Authors: John Updike
Picked-Up Pieces (63 page)
The story is simple: D(ivine) R(ight) (for David Ray) Davenport, stoned crazy, makes his way in a VW bus called Urge, with a girl called Estelle, from the West Coast to his home territory of Appalachian Kentucky, where he finds peace and purpose in soil reclamation by means of rabbit manure. Along the way, he meets a number of more or less allegorical Americans, such as the Lone Outdoorsman, and a garageman who says, “All of you, come back and see us, you hear?” and a Greek who believes the world can be cleansed of mucus by adherence to the walnut diet of the ancient Sumerians, and St. Louis dope dealers, and an Indiana talk-show host, and a Cincinnati housewife who is also Divine Right’s sister. D.R.’s favorite accolade is “far out,” and all the types he encounters dissolve into harmlessness under his guileless appreciation. Sheer good-heartedness rather saps the saga of tension. The Lone Outdoorsman, for instance, has many ingredients of a villain: an “absurdly handsome” face on a stubby body, a fastidious armor of camping gear, a hard-hatted interior monologue. But, the author reassures us,
The Lone Outdoorsman is far from your ordinary, everyday one-dimensional heavy: the thing that redeems the Lone Outdoorsman is a refreshing mental complexity of a kind you don’t ordinarily run into in folk tales. All mixed in with his gory mental images of bullet-riddled bodies and heroic assaults upon beachheads was a commendable impulse to be nice to these kids, to befriend them and hopefully influence them in some constructive way.
Having spied D.R. and Estelle copulating in the woods, he debates shooting them, and decides instead to feed them steaks. And D.R.’s sister’s husband, Doyle, a Cincinnati mechanic, feeds the young tripper at his table, freakiness be damned. “Doyle understood that his brother-in-law was some sort of mild outlaw. But … it never occurred to any of them to withdraw their affection just because the kid was in a phase.” Doyle himself had been a maverick when he was young, and even today—“Doyle was thirty-four now, but as he bit down on his food the
tendons in his big jaw flexed beneath his skin, and for a second the old toughness, and even meanness, of his youth was restored to his face, and for some reason D.R. found that very moving. He loved Doyle.” D.R.’s America, indeed, is a web of such benevolent recognitions; nothing is too banal for him to dig, nothing too weird to merit respectful attention. If it is a land despoiled by strip mining and studded with importuning billboards, it is also a land of daily magic, where a credit card fuels a hegira, and collect phone calls bind together a freemasonry of friends, and a West Coast Prospero called the Anaheim Flash foots all bills and mends all missed connections and arrives in backwoods Kentucky in a silver Lotus to conduct a wedding in a silver jumpsuit.
No, the only real dragon our knight errant encounters is himself—one half of himself, when, in an extraordinary episode, he splits, under stress of long drug use, into two persons: D.R. and David. Surprisingly, D.R., the stoned new-consciousness half, remains our hero, and the dragon is pure, rational David:
There is David, lurking in the shadows of the ledge. He pulls my flesh around and makes me see his eyes shining in the murky darkness of his lair. My stomach turns, my hair feels wild, but my adoration of the light remains serene. It’s only David’s eyes, and lower forehead. The rest is monster, the mouth of dragon teeth, the chin and jaws receding to a short, thick neck and back of horns and scales and fur.
Oh, it’s true all right.
He’s the monster-guardian of the light.
The descriptions throughout
Divine Right’s Trip
of drug experience, in its range of revelation and nightmare, its jerkiness, its comically bent perspectives, and its atrocious cumulative fatigue, bear comparison with Malcolm Lowry’s descriptions of drunken states in
Under the Volcano
. In both books, an inflamed mind enlarges the universe, dyes it deeper, forces its petals wider. Yet Lowry’s Consul is a pathological case, a sick man even in his own judgment, whereas to a young man of D.R.’s cultural conditioning experience normally arrives as a “trip,” a “hit,” a “flash,” a “rush.” An image that frequently recurs is of the mind as a movie screen. “As D.R. drove on through the night to Cincinnati he entertained a very complex little drama in his mind, rather like a movie an airline might show its passengers while in flight.” Telephoning, he
fantasizes that the transparent walls of the booth are “just bad movies projected from somewhere on the other side.” The television shows D.R. sees are described as circumstantially as “real” encounters. Reality, the implication is, has lost its objective backbone; inner space is the only space. Living has become continuous spectatorship. This generation was zonked on television before it zonked itself on drugs. What but an ingrained disregard for the workaday, empirical world could breed the swarm of superstitions, such as astrology and the
I Ching
, that distinguish the counterculture, and that in this novel aid D.R.’s pathetic search for “balance,” for harmony with a world drained of substance.
