1990
RAYMOND CARVER
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
One Sunday last November, in some suitably ‘high tacky’ club in London, a bunch of us read out pieces for, and by, and in memory of, Raymond Carver. At one moment I looked along my row and the truth is we were all blubbering away, or close to it, anyhow, except for Ray’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, who loved him most and who reminded me then of my grandmother refusing tears after my grandfather died. Tess gave out an iron serenity and even a kind of joy, and it’s there again in A New Path to the Waterfall, their last book, in her beautiful, scrupulous, unflinching introduction and in his own last poems.
I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.
It’s a hard fate to beat the booze and then lose out, a decade later, to the cigarettes, but then again ten years of good and plenteous work, ten years of feeling yourself beloved on the earth, that’s more than most of us get, more, even, than we learn to expect. Raymond Carver was a great writer and, as A New Path to the Waterfall tells us he knew, a pretty lucky man.
‘Memory doesn’t care where it lives,’ Carver writes. The memory of a slim, gay youth as a débutante who ran off to the Folies Bergères can survive in the dirty, 300-pound body of a dying baglady. The memory of old wretchedness and ruined love can haunt a happy man. Ray never stopped writing about that old wretchedness, that ruined love, his first marriage. Manic calls on an answering machine, sudden beatings on an aeroplane, the loss of trust in the idea of love itself, the money problems, the terrible relationships with the children (‘Oh, son, in those days I wanted you dead/a hundred—no, a thousand—different times’): this old violence, as much as the late serenity, creates the distinctive Carver voice, and universe. There’s no censorship in Carver, which can lay him open to the charge of writing ‘list poetry’, but which recognizes, too, the dark and cluttered actuality of the heart. He is a poet of inclusion, of capaciousness:
The faint sound of rock and roll,
The red Ferrari in my head,
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around in the kitchen …
Put it all in,
Make use.
Scattered through this book are passages of Chekhov laid out as verse. The success of these arrangements guides us to see that in Carver’s work, too, even the most narrative and ‘prosaic’ of his poems, even the ones that look most like chopped-up stories, gain added resonance from their form. ‘Suspenders’, which describes a nightmarish childhood moment, would ‘work’ as prose, but would lose its formal, distanced air, which seems almost like a truce, like the quiet that settles on the quarrelling family in the poem, the ‘quiet that comes to a house/where nobody can sleep’.
In two consecutive poems, ‘Miracle’, the one about the beating he suffers on the aeroplane at the hands of his first wife, and ‘My Wife’, in which she has left him, we find the idea of having to ‘account for’ one’s life: ‘It’s now/they have to account for, the blood/on his collar, the dark smudge of it/staining her cuff’; ‘She left behind two nylon stockings, and/a hairbrush overlooked behind the bed … It is only the bed/that seems strange and impossible to account for.’ The phrase contains both the idea of narration and that of balance sheets, and many of Carver’s poems seem to use narration as a process of arriving at a profit-and-loss understanding of life, complete with bottom line.
The bottom line, for Ray, was lung cancer. The last group of poems in this volume, poems strong enough to turn inevitable death into art, have a simple, declaratory honesty that makes them almost unbearable to read. This is the beginning of ‘What the Doctor Said’:
He said it doesn’t look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on
one lung before
I quit counting them
And the ending is, if anything, even more shocking: ‘I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me/something no one else on earth had ever given me/I may even have thanked him habit being so strong.’
But in writing the story of his death Raymond Carver also wrote the story of his love. There is a poem about getting married, Tess and Ray’s Reno wedding, a wedding in that town of divorcees and gamblers, ‘as if we’d found an answer to/that question of what’s left/when there’s no more hope.’ There is a poem which sets love explicitly against death: ‘Saying it then, against/what comes: wife, while I can, while my breath, each hurried petal/can still find her’. And there are poems of farewell, of which at least one, ‘No Need’, is a great poem, of a perfection that makes me unwilling to quote. Read it. Read everything Raymond Carver wrote. His death is hard to accept, but at least he lived.
