[World Literature Today vol. 57 iss. 1] Review by John L. Brown - Varia Issue O What a Paradise It Seemsby John Cheever (1983) [10.2307 40138625] - libgen.li

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Review
Author(s): John L. Brown
Review by: John L. Brown
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 1, Varia Issue (Winter, 1983), pp. 107-108
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40138625
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ENGLISH
Fiction
Saul Bellow. The Deans December. New York. Harper &
Row. 1982. 312 pages. $13.95.
Toward the end of The Deans December Dewey Spangler, eminent columnist and childhood friend of the
novel's protagonist Albert Corde, sits in a cafe in Bucharest
"
and says, "The action is at home. This comes as no surprise
to the reader who has been aware that the real action of this
novel is set in Chicago, a city which Bellow both adores and
deplores, often for the same reasons. Witness his statement
about Corde's sister: "She had no need of Proust or Freud or
Krafft-Ebingor Balzac or Aristophanes. Chicago had it all."
And this is the central problem with the novel: Bellow's
fascinationwith Chicago so overshadows the events in Romania that the reader is lulled almost to inattention during those
long stretches in which Bucharest and the oppressive system
are depicted.
Corde is not an altogether attractive or likable figure, but
he is sufficientlyinteresting and complex. His early career as
a journalist was marked by brilliant success; in his early
twenties his personal account of the Potsdam Conference
was printed by The New Yorker. He then spent many years
writing from European bases. But in the middle of his life he
gave up journalismand came to rest in the academic world in
a
or
Chicago, where he is, at the time of the
' novel, dean,
rather "a journalist passing for a dean.
He is married to Minna, an acclaimed astronomer whose
mother is dying in Romania;hence the reason for the dean's
presence in that country. While there, he has many insights
into the nature of his life and his desires, and he manages to
"
carve out a sense of his own "inner city, one which most
closely resembles Chicago with its crime, cacophony and
vividness. He struggles with his career changes and questions whether his move toward what he sees as passivity and
petty politics in the academy has been fruitful. In these
passages Bellow touches on crucial moments in the angst of
modern man: whether or not the fear of being seen as a fool
corrupts action; what the powerful knowledge of mortality
does to our ability to act; how the love of others and of self
empowers us to function.
As with any Bellow work, even the most tendentious
passages can be worthy of attention; in the best of Bellow,
however, it is not the worthiness of the art that forces our
eyes to the page, but the absolute Tightnessof the moments
he captures. As Corde muses, "Thefirst act of moralitywas to
disinter the reality, retrieve reality, dig it out from the trash,
"
represent it anew as artwould represent it. In this novel art
would only represent the reality of Chicago.
This is essentially a novel of the mind, discursive in true
Bellovian style but spiced with revelations of the city that
only an observer such as Bellow could delineate. The most
alive of the charactersare the criminals, pimps and whores,
and the fury of their lives is beautifully captured. But I must
admit that I longed for a briefer view of the action- or lack
thereof - in Romania, in part because the oppressive society
makes for oppressive description and in greater part because
the two locations of the novel never effectively coalesce.
Bellow is an artist of the real, and his Romania remains
distant and pallid. For me, as for Corde's sister, Bellow's
Chicago has it all.
Rita D . Jacobs
Montclair State College
John Cheever. O What a Paradise It Seems. New York.
Knopf. 1982. 100 pages. $10.
What begins like a folktale ("Thisis a story to be read in
bed in an old house on a rainy night")ends precisely 100
pages later with the same phrase. Cheever's last work,
ambiguous and strangely disturbing, is at a far remove from
the sharply etched New Yorker stories on which his reputation was founded. Eric Neuman, in discussing the evolution
of certain artists like Titian and Michelangelo, speaks of a
distinctive style which comes with age, a style markedby the
freedom and the independence of those who have lived long
enough to have gone beyond the modes and conventions of
their time, who can permit themselves the liberty, even the
eccentricity, of a completely personal vision. Such characteristics can be seen in writers as well. The example of Yeats
immediately comes to mind.
Yeats is quoted: "An
Significantly, early in this novella,
"
aged man is but a paltry thing. Cheever, too, as he neared
the end, would seem to have cast aside what Yeatscalled "the
"
embroideries in order to compose a parable for the close of
an era. In it, more and more overtly the moralist, he expresses his dismay at the pollution of nature and of man
which he perceives all about him and which awakens in him a
desperate nostalgiafor a vanished purity. The central symbol
he employs in this exemplary tale is a lovely ruralpond which
has been rezoned, through greed and corruption, for use as a
dump. Its waters have been contaminated, and water- of
rivers, of lakes, of rain- is constantly associated here (as in
Cheever's earlier work) with purity and life and love. He
presents to us "a"landscape and a people who had lost the
sense of harvest and the sense of reality as well.
We also encounter a swift series of apparently unrelated
incidents and digressions: two women fighting in a supermarket about a place in the check-out line; a barber shooting
his old dog; a couple who forget their baby on the shoulder of
an interstate highway; an ecologist brutally murdered by
Mafia toughs; a visit to a Balkan seeress who lives in a cave
beside a volcano; a housewife trying to frighten the community into saving the pond by leaving bottles of poisoned
Teriyaki sauce on the supermarket shelves; comments about
technicalities of decontamination or of computers. Together
these convey an impression of strangeness comparable to
that produced by a surrealiste collage, composed of familiar
objects disconcertingly
juxtaposed.
