Odd Jobs (54 page)
Authors: John Updike
Lady Cockerell keeps her good looks magically. Many many years ago she went to bed; found it comfortable; and has lain there in a sort of glory ever since. I have never pretended to believe that there is or ever was anything the matter with her.
So I began with a prejudice against him [Henry Irving] through the disappointment of a strong fancy for him.
As a Socialist it is my business to state social problems and to solve them. I have done this in tracts, treatises, essays and prefaces. You keep asking
why I do not keep repeating these propositions and principles Euclidically in my plays. You might as well ask me why I dont wear my gloves on my feet or eat jam with a spade.
As the raiders are highly scientific, and fly blindly by their instruments, they begin every night by bombarding us in the firm conviction that they are making direct hits on Churchill’s hat.
The phrase “Churchill’s hat” may have been current in wartime Britain, or Shaw may have invented it; in either case, it arises from a source in the language that only living slang or a born writer can easily tap. Shaw still “plays,” though his estate has been most enriched by what he stoutly resisted when he was alive—a musical version of
Pygmalion
. Even if all the plays come to seem too declamatory and farcical for the contemporary stage, and all his brusque propaganda for a saner world sinks into the dust of discarded tracts, he will linger as a lightsome spirit whose heart, these private communications from his old age indicate, was in the right place.
C
OLLECTED
E
SSAYS:
Volume 2, The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel
, by Q. D. Leavis, edited by G. Singh. 280 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
As novelists sometimes comfort themselves by marrying other novelists, filling adjoining rooms with the hesitant clatter of two typewriters, critics can marry critics. Think of the Trillings. Think of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. Queenie (not a nickname) Dorothy Roth, born in 1906, was a literary adept before she married F. R. Leavis, in 1929, and she continued on her own, though in striking harmony with her celebrated husband’s convictions and crotchets, to practice the critic’s art, at the lecterns of Cambridge University and in the pages of his influential
quarterly journal
Scrutiny
. Since the death of Q. D. Leavis in 1981, Cambridge University Press has been assembling a three-volume collection of her essays, published and unpublished, of which the second volume,
The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel
, especially recommends itself to our attention. Though not so frantic in style or pugnacious in homage as D. H. Lawrence’s
Studies in Classic American Literature
, Mrs. Leavis’s observations have the same value, of the generalizing external glance. The Americans and the English share a language and a long historical interaction, but their literatures indicate a difference between them as great as that between Hawthorne and Trollope, or between
Moby-Dick
and
Middlemarch
. Mrs. Leavis was, like her husband, one of that vanishing breed of critics who can feel they have read all the novels that matter—who have been enough saturated in the all-too-copious genre of prose fiction to make brisk and authoritative assertions that cover the field and, in the guise of literary criticism, characterize whole nations. Whereas her husband organized his confident estimations into a number of book-length studies of poetry and fiction which systematically distinguished the sheep from the goats, Mrs. Leavis’s opinions must be gathered piecemeal, from reviews and essays and lectures she did not bother to collect or, in the case of eight of the fourteen pieces in this volume, to publish in any form.
Ghan Shyam Singh, a Professor of Italian Language and Literature at The Queen’s University in Belfast, and a friend of the Leavises, is to be thanked for seeing these specimens of her acute and spirited criticism into print. He is to be chastised, however, for the “minimal editing” (his phrase) that has left her hitherto unpublished lectures so full of erratic punctuation and grammar, with many run-on sentences and a few virtually inscrutable ones:
Yet it is this social life which James had elected to share, evidently not without psychological strain, as a work that approaching never to perfection, yet does not strike cold.
I would suggest that it is James’s sense of not being on sure ground and his lack of any deeper knowledge of and response to the whole English subject than aesthetic or prejudiced that makes him so prone to make use of other novelists, truly English novelists, to provide a scaffolding from which to work or a framework within which to construct with a difference.
A more merciful editor, surely, would have silently corrected Mrs. Leavis’s spelling “Nabakov” to “Nabokov,” added the omitted definite articles to the titles she cites as
Grapes of Wrath
and
Cancer Ward
, given the post–Civil War epoch of American culture that she terms “the Gold Age” its usual name “the Gilded Age,” restored William Dean Howells’s own title
A Hazard of New Fortunes
to the novel that she with misplaced wifeliness calls
A Husband of New Fortunes
, and rectified the egregious misquotation of Huck Finn’s pivotal declaration “All right, then, I’ll
go
to hell” as the nonsensical “All right then, I’ll go to hide.” Professor Singh might also, editorial minimalist though he is, have considered deleting the sentence (concerning Henry James) “He tried and often succeeded in doing his duty as a novelist” one of the two times it appears, in identical form, in the same essay.
In 1980 Professor Singh persuaded Mrs. Leavis to come to Belfast and perform the Herculean task of giving, during a one-week stay, “five lectures—one each on the English, the American, the Anglo-Irish, the French, the Russian and the Italian tradition of the novel.” I count six lectures there, but in any case it was a huge assignment, which, though she was a few months short of her death, she performed heroically, with a lavish dispersal of provocative ideas. The French, Russian, and Italian lectures close this volume, and the American one begins it, describing a complex cultural situation with a bracing simplicity:
I see the American novel as resulting from two conditions. The first is the reaction of a former colony having emancipated itself successfully by war from the mother-country, determined to show it then stood on its own feet culturally as well as politically.… The second condition which gave the American novel its unique character was the naïve
Utopian
theory on which their settlement of the new continent was originally based.… Hence the American novelist was characteristically both a patriot and a dissident and the failure to achieve the intended (moral and spiritual) goal could not be blamed on the English, but, as these writers recognized, was innate, owing to the facts of human nature. Hence a radical bitterness from loss of faith in man characterized the American novel from its early days and up to the present day, so that its prevailing and indeed inevitable style has always been ironic—ironic not only in tone but in essential structure.
