Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Ludvik Jahn, a prize student, gifted musician, and rising Party loyalist, falls from official grace through a joke: he sends a girl he wishes to tease and impress a postcard reading:

  Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!

  Such irreverence on a postcard does not go overlooked; inexorably Ludvik is investigated, summoned, and expelled not only from the Party but from the university. The military is the compulsory option left to him, and he is assigned with other suspect recruits to the penal battalion, which wears a black insignia and mines coal. The process of his disgrace and the life of the penal camp are described with a convincing calm realism, the emphasis laid less on their cruelty than on the victim’s psychological adjustments. Ludvik’s fellow soldiers in the camp of outcasts are given human variety and plausible raisons d’être; even the brutal, histrionic boy commander who heads up the camp is analyzed and excused: “The young can’t help acting: they’re thrust immature into a mature world and must act mature.… Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand.” The one camp inmate who gets destroyed is the one fanatic Communist, pathetically determined to prove himself loyal. The others do what they must, slack where they can, and cope with their sexual frustration. They are paid for their labors and allowed some weekend leaves. Ludvik makes the acquaintance of a virtually mute, shabbily dressed girl of the people, Lucie, and his love for her, fed by the gifts of flowers she slips through the barbed wire that usually separates them, is the one pure note of his life. They never consummate this love. They fight when she denies him sex, and Lucie disappears. After five years of laboring, Ludvik manages to resume his studies and eventually rises to a high position in an unspecified research institute. (Kundera himself was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies.)

  Ludvik Jahn’s memory of his expulsion from the Party, of the meeting that decided it—“Everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion”—and of the former friend, Zemanek, who delivered the eloquent address recommending expulsion, has poisoned his life and his relation with humanity. “Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that place, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test.” An opportunity arises, after fifteen years, to avenge himself upon Zemanek; Ludvik seizes it, with complex and unforeseen results. All the plot’s threads are wound around a busy three days Ludvik spends in his home town, an unnamed community in Moravia where, as it happens, Lucie has reappeared and the streets are filled with a collective enactment of the Ride of the Kings, an ancient folk ceremony that the Party now administers. The climax of the novel is too crowded, too freighted with symbolization and pronouncement, and aspects of the denouement border too closely on farce. But this terminal congestion testifies to the fullness of the material and the pressure with which it bore upon the author.

  Two old friends Ludvik encounters are Jaroslav, first fiddle in the town’s cimbalom ensemble and an ardent folklorist, and Kostka, a doctor in the local hospital and a Christian whose faith has cost him several official posts. Both men, in their individual chapters of monologue, articulate their master passions and relate them to the country’s socialism with striking brilliance. Kostka believes that materialism is unnecessarily linked to socialism; he mentally addresses the atheist Ludvik:

  Do you really think that people who believe in God are incapable of nationalizing factories?… The revolutionary era from 1948 to 1956 had little in common with skepticism and rationalism. It was an era of great collective faith.… In the end the era turned coat and betrayed its religious spirit, and it has paid dearly for its rationalist heritage, swearing allegiance to it only because it failed to understand itself. Rationalist skepticism has been eating away at it without destroying it. But Communist theory, its own creation, it will destroy within a few decades. It has already done so in you, Ludvik. And well you know it.

  Jaroslav finds the collective essence in folk music, and entertains us with a rapturous evocation of the levels of history he hears in the melodies of southern Moravia: brass-band tunes from the last seventy years, syncopated gypsy czardas from the nineteenth century, the songs of the native Slav population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late-medieval Wallachian shepherd songs “completely innocent of chords and harmony,” four-tone mowing and harvest songs from the great ninth-century Moravian empire, and, finally, songs analogous to ancient Greek music—“the same Lydian, Phrygian, and Dorian tetrachords.” Jaroslav’s dream, unrealized, is to give his beloved folk music the worldwide currency of jazz, for, like jazz, it is a music of improvisation and rhythmic originality. While such fascinating passages of exposition run on, Kundera’s plot stands still, and his Ludvik, Jaroslav, and Kostka speak too much with one voice, so that a single erudite professor seems to be discussing from three angles how Marxism failed him. But the virtue of these passionate digressions, much as with Mann’s spoken lectures in The Magic Mountain, lies in their dense enrichment of the novel’s locus and the significant weight they add to its incidents. The Joke is not ultimately about Communism, or love, or misanthropy; it is about a patch of land called, in recent times, Czechoslovakia. Most novels that strike us as great, come to think of it, give us, through the consciousness of characters, a geography amplified by history, a chunk of the planet.

