Odd Jobs (2 page)

Clearly, the present writer said Yes not infrequently. In one especially affirmative phase, toward the end of 1988, as I was trying to muster my scattered resources and commence a novel, I found myself obligated to write an introduction to an album of
New Yorker
covers, a study of our national monuments from the engineering angle for
Popular Mechanics
, a hymn to winter golf for
Golf Digest
, and an essay upon the Gospel of St. Matthew for a book on the New Testament—an anthology of amateur exegeses called
Incarnation
, a wispy Christian sequel to an Old Testament bodice-ripper titled
Congregation
—not to mention an adaptation of an old short story of mine into a brief play, a commentary upon a poem of mine for a children’s anthology, a speech on computers to be given at M.I.T., and definitive reviews of a Chinese Communist sex novel, a historical treatise upon a certain John Hu who happened to go crazy in eighteenth-century France, and two giant tomes devoted to the further glory of George Bernard Shaw. Except for the tiny commentary on the poem, written in kiddy-talk, and the cover introduction, senseless without the covers themselves, and the golf piece, saved for some more sporty collection, all these efforts are contained in
Odd Jobs
, including the
Popular Mechanics
article, which I had considered leaving out but which on being reread held my interest, with its piquant nuts and bolts, its saga of leveraged heft and large-scale chiselling in the cause of patriotic symbolization. Do not think, however, that I have lazily included every odd job performed since mid-1982: I left out forewords to the collected lyrics of Cole Porter and the supposedly best short stories of 1984, several essays on photographs, a number of pedagogic textbook commentaries, two funeral orations, a few
New Yorker
“Notes and Comments,” all essays on golf and art, and more than a few saucy little speeches, including one jovially introducing George Plimpton so he could as jovially present the MacDowell Medal to a slightly less jovial William Styron.

The very first item, the account of my five days in Finland, came about curiously: a new Condé Nast magazine,
Traveler
, invited me to contribute,
and, since I had already scheduled my sentimental visit to Finland, I thought to write for them a kind of parody of a travel piece. But
The New Yorker
, to whom, in obedience to my contractual obligations, I showed the result first, surprisingly accepted it, and thus my nonevents and angst-ridden excursion popped up in its deadpan pages, under the commodious heading “Our Footloose Correspondents.” Several Finnish schoolchildren, thinking I was attacking their excellent country, sent me indignant postcards. My travel confidences are followed herein by two stray pieces of semi-fiction, to give them a home between covers, and the wee self-plagiarized play. In the cases of “The Importance of Fiction” and “Can Architecture Be Criticized?” an irritation with myself for accepting the assignments may have galvanized my style and hyperbolized my assertions. Otherwise, my conscience is clear enough. After all, what is a writer for but to write? Some novelists—Bellow, Styron, Pynchon—seem able to confine themselves to well-spaced presentations of book-length works to a grateful public; I, even though (or perhaps because) I have lived most of my life in small towns, need a certain frequent reassurance of proofs coming and going, of postage and phoning, of input and output. The discreet fuss of periodical publication gives me citizenship in the corporate world and connects me, not too bindingly, with a network of literary colleagues. I cannot live within the anchorite’s cell of a novel all the time. And, raised in a Depression atmosphere of financial anxiety, I have trouble turning money from the door; today’s eager profferer of two dollars a word may be tomorrow’s bankrupt venture in targeted marketing. Just now, as I write these words,
New England Monthly
, which ran several of the frothier concoctions below, has its folding noted in the morning paper, and an hour later a Federal Express truck huffs and puffs to my door with a billet-doux from
Gentlemen’s Quarterly:
“We would very much like to have something by you in the magazine. We had thought of a couple of essay ideas—art, the business of art, galleries, museums, etc.—but we wonder if you might not rather write a piece on golf?” Alas, even the courteously cajoling editor seems to sense that I may have said my fill on these thoroughly stroked pet topics. My best defense, in fending off odd jobs, remains a widespread ignorance.

