by Martin Amis
For instance, is it funny that a Canadian should be asked to compile an anthology of funny prose? ‘The Cream of Canadian Humour’, after all, is a regular contender in those jocose short-book competitions – along with ‘Australian Etiquette’, ‘Italian War Heroes’ and so on. Mordecai Richler is an accomplished comic novelist, though of the manic, buttonholing, spray-fire variety: a glance back through his stuff confirms that he is funniest when being least ‘humorous’. And humour itself is a bad word, isn’t it, in such ‘best-of’ contexts? The humourless will buy this book in hope that it will wonderfully improve their laughter quotas and joke-recognition profiles. But it will only multiply their confusions.
Like Richler’s fiction, the anthology divides fairly equally into two unrelated categories: first, prose that is incontestably, fanatically, apoplectically funny and is (therefore) not funny at all; and, second, prose that is going about its business as prose should and is only incidentally or secondarily funny, or quite funny, or (in many cases) not funny at all. Mr Richler clearly likes a good laugh. It would be idle to accuse him of humourlessness. I would say with some confidence that, on the whole, Mr Richler boasts a sense of humour. But we all have our blind-spots, and humour is a funny thing.
Of obvious appeal to the humourless is the writer who comes on stage in a clown outfit or King Kong suit, with party hat and harem slippers, with banana skins and custard pies. Now here’s a humorist. Such writing takes six main forms:
1. The whimsical travesty. ‘Gertrude raised her head and directed towards the young nobleman two eyes so eyelike in their expression as to be absolutely circular, while Lord Ronald directed towards the occupant of the dogcart a gaze so gazelike that nothing but a gazelle, or a gas-pipe, could have emulated its intensity.’ No one laughs at this kind of facetiousness except the author himself (Stephen Leacock), whose chortlings are audible, and ruinous. I’m afraid J.B. Morton comes under this grouping too. People I think are funny think ‘Beachcomber’ is funny. But he isn’t funny. He might once have cheered you up in a surgery waiting room. A few years on, though, and between hard covers? Lady Nausea (Tabs’) Bottleown? Celery Vowpe? Lord Lochstock and Barrel?
2. The prose parody (which must always announce itself as such, just in case). The appropriate form for parody is the short poem. Perelman’s Chandler is fun, and so is E.B. White’s Hemingway, and so is Wolcott Gibbs’s mimicking exposé of Time magazine; but they exhaust you with their surplus brilliance after less than half a page. As for cases like Jean Kerr on Francoise Sagan: why compound the tedium when the original author has done so much of the work?
3. The autobiographical anecdote. This genre is another clunker, though inoffensively represented here by Nora Ephron, John Mortimer and Jessica Mitford. The tone is cosy and collusive. The narrator tends to be in a bit of a scrape but comes through okay in the end. ‘We peered cautiously out of the window’, ‘we quickly dashed round a corner’, and so on.
4. The comic column. It remains a sound rule that funny journalism can only flourish as the offshoot or sideline of something larger. No funny journalist who is that and nothing more will ever write anything lastingly funny. Thus the more recent stuff (by Alan Coren, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier) looks good, because the contemporary frissons it deals in are still current. The less recent stuff looks bad. And the more recent stuff will soon look like the less recent stuff.
5. The mock-heroic, in whatever guise. One example, from Alexander Theroux: ‘It was high tea: the perfervid ritual in England which daily sweetens the ambiance of the discriminately invited and that nothing short of barratry, a provoked shaft of lightning, the King’s enemies, or an act of God could ever hope to bring to an end.’ This elaborate banality might serve as a lesson to all fifth-formers. The sentence is a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate; even in the interests of pseudo-elegant variation, you cannot start a clause with a which and then switch to a that.
6. The party turn. Extended charades or word games, diverting enough in the workaday hands of Thomas Meehan, Dan Greenburg and George S. Kaufman. It is bathetic, however, to see Flann O’Brien, a writer of comic genius, represented only by his lugubrious ‘Keats and Chapman’ concoctions. ‘ “There’s a nip in the heir,” said Keats.’ ‘ “His B. Arch is worse than his bight,” said Keats.’ Puns are cues or triggers to the humourless, and double puns are obviously twice as funny as single ones. Poor Flann! He must have cranked out these duds after lunch, in drunken scorn or cynical despair.