  Czechoslovakia could well have become another Austria; the last of the satellite countries to fall into Russia’s orbit, and the most progressive and industrialized, it had itself—that is to say, a powerful domestic Communist movement—largely to blame. The ideology in The Joke is discussed in a geopolitical vacuum, as an internal debate encapsulated within each thinking citizen. Poland, on the other hand, has for centuries defined itself against the encroachments of the Germans to the west and the Muscovites to the east, and the ideology of Tadeusz Konwicki’s The Polish Complex is purely nationalistic. The novel’s hero—who, like the hero of Moscow Circles, bears the name of the author—is standing in line in front of a state-owned jewelry store in Warsaw, with dozens of others, waiting for a promised shipment of gold rings from the Soviet Union, the purchase of which will convert their sheaves of thousandzloty bills into something of soldier value. It is the day before Christmas. The rings never arrive; instead, Russia sends Poland a shipment of electric samovars, with a promise of five free trips to the Soviet Union to “customers with lucky sales slips.” But there is time in the waiting line for many conversations and encounters, and many reflections by the fifty-year-old, ailing, depressed author. He reflects that nations, like people, are lucky or unlucky:

  Russia always had luck. The tsars slaughtered their own people, established the stupidest and most ignorant laws, embroiled themselves in the riskiest of wars, set unreal political goals, and the foolish always became the wise, the reactionary the progressive, and defeat was changed to victory.… The ignorant, obscurantist despotism, the barbarity of the higher spheres, the people’s poverty, the arbitrary, stupid, venal officials, the unbelievable indolence of the leaders, the most reactionary laws and customs, the savagery of human relations, all this, instead of inundating the state in disgraceful anarchy … went into the laborious building of old Russia’s power, her supremacy, her greatness among the nations of the old continent.

  In Poland, the nobility of educated monarchs, the energy of intelligent ministers, the goodwill of the citizenry, the homage to mankind’s lofty ideas, in Poland all these positive, exemplary, copybook values were, quite unexpectedly, devalued. Out of the blue, they were prostituted and dragged the venerable corpse of the republic straight to the bottom like a millstone.

  The Polish Complex is as zany as Moscow Cir
cles and as intellectual as The Joke. Konwicki, born near Wilno, which is now part of Soviet Lithuania, fought as a teen-age Partisan in 1944–45, and in his early writings supported the new Communist order. A screenwriter and director as well as a productive author, he, until The Polish Complex, expressed his disillusions obliquely enough not to rouse the censors. Here in this banned novel, which was published in the underground Polish press in 1977, he seems to express a personal crisis as well as political exasperation; the Konwicki persona drinks too many “binoculars” (two tall hundred-gram glasses of vodka), has chronic pain in his chest, suffers a heart attack, and while recovering from the attack in a back room copulates with a voluptuous shop attendant who calls him “old man.” “I’ve been through it all,” he tells her. “I have no curiosity left, my curiosity’s exhausted, or actually, it was never satisfied and now nothing will satisfy it.” He sees himself as “a miserable creature with emphysema of the soul.” He invites a man, who claims to have been on his trail since 1951, to kill him, and steps out on the railing of a ruined balcony to make it easy for his assassin. The invitation is not taken, the night fritters away, and Christmas morn approaches by the glow of the feeble hope that “there is some sense to all this senselessness.”

