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 Accessed: 23-02-2016 16:51 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Literature Today. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 147.188.128.74 on Tue, 23 Feb 2016 16:51:18 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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- This content downloaded from 147.188.128.74 on Tue, 23 Feb 2016 16:51:18 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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, This content downloaded from 147.188.128.74 on Tue, 23 Feb 2016 16:51:18 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions