Hypocrites and Tortoises
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing HYPOCRITES AND TORTOISES BY PEARL K. BELL WHATEVER happened to those strident Lelchuks of the 1960s, the bearded radical professors in tailored blue jeans who turned every class...
...Bowing to the imperative of that mystery, she and William summon up the energy their depressed spirits had thought gone forever...
...In the hands of a less adept writer, the turtle affair would be drenched in whimsy, and the heroic animal lovers, bravely resisting the powers-that-be, would, after hearty doses of cliff-hanging frustration, win the good fight with cozy glory...
...Bradbury sets his caustic satire at Watermouth University, in the south of England, a huge lunar confection of prestressed concrete and acres of glass, "one of those dominant modern environments of multi-functionality that modern man creates...
...In early middle age, William H. has been bereft of his past (even his name has withered, as though a name implies more presence than he can dare claim...
...Despised by teachers and students alike for his short hair and polished shoes, the nonconformist degeneracy of his white shirt and tie, Carmody protests the comments of "pure fascism" and "reactionary crap" that his professor keeps scrawling in the margins of his essays...
...If Hoban—an American living in London who has produced 37 books for the young—had concluded his beautifully written and gently ironic book at this point, Turtle Diary would have had a melancholy perfection...
...And George Carmody, an incorrigibly square student, shows that underneath the trendy carapace of ideology and relevance Howard is a hypocritical bully...
...He has dropped from a good job in advertising to clerking in a bookstore, lives in a drab boarding house, drags his loneliness around London like the dead weight of damnation...
...With the help of a sympathetic aquarium keeper, they abduct the turtles and drive to Cornwall, where they tip the compliant creatures into the ocean and let blind instinct take over...
...With foxy belligerence, Howard manipulates his Watermouth world so that everything and everyone is nude and available to him...
...Guarding her isolated privacy like a miser, she reflects, "Here I am 43 years old...
...The world spins on without missing a beat, and for all it matters to anyone except the tortoises, they might just as well have ended up, as they would have in the normal course of events, in soup and eyeglass frames...
...After the caper, Neaera falls in love with the cheerful keeper ("I didn't know how lonely I'd been until the loneliness stopped"), and the writer's block melts...
...Together with his frenetically busy, "consciousness-conscious" and resentful wife Barbara, Howard has shed all traces of his lower-class "vestigial Christianity and inherited social deference...
...in the end, everyone tainted with decency either submits to his juggernaut of the future or is destroyed by him...
...In and out of their aggressively "open" marriage, they are uninhibited experimenters...
...Howard replies that Carmody's papers suffer from "too much work and not enough analysis...
...Nothing was different or better but I didn't mind being alive at the moment...
...Bradbury attempts to demolish the fake and flatulent radicalism of more recent years, just as pompous and far more vile, but lacks Amis' genius for manically enacting the ridiculous with guileful attention to every gloriously slapstick detail...
...Inevitably one compares it with Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis' classic university satire from the early '50s...
...Eventually, Kirk manages to have Carmody expelled...
...Amis was mocking the pomposity and fraudulence of academic culture-vultures pretending to be scholars and connoisseurs...
...This is a pity, because if the Zapata mustaches and luxuriant Afros are by now more or less out of fashion, the simplistic and brutally righteous habits of radical judgment are as persistent as a dog in heat, and not only in the universities...
...That is to say, Carmody has actually read Mill and Weber...
...A very different contemporary England is the object of Russell Hoban's witty concern in Turtle Diary (Random House, 211 pp., $7.95), a modest and poignant story about two wounded souls in London...
...close it down as a university and you could open it again as a factory, a prison, a shopping precinct...
...Where now are those aging acolytes of the Zeitgeist (Irving Howe called them "guerrillas with tenure") who wooed the young with specious intimacy and "nonnegotiable" idealism...
...Divorced by his wife, he hasn't seen his daughters in years and doesn't know where they are...