1989
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
In a writer who has just been made painfully aware of the extreme intolerance of some members of his own religious tradition, the easy irreverence with which Isaac Bashevis Singer continues to treat the great subjects of God and the Devil arouses a kind of envy: no fundamentalists are after him, no government has banned his book for blasphemy. Look at what the fellow gets away with! This, for instance, in the brief Author’s Note with which he prefaces his new collection of stories: ‘Art … can also in its small way attempt to mend the mistakes of the eternal builder in whose image man was created.’ God’s mistakes? That’s dirty talk.
Nor is Singer’s version of Satan by any means all bad. (Religious or not, he seems like many writers, from Milton onwards, to be somewhat ‘of the devil’s party’.) In the title story of this superb collection, ‘The Death of Methuselah’, the 969-year-old Methuselah is taken on a visit to Hell, ‘Cain’s city’, and finds that it has its positive side: ‘Satan and his brother Asmodeus are gods of passion, and so is their spouse, the goddess Lilith. They enjoy themselves and allow others their enjoyment.’ While, at the other end of the book, a certain Kaddish, ‘The Jew from Babylon’, who has spent his life casting out demons, is captured by them at the moment of his death and borne off to the depths, where he actually gets to marry Lilith, the ‘Queen of the Abyss’.
God’s work and the Devil’s, Singer suggests here, aren’t all that far apart. Gehenna itself, in the comic parable ‘Sabbath in Gehenna’, is a distinctly worldly spot, in which the condemned of the earth talk about demanding improvements in their condition, dream of revolution, contemplate starting a magazine. (‘When you sign a petition the angels throw it away … But a magazine they would read. The righteous in paradise expire from boredom.’) There is even a ‘liberal group among the angels’ who want the condemned to have weekends off and a week’s vacation in the World of Illusions.
Singer has obviously not heard that the smart money now considers this type of magic realism to be yesterday’s horse. This, too, is fortunate, both for him and for us, because The Death of Methuselah is the most sheerly enjoyable book I’ve read all year, full of wisdom, history and wit. In the majority of the stories, a version of the author appears not as the story-teller but as the recipient of stories; these are tales compulsively told by their characters, a gallery of human beings for whom the act of story-telling is akin to that of coming-to-be. They talk that they might exist.
The frustrated painter Max Stein confesses his penchant (shared, one gathers from elsewhere, by George Bernard Shaw) for becoming a ‘house friend’, the ‘other man’ in a ménage á trois. Prisoners in jail tell each other the story of another triangle that goes murderously wrong on a boat to America, and at the end ‘burst into the hilarious laughter of those who have nothing left to lose’; for them the story of the misfortunes of others is a way of briefly, bleakly, cheering themselves up. On a steamer to South America, a chance acquaintance
tells the ‘author’ the tale of how an accidental glimpse of his fiancée kissing another man poisoned the rest of his life. This last story, ‘A Peephole in the Gate’, is to my mind the very finest in this fine collection.
What happens between men and women in this book is, mostly, trouble. The men cheat but cannot stand it if they think the women are doing the same; the very women with whom they cheat destroy their faith in womankind as a whole; although their own actions do not, naturally, make them think any the worse of their own sex. Jealousy, treachery, abandonment, cuckoldry: all human life is here. In one beautiful story, a woman’s life is ruined by the discovery, after her marriage, that her husband has no sense of humour. In another, a certain Zeinvel, who is a frequenter of whorehouses, rediscovers his old friend Shmerl (who isn’t), only to find that Shmerl’s perfect and demure wife was once the ‘most salacious of strumpets’. Heartbreakingly, Zeinvel is obliged to leave his friend for ever rather than tell him the truth, condemned by friendship to the tedium and loneliness of his paltry life.
Many of these stories are structures like old-fashioned fables, even down to the capsule of wisdom at the end: ‘A day after the wedding both sides begin to search, the husband as well as the wife.’ ‘Of one thing I’m convinced—that here on earth truth and justice are for ever and absolutely beyond our grasp.’ And in many of them there is trouble between Man and God as well as men and women; but behind the trouble there is a mischievous serenity, a disenchanted joy in life that compensates for all the difficulties life creates. This is an irresistible book.
1988
PHILIP ROTH
In Borges’s story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, the garden turns out to be a fantastic and impossible novel by a certain Ts’ui Pen in which the characters live out all their possible lives: ‘In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate … The hero dies in the third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive.’ Like the fictional Ts’ui Pen, the real—or perhaps ‘real’—Philip Roth has long been the creator of counterlives: Portnoy, Tarnopol, Kepesh, Zuckerman. He is accordingly well aware that his readers will approach his autobiography—his ‘novelist’s autobiography’—with a measure of suspicion. That he has called the book The Facts is no more than his way of upping the ante. Facts are slippery creatures, as we know, and Rothian facts are likely to be more slippery than most.
The Facts is, in fact, addressed not to us, the readers, but to the fictional Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s long-serving counterself. Apart from this, however, it begins factually enough: ‘I will tell you that in the spring of 1987, at the height of a ten-year period of creativity, what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution.’ After the crack-up, Roth began to ‘render experience untransformed’ so that he could ‘retrieve my vitality, transform myself into myself’; or, perhaps, began to be reborn, like his characters, ‘like you, Zuckerman, who are reborn in The Counterlife through your English wife, like your brother Henry, who seeks rebirth in Israel with his West Bank fundamentalists.’ The book he gives us is much more than mere therapy, however. It’s a vivid and often touching account of a writer’s beginnings, which deserves a place beside Eudora Welty’s recent, marvellously evocative book on the same theme.
Two passages are particularly striking. One is Roth’s account of how, after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus, he was accused of being anti-Semitic, a self-hating Jew, and how, at a conference at Yeshiva University in New York, he ‘realized that I was not just opposed but hated.’ His responses to being so vilified have been—if I may be forgiven a personal note—very moving, even helpful, to this similarly beleaguered writer. I was able to recognize in myself the curious lethargy, the soporific torpor that overcomes Roth while he is under attack; to recognize, too, the stupid, humiliated rage that leads him to cry: ‘I’ll never write about Jews again!’ And when the anger passes, and he understands that ‘the most bruising public exchange of my life constituted not the end of my imagination’s involvement with the Jews, let alone an excommunication, but the real beginning of my thralldom … This group whose embrace once had offered me so much security was itself fanatically insecure. My humiliation … was the luckiest break I could have had. I was branded’—then, too, he seems to speak directly, profoundly, not only to, but for, me.
The second passage is the one about his first, terrible marriage to Josie, or possibly ‘Josie’, who came close to destroying him, he tells us, and whose faking of a pregnancy to force him into wedlock he used unchanged in My Life as a Man. Josie is the one real monster in this book, the one ‘character’ for whom Roth feels the kind of anger that has motivated so much of his best work. So she is not only a monster, but the book’s most unforgettable character.
It’s true, though, that you begin to feel a little uneasy about Roth’s philippic against his first wife, who is dead, after all, killed in a motor accident and unable to defend herself against his portrait of her. And were it not for Roth’s last and best counterpunch, these doubts could have been substantial enough to undermine the book.
The stroke that saves it is Roth’s decision to hand The Facts over to Nathan Zuckerman, whose reply to his author is brilliant and savage. Roth has made himself and his family too nice, and as for Josie, she must have been ‘both better and worse’ than Roth allows: his true equal. Zuckerman, Roth’s male other, recognizes in Josie his female counterpart. As for the book itself, ‘Don’t publish,’ Zuckerman advises. The autobiography doesn’t explain the most important things: the rage, and the work. Zuckerman and his English wife Maria need Roth to go on giving them life (even though they are filled with trepidation at what might lie in store for them); Roth’s flirtation with ‘real life’ won’t do.
