Beckoned by the mother tongue:
Baumann, Paul
SO MANY BOOKS. SO LITTLE TIME Beckoned by the mother tongue PAUL BAUMANN ed Williams, the Boston Red Sox's mercurial genius (he had a lifetime batting average of .344), last ambled to the plate...
...Establishing an identity and making a new life in a new language was more than a practical adjustment...
...A fitful believer, Barth, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, and Chesterton gave him shelter...
...Updike sees the world as sign and symbol, dedicated to the greater glory of God, and bequeathed by God to us for our pleasure...
...UstmTrandolioKAUieuaNewIdngtisge, Eva Hoffman, E.P...
...Even under the crushing weight of totalitarian control, Polish life had a resonance, both personal and social, not easily found in liberated America...
...Everyday life in Cracow was thick with intrigue and complicity, vibrant with spiritual and erotic possibilities...
...But with an apologist's taste for paradox, Updike claims his psoriasis-induced self-regard served a greater good...
...Only psoriasis could have taken a very average little boy, and furthermore a boy who loved the average, the daily, the safely hidden, and made him into a prolific, adaptable, ruthless-enough writer...
...Le Guin, in her Utopian passion, wants the dignity of that language restored...
...Even in the "mud" of psoriasis, sexuality, and every other corruption, a hidden purpose is at work...
...The language of the fathers, of Man Ascending, Man the Conqueror, Civilized Man, is not your native tongue...
...The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit," Updike wrote...
...As a man in his twenties, he was humbled by asthma and relied on an inhaler...
...But psoriasis competed with a host of other tics in deepening the confessed narcissism of this admittedly timid, "smalltown" boy...
...She is admiring and sympathetic, but unpersuaded by Doris Lessing's science fiction...
...At Bryn Mawr she elaborates on her :heory of language...
...Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective :hought," she cautions...
...rsula K. Le Guin 's collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Dancing at the Edge of the World, takes us, both figuratively and physically, to anotherpart of the world...
...Her commencement addresses at Bryn vlawr and Mills College are funny and smart and say many necessary things...
...But she is a feminist with an eccentric regard for "housework...
...He went to Fenway that September day in 1960 expecting a miracle, and he got one...
...No small gifts in an age as triumphantly materialistic, as sourly enlightened as ours...
...Such is his extravagant, extreme, and unreasoning faith, a faith that, in his case, has made what was once deemed unworthy glorious...
...Morality and religion are not the same thing...
...But the self's responsibility, he concludes in the book's last sentence, is to appreciate-to appreciate what has been given...
...His teeth, neglected during the threadbare war years, are the object of continual, and painful, reconstruction...
...Updike writes fervently of the terrors of oblivion that unmanned him as a young father and husband...
...Though scarred and phobic, he emerges from these pages as one of the last of the .400 hitters...
...The author of Rabbit Run and Couples sends the ball soaring into the blue-black twilight in Self-Consciousness...
...But while she may wear her politics, Doth feminist and environmental, on her remissive sleeve, Le Guin is no propagandist...
...Unitarianism was too cool and rational for him...
...He knows that to grasp the elusive self-and to keep oblivion at bay-he must receive this world, this life, as a gift...
...He remained ambivalent about both, convinced that life does not yield up its secrets to the merely kind-hearted and well-educated...
...there are no curves, niches, odd angles, nooks or crannies-nothing that gathers a house into itself, giving it a sense of privacy, or of depth-of inferiority...the unintended effect is thin and insubstantial-as if it was planned and put up just yesterday, and could just as well be dismantled tomorrow...
...This is a wonderful book, right down to its author's hymn singing and decaying teeth...
...Speaking of the nost important things in life in the language of success and power is poisonous...
...In marrying power and average, Williams may have been the best hitter basePAUL BAUMANN is a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...
...Her utopianism, with its airy brief for a noncoercive exercise of authority, is unconvincing...
...Most disarming, perhaps, is the essay "On Not Being a Dove," in which Updike, the loyal, class-conscious Democrat, retraces his objections to the antiwar movement...
