BOOKS

VANITY FAIR NOTES

THE FEUD, by Thomas Berger (Delacorte). Man named Dolf Beeler goes to buy paint remover in adjoining town because store in his neighborhood is closed. Kid behind counter sasses him. Bickering starts. Weird cousin of store owner threatens Beeler with gun. Hardware store burns to the ground that night. End of first chapter, a brilliant opening by one of the trickiest writers alive. Berger’s trick this time: while a feud breaks out between the Beelers and the Bullards of Bullard’s Hardware, and awful events occur—a car bombing, bloodied noses, a nervous breakdown, a heart attack, a bank robbery shoot-out—the novel is pastoral in mood and innocently sweet in detail.

We don’t even realize for a while, though we know we’re in small-town Middle America, that the time is the Depression. Instead of laying on nostalgic period detail, Berger limits himself to mentioning prices: it costs fifteen cents to go to the movies; a family with Dad in the hospital may lose their house because they have only seventy-six dollars in savings. This is artistic economy at its strictest. Berger’s Neighbors went out of control, I thought. This one is exquisitely paced, slowing wherever needed for domestic non sequiturs that make me think Berger must be a fan, as I am, of Paul Rhymer’s classic radio serial of the ’30s and ’40s, Vic and Sade. Berger is funny in a way that can hardly be quoted because everything depends on context and simplicity of delivery. I’ll mention that when one of the Beeler kids complains of the body odor of the Hunky junkman who comes down the alley with his horse cart— “Does he stink as much as ever? You could smell him all the way upstairs from the cellar”—her mother’s vague, gentle reproof for such intolerance is, “Well, it takes all kinds.” A Romeo-and-Juliet romance between children of the warring families works out, like everything else, in the quietest, most surprising way. A minor Berger work, you may feel. A wonderful one, I say.

WALTER CLEMONS

IN SEARCH OF LOVE AND BEAUTY, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Morrow). The Sonnenblicks are a prosperous German Jewish family who managed to escape to New York in the 1930s with their money and heavy furniture and settled in a high-ceilinged apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In Search of Love and Beauty is an acrid tragicomedy of three generations of change and sameness: habitual dinners at the Old Vienna restaurant, estrangement and reconciliation among the family members, and their involvement over a fifty-year period with a dubious fellow-emigre guru of adhesive charm.

“Everyone always knew that Leo Kellermann had something, was something, special.” We see his effect on Louise, who early takes him as a lover while her husband, heartbroken, stands aside; on her daughter, Marietta, for whom catching her mother in the act of love with Leo is a lifelong trauma; and on Marietta’s children, the homosexual Mark and the self-sacrificial Natasha, who serves during the ’70s at Leo’s upstate Academy of Potential Development—which attracts ‘‘many followers who were like Marietta” (though Marietta happens to hate him), “that is, successful, highstrung women with problems.”

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has called herself a “disinherited” novelist. German Jewish by birth, she emigrated to England with her parents in childhood and grew up there. She married an architect with whom she spent twenty-four years in his native India, the scene of all her earlier novels (which include the superb Heat and Dust). She is now a New Yorker, and this ninth novel is the first she’s set in her third adopted country. Family saga isn’t what Jhabvala is up to here. What interests her is the search for community among the uprooted and the way attachments with strong components of dislike and discontent can endure for decades.

Though nobody in the book achieves the love and beauty the title seems to promise, none of them can give up on one another. Jhabvala is a tough, distinctly unkind novelist. Yet her story is anything but depressing. Louise, in her seventies lunching at the Old Vienna with an ancient red-wigged friend up from Florida on a visit, has a very good time, as do we. We can’t hear enough about these people. This is the mark of an original novelist operating, in a new milieu, at her best.

—W.C.

TWO LITERARY LIVES: Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes, by Andrew Field (Putnam), and James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart, by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Odd bedfellows, these two, the author of Nightwood and the author of By Love Possessed: different sexes, different styles, different bank accounts. But both were born American and northeastern Wasp at the turn of the century; both lived long lives—Cozzens into his seventies, Barnes to her ninetieth birthday—and died misanthropic; both were willfully ignorant of and indifferent to the apocalyptic politics of their times; and neither gets a decent biography.

Andrew Field’s sins are psychobiographical. With patience, by rearranging his pages and adapting ourselves to his use of dashes instead of quotation marks, we can learn a bit about Barnes’s difficult family, her Greenwich Village bohemian days (during which she did some excellent reporting for this magazine), her Paris and its lesbians, her England and the people zoo maintained by Peggy Guggenheim, her return to a New York cold-water flat—where “she would wake up at night to find mice nestling in the crook of her neck” or sleep through dreams “in which her bed was full of little dead horses”—and her long, witchlike silence.

