The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible; and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes. Whereas Updike, of course, is a psychotic Santa of volubility, emerging from one or another of his studies (he is said to have four of them) with his morning sackful of reviews, speeches, reminiscences, think-pieces, forewords, prefaces, introductions, stories, playlets and poems. Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by an embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favourite colour. No problem – but can they hang on? Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.

  Odd Jobs is his fourth cuboid volume of higher journalism, following Assorted Prose (1965), Picked-Up Pieces (1975) and Hugging the Shore (1983). It shows us a huge mind at once crammed and uncluttered. If writers – if people – are either clean-desk or messy-desk (and I write these words from under the familiar haystack), then Updike is a spotless work-surface above tightly packed drawers: he is organized. He is also, apparently, omniscient, as au fait with evolution, for example (‘asteroidal or cometary causation’ set against ‘punctuated equilibrium’), as with scriptural scholarship (‘it is roughly true that Matthew = Mark + Q and that Luke = Mark + Q + the considerable body of narrative and preachment present only in Luke’). Or how about this:

  Edward is the son of the famous painter Jesse Baltram and his mistress, Chloe Warriston, and Stuart of the famous writer Casimir Cuno’s son Harry, who married Chloe when she was pregnant with Edward, and Harry’s first wife, Teresa, née O’Neill, a Catholic from New Zealand who, like Chloe, died young, having produced one male child.

  John Updike even knows what’s going on in a novel by Iris Murdoch.

  On the whole, he is modest about his formal education. ‘I peaked, as a scholar, in my junior year,’ he writes, and capped my academic career with a dull thesis and a babbling display of ignorance at my oral examination.’ Since then, in a trance of evergreen precocity, he has been educating himself: doing his homework and writing his essays. It is a commonplace that autodidacts are trying to impress somebody – mother, father, a sainted schoolteacher, their own platonic selves. But there’s no need to ask whose approval Updike is after. He aspires, in his own way, to something seraphic while heeding various New Testament recommendations about kindness, self-abnegation, and the value of suffering.

  It isn’t the first or indeed the second thing that strikes you, but Odd Jobs is a record of near-biblical torment. (Maybe the second half of the title should be pronounced with a long o.) ‘The prose’, Updike stoically notes at one point, reviewing Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov, ‘comes across as colorless and rarely gets off the ground’: the book is 685 pages long. And still the supposed masterworks are heaping up on the mat, from Chile, from Paraguay, from Austria, from Albania. You have only to look at the bibliographical lead-ins to feel your lower lip tremble: ‘Cities of Salt, by Abdelrahman Munif, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux. 627 pp.’ 627 pages from the Arabic … Yet Iron John dispatches that one, and is ready for more. Often he is to be found chirpily welcoming a ‘sprightly first novel’ or the latest from a ‘brave little publishing house’. Although many writers leave Updike unstirred (deficient in juice, in warmth, in life), only a handful succeed in disheartening him: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Thomas Bernhard, Jacques Derrida.

  In one of the four admiring essays on John Cheever, Updike fondly recalls a trip they made together in 1964 to Russia, where Cheever’s ‘lively fancy and brave ebullience’ made the grim tour ‘as gay as an April in Paris’. We therefore share Updike’s consternation (‘It was with some surprise that I read …’) a few pages later, when he comes across the following from The Letters of John Cheever:

  Updike, whom I know to be a brilliant man, traveled with me in Russia last autumn and I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company. I think his magnaminity [sic] specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart.

  Still reeling from that, we then get S.J. Perelman writing to Ogden Nash about ‘the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page’. Updike takes this hard, but he takes it; and his admiration doesn’t falter. On the way up, the aspirant sees literary eminence as an ocean liner, with a champagne reception awaiting him in first class. Once there, he encounters ‘a kind of Medusa’s raft’, littered with snarling skeletons.