One accepts editorial invitations in the hopes of learning something, or of extracting from within some unsuspected wisdom. For writing educates the writer as it goes along. “I always write a thing first and think about it afterwards,” E. B. White wrote, “because the easiest way to have
consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down.” The pieces herein that I feel fondest toward are, perversely, those prodigals that gave me most trouble: the eye-grinding forays into vast prose tracts of Emerson and Howells, of Tolstoy and Shaw and Ben Franklin. I returned with a piece of the boundless kingdom of the written word a little better mapped in my mind. Without being a reader the way some professors, editors, and chairbound agoraphobes are readers, I am shyly happy among texts. Quotations, and even quotations within quotations, please me. How nicely, it seems to me, “Fictional Houses” frames up its topic, of the real within the imaginary! How real, to me, became, in Stephen Gould’s exposition, the precipitous, layered terrain where Victorian theology and geology collide! My ability to get excited by such verbal constructs perhaps goes back to my childhood cartooning—my yen to draw talk balloons in ruled-off panels. Then I became a college English major. Now, having shied from graduate school and the conventional literary sideline of teaching, I feel a need for quick-fix seminars, and write term papers for pay instead of for grades.

Of the odd jobs I do, writing
New Yorker
reviews feels the least odd; the generous space the magazine provides, the weight of attention its editors and fact-checkers selflessly bring to bear upon the columns my name alone claims, the cheerful welcome granted to a little fun and freestyle generalization in the prose all make the reviews feel like a profitable subdivision of creativity. To date I have written two hundred and one signed reviews for the magazine, plus dozens of “Briefly Noted”s. In my four collections of non-fictional prose, I count (not including introductions) three hundred sixty-nine books reviewed. At the modest estimate of ten hours per book, that comes to 3,690 hours, or 461.25 eight-hour days, amounting to ninety-two five-day weeks, or, less holidays and vacations, just about two working years. I consider it time not ill spent. At this task I have been allowed to create an alter ego, a kind of sage younger brother, urbane and proper, with none of the warts, tics, obsessions, and compulsions that necessarily disfigure an imaginative writer, who must project a world out of a specific focus and selected view—whose peculiarities, indeed,
are
his style, his personality, his testimony, his peculiar value. It is reassuring, not only to such a monster but to his ideal readers, to be able to claim as kin a business-suited, levelly judgmental critic—a kind of lawyer in the family. The establishment and certification of this figure (no more or less fictional, somehow, than the
heroes of
Rabbit, Run
and
The Coup
and
Self-Consciousness
) has given me much methodical pleasure over the decades and lent the comfort of respectability to my near and dear.

Respectability, however, comes with a price for a would-be artist. As eminent a critic as Malcolm Cowley once, after some kind words about a review of mine of James Joyce’s letters, wondered if I ought to be doing this sort of thing at all. I wondered, too. Creativity is a delicate imp; it should dwell under toadstools and garb itself in cobwebs and not be smothered beneath a great load of discriminatory judgments. Too much left-brained control takes the emptiness, as a Zen golf instructor might say, out of your swing. And there is a rhythm, of artful qualification—a scorpion circling, sting poised above his back—that critical sentences acquire, and which can infect descriptive prose with a circumlocutory smugness. It is almost impossible to avoid, in writing a review, the tone of being wonderfully right; whereas any creative endeavor launches itself on the winds of uncertainty and accident, and will certainly go wrong in some drifts and be judged wrong in others. I found the writing of these reviews a bit hectic—locating the quote you want, patching up the transitions, rushing along before the book quite fades from memory—but reprehensibly safe from the fear of blasphemy, the fear of doing a great thing poorly that makes every venture into fiction and poetry a tentative and fretful affair, rife with delaying maneuvers and second cups of fortifying tea. How much better to do a great thing worthily than to do many things well enough! “Man of letters” is not, to me, a term of much praise; it suggests the uniform yet lightweight solidity of a mannequin, a humanoid artifact posed in the big windows of cultural display, crisply dressed in this season’s fashions but its body consisting, from toeless feet to alertly tilted head, of a single plastery substance, ground-up letters. A mannequin’s eyes are dead; there is nobody home; men of letters live in limbo. So I am relieved to see that, under
The New Yorker
’s new management, fresh young untamed blood is being infused into the Books Department and my dutiful reviewing pace can at last be slackened. Though the present editor, Robert Gottlieb, and the editor for my Books pieces, Ann Goldstein, are as hospitable and assiduous as their predecessors, William Shawn and Susan Moritz, and though Edith Oliver, the Books dispatcher, is as recklessly on-cheering as ever, the heat is somehow off. In keeping with the valedictory mood of my late fifties (see
this page
), the bulk of my reviewing feels behind me, and a perspective looms from which all of it was, if not a mistake, an aberration. My purpose
in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal.

