The nuclear family doesn’t provide nearly enough companionship … In a nuclear family children and parents can be locked in hellish close combat for twenty-one years or more. In an extended family, a child has scores of other homes to go to in search of love and understanding. He need not stay at home and torture his parents, and he need not starve for love.
This particular direction of Vonnegut’s thought seems to have been caused by the breakdown of his twenty-year-old marriage and the dispersal of his six children. Without rancour or sentiment he chronicles their lives and assesses their characters and future. He regards his family in the same way as he contemplates other people: alien but generally nice beings who are difficult to understand or fathom, whether they are leading aimless or purposeful lives. This is particularly evident when he savours the irony of the fact that—a professed and radical atheist all his life—not only his wife but also both his daughters should have recently become fervent born-again Christians.
Unlike the hostage-diplomat, the explorer or the film star, the novelist’s life is on the whole a dull unremarkable affair. Auden’s poem sums it up perfectly. The novelist
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.
Vonnegut is no exception. He lives in New York with his second wife, smokes fifty cigarettes a day, and writes. So when it comes to autobiography something other than the facts must be present if the account is to grip and intrigue. The answer is to cultivate a tone of voice—a literary personality who may bear no relation to the real one but whose idiosyncrasies and manner provide a point of view, an angle of vision, that redeems the otherwise banal details and unexceptionable events. In fact this dictum may well apply to any published writing where the first person pronoun is frequently in use.
Nabokov in Strong Opinions achieves this superbly. The spry, dandified inconoclast is highly engaging and teasingly outrageous. So too with Graham Greene in A Sort of Life and the recent Ways of Escape. The measured self-deprecating ironic gaze suits the recollections admirably. It doesn’t matter if the real Nabokov and Greene bear scant resemblance to their literary siblings—indeed there is something to be said for maximizing the distance between the two—the pleasure resides in the pose, the imposture. Vonnegut may or may not be like the portrait he presents of himself here. The point is that he has found his voice and it informs and colours the moderately interesting facts and tendentious opinions in a beguiling and sympathetic way. When talking about Thoreau, Vonnegut observes that “Thoreau, I now feel, wrote in the voice of a child, as I do.” That is Vonnegut’s voice, his particular imposture, and, like any child, its pronouncements can be maddening or inspiringly perceptive. There are enough of the latter to make us hope for more in the future.
1981
Kurt Vonnegut (2)
(Review of Deadeye Dick)
Every time I open a novel by Kurt Vonnegut the same words spring to mind: “Coy,” “Arch,” “Winsome” and “Cute.” But they are equally quickly dispelled. I suspect that Vonnegut’s tone of voice—and a remarkably consistent one it is—either wins the reader over fairly promptly or not at all. In my own case it’s the former effect that occurs, certainly with the category of novel which we can safely demarcate “late” Vonnegut: the sequence of books beginning with Breakfast of Champions and including Slapstick, Jailbird, Palm Sunday (autobiography) and this, the latest.
In these novels—and in Slaughterhouse 5 — the connection between life and art is straightforwardly causal. It seems to me that all the books mentioned emerge directly from the author’s baffled observation of human life and nature and effectively dramatize certain questions (and attempt to come up with some answers) that the observation engenders. Vonnegut considers our swarming damaged planet and contemplates our bizarre behaviour-patterns. He looks at the way we exploit and corrupt each other; he marvels at the multitude of toxic chemicals we happily ingest; he ponders why we spend so much time inventing devices that can so easily bring about our annihilation as a species—and so on, as he would say. But he also focuses his gaze more precisely: on the sex-game, as he terms it; on the connection between love and common decency; on how to cope with the random fatalities of life, with sudden and incomprehensible bereavement. In this sense Vonnegut is the most overtly humane of that remarkable generation of American novelists to which he belongs, and it’s to his undying credit that no sentiment, pap or any kind of emotional sop ever clouds or diminishes the cool, ironic, unapologetic quality of his vision.
