Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Further on in Huckleberry Finn, a steamship engine explodes, and Huck’s Aunt Sally says, “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” Huck answers, “No’m. Killed a nigger.” She responds, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

  The passage is strikingly like the opening dialogue of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust.

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No one I am thankful to say,” said Mrs Beaver, “except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court.”

  The Twain dialogue is somewhat incidental, though it does touch upon the book’s principal social themes, the brutality of frontier life and the wrongness of slavery. But Waugh begins with his, and human callousness, fostered by the class system but encouraged by greed and lust, is his theme. Again and again, we are startled into laughter because the characters are more flip and diffident and hard-hearted in their responses than we expect. In the shadows of their very English politeness, we keep barking our shins on the furniture of their avarice. The novel concerns sexual love, yet only in its social effects. The one passion we are allowed to feel with the characters is the hero’s passionate attachment to Hetton, his huge, ugly, and expensive family estate. Otherwise, everything is masked in offhand conversation and oblique implication. The characters set conscious stock by this manner of expressing themselves:

  “Well,” said Reggie, puffing at his cigar. “There’s more to it than just money. Perhaps I’d better tell you everything. I hadn’t meant to. The truth is that Beaver is cutting up nasty. He says he can’t marry Brenda unless she’s properly provided for. Not fair on her, he says. I quite see his point in a way.”

  “Yes, I see his point,” said Tony. “So what your proposal really amounts to is that I should give up Hetton in order to buy Beaver for Brenda.”

  “It’s not how I should have put it,” said Reggie.

  The other three novels we have read from were all rather picaresque, and could be excerpted easily. Waugh’s is a thoroughly modern novel, so interwoven that the full sense, wit, and burden of any passage depends upon a set of prior circumstance that would be tedious to explain. Suffice it to say that Tony is the hero, Brenda is his wife, and Beaver is her lover. In this entire short scene late in the novel, Brenda and Beaver are together:

  Dawn broke in London, clear and sweet, dove-grey and honey, with promise of good weather; the lamps in the streets paled and disappeared; the empty streets ran with water, and the rising sun caught it as it bubbled round the hydrants; the men in overalls swung the nozzles of their hoses from side to side and the water jetted and cascaded in a sparkle of light.

  “Let’s have the window open,” said Brenda. “It’s stuffy in here.”

  The waiter drew back the curtains, opened the windows.

  “It’s quite light,” she added.

  “After five. Oughtn’t we to go to bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only another week and then all the parties will be over,” said Beaver.

  “Yes.”

  “Well let’s go.”

  “All right. Can you pay? I just haven’t any money.”

  They had come on after the party, for breakfast at a club Daisy had opened. Beaver paid for the kippers and tea. “Eight shillings,” he said. “How does Daisy expect to make a success of the place when she charges prices like that?”

  “It does seem a lot … So you really are going to America?”

  “I must. Mother has taken the tickets.”

  “Nothing I’ve said tonight makes any difference?”

  “Darling, don’t go on. We’ve been through all that. You know it’s the only thing that can happen. Why spoil the last week?”

  “You have enjoyed the summer, haven’t you.”

  “Of course … Well, shall we go?”

  “Yes. You needn’t bother to see me home.”

  “Sure you don’t mind? It is miles out of the way and it’s late.”

  “There’s no knowing what I mind.”

  “Brenda, darling, for heaven’s sake … It isn’t like you to go on like this.”

  “I never was one for making myself expensive.”

  What we have witnessed, in this laconic exchange, is the end of an affair, the flickering out of a passion that has uprooted an ancient homestead and overridden a little boy’s death. But in this conversation, which ostensibly traces the departure of a tired couple from a restaurant, money is revealed as the backbone of their lives: Beaver’s mother has spent the money to buy the tickets to take him away to America; Brenda, with her husband fled and refusing to pay the exorbitant alimony that had been asked, hasn’t even enough money to pay for the kippers and tea. Beaver, protesting the price, reveals his stinginess, and exposes his love as a love of her money; and Brenda ironically recognizes this by saying in unacknowledged farewell that she never was one for making herself expensive. He, too caddish even to accompany her home—there seems to be no question now of their going to bed together—is reminded that in this summer of love he has taken her free. The humor in this, as in the texture of Candide, is bound up with the economy and energy of the telling. There is also a deflationary aspect, felt not so much in each scene as through the book as a whole: as Don Quixote put medieval romances on trial, so Victorian romances are on trial here. We expect, from conditioning by the novels of that Romantic century the nineteenth, adultery to be less cool, more absolute and disastrous than this. The Victorians took a holy and intense view of sex; contrastingly, in one of Waugh’s other books, a young lady, after her first sexual experience, compares the experience unfavorably to a trip to the dentist.

