Sunrise with Seamonsters (2 page)

There is immense value in reviewing, though there is no denying that it is often a great nuisance, too. The reviewer is forced to judge a work; he must articulate his reaction; he must learn to read intelligently. I think reviewing tends to make a writer a bit more open-minded, less self-regarding and precious. It could be argued—I certainly believe it—that reviewing is one of the duties of the profession, too, and a much greater necessity for a writer than teaching how to write at a university, or leading seminars on literary culture. I have a comradely feeling for novelists who review books, and those who don't—who turn their refusal into a sort of loathsome boast—I find lazy and contemptible.

And yet I cannot bring myself to reprint all that stuff. I know they would have a weak warmed-over flavor, and I am satisfied that they have served their purpose. Looking through them, just before I decided to chuck them all, I was somewhat startled by their dated ferocity. This is the beginning of my review of
Fear of Flying:

With such continual and insistent reference to her cherished valve, Erica Jong's witless heroine looms like a mammoth pudendum, as roomy as the Carlsbad Caverns, luring amorous spelunkers to confusion in her plunging grottoes. On her eighth psychoanalyst and second marriage, Isadora Wing admits to a contortion we are not privileged to observe and confesses, "I seem to live inside my cunt," which strikes one as a choice as inconvenient as a leaky bedsitter in Elmer's End...

This crappy novel...

At the time of the Royal Wedding in London, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, an ambitious Australian who was also one of the nastier television critics, wrote a slurping poetic tribute to the prince. Perhaps he deserved this:

It is not true that all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. Look at this book, for example. It is about as awful, as lame and as lifeless as can be, and yet it clearly springs from spurious feeling, self-boosting facetiousness and back-handed social climbing which, in Clive James's couplets, turn into fawning mockery, as he hitches his trundling wagon of assorted poetic styles to the Royal Coach in the hope of someone catching sight of his bumpy head and inefficient eyes, so he can wave hello in his own way...

It went on in this way for eight more paragraphs.

Another waspish review, far too long and far too cruel to quote, was the one I wrote of John Updike's
Rabbit Redux.
I read the book and wrote the review when I was in Indonesia, living among some of the poorest people I have ever seen in my life. This was on the fringes of Djakarta. In
my lap was the complacent Rabbit Angstrom and his hysterical wife and the sexual tangles that Mr Updike seemed to be insisting were serious problems; and out of the window—I could see them by glancing up—were people living in cardboard shelters, drinking black water and actually starving to death. To say that I took a dim view of Rabbit is an understatement; I said it was immoral and asinine. I am sure I overreacted, but I still think it is a silly book.

I had my fill of reading bad books and giving damaging reviews. I decided that if a book was no good I did not want to read it, much less review it, and for the past eight years or so I have stuck to that. No one is sure whether reviews play much of a part in the selling of a book, and this uncertainty is a salutary thing—it has at least kept book reviewing honest. One of the happiest results of a book review I wrote was my receiving, a few years ago, a copy of the local newspaper of Wilton, Connecticut. Just under the paper's title, at the top of page one—where you might expect to find a quotation from Deuteronomy or one of Pudd'nhead Wilson's Maxims—was the line: "
I never knew a snob who was not also a damned liar"—Paul Theroux.
From a book review—bless them! I thought then, maybe someday I'll collect those reviews. But I have read them all. Some made me laugh, some made me cringe. What a lot of work! But they have served their purpose. There are none here.

The past tense and reminiscing tone of this Introduction might make it seem as if in a fit of renunciation, the way you clean out a drawer, I have put it all behind me and given up writing pieces. But, no, I am still at it.

P.T.
December, 1984

There is a crack in the earth which extends from the Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland. This crack is the Great Rift Valley. It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland it is replacing the fishing villages, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was torn amid great volcanic activity. The period of vulcanism has not ended in Africa. It shows itself not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift.

My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved like prisoners, muscles showing through their rags. They are waiting to peer through the tiny lens of a cheap microscope so they can see the cells in a flower petal.

Later they will ask, "Is fire alive? Is water?"

The children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else. It becomes Africa at noon when there are no clouds and the heat is like a blazing rug thrown over everything to suffocate and scorch.

In the afternoon there are clouds, big ones, like war declared in the stratosphere. It starts to get gray as the children leave the school and begin padding down the dirt road.

There is a hill near the school. The sun approaches it by sneaking behind the clouds until it emerges to crash into the hill and explode yellow and pink, to paint everything in its violent fire.

At night, if there is a moon, the school, the Great Rift, become a seascape of luminescent trees and grass, whispering, silver. If there is no moon you walk from a lighted house to an infinity of space, packed with darkness.

Yesterday I ducked out of a heavy downpour and waited in a small shed for the rain to let up. The rain was far too heavy for my spidery umbrella. I
waited in the shed; thunder and close bursts of lightning charged all around me; the rain spat through the palm-leaf walls of the shed.

Down the road I spotted a small African child. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl, since it was wearing a long shirt, a yellow one, which drooped sodden to the ground. The child was carrying nothing, so I assumed it was a boy.

He dashed in and out of the puddles, hopping from side to side of the forest path, his yellow shirt bulging as he twisted under it. When he came closer I could see the look of absolute fear on his face. His only defense against the thunder and the smacking of rain were his fingers stuck firmly into his ears. He held them there as he ran.