But Field prefers to paddle his canoe on a black lagoon. He assumes the significance of Nightwood; after all, T. S. Eliot said so. If the rest of us find The Antiphon almost unintelligible, well, Field has read the early drafts and it’s perfectly clear to him: . “Djuna Barnes was not exactly seduced or raped but rather ‘given’ sexually by her father like an Old Testament slave or daughter.” Therefore: “The Barnes oeuvre may be said to be one of the best instances of deep auto-analysis outside the Freudian canon in modern English literature.” Besides which, when Field considers the fact that Barnes’s grandmother was a feminist, he is “persuaded by the medical literature which indicates that in such unstable family constellations there can frequently be observed a homospiritual arc or link between a such-minded grandmother and a granddaughter, who will have a very much increased statistical probability of developing homosexual inclinations.”

This isn’t biography, or criticism. It is voodoo. Field’s two books on Vladimir Nabokov were more circumspect. Lucky for him—Nabokov was still alive when he wrote them, Similarly traduced, Nabokov would have pinched Field’s head off.

Whereas Matthew Bruccoli starts at the beginning, and when he gets to the end, stops. Cozzens is safe from Freud, but not from a preposterous overinflation. Nothing much happened to Cozzens—he went to Kent, to Harvard, to Cuba, to Europe, and then back home again, where his wife, who was also his literary agent, took care of him until they both expired in Florida—and Bruccoli must pause periodically to remind himself why he is doing to Cozzens what he has already done to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and O’Hara. That is, using up file cards.

“Major” is then the adjective that occurs to Bruccoli to describe Cozzens as a novelist. This is meaningless. Major about what? About “deontology (the ethics of duty) and the limitations of will.” If you don’t believe Bruccoli, he will quote the favorable reviews; if you prefer the unfavorable reviews, he will accuse you of membership in “the professorial-critical axis operating in collaboration with spokespersons for what is regarded as the intellectual establishment.” So there.

Bruccoli seems not much drawn, personally, to the major deontologist. Defending him against his critics, he quotes enough Cozzens to prove that the man really was a smug bigot and an obtuse reader. We are otherwise advised of his first spoken word (“Hark!”), his sixth-form nickname (“Gouldy Gouldy Coz Woz”), his high opinion of Maugham and his low one of Faulkner. Bring back the New Criticism!

JOHN LEONARD

SHORT FLIGHTS, by Barbara Probst Solomon (Viking). In her first J^book of memoirs, Arriving Where \WWe Started (1972), Barbara Probst Solomon explained how a nice Jewish girl could graduate from f the Dalton School in New York City to the Sorbonne in Paris and end up in the anti-Franco underground, assisting in the 1948 rescue of political prisoners from a Spanish concentration camp, with the help of Norman Mailer’s car, after which she wrote a novel and lost a husband. It was as if Daisy Miller had gone to the Revolution without Henry James’s permission.

Short Flights resumes her survivor story in 1974. In New York, in Paris, in Marrakech, she waits for Franco to die. In Lisbon she takes a taxi to the Portuguese coup. In Barcelona and Madrid she covers the first free Spanish elections in forty years. In her head she is dismayed and angry at the anti-Zionism of the European left. All over the place—reporting the present, remembering the past, quoting from her political journals and her psychoanalyst—she is trying to make some sense of the messiest century since the fourteenth.

Although still a woman of the left, “I am not even an ex-Marxist” and “I dislike boutique terrorism and cheapo political thrills, I loathe airplane hijackers, and I am not enamored of the Third World.” Although once upon a time a novelist, she is bored by the “elliptical” in modern writing, which reminds her of “my parents’ youth, when Freud and Jung were very much news and surrealism was the report on the discoveries of the subconscious.” Although from the beginning and at the end a feminist, she refuses in any way to ideologize love. “Improvise,” she tells a young woman and herself, and God knows that’s her winning style.

Because, of course, she is also having a bizarre affair with the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, whose bisexuality she must share with a wonderful Arab entrepreneur named Ahmed. Solomon specializes in falling in love with good writers— Clancy Sigal and Jakov Lind are mentioned too—and telling all. Where will it end? Clancy Sigal shows up in caricature in a Doris Lessing novel, as does Lessing in a Sigal novel, and everybody from Albert Camus to Nelson Algren shows up in a novel by Simone de Beauvoir, and left-wing politics might as well be the musical beds of Bloomsbury. The brave and witty Solomon has, however, been there, wherever there is, and it’s been years since I’ve read a more likable book about such ugly, abiding issues. —J.L.

