Reading for My Life Read online

  Taking the book episode by episode, the Hiss business is most interesting (except for the 1960 campaign), only because it is of such continuing interest. We are still arguing about the typewriter. For myself, I agree with Murray Kempton, whose report on Hiss-Chambers in his book A Part of Our Time is the best around. Hiss is probably guilty; the transcript shows he continually lied. But this is both more and less than a “tragedy of history”—it involves two atypical men, both products of the same shabby gentility that produced Nixon, the shabby gentility whose cardinal rule is: you can’t be too careful. The worst thing about the Hiss case is that it convinced Richard Nixon he could ride anti-Communism into the Presidency, and he almost did so. To say, as he does, that it cost him that office is balderdash.

  But we get bogged down in the chapters devoted to the Fund speech, the heart attack, Caracas, and Khrushchev. The Fund was a nasty little business, a third-rate scandal, really, and rather minor all the way around. But out of it emerged Nixon the cliché machine, the mechanical dispensary: drop in your coins, and out gurgles a wet and sticky sentimentality, a poisonous brew concocted out of mother, America, dogdom, cloth coats, really folks, and all the Technicolored garbage of the boy next door. Caracas demonstrated that he doesn’t understand what’s going on in the world; the heart attack crisis, that he can be discreet; the trip to the Soviet Union, that he knows a good gimmick when he sees one. But it is the 1960 campaign that really tells us something, and it is there the narrative picks up again. Somewhere along the line the likes of Nixon click off and can’t make it. The compensatory mechanism catches up with them, and they haven’t the self-knowledge to understand what’s happened. All right: Nixon didn’t have a chance; he was an outsider; he didn’t have time to make himself over into a man. He went too far, too fast, on accidents and cunning, and he never really became a man. He simply didn’t exist; he had no style; he was only a Platonic ideal of what he would like himself to be, a cardboard image of what he thought it would take to win. That’s what the American voters learned the evening of the first television debate. Substantive questions were not argued, but it was immediately clear that Kennedy had style (the style of the rich, the style of money, the style of Harvard, and the Kennedy style); Kennedy was, as Norman Mailer has observed, a hipster. As such, he existed as a man in his own right, self-assured, with his own private grace and definition and approach. Nixon couldn’t compete; he had no such existence. And in his defeat he has only fallen into that flower of bruised ego, and is capable only of this obscure apology and this moral indignation, the sort of indignation H. G. Wells called jealousy with a halo. Therefore this incredible business of Cuba, in which he took a position opposite to that which he says he believed, because Kennedy was saying what he really thought; and now Allen Dulles must strike him down by denying all. Or the humbuggery about Martin Luther King. Or the carpetbagger statement.

  These are mistakes, the sort of mistakes which will ensure that he loses even in California, and they are significant mistakes. America is a terrible place in which to live if you fail; it is against the law in America to fail. But Nixon failed. Like a gambler who was always lucky and always won, he was suddenly struck down when the stakes were huge, and he is now reduced to desperation, to wilder and wilder bets, to the flinging of miscellaneous coins upon the table, and the frantic prayer to the great spinning wheel, and he doesn’t win. There is something pathetic about it, I will agree; but there are those of us who are unmoved by the pathos of Richard Nixon. He kicked us so often when we were down; we aren’t very forgiving. It has been his triumph, the triumph of his assertion and his failure, that we respond to him upon the level on which he first insisted. We are all soiled by his saga, by how long it took the compensatory mechanism to catch up with him, by what he left behind. We all smell of his exploded ego.

  Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City

  ON FINISHING THIS book, you want to go out and get drunk. The Four-Gated City is less a work of art than an act of despair, and its cumulative effect is numbing. It depicts a world—from 1950 until 1997—in which technology and fascism have triumphed; a world in which sex and imagination and intelligence have been brutalized; a world of figurative and literal plague; and a world for which the only hope is drastic biological mutation. What makes Doris Lessing’s black vision so compelling is that it is not the product of a literary debauch. It is not a satanic self-indulgence. It is not a tract. It is, instead, a painstaking extrapolation of the present, a sort of elephantiasis of the already obvious and the perfectly ordinary. It is the inevitable terminal point toward which the modern mind is monorailing. Those logical lunatics described by Wallace Stevens in Esthétique du Mal—men like Konstantinov, who “would not be aware of the clouds, / Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire”—have taken over; and our blank uneasiness has turned to terror.

  Martha Quest arrives in London in 1950 with an advanced case of blank uneasiness. The intellectual and emotional terrain she has crossed to get there has been exhaustively cartographed by Doris Lessing in the four previous volumes of the Children of Violence series. She has gone through a “Zambesian” (Rhodesian) childhood, two husbands, motherhood, racism, the Communist Party, and a war. The Four-Gated City will not only finish her off, but will finish off the series and England as well.