  By excluding any sympathetic picture of sexual passion, Waugh cuts Brenda off from her own motives, makes her a villainess, and tinctures with nonsense all the action around her; his exclusion provides the insulation that enables us—though rather grimly—to laugh. His dialogue, however, is never only humorous; in this book at least, it is always directed toward the advancement of the action and the delineation of character and milieu. Nor does this method, of unadorned dialogue and skillful indirection—as if the author is, like the characters, somewhat diffident—belong to Waugh alone; it seems especially well suited to depiction of English society and may be found in E. M. Forster and Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green and Anthony Powell. But there is a special Waughian edge, a daring and a savagery, that sets him apart, and with the immortal masters of comic fiction. The scene I have just read is sandwiched between two others set in the South American jungle. While Brenda is winding up her affair in London, Tony has fallen in with an unlikely explorer, a Dr. Messinger, who is still looking for El Dorado in equatorial America. In the scene previous to Brenda’s talk with Beaver, Dr. Messinger has frightened away his native bearers and guides by demonstrating a mechanical mouse; in the scene following, the natives return in the night and steal all of his and Tony’s weapons and rations, beginning the chain of disasters that will culminate in Tony’s being declared dead in England, though in fact he lives as a captive of a jungle lunatic who makes Tony read aloud to him, over and over, the complete works of Charles Dickens. This absurd but horrible life-in-death, strangely terrifying despite its farcical form, is worthy—indeed, is more than worthy—of today’s black humorists.

  I do not know how much the phrase “black humorists” means to an audience of international poets, essayists, and novelists. But for the last five years in the United States the journalists who invent literary schools have filled the air, and our expectations, with this magic category. Vladimir Nabokov is named as a progenitor, and John Barth and Donald Barthelme are enlisted as contemporary examples. Though their work, initially, was taken as a nihilistic explosion of all accredited social values, today it is linked hopefully with social criticism of the American military involvement in Southeast Asia and the corrupt values that produced it. Humorous fiction is being urged, from some quarters, as one of the means of bringing on a healthy revolution.

  M
yself, I would not deny that some topical satire is momentarily interesting, and that a little of it achieves the lasting interest of art. But my general impression is that, in literature, other literary modes are the most effectively hit satiric objects, and that, insofar as humor is not an abundance, in the author, of good humor, it testifies to a disenchantment more metaphysical than political. Waugh’s disenchantment, for instance, extends to the entire modern world and its materialist premises, which in practice quickly reduce to money-grubbing, snobbery, and selfish sensuality. And Voltaire’s real anger is directed beyond the Christian Church and its meliorist apologists, toward a universe that tolerates pain, cruelty, and disaster. Just as we laugh harder at the jokes of someone we trust and like, great humorous authors establish with us, through their evident style and tact and general wisdom and frequent seriousness, a credibility that makes our laughter, when it comes, deep and sincere. However far mechanical theories explain humor, humor cannot be mechanically produced. It is part, in literature as in life, of human exchange; and any attempt to isolate it as a genre will trivialize it.

  Just as our tears fatten upon our memories of joy, and our dreams rehearse our waking days, laughter draws strength from the gravity of actual life. The modes of humor in fiction are various, and often lowly; but in the examples I have chosen, humor coexists with the noblest qualities of imagination. These authors do not hasten toward our laughter, and the laughter they prompt does not hasten to pass judgment; rather, the laughter is allied with the wonder that suspends judgment upon the world. We began by discussing the laughter of infants; perhaps one reason we laugh so much in childhood is that so much is unexpected and novel to us, and perhaps fiction revives that laughter by giving us back the world clearer than we have seen it before.

  LIVES AND LAURELS

  Søren Kierkegaard, 1813–1855

  Written for Atlantic Brief Lives, edited by Louis Kronenberger (1971).

  PERHAPS BECAUSE HE LIVED in the toy metropolis of Copenhagen, a little man with a dandy’s face and a crooked back strolling zigzag along the sidewalk, we presume to love him; or perhaps it is his voice—that extraordinary insinuant voice, imperious and tender, rabid and witty—that excites our devotion. He wrote, in a sense, as a lover, having spurned marriage, and the torrent of volumes that follows his break with his fiancée abounds with lovers’ stratagems: with flirtatious ambiguities, elaborate deceits and impersonations, fascinating oscillations of emphasis, all sorts of erotic “display.” Apart from his passionate literary production of the 1840s, his life knew few events: his struggle with his father, the attack by The Corsair, the attack upon Christendom. A life of antidotes. His “aesthetic” holiday of café conversation, brothels, and the Royal Theatre served as an antidote to the dour household of his theologically obsessed father. His father died, and Kierkegaard began to write like a slave. His first title, Either/Or, established the note of zigzag and alternation; each pseudonymous “aesthetic” work was accompanied upon publication by “edifying” discourses under his own name. The two campaigns of publicity in which he was involved—defensive against The Corsair, offensive against the Church—seem thrust and counterthrust in his war with “the herd.” His final, suicidal burst of energy, a public execration of all earthly manifestations of Christianity including a deathbed rejection of the Eucharist, was perhaps the subtlest antidote of all—an atoning reënactment of his father’s gesture when, as an eleven-year-old shepherd boy on the Jutland heath, Michael Kierkegaard (in the words of his youngest son’s journal) “stood upon a hillock and cursed God.”