ART AND ARDOR, by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf). Almost every essay in Cynthia Ozick’s brilliant, cranky collection comes out of Sinai with a sword. She will do battle, on behalf of the Covenant. The Second Commandment—“Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image”—is as real to her as the book at hand, the face in the mirror, the Jew in history. She is an idol smasher; heads will roll.

On Norman Mailer: “One day he will become a small Gentile footnote, about the size of H. L. Mencken.” On Arnold Toynbee: “the classic anti-Semite in scholar’s clothing.” On Edith Wharton: “Her necessities were self-imposed. Her tub went round and round in a sea of self-pleasing.” On Virginia Woolf: “Her genius does no one any good, has no social force or perspective....” On E. M. Forster: “His humanity goes from wound to wound. His politics, his morality, ultimately his liberalism, all signify the humanism of cripples. It is too thin. The thugs escape.”

Does this sound fiercely prescriptive? Indeed it is. In Nabokov, as in most “experimental” writing, Ozick finds little but “mockeries.” Updike, when he isn’t being Christian and “eucharistic,” when instead he pretends to be Bech, entirely misses the Jewish point of “conscious implication in millennia.” And literary critic Harold Bloom, with all his poems and “latecomers,” is in the dastardly business of “god-proliferation”; he would unleash the demons, the black ecstatic magic.

Literature, says Ozick, exists “for the sake of humanity,” to serve “a community of justice.” Of what use is any other art, or religion of art, so long as there are killers who play Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz? Even “innovation” should have “a hidden subject: coherence.” Finally, “of the stories and novels that mean to be literature, one expects a certain corona of moral purpose: not outright in the grain of the fiction itself, but in the form of a faintly incandescent envelope around it.”

By such a corona, she doesn’t mean Soviet agitprop or Christian morality tales. I’m not, in fact, sure exactly what she does mean: a literature somehow “liturgical,” historical, traditional, worrisome and commodious enough to contain all her ambivalence about image making even as she makes her own images— so startling, moving, joyous, darkly funny in books of stories like Bloodshed and Levitation, so ornery and cutting in these essays—and goes on being one of the most interesting minds at work in her Diaspora and our graven culture.

—J.L.

THE BIRTH OF THE PEOPLE S REPUBLIC OF ANTARCTICA, by John Calvin Batchelor (Dial). Perhaps you don’t know as much as you should about comparative religion, political economy, prophetic literature, Norse myth, navigation on the high seas, and the mating habits of heroes and icebergs. Not to worry. John Calvin Batchelor will explain everything in this remarkable novel, a mock-epic/philosophical romance in which Grim Fiddle, the redbearded bastard son of an American draft dodger and a Swedish witch, is Beowulf, and history is Grendel, the monster to be slain.

The time is late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The places are Stockholm, the Atlantic Ocean, the Falkland Islands, and Antarctica. The weather is “the politics of falsehood.” The quest is through time, “outside of civilization.” The characters, besides Grim Fiddle, have names like Ide, Israel, Labyrinthe, Horshead, Miss Charity Bentham, Lazarus, Cleopatra, Orlando, Ariadne, and Germanicus. The ship is called Angel of Death, and it comes with wolf cubs and an albatross. The heart sinks, and so should the novel, under the weight of so much symbolic baggage.

That it sails instead, bloody and abundant, before a wind of strong ideas, is a tribute to Batchelor’s ability to reimagine every dread possibility of such soul voyaging. He is equally at home among the mystagogues, the political philosophers, the mythmakers and narrative strategists from Homer to Melville. At each way station en route to the Ice Cross, Grim Fiddle finds, in the organization of societies “outside,” historical analogues of Khomeini’s Iran, the Indochinese boat people, the Gulag, and the Final Solution. He adventures, with Plato and Machiavelli and John Adams and Karl Marx, in logical positivism and the irrational.

The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica has its doldrums: digressive essays on cosmology and economics; sloppy characterization of the crucial Cleopatra; a hasty telescoping and rush to judgment in the concluding pages. But the ambition startles and persuades. Batchelor has written nothing less than a novel against the naivete of the Enlightenment. “Outside,” there are villains, “there is darkness,” and magic, and we do “wrong by stealing trust and taking rank,” and “it is not possible or desirable to rule innocently.” Outside, “we did drink the blood. We did eat the dead.”

—J.L.