The failure is, unquestionably, in part polemic. That Vargas Llosa’s lefties are without exception fanatics, weak, incurably romantic, party hacks, narrow ideologues, stupid, or opportunistic, is some of it. That he portrays the revolutionary impulse as being invariably divorced from the real lives (if I may use the term) of the people, is simply unhistorical. Whatever one’s politics, it would be hard to look at twentieth-century Latin American history and come to such a conclusion.
For a novel about the nature of history, Mayta doesn’t have much in the way of an historical sense. Why is the apocalypse imminent in this fictional Peru? What great forces are in collision? Only blind ideologies. It won’t do. In The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa gave us a genuine historical tragedy, in which the economic and military power of a State collided with, and finally crushed, the religious fervour of the downtrodden poor. That ‘end of the world’ felt real; Mayta’s garbage-mountain Peru is a comic-strip.
No, it’s worse. Because Vargas Llosa clearly lays the blame for the apocalypse at the feet of his hapless anti-hero. His feeble uprising ‘charted the process that has ended in what we are all living through now.’ So the revolutionaries are the reason why the State has to call in the marines. As a distortion of history, this takes some beating.
But such disputes are secondary. Mayta’s clumsy adventure is not funny enough, sad enough or just plain exciting enough to hold our interest. As the novel progresses, Vargas Llosa seems to realize the thinness of his material, and the telling of the tale grows more frenzied. The witnesses proliferate, until almost every paragraph is told by a new voice; the distinction between past and present blurs, so that the ‘I’ is sometimes the narrator and sometimes, bewilderingly, Mayta himself. This is Kane without Kane (Mayta is a rather hollow centre, after all), and—although the ‘real’ Mayta, in his last-chapter meeting with the narrator, does reveal a long-concealed secret, which inevitably shows up the novel’s Trots as being even nastier than we had hitherto supposed—without Rosebud, either.
This final meeting between investigator and investigated uncovers what, for me, is the novel’s deepest flaw. To change the Spanish Historia de Mayta to the English Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (and who, by the way, was responsible? The book names no translator) is to invite comparison with a very similar novel with a very similar name, Nabokov’s Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Nabokov’s narrator, too, pursues an elusive subject, and in fact never meets him. He, too, seeks to conceal himself from the reader. But Nabokov’s genius reveals him anyway, and shows him, at the last, losing his identity in his subject. (‘I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows.’) The point is, something happens to the narrator. He is drawn into the tale he uncovers, and becomes its meaning. Vargas Llosa’s narrator, never dropping the mask of objective neutrality while his creator loads the dice, opposes the hollowness of Mayta with an emptiness of his own. In place of Nabokov’s merged identities, we have only a pair of badly crossed Is.
1986
11
THE LANGUAGE OF THE PACK
DEBRETT GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
E. L. DOCTOROW
MICHAEL HERR: AN INTERVIEW
RICHARD FORD
RAYMOND CARVER
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
PHILIP ROTH
SAUL BELLOW
THOMAS PYNCHON
KURT VONNEGUT
GRACE PALEY
TRAVELS WITH A GOLDEN ASS
THE DIVINE SUPERMARKET
THE LANGUAGE OF THE PACK
Now it is a thing well known to any citizen who ever sits down to an evening of action that a deck of cards represents a vocabulary as supple as may be found in any dictionary; and, accordingly, that the playing of a little poker or gin is as absorbing a dialogue as any heated dispute over the burning issues of the day; and that, during such a dialogue, the citizen comes to discover a fair amount with regard to the innermost nature of his companions and himself also, including handy information as to which of them is the most foolhardy and which the most cautious, and who is a person of true sophistication and who, even though he is dressed to beat the band, is at bottom no more than a common rube. And as languages go a game of cards is superior in one respect to all other languages presently in employment, viz. that the person who speaks it best, demonstrating the greatest fluency and the fanciest subordinate clauses, most likely ends up going home holding a sizeable sack of potatoes, unless it happens that his less articulate colleagues pursue him to some shady quarter and beat him stupid and rob him blind.