Mr Richler does lesser but considerable disservice to many of his writers by catching them left-handed or wrong-footed. Such capable middleweights as Truman Capote, Terry Southern, Bruce Jay Friedman and Wilfrid Sheed are included merely as jocular journalists; the exuberant Saul Bellow is thrown away with a travel piece; the great innovator Peter de Vries is shamed by a dull parody of Faulkner. Showing remarkable assiduity, the editor has also managed to track down and rootle out a wholly ill-judged critique by Kenneth Tynan and a completely unfunny article by H.L. Mencken.
Otherwise, Mr Richler includes decent-sized extracts from the mainstream fiction of Eudora Welty, Thomas Berger, Stanley Elkin, Beryl Bainbridge, John Cheever, V.S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and – the most successful piece in the book – Philip Roth. Some of these offerings are no more than mildly funny, and were never meant to be. They are loosely comic as opposed to humorous, comedy being definable as a world where the greatest sins are folly and pretension, and where the ultimate deliverance is merely one of laughter. Your response to these writers at their best, is a persistent smile of admiration – a response that Mr Richler should perhaps have aimed for all along.
There is something whorish about looking for laughs, or laughs only, and there is certainly a good deal of excruciation in following such a quest. Seldom have I eyed a half-finished book with more vivid dread. Give me an 800-page extravaganza by a Guatemalan magical realist; give me a book on German accountancy. Well, only the meek and put-upon reviewer has to trudge through the whole thing. It can be done. As in all life’s crises and trials, you just have to keep your sense of humour.
Observer July 1984
John Updike
Life Class
Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike
The adversaries of good book-reviewing are many and various, but the chief one is seldom mentioned – perhaps because of its ubiquity. We hear a lot, especially from academics, about reviews not being academic enough; and it is true that ‘name’ reviewing of the Evel-Knievel-on-Kierkegaard variety often shows the reviewer hideously stretched. We hear a lot, especially from publishers, about reviewers using books as springboards for tangential musings; and it is true that the book trade might well improve if the blurb-transcribing sots of yesteryear were reinstated. And we hear a lot, especially from authors, about ‘showing off’, about metropolitan spite, and about the unearned asperity of the menial scribbler – cheek’, as F.W. Bateson once labelled the tendency. These vices exist, perhaps, but they don’t seriously diminish that corner of intellectual life which literary journalism inhabits. The crucial defect is really no different from that of any other kind of writing: it is dullness. The literary pages throng with people about whom one has no real feelings either way – except that one can’t be bothered to read them.
As a literary journalist, John Updike has that single inestimable virtue: having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes. At a time when the reviewer’s role has devolved to that of a canary in a pre-war coalmine, Updike reminds you that the review can, in its junior way, be something of a work of art, or at least a worthy vehicle for the play of ideas, feeling and wit. His stance is one of ultimate serviceability: the alert and ironic layman unanxiously detached from the world of literary commerce (indeed, ‘I must be one of the few Americans with a bachelor-of-arts degree who has never met either Robert Lowell or Norman Mailer’). And the fizzy pungency of his prose is answered by the intense, if erratic, streng
th of his responses. Updike’s reviewing is high-powered enough to win the name of literary criticism – which is to say, it constantly raises the question (a question more interesting than it at first sounds), ‘What is literature?’
A rather workaday grumble to be made about Picked-Up Pieces is that many of its pieces ought never to have been picked up – at least not without emendation. Complaints about the price of particular novels or a book’s margin-sizes may look well enough in the columns of the New Yorker but appear footling between hard covers. Several books-received notices on humdrum theologians should have been exorcized, and it is hard not to be startled by a sixty-word citation to Thornton Wilder (which carries a fifty-word footnote humourlessly defending its inclusion). Include away: here, plainly, Updike is more interested in his personal filing-system than in his normal courteousness towards the reader. And then, too, the hot snort of the hobby-horse can be felt on and off throughout books of this kind. Updike is mad about golf, for instance, and three excitable articles on this pastime are duly reprinted. Part of the trouble, no doubt, is that a regular reviewer will often have to gouge standard-length pieces out of sub-standard books. And, inevitably, Updike will sometimes look like an Olympic swimmer in a bathtub.
