Odd Jobs (56 page)
Authors: John Updike
*
This and all subsequent translations are taken from E. V. Rieu’s 1952 translation
The Four Gospels
, for the Penguin Classics series.
†
In Greek the words are
iota
and
keraia
, the latter being small horns attached to some letters of Hebrew; the King James translation has it “one jot or one tittle,” and the Standard Revised “not a letter, not a stroke.”
‡
He relates how, during his first London sojourn, while working at the Watts’s Printing House, he “carried up & down Stairs a large Form of Types in each hand, when others carried but one in both Hands” and, to impress some acquaintances, he swam the Thames from near Chelsea to Blackfriars, a distance of five miles, “performing on the Way many Feats of Activity both upon & under Water.” He considered opening a swimming school in London, and his thoughts on how to teach the skill, as confided in a letter to Oliver Neave, are typically ingenious and sound.
§
Charles Cotton (1630–87), whose
Scarronides: or, Virgil Travestie
has lines that might also apply to our journeying hero: “Long wander’d he thro’ thick and thin; / Half-roasted now, now wet to the Skin.”
‖
Mr. Paul B. Beers, Legislative Historian for the Pennsylvania General Assembly, House and Senate, has genially informed me that “Franklin did a bit more than doodle.” Exactly what is not easy to ascertain, however, since Franklin “might have been the most duplicitous lawmaker in 305 years of the General Assembly” and as chief clerk “edited the Legislative Journals, and edited references to himself out.” “It was he who printed the 3 volumes of ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Assembly’ ” and “he edited the journals so thoroughly that most years his name is mentioned once.” It seems clear, however, that his ability to retire in comfort at the age of forty-two was related to his activities as clerk; he himself wrote in his autobiography, “The Place gave me a better Opportunity of keeping up an Interest among the Members, which secur’d to me the Business of Printing the Votes, Laws, Paper Money, and other occasional Jobbs for the Public that, on the whole, were very profitable.” Though Franklin spoke against paying elected public officials, as President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania he—Mr. Beers avers—“took a damn good expense account.” At his death in 1790, the estate of Poor Richard was worth an estimated $500,000, not the largest fortune in the Commonwealth but twice the state’s 1791 budget of $249,538. Considerable elisions in the records, evidently, make a thorough financial history of the public Franklin a smiling mystery.
a
And through his writing in general, nowhere more rousingly than in the last sentence of “Sebastopol in May,” dated June 26, 1855: “No, the hero of my story, whom I love with all my heart and soul, whom I have attempted to portray in all his beauty and who has always been, is now and will always be supremely magnificent, is truth.”
b
Letter to Stanislaus from Trieste, September 18, 1905.
c
“Tolstoi,” in
By Way of Sainte-Beuve
(1908; English translation by Sylvia Townsend Warner).
d
Including a persistent tendency to spell “worldly” “worldy” and that typographical classic “See p. 000.”
e
In the preface to
Buoyant Billions
he hyperbolically reiterates the point, and casts a wondering glance back over his life:
“There is nothing in my circumstances or personality to suggest that I differ from any other son of a downstart gentleman driven by lack of unearned income to become an incompetent merchant and harp on his gentility. When I take my pen or sit down to my typewriter, I am as much a medium as Browning’s Mr Sludge or Dunglas Home, or as Job or John of Patmos. When I write a play I do not foresee nor intend a page of it from one end to the other: the play writes itself. I may reason out every sentence until I have made it say exactly what it comes to me to say; but whence and how and why it comes to me, or why I persisted, through nine years of unrelieved market failure, in writing instead of in stockbroking or turf bookmaking or peddling, I do not know.”
The play at hand (he claims) illustrates his lack of control over his own activity: “I commit this to print within a few weeks of completing my 92nd year. At such an age I should apologize for perpetrating another play or presuming to pontificate in any fashion. I can hardly walk through my garden without a tumble or two; and it seems out of all reason to believe that a man who cannot do a simple thing like that can practise the craft of Shakespear.… Well, I grant all this; yet I cannot hold my tongue nor my pen. As long as I live I must write.”
Shaw kept remarkably busy in his nineties: he contributed several hundred articles, messages, and self-interviews to journals; kept up his correspondence of several thousand letters and postcards a year; expanded
Geneva
to four acts for the Standard Edition; with the help of F. E. Loewenstein compiled and edited and provided fresh matter for the autobiographical
Sixteen Self Sketches;
resurrected a play,
The World Betterer
, left incomplete in 1936 and finished it as
Buoyant Billions
in late 1946; cheerfully grappled with the issue of global annihilation in
Farfetched Fables
(1948); and accepted the Malvern Marionette Theatre’s invitation to write a puppet play about himself and Shakespeare,
Shakes Versus Shav
(1949)—“this in all actuarial probability is my last play and the climax of my eminence, such as it is.” In 1948 he described himself as “this poor old crock, overworked to the limit,” and on the verge of ninety wrote Sidney Webb: “The bachelor life with nobody to consult but myself—eat when I like, go to bed when I like, work when I like, order the house and garden as I fancy, and be solitary (or social) all to myself—suits me very well; it actually develops me at 90!”