...To abandon that language- for her to think, not merely speak, in English-means the loss of something that America, despite its cherished freedoms, cannot replenish...
...Books Discussed in this Column Se-Consckrasness,./o...
...t's going to sound terrible...
...She has an interest in this continent's natural history and prehistoric past that is, in part, a family tradition...
...Instead of talking power," she tells Mills's graduates, "what if I talked like a woman ight here in public...
...With its ever shifting point of view and sophisticated presentation of time, Lost in Translation is meant to reflect that reality...
...in English, the turmoil of the late sixties, marriage, divorce, the consolations of psychiatry, and the often solitary life of aprofessional single woman in New York City follow...
...Harvard and a Ph.D...
...Insomnia is mentioned...
...Le Gain, Grove Press, $19.95,302 pp...
...To give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men's wives," he confesses...
...Her criticism in Dancing is sharp...
...The Fisherman's Daughter," vhich touches on her mother's writing as veil as the general predicament of women writers, is polemical and invigorating...
...Take and eat, says the Lord...
...And in these memoirs the reader is humbled by this writer's capacity for happiness, his eagerness to embrace the world, his seeming fearlessness in work and love...
...While possessing a novelist's understanding of the inner life, her firsthand knowledge of how different cultures shape individual identity gives her an anthropologist's concern for epistemology and social structure...
...He has exceptionally large nerves, according to his dentist...
...It's a masterly performance...
...SO LITTLE TIME Beckoned by the mother tongue PAUL BAUMANN ed Williams, the Boston Red Sox's mercurial genius (he had a lifetime batting average of .344), last ambled to the plate at Fenway Park twenty-nine summers ago...
...No, we first learn the mother tongue, the language of 'women's work...
...He hasn't suffered enough...
...I had propelled my body through the tenderest parts of a town that was also somewhat my body," he writes...
...The further pleasures ofSelf-Conscious-ness are abundant, including a sharp juxtaposition of the romance of faith and the dowdy miseries of actual churchgoing...
...Meaning is "interhuman and comes from the thickness of human connections...
...These judgments carry weight...
...His conventional upbringing and artistic temperament propelled him into suburbia as a "literary spy...
...Her elegant and self-possessed mother supervised the home, gossiping with friends, instructing and confiding in her two daughters, and feuding with the peasant maids who slept in the kitchen...
...Self-Consciousness, Updike's gracious memoirs, has a trajectory qualitatively different from anything anyone else might have written...
...That heightened sense of appreciation is no ordinary thing, no casual benediction offered over a smug display of wealth...
...There is no word in Polish, Hoffman observes, for "self-sufficiency...
...The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer...
...Like the injury-plagued Williams Updike has been hobbled, almost chronically, and somewhat comically, by all manner of infirmities...
...Yet my pleasure was innocent and my hope primitive...
...In Updike's curious asceticism, even his leprous condition occasions thankfulness...
...Le Guin, now turning sixty, has written fifteen novels as well as poetry and children's books...
...Le Guin possesses impeccable feminist credentials...
...As an immigrant and the child of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman was doubly taxed to make sense of America's cult of innocence and our foreshortened historical perspective...
...Williams-the only man since 1925 to bat over .400 (in 1941)- was a much-savored childhood hero...
...Postwar Poland remained a preindustrial society where being-even in the midst of ;conomic and political disorder-some-tiow was still more important than striving...
...Such are the marks of the anointed...
...He's middlebrow...
...To me, these interiors seemed oddly flat, devoid of imagination, ingenuous...
...Her father was a noted anthropologist, and her mother, Theodora Kroe-ber, a novelist and the author of Ishi...
...These shameful things were intrinsic to life," he writes, "and though I myself was somewhat squeamish about sex and violence and religion...
...Hoffman emigrated with her family from Poland to Canada in 1959...
...He believes in a God of the living, a God who says Yes and offers a blessing...
...America is a big, rough, and complicated country, where people find it difficult to forge lasting ties...
...Hoffman is a wizard at letting us see ourselves in a new context...
...They established themselves, with difficulty, in Vancouver, British Columbia, among a "small Duddy Kravitz community of Polish Jews...