The heart of Picked-Up Pieces, however, is its fiction reviews, where Updike can always revert to first principles and so remain unimplicated by the frequent banality of his material. Updike goes at fiction with a firm idea of what he takes a novel to be, but he is incomparably good at conveying the weight of an author’s prose, the lineaments of the talent behind it. Even when he is scorning what seems admirable or praising what seems mischievous, there is never any clouding of the issues involved. Yet the readings are intractably didactic, even polemical; and although Updike’s methods are close to irreproachable, one can only react polemically to his findings.
For some reason, most of the novels Updike has chosen to review are translations. I thought at first that Updike must have some gluttonous craving for local colour, judging by his preparedness to read the likes of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Yambo Ouologuen, Ezekiel Mphahele, Paul van Ostaijen, etc. Surely, one reads even the foreign classics in translation as a guilty duty, to get some blotched silhouette, as one might look at snapshots of inaccessible paintings. But Updike regards the language barrier as a rut which any frog could straddle:
Distinctly unmusical, at least in translation … at least for a reader deprived of the original Polish … [the translator], who for all I know has done the best of all possible jobs … also excellent, at a guess, is the translation from the Dutch …
Updike can keep a straight face while noting the linguistic tang of translated ‘Arab and Bantu exclamations’; and he is perfectly capable of talking about the style of a novel translated from the French translation of the Polish – which is like analysing the brushstrokes in a Brownie. It is an insensitivity that points to an imbalance in Updike’s view of how novels work, and it loiters in everything he says about fiction.
Even Nabokov’s fiction – and the seven essays on Nabokov are perhaps the most valuable thing in the book. The swagger of Updike’s prose provides the ideal window for the teeming haughtiness of Nabokov’s, from his excesses (‘his prose has never menaced a cowering reader with more bristling erudition’), to, very nearly, his essence: ‘Nabokov’s is really an amorous style … it yearns to clasp diaphanous exactitude into its hairy arms.’ Here, you feel sure, is a critic unimprovably equipped for and attuned to his author. But here too, suddenly, Updike’s linguistic blindfold (e.g., Dmitri Nabokov’s adjectives in his translation of Glory are caressingly praised, as if for all the world they were Vladimir’s) is whipped off to reveal tightly closed eyes. ‘Is art a game? Nabokov stakes his career on it’; he makes ‘airtight boxes … detached from even the language of their composition’. If you substituted ‘embodied in’ for ‘detached from even’ you might get within hailing distance of Nabokov’s art, but by now Updike is in full retreat. Nabokov, horribile scriptu, spurns ‘psychology and sociology’, confronting us ‘with a fiction that purposely undervalues its own humanistic content’.
Uh-oh, one thinks. Updike is a Protestant of the small-town Dionysian sort, and that does his writing no harm; yet he is also a Humanist, of the numinous Apollonian sort, and this does seem to account for that vein of folksy uplift which underlies his novels as well as his criticism. Thus, Auden’s ‘technical displays cast doubt upon the urgency of his inspiration’ (presumably, then, Updike’s ignorance of the form of the haiku, revealed in the previous paragraph, is an oblique tribute to Updike’s urgency). Thus, Erica Jong’s appallingly written and irreducibly autobiographical Fear of Flying is a ‘lovable, delicious novel’, because, well, in Updike’s view Erica Jong has a lovable and delicious lifestyle. Would Updike defend this on the grounds that a writer’s life can ‘matter more than his works’? Or because, as Updike says five pages later, books can ‘exist less as literature than as life’?