  The texture of the present-day, ostensibly autobiographical passages is airy, startling, disjointed, and deft—somewhat like that of Raymond Queneau, if Queneau had been a less happy man. Konwicki enjoys that easy access to the surreal noticeable in Polish writers as disparate as Lem and Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz, as Jerzy Kosinski and I. B. Singer. But our attention scatters amid these tipsy incidents and arguments; it is in two extended historical fantasies that Konwicki shows his imaginative strength and brings the reader into the continuing Polish agony. The first, over fifty pages long, describes the attempt of a twenty-three-year-old soldier, Zygmunt Mineyko, to lead, under the name Colonel Macidj Borowy, a section of the uprising of 1863, one of a number of unsuccessful nationalist rebellions in the long century (1795–1918) when Poland didn’t exist on the map, having been partitioned among its three large neighbors; the second historical episode, in a later time of troubles, shows another young man, with the name of Traugutt, saying goodbye to his wife in a hotel room before going off to accept “the leadership of the People’s Government” in Warsaw—an assignment certain to cost him his life. No doubt both these doomed heroes are enshrined in the collective Polish memory; for any reader the sense of circumambient oppression, of terror and futile daring and bravery amid the details of the daily are evoked with a masterly command of such sensory realities as the noises of drunken Russian officers in the adjoining hotel room and the singing sound of sand spinning from the wheels of a carriage. Of course, Communist writers have often sought breathing space in historical fiction, where dangerous contemporary issues can be avoided or disguised, and are at home there; nevertheless, the immediacy of these “old-fashioned” pieces of Konwicki’s narrative oddly overpowers the whimsical, skittish rest. A sexy strain of imagery does link the Polish past and present: the desirable women all savor of grass and herbs. Colonel Borowy admires a young wife whose eyes “shimmered with the colors of moss and heather” and whose scent is mingled of “sleep, lovage herb, and impetuous love.” Traugutt’s wife “gave up her warm cloak, which smelled of heather,” and, when she was further undressed, “her damp sweat … smelled like herbs.” Our aging author joins these warriors whose “sweetheart [was] Poland, golden-haired Poland,” when, rather ignominiously couched with his shop assistant, he finds “she smelled like the wild herbs of the earth.” An earth that, in the Polish complex, floats underfoot, not quite possessed, parcelled out, dominated by others historically and now.

  Estrangement—from earth, sky, and the ruling powers in between—is not absent from Western contemporary literature, either, and there is no assurance that under a capitalist system Erofeev would drink less, Ludvik would find it easier to locate what he calls “final beauty,” or Konwicki would be spared the discomforts of turning fifty. Yet all three books have been outlawed in their respective homelands, and therefore must contain words judged dangerous by the authorities. The absurd cowering by Communist governments in the face of honest and questioning art is one of the wonders of the world, a fertile source of embarrassment to its enforcers and an apparent declaration of bad faith; for from such fear of the truth we can only deduce a power that believes itself to be based upon lies.

  Out of the Evil Empire

  ANOTHER LIFE and THE HOUSE ON THE EMBANKMENT, by Yuri Trifonov, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny. 350 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1983.

  WILD BERRIES, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis. 296 pp. Morrow, 1984.

  RUSSIAN WOMEN: Two Stories, by I. Grekova, translated from the Russian by Michel Petrov. 304 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

  THE ISLAND OF CRIMEA, by Vassily Aksyonov, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim. 369 pp. Random House, 1983.

  The Russians seem to be receding. It is not just that our President cracks jokes about outlawing them and calls them an evil empire; their own chiefs of state, from the sickly late Brezhnev to the sallow and infirm Andropov to today’s far from entirely healthy Chernenko, have become wan, and the Russian global presence is signified by a muffled, stubborn war in Afghanistan and by non-appearance—at the Olympics, at the conference table. One remembers with a perhaps soft-headed fondness the old days of Khrushchev in America, banging his shoe at the U.N. and waggling his hips at Disneyland. And one turns to some contemporary Russian fiction with genuine curiosity as to life in our recessive fellow superpower’s territory, on that portion of our planet’s surface just about equal, in acreage, to what we can see of the moon.

