by John Updike
Alas, poor Tasurinchi! I’d changed into an insect, that’s what. A buzz-buzz bug, perhaps. A Gregor-Tasurinchi … I’ve asked the seripigari [wise man] many times: “What does it mean, having a face like mine?” … Why did Tasurinchi breathe me out this way? Shh, shh, don’t get angry.… Before, this stain used to matter a lot to me. I didn’t say so. Only to myself, to my souls. I kept it to myself, and this secret was eating me alive.… We’d best be what we are. The one who gives up fulfilling his own obligation so as to fulfill that of another will lose his soul. And his outer wrapping too, perhaps, like Gregor-Tasurinchi, who was changed into a buzz-buzz bug in that bad trance.
Transformation is the novel’s theme, as metamorphosis is the engine of primitive legend. Saúl, born disfigured, is born transformed, and his self-conversion into a Machiguenga corrects the wrong and completes the cycle. A “talking parrot” in the Zuratas household in Lima during Saúl’s school days is changed, in the jungle, into Saúl’s totem—a pet and guardian who travels on his shoulder, who conjures up a canopy of friendly parrots, and whom Saúl calls Mascarita.
These mock-primitive chapters are the novel’s dark and tangled heart, and they reward a second reading with greater, though not perfect, intelligibility. Enough, perhaps, has been quoted to indicate the fervor and vigor of Vargas Llosa’s powers of invention, and also the strain he has placed upon them. The smell of ink doesn’t quite leave this tale of taletelling. Little seems to fall into place lightly. When the novelist is being himself and not Saúl being Tasurinchi, he can drop vivid casual details, like the “dark pouches hanging from the palm-leaf roof” that disappear at daybreak and turn out to be “balls of hundreds of spiders that curled up together,” or like the interviewed Spanish writer of romances who stores “thousands of novelettes” in her basement and “finishes one every two days, each exactly a hundred pages long.” This novel could do with a little romance. Saúl Zuratas and the narrator, like the heroes of boys’ adventure books, have no sex lives. And the notion, insistently repeated, that Saúl’s being Jewish makes it easier for him to identify and merge with the persecuted Machiguengas comes to seem too simple. Vargas Llosa, if he has a fault, tends to be programmatic; his prose presents a blunt, masculine texture rarely varied by a touch of the spontaneously sensual, the offhandedly immediate. The Storyteller is an animated anthropological, ecological, psychological meditation, admirably intelligent and humane, but not much, strange to say, of a story.
Peter Handke, in The Afternoon of a Writer, presents a texture that is almost alarmingly immediate. Handke can be hysterical—indeed, hysteria is his métier—but this brief tale of the after-work hours of one of those nameless writers (he walks into town, out of town, has a drink or two, walks home, and goes to bed, alone) applies such an intense sensibility to the details that we seem to enter a supernatural dimension:
It was early December and the edges of various objects glowed as they do at the onset of twilight. At the same time, the airy space outside and the interior of the curtainless house seemed joined in an undivided brightness. No snow had yet fallen that year. But that morning the birds had cheeped in a certain way—in a monotone suggestive of speech—that heralded snow.
The snow settled first on the middle strip of grass; it looked as though birch branches had been laid on the road, one after another, and so on to the horizon. In a bramblebush, single crystals would balance on thorns and then encircle them like ruffs. Though there was no one to be seen, the writer had the impression at every step that he was walking in the traces of someone who had been there before.
And when the hero comes in his walk to a convex traffic mirror, and gazes into its bent reflections, we labor along with the translator to realize the precise evanescent shades of reported sensation: “The rounding of the image gave emptiness a radiance, and gave the objects in this emptiness—the glass-recycling center, the garbage cans, the bicycle stands—a holiday feel, as though in looking at them one emerged into a clearing.”