And so it is natural that the language of cards spills over into our everyday speech, so that when we are shooting the breeze we can make mention of how a certain attribute, for example honesty, is not So-and-So’s long suit; or if faced with a guy of an unpredictable disposition we can mark him down as the joker in the pack. Even citizens who get no action whatsoever can readily comprehend what it is to be dealt a bum hand in the game of life, or when some grand design for the future turns out to be a busted flush. The uninitiated civilian does not know that aces and eights are termed The Dead Man’s Hand, as it is the hand held by Wild Bill Hickock when they drill him, but he is fully conversant with upping the ante and even finessing and when he is sitting pretty he knows he is holding all the aces or maybe coming up trumps.
What is more surprising, if you are given to being surprised by life, in which case you are very likely not a card-player, is that an activity wherein chance, skill, drama, intrigue, deception, crime, violence, money and wild fluctuations of fortune are so intimately conjoined, an activity at once literal, symbolic, and even allegorical, should feature so relatively rarely in literature. There is The Rape of the Lock, it is true, and there is Alice in Wonderland, and there is the character of Frankie Machine, the dope-fiend card-player, in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. There is Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which tarot cards are used to tell stories, and there is Vladimir Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave. Then you start to scratch around. There is a Pushkin story of which I do not recall the title. In the cinema, there is The Cincinnati Kid, but The Joker is Wild is a movie that is not about cards, in spite of its name. One-Eyed Jacks likewise; also Aces High.
Gambling in general crops up now and again, in Dostoevsky and even in the Mahabharata, in which Prince Yudhisthira loses his entire kingdom to his arch-enemies because of his fondness for the tumbling dice. But cards? They are thin on the ground. It is as though these two languages, the language of cards and that of literature, are incompatible, and it is tougher to translate the one into the other than it seems.
The reason for this may be that the really interesting thing about cards is cheating. Damon Runyon (whose manner somewhat infected the opening of this piece, though it will be resisted henceforward) wrote what may be the two greatest stories about card-players, and cheating is central to both. In ‘The Lacework Kid’, the eponymous Kid, a genius at all card games except gin rummy, is obliged, during a wartime sojourn in a prison camp, to play gin against the German camp commandant. The Kid wins, the German is found with a bullet in his head, and the Kid uses his winnings to bribe the guards into letting all the prisoners escape. Years later, it turns out that the Kid used his magic dealing fingers in a less than straightforward way. ‘In fact,’ we are told by his old mentor, Kidneyfoot, ‘The Lacework Kid is a rank sucker at gin until I instruct him in one manoeuvre that gives you a great advantage, which is to drop any one card to the floor accidentally on purpose.’ Cheating at cards, the story suggests, can be thought of as a creative act. You achieve your end by stepping outside the frame. Which is OK as long as you get away with it.
Runyon’s other great tale of cards and gambling, ‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown’, which was the basis for Guys and Dolls, contains the most memorable cautionary passage ever written about card-sharping. Not surprisingly, it is quoted at length (twice!) by Anthony Holden in Big Deal, his entertaining account of a
year spent playing professional poker:
‘Son,’ the old guy [Sky Masterson’s father] says, ‘you are now going out into the wide, wide world to make your own way, and it is a very good thing to do, as there are no more opportunities for you in this burg. I am only sorry,’ he says, ‘that I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but,’ he says, ‘not having any potatoes to give you, I am going to stake you to some very valuable advice … Son,’ the old guy says, ‘no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: Someday, somewhere,’ he says, ‘a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son,’ the old guy says, ‘do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider.’