  Actually, the density of Odd Jobs is not just an indication but a proof of Updike’s magnanimity. As Karl Barth says of Mozart, ‘Joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it … The Yea rings louder than the ever-present Nay’; and Updike has always been spiritually committed to the Yea. Oddly, it is his generosity that causes the only kind of trouble he ever gets into – trouble with the bien-pensant left. His recent, quirky autobiography, Self-Consciousness, contained a contorted essay on Vietnam. Here, Updike’s selective blindness, his reluctance to think ill, led him to reject the radical package of malaise, conspiracy and paranoia – and thus to support the war. Included in Odd Jobs is a speech entitled ‘How Does the State Imagine?’, given in 1986 as part of the forty-eighth International PEN Congress, in which Updike sings a sunny little hymn to the US Postal Service. A postscript tells us how very badly the speech went down, in the ‘goblin air of fevered indignation and reflexive anti-Americanism’. Updike sometimes seems a lonely and anachronistic figure in this age of irony and dread. But only a cynic would accuse him of cynicism, for cynics are condemned to see cynicism everywhere.

  In Self-Consciousness Updike revealed that his father, in later years, took to wearing a wool Navy watch cap: ‘It kept his head warm, yet also made him look like a cretin.’ This is one of the perverse consolations of ageing, Updike argued: pleasure in looking foolish, whimsicality, unselfconsciousness. One can see a similar strain, perhaps, in Updike Jr (who now wears a watch cap himself, all winter, inside and out). There is a trundling quality, increasingly indulged: too much trolley-car nostalgia and baseball-mitt Americana, too much ancestor worship, too much piety. In his collected art criticism, Just Looking, Updike often seemed happier with the hack than with the genius. Here, too, you feel he is more relaxed with the likes of Sherwood Anderson and William Dean Howells than with, say, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov – his only obvious superiors in the second half of the American century.

  But let’s be clear. This book is a torrent of finely phrased justice: the ‘rather blithely morbid sensibility’ of Graham Greene; ‘the ailment of excessive clear-sightedness’ suffered by Tolstoy; Umberto Eco’s permanent ‘orgy of citation and paraphrase’; John O’Hara, in whose work ‘all sorts of irrelevancies stick up, almost like bookmarks’; the ‘slightly unctuous stiffness of tone’ in a biography of T.S. Eliot, as if ‘[Peter] Ackroyd were trying to make adequately stuffy conversation with an odd old type with whom he has been condemned to spend a fiendishly prolonged sherry hour’; or the sensation, in Kafka,

  of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every touch as pain.

  New York Times Book Review November 1991

  Ultramundane

  Here Comes Everybody

  Who’s Who in Twentieth Century Literature by Martin Seymour-Smith

  It is said that Coleridge was the last man to have read everything. He isn’t any longer. Mr Martin Seymour-Smith is. The author of the four-volume Guide to Modern World Literature (a work so panoptic that hardly anybody dared review it) now brings us the equally far-flung Who’s Wh
o in Twentieth Century Literature. And here, again, Seymour-Smith not only gives the impression that he has read everything ever written by and about everyone in every language: he also gives the impression that he has read everything ever written by and about everyone in every language twice.

  Genuinely humbling though much of Seymour-Smith’s erudition is, the constant parade of omniscience is not, to put it mildly, without its funny side. He makes no apologies for knowing everything, and indeed it is his tundra-like humourlessness on the point that makes the book so diverting. Having read, in the ‘A’ section, successive essays on a Romanian poet, an Argentinian novelist, an Alsatian sculptor, a French playwright and a Guatemalan ‘fiction writer’, I went back to a remark I had noticed in the introduction. There it was: ‘The resultant selection is therefore necessarily biased towards British and American authors.’ Muttering not just ‘who’s who?’ but occasionally ‘who dat?’ I stumbled on through the gobbets about Danish polemicists, Senegalese poets, Italian memoirists, Afrikaans poetesses, Nigerian playwrights, Basque philosophers, German essayists, Russian syncretists …

  A bemusing habit of Seymour-Smith’s is to make a remark of truly galactic learning – and then dwarf it by revealing a whole new universe of bibliomania in the background. Daniel Fagunwa is the first important writer in Yoruba and Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale is assuredly his best book. Ah, but he did not build up an account of Yoruba cosmogony as poetically as did ‘Tutuola (q.v.)’. The Icelander Halldór Laxness’s fiction, we’re all agreed, is ‘not wholly integrated’. Were you aware, however, that he owed much to the ‘untranslated’ Thórbergur Thórdarson ‘who is perhaps the superior writer’?

