BOOKS

The. Myth in Action

BY RICHARD G. STERN FOR tracking purposes, one might consider the young American writer John Updike a latter- day John O'Hara. The large measure of differ- ence may be as well charged to 'the times' as to their distinct temperaments, the young man's lyric reflectiveness satisfying the insecure comfort of mid-century America as the older man's de- caying brawn did the ravenous, troubled Thirties and Forties. Both men set their fictions in the small Pennsylvania towns of their origin; both luxuriate in catalogues of sheer stuff; both have churned out the blunted anecdotes for which the New Yorker magazine handsomely pays; both are expert, popular and prolific, and it may be that both have abused strong or fulfilled minor gifts; finally, both started their novelistic careers with short, tightly-composed works, which is where we'd better let them diverge.

O'Hara's famous beginning was Appointment ut Samarra, a book which brilliantly worked out the theme he has expanded into larger and larger chunks for thirty years, the collapse of the solid, sullied Xanadu of American comfort under the assault of impulse or desire.

Updike's quieter beginning was The Poorhouse Pair, and it dealt•with that much-loved subject of the Fifties and Sixties, the very old. The book was further hors de combat by being set a few decades into the future, in the contained world of a State poorhouse run into the ground of rational humanitarianism by an enlightened civil servant. The admirable thing about the novel was that its characters were more men than spokesmen, and yet their problems, the sale of quilts at the fair, the name-tags put on their chairs, engaged a fine dialectic between the atheistic, collective, machine-tooled, rational future and the sentimental, craftsmanly, Chris- tian past. The centre of the book was an argu- ment between the civil servant and the ninety- four-year-old ex-schoolteacher Hook, which, though weighted toward the latter, was unre- solved. Such discussion would die for breath in O'Hara's world. It may be that the reader of the Thirties and Forties needed quick, specific dramatisation of what was oppressingly at hand, where the more Alexandrian reader of the Ameri- can niid-century permits his favourite story- tellers more remote experimental cdvortings.

Not that Mr. Updike's second novel, Rabbit, Run, was (as far as I read, ninety pages) experi- mental or remote. Indeed, it struck this perhaps overly hasty reader as bad O'Hara, a work ner- vously padded beyond endurance. It dealt with an ex-basketball hero's short furlough from life, and the milieu was again a recent American favourite, the small-town high school where the thin vestiges of Western culture get washed up on native barbarities and where ugly Pythian cheers bruise the smoked air of a basketball court.

The' Centaur* is, 1 think, a better book. It works in, the tradition—honoured in English fic-

• TRE CENTAUR. By John Updike. (Andr6 Deutsch. 21s.)

tion since Joseph Andrews—which relates one story more or less consistently to another, better- known one, the aim being enrichment by widened perspective, ironic contrast and rever- berating overtones. The contemporary reader, trained on Joyce, Faulkner, Pound and Eliot, has an apparatus which goes into comparative gear at the first sniff of an Odyssean or Christian reference, as ready for the second-story overtone as Bunyan's or Dante's reader would have been.

The Centaur uses a rather odd variation of this technique, for the story of Chiron in Updike's book is part of the basic narrative. Here, for example, the hero, George Caldwell, the science teacher in a Pennsylvania high school, surprises the school gym teacher, Vera Hummel, drying herself after a shower,

. . . a blue towel held gracefully away from her body, her amber pudenda whitened by drops of dew.

'Why should my brother Chiron stand gaping like a satyr? The gods are not strange to him.'

This is not persiflage, or not merely persiflage. For the next few pages, the two discuss their 'fellow gods,' all of whom have parallels in the 'real story,' although the reader has not yet been given enough information to make all the iden- tifications. One supposes that the intention is to vary narrative texture without the obvious shift of an interpolated tale.