  Yet to make of Kierkegaard a case history and to view his ideas—as does Josiah Thompson in The Lonely Labyrinth—as maneuvers in a self-administered, and eventually futile, therapy is to excuse ourselves from his truth and his heroism. Heroism not so much of labor (for his was an industrious century) or of personal suffering (for in fact Kierkegaard, though he continually bemoans his mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” never impresses us as a martyr; like his slightly younger American contemporary Thoreau, he is a bachelor comfortable among willfully chosen privations), but heroism in facing down the imperious tradition of German idealistic philosophy: “Now if we assume that abstract thought is the highest manifestation of human activity, it follows that philosophy and the philosophers proudly desert existence, leaving the rest of us to face the worst.… [Philosophy] is disinterested; but the difficulty inherent in existence constitutes the interest of the existing individual, who is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought thus helps me with respect to my immortality by first annihilating me as a particular existing individual and then making me immortal, about as when the doctor in Holbert killed the patient with his medicine—but also expelled the fever.”

  It is no criticism to say that Kierkegaard is not a systematic philosopher like Hegel; it was his mission to be the anti-Hegel. “I am anything but a devilish good fellow at philosophy,” his pseudonym Johannes Climacus admits. “I am a poor, individual, existing man, with sound natural capacities, not without a certain dialectical dexterity, not entirely destitute of education. I have been tried in life’s casibus and cheerfully appeal to my sufferings.” To be human is inherently to be a problem; he certified what the Romantics had merely suspected, that sickness is a prerequisite of wisdom: “With the help of the thorn in my foot I spring higher than anyone with sound feet.” Philosophy, in his day the monarchial overscience, has become in ours the humblest of semantic inquiries, or else personal testimony. What seems strange is how the atheists Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger have given currency to terms—“the absurd,” “the leap,” “dread,” “despair”—that Kierkegaard coined to pay his way into heaven; but, writing of Christianity as “an actualization of inwardness,” Kierkegaard asserted that only two kinds of people could know anything about it, those who accept it and those who “in passion” reject it—“the happy and the unhappy lovers.”

  It is to would-be believers, above all, that Kierkegaard speaks. Behind all the fireworks and jockeying, the flights of poetry and dramatic imagination, the exegetical brilliance and the casually bestowed abundance of psychological insight, he is conducting, and the religiously inclined reader is desperately following, a search for the “Archimedean point” outside the world from which the world can be lifted, admitting, like a crack of light in a sealed cave, the possibility of faith—that is to say, of escape from death. The assertion that “subjectivity is truth” provides such a point, though a rather slippery one. The concept of “the paradox,” all too violently felt as the “crucifixion of intellect,” accords with ancient Christian formulae, and gives a certain Promethean aura to alogism. And “the leap” does seem to be the way, both in particle physics and in human affairs, that things move, rather than Hegel’s deterministic “mediation.”

  Although he posited, in Fear and Trembling, a “knight of faith,” Kierkegaard did not himself become that knight. The theology of his last years is dismaying in its ferocity. And his copious oeuvre seems unbalanced, incomplete, subjective to a fault. It remained for Karl Barth to build upon the basis of God’s otherness (a concept Kierkegaard phrased, tragically, as “God’s inhumanity”) an inhabitable theology; it remained for Kafka, though the Dane’s journals abound in miniature fables, to develop Kierkegaardian sensations into real fiction, into epic symbols. Kierkegaard, whose emphasis was ever upon “the individual” and who wanted this citation as his epitaph, lives in history not as an author or thinker attached to his work like a footnote, but as a man incarnated in his books, a human knot that refuses to be unravelled, a voice asking to be loved.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896–1940

  Contribution to F. Scott Fitzgerald at 100, a garland of tributes collected by Jackson R. Bryer (1996).

  FITZGERALD should be honored, as a writer, for attempting to describe the American life of his time with all the refinement of European fiction; from imitating the smartness of Shaw and Wells and Compton Mackenzie, he moved to an attempt to absorb the example
s of Conrad and Turgenev and Tolstoy and Proust. Not for him an invented American style, brashly experimental like those of Hemingway or Faulkner: unlike theirs, his style is hard to parody, blended as it is of poetry and aperçu, of external detail quickly transmuted to internal sensation. His American characters, from small-town children to uproariously disintegrating sophisticates, receive a respectful and tender attention. He loved Americans and took comfort in their aura; the hero of “Babylon Revisited,” returning to Paris after the Crash, finds “the stillness in the Ritz bar … strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more—he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France.” The matter of America was much on Fitzgerald’s mind, without the braggadocio of Wolfe or Whitman but thoughtfully, in contemplation of a spiritual puzzle. Gatsby balances on the dashboard of his car “with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.” Later in the book comes the abrupt observation that “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” And so on—the book concludes, a touch thunderously, with its celebrated paean to virgin Long Island, “a fresh, green breast of the new world” wherein man came “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” To Henry James’s observations of our precious and vulnerable innocence abroad Fitzgerald added notes on our capacity for correspondingly unqualified corruption and despair.