Graham Hough

John Cheever’s two celebrated novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are now reissued in one volume. In this form, we can see that the two are really one and the end was always implied in the beginning. We are often told that the American novel is not very deeply rooted in the social world, that in a society so fluid and so quickly changing fiction hardly has time to take stock of the way things actually work and tends to blow up into some kind of surreal fantasy. The Wapshot annals both confirm and contradict this. Some of the characters are fantastic enough, and so are the things that happen to them. In places the words get the bit between their teeth and run off on an autonomous joy-ride. All the same, we are securely situated in a time and a place: the time the first half of the present century, the place St Botolph’s, a small New England town. At the start, St Botolph’s is so securely tied to its past and its ingrained, unexamined heritage as to seem almost incapable of change; at the end, it is so hopelessly adrift as to have no future that it can foresee, and perhaps no future at all.

For the last 45 years – ever since Matthiessen’s book in 1935 – the steady flow of critical lucubration on T.S. Eliot has gone on unabated. Not particularly contentious – at any rate since the early days, not particularly progressive – it does not seem to be getting anywhere, it has settled down into a decorously repetitive exercise, rather like chewing the cud. The eagle who by the age of 40 no longer wished to stretch his wings soon established himself as a classic to be accepted rather than to be called in question. There were several reasons for this. The most powerful impact of his work both in poetry and criticism was all early. Those who had been affronted and dismayed by the land-mines scattered around The Waste Land and The Sacred Wood soon found themselves writing ‘Ah, how true’ in the margins of the work of the middle period – so that its real power and originality were often obscured. And there was a long final stretch in which Eliot’s creative powers quietly free-wheeled to a standstill. The early absorption of his work into the academic curriculum created a body of received opinion, and another considerable public has been assured by those who like the piety more than the poetry. The stratagems of the imagist method have long ago been absorbed into ordinary reading habits; the quotations and allusions have all been identified and accepted without remark. So it is a little difficult to see what is left for criticism to do.

No doubt it is yet another symptom of the decline of the West that we can so rarely afford proper novels nowadays, only skimpy little pieces of 130 pages or so, barely enough to last from dinner to bedtime. These are not novellen, purpose-built long-short-stories, with their defined themes and central symbols, but stripped-down, elliptical narratives that once would have been told at far greater length. Aesthetically, this may be a gain. Such a contracted form must preserve the strongest flavours, the crises of passion, sensation, eccentricity or pathos; what gets left out is the mashed potatoes of descriptive realism. But seen as a social phenomenon, which it also is, the novel so conceived starts to fulfil a different role. It is no longer the companion for days, or weeks, to be picked up, dropped and resumed, digested and pondered over in between. It is something to be swallowed at a sitting, a rapid mood-changer. Here are two examples, one English and one American, both extremely accomplished.

A week or two ago I reviewed a novel about rock-climbers. A very absorbing tale it was too, but specialised; and one was bound to say that to a reader wholly without interest in the technicalities of the sport it might well fall flat. How far can you go? is a novel about Catholics. There are more Catholics than rock-climbers, but even so their concerns are special ones, and it would seem on the face of it that the same limitations must apply. For David Lodge is writing about Catholics as Catholics, about their particular dilemmas, their casuistical puzzles, the blind alleys that modern Catholic prescriptions lead them into, about their various ways out, and finally about the astonishingly sudden and almost total dissolution of the moral and theological structure on which their lives have been founded. The subject is a large one, but the treatment is not solemn. The tone is that of serious comedy, with occasional glimpses into black holes. We are not in Greeneland, among lugubrious and spectacular adulteries, sacrilegious communions and whisky priests; we are not in Waugh territory, gaping at the raffish pieties of the aristocracy; we are in middle middle-class Catholic England, where sin is an obsession, and sin mostly means sex. So the book is mainly about what happens to the sex life under these particular constraints, the obstacles to its expression, the contortions to which it is subjected. This is done with candour and in detail – a bit too much candour and detail for my antiquated taste – but it is neither flip not clinical, and is always set against a formidable dogmatic background. This means that the ever-interesting topic, besides its intrinsic interest, serves as the index and symbol of a host of other attitudes and relations.

This is John Updike’s first collection of stories for seven years. There must have been problems, he says, to account for such a long delay. His preface glances ruefully at some of them – social and political disquiets between 1971 and 1978; but, in fact, the stories hardly move into the public domain. One of them is actually called ‘Problems’, and is cast in the form of exam questions. A, sleeping with B, a new partner who thinks he loves her, has a vivid and longing dream of his old partner C. Which has he more profoundly betrayed, B or C? This would serve pretty well as a paradigm for most of the present collection. Another is called ‘Domestic Life in America’; and if life there is interpreted as dull unease, half-hearted infidelity, not quite unbearable tension, this would describe the repeated theme. It makes for economy. The same apparatus can be infinitely extended, re-used with changed names for the indistinguishable partners, a different selection from an interchangeable set of unhappy offspring, and a slight shuttle to alter the setting. The family is the centre, but the family in decay, its bonds strong enough to cause neurotic dependence but not strong enough to give strength or support. The main activity is divorce – the glumly ‘civilised’ divorce that involves endless meeting, backtracking, wondering whether it is all worth while.