Without quite knowing what an ironic structure is, this American reader can feel in his Utopian bones the justice of that supposed “radical bitterness”
generated by a background of unreal expectation, a bitterness to be felt behind the tortuous verbal churning of Faulkner as well as beneath Hemingway’s surface of taut facticity—a naïve, unending surprise and indignation that life is as it is. We cannot, unlike the Europeans, quite get over it.
Our two opposed attitudes toward the Old World are epitomized by men called Henry James: the father scorned the English as “an intensely vulgar race, high and low,” and wrote that “American disorder is sweet beside European order: it is so full of promise,” while the son found an artistic life impossible to live in America and settled in England. Eight of Mrs. Leavis’s essays touch on the younger Henry James, and, composed over a span of forty years, they vary in degree of admiration. He saw his duty and frequently did it, we are twice assured, and the essay lengthily titled “The Fox Is the Novelist’s Idea: Henry James and the House Beautiful” concludes in the tone of a guest tersely thanking his host after a quarrelsome evening: “In his
Notebooks
he exhorted himself ‘Be an artist, be distinguished, to the last.’ And I must say, I think it evident that he was.” Yet Mrs. Leavis, despite the affection with which she recalls reading her first Henry James as a girl, sketches a rather devastating portrait of a foreigner in England who “was largely dependent on English literature for his usable knowledge of the English people,” who as “an American novelist peculiarly dependent on Old World novelists for techniques, themes and patterns” borrowed wholesale and wrong-headedly from Trollope and George Eliot, and who through the decades of exile lost his ear for American speech:
As regards language, the novelist’s essential medium, we can see (as James apparently never did) that instead of having an advantage in having two closely related languages at his disposal he hadn’t a really sensitive mastery of spoken English, while his native ear for American, at first so fine and sharp, gradually dulled, so that later American heroines like Maggie and Millie speak insipidly.
Further, James was not, as Americans see him, an Anglophile and imitation Englishman, but—in line with his father’s patriotic views and his Irish grandmother’s animus—downright anti-British. “James’s accounts of the English gentry, while becoming increasingly confident, are always hostile and external, and they are used for propaganda. His English lords and gentlemen are satisfyingly cut down to less than American size.”
James is “susceptible” to the charms of English country houses; however, “he sees them as beautifully desirable but in degenerate or unworthy hands. This is what makes it all right for them to be taken over by American money.” His well-known short story “The Real Thing,” generally understood to concern the paradoxical relations of art to reality, seems to Mrs. Leavis full of “anti-English hostility,” vented when the American painter-hero “brutally” turns his two models, Major and Mrs. Monarch, “out to starve” even though “there is almost nothing to be said against [them] except that they are upper-class English.” Their evident virtues, as she sees them—their “dignity in humiliating circumstances,” their “touching magnanimity to the Cockney female model”—do not placate their creator’s “uncertain and sometimes unmanageable anti-British drives,” which hopelessly blind him to the fine balances and shadings of “the whole English subject.”
It is a pretty picture that Mrs. Leavis paints of the eighteenth-century English society in which the English novel developed:
It was a very fluid society where the middle class, unlike Germany and other European countries, constantly married into or otherwise rose into the aristocracy and where the younger brothers of aristocratic families were traditionally, ever since the Middle Ages, able to enter all professions and become merchants, without incurring social disability, and where the landowners traditionally lived on their estates for most of the year and in contact with their tenants of all grades, making local communities centring on the great house and parsonage complex, ideal for a novelist needing a microcosm of society for his purposes. But this was the English system.
Needless to say, “this inter-penetration of classes in England was a great asset to the novelist,” and the established Protestantism added to interpenetration “the compassion for the underdogs so unfailing in Fielding’s novels, as later in Dickens’s and George Eliot’s.” Mrs. Leavis waxes panegyric: “One sees why England, where the squire played cricket on the village green with his tenants, the blacksmith and the villagers, was the envy and astonishment of Europe.” In contrast to the French—whose novels were aristocratic in origin and remained locked into “spiritually desiccating” studies of amorous psychology and thorough disillusion—the British in their novels, of which her favorite instance is
Middlemarch
, took as their province “a society revealed from top to bottom and all
characters shown as mutually dependent and as affected by the rest, and all equally seen with respect and compassion.” Whereas even “Stendhal’s great novel,
Le Rouge et le Noir
, is utterly un English in its absence of respect for social order and in being without any idealistic weakness for human nature or natural ties.”
While this vision of a peaceable kingdom where the squire and the blacksmith play cricket together may seem rather rosy to those who are still struck by England’s ineluctable stratifications and class antagonisms (which Thatcherism has done little to assuage), Mrs. Leavis does confront the central issue, in fiction, of accessibility. The class-bound British fiction writer would appear to have imaginative access to a broader, livelier range of human types than his democratic American rival. Hawthorne, the first of our writers resoundingly to strike the oddly hollow American note—the first to make apparent in the quality of his imagination that an American is not simply an Englishman on another continent—gave the case an indelible phrasing in a letter to his publisher, James Fields, in 1860, on the eve of the publication of his last novel,
The Marble Faun
. As he nears the end of his distinguished yet rather crepuscular career, Hawthorne makes the piquant observation that he is not really a popular writer. “Possibly I may (or may not) deserve something better than popularity; but looking at all my productions, and especially this latter one with a cold or critical eye, I can see that they do not make their appeal to the popular mind. It is odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write.”
A disconnection is observed between the artist as himself part of the populace and what he is able in good conscience to produce. No such disconnection yet exists in England, apparently, for Hawthorne goes on, illustrating the “quite another class,” to ask Fields, “Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of.”