  After some preliminary skirmishing, Martha settles down as a combination nursemaid-housekeeper-editorial-researcher in the home of Mark Coldridge, a novelist. At first the Coldridge household seems a domestic mirror image of the world outside: private madness taking refuge from public madness. Outside, there are totalitarianism and genocide; spiritual impotence and scientific evil. Inside, there are hallucinations and despair. And Martha Quest, somehow hanging out the window, videotapes it all.

  But we become gradually aware that this time Miss Lessing is up to something different. Mark Coldridge has written a fantasy novel, part prophecy and part racial dream, about an ancient city ruled benignly by a clairvoyant priesthood. This “four-gated” golden city was betrayed—a kind of original sin ushering in our modern, postlapsarian civilization—and the clairvoyants went underground. Somehow their psychic powers were dispersed.

  Coldridge’s novel takes over from Doris Lessing’s novel. Suddenly we are no longer living in the world of Doris Lessing’s indefatigable realism, but in a nightmare of evil. The city and its destruction and its meaning can only be apprehended fleetingly in dreams; or perceived at the odd angle of madness. We are made to understand that the psychic powers dispersed at the time of the city’s betrayal attach now in bits and pieces only to the dislocated and the outcast, the drugged and shocked and suicidal. Our final, chilling realization is that, after the bombs and the nerve gas and the holocaust, the children of these mad believers will be the new clairvoyants, the mutant hope of a new world.

  Miss Lessing, in other words, has given up: on politics, on rationalism, on psychoanalysis (except for a dose of R. D. Laing). This most exemplary of modern women, who has moved like a relentless tank over the abstractions, aggressions, and dependencies of the twentieth century, who has noticed and remarked on everything, who has entertained and ultimately refused almost every illusion that tempts the contemporary intelligence, has given up. She seeks now, in prehistoric recesses and unconscious memory, a new sustaining myth, an island of the mind on which to hide.

  And what is terrifying about her giving up is the absoluteness of the documentation. She has never been an elegant writer, and she has usually been a humorless one. But her mind is formidable, her integrity monumental, and her operating methods wholly uncompromising. She has not spared herself and she will not spare the reader. So she is not content merely to show us the asylum and the hospital. She grabs us by the lapels and drags us inside. She forces us to touch the slavering idiots and the haunted children, the ideas that fester and the flesh that rots. If hatred is the underbelly of “all this lovely liberalism,” then she will take the knife to that belly. And if monsters then climb out of th
e knife wound, she will introduce them to us. The monsters are our fathers and our children and ourselves, and we can’t ask Miss Lessing to dispatch them for us. She has done her job, and what a staggering one it is.

  Nabokov’s Ada

  HERE IS VLADIMIR Nabokov’s first new novel in seven years, twice as long as any book he has ever written before, and fourteen times as complicated. Naturally, the reviewer approaches it scared to death. Nabokov’s prose is always booby-trapped, and if Edmund Wilson can get bombed (the “sapajou” joke in the Pushkin translation), mere mortals want to stay at home with the comic strips. Which is too bad, for there is more pleasure to be derived from a Nabokov novel than from almost anything else available in contemporary literature—or even, for that matter, from any mixed-media group-grope of deracinated starvelings desperate to groove the East Pillage obscene. Why leave the explications to the exegetes? Or the execration to those radical critics who keep trying to put N. down as some sort of recidivistic White Russian ingrate?

  He is, as he once wrote about something else, “a goblet of rays of light and pus, / a mixture of toad and swan.” He is, as well, our only living literary genius. Nobody else could have written an antideterministic masterpiece, contemptuous of Freud (there is no guilt) and Marx (there are no politics, no economics, not even any history), that is at once a sexual and philosophical romance, a brilliant science fiction, an awesome parody, and a gigantic punundrum.

  Let me risk some tentative explications. Ada is:

  (1) The anthropological description of an alternative world. N., by deciding that certain ancient wars, which were lost, should have been won, has rearranged history to suit himself. There are Russians all over North America, and, because all Russians speak French, they go about obsessively coining trilingual puns. N.’s world is called Antiterra. “Our” world, Terra, is apprehended only by madmen, philosophers, and science fiction writers. The two worlds are out of technological phase, allowing N. to pump away on his narrative as though it were a slide rule.

  (2) A theory of time which makes time a kind of privately owned supermarket of sensations and events, through which the artist strolls to impulse-buy. Time is always present, and the instant becomes eternal insofar as it engages and freezes consciousness into metaphor. (Intense love, for instance, is such a frozen slab of consciousness, always available for a quick fry in the imaginative oven.) Unfortunately, it’s a theory of time that only works for geniuses, men of unlimited imaginative capital; the rest of us must live in an empirical funk.

  (3) A parody of Anna Karenina in particular, the Russian novel in general, and the evolution of The Novel in universal. N. opens Ada with a reversal of Tolstoy’s opening Anna paragraph, and then manages in one book to recapitulate all the various fecundations and despoliations that the great Earth Mother of Prose has had to endure from an army of ravishing innovators for centuries.

