The Goddess and the Schlemihl
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Goddess and the Schlemihl By Stanley Edgar Hyman Anew sort of American novel seems to be emerging in the '60s. I am led to that conclusion by the appearance of a first...
...Surrounding Benny and Rachel are a group of young eccentrics who call themselves the Whole Sick Crew...
...I am led to that conclusion by the appearance of a first novel, V., by Thomas Pynchon (Lippincott, 492 pp., $5,951...
...Yibble, yibble, yibble," he says, pointing at one wellfed Jew after another, "got you dead center, Abdul Sayid...
...then as Veronica Manganese in Malta in 1919, by which time she has a star sapphire sewn into her navel and a glass eye with a clock for a pupil...
...The international incidents are deliberately preposterous, from the first armed assassin disabled by a kick from a well-shod boot, to the last double agent going numb at the threat of exposure and fiendish retribution...
...Esther Harvitz is the mistress of her plastic surgeon...
...She is the goddess Venus and the planet Venus, the Virgin, the town of Valetta in Malta, the imaginary land of Vheissu with its iridescent spider monkeys and Volcanoes...
...his wife Mafia plays Musical Blankets with male roomers named Charisma and Fu...
...What Pynchon and his fellows are really offering us are the slogans of revisionist psychoanalysis: kindness, consideration, mutuality, unselfish love...
...The least successful feature of V. is Pynchon's whimsy...
...Profane finally manages an affair with Rachel Owlglass, a Bennington alumna who loves him and wants to transform him...
...Roony Winsome tapes street fights...
...In a wider circle are two truly grotesque figures: Shale Schoenmaker, Esther's nose surgeon and lover, who cannot control his impulse to remodel the rest of her...
...Stencil discovers, or invents, everything about her except the important fact which the reader eventually figures out, that she was Stencil's mother...
...Slab devotes his life to painting a series of Cheese Danish canvases...
...Women throw themselves at him, but something always goes wrong...
...A Brazilian salad man at a borscht resort acquires a machine gun, camouflages it with watercress and endive, and sits through meals pretending to strafe the guests, dreaming that they are Arabs and that he is an Israeli soldier...
...When Pynchon's invention flags he flogs it, and the reader may be reminded of Mad...
...in the other, a friend of his named Herbert Stencil dredges up the history of a fabulous adventuress and secret agent named "V...
...finally disguised as a nameless priest on Malta in 1939, dying in an air raid when some children find her unconscious and despoil her, killing her in their efforts to dig out her star sapphire...
...A nose-lifting operation is described in detail for five pages, a young ballerina is horribly impaled during a performance, and one chapter is devoted to the sadistic atrocities against natives committed by the Germans in German South-West Africa in 1904 and later...
...Yibble, yibble, Muslim pig...
...If Pynchon has been influenced by Sterne, he has also been visibly influenced by our bitter symbolists of the '30s, Nathanael West and Djuna Barnes...
...It soon becomes clear that Pynchon is indirectly commenting on the Nazi crimes against the Jews, one of the things that has created Profane's numbed world...
...then as Vera Meroving of Munich in German South-West Africa in 1922, punctuating a garden conversation by braining a goldfish...
...V. is almost impossible to synopsize, or even to describe...
...Profane turns out to be incapable of accepting the responsibility that Rachel represents, and when last seen he is on Malta, with a new girl, looking for sewer work...
...Where the British Angry Young Men derive from the tradition of Fielding, Smollett and the picaresque novel, Catch-22, V. and the others derive principally from Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Twain, and the conventions of digressive oral narrative...
...How treacherously that last appears to resemble Krishna's message to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: Do your duty without attachment...
...Benny Profane, who never fought in any war, has made a separate peace in every human struggle, even the one against mice (pro-mouse, Benny springs traps...
...and so on...
...New York is usually referred to as "Nueva York...
...There are several beautiful and moving love scenes between them, written with power and honesty...
...It has an interwoven double plot...
...She is Vesuvius, Venezuela, the Violet of a vulgar mnemonic...
...These are only the few of V.'s impersonations that we see...
...Stencil reports that she spent a year disguised as an old fisherman in Mallorca, that she was a partisan in Asia, that she crashed a stolen airplane in Spain...
...They suffer from meagerness of aim, asking only to be physically gratified and otherwise left alone...
...Pynchon wants more of life than Benny does, and his message is delivered as a series of slogans by the book's sympathetic characters...
...Sometimes he writes like E. Phillips Oppenheim or the Baroness Orczy...
...Pynchon takes advantage of his international melodrama for all sorts of fine mean parody...
