Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  We burned and looted because we had proclaimed poverty the universal law, and we had the right to appropriate the illegitimate riches of others, and we wanted to strike at the heart of the network of greed that extended from parish to parish.… We killed to punish, to purify the impure through blood. Perhaps we were driven by an overweening desire for justice.… We had to kill the innocent as well, in order to kill all of you more quickly. We wanted a better world, of peace and sweetness and happiness for all, we wanted to kill the war that you brought on with your greed, because you reproached us when, to establish justice and happiness, we had to shed a little blood.

  The parallel with the rationale of modern terrorism, which has afflicted Italy above all Western nations, is as clear as the sly allusion to Pope John XXIII quoted earlier. Eco spells out the revolutionary impulse behind heresy, and the oppressive poverty of the “simple” that lies behind the impulse: William of Baskerville tells the conservative, jewel-loving abbot, “I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life.” Yet he is frightened by the cellarer’s outburst of radical fervor, the cellarer’s lust for purity. When Adso asks, “What terrifies you most in purity?,” William answers “Haste,” and seems the very voice of the modern liberal paralyzed between the system’s enforcers and its unappetizing would-be revisers.

  Though a cleric and an imperial envoy, William of Baskerville is presented as an incipient modern man. He wears reading spectacles, concocts a magnet, and knows how to use—another fresh invention—a fork. He is an intellectual follower of the empiricist Roger Bacon and the nominalist William of Occam, both of whom he has known at Oxford, where, Jorge of Burgos accuses him, he has been taught to idolize reason. He foresees a future when “the community of the learned will have to propose this new and humane theology which is natural philosophy and positive magic.” Yet he also enters vigorously into medieval debate, with its stupefying mix of idle analogy, scholastic chop-logic, and reverent quotation from the Bible and its sainted commentators. Eco’s picture of late-medieval intellectual life is one of the richest aspects of this richly worked book; where we tend to imagine a gray monochrome like that of the era’s limestone cathedrals, he gives us splashes of brilliant debate upon issues still fundamental, in lurid colors taken from such now-faded sources as the apocalyptic Revelation of St. John and the Coena Cypriani, a kind of rhyming underground joke-book that flourished beneath the stern surface of orthodoxy and turned its images upside down. Eco even manages to give us a sex scene, bejewelled in quotations from the Song of Solomon; Adso, having been seduced by a young peasant girl from a village near the abbey, is thereby provoked to a noble philosophical examination of the nature of love:

  My intellect knew her as an occasion of sin, my sensitive appetite perceived her as the vessel of every grace.… I understood why the angelic doctor said that amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio, that we know things better through love than through knowledge.… And I believe that the nighttime love had been concupiscent, for I wanted from the girl something I had never had; whereas that morning I wanted nothing from the girl, and I wanted only her good … and I wished her to be happy.

  Yet it cannot be said that Umberto Eco immerses us in the Middle Ages as, say, Zoé Oldenbourg or a host of lesser historical novelists have striven to. We are always aware of—indeed, the very lavishness of his displayed erudition serves to remind us of—the play of his detached, very contemporary mind across the reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention. The book is semiotic in essence, a glittering assembly of signs vacant at the center; or, rather, at the book’s center is its own bookishness, of which dozens of bookish references remind us. The preface is elaborately bibliographical. The first sentence posits the primacy of the Word. The central mystery involves the abbey’s library and scriptorium and a certain priceless volume therein. “Here we are trying to understand,” William explains, “what has happened among men who live among books, with books, from books.” For William, Adso observes, “every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land,” and, a semiotic scholar before his time, he tells Adso, “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.” Borges’s beautiful parable of “The Library of Babel” has been here monstrously expanded, with the aid of the medieval belief that “omnis mundi creatura, quasi liber et scriptura”—“every creature of the world is as a book and scripture.” A world composed altogether of signs, however, wears thin: medieval probability is strained as Eco smoothly leads his pious young narrator into what seems limpid late-twentieth-century atheism. “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible?” Adso is made to ask. “What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?” As an old monk near death, he prepares to sink into a God who “ist ein lauter Nichts”—“a pure Nothing,” a “silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and no image.” Even granted that the Age of Belief had considerable daring in its thought and mysticism, and like our own was haunted by the void (St. Thomas discusses God, for instance, almost entirely in terms of what He is not), these stately stoic negations do seem forced upon our fourteenth-century monk from afar—from the University of Bologna, to be exact.