In many ways Vonnegut exhibits—in his candour and disarming openness, the way he squares up these Big Issues—an archetypal Americanness. But he avoids the typical American response: an appeal to the heart, whether in the form of God, the flag, Mom or apple pie. He seems to lack the sophistication of a Roth or Heller; he has, in the best sense of the word, the most popular approach. But that type of naivety and simplicity is illusory. Vonnegut’s verdict on the world and its denizens is as hard-nosed and unconsoling as any his peers can offer up. And it’s this seeming paradox—the gum-chewing hick from middle America combined with a brand of cynicism almost classical in its consistency—that makes his work so intriguing.
Deadeye Dick exhibits all these qualities in the most satisfactory ways. The story relates the life of Rudolf Waltz from Midland City, Ohio. Rudy is, in his own terms, a “neuter”—he takes no part in the sex-game. He works as an all-night salesman in Schramm’s drugstore. His main aim in life is to be inconspicuous. This is partly owing to his crippling shyness but is also as a result of an accident he was responsible for when he was twelve. In a moment of elation young Rudy fired a gun over the roof-tops of Midland City. The bullet, falling many miles away, drilled a hole between the eyes of a pregnant woman. Thus Rudy became a double murderer, and thus he earned his nickname, Deadeye Dick.
This sort of picaresque autobiography (Rudy is the narrator) allows Vonnegut’s distinctive style and approach to function at their most effective. Various characters in Midland City are introduced to us and the mundane course of Rudy’s life steadily progresses. People die, people are unkind to and misunderstand each other. In the end a neutron bomb accidentally explodes in Midland City, wiping out the population but leaving the buildings intact. Fortunately, by this time, Rudy and his brother Felix have left and have set up in a hotel they’ve bought in Haiti. Rudy’s final comment is “we are still in the Dark Ages,” but there is no sense of Vonnegut passionately indicting man’s inhumanity to man. His stance is, if anything, more disinterested than ever. The book opens with a warning: “Watch out for life.” Rudy survives—to the extent that anyone survives—through a policy of mental non-engagement. In his attitude to others he is selfless and caring, but intellectually he is entirely uncommitted. Behind the wit and the humour this is the bleakest Vonnegut since Slaughterhouse 5.
1983
W. H. Auden
(Review of The Orators)
The Orators by W. H. Auden was published in 1932 when Auden was twenty-five. It is an immensely precocious, rambling, difficult and eccentric work, mainly in prose and almost entirely forgotten. Today, outside libraries, it is only available in The English Auden, a collection of his poems, essays and dramatic writings from 1927 to 1939. The Orators, I suppose, is subsumed under “dramatic writings,” but it’s not in any sense a play, or even a piece for several voices. It is in actual fact an un-classifiable oddity, a maverick work in Auden’s output, impossible to label or pigeonhole. It is fiction, but it’s neither a novel or a short story. It contains parodies, lists, geometric drawings, diagrams, odes, doggerel and straightforward poems too. And, to be honest, it is long-winded occasionally, and, at times, maddeningly opaque with a rich seam of cockeyed, socio-cultural analysis. Auden himself, in later life, said of it, “My name on the title page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented, but near the border of sanity.” So why do I keep on reading it all the t
ime?
Two main answers and lots of minor ones. I re-read it chiefly because it’s very funny and also for the access I gain into an astonishingly vivid, entrancing and daft imagination. Auden is my favourite poet, but in the prose of The Orators the control and discipline of poetry are abandoned. If you like the Audenesque tone of voice, its particular tropes and obsessions, then here you will find it writ large, lavishly piled on. It is, I think, something to be dipped into or picked over and, although it was vaguely designed as a coherent statement, its parts are infinitely richer than its whole.