The Oxford Guide to Card Games, by David Parlett, has disappointingly little to tell us about cheating. It refers us to Girolamo Cardano’s Liber de ludo aleae (‘Book on Games of Chance’), written in 1564, and containing, apparently, a detailed examination of the ‘inexorable logic’ of cheating—alas, however, Parlett does not quote. He does tell us about the seventeenth-century view of whist as ‘a low-class game … wicked by association with cheating,’ and quotes Charles Cotton (1674): ‘There is a way to discover to their partners what Honours they have; as by the wink of one eye, … it signifies one honour; shutting both the eyes, two; placing three or four fingers on the table, three or four honours.’ And in a later (1734) edition of Cotton, the editor, Seymour, added some more sophisticated variations: ‘piping’, a means of indicating the Honour cards held by the disposition of the cheat’s fingers upon his pipe while smoking; and verbal cheating, too. ‘“Indeed” signifies diamonds; “truly”, hearts; “Upon my word”, clubs; “I assure you”, spades.’
In spite of its relative reticence on this subject, The Oxford Guide is a handy and erudite volume. Parlett has absorbed the work of his great predecessors, ancient and modern, from Hoyle to Dummett, and written what is neither a rule-book nor a guide to better play, but a sort of eager meditation on the whole field of activity. He is excellent on history, demonstrating that cards did not arrive in Europe, as so often supposed, from China, possibly in Marco Polo’s luggage, because trade with China had ‘petered out long before John of Rheinfelden described [playing cards] as new’ in 1377; nor were they brought back by crusaders returning from the East. The true source, as proved by the provenance and dating of a twelfth- or thirteenth-century pack now held in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, was Mameluke Egypt.
Parlett is strong on poker, sketchy on bridge, and fascinating on a vast range of minor games, which he groups into categories of technique—‘Happy families’, ‘vying and bragging’, ‘matching and cribbing’. But for a portrait of card games in action, of the players as well as the play, it is Holden’s book to which one must turn.
Holden is no Runyon or Algren, though clearly under the influence of both. He is an excellent journalist and a poker maniac, whose very name is so close in sound to the pro version of poker (‘Hold’em’) that he keeps thinking the public address systems of Las Vegas are calling it out. His book is vivid, engrossing, and, along with his friend A. Alvarez’s book The Biggest Game in Town (1983), the best description of world-class poker we’ve been given. (Alvarez is the dedicatee of Big Deal, and also appears in it as The Crony.) Not much here about cheating, either, but nobody’s perfect. What Holden captures superbly is the madness of the committed card-player, which Runyon, in ‘The Lacework Kid’, summarized thus:
I will not attempt to describe gin rummy in any detail as you can call up any insane asylum and get any patient on the phone and learn about it in no time, as all lunatics are bound to be gin players, and in fact the chances are it is gin rummy that makes them lunatics.
There is a hilltop park in Karachi in which, as the heat of the day cools into evening, men gather in happy groups to sit cross-legged on the grass and break out the decks. The soft slaps of cards being played in triumph or resignation fill the air. Even at the height of the Zia dictatorship’s puritanism, when night-clubs went out of business and the Karachi drive-in, that traditional site of youthful lust, was closed down, the moral guardians of the nation did not dare to prevent the people from playing their card-games. There could be no more striking tribute to the obdurate mania of the card-player, and to the enduring vitality of the language of cards.
1990
DEBRETT GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
In Times Square, a few years back, New Yorkers were alarmed by a gigantic poster that asked, in large white letters on a black background, a somewhat unsettling question: PATHETIC HUMANS, WHO CAN SAVE YOU NOW? A couple of weeks later, the answer went up in the question’s place. It read: FLASH GORDON.
Hollywood always did see us as pathetic humans, didn’t it, as lesser breeds in need of the profane demigods up there in VistaVision, Todd-AO or CinemaScope. Our place was a seat in the dark, from which we could look up to the stars and watch them shine. Banality made our lives unreal; they were the ones who were fully alive. So we munched our popcorn and grew confused about reality. As the modern city became the negation of nature, so the movies were the perfect metropolitan form, mythologies of the unreal, and they came complete with a new religion: fame.
‘Fame! I wanna live for ever,’ runs the song. The game is, has always been, immortality. Once you had to be a Roman emperor, a prophet, a hero, or at the very least a genius, to qualify for that particular curse. Hollywood pretended to democratize deification. If you were Lucille LeSueur, you could step away from your sleazy, poor, unhappy past, say the magic word, and shazam! There you were: Joan Crawford.