  A murder mystery is the most bookish of novels, with its characters made to be killed and its puzzles knotted to be unravelled. As Eco observed in connection with Fleming, a mystery “seems to be built on a series of oppositions which allow a limited number of permutations and interactions.” The reader/writer contract is plainly drawn up; after the hermeneutic delay, as Barthes wrote, “everything falls into place, the sentence can end.” But an abrupt deflation accompanies the resolution of mysteries so formally limited, and a novel thus constructed ends by seeming terribly much smaller than while in progress. Indeed, the reader feels he has earned the right to have it disappear entirely; Agatha Christie fans hope for the total forgetfulness that will enable them to read her works all over again. I do not think (as did the distinguished Boston critic Robert Taylor) that The Name of the Rose, as a historical exploration, would be better without the murder mystery in it; it is the mystery which keeps us going through all the history. But once a code has been broken, it becomes a trinket. Once this novel is set down, it feels more miniature and toylike than it should, considering the large amount of passionate wit and learning poured into its pages.

  Henry James had no use for the “fatal cheapness,” the “mere escamotage,” of the historical novel; if, after the exotic adventure of The Name of the Rose, we long for what James called “the palpable present intimate that throbs responsive,” we can turn to no more reliable purveyor of intimacy than Iris Murdoch, whose new novel, The Philosopher’s Pupil, is one of her biggest and best. It opens with a whirlwind of an argument between husband and wife, and its first paragraph is the most vivid description of driving a car in the rain—a “palpable present” sensation par excellence—that I have ever read:

  A few minutes before his brainstorm, or whatever it was, took place, George McCaffrey was having a quarrel with his wife. It was eleven o’clock on a rainy March evening. They had been visiting George’s mother. Now George was driving along the quayside, taking the shortcut along the canal past the iron foot-bridge. It was raining hard. The malignant rain rattled on the car like shot. Propelled in oblique flurries, it assaulted the windscreen, obliterating in a second the frenetic strivings of the windscreen wipers. Little demonic faces composed of racing raindrops appeared and vanished. The intermittent yellow light of the street lamps, illuminating the grey atoms of the storm, fractured in sudden stars upon the rain-swarmed glass. Bumping on cobbles the car hummed and drummed.

  Let
this evocation stand as typical of Miss Murdoch’s magic when it works: the blunt successive sentences, with scarcely a dependent clause among them, yield up the superb “little demonic faces composed of racing raindrops” to remind us that not all is as simple and declarative and breathless as it seems—that a highly symbol-prone intelligence presides behind this hurrying actuality. In twenty-one unstinting novels now, this writer has mined her imagination and the world around her for philosopher’s gold. With rare concern and knowing, she writes, in a post-religious age, about spiritual activity, as it sparks along that interface where human perception breeds demons out of raindrops.

  The quarrelling couple is George and Stella McCaffrey; the McCaffreys—Alexandra, the sixty-six-year-old doyenne of this wealthy family; George and Brian, her sons, in their forties; Tom, the twenty-year-old offspring of Alexandra’s dead husband, Alan, and a runaway, now also dead, named Fiona Gates; and Adam, the eight-year-old son of Brian and his wife, Gabriel—are at the center of the saga, which has so many other characters they seem to constitute the entire population of Ennistone, the small English city, “not exceedingly far from London,” where the action takes place in a busy period of about three months. The compressed time-span, the device of a disappearing and reappearing first-person narrator who knows impossibly much, and the emphasis upon a certain family and a provincial community, feel reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s later novels. If Miss Murdoch has deliberately refreshed her reading of these, it is a happy move; the Russian’s theatricality, wild humor, and troubled spiritual urgency are all up her alley. Like Dostoevsky, she is interested in people’s influence over one another—their sway; the bogies we make in one another’s minds; the gravitational permutations as spiritual bodies plunge on in their self-centered orbits.