...At least in America, they are quietly marooned, like everyone else, in the anxious and sober '70s, when radical fervor is more apt to be spent on the Op Ed page of the Times than in an angry march on the Pentagon...
...Depression and withdrawal are by now second nature to her...
...I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and cats...
...In this asymmetrical cloister of "liberated," with-it learning, barely 10 years old and already in a state of grimy disrepair, no one is more liberated and with-it than Howard Kirk, radical sociologist...
...We're all nude and available...
...Unable to think up any ideas for a new book, she writes instead, like William, in a self-mocking diary (the story is told through their alternating entries...
...When a troubled and weeping friend confides that she is leaving her husband, Howard comforts her with therapeutic platitudes from his latest tract, The Defeat of Privacy: "There's nothing that's not con-frontable...
...footnotes are reactionary, bibliographies totalitarian...
...my next book will be about a predator...
...But Hoban's timid conspirators find, once the turtles are smoothly dispatched, that nobody cares or notices, even at the zoo...
...Bound hand and foot to hopelessness and defeat, he feints with suicide, writing in his diary that "the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in a corner of my mind.' William's counterpart in loneliness is Neaera G., a moderately successful author of children's books who is tired of "meek and cuddly creatures...
...One discarded bedmate accuses him of being "an historical rapist...
...Were The History Man a stronger novel, Bradbury's acid would sting more...
...Writers & Writing HYPOCRITES AND TORTOISES BY PEARL K. BELL WHATEVER happened to those strident Lelchuks of the 1960s, the bearded radical professors in tailored blue jeans who turned every class into a revolutionary encounter group...
...Poverty, racialism, inequality, sexism, imperialism, and repression, the things that I expect you to consider and account for...
...For Neaera "the mystery of the turtles and their secret navigation is a magical reality, juice of life in a world gone dry...
...We're all right there in front of the entire audience of the universe, in a state of exposure...
...But the compulsions of a children's author die hard...
...He and Barbara have become "true citizens of the present," energetically ticking off the items in their bursting calendar of meetings and causes, demonstrations and conspiracies, love affairs and assignations...
...All that well-honed and self-conscious eloquence, however, is achieved at the expense of dramatic action, which makes for admirable commentary but a rather boring novel...
...Suddenly, from a skillfully controlled mood of despondency we are plunged into a hackneyed atmosphere of easy optimism, with the characters striding head up, eyes bright, toward the embracing sunset of a hopeful future...
...Although he speaks of "the inevitability of history," he is by no means above giving history a helpful shove in the service of his own pleasure or position...
...Thus he excludes "everything that makes up the real face of society...
...Bradbury's target thoroughly deserves his satiric virulence, yet The History Man is not, alas, the first-rate comedy it should be...
...But according to The History Man (Houghton Mifflin, 230 pp., $7.95), a comic novel by the English writer Malcolm Bradbury, academic radical chic is still brazenly swinging in the new universities of Great Britain...
...William suddenly finds himself not yielding his desiccated heart to despair: "I could imagine good times, why I don't know...
...Unknown to each other, William and Neaera visit the London Zoo obsessively to watch the huge sea turtles swim back and forth in their glass cage, "that little bed-sitter of an ocean...
...The History Man is sharply astute, cleverly sardonic and epigrammatic to a fault...
...Chic will go out as shtick...
...Prodding the future into everyone you can lay your hands on...
...There are no concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul...
...They are reluctantly drawn together by a powerful urge to kidnap the turtles and set them free in the sea, so that the creatures can reach their breeding ground across the Atlantic and fulfill their natural destiny...
...Be that as it may, we can console ourselves with the thought that the Howard Kirks, whether in England or America, can override everything except the inexorable change in the Zeitgeist...
...To their nervous surprise, the scheme comes off without a hitch...
...The trouble with an unearned happy ending, though, is not merely its unbelievability: it also, and unfairly diminishes our assent to what has come before...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 6
