Appointment in Eastwick

John Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick has its comic moments but the shadow of the grim reaper hangs over it. “We all have ends. The heart beats time. Time beats us,” notes one of the widows bleakly and as it turns out, prophetically. Jane is one of the three of women whose history continues after the long hiatus since Updike introduced them in The Witches of Eastwick (1984). Her story ends this time around, but Sukie and Alexandra live on. At the novel’s end the narrative voice—the collective voice of Eastwick, the chorus as it were—primly rejoices that the three “unholy wantons” have once again left. It regrets, however, that they seem to have shed the guilt of their former sins—recounted in the first novel—“as casually as when they shed their clothes.” Yet time beats for the two survivors just as surely as it did for Jane, and in the face of death, what does a little guilt matter—we’re all guilty of something. The nature of the women’s’ witch hood—were they really witches and what did Updike mean by it?—that hung over the first novel seems a side issue this time. Like the frightened man in Somerset Maugham’s re-telling of the tale of the servant who flees to Samarra to avoid death only to find him there, these three women return to Eastwick not only to re-live their past, but to prolong their lives by re-discovering their younger selves. In a sense they do find the past, or the fragments of it that exist in the rather sad New England village that Eastwick has become, but it fails to revive them.
As always, Updike writes like an angel yet there were moments when my attention wandered. In the first part of the novel the women do some traveling, including to Egypt and China. The sections read as if Updike had dug out his old itineraries and incorporated his characters into them—I’ve been both places and I could almost have done the same myself. I could not, however, have re-created tired old Eastwick as he does, or the scene in which the three attempt to summon up their supernatural powers once again, complete with a circle dribbled onto the carpet with dishwasher soap. Nor could I have near to creating the immanence of death that pervades the novel—the sudden sharp reminders that this is Updike’s subject. As one of the women says, “Weddings and funerals. Graduations and divorces. Endings. Ceremonies get us through. They’re like blindfolds for people being shot by a firing squad.” That’s us, dear readers, standing in front of the firing squad with our eyes tight shut.

Libraries

I believe in libraries because they have been a lifeline for me. Libraries provide books; they embody the idea that books are the vehicles of knowledge and pleasure, essential elements in the pursuit of happiness, and this I also believe. The Brownell Library in Little Compton RI, to which this blog is linked, is about the tenth library I have known since my mother took me as a small child to the library in Aurora, New York and introduced me to the joys of picking out books. There were plenty of books in our house, but we always went to the library. Today libraries, ours included, offer computers, audio materials, story hours, etc. But the Tudor Revival building that housed the Aurora library was a quieter place. The librarian ruled with a firm hand on the date stamp and warning looks at disturbers of the peace—as did the stern-faced woman behind the desk at the Brownell when I first went there some 50 years ago. Yet I felt at home, and that Christmas I asked for a date stamp so I could play library, which I did, thus defacing a number of my books.
As an only child who was home schooled for a while, books were my companions. After Aurora I got them from the library in Northfield Minnesota, today one of the few remaining Carnegie libraries that is still a library—its website shows an elegant space but what I remember is the dusty smell of the books and the sunlight on the reading room tables. My mother persuaded the librarian to give me access to the adult literature, believing that the more widely I read the sooner I’d be equipped to separate the good from the bad. I went to a high school I chose primarily for its library, a room with a fireplace and leather couches in which I could hide of an afternoon and read. I married early and kept on searching out libraries, now with my children in tow. A voracious reader’s appetite knows no bounds, and libraries provide the needed food.
When we settled in Providence I discovered the Athenaeum, one of the oldest private libraries in the country, where I worked both as a volunteer and an employee; I finally had an official date stamp. I loved observing the patrons, young and old, like the gentleman who came in every afternoon whose routine depended on touching certain objects in order, and the children whose heads barely reached over the top of the desk, their harassed mothers laden with armloads of overdue books.
The staff at the Brownell is anything but stern. I rely mostly on interlibrary loan and make my requests on line, but I still love walking into the library and seeing all that goes on now; there is a direct line between the child who loved books and the woman who believes in libraries as repositories of companionship, possibility and life-enhancing pleasure and knowledge.

