Picked-Up Pieces (36 page)
Authors: John Updike
In spite of certain lazy, boyish locutions (“the tiniest,” “screaming with pain,” “swimming in a sort of”), a private apocalypse is rendered with icy exactness, and throughout the succeeding pages of hospital ordeal Welch does not funk his essential task—the portrayal of “the savage change from fair to dark”:
In the middle of the furnace inside me there was a clear thought like a text in cross-stitch. I wanted to warn the nurses, to tell them that nothing was real but torture. Nobody seemed to realize that this was the only thing on earth.
It is strange to realize how incidentally narrative fiction treats the physical base of human existence; food is an occasion for conversation, sleep an interval of action, elimination a joke. Bodies are felt as mobile
scaffoldings for conversing sensibilities, and pain, that sensation of ultimate priority, is almost never (Tolstoy and Samuel Beckett are exceptions) rendered solidly. In Welch’s narrative, agony precedes psychology; introspection takes place only as pain’s monopoly loosens. The mind worms in the chinks of suffering.
I tried to lull myself to sleep.… but all the pleasant things that only yesterday I liked so much rose up to haunt me. I thought of eating delicious food, wearing good clothes, feeling proud and gay, going for walks, singing and dancing alone, fencing and swimming and painting pictures with other people, reading books. And everything seemed horrible and thin and nasty as soiled paper. I wondered how I could ever have believed in these things, how I could even for a moment have thought they were real. Now I knew nothing was real but pain, heat, blood, tingling, loneliness, and sweat. I began almost to gloat on the horror of my situation and surroundings. I felt paid out, dragged down, punished finally. Never again would my own good fortune make me feel guilty. I could look any beggars, blind people in the face now. Everything I had loved was disgusting; and I was disgusting, too.
As this terrible gloating unhappiness flooded over me, my head began to swim; the pain sucked me under and I wanted to die and not be tortured any more.
The action of this narrative is the narrator’s recovery of the world, a recovery effected without much assistance from other people. Welch, though he can do a sketch of a doomed eccentric as well as the next literate hospital patient, is not a creator of characters. All the persons he meets are depicted flatly, on the inner walls of a neurasthenia that probably existed before his catastrophe. At the worst, other people outrage and torture him—most of the hospital attendants he met struck him as sadists—and at best they merely disappoint and irritate, like static obstructing a delicate tuning-in. Welch/Maurice seeks rapport not with any other person but with the world at large, and it is remarkable, considering that more than ten years had passed since his accident, how fully, how delicately he can conjure up the sense impressions that make this search credible:
The bare walls [of the hospital corridor] seemed to be waiting for just another human sight or sound or smell to be swallowed up in them. They had sucked in so much hope and fear and boredom; but nothing showed. Their blank faces stared back and sinister little draughts struck against my face and ears and hair.
As he ventures into the outer world, everything is hungrily snapped up—“the leathery gray spread of the sea,” “the faint gunpowdery smell of new stone,” “the broad leaves in the gutter, splendid, decaying, rich, like some rare food.” Returning from the verge of oblivion, he writes of familiar sights as might a visitor from another planet:
I had not been in a night street scene for a long time. I watched the people’s faces as they pushed through the theatre doors. The faces changed when they passed from the street into the building. Outside they were more hardened, more scoured and flinty, tragic too from all they had withstood. Inside they grew more cushiony and fluid; they lost the vagrant haunted look. The look of anxiety melted into the sparkling monkey, or the soft bear look. And people undid belts and buttons, loosened their hair, patted, polished, breathed out their warm breath, like animals penned together in a farmyard.
In an age quick to label any sufficiently bleak and sententious novel “existential,” here is a work, by an author born again out of agony into the world, that seems to reconstitute human existence particle by particle.