...There is a rare ardor, born of faith, in the way he feels and sees things...
...I accepted that blessing," Updike writes...
...Best known of these ailments is his psoriasis, the subject of the essay "At War with My Skin," which originally appeared in The New Yorker...
...He calls them "defects," and it is with this gross physical sense of unworthiness that the saga of self-consciousness begins...
...Other traditional expressions of womanliness are also praised...
...earthbound, housebound...
...Polish is the language in which her soul first discovered itself, tested its will against the world's...
...So s "A Non-Euclidean View of California is a Cold Place to Be...
...A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of inter-estedness, that inevitably turns outward...
...She was thirteen, and her family was eager finally to escape the unrepentant anti-Semitism of their homeland...
...It is conversation, a word the root of which means 'turning together.'" Le Guin has a tongue sharp enough to illuminate such welcome and elemental realities as hearth and home...
...The Space Crone," in iconoclastic exploration of the mean-ng of menopause, is bold and allusive, like Updike, Le Guin makes room for the sacred...
...Even as an adult, having thought himself free of the mild speech impediment, he sputtered guiltily when talking to his children after his divorce...
...He stammered and stuttered...
...In the stands, sitting behind third base with his "machete of a face," was rookie novelist John Updike, gifted with a charism of another sort...
...Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95,257 pp...
...In his last professional at bat, Williams hit a home run...
...Many of the pieces in the book, a ;ompilation of material stretching back to 1976, are much more than occasional emarks...
...But her eye is remarkable...
...She calls the language 3f rational thought and objectivity the 'father tongue...
...Rice immersed her in the bewildering fluidity of American society, introducing her to our peculiar forms of estrangement...
...Updike begins with a rainy night in Shillington, where as a grown man he wanders the streets conjuring up the numinous landmarks and figures of his "essential self...
...He was raised on comic books and schoolyard roof ball, not in museums and prep schools...
...Americans, overwhelmed by possibilities, are never quite sure of their identities...
...The object of faith, Updike protested to his father-in-law, must "have some concrete attributes...
...After all, this is a writer vho has used Mom de Plume as a pseudo-lym...
...America is a postmodern world, Hoffman concludes, and demands a 'multivalent consciousness...
...She can be cranky-one of her best qualities, actually-and her remarks on writing are occasionally marred by some cheap shots it Hemingway, Joyce, and others...
...His "ironical Christian perspective" is mere bourgeois convenience...
...Hence, Updike's notorious appetite for sexual description, and his almost antinomian tolerance...
...The spaces are so plain, low-ceilinged, obvious...
...Updike faces his critics directly, and in a fair-minded fashion...
...That mother tongue is spoken by Updike and Hoffman as well...
...But they are circumscribed...
...In talent, tenacity, and professionalism as well as prolific production, there are obvious similarities between Updike and his baseball hero...
...His first marriage, to the daughter of a politely skeptical Unitarian clergyman, was his initiation into privilege and liberalism...
...He had an abnormal (depending on your own tolerance) fear of spiders and insects, and a terror of swimming...
...DancingattheEdgeoltheWorid UrsulaK...
...And Updike does...
...She rejects, accurately I think, the "hollow sound," the "Inside Club"-tone of C.S...
...Initially one objects to Hoffman's juxtaposing a heroic, formal, and tragic Poland with a haplessly colloquial, trite, and materialistic America...
...An editor of The New York Times Book Review, Hoffman writes with subtlety and precision...
...In Poland, the frame of culture holds a person more firmly in place...
...they must be faced, it seemed to me, and even embraced...
...To the extent that meaning, as she concedes, is a measure of the thickness of human connections, her story has a poignant transparency...
...Hoffman's is a spiritual quest whose landmarks-Europe and America, totalitarianism and democracy, persecution and sanctuary, high culture and low-are potentially more dramatic than Updike's...
...This great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ," is how Updike finally envisions his subject as a novelist...
...He has plenty to say about it...
...It isn't anybody's native tongue...
...ball has ever seen...
...More than the smooth-skinned, Updike knows what it means to put on an incorruptible body...