Handke’s hero is all eyes, all nerves. Being a writer gives his hypersensitivity a use, and also a professional alternation with insensibility. While he writes, he is all but oblivious to the outer world: “In his mind, it was only a moment ago that the midday bells of the chapel of the old people’s home at the foot of the little hill had suddenly started tinkling as though someone had died, yet hours must have passed since then, for the light in the room was now an afternoon light.… At first he was unable to focus on anything in the distance and saw even the pattern of the carpet as a blur; in his ears he heard a buzzing as though his typewriter were an electric one—which was not the case.” Preparing to leave the house, he returns to his study to make one last revision: “It was only then that he smelled the sweat in the room and saw the mist on the windowpanes.”
In his few human contacts, too, he is able to turn off. A drunk in the bar addresses the writer at futile length:
As he spoke, his face came so close as to lose its contours; only his violently twitching eyelids, the dotted bow tie under his chin, and a cut on his forehead that must have bled recently remained distinct.… Not a single word of what he was saying came through to the writer, not even when he held his ear close to the speaker’s mouth. Yet, to judge by the movements of his lips and tongue, he was not speaking a foreign language.
The writer inwardly bemoans his deafness, his isolation, his “defeat as a social being.” He asks himself, “Why was it only when alone that he was able to participate fully? Why was it only after people had gone that he was able to take them into himself, the more deeply the farther away they went?” Handke’s writer suffers a Promethean, a Luciferian, isolation—that of the too greatly daring, the damned. “To write was criminal; to produce a work of art, a book, was presumption, more damnable than any other sin. Now, in the midst of the ‘gin-mill people,’ he had the same feeling of unpardonable guilt, the feeling that he had been banished from the world for all time.” A translator of his (apparently an American), whom he meets in his day’s one scheduled encounter, once wanted to be a writer but couldn’t bear the onus: “My attempt to decipher a supposed Ur-text inside me and force it into a coherent whole struck me as original sin. That was the beginning of fear.” Translation, while being sufficiently engaging, avoids the primordial fear: “By displaying your wound as attractively as possible, I conceal my own.”
At his brief excursion’s end, our wounded but resolute hero climbs into bed. Trying to recall the hours so vividly just passed, he can visualize only two small details, both of them distorted. Already, he is writing. He is an inscrutable stewing, a transmuter of world into word. “To himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment.” To a cold-eyed reader, however, he is in danger of seeming a self-dramatizing solipsist. With a phenomenal intensity and delicacy of register, the little book captures the chemistry of perception and of perception’s transformation into memory and language. We are there with the writer, behind his eyes and under his skin. But the cultural presumptions that make it worth our while to be there are perhaps more European than universal. These winter walks with reflective, misanthropic bachelors occur also in the brief contemporary novels of the Swede Lars Gustafsson and Handke’s fellow Austrian the late Thomas Bernhard, and go back to Olympian strolls with Kant and Goethe and Nietzsche. To an American reader, so reverent an examination, by a writer, of a writer’s psyche verges on the pompous and, worse, on the pointless.
The Afternoon of a Writer is dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in 1936 published a short story called “Afternoon of an Author.” Freshly available in Scribner’s edition of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story offers a somber contrast with Handke’s small, rapt novel. It has none of the Austrian’s triumphant undercurrent; Fitzgerald’s American scribe is in poor health and down on his luck. He wakes up after nine o’clock, gratefully observes that he does not feel distinctly ill (“better than he had for many weeks”), shuffles through “an annoying mail with nothing cheerful in it
,” chats desultorily with his maid, has to lie down for fifteen minutes, and then unsuccessfully tries to write: “The problem was a magazine story that had become so thin in the middle that it was about to blow away. The plot was like climbing endless stairs, he had no element of surprise in reserve, and the characters who started so bravely day-before-yesterday couldn’t have qualified for a newspaper serial.” He ends by going through the manuscript “underlining good phrases in red crayon,” tucking these into a file, and dropping the rest into the wastebasket. The process, though dismal, seems more concrete than the creative processes in Handke’s book, and there are phrases of mournful self-illumination, of a flickering romantic light. Looking into a mirror, the writer calls himself “slag of a dream.” Out riding a bus, he comes into a district where “there were suddenly brightly dressed girls, all very beautiful … no plans or struggles in their faces, only a state of sweet suspension, provocative and serene.” He observes within himself a sudden spark of life-force: “He loved life terribly for a minute, not wanting to give it up at all.” A deflationary sentence immediately follows: “He thought perhaps he had made a mistake in coming out so soon.”
