Picked-Up Pieces (66 page)

What we have, then, is a trio of large fragments crudely unified by a Caribbean setting and the nominal presence of Thomas Hudson. “Bimini” is a collection of episodes that show only a groping acquaintance
with one another; “Cuba” is a lively but meandering excursion in local color that, when the painter’s first wife materializes, bizarrely veers into a dark and private region; and “At Sea” is an adventure story of ersatz intensity. Hudson, if taken sequentially, does not grow but dwindles, from an affectionate and baffled father and artist into a rather too expertly raffish waterfront character into a bleak manhunter, a comic-book superhuman containing unlooked-for bubbles of stoic meditation and personal sorrow. Some conscious attempt is made to interlock the characterizations—the manhunter remembers that he is a painter, and gives us some hard-edged seascapes to prove it; the bar clown intermittently recalls that he is drowning his grief at the death of a son—but the real congruence of these masks is involuntary: all fit the face of Ernest Hemingway.

Whereas an achieved novel, however autobiographical, dissolves the author and directs our attention beyond him,
Islands in the Stream
, even where most effective, inspires us with a worried concern for the celebrity who wrote it. His famous drinking, his methodical artistic devotions, his dawn awakenings, his women, his cats, even his mail (what painter gets anything like a writer’s burdensome, fascinating mail?) are all there, mixed with less easily publicized strains, dark currents that welled into headlines with his last illnesses and shocking suicide. The need to prove himself implacably drives Thomas Hudson toward violence and death. His enemy, pain, has become an object of infatuation. Even in the first, most lyric passages, when he is visited on Bimini by his three sons, what lives for the father-narrator are scenes of savagery—the machine-gunning of a shark and a boy’s day-long wrestle with a huge swordfish. The child, bent double, bleeding in hands and feet, is held fast to the fighting chair by the surrounding men, his guardians, so that he can experience “love”:

As if to insulate his fatherhood from his dreadful passion for violence, Hemingway creates in this section (never to reappear) another alter ego,
a brawling, brooding writer named Roger Davis, and thrusts upon him a gratuitously brutal fistfight, as well as a number of reckless and self-destructive traits that the placid morning painter Thomas Hudson has supposedly outgrown. But in “Cuba,” Hyde has been reunited with Jekyll, and Hudson—always a fond describer of guns, and a lover of blood sports—seems right at home among drinking companions who cheerfully remark, of prostitutes who gave imperfect service, “We ought to have poured gasoline on them and set them on fire.” Later, Hudson himself, asked by his wife if their only son is dead, answers with the amazing monosyllable, “Sure.” The final episode, “At Sea,” sees Hudson’s fulfillment as a killer, and Hemingway’s as an addict of the casually cruel touch. A large “obscenely white” crab offends Hudson: “the man shot him between his eyes and the crab disintegrated.” Removing a bullet from a sun-dried corpse is “like cutting into a pie.” A grenade eliminates a wounded German: “How is the Kraut in the bow?” “He’s a mess.” Truly Hudson tells himself, “The horrors were what you won in the big crap game that they run.” Well, the author is helping run this crap game, and it takes a little disintegration to keep him happy; unable to decide which of the hero’s three boys to kill, he kills them all, two in one section and the third, with comic rigor, in the next.

Hemingway of course did not invent the world, nor pain, mutilation, and death. In his earlier work his harsh obsessions seem honorable and necessary; an entire generation of American men learned to speak in the accents of Hemingway’s stoicism. But here, the tension of art has been snapped and the line between sensitive vision and psychopathy has been crossed. The “sea-chase story” is in many ways excellent, but it has the falsity of the episode in Hemingway’s real life upon which it was based. In the early days of World War II, he persuaded his friends in the Havana Embassy to let him equip his private fishing launch the
Pilar
as a Q-boat, with bazookas, grenades, bombs, and machine guns. His dream was to lure a Nazi submarine close enough to toss a bomb down the hatch. He staffed the
Pilar
with cronies and, fruitlessly, but displaying much real courage and stamina, cruised the Cuban coast. Everything in “At Sea” is true, except the encounter with Germans and the imperatives of the mission, which was not demanded from above but invented and propelled from within. Such bravery is not grace under pressure but pressure forced in the hope of inducing Grace.