As for the reader (this one, anyhow) he ends up voting for the Zuckerman version, but it’s a close-run thing. As Maria says of Roth: ‘The only person capable of commenting on his life is his imagination. Because the inhibition is just too tremendous in this form … He’s not telling the truth.’ The Truth, however, would probably have been less interesting than The Facts.
1989
SAUL BELLOW
Corde, the Chicagoan dean of journalism whose winter of discontent is the matter of The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow, is in part the Dangling Man reincarnated. For much of the book he hangs about while various nooses tighten around his neck. (His name is surely no random choice.) Corde has accompanied his wife Minna, a distinguished astronomer and a defector, back to Bucharest to be present beside the deathbed of her mother Valeria. There isn’t much he can do. ‘Language was a problem.’ Valeria, the fallen matriarch, is in the State hospital. Difficulties are being made to prevent her family from seeing her. Corde helps his wife and her aunt struggle with the system, but his efforts don’t do much good. Most of the time he is left to his own devices, observing, thinking, worrying, remembering. And Romania, a precisely, almost lyrically described place of pollarded trees and informing concierges, comes to seem more like a projection of Corde’s inner anguishes than a ‘real’ country; a grey, repressive Romania of the mind, in which the State sets ‘the pain levels’ for all its citizens.
Back in Chicago, a murder trial is taking place. Two blacks are accused of having killed one of Corde’s students. Corde is bound up in the trial; he has had a hand in bringing the defendants to court, and is being attacked and vilified as a result. He has recently written a series of articles about Chicago. These pieces have made many powerful people angry, and embarrassed the college whose dean he is. Dangling in Romania, Corde awaits the result in the case, which is also, metaphorically, a case in which he is the accused.
This is an extraordinary book in that almost all its a
ction takes place off-stage. ‘Of course America is where the real action is,’ says Corde’s boyhood friend, Dewey Spangler, now a big-time Lippmanesque journalist whom Corde runs into in Bucharest. This is terrible news to have to tell humankind, but what else is there to say?’ Corde’s American life unfolds in the form of recollections, conversations, flashbacks, letters, rumours. Even in Romania, the matriarch Valeria must do her dying in the wings; the novel is only permitted to visit her a couple of times. This curious technique has a purpose. It clears the centre of the stage for Corde’s inner monologue; and it is Corde’s mind, agitated, relentlessly probing, analysing, thinking the world into being, that dominates the novel. Mere events become aspects of perception. It’s impossible to overstate the energetic brilliance with which Bellow invests the world-according-to-Corde. This is an astoundingly well-written book.
Corde ranges over many different themes. And at first the selection seems almost arbitrary: astronomy (Minna), race, Chicago, communism, journalism, humanism, prison conditions, motherhood, even environmentalism, in the form of the scientist Peech who believes the world’s ills are caused by the build-up of lead in the atmosphere—apocalypse caused by ‘chronic lead insult’. But then you see how intricately Bellow has worked to shape these elements into an artistic whole. There are parallels, connections everywhere. Apparently ‘lead insult’ was also responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire, when lead was used to adulterate wines; and we are now in Romania, and lead is described as ‘the Stalin of the metals’ … And many more elegant correspondences are revealed: Minna’s stars are the exalted opposites of the depths of the Chicago jails; Dewey Spangler’s column about Corde, which costs him his job, is the echo of childhood letters which also got Corde into deep trouble; and the novel’s many women, both American and Romanian, are connected and contrasted in endlessly subtle ways The Dean’s December seeks to be nothing less than a redescription, free from jargon, of received ideas and the whole accumulated detritus of the age, of Western civilization itself: the whole shooting-match, the works. It is a thrillingly ambitious book.