Though it is hard to believe that even that chairbound agoraphobe will read this collection straight through, I have tried to arrange its over one hundred and sixty items along an encouraging curve. The book arches from the fairly personal into the wide heavens of other people’s books and then back to the grassy earth of the personal again, in the form of salvaged bits of autobiography and autocriticism. It became my habit to review, for
The New Yorker
, two or more books together, aggregation providing a pleasant reinforcing effect. Where the pairing was but lightly secured, I have separated the titles, but in most cases the glue of joint argumentation resisted, and the bond was allowed to stand. Hence only one author, Philip Roth, has a section all to himself, and some, like Umberto Eco and Mario Vargas Llosa and Robert Pinget, are repeatedly considered but in widely separated places. Where a miniature review, written anonymously for
The New Yorker
’s “Briefly Noted” section, fit handily, I slipped it in. Laughably loose categories like “Other Countries Heard From” and “Odd Couples” catch the otherwise unclassifiable. Most of the books reviewed are novels and most of these, by my preference, are from across the Atlantic or south of the border. The innovative power of American realism isn’t what it was for Hemingway and Faulkner, and foreign solutions to the puzzle that fiction poses in this post-print, anti-teleological era held out to me hope of some magical formulae that wouldn’t occur to my fellow countrymen.

The reviews are undated but were generally written the years the books were published, which are given in the subheadings. An effort has been made to reproduce the numerous quotations accurately, even to paragraph indentations and English spellings. Franklin, Emerson, and Howells are as they appear in the Library of America texts, quaint punctuation and all. The problem of how to address authors in the course of a piece, where their names arise as faithfully as a drumbeat, has been relegated to the inconsistencies of social instinct: simple last names sit less rudely on men than on women; in the case of a female author known to use a married name, “Mrs.” is used, and “Miss” for maiden-name users old enough not to find the usage curious. Mrs. Spark, Miss Murdoch, Ms. Tyler: please don’t be offended. But for a few brief footnotes, no attempt has been made to bring the historical background—the contemporary temperature of the Cold War, the political condition of Chile and Germany and Albania—up to date. Most of the pieces belong to an
already slightly bygone era when Ronald Reagan reigned over the United States and William Shawn over
The New Yorker
, and it seemed important to quote from Calvino and Borges at length. The presiding term was “postmodern,” yet, though the concept of postmodernism comes in for a grapple several times, I remain uncertain whether it means anything more than a bored playfulness and a nagging sensation of déjà vu. It is perhaps in the nature of Nineties to be mauve decades, silted-up
fins de siècles
. These assembled critical considerations muster, it seems, their stoutest enthusiasm for the products of decades early in the century, when even Kafka’s terrible vision had an edge of naïveté to it, an awareness undulled by an accumulated and still-accumulating muchness. My diffident title for this high heap of work is, I suppose, postmodern in itself. But honest labelling never goes out of date, and an honest laborer usually gets his due.

J.U.
September 1990

FIVE DAYS IN FINLAND AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-FIVE