But the cinema is the least democratic, most hierarchical and status-ridden of worlds, and Hollywood has always been a place of despots (Goldwyn, Thalberg, Cohn), Kings (Gable) and Queens (Pickford). Of course the stars were snobs. Of course they wanted to be aristocrats. But maybe they never quite believed they really truly were, because when Rita Hayworth married Aly Khan, she cried, ‘I’m so excited, I can hardly think, I’m sort of lost in a dream world.’ And when Grace Kelly married Monaco’s Rainier, an even dizzier pinnacle had been attained.
Debrett Goes to Hollywood sets out to chart the dynasties of Golden Age Hollywood, offering us both family trees and ‘webs’ at whose heart the sacred monsters sit: Elizabeth Taylor of the six husbands, Constance Bennett, Howard Hawks. It’s a bizarre book, its nose at once high in the air and deep in the dirt. Its author, Charles Kidd, seems torn between the posh genealogical delights of revealing the connection between Tyrone Power and Evelyn Waugh, and the pleasures of gossip-column scandal-mongering.
That isn’t surprising. Scandal and Hollywood were always difficult to separate. Maybe we always wanted the stars to fall. We wanted their divinity tarnished. So when Charles Kidd evokes ‘an age of glamour never to return’, he conjures up the Bennett sisters, who ‘totalled twelve husbands, eight divorces and twelve children. Their stories include an unsolved mystery, the tragedy of mental illness, and a scandal that nearly ended a career.’
If that’s glamour, his book is full of it: alcoholism, syphilis, suicide. ‘Unhappy Sapphic affairs’ were the undoing of one Pepi Lederer. Heterosexuality didn’t have much better results. ‘I hope they blast the living daylights out of that Elizabeth Taylor,’ murmured Debbie Reynolds’s mum after Liz ran off with Debbie’s Eddie, whom she later ditched for Dick. ‘Everyone knows exactly what she is.’ Take that.
Who are the really pathetic humans, I thought more than once as I read; and who can save them now?
One of the (unintentional) revelations of Debrett Goes to Hollywood is, after all, that stars do dim, fade and go out; that, except in a very few cases, fame isn’t for ever, and the promise of immortality is a con. Many of the ‘legends’ in this collection no longer seem quite so legendary. Does it interest you that Joan Bennett’s daughter was once the sister-in-law o
f Gloria Swanson’s daughter? How much do you care about Franchot Tone? Who on earth were the Rankin and Davenport dynasties? Sic transit Gloria Grahame, even if she does turn out to be descended from Edward III.
Many of the old-time stars whose immortality still seems assured are missing. No Mae West, no W. C. Fields, no Keaton. Even Monroe only rates a photograph. It’s significant, too, that the most interesting connections Charles Kidd has managed to unearth catch the eye because they are links between the movie world and famous people from the ‘real’ world.
One of these connections is that between Humphrey Bogart and Princess Di (Bogey’s mother was an eighth cousin of the Princess’s great-grandmother; pretty close, no?). The other is even more startling. Groucho Marx’s wife’s sister’s husband’s ex-wife’s ex-husband’s ex-wife’s husband was Randolph Churchill, whose father was, of course, Winston himself. Thus are two of the world’s greatest cigar-smokers joined by indissoluble (well, sort of) ties.
Very few stars, nowadays, can generate enough power to dazzle us. TV has made them smaller than we are. We no longer go to their darkened temples; no longer larger than life, they visit us instead. We channel-hop while they kiss, we push the fast-forward button on our videos when they bore us. Even their scandals fail to raise our eyebrows.
But maybe Hollywood gets the last laugh, after all. The stars may no longer command our devotion, but the religion whose first deities they were has conquered the earth. In The Big Room, Michael Herr and Guy Peellaert’s portraits of celebrity revealed that the real stars, today, can be gangsters (Meyer Lansky), gamblers (Nick the Greek) or hoteliers (Conrad Hilton). They can be used-car salesmen like Richard Nixon, or, like John Fitzgerald Kennedy, they can be President of the United States.