...Profane is a selfidentified schlemihl who works at such jobs as hunting alligators in the New York sewers or being night watchman in a laboratory that mutilates plastic human dummies...
...after that nameless in Paris in 1913, a Lesbian fetishist in love with a young ballerina she dresses as a boy...
...The garish fantasy of V. dominates the book...
...What has been lost is the innocence...
...then in Florence in 1899, seducing Stencil's father on a couch in the British consulate...
...and McClintic Sphere, a Negro jazz musician and parody of Omette Coleman, who plays a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone...
...ultimately she is the V of spread thighs and the mons veneris...
...and Dudley Eigenvalue, a "psychodontist" who diagnoses his patients' emotional difficulties as "malocclusion," "deciduous dentition," or "heterodont configuration...
...You have to con each other a little," Rachel tells Profane, trying to prevent a quarrel...
...Pynchon is even more wildly imaginative, highspirited and funny in the Profane episodes...
...Hemingway's Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms made a separate peace and deserted the war after he had fought bravely...
...Benny Profane is as soft and fat as Friedman's Stern, as cowardly as Heller's Yossarian, as addicted to "yo-yoing" (traveling aimlessly back and forth on subways and ferries) as Percy's Jack Boiling is to escapist moviegoing...
...V. is raw and formless in comparison with those two, but it is powerful, ambitious, full of gusto, and overflowing with rich comic invention...
...It strikingly resembles another recent first novel, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and it has a number of things in common with other first novels of the decade, including two excellent ones that I reviewed in these pages, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (April 30, 1962) and Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern (October 1, 1962...
...Just outside the Crew are two sympathetic characters: Paola Maijstral, a Maltese who disguises herself as a Negro whore named Ruby...
...These heroes are in neurotic withdrawal and thermonuclear shock...
...At the same time, V., as a Platonic myth of the passions, enlarges the significance of the contemporary action...
...In one action, an ex-Navy Italian-Jewish drifter named Benny Profane pursues the good life with little success...
...at other times like Lawrence Durrell or the French New Wave...
...Beyond that V. is some great female principle, embodied even in the rat Veronica, who was either Father Fairing's saintly nun-to-be or his mistress, "depending which story you listened to...
...It has the long chapter headings of older comic fiction ("In which Rachel gets her yo-yo back, Roony sings a song, and Stencil calls on Bloody Chiclitz"), the comic capitals of George Ade ("a ghetto for Drunken Sailors nobody knew what to Do With"), and an omniscient narrator who explains things to the reader...
...But outside and beyond this world of moderate adjustment is V., who wants more of life than Pynchon does...
...Along with Catch-22 and other recent first novels, V. represents a deliberate return to old-fashioned literary conventions...
...These new novelists also delight in impure forms...
...As in musical comedy, his characters sometimes interrupt their conversation to break into duets...
...None of the real characters in the book can quite come up to this fertility goddess...
...The relationship between these two plots is a subtle and complex one...
...If he is not interrupted by a comic intruder he is repelled by the girl's eagerness and changes his mind...
...The comical behavior of drunken sailors gets to be a bore after a while...
...Love with your mouth shut," McClintic tells us, "keep cool, but care...
...She wants passion, danger, total immersion in the destructive element, rebirth in the artifice of eternity...
...The international hi-jinks of the chapters involving V., with their grand amours and exotic wickedness, oddly serve to make the random lechery and low carousing of Profane's world seem not sordid but human and sympathetic...
...At other times Pynchon seems principally interested in harrowing the reader...
...We see her first as a 19-year-old Yorkshire girl named Victoria Wren, deflowered by a British agent in Cairo during the Fashoda crisis in 1898...
...The doomed love between Profane and Rachel is the material of tragedy, and Pynchon handles it with great purity of feeling, but jostling their scenes in the book are wild comedy, outlandish melodrama, and bloated caricature...
...Pynchon is a writer of enormous talent and potential, and before making some observations about the new sort of fiction that I think he represents, I will discuss some features of his remarkable novel...
...A Jesuit priest, Father Fairing, convinced that the rats are about to take over New York City, moves down to the sewers to convert the rats to Roman Catholicism, and by blessing and exorcising all the sewer water between Lexington and the East River and between 79th and 86th, creates Fairing's Parish...
...The hero of the modern novel has been unheroic for a long time—one has only to think of Swann and Leopold Bloom—but rarely so unheroic as these protagonists...
...Only the last of these has any relevance that I can see...
...The characters' names, like those of Catch-22, are juvenile: Dewey Gland, Baby Face Falange, and such...
...It is a sign of Thomas Pynchon's intelligence and imagination that he knows that too...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 6