Fiction captures and holds our interest with two kinds of suspense: circumstantial suspense—the lowly appetite, aroused by even comic strips, to know the outcome of an unresolved situation—and what might be called gnostic suspense, the expectation that at any moment an illumination will occur. Bald plot caters to the first; style, wit of expression, truth of observation, vivid painterliness, brooding musicality, and all the commendable rest pay court to the second. Gnostic suspense is not negligible—almost alone it moves us through those many volumes of Proust—but it stands to the other rather like charm to sex in a woman. We hope for both, and can even be more durably satisfied by charm than by sex (all animals are sad after coitus and after reading a detective story); but charm remains the ancillary and dispensable quality.
Toward the end of
A Voice Through a Cloud
, the hero acquires some use of his legs, and the plane of concern shifts from the struggle with oblivion to a search for suitable housing. The writing, though more polished than before, begins to feel aimless. Detail becomes obsessive. Maurice walks up an ordinary road of two-family dwellings: “There was something monstrous about the long avenue of coupled pink brick boxes. I felt that I was climbing up between gigantic naked Siamese twins with eyes all over their bodies.” Circumstantial suspense is deliberately generated; old characters reappear and are skillfully “used.” The book, as the dying author wearies, begins to act like a conventional novel. Though Welch had the abilities of a novelist, misfortune made him a kind of prophet, and it is as a prophetic document, a proclamation of our terrible fragility, that his book possesses value.
F
ABRICATIONS
, by Michael Ayrton. 224 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
In 1967, the English painter and sculptor Michael Ayrton published
The Maze Maker
, one of the best of the many mythological novels written in English since 1955, when Robert Graves offered, in his two-volume Penguin
Greek Myths
, a handy compendium with-it and far-out enough to make the Hellenic legends interesting again. Mr. Ayrton’s tale of Daedalus, supposedly written by Daedalus himself, picks its way nimbly among the scattered and conflicting classical references to its hero, ingeniously exploits Graves’s jumbled treasure of semantic and anthropological explications, and—though the narrative turns rather mazy amid a welter of mysticism and interlocked symbols—repeatedly draws energy from the author’s excitement over the art, business, and mystery of fabrication. The primitive craftsman’s careful magic comes to life in a dozen procedural descriptions—how to cast bronze, how to make wings, how to counterfeit a honeycomb in gold, how to construct an artificial cow in which a real woman may enjoy intercourse with a god who has assumed the form of a bull. Daedalus gives us the book’s thematic core: “Poets have much in common with heroes. They are neither of them aware of the world, of its true
appearance nor its real consequence, its structure nor its marvellous imperfection. They are blind to that, and because my methods of gaining experience have been observation, deduction, and experiment, I have been no worse off and much better instructed than any poets or heroes known to me.… I am involved in matters which I do not wish disturbed nor interrupted by eloquent activities, the facile assumption of power, speculation on immeasurable phenomena, nor any apotheosis. What I make exists.”
Fittingly, then, Mr. Ayrton’s next, and present, volume of fiction is entitled
Fabrications
. Twenty-seven short prose pieces, fashioned in a variety of styles and with a variety of pictographic devices, propose to insert into the packed and stacked reality of documented history various shims of speculation and fantasy. Imaginary pages of actual memoirs are supplied. Gilles de Rais takes his part in a performance of Shaw’s
Saint Joan
in wartime Southampton, and enlarges the part with a stirring self-defense. An invented Scots artist, “John Calder of Kelty,” is plausibly intertwined with known facts and surviving works of 16th-century Italy. An extant 12th-century manuscript illustration is explained by a fable involving one of Mr. Ayrton’s favorite themes, taurophilia. The man whose ear St. Peter sliced off lends the other to the mendacities of Flavius Josephus. And so on. The stories presuppose a reader able to delight in pedantry, with enough sense of history to find enchantment in its odd nooks and corners—Rome in 1001, Jotapata in 67. Embroidery of the archival texts is not, in this eclectic era, an unfamiliar form of art: witness the stories of Borges and Barthelme, the poems of Richard Howard and, a century ago, Robert Browning. As a cherisher of old oddities, Mr. Ayrton shows much erudition, wit, and spirit. He tells us about John Philip Sousa’s novels, about the curious cookery (flourishing in the dyspeptic reign of Charles I) that incorporated consenting dwarves into large pies called “surprise pastries,” and about the eerie heroic statuary of the Saluvii, a Celtic tribe that dominated the valley of the Rhone in pre-Christian times. He is especially vivid, predictably, when he deals with art. Brunelleschi and Giacometti are seen interfering with the space of their time, and Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio deliver monologues that startle with their intensity—for Mr. Ayrton, not predictably, is an excellent mimic of dead styles.