After getting a shampoo at a barbershop, he rides the bus back to his apartment, reflecting on reviews he received when young, at “the beginning fifteen years ago when they said he had ‘fatal facility’ and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.” He feels fatigue and the “growing seclusion” of his life; he thinks of himself as needing “reforestation” and hopes “the soil would stand one more growth.” But, he further reflects, “It had never been the very best soil for he had had an early weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing.” He makes it back home, chaffers bleakly with the maid, asks for a glass of milk, and lies down again: “He was quite tired—he would lie down for ten minutes and then see if he could get started on an idea in the two hours before dinner.” The reader doubts whether he will get started; the atmosphere of creative exhaustion is thick. Death is not far off. Writer-consciousness, in Handke exhilarating and enviable, in Fitzgerald weighs like a disease, a gathering burden of guilt. We pity the fellow, while admiring the subtle slight strokes by which his plight is sketched. As so often in Fitzgerald, we have only the afterglow of a dream to see by. There is a strong sense of professional predicament and none of cultural mission; a weary clarity but no wonderment. The point is, we die.
A democracy of honest workmen, it may be, resists the idea that doing one kind of labor deserves more exaltation and excuses more self-indulgence than doing another kind. The shoemaker, for example, doesn’t get moony and mock-heroic about pounding out his shapely, intricate product, and doesn’t ask to be especially praised for sticking to his last. Yet shoes are more plainly useful than books. We all have chosen, in submission to the passions of childhood and accidents of adulthood, lasts to stick to, and the trade of writer is, with its unstructured hours, opportunities for self-expression, and possible rich rewards, sufficiently attractive so that there are far more applicants than positions available. The lucky few able to see their product into published, distributed, profitable form should be quiet about it, and exaggerate neither the hardships nor the glory of their achievement. Annie Dillard, the inimitable essayist and metaphysician, whose newest flirtation with the absolute is called The Writing Life, is able, in the course of her segmented, diverse disquisition upon her craft, to come up with an occasional modest shrug: “It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation.” But more often she presents the writing life as a constant marvel of hazardous adventure and surging metaphor:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick valves; it palpates the dark muscle strong as horses, feeling for something, it knows not what.
Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air.… Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
This is your life. You are a Seminole alligator wrestler. Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence’s head while its tail tries to knock you over.
Some years ago in Florida, she goes on to tell us, an Indian alligator wrestler lost the struggle and his life. And her seventh and last chapter extols, as an implicit symbol of the writer’s feat, the stunt flying of a pilot, Dave Rahm, who eventually crashed and died. Does writing, that most sheltered and stationary of occupations, whose principal hazards are alcoholism and eyestrain, warrant such flights of melodramatic mystique?
Dillard, in her determination to impress her reader, or an imaginary classroom of callow students, with the splendid difficulty of writing, introduces at the outset a couple of dogmas that struck me as not necessarily so. One: “It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.… The work’s beginning greets the reader with the wrong hand.” Two: “It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant.” Well, perhaps Simenon and P. G. Wodehouse and Trollope and Voltaire and Evelyn Waugh (who told The Paris Review that his early novels each represented “six weeks’ work”) and William Dean Howells and Agatha Christie are statistically insignificant, but they did produce books oftener than biennially, without, one suspects, throwing all the first chapters away. If these authors are not the most academically chic, and their books furthermore are often dismissably slim, consider how Stendhal composed The Charterhouse of Parma in seven weeks and Henry James belted out The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl at the rate of one a year. Not to mention Balzac and Dickens and that obliging hack Shakespeare, who never blotted a line. Styles and methods greatly vary; the kind of writing Dillard does—intense, poetic, inquisitive, philosophically ambitious—no doubt does proceed much as she describes, in the manner of an inch-worm attaching its back feet to a grass stem and “in virtual hysteria” throwing its front end about in search of the next footing. As far as this reader is concerned, she could have thrown her first chapter here away, or at least lowered its pontifical tone.