It is a method which invites some con- fusion. For instance, the book begins with the wounding of the hero: 'Caldwell turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow.' Ah, says the reader, alerted by an epigraph, the author is comparing a sprained ankle to the poisoned arrow which wounded the centaur at the Lapiths' wedding feast. Yet the next few pages take Caldwell to the Hephaestean garage of Mr. Hummel, who actually extracts a steel- shafted arrowhead from Caldwell's ankle. 'It isn't every day I burn an arrow out of a man's leg.' But earlier it is hinted that the arrow is a nerve: 'It seemed the cutters were biting not into a metal shaft but into a protruding nerve of his anatomy.' Since the teachers frequently come to Hummel's 'to let their martyred nerves uncurl,' one feels surer that the arrow is metaphoric But no. Hundreds of other lines deal explicitly with the extraction, and slater, with the use to which the arrow is put (Caldwell strikes one of his incredibly undisciplined students with it). There are even eight lines devoted to equations of ex- traction, 'mechanical advantage equals load over force less friction,' etc. An immense amount of time is spent tossing the reader back and forth about the actual nature of this wound; it almost seems as if it's the tossing which counts for Mr. Updike.

Only 'almost.' There is an aspect of this novel, indeed of all Mr. Updike's work, which weakens our confidence. The aspect is the odd insecurity of his style which is related to the tendency he shares with O'Hara, the inability to stop fondling detail. Concern lot the richuss of minutia! may

be a writer's chief gift, but if he works in the narrative convention whose strictest term is that nothing shall be written which does not advance and enlarge the narrative, he must exercise the gift with especial caution. This does not limit the fiction writer to adventure stories. Indeed, Proust or Musil or, occasionally, Broch, can spend thirty exciting pages on a small detail or minor character because it is felt to be part of the integral narrative. Mr. Updike's dilations (like those of Doctor Zhivago) frequently seem to stem from poetic inclinations, and they go wonderfully toward-scattering the narrative force. Mingled, as they often are, with barely disguised cliché and syntactic gaucherie, they blur the book's line.

Even so, a reader of The Centaur may still feel that the mythic parallel, though awkwardly applied, is a genuine enhancement of the story line. The book revolves around the relationship of an artistic boy to his clumsily affectionate and altruistic schoolteacher father, whp through- out most of the three winter days of the action suffers the illusory conviction that he's going to die before he has adequately provided for his son. The applied myth is that of the centaur Chiron's happy renunciation of immortality in favour of Prometheus after he has been wounded at the Lapiths' feast. There are other mythic enrich- ments of the story which are employed more casually and which may serve as much for stimuli to the author's invention as pleasure for the reader. An appendix is provided, tat my wife's suggestion,' so that, say, the identification of the school principal, Zimmerman, with Zeus may be discovered at a glance. Such identification is harmless; the central expansion, however, works to enforce the dignity of the novel's hero.

In addition to this fine central relationship, there are five or six scenes which move both rapidly and poetically in the narrative track, a splendid account of a car breaking down on a frozen hill, a subtle exchange between a woman- shy but excited minister and the seductive gym teacher, Mrs. Hummel, and a grand lecture on the expansionist theory of the universe which, though punctuated by banal devices (scarcely credible classroom sex-play), is another way of placing this small-town world amidst the fantas- tic extensions of space and entropic time.

A good, if smudged, book. And, one might conclude, a good but clumsy writer, were it not for a book published a few months earlier than The Centaur, Updike's second collection of short stories, Pigeon Fcathers.1- Nineteen stories, of which five or six are beautiful, and only a few of the remainder marred by the glassy ease of his earlier stories and light verse or by the in- flations of his longer work. The novels are im- plicit in most of these stories: the teacher- father, the sensitive, prodigal son, the mother who moves them back to her childhood farm, the remarkable grandparents, the Pennsylvania Dutch names, bodies, anger, the ceremonious little town, the churches in and out of which the speculative heroes come seeking warmth against the local chill, all are here relaxed out of the novelistic binding. Stylistic clarity follows, and even the loose organisation of selected reminiscences makes beautiful shapes. These stories suggest that Updike's material is available for constant reformulation, and that he might be more than a new O'Hara, the alert recorder of the small-town Middle-Atlantic schools and farms where poets and barbarians come to dim terms With Western culture and the thrusting, mechanic future.

t PIGEON FEAlliERS. (Andre Deutsch. 18s.)