Yet, though
Fabrications
pulls us willingly along from one conceit to the next, and a number seem perfect, something makes resistance all
the way, and we emerge feeling that we have left the shop not of an artist but of a hobbyist. Why is this? For one, Mr. Ayrton’s voice, when not engaged in a work of impersonation, gravitates toward an off-putting archness:
If I suggest that an art dealer, with whom I have for some time been acquainted, is exceptional even among his coevals, I might, if I named him here, be thought basely to seek to curry favor with him.
In flirting with clichés, he does not always avoid being seduced by them:
He is particularly knowledgeable about, and on the best of terms with some of those commanding and seminal figures whose names hang, in the world of art, upon every lip.
… not without a substratum of truth to which I at least subscribe.
And, from this same unfortunate pair of pages (the first two in the book, and we never quite trust him again), a specimen of the clarifying that stupefies:
His later life was spent in endlessly seeking to penetrate the barrier and establish the spatial and human dimensions of those few personages whom experience had taught him he could grope truly to perceive when face to face with one.
More than a matter of an occasional careless or windy sentence, it is an error of tone, this trivializing fussiness of diction. In contrast, Borges (whom Mr. Ayrton several times names, as if defying an invidious comparison), though equally recondite in his matter, maintains a directness and simplicity of prose that carry us into the heart of his shadows and bestow upon
his
fabrications—his
Ficciones
and
Labyrinths
—the nobility of monoliths.
Nor are Mr. Ayrton’s fancies uniformly pretty. It is one thing to bring Dionysus to modern America in search of devotees (“Cool it, man” is the greeting he receives) and another to have Kierkegaard watch the progress of Abraham and Isaac up Mount Moriah in an episode of a television Western. The former impossibility has a certain pith; given
the existence of gods, this is how they might behave. The latter is merely impossible; given the existence of television, it could not have been turned on in 1843. The incongruity seems wantonly—even, with the attendant gibes at the Dane’s theology, spitefully—produced. Mr. Ayrton takes too lightly his own dreadful freedom to invent what he pleases. Some of his fabrications—“The Minocorn,” “Dr. A. R. Broga”—are feeble japes, if not family jokes; others—“A Gesture of the Hand,” “The Vanishing Point”—are so graphic in conception that they are too difficult, even with illustrations, to “picture.” The illustrations, some of them indispensable, are not very snugly married to the text, or very sharply engraved. Indeed, and alas, the book as a whole is not very well produced. Unlikely to reach a large audience, it should have been exquisitely aimed, as a fine fabrication, at the few who would relish its dry learning and delicate mirror play. But the American publisher has imported the English edition, with its strong savor of thrift. The pages have slender upper and outside margins, matched with disproportionately wide lower and inside margins; these large margins make it possible to add illustrations here and there without the expensive trouble of resetting type around them, but they look mistaken on the pages (two out of three) that carry no illustrations or footnotes. And I have never seen a book contain, for its size, so many widows. A widow (a short line, especially one ending a paragraph, that turns up at the top of a page, where it looks bereft) can usually be avoided, either by tampering with the text or by adjusting the pagination; it is elementary book-production manners to do so. Of the first thirty-one pages in
Fabrications
that could be possibly headed by widows, seven are; a deliberate widow-maker could scarcely have contrived more. What would Daedalus have said? Daedalan strictures will seem picayune to writers of a Dionysian persuasion; and of course no story or poem is purely constructed, or purely inspired, any more than the event of sailing can be all sail or all wind. This time out, Mr. Ayrton’s intricate rigging creaks, in puffs of erratic breeze.
S
WANS ON AN
A
UTUMN
R
IVER
, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. 200 pp. Viking, 1966.