  The seminal event in The Philosopher’s Pupil is the arrival back in Ennistone of Professor John Robert Rozanov, who, after a humble youth in one of the city’s less fashionable districts, has found in the wider world fame as a philosopher and in America, where he teaches and lectures, some wealth. He has brought in his wake his granddaughter, Hattie Meynell, and her paid companion, Pearl Scotney, who by no great stretch of coincidence is half-sister to Alexandra’s venerable servant, Ruby Doyle, and cousin to George McCaffrey’s longtime mistress, Diane Sedleigh; Rozanov installs Hattie and Pearl in the Slipper House, an elegant little Art Deco residence on Alexandra McCaffrey’s property, and, oddly keen to find a suitable mate for his seventeen-year-old ward, settles upon happy and innocent Tom McCaffrey. Tempestuous, demon-driven George, in the meantime, is ferociously obsessed—in one of those apostolic obsessions that torment Iris Murdoch’s characters and that all seem descended from a primal schoolgirl crush on Teacher—by Rozanov, whose unsuccessful pupil he once was. John Robert’s Olympian indifference to him rankles George to the point of murderous rage. The novel’s title, incidentally, is somewhat ambiguous. Though George would seem to have foremost claim to be the titular pupil, his wife, Stella, was also a student of Rozanov’s, and a more favored one; and Father Bernard Jacoby, a disbelieving Anglican priest, claims in a letter that “I was his last pupil and I failed the test.” And, in a droll final twist, a prize younger pupil of Rozanov’s, the American Steve Glatz, shows up in Ennistone and carries off the town prize, the rich and beautiful Anthea Eastcote, great-niece of the saintly Quaker philanthropist William “The Lizard” Eastcote—who, you should know, makes the first of several flying-saucer sightings reported in the novel. Another character worth mentioning is Emmanuel “Emma” Scarlet-Taylor, Tom’s androgynous young Irish friend, a brilliant student on his way to be a historian but distracted by Pearl Scotney and his own magnificent counter-tenor voice. The peekaboo narrator calls himself “N” and names the town after himself—N’s town, Ennistone. He is, we gradually learn, middle-aged, unmarried, something of a voyeur, and Jewish. Jewish also are Stella McCaffrey, Father Jacoby, and, one surmises, Steve Glatz. Enough plot, surely. There is plenty more of it, all sumptuously cloaked in Miss Murdoch’s unfailing and seemingly effortless provision of faces and costumes and hairdos, of furnished rooms and architectural façades, of histories personal and local, of delightfully individual toads in botanically specific gardens. She is the happiest imaginer in the English-speaking world, fearless and fresh whether she bares a night of homosexual initiation or a music lesson, a Quaker meeting or a murderer’s exalted frenzy, a dog’s impression of a fox or an old woman’s dream of dispossession.

  This reviewer found The Philosopher’s Pupil more involving and satisfying than the previous, equally energetic and knowledgeable novels by Miss Murdoch that he has read lately—The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and Nuns and Soldiers. Why? For one thing, love has been given something of a vacation here, or at least romantic infatuation shares with other sorts of steam the propulsion of the characters. A certain friendly grit coats this little industrial town, with its “strong and long-standing puritan and non-conformist tradition.” Away from the dreaming spires of Oxford and the verdant squares of London, Miss Murdoch shows a bracing grasp of plain unpleasantness. In George McCaffrey she has created a fascinatingly nasty man—conceited, disappointed, muddled, and outrageous and destructive with a smugness that perhaps only an Englishman could muster. His brother, Brian, is saner but otherwise no great improvement; nor is tyrannical, corpulent John Robert Rozanov a very appealing apparition. Unless we call love George’s mad desire to impress Rozanov, or Stella’s aloof loyalty to her cruel and slovenly mate, erotic passion scarcely enters the plot until halfway through, and then in the ironic form of a knightly quest openly allegorized. Until then, and throughout, we are in the grip of a type of murder mystery, in which the question is not “Whodunit?” but “What did he do?” Did George try to kill Stella? And the psychological mystery the author has set herself to examine is not that of amorous affect but that of human destructiveness, bilious and incorrigible. Miss Murdoch, in short, has given her darker side some rein and her broad and shrewd perceptions of human nature some breathing space away from the doctrine of omnipotent Eros. The Triumph of Aphrodite is a masque rehearsed in the novel, but the reader is excused from seeing it performed.