He ran into my shed, but when he saw me he shivered into a corner where he stood shuddering under his soaked shirt. We eyed each other. There were raindrops beaded on his face. I leaned on my umbrella and fumbled a Bantu greeting. He moved against a palm leaf. After a few moments he reinserted a finger in each ear, carefully, one at a time. Then he darted out into the rain and thunder. And his dancing yellow shirt disappeared.

I stand on the grassy edge of the Great Rift. I feel it under me and I expect soon a mighty heave to send us all sprawling. The Great Rift. And whom does this rift concern? Is it perhaps a rift with the stars? Is it between earth and man, or man and man? Is there something under this African ground seething still ?

We like to believe that we are riding it and that it is nothing more than an imperfection in the crust of the earth. We do not want to be captive to this rift, as if we barely belong, as if we were scrawled on the landscape by a piece of chalk.

In July, it was very cold in Malawi. On the day that Malawi gained her independence the wind swept down from Soche Hill into the Central stadium bringing with it cold mists. The Africans call this wind
chiperoni
and dread it because they don't have enough clothes to withstand its penetration. They also know that it lasts only a few weeks and that once this difficult period is gotten through they can go out again into the fields and dig furrows for planting.

Independence was very dark, yet despite the cold winds the people came to see their newly designed flag raised. The Prime Minister told everyone that Malawi is a black man's country. The cold seemed to turn everything, everyone, to wood; even the slogans were frozen, the gladness caged in trembling bodies.

Through August it became warmer. The violet flames of the jacaranda, the deep red of the bougainvillaea, the hibiscus, each bloom a delicate shell—all suddenly appeared out of the cold of the African winter.

In September, two months had passed since that winter, two months since that freezing Independence Day. And now, in this dry season, the people have begun to burn the grass.

September 8 was the first day of school. On this same day three members of the cabinet were asked to resign. Shortly afterward all the ministers but two resigned in protest. The Prime Minister, "the Lion of Malawi," was left with only two of his former ministers. Two months after independence the government smoldered in the heat of argument.

The custom of burning grass dates back to prehistoric times when there was a great deal of land and only few farmers; much of the land could lie fallow while the rest was burned. It was thought that the burning was necessary for a good crop the following year. The scientists say this is not true, but there are only a handful of scientists in this country of four million farmers. So each year, in the dry season, the grass is burned. A few weeks ago I saw thin trails of blue smoke winding out of valleys and off
the hills to disappear in the clouds. And at night I saw the flicker of fires at a great distance. A short time ago the fires were not great; I could still see the huge Mlanje plateau, a crouching animal, streaked with green, disappearing into Mozambique.

Last night I walked outside and saw the fires again. It can be terrifying to see things burning at night, wild bush fires creeping up a mountain like flaming snakes edging sideways to the summit. Even behind the mountains I could see fires, and off into the darkness that is the edge of Malawi I saw the glowing dots of fires just begun. They could burn all night, light the whole sky and make the shadows of trees leap in the flames. During the day the flames would drive the pigs and hyenas out of their thickets; the heat and smoke would turn the fleeing ravens into frightened asterisks of feathers.

Today the portent was real. Early this morning the radio said there would be heavy smoke haze. I looked off and Mlanje, Mozambique, even the small hills that had always lain so patiently in the sun, were obscured by the smoke of the bush fires. The horizon has crept close to my house. The horizon is still blue, not the cold blue of the air at a distance, but the heavy pigment of smoke and fresh ashes lingering low over the landscape, close to me.

In this season the ministers who have broken from the government are making speeches against the Prime Minister. They are angry. They say that this government is worse than the one it replaced. They say that in two months the Prime Minister has kept none of his promises; the ministers have spread to all the provinces where, before great numbers of people, they repeat their accusations. The air is heavy with threats and indignation; the people are gathering in groups to talk of this split in the government. They take time off from burning the grass to speak of the government now, after two green months, in flames.

Fire in Africa can go out of control, out of reach of any human being, without disturbing much. It can sweep across the long plains and up the mountains and then, after the fire has burned its length, will flicker and go out. Later the burned ground will be replaced by the woven green of new grass. For a while very little will clear; the smoke will hang in the air and people will either dash about in its arms blindly or will be restless before it, anxiously waiting for it to disperse.

We all know that the horizon will soon move back and back, and another season will come in Malawi. The prolonged fires will delay planting but planting will certainly begin; perhaps the harvest will be later than usual.

Yet now we have the flames and we must somehow live with the heat, the smoke, the urgency of fires on mountains, the terror of fires at night, the burning grass, the dry fields waiting to be lighted, and all the creatures that live in the forest scattering this way and that, away from the charred and smoky ground.

Ptolemy guessed that there was snow on the equator, but it was not until 1848 that Johann Rebmann actually saw it. Rebmann noted in his diary that it was a "dazzling white cloud" on Mount Kilimanjaro; his guide told him that it was called "beredi", cold.

The idea of snow on the equator was ridiculed even after Rebmann's discovery and it was some time before it was a proven fact. Late in the nineteenth century it was discovered that the snow on the Ruwenzoris (Ptolemy had called them "the Mountains of the Moon") provided the water which formed one of the sources of the River Nile.

Ptolemy was more realistic about these matters than most people were, or are. It can be very cold in Africa.

In the tiny country of Malawi the winter is severe, though paradoxical, and the inhabitants of this country are both eager and hesitant to greet it. May, June and July, the cold months, are also the harvest months. This is the season when the village silos—huge baskets on legs—are filled to the brim with corn, the staple food of the Malawian. The oranges and tangerines are ripe; the second bean crop, the tobacco and tea are all being harvested and auctioned. This is the season when there are jobs, a season of feasting in the cold.