When she describes herself writing, her dramatic and romantic propensities are usefully hitched to a personal narrative. She tells a good story on herself, as, for example, of the way she sometimes lays out her manuscript on a twenty-foot conference table: “You walk along the rows; you weed bits, move bits, and dig out bits, bent over the rows with full hands like a gardener.… You go home and soak your feet.” Once, she solemnly avers, her typewriter (presumably electric, unlike Handke’s writer’s) erupted on her like a volcano. The time she spent on lonely insular terrain in Puget Sound working through the writing of her most nakedly religious book, Holy the Firm, is especially charged in her memory.
The writing was simple yet graceless; it surprised me. It was arrhythmical, nonvisual, clunky. It was halting, as if there were no use trying to invoke beauty or power. It was plain and ugly, urgent, like child’s talk.…
Once when I opened my eyes the page seemed bright. The windows were steamed and the sun had gone behind the firs on the bluff.… By the time I left, I was scarcely alive. The way home was along the beach. The beach was bright and distinct. The storm still blew. I was light, dizzy, barely there. I remembered some legendary lamas, who wear chains to keep from floating away.… My thighs felt as if they had been reamed.
The reader cannot but be excited by her descriptions of nature and her way of examining its details as if they compose a script of the spi
rit. At her best, she writes like a giantess in love with infinity—a sister more of Melville than Thoreau, an Emersonian without a pinch of Yankee salt. Her writerly remarks are most illuminating when they are most incidental. She reveals in passing that to warm up her writing faculties she reads “pure sound unencumbered by sense”—Conrad Aiken’s poetry, or “any poetry anthology’s index of first lines.” She relates how while writing her first book she let all the houseplants die—they “hung completely black dead in their pots in the bay window.” A certain blackness and ruin also attend the finished result of inspiration: “The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.” She can be delightfully definite, in a regal manner reminiscent of Rebecca West:
The novel often aims to fasten down the spirit of its time, to make a heightened simulacrum of our recognizable world in order to present it shaped and analyzed. This has never seemed to me worth doing, but it is certainly one thing literature has always done. (Any writer draws idiosyncratic boundaries in the field.)
Surely we didn’t need that anxious, academic parenthesis. A split exists in the personality of The Writing Life. On the one hand, the life, her life, is exhilaratingly scrutinized like any other natural phenomenon, as potent and numinous as the tides or insect behavior; on the other, weaker hand, a certain instructive, exhortatory tone seems to want to enlist us in a quixotic but good cause.
Good for what? Both Handke and Dillard present the writer as an eremitic, obsessed creature, whose saintly creative efforts barely brush the crude question of utility, of audience, of communication. Yet writing is communication, at least with oneself, in the faith that others are likeminded enough to get interested. Dillard says rightly, “In my view, the more literary the book—the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep—the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be. They like, or require, what books alone have.” But this class, never a majority, dwindles of late, and both these youngish writers describe encounters with readers or potential readers as comedies of incomprehension. Dillard suspects there is something wrong: “I was too far removed from the world. My work was too obscure, too symbolic, too intellectual. It was not available to the people. Recently I had published a complex narrative essay about a moth’s flying into a candle, which no one had understood but a Yale critic.” Handke’s hero, in the course of his stroll, cringes from the passersby who recognize him as a literary celebrity, and reflects that, whenever an interview was published, he “would be seized with terror or shame—he would even feel guilty, as if he had broken a taboo.” The mysteries the writer nurtures in his or her study are beyond explaining. Readership, a public, and public attention arrive as violations, embarrassments, beside the point. The writer’s artifacts are like shoes that disdain actual feet.