The Orators is subtitled “An English Study” and is, rather as The Waste Land intended, meant to be a survey of the state of England, and the moral and spiritual health of the populace. This all sounds eminently serious and dull but, being Auden, it is Englishness that comes through rather than gravitas, and the ills of society are very idiosyncratically diagnosed. There is none of the monumental distanced angst striven for in Eliot’s poem. The needs and desires voiced—though genuine—are much more the needs and desires of W. H. Auden Esq., one suspects, rather than the unspoken pleas of a generation.
The book is divided into three sections, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. Part One is called “The Initiates” and is itself subdivided. It opens with an “Address for a Prizeday,” a hectoring speech analysing the current problems of the population. The English, it transpires, can be classed as four different types of lover. Excessive Lovers of Self, Excessive Lovers of Neighbours, Defective Lovers and Perverted Lovers. All this has at root some ostensibly serious purpose, to do largely with Auden’s preoccupation with psychosomatic illness as inspired by people like Groddeck and Layard. But this can be safely set aside, for the “seriousness” of The Orators, it seems to me, is only a starting point—a sort of skeleton of the book which gives it a rough structure and shape but which is really only there to provide support for the fleshing out of the text. It provides Auden’s talent with the excuse it has been waiting for. Having classified the population in this way he can now get on with describing them. The Excessive Lovers of Self: “Habitués of the mirror, famous readers, they fall in love with the voice of the announcer, maybe, from some foreign broadcasting station they can never identify.” The Defective Lovers: “They sit by fires they can’t make up their minds to light, while dust settles on their unopened correspondence … Wearers of soiled linen, the cotton wool in their ears unchanged for months. Anaemic, muscularly undeveloped and rather mean. Hit them in the face if necessary.” And so on for two delightful pages.
The following sections, “Argument” and “Statement,” introduce the atmosphere of war, insurrection, civil unrest and the emergence of a Leader who will guide the true of heart to victory and a new life. Once again the rather “loony” message is the excuse for more virtuoso comic description. A bizarre and fantastic atmosphere of risk, threat and paranoia is conjured up. And here too are all the familiar ingredients of the Audenesque landscape: public schools, the OTC, mines, mills, crags, borders and spies. “The fatty smell of drying clothes, the smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun … Rook shadows cross to the right. A schoolmaster cleanses himself at half term with a vegetable offering; on the north side of a hill, one writes with his penis in the snow ’resurgam.’”
You will be beginning to gain some idea of the tone of The Orators— the sinister-comic-eccentric voice at its most developed. The mood is sustained in the final section “Letter to a Wound.” This is based on Auden’s own experience after an operation he underwent on an anal fissure which took many months to heal. The letter forms a curious coda: a love letter, it shows the extent to which illness and sufferer become one.
Part Two is “Journal of an Airman” and the triumph of The Orators. It should be included in every anthology of the English short story. In it the vague impulses and solutions, needs and prognoses that preoccupied Part One are splendidly focused and dramatized in the diary of a neurotic aviator. The battle lines are drawn. The airman and his comrades face the Enemy. Although meant to function as a metaphor, the Enemy turn out to be suspiciously like the English middle classes at their smug, bourgeois worst. A strange civil war or revolution seems to be in progress in a landscape which is half Icelandic, half Cotswolds, with moors and ice floes, golf links and country pubs. The airman’s tortured and paranoid voice leads us through the mounting conflict with notes and jottings, attempts at aphorisms and pensées. The need for a true Leader re-emerges, while the airman frets about his fear of his mother and his love for his homosexual uncle Harry. The voice is uniquely Auden’s—D. H. Lawrence meets P. G. Wodehouse by way of Freud and Ealing comedies, if you see what I mean.