Gurney Norman and Divine Right were born and raised in rural Kentucky, and this regional reality does offer an outer space they can trust. When, midway through,
Divine Right’s Trip
hits Kentucky, the book sheds its shimmering snakeskin of fantasy and becomes a stout celebration of the clan, of native soil and hard work and pastoral goodness. Yet it rings less true than in the first, weirder half. Not that the Kentucky voices are not lovingly and amusingly rendered; not that the blasted coal land isn’t a cunningly appropriate territory for D.R.’s Dark Passage and Recovery of the Grail. The trouble is the marriage that Mr. Norman wishes to occur, and makes occur, between the rural proletariat of Trace Fork and the young would-be gods of the dome communes. The idyll becomes cute:
“I think ginseng is the answer to about half of mankind’s problems,” the freak said.
“Shoot,” said Elmer. “My daddy picked ’sang for a living, when I was a boy. It’s as native to these hills as it is to over yonder in China.”
The author names all of his friends, hill folk and dome folk, tobacco chewers and cocaine sniffers, and has them all dance round and square to a new sound “dubbed Hillbilly Hindu Rock.” And the bride and groom, D.R. and Estelle, take their vows wearing coonskin and gingham, and the Anaheim Flash in his silver jumpsuit pronounces “everybody at this wedding hereby married to one another.” Just so,
The Last Whole Earth Catalog
married Buckminster Fuller to L. L. Bean and pronounced the spirits of Buddha and Henry Ford one.
Well, let’s not have any dry eyes at the wedding. But a doubt remains whether D.R.’s love affair with rabbit dung and the blisters that come
with digging fence-post holes amounts to much more than another “trip.” Is Estelle in gingham sufficiently different from Marie Antoinette in the garb of a shepherdess? Can the sated and disgusted offspring of middle-class urban and suburban homes ever do more than condescend, with however good a will, to the remnants of rural America? Agriculture, after all, is not an intrinsically virtuous enterprise. Those who are good at it are capitalists like any other, paying their Chicano fruit pickers no more than they must, manipulating their acreages and machinery and tax loopholes toward the highest profit. Those who are not so good at it hasten (as they have done ever since the first American communes, the Puritan villages, were broken up by entrepreneurism) to the cities, to get the soft desk jobs and the middleman’s cut. The counter-culture’s return to the soil is a luxurious gesture, financed by the Anaheim Flash and other such imps of industrial affluence.
Divine Right’s Trip
in book form is subtitled “A Folktale”; its subtitle in
The Last Whole Earth Catalog
was “Our story thus far”—more modest and more accurate. A folktale must be made by the folk, “the gathered people” mentioned in the novel’s last words. But the folk are slow to speak, and in this country, even as the costumes and mores and prejudices of the once radical young gain wider acceptance each year, the folk are not yet ready to yield their suffrage to D.R. and his friends. Mickey Mouse and Archie Bunker are truer folk heroes, and will probably be reelected.
*
But Divine Right
is
bigger than life, and in giving the story thus far of a segment of his generation, in prose nicely threaded between the vernacular and the symbolic, Gurney Norman has shown a noble reach and a healthy grasp.
Although Barry Hannah, the author of
Geronimo Rex
, is several years younger than Mr. Norman, his novel belongs to an older tradition—the whining-adolescent novel of the fifties. The action begins in 1950, when the hero, Harry Monroe, is eight years old, and ends in the middle sixties,
when he is married and a graduate student of English at the University of Arkansas. America broke in two in those years, when Johnson committed the half-million troops to Vietnam, and the new consciousness at the heart of
Divine Right’s Trip
figures in
Geronimo Rex
as a bleak dawn, an irony heavily in hock to despair, an accelerating incoherence in the never very tightly woven events that make up the novel’s action. These events, though they fill three hundred and thirty-seven large pages, are adequately adumbrated by the author’s bio note on the jacket flap: born down South, educated here and there, “plays the trumpet,” took detours into “such odd work as a research assistant in pharmacology or trouble-shooter in a turkey-pressing plant,” married, “presently makes his home” someplace, “where he is at work on his second novel.” The major weakness of a first novel like this is its limp susceptibility to autobiographical accident; its vitality must lie not in the shaping but in the language of the telling, and here Mr. Hannah is no mean performer. His whine is full-throated:
The old man had a Buick. He liked to wheel it up our brick drive, which was bordered by a dense cane patch. He was one of these magazine handsomes who was turning gray in the hair at forty-five; the gray strands were flames from a hot and ancient mental life, or so he thought. His mental life was always the great fake of the household. He had three years at L.S.U., makes sixty thousand a year, has the name of a bayou poet—Ode Elann Monroe—and has read a book or two over above what he was assigned as a sophomore. So he’s a snob, and goes about faking an abundant mental life. He always had this special kind of bewrenched and evaporated tiredness when he came home from the factory.