  (4) A love story. Ada is, really, the memoir of a philosopher who, at age fourteen, fell in love with his cousin, age twelve. But the cousin, Ada, turns out to be his sister, and they spend the next seven decades solving the togetherness problem. During those decades, Ada sleeps around and the philosopher, Van, writes the treatises—“catching sight of the lining of time… the best informal definition of portents and prophecies”—which account for Explications 1 to 3.

  It should be pointed out right here that Ada, as a character, is lovable. There are those critics who—resenting the fact that N. enjoyed a happy childhood—complain of his cerebral chill. They have ignored Pnin, Fyodor, Luzhin, Krug, and even Humbert Humbert in the earlier novels; but if they ignore Ada, there isn’t a lyric spark in their gray clay hearts.

  It should also be pointed out, before I give the one and only true explication of Ada, that the book is full of incidental games: N. makes fun of existentialism, of his own annotators, of Jorge Luis Borges, of Balzac, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, John Updike (very affectionately), and especially himself: “Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables… all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed.”

  Exactly. And what he’s done in Ada is to write his own artistic autobiography, a companion piece to Speak, Memory, a treatise on his own internal Antiterra. He has constructed an entire shimmering culture out of his exile and wanderings, a language out of his own experience. Combine Van (chess-playing, tone-deaf “old wordman”) with Ada (butterfly collector, amateur botanist); superimpose them on a Russian America; add masks, deceit, memory, dreams, conjuring, apostasy, acrobatics, the zoo and the cage; celebrate the crime (which was that of Cincinnatus C.) of being opaque in a transparent world—and you have the elusive N., like “a bifurcated spectre… a candle between mirrors sailing off to a sunset.”

  He has written elsewhere that “the future is but the obsolete in reverse,” and that “the only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition.” Ada, dedicated to his wife, is his jeweled butterfly, singular, timeless, the man himself. If he doesn’t win the Nobel Prize, it’s only because the Nobel Prize doesn’t deserve him.

  Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

  YOU EMERGE FROM this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendía family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendías (inventors, artisans, soldiers, lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride a biological tragi-cycle from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.

  Which isn’t to say that the book is grimly programmatic. It is often wildly funny, and superbly translated by Gregory Rabassa. Nor does the specific get buried under the symbolic. Macondo with its rains, ghosts, priests, Indians, Arabs, and gypsies is splendidly evoked. So richly realized are the Buendías that they invite comparison with Karamazovs and Sartorises. Indeed, specificity overwhelms incredulity, setting up the reader for imagist explosions more persuasive than mere data can ever be: Anything goes, and everything comes back.

  Would you believe, for instance, men with machetes in search of the sea, hacking their way through “bloody lilies and golden salamanders” to find in a swamp a Spanish galleon? A plague of insomnia? A stream of blood feeling its path across a city from a dying son to a grieving mother? A mule that eats sheets, rugs, bedspreads, drapes, and “the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed”? A Sanskrit manuscript predicting the hundred years of Macondo, down to the very deciphering of the prediction by the last Buendía? A paterfamilias chained to a tree in the garden, muttering in Latin? Or, when that paterfamilias finally dies, this consequence:

  A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outside. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

  I believe—in the last Buendía infant born as prophesied with the tail of a pig, and eaten alive by ants. In the brothel with alligators. In the three thousand dead strikers against the banana plantation, hauled away by silent train; and Remedios the Beauty, plucked up by the wind and flown to God as she hung up bedsheet
s to dry; and Melquiades, who introduces Macondo to the miracle of ice. I believe in all the Buendías, from the original José Arcadio and the original Ursula (cousins who marry and by mythic mitosis divide into generations of Arcadios and Aurelianos and Armarantas) down through “the most intricate labyrinths of blood” to the end of the family line in a room full of chamber pots in “the city of mirrors (or mirages)” as the wind comes to sweep away all memory.

  Family chronicle, then, and political tour de force, and metaphysical romp, and, intentionally, a cathedral of words, perceptions, and details that amounts to the declaration of a state of mind: solitude being one’s admission of one’s own mortality and one’s discovery that that terrible apprehension is itself mortal, dies with you, must be rediscovered and forgotten again, endlessly. With a single bound. Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either. Don’t miss this one.

  Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing

  FIRST, LET ME don a penitential sackcloth. Like cowards, reviewers try to kill the thing they love with an apothegm instead of a sword. Thus, commenting some months ago on a collection of essays, I said of Arthur Koestler: “On the twentieth-century grid, he is the ultimate waffle.” How fearlessly inadequate! Macmillan’s reissuings of the Koestler oeuvre in the handsome, uniform Danube Edition constitutes an enormous reproach. I had managed to forget that Koestler had taught my generation what we needed to know about the century that grilled him. On the evidence of his novels, essays, and four volumes of autobiography, he is the West’s preeminent journalist. That he is equally uncomfortable with monogamy and ideology may account for his awe-inspiring vagabondage.