Life. ‘Life.’ Some people seem very keen on stressing their approval of this commodity, almost as if the rest of us had no time for the stuff. Updike, who likes fiction to believe in ‘improvement’ and ‘a better world’, crucially asserts that ‘by a novel we understand an imitation of reality rather than a spurning of it’, and grades them accordingly. But what’s the difficulty? Life goes on regardless, and reality won’t mind if a novel spurns it. The confusion is age-old, answering as it does to an authentic pang. If Updike granted art the same reverent autonomy he grants life, some ‘improvement’ would indeed take place: he would become a better critic. Meanwhile, get to grips with this Christian gentleman. His gallantry reliably extends to whatever is disadvantaged, homely, long-suffering, foreign or feminine. Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be available to all.
New Statesman March 1976
Roger’s Version by John Updike
If the strong nuclear force were 2 per cent stronger than it is, the universe would consist entirely of helium; if it were 5 per cent weaker, the sun wouldn’t burn. If the weak nuclear force were any weaker than it is, there would be no heavy elements, no structures, in space. And if the mass of the neutron were only .998 of its actual value, there would be no atoms at all. In short, the universe – the world, human life – is a preposterous fluke. You could fill the rest of this page with zeros and have little notion of the odds against:
‘Everywhere you look,’ he instructed me, ‘there are these terrifically finely adjusted constants that have to be just what they are … and there’s no intrinsic reason for those constants to be what they are except to say God made them that way. God made Heaven and Earth. It’s what science has come to. Believe me.’
The speaker is Dale Kohler, a spotty, pallid, wised-up eternal student, who wants a grant that will enable him to prove the existence of God – on his computer. The listener, appropriately, is an expert on heresy: Roger Lambert, our narrator, one-time Methodist minister, now a divinity-school professor in New England. (As he puts it, he used to be in the ‘distribution’ end of the religion business, but these days he’s in ‘quality control’.) Roger is repelled and intrigued by Dale – and by almost everyone and everything else (this is a novel of weighty dualities). In Dale, perhaps, he sees a version of his younger self, though one hopelessly degraded by modern ‘head-culture’, by the era of big brains and microscopic sensibilities.
At any rate Roger adopts Dale and helps him get the grant for his doomed and blasphemous project. In return Dale reacquaints Roger with a lost relative, sassy and foul-mouthed young Verna. A single parent in a housing project, Verna is Roger’s runaway niece, the daughter of his half-sister: there is just enough consanguinity to lend an incestuous flavour to their entanglement. Meanwhile, via feats of empathy which teeter on psychosis or fictional innovation (what one might call the W
andering or the Floating Narrator), Roger starts to ‘live through’ Dale, to see through his eyes, to yearn through his loins. This is a particularly absorbing hobby for Roger, because Dale is now dividing his time between his quest for the evident God and a rather more successful quest for Esther, Roger’s neglected little wife.
All according to Roger, of course. This is merely Roger’s version, the gospel according to Roger. It is never quite clear, for instance, whether Dale is really having an affair with Esther, or whether Roger is indulging in extended erotic fantasy as he pictures their couplings and ungluings, their squattings and squirtings. Here too we encounter one of Updike’s few faults or excesses, his undifferentiated love of detail. Faced with a character’s genitals, we don’t get the phrase or sentence we think we could make do with: we get a paragraph of close-up. On the other hand, maybe the obsessiveness can be granted structural status here: it is Roger’s obsession, and provides an overlong but necessary glimpse of his duplicitous, sublimating, sleepwalking soul.
Even by the standards of late-middle Updike, Roger is a grossly paradoxical figure, exalted and demonic, heartless and sentimental, magnanimous and mean: a ‘dour, tweedy villain’, ‘with every pinch that lust and spite had delivered in a half-century of egoism somewhere remembered in the slack and creviced texture of [his] cunning, cautious face’. He is caught between heaven and hell – or between heaven and earth, which will do these days. Equally keen on pornography and theology, he is alike addicted to the ‘rat scrabble’ of Dale’s God-seeking computer and to the helpless nostalgie that leads him back to the smells and secretions of Verna’s two-room walk-up. She calls him ‘evil’ – and he is flattered. He revels in his own heresy: ‘that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God’s forgiveness can magnificently play’.