  Yuri Trifonov had emerged, in the last decade of his rather short life (1925–81), as the most sensitive and honest of officially published Soviet fiction writers. The son of an Old Bolshevik who fell from favor under Stalin and disappeared, Trifonov, when young, wrote a novel that won a Stalin Prize. In middle age he turned apolitical and became a first-rate writer; his chosen form was the novella, and his subject the private lives of white-collar Russians—professors, translators, theatrical people. Three of his novellas were translated and published here in 1978, under the title The Long Goodbye. Now two more, Another Life and The House on the Embankment, are available, in one volume. All take place in Trifonov’s recognizable world, a dense world of edgily multi-generational families crowded into Moscow apartments, of dachas and seaside vacations as escape hatches into the romantic, of mysterious and ominous professional rises and falls, of admirable women and unhappy men, of nagging dissatisfaction and nostalgia, a world described in leisurely loops of flashback, with something of Chekhov’s tenderness and masterly power of indirect revelation.

  Another Life transpires in the reminiscing mind of Olga Vasilievna, whose husband, Sergei, has recently died. She and her teen-age daughter, Irinka, still live with Sergei’s mother, Alexandra Prokofievna, who possesses a law degree and whose husband, a mathematics professor, died in the 1941 defense of Moscow. She is a staunch Communist and forgiving neither of her granddaughter’s typically adolescent behavior nor of her daughter-in-law’s supposed guilt: “This woman firmly believed that the death of her son, in November of the previous year from a heart attack at the age of forty-two, was the fault of his wife.” Olga’s memories, as if searching out the justice of this charge, move back through her seventeen years of marriage, beginning with a sunny Black Sea vacation and ending under a Moscow cloud as Sergei, a historian, somehow offends the academic higher-ups with his researches into the Czar’s secret police. Throughout their relationship, Olga has been distressed by the other women whom her moody and elusive husband has attracted, and by his fickle professional enthusiasms. A successful biologist, reasonable and shrewd enough to see in Sergei and his family an “emotional ineptitude and a compulsion to do only what pleased them,” she nevertheless is “psychologically dependent”
upon him and fiercely defensive of what is consistently italicized as “their life”—“their life” as opposed to the “separate life” he keeps living during his mysterious escapes from domesticity and “another life” of which he often dreams. In the surprising ending, it is Olga who finds “another life,” with a nameless man who sounds even frailer in health than Sergei and who, from his coy anonymity (in a narrative where even the most fleeting characters are named), might be a version of the author. Trifonov dedicated the book to his wife, Alla, and seems to have reaped the benefit of detailed female confidences. As a portrait of Olga in her stages of young beauty and mature weariness, in her moods of happiness and anger, in her conflicting roles as mother, lover, daughter, and worker, Another Life has been executed with an air of natural understanding and admiration. “Look at this woman!—she exists!” the book seems to exclaim, and only the warmth of the exclamation suggests that the creator and the creation are not of the same sex.

  The House on the Embankment also describes balked academic careers, rotting but embowering dachas, heavy-drinking men with adverse cardiovascular symptoms, and deliberate efforts of reminiscence. For Trifonov, too, the novella seems to have been an exercise in reminiscence; it reworks many of the characters that appeared in his first novel, Students (1950). One of these seems to be a stand-in for the author: “Yura the Bear” narrates intermittent chapters of this tale of ambition and aging, and Trifonov spent much of his childhood in privileged housing like “the house on the embankment.” The apartments within are spacious and the top stories have a view, across the Moscow River, of the Kremlin walls; its shadow cuts off sunlight from the shabby little house where lives Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov, with his father, grandmother, and Aunt Paula in one room, while six other families crowd into the other rooms. The Glebov boy’s jealousy of those who live above him in the apartment house forms “a source of burning resentment from his childhood onward.” The schoolboy episodes of this novella reminded me of the coarse nicknames and dangerous pranks of Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse and Shusako Endo’s When I Whistle; they reflect a more Spartan youth culture than that sketched in, say, Penrod. The author’s treatment of Glebov—who from his shabby beginnings rises to betray (slightly) his literature professor and to become a literary functionary with a spoiled and silly daughter and international travel privileges—reminded me of Chekhov’s “The Darling,” or, rather, of Tolstoy’s well-known commentary upon it, to the effect that Chekhov, setting out to satirize his character, “intended to curse, but the god of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless.”