Throughout, the airman keeps trying to define and fix the Enemy in his mind and encourage in himself the right elements of daring and fearlessness. “Three kinds of enemy walk—the grandiose stunt—the melancholic stagger—the paranoic sidle. Three kinds of enemy face—the fucked hen—the favourite puss—the stone in the rain. Three enemy traits—refusal to undress in public—proficiency in modern languages—inability to travel back to the engine. Three kinds of enemy hand—the marsh—the claw—the dead yam.” And manically on and on. The journal has all the elisions, fractures, non sequiturs and private references one would expect. But what is most striking and admirable is the way Auden has seized on the potentiality of this literary form and exploited it to the full. Hint, allusion and half-meaning suddenly become potent assets: the briefest references can conjure up the density and detail of a long novel.
Here are some examples.
Tea today at Cardross Golf Club. A hot bed. Far too many monks in Sinclair Street.
Thursday
The Hollies. Some blazers lounge beneath a calming tree; they talk in birds’ hearing; girls come with roses, servants with a tray, skirting the sprinkler preaching madly to the grass, where mower worries in the afternoons.
Fourteenth anniversary of my uncle’s death. Fine. Cleaned the airgun as usual. But what have I done to avenge, to disprove the boy’s faked evidence at the inquest? NOTHING.
Monday—Interviewed A about his report.
Tuesday—Pamphlet dropping in the Bridgenorth area.
Wednesday—Address at Waterworm College.
Thursday—The Hollies. 7.30.
Friday—See M about the gin to be introduced into the lemonade at the missionary whist drive.
Saturday—Committee meeting.
Sunday—Break up the Mimosa’s lecture on blind flying.
We are drawn into the batty, surreal world of the airman. We are his confidant, his confessor. We share his worries (his errant love of Uncle Harry, his betrayal of Derek), his grief (Derek’s death, a crash: “His collar bone was sticking through his navel”); his love for E; the dangers of war (“A feint landing by pleasure paddle steamers near the bathing machines”); his own perpetual struggle to be heroic (28th. 3.40 am. Pulses and reflexes normal … Some cumulus cloud at 10,000 feet. Hands in perfect order”).
The final section of The Orators is all poetry—six odes—with examples of Auden at his most silly (“Christopher stood, his face grown lined with wincing/In front of ignorance—’Tell the English,’ he shivered,/‘Man is a spirit’”); evocative (“After a night of storm was a lawn in sunlight”); and typical (“Go south, lovey, south by Royal Scot/Or hike if you like it, or hire a Ford”). But the odes are a mixed bunch, and the best have been reprinted elsewhere, as have the other poems in the body of the book. As a result the work itself has fallen into obscurity, remembered if at all as the original context for a few more famous poems (“By landscape reminded of his mother’s figure” and the superb sestina “We have brought you, they said, a map of the country”). This is a real shame, for in The Orators one encounters the Audenesque at its most vivid and ill-disciplined and, accordingly, most fecund and distinctive. But more than that it reveals the vast range and scope of Auden’s astonishing eye for detail, Dickensian in its precision and accuracy, a
nd provides us with that rare opportunity: to find in prose the word by word, line by line delights of poetry.
1984
Milan Kundera
(Review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
This novel begins with a myth. Suppose that every act we committed in our life on earth was destined to be repeated, not just once, but in an endless series of cycles. In that case everything we did, trivial and grand, from minor sin to major goodness, would be invested with a momentous importance simply because of its permanence in the scheme of things. Every act of kindness, selfishness, deceit, self-regard would be etched on existence for ever. And, consequently, we would think twice, thrice, many times, before acting—our lives would be weighted down with import and significance, with unbearable responsibility.
But if, on the other hand, life is instead merely an endless linear flow of time, then every act, every moment, is at once unique and lost for ever—gone in an instant, never to return. The upshot of this theory is that life becomes an affair of utter insignificance, a droll succession of inconsequences—living (Being) is frivolous, transitory, light.
Kundera introduces these two opposing notions at the outset of this—his fifth and best—novel and throughout further opposes their two related qualities of lightness and weight. Which is better (I paraphrase drastically)—a life lived burdened by the weight of responsibility? Or a life lived unfettered by duty and moral injunction: a life of perfect, airy freedom?