  Similarly, opinions so exotic that you can’t imagine anyone human holding them are frequently made to sound banal and secondhand by the World-weary Seymour-Smith. ‘It is now fashionable’, for instance, ‘to dismiss his poetry while acknowledging his enormous influence.’ Who might this be? Rubén Dario, the Nicaraguan poet who died in 1916. Well, if it is fashionable, I shall start dismissing Dario’s poetry at once, while naturally acknowledging his enormous influence. How, you wonder, can Seymour-Smith keep in touch with so many cultures? Do people ring him up from time to time and say, ‘Someone else has learnt to read and write down here’? I went through the book half-expecting the ‘X’ section to be the longest: there, surely all the really unknown writers would find a home.

  Unfair, of course. Despite the fact that Seymour-Smith’s oeuvre includes The Bluffer’s Guide to Literature, I am inclined to credit at least half of the scholarship exhibited here – in itself a colossal accolade. How much use this book will be to anyone but George Steiner, though, remains debatable. On those writers who do ring a bell with me, Seymour-Smith is by turns impartial, biased, mean, forgiving, prurient, sympathetic, hamfisted, delicate, trivial and profound. Is Willa Cather ‘one of the more important American writers of this century’, Pirandello ‘the greatest short-story writer of the century’, Kenneth Burke ‘the most rewarding English-language critic of this century’? Was Graves ‘ultimately rejected’ by Laura Riding? Was Kipling ‘(unconsciously) in love’ with his second wife’s brother? God knows, and so does Mr Seymour-Smith, but what is a beginner to do with such questions?

  Digests of this sort should be the work either of committees or of humdrum minds. Seymour-Smith is not a committee and his mind is not humdrum. On the contrary, his response to literature is at once busy and deep. The main question posed by the book, which is a plea for internationalism rather than a directory, is whether it will make readers less parochial or more so. Having been drawn into Seymour-Smith’s surreal world of – what next? – Kampuchean controversialists, Chelyabinskian concretists, Maharashtrian manifestoists, Kalmykovoan typewriter-repairers, Liaoningian paperclip-dealers, I have decided to get round to reading The Merry Wives of Windsor first. Then we’ll see.

  Observer June 1976

  Russian Ghost

  Islanders and The Fisher of Men by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Translated by Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi

  Along with Bely, Bunin and Bulgakov, Yevgeny Zamyatin rode the last wave of Russian fiction. ‘Having become the most fantastic country in all present-day Europe,’ he wrote, in an essay on Wells published in the early Twenties, ‘post-revolutionary Russia will undoubtedly reflect this … in a literature of fantasy.’ But of course the literature never happened; it was collectivized, immured, eliminated, and now persists only in scattered and contorted forms. Its ghost is visible in the Nabokov of Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, in the skittish mysticism of ‘unborn’ Russian writers like Saul Bellow, and in the satirical epics of such banished survivors as Alexander Zinoviev; and of course there is Solzhenitsyn.* Bely’s Petersburg, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Zamyatin’s We – exalted, ecstatic, fizzing with humour and licence – are the flagships of a vanished literature.