Fact and Fiction: Mayer and LeCarre

I recently read two books that went together like cakes and ale, although not quite so pleasantly. One, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side is, as the sub-title says, “The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.” The other is John Le Carré’s new novel, A Most Wanted Man, a chilling page turner featuring a British banker and a young German lawyer who try to save a Muslim refugee caught up in the “War on Terror” described so eloquently in Mayer’s book.
Mayer offers ample proof for her thesis that the Bush Administration “invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10.” Allowing that extreme measures were “perhaps understandable” in the dark days right after the attack on the Twin Towers, Mayer argues that years later the Administration’s “counterterrorism policies remained largely frozen in place.” She also details the legal machinations that went on to ensure that those involved at the highest levels would escape prosecution at a future time. Not surprisingly, she identifies the villain in the story as Vice-President Cheney
Mayer’s book, which spares its audience few details of the evils done in America’s name, is troubling reading. A Most Wanted Man echoes its message in fictional form, giving the administration’s doings a human face. Issa is a ill young Muslim refugee with a mysterious history and a claim to money deposited long ago in a private bank in Hamburg by his Russian father—not that he wants the money for himself, no, he wants to help his fellow Chechens. His lawyer, an idealistic young woman called Annabel, determines to save him and enlists the help of Tommy Brue, the aging proprietor of a private bank that is on the outs. Together they battle the German and British and American intelligence services—each with a different agenda--that are determined to use Issa to capture bigger fish. In the end the good guys fail, and they fail in large part because of the demands of the Americans, who consider Issa dispensable even if he isn’t guilty. The last Annabel and Brue see of the boy, he is spread-eagled on the floor of a van as it speeds away, guarded by men in black balaclavas and jumpsuits. The scene brings to life Mayer’s description of the renditions that the US has carried out under the auspices of the Bush administration.

Class Trash

And just what is class trash? As far as I’m concerned it’s a book like Godchildren, Brit novelist Nicholas Coleridge’s 2002 saga about a self-made billionaire, Marcus Brand, and his six godchildren. Although there are many differences between out-and-out trash and something better, an ability to write and the sophistication of the narrative voice are key. Coleridge, for instance, endows his characters autonomy while simultaneously viewing them ironically, thus giving readers license to be absorbed in the lives of totally useless people, conscience free—we align ourselves with the narrative voice’s implicit moral superiority.
Meanwhile the (obviously) above-it-all reader is free to enjoy all the mouthwatering features of real trash—exotic settings, the best brand names, sexual high jinks; you name it, it’s here. The novel unfolds chronologically and centers on the rare times when Brand, purportedly childless, gathers together his godchildren in places like the Bahamas, Paris and finally, Bali. The story moves back and forth between the godchildren, following them from early childhood until adulthood. Among them are Charlie, the boorish son of a titled but decrepit Scots family, Stuart, the determined middle-class achiever, Jamie the charming drifter, and Saffron, the beautiful daughter of a mother who specializes in sleeping around. The plot follows them through school, first jobs, marriage, and their complicated relationships with each other. Meanwhile Brand is consolidating his fortune and often unbeknownst to them, manipulating the godchildren. In time it turns out that he is connected to most of them in ways well beyond having sprinkled water on their heads in a church.
Aside from his ability as a writer, what saves the novel from inanity is Coleridge’s sharp eye for social nuances. If nothing else, the book is a primer to what was smart in London in 2002. This reader was caught between feeling guilty for enjoying a book that adds up to precisely nothing and turning the pages hypnotically. Reading Godchildren is like eating too many expensive chocolates, a lot of fun in the doing but kind of a letdown afterwards.

Looking for the Cross

Once in a while something takes me back to a piece of literature I haven’t thought of for ages. Not long ago I read an article about medieval art that referred to the Ruthwell Cross, which is in a church near Dumfries in southern Scotland. There was also mention of an Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, some verses of which are inscribed on the cross. I hadn’t thought of that poem for ages, probably not since reading it in college, when it was the second item in the first volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a staple of English department syllabi. Except there, at least in my ancient edition, it is in prose. In search of another version, I turned to the internet and found a more appealing poetic rendering (http://faculty.uca.edu/~jona/texts/rood.htm if you’re interested).
Although authorities do not agree, some credit the poem to an Anglo-Saxon poet called Cynewulf about whom little is known. But as the Norton editors point out, the poem “may antedate its manuscript by almost three centuries,” precisely because some passages are carved on the Ruthwell Cross, which is earlier—the manuscript is tenth century. But in one sense none of this scholarly where when and who matters much, nor is it necessary to be a believer to comprehend the beauty of the poem; what counts is the power of the language, and of the dreamer’s vision of the cross on which Christ died. I was struck anew by the immediacy of the imagery, as in, for instance, the following lines: “the young hero stripped himself—he, God Almighty-- / strong and stout-minded. He mounted the high gallows, / bold before many, when he would loose mankind. / I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth, / fall to earth’s fields, but had to stand fast. / Rood I was reared. I lifted a mighty King, / Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.”
It’s all there, the mix of the concrete and the literal with the visionary that makes the little art we have of so early a time compelling. Curious to know more about the Ruthwell Cross, I followed the original article’s reference to art historian Meyer Schapiro’s essay and found it in Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art . Insightful and thorough as always, he leaves no stone unturned in detailing the religious meaning of the cross, which in turn helps to expand the meaning of the poem—even if the two reflect slightly different periods. My journey from the original article to the poem and then to Schapiro was a reminder of the satisfaction of pursuing some small matter with the help of a few books, the internet, and a library.