And even love becomes a species of cruelty, which divides women into
whores and bitches on the one hand and on the other a single icy-perfect adored. Some reviewers have complained that the first wife is unreal: to me she has that hard reality of a movie star (which in the book she is), a star on the screen, with “the magic rolling line of the hair that was the same silvery ripe-wheat color as always.” But it is an easy transition from the image of this beloved and lost woman, this enforcer of proud loneliness, to the cool gray pistols Hudson sleeps with:

Love and death: fused complements in Hemingway’s universe. Yet he never formulated the laws that bind them, never dared depart from the knightly code and poser’s armor he forged against the towering impressions of suffering received at his father’s side in the Michigan woods.

Sure of certain things, he never achieved the step away from himself, of irony and appraisal. He wanted to; he tried; this book opens in a mood of tonic breadth and humor, and closes with a beatific vision of Hudson dying and beloved:

The new generations, my impression is, want to abolish both war and love, not love as a physical act but love as a religion, a creed to help us suffer better. The sacred necessity of suffering no longer seems sacred or necessary, and Hemingway speaks across the Sixties as strangely as a medieval saint; I suspect few readers younger than myself could believe, from this sad broken testament, how we
did
love Hemingway and, pity feeling impudent, love him still.

B
ULLET
P
ARK
, by John Cheever. 245 pp. Knopf, 1969.

In the coining of images and incidents, John Cheever has no peer among contemporary American fiction writers. His short stories dance, skid, twirl, and soar on the strength of his abundant invention; his novels tend to fly apart under its impact. His first,
The Wapshot Chronicle
, was unified by a pervading nostalgia and a magnificent old man’s journal; his second,
The Wapshot Scandal
, amounted to a debris of brilliant short stories.
Bullet Park
, his third, holds together but just barely, by the thinnest of threads. It begins with an evocation of Bullet Park, a more ominously named version of the suburban essence Cheever used to call Shady Hill:

At church one Sunday, Eliot Nailles, our hero, meets Paul Hammer, our other hero. Not unnaturally, they, and we, are roused to foreboding by the coincidence of their names, but for the bulk of the book they merely glimpse one another; their fates intertwine only at the end.

The first half of the novel tells Nailles’s story: he is, as male suburbanites go, uxorious and cheerful, but his seventeen-year-old son Tony in a spell of despair takes to his bed, inaccessible to mother, father, and psychiatrist. At last a Negro guru from the town’s little ghetto coaxes him, with repetitions of the magic word “Love,” back into the American Way of Life. The second half of
Bullet Park
shows Hammer, a wealthy bastard (literally), being chased from hotel to hotel in both hemispheres by a melancholy-inducing
cafard;
his temporary occupation of a yellow room where he feels at peace leads to his marriage to a wood-nymph who, once wed, becomes a bitch (figuratively). In the end, Hammer goes mad, decides to crucify Tony, kidnaps the boy, and is overtaken in that Episcopalian church by Nailles armed with a power
saw—events almost redeemed from implausibility by the bravura speed of their telling.

The book’s broad streak of the fantastic has been deplored by some critics—the same critics, I suspect, who readily grant emancipation from the probable to younger, overtly “experimental” novelists like John Hawkes and James Purdy. A more serious weakness lies in the similarity of the two heroes; though intended, perhaps, to be contrasting polarities of the American psyche, Hammer and Nailles are in fact much alike—decent hard-drinking
hommes moyens sensuels
oppressed by a shapeless smog of anxiety. Tony is headed the same way, and the author, in the askew irony of his upbeat conclusion, with its quartet of “wonderfuls,”
^†
seems to be shrugging off his own
cafard
. The tender, twinkling prose has an undercurrent of distraction and impatience.

Bullet Park
succeeds, I think, as a slowly revolving mobile of marvellously poeticized moments—the portrait of the hungover party couple the Wickwires as they struggle to rise on Monday morning; Hammer’s mother’s detection of symphonies in the roar of various airplane motors; Nailles’s wife’s visit to an off-off-Broadway play and her subsequent haunting by a nude actor, “his thick pubic brush from which hung, like a discouraged and unwatered flower, his principal member.” America’s urban hell presses hard upon the suburbia that was meant to be paradise. Cheever maintains his loyalty to the middling and the decent, but speaks increasingly in the accents of a visionary.

T
HE
L
ONG
-W
INDED
L
ADY
:
Notes from The New Yorker
, by Maeve Brennan. 237 pp. Morrow, 1969.

The New Yorker
’s “Talk of the Town” department, a space set aside when Ross founded the magazine as a smart-aleck local, survives as a
vacuum maintained in case someone has something to say.
^‡
When, a dozen years ago, I served on the large team that labored to fill each week this frontal void (a task that White and Thurber had performed with the aid of a few legmen), the problem was to perpetuate a cozy tone about a city that had ceased to seem cozy. We were, we “Talk of the Town” reporters, a sallow crew-cut brigade fresh from Cornell or Harvard, sent forth into the mirthless gray canyons to attend a mechanical promotional exhibit or p.r.-pushed pseudo-event, battering out upon our return six or seven yellow pages of rough copy to be honed into eight hundred gay, excited, factually flawless words by veteran martyrs like John McCarten and Brendan Gill. Some of us did not even live in the city, but had already established families and golf memberships in Bronxville or Rye, and even those who, like myself, did live in Manhattan had their hearts set on the green pastures of Fiction and the absentee ownership of Literary Glory. We were not avid to extract from the Eisenhowered, sullen if not apocalyptic metropolis of those years the enchantment of the Baghdad-on-the-Subway celebrated by O. Henry, by Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Millay, by Dorothy Parker and Benchley and Woollcott—whose chairs were still warm in the Algonquin lobby. It is to Maeve Brennan’s credit that she, with the device of her letters from “the long-winded lady,” has helped put New York back into
The New Yorker
, and has written about the city of the Sixties with both honesty and affection.

Not that the pieces, as collected here, without most of the italics that gave them on first printing a comic breathlessness, entirely escape the “Talk of the Town’s” way of making too much of too little and of being complacently, exhaustedly flat. She gives us John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s entire credo as chiseled into Rockefeller Center, and the menus of a lot of meals she happens to eat, and the names of everyone present at a New Year’s party at the Adano Restaurant. And the long-winded lady, read in bulk, reveals certain personal eccentricities. She tends to rise at dawn, to read while she eats, to like street music, to liken real streets to stage sets,
to plug her favorite restaurants, to be threatened by large people and animals and loud noises—we deduce that she is small. She walks a lot but her range is curiously restricted; she never strays south of the Village, north of the eighties, and rarely east of Madison Avenue. Her favorite region, dismally enough, is the West Forties, those half-demolished blocks of small hotels and cellar restaurants and old coin shops between Fifth and Eighth Avenue; she most frequently strolls on Sixth, which she never calls the Avenue of the Americas.

Within these limitations she is constantly alert, sharp-eyed as a sparrow for the crumbs of human event, the overheard and the glimpsed and the guessed at, that form the solitary city person’s least expensive amusement. A little boy crying, a bigger boy greeting his father, a young man courting over the telephone, a middle-aged couple enacting their estrangement across a restaurant table, an old lady flipping the pages of a letter from her hotel window as she reads—these vignettes are well realized, and need only a touch of padding and bluff to make them short stories. Miss Brennan does not blink when, surveying the cityscape, she sees drunks and crazy men and prostitutes with “the eyes of satisfied furies or unsatisfied prison wardresses,” costumed in miniskirts “designed to show even more leg than they had.” She is an unfussy but formidable phrase-maker, as in her long poem to the ailanthus (which she never calls the tree of heaven) or in her image of “daylight streaming like cold water” over the curved staircases and papered walls of roofless brownstones. A melancholy picture of New York’s streets accumulates: