, answers the description of the section entitled “Cuba” in the present book. “The Island and the Stream” (sic) had become, by mid-1951, the working title of the first section, presumably the revamped Garden of Eden. Baker says: “It contains ‘wonderful parts’ that he hated to cut out, but he was now clear that it must be reshaped to the style and tempo of the other three sections.” Of the “other three,” one is the story of Santiago that would soon be a separate novel, one is the “Cuba” mentioned above, and the third is “the sea-chase story,” which, in Hemingway’s opinion, was “impregnable to criticism” and was almost published in Cosmopolitan, in two installments. In the book Scribner’s has published, this sea-chase is the third section, “At Sea,” and the first section, whose adjusted title now does for the whole, is entitled “Bimini.”

  What we have, then, is a trio of large fragments crudely unified by a Caribbean setting and the nominal presence of Thomas Hudson. “Bimini” is a collection of episodes that show only a groping acquaintance with one another; “Cuba” is a lively but meandering excursion in local color that, when the painter’s first wife materializes, bizarrely veers into a dark and private region; and “At Sea” is an adventure story of ersatz intensity. Hudson, if taken sequentially, does not grow but dwindles, from an affectionate and baffled father and artist into a rather too expertly raffish waterfront character into a bleak manhunter, a comic-book superhuman containing unlooked-for bubbles of stoic meditation and personal sorrow. Some conscious attempt is made to interlock the characterizations—the manhunter remembers that he is a painter, and gives us some hard-edged seascapes to prove it; the bar clown intermittently recalls that he is drowning his grief at the death of a son—but the real congruence of these masks is involuntary: all fit the face of Ernest Hemingway.

  Whereas an achieved novel, however autobiographical, dissolves the author and directs our attention beyond him, Islands in the Stream, even where most effective, inspires us with a worried concern for the celebrity who wrote it. His famous drinking, his methodical artistic devotions, his dawn awakenings, his women, his cats, even his mail (what painter gets anything like a writer’s burdensome, fascinating mail?) are all there, mixed with less easily publicized strains, dark currents that welled into headlines with his last illnesses and shocking suicide. The need to prove himself implacably drives Thomas Hudson toward violence and death. His enemy, pain, has become an object of infatuation. Even in the first, most lyric passages, when he is visited
on Bimini by his three sons, what lives for the father-narrator are scenes of savagery—the machine-gunning of a shark and a boy’s day-long wrestle with a huge swordfish. The child, bent double, bleeding in hands and feet, is held fast to the fighting chair by the surrounding men, his guardians, so that he can experience “love”:

  “Well,” David said with his eyes tight shut. “In the worst parts, when I was the tiredest I couldn’t tell which was him and which was me.”

  “I understand,” Roger said.

  “Then I began to love him more than anything on earth.”

  As if to insulate his fatherhood from his dreadful passion for violence, Hemingway creates in this section (never to reappear) another alter ego, a brawling, brooding writer named Roger Davis, and thrusts upon him a gratuitously brutal fistfight, as well as a number of reckless and self-destructive traits that the placid morning painter Thomas Hudson has supposedly outgrown. But in “Cuba,” Hyde has been reunited with Jekyll, and Hudson—always a fond describer of guns, and a lover of blood sports—seems right at home among drinking companions who cheerfully remark, of prostitutes who gave imperfect service, “We ought to have poured gasoline on them and set them on fire.” Later, Hudson himself, asked by his wife if their only son is dead, answers with the amazing monosyllable, “Sure.” The final episode, “At Sea,” sees Hudson’s fulfillment as a killer, and Hemingway’s as an addict of the casually cruel touch. A large “obscenely white” crab offends Hudson: “the man shot him between his eyes and the crab disintegrated.” Removing a bullet from a sun-dried corpse is “like cutting into a pie.” A grenade eliminates a wounded German: “How is the Kraut in the bow?” “He’s a mess.” Truly Hudson tells himself, “The horrors were what you won in the big crap game that they run.” Well, the author is helping run this crap game, and it takes a little disintegration to keep him happy; unable to decide which of the hero’s three boys to kill, he kills them all, two in one section and the third, with comic rigor, in the next.