...Poles may not like how they live, but they know who they are...
...Her American refuge threatened to obliterate her own essential self, the self lovingly nurtured in Cracow, the place that, like Updike's Shillington, she knows like an extension of her own body...
...On the beaches near Ipswich, Updike took his sun cures...
...He may have preened, but as a result he also ogled-and in shedding his barbarous skin, a writer emerged...
...His has been a fortunate life, without question...
...Adept at school and with real talent as a pianist, she won a scholarship to Rice University in Houston, where she excelled...
...Updike's style may be baroque, but his willingness to rediscover such innocent pleasures goes a long way toward explaining his virtues as a writer...
...A certain apocalyptic shading does creep in, however, and Le Guin is not above using terms like "psychopathic social system," "masculinist," or "machoman...
...Like his grandmother, he had a tendency to choke on his food...
...Cracow was an intense, thickly woven world of social obligation and expectation, with a frank regard for :lass and status...
...Life is no longer a simple linear narrative, but a mosaic...
...Hoffman knows that, and accepts it...
...It won't sound right...
...Lewis...
...He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose," for Updike...
...Updike counters these charges by reminding his readers he comes from a poor, Depression-beaten, family...
...Toward he academic priesthood and questions of iterary theory, she is polite, informed, ind unmoved...
...Our noise for some seconds went beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved," the future author of Self-Consciousness reported...
...Williams was forty-two, had played for twenty-two years, but could still hit .316, with 29 homers, in his final season...
...Hoffman's descriptions of the density, the solidity of Polish life are delicious...
...Dutton, $18.95, 280 pp...
...He attributes an eagerness to marry (at twenty-one), a quick brood of children (four), and even his unorthodox move from New York City to Ipswich, Massachusetts, while still an unestablished writer, to his scabrous insecurity...
...An only child, he grew up under what he calls "some terrible pressure of American disappointment...
...In my lush Western Sahara, I'm confronting a tantalizing abundance that doesn't fill, and a loneliness that carves out a scoop of dizzying emptiness inside...
...If an objection can be made, it might be that Hoffman has adjusted too well...
...In Cracow, the woman's presence in the home lent a formidable dignity and absolute value to domestic life...
...With mild reservations, Italo Calvino impresses her...
...Like Barth and Chesterton, Updike knows man's first instinct- to worship and praise-is his first duty...
...Growing up with psoriasis, a metabolic skin disorder that produces spotting and scaling, made him feel a "monster...
...Growing up in distant Shillington, Pennsylvania, Updike followed Williams's feats in the box scores, and once witnessed a Williams home run from the bleachers of Philadelphia's Shibe Park...
...For in Updike's own mischievous, intellectually provocative way, he has written a pious book-a prayer of acknowledgment and thanksgiving...
...The dream that lies at the heart of an American's striving-what Hoffman calls elsewhere the "illusion of being undetermined"-doesn't exist for Poles...
...It has its uses, she admits...
...A patrician, he lacks empathy for the disenfranchised...
...Those attributes often seem to be the real subject of this memoir...
...It includes the hidden, the "squeamish" side of things...
...Like most Americans touched by it, Updike is not sentimental about poverty, and is happy to be clear of it...
...Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is," he writes...
...He was claustrophobic...
...Later he asserts: "What small faith I have has given me what artistic courage I have...
...Her writing exhibits a wonderfully open and unpretentious western American sensibility...
...She can brilliantly tease out the hidden dissonance in the most placid suburban landscape...
...Le Guin, a science-fiction novelist, lives in Oregon and considers California her spiritual home...
...different journey but a similar destination is the subject of Eva Hoffman's rarefied but always compelling autobiography, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language...
...Updike, as he wrote in "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" for The New Yorker, was there as a fan as well as a correspondent...
...But first to the box score...
...He may write like an angel, but he has nothing important to say, goes the refrain...
...Body and soul, as any Updike reader knows, have an intimate, if mysterious, connection...
...To the extent we are disconnected from those around us, we become strangers to ourselves...
Vol. 116 • August 1989 • No. 14