Lest, however, he be thought unaffected by Charlotte’s death in 1943, here is the description of her last hours that Shaw wrote to H. G. Wells: “Charlotte died this morning at 2.30. You saw what she had become when you last visited us: an old woman bowed and crippled, furrowed and wrinkled, and greatly distressed by hallucinations of crowds in the room, evil persons, and animals. Also by breathlessness, as the osteitis closed on her lungs … But on Friday evening a miracle began. Her troubles vanished. Her visions ceased. Her furrows and wrinkles smoothed out. Forty years fell off her like a garment. She had thirty hours of happiness and heaven. Even after her last breath she shed another twenty years, and now lies young and incredibly beautiful. I have to go in and look at her and talk affectionately to her. I did not know I could be so moved.”
The tone takes us back to a letter he wrote Ellen Terry in 1897, evidently after making love to Charlotte: “And now, dear Ellen, she sleeps like a child, and her arms will be plump, and she is a free woman, and it has not cost her half a farthing, and she has fancied herself in love, and known secretly that she was only taking a prescription, and been relieved to find the lover at last laughing at her & reading her thoughts and confessing himself a mere bottle of nerve medicine, and riding gaily off.”
AMERICANSTwisted Apples
S
HERWOOD
A
NDERSON
’
S
Winesburg, Ohio
is one of those books so well known by title that we imagine we know what is inside it: a sketch of the population, seen more or less in cross-section, of a small Midwestern town. It is this as much as Edvard Munch’s paintings are portraits of the Norwegian middle class around the turn of the century. The important thing, for Anderson and Munch, is not the costumes and the furniture or even the bodies but the howl they conceal—the psychic pressure and warp underneath the social scene. Matter-of-fact though it sounds,
Winesburg, Ohio
is feverish, phantasmal, dreamlike. Anderson had accurately called this collection of loosely linked short stories
The Book of the Grotesque;
his publisher, B. W. Huebsch, suggested the more appealing and neutral title. The book was published in 1919, when Anderson was forty-three; it made his fame and remains his masterpiece.
“The Book of the Grotesque” is the name also of the opening story, which Anderson wrote first and which serves as a prologue. A writer, “an old man with a white mustache … who was past sixty,” has a dream in which “all the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.”
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering.
Another writer, an “I” who is presumably Sherwood Anderson, breaks in and explains the old writer’s theory of grotesqueness:
… in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.… It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
Having so strangely doubled authorial personae, Anderson then offers twenty-one tales, one of them in four parts, all “concerning,” the table of contents specifies, one or another citizen of Winesburg; whether they come from the old writer’s book of grotesques or some different set to which the younger author had access is as unclear as their fit within the cranky and fey anthropological-metaphysical framework set forth with such ungainly solemnity.
“Hands,” the first tale, “concerning Wing Biddlebaum,” introduces not only its hero, a pathetic shy old man on the edge of town whose hyperactive little white hands had once strayed to the bodies of too many schoolboys in the Pennsylvania town where he had been a teacher, but also George Willard, the eighteen-year-old son of the local hotelkeeper and a reporter for the
Winesburg Eagle
. He seems a young representative of the author; and there is also a “poet” suddenly invoked in flighty passages like:
Let us look briefly into the story of the hands. Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but fluttering pennants of promise.
A cloud of literary effort, then, attends the citizens of Winesburg, each of whom walks otherwise isolated, toward some inexpressible denouement of private revelation. Inexpressiveness, indeed, is what above all is expressed: the characters, often, talk only to George Willard; their attempts to talk with each other tend to culminate in a comedy of tongue-tied silence.
Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at the train that had begun to groan and get under way. “Well, you see,” he began, and then lost control of his tongue. “I’ll be washed and ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he muttered half incoherently.
[“Queer”]
Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on. His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he wanted.
[“The Untold Lie”]
Anderson himself had taken a long time to express what was in
Winesburg, Ohio
. Raised in the small Ohio town of Clyde, he had worked successfully as a Chicago advertising man and an Elyria, Ohio, paint manufacturer, and had acquired a wife and three children, but remained restless and, somehow, overwrought. In late 1912, in the kind of spasmodic sleepwalking gesture of protest that overtakes several of the pent-up and unfulfilled souls of Winesburg, he walked away from his paint factory. He was found four days later in Cleveland, suffering from exhaustion and aphasia, and, more gradually than his self-dramatizing memoirs admit, he shifted his life to Chicago and to the literary movement that included Dreiser, Sandburg, Ben Hecht, and Floyd Dell. Already Anderson had produced several long novels, but, he later wrote, “They were not really mine.” The first Winesburg stories, composed in 1915 as he lived alone in a rooming house in Chicago, were a breakthrough for him, prompted by his reading, earlier that year, of Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
and Gertrude Stein’s
Three Lives
.
*
Masters’s poetic inventory of a small Midwestern community, just published that year, stands in clear paternal relation to Anderson’s rendering of his memories of Clyde; but perhaps Stein’s own elevation of humble lives into a curious dignity, along with her remarkably relaxed and idiomatic style, was the more nurturing influence in releasing Anderson into material that he
did
feel was really his and that gave him, for
the first time, as he later related, the conviction that he was “a real writer.”