  Moreover, in the so thoroughly and affectionately constructed setting of Ennistone she has given her volatile spiritual dramas a solid stage. The town is distinguished by the presence of famous and ancient hot springs. The waters, dating back to Roman times and rumored to have medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities, are housed in a set of pools and Victorian structures called The Bath Institute. Almost all the citizens of Ennistone swim the year round, and the gatherings and encounters of the characters at this watery forum as they stand about in the near-nude like figures on one of Dante’s penitential terraces make a recurrently resonant image—souls and not bodies seem to be assembled. Miss Murdoch, with her painterly eye and theatrical sense, is a deviser of tableaux, of meaningful environments. When, during an impromptu revel outside of the Slipper House, a drunken Emma lifts the lid from his hidden gift and sings, the crowd freezes like a throng in Mallory: “And they stood where they were, as still as statues, some even in the attitudes in which the music had surprised them, kneeling on one knee or holding up a hand.” The Ennistone baths, with their constant steam and rumble issuing from an unfathomable underground source—the earth’s subconscious, as it were—afford the novel’s vapors and machinations a hot center that yet is quaintly, sturdily actual. Tom, in his role of knight errant, descends into the heart, forbidden to the public, of the bath’s mechanism, a “mass of gleaming pipes, some very small, some enormous … a light silver gilt in colour, a very very pale gold, and covered with tiny droplets of moisture which glittered here and there like diamonds.” We are thrilled, and simultaneously acknowledge the symbolic dragon’s cave and the pragmatic marvel of Victorian plumbing. Water has often figured in Miss Murdoch’s work as the outward emblem of the amorous power that suffuses and overwhelms us; by enhousing it at the center of her city she has tamed and channelled and strengthened
the symbol. Things fit; the novel’s furniture is irradiated by feeling, and functions as thing and sign both. When, toward the end, a UFO swoops low and blinds a character, we are not put off as if by whimsy; we know by now what is meant, and in what sense such things do happen. “The inner is the outer, the outer is the inner: an old story, but who really understands it?”

  Of course, fault can be found, as with any free and generous production. In a field of characters so panoramically wide, not all ripen as perhaps was intended. Adam and his dog Zed rather fade away; Ennistone’s crowd of “bright young things” do little more than swell the scene. Though Father Bernard was mistaken for the main character by the person who writes up the Times Book Review’s “And Bear in Mind” section (for this novel was no best-seller), in fact the priest is flimsy, and a victim of the author’s tendency to hit and run, to fling scarecrows into her gardens. At one point during an electric-power cut, this faithless but compassionate cleric is ministering to a Miss Dunbury, who is near death, frightened, and deaf; so she can read his ritual consolations, he has her train a flashlight on his lips. What pathos and terror Bernanos or Graham Greene or even, in his clipped way, Evelyn Waugh would have extracted from this inspired tableau! But here it glances by, somehow campy. In a later scene the priest is found meditating to the sound of Scott Joplin’s “Sugar Cane.” Though he thinks, “But oh the desire for God, the desire, the desire,” it is “Sugar Cane” that gets, and keeps, our attention. The novel’s evident moral haphazardly falls to the priest to pronounce, in a letter penned from Greek exile: “Metaphysics and the human sciences are made impossible by the penetration of morality into the moment to moment conduct of ordinary life: the understanding of this fact is religion.”