'
The "Everyman of this modern fable is Lemuel Sears,
who, like the principal characterof Falconer, Ezekiel Farragut (see WLT 51:4, p. 619), bears the name of an Old Testa-
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108
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
ment prophet. He is "old" but still vigorous and somewhat
concupiscent and works in New Yorkfor a computer firm. On
weekends he often visits "Janice," the village (location unspecified) of his boyhood. His daughter, with whom his
relationship is "sceptical but profound," still lives there.
(Once mentioned, she never appears again.) He particularly
enjoys skating there on Beasley's Pond which, he learns with
rage and sorrow, is being turned into a dump. Much of the
slender and unpredictable tale is devoted to Sears's ultimately successful efforts to save it.
One day, strolling beside the pond, he reflects with a
Transcendentalist fervor and optimism on the joys of existence: "The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege,
the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with
love. What a paradise it seemed!" But somehow the minor
prophet Lemuel is, like his creator, more convincing when
he is castigating the mindless evil and disorder of his time
'
than when he is hymning the praises of a seeming "paradise.
John L. Brown
Washington, D.C.
ger from the originatingplanet (Canopus),the novel seems to
take a turn toward psychology and visionary experience.
Stripped of their administrative functions by the approaching end of the planet, the Representatives begin to think and
act as one person, Doeg, the Memory Maker. All become
aware that they incorporate social history into a new, disembodied personality which preserves (at least at the end of this
novel) the many.
In her introduction to the third novel in the Canopus
series, The Sirian Experiments (see WLT54:4, p. 631), Lessing relates her conviction that a new form of mind is coming
into being, something less limited by individual ego, something developing toward what may have been our nonearthly origins. The simultaneous development from and
toward something superior, while not quite in balance with
the thrust toward catastrophe in this novel, will fascinate
those who have followed the novelist in the post-Marxist
phases of her career.
W. M. Hagen
Oklahoma Baptist University
Theatre
Doris Lessing. The Making of the Representativefor Planet
8. New York. Knopf. 1982. 145 pages. $11.95.
Doris Lessing has always been fascinated with the
means by which one can free oneself from being bound,
body and mind, to a particular place at a particular time.
Marxism, drugs and even clinical madness have allowed her
personae to perceive and criticize from a distance, while
maintaining a necessary, painful engagement with experience. Now, in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, of
which The Making of the Representativefor Planet 8 is the
fourth novel, Lessing has a structure that allows her to incorporate all her previous means of distancing, as well as all
her previous means of narrating (from first-person tale to
notebook entries).
The Making ... is the shortest installment in the series so
far and is presented as a tale told by Doeg, "Memory Maker
and Keeper of Records." Like Memoirs of a Survivor, the
novel records the breakdown of civilization- in this case of a
whole planet's civilization- due to the onset of an ice age.
This makes for a compelling, even moving tale, but the
massiveness of change here, as in the other Canopus novels,
seems to create too much distance between the developing
self and the flux of experience. Not that Lessing is interested
in the reader's becoming a tourist of new technology, as
happens in much second-rate science fiction. Her focus is on
a recognizablyhuman characterin an earthlike environment.
But the large-scale change of that environment into a glaciated world, the subsequent exploration and adjustment to
this worsening environment, the changes in attitudes consequent to physical adjustment to the cold and a diminished
food supply- these are the controlling forces of the plot.
Like most science fiction, then, the encounter with the New
tilts analysis toward description and character psychology
towardcommon reaction for most of the book. The narratoris
the corporate voice of the Representatives; the creativity of
these sensitive people is occupied almost wholly with meeting survival contingencies for a society traumatized by climatic change. Ultimately, individual character is subsumed
into a collective type; the novel becomes social realism.
With the long-awaited reappearanceof Johor, the messen-
Edward Albee. The Plays. Vol. 3. New York. Atheneum.
1982. xxv + 398 pages. $9.95.
Recent interest in Albee seems restricted to questions of
what has happened to him as a dramatistand of whether
there is any likelihood that he will surpass or even approximate his early successes. This inclination for diagnosis and
prognosis may or may not be entirely fair, but these are
issues which the third volume of his collected plays will
certainly raise again. The plays- All Over, Seascape, Counting the Ways, Listening- are all shorter than full length, all
were box-office failures, and all (with the possible exception
of Seascape) met with critical censure. Since this naturally
makes it difficult to approach them with an open mind, the
collection serves as a needed invitation, even a challenge, for
more carefulcriticalassessment of each play on its own terms
and also for what it can add to our understanding of Albee's
message and craft.
We see Albee here in an experimental mood, perhaps too
self-consciously so, yet still committed to certain themes: the
self-loathing that precludes love, the substitution of the form
of living for life itself, the lack of engagement that consigns
the individual to emotional death. "The Woman" in Listening sums it up: "The greatest sin in living is doing it badlystupidly, or as if you weren't really alive, or wickedly. . . .
Takingyour life in your own two hands may be the one thing
you'll ever do in the whole stretch that matters."
Except for Nancy (Seascape), whose hankering for change
gives birth to the two lizard-creatureswho jar her husband
out of inertia, the charactersin these plays seem incapable of
the challenge. We miss, therefore, the engagement of individuals with each other and with their own elemental
drives that generates the dynamism of the earlier works.
There is no catharsisbecause there is no real or total conflict;
instead the characters,all sophisticates, substitute analysisof
their pain for the experience of it. Their conversation is a
the effect is only
pretext for monologue, and when
" they rail,
of "fistspounding on the wind. Despite all the shortcomings
of these plays, Albee has not lost his ability to offer serious,
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