  The present volume contains the previously untranslated novella Islanders and the companion story ‘The Fisher of Men’. And the book is remarkable in every way, not least in its provenance and implications. A naval architect, Zamyatin spent most of 1916 and 1917 in Newcastle, overseeing the construction of ten ice-breakers for the Tsar: an appealingly eerie happenstance, as if D.H. Lawrence, say, had designed aeroplanes in Vladivostok. Both stories are set in England – Islanders was written there – and they reveal Zamyatin’s complicated attachment to our national ethos. (Among the Russian bohemians of his day the tweed-suited Yevgeny was known as ‘The Englishman’; he translated Sheridan and Wells, and wrote on Bacon and Shaw, among others.) In Zamyatin’s quirky diagnosis, the natives emerge as fastidious and fantastical, dogged and capricious, busy rationalizers of their abiding repressions. Islanders predates We by three years and anticipates it in detail, despite the radical switch in setting and timescale. For a while, one entertains the extraordinary thought that We is not a futuristic satire on mature Soviet tyranny so much as a gentle lampoon of British utilitarianism. The Benefactor, the Big Brother in We, is Lenin all right; but he is also Dickens’s Gradgrind, hideously magnified.

  Just as the One State in We is ruled by Hourly Commandments, so the Reverend Dewley in Islanders is smugly in thrall to a life of self-imposed timetables. On one timetable, ‘which particularly concerned Mrs Dewley … every third Saturday was marked’ – for amorous play, again prefiguring We, with its Sexual Days and copulation coupons (‘She held out to me her tiny pink mouth – and her small pink ticket. I tore off the stub’). The English bourgeoisie secretly yearns for the Great Machine of State, which will eradicate human volatility and variance. Even the effusiveness of nature is repellent to the well-regulated citizen: the ‘ill-bred’ sun shines ‘scandalously bright’, the birds sing ‘inexcusably’, and the flowers ruin the ‘respectable, well-clipped’ trees. As in We, mendacity is saluted as an evolutionary accomplishment (lying alters messy reality; besides, animals can’t do it, so it must be good); and the nightlife of dreams is feared and hated, because it represents chaos, creativity and desire, the three things that the good citizen is most anxious to suppress.

  The point is, of course, that Zamyatin was himself imaginatively drawn towards the tendencies he vilified and satirized. Artist and engineer, he responded to an impossible vision of human order and mechanical harmony. The comic masterstroke of We (the title is marvellously triumphal, with its proud denial of all singularity) was to make the narrator, D-503, a passionate fan of the One State, pompously exulting in the horrors that surround him. Zamyatin had the imagination of a Futurist and the heart of a Luddite; and in that rift his genius lived. Like Bernard Guerney’s We, the translation is wonderfully supple and elegant – perhaps because Zamyatin’s ‘Englishness’ eases the passage of his prose. We now await the resurrection of the essays and the plays.

  Observer November 1984

  * There is also, unquestionably, Vasily Grossman. His monumental Life and Fate was published, posthumously, in 1985.

  Nothing is Deserved and Everything i
s Accepted

  The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka; The Complete Novels of Franz Kafka. Principal translators: Edwin and Willa Muir

  Much has been said and written about Kafka’s guilts and alienations, his obsessive love for his father and for Milena Jesenská, his sickness of body and distemper of mind, the prescient universality of the Kafka ‘predicament’. These handsome volumes, published halfway through the centenary year of his birth, provide a chance to re-glimpse an aspect of Kafka often lost among the punditry and scholarly gossip, and among the half-impressions subsumed by that woolly watchword ‘Kafkaesque’ (used, nowadays, to describe a train delay or a queue in the post office). Namely, the stuff itself – the work, the art.

  The Penguin Complete Short Stories cunningly opens with ‘Two Introductory Parables’ – ‘Before the Law’ and ‘An Imperial Message’ – neither of them much more than a page in length. In the first story, a man from the country approaches the gate to the Law and begs its formidable doorkeeper for admittance. ‘Not at the moment’ is the repeated reply. Should the man venture through the gate, there will be other doorkeepers, each more formidable than the last. ‘The third doorkeeper’, says the first doorkeeper, ‘is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.’ The man sits and waits, for months, for years. Now withered by age, the man asks with his last breath why no one else has ever come to seek admittance to the gate of the Law. The doorkeeper shouts into the ear of the dying man: ‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.’