With the verve of the young Bellow but with little of Bellow’s love, Mr. Hannah can seize a person and hurl him into print:
Perrino, still sporting his horseshoe beard and instructing trumpets, was odd. Eastman had given him license. He came to us wailing; he had his hands over his head, and you could see written back in his eyes that he had obtained some ruinous Ph.
D
. from somewhere. His tie knot waggled down on his open collar, and his clothes were like bandages coming apart over a horrid wound to his chest and soul. He
wore sandals over black socks, which seemed to represent the same anguish at his feet. He was slightly chubby, with bags under his eyes like rotting bananas, and behaved as if he were the last gasp of Italianism in America.
The author does not shy from pushing an image into absurdity, and pulling it out on the other side:
[My father] engaged me in a sort of contest at milk-drinking while we waited for the answers to come out. It all ended with our drinking so much milk we were ready to puke; the old man churning himself into a dull butter of meditation about my life.
Some of the metaphors carry the shock of real poetry:
My youth was an old sick pirate; there was a boy back there lying on the reefs, bleeding. The lad’s throat had been cut. I had cut it.
All this energy of expression, however, adorns a listless and ugly tale whose dominant mood is funk. “He wondered … if he could get over this period, this hump, which was not a hump really but a whole range of dismal mountains of funk.” Harry’s father is the third-richest man in Dream of Pines, a Louisiana papermaking town with a pervasive miasma and the cultural scope of a broom closet. Off-hours from the mattress factory he owns, he doodles in his study with the fantasy of being an author; his son flavors boredom with raptures over music. The Dream of Pines Colored High School has funnelled its meagre resources into a crack marching band, “that played Sousa marches and made the sky bang together”; this flare of excellence lights up the sodden mediocrity of all else. Dream of Pines public education is detailed with morbid zest, and the Mississippi college that enrolls Harry seems even more ill-tuned to his inner melody. Nothing links up; Harry keeps dropping things halfway through, including an inspired jazz solo and several instances of sexual intercourse. He tends to see all women as “roaches.” The males he knows are possessed of isolating visions: Harley Butte, his mulatto friend, by a passion for John Philip Sousa; Bobby Dove Fleece, his roommate, by a lavishly verbalized obsession with sex; Whitfield Peter Lepoyster, his enemy, by a demented racism; Dr. Lariat, his professor, by a
sterile cynicism. And in his own head Harry is Geronimo, the savage Indian rebel, at war with all society.
The youth of the fifties were not, as is sometimes implied, complacent; their contempt for the institutions around them was paralyzingly thorough. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar saw right through everything, and were too savvy to believe things could ever be otherwise. The vision of becoming as gods, of a neo-primitivist life style alternative to an ironical conformism, of a hot connection between private emotion and public policy, had to wait for a wave of desperation prefigured in
Geronimo Rex
by an unconvincing turn toward violence. This caustic small-town boyhood becomes, finally, a hollow shootout, with real bullets and blood if not real reverberations. Granted, guns seem standard equipment down South, and craziness does sometimes out. But—as in another Louisiana novel with a humid flamboyance, Robert Stone’s
A Hall of Mirrors
—the violence feels dreamy, and too much the author’s; the plot does not produce the violence as a tree produces fruit, but ends in it as a car ride sometimes ends in an accident. The author loses empathy with the hero. Harry’s boyish infatuation with a sluttish millworker is movingly explored, but his later affair with Lepoyster’s niece Catherine is nearly inexplicable, and his abrupt marriage to sixteen-year-old Prissy Lombardo totally so. The book ends on a sour note of putdown; Dr. Lariat, the professor of literature, tells Harry Monroe, the budding practitioner of it, that they’re in the “wrong field.” Music is the one.
