before the curtain rises
by Douglas Messerli
John Updike Gertrude and Claudius (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2000)
Regarding
his most recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, however, I can only
assert—in contrast to the several appreciative reviews that have proceeded this
one—that it is little more than a work of restrained mediocrity.
The problems
are many, not the least of which is the fact that Updike has chosen to write in
the shadow of a great work of art that we all know and love, only to leave off
at precisely the moment the other begins. That is, he has chosen to narrate the
events of Shakespeare's play up until the very moment Hamlet gets underway.
Certainly, the story of Gerutha (later Geruthe
and finally Gertrude) and Feng's (later Fegon and ultimately Claudius)
adulterous relationship fits nicely into an oeuvre obsessed with
adultery. And in the hands of a greater artist—Tom Stoppard has shown us in Rosencrantz
and Gildenstern what can be done with Shakespeare and his sources—this
might have been an entertaining fiction. But in Updike's hands there is no
sustaining story. Gerutha is forced by her father Rorik to marry Horwendil
(King Hamlet); she finds him unsubtle and lacking in the finer sensibilities of
bedroom behavior, and from childhood has been attracted to his brother, Feng.
When Feng returns from his multifarious travels—undertaken primarily to remain
away from his brother and Gerutha, to whom he too has been highly attracted—they
gradually develop a relationship that quickly shifts from a play of wits to a
drama of secretive and romantic love. When the King discovers their treachery,
Feng (with the help of the Lord Chamberlin, Corambus [spelled throughout the
novel also as Corambis, later Polonius]) poisons the King and takes over the
throne, marrying his lover. Enter Hamlet.
Of course,
great works of art have been written with much less of a story to go on. But
Updike's work—at least in this novel—is highly dependent upon plot, and with so
little to work with he fills the book with what I am sure he believes are deep
insights into his characters: Gertrude is an independent woman who has no other
choice in her society but to be pliant and supple; King Hamlet is a man of good
deeds, a good King, a good Husband, but has no sensitivity whatsoever, and hence,
is referred to by Gertrude and Claudius as "The Hammer"; Claudius is
a true romantic and is capable of great subtlety in love, but also is deceitful
and capable of murder. In repeating these qualities again and again throughout
this short work, however, Updike becomes less than subtle himself and hammers
his characters' qualities into the poor reader's perceivèd thick head. Gertrude
is described over and over as "surrendering" (even as late as page
200 in the 210-page work); King Hamlet is The Hammer throughout, Claudius a
clever but too subtle man.
One might
overlook some of these simplistic characterizations had Updike filled his yarn
with some true adventure, but it is almost as if the author could not decide
what to fill it with. Time and again in the book, he devotes paragraphs
and entire passages to various arcane subjects: a short treatise on falconry, a
description of the various toiletries available to a Scandinavian queen of the
day, a list of the foods they eat, a short historical compendium of the Byzantine
empire, a brief explanation of the Nordic råd and thing. Many
readers enjoy historical fictions precisely because of what they can glean from
such information. In the hands of a Lagerlöf, of an Undset or a Yourcenar these
kinds of facts are thoroughly embedded in the stories themselves; here Updike
features it as if proving to the reader that he has done his research or used
his imagination; or perhaps again he feels that few readers could possibly have
knowledge of such things. One can almost see the scraps of loose jottings
spread across his writing desk as he determined what to include and what not.
That said,
there are a few delightful moments in the plot, as when Gertrude (having
obtained from Poloinus the use of his castle for her rendezvous) requires the
middle-aged Claudius to climb through the tower window, which she must help to
pull him through. The couple later have a hot groping session—with their heavy
clothes on. Yet, Updike doubting, so it appears, that the reader may not recall
the event, repeats it later, as Claudius—fresh from emptying his vial of poison
into the ear of the King—climbs for his escape, through a window (reminding him
of the earlier one) into the castle latrine. Get it?
The paucity of
plot might be less an issue if Updike's style—that for which he is most often
touted—were not so embarrassing. He begins the novel in a kind of fake
Shakespearean language "bespoken" with "bewitchments,
be-botherments, and bewildernesses" and some inverted syntax that,
fortunately, he quickly drops. But what replaces it is, at times, even more
embarrassing. After a discussion between Gertrude and Polonius, the author
waxes poetic:
O the
days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—
days of
hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast,
days of
steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of
of hay
and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth and of hearth-smoke
blown
down from the chimney pots, misty days...days of luxurious tall clouds...
days when
the shoreline of Skåne lay vivid as a purple hem upon the Sund's
rippling
breadth...[this continues for another page]
One can almost see, as in a grade B film of 1940s, a
montage of calendar pages being ripped away one by one. How one longs for a
simple, elegant, "Time passes."
Indeed, there
is a kind of hack cinematic quality in many of Updike's images and words
throughout the book. Each character is described at some point as if the camera
were embracing their faces in a closeup, perspiration forming on their upper
lips ("A ridge of dew appeared on Geruthe's upper lip, which bore
transparent down he had never noticed before.") But the language of much
of Updike's work is that of the soft porno novel. Penises are referred to as
"horns," "members" or—when the action gets truly
racy—"spouting cocks" ("I should beat you. I should pound the
pale slime of that spouting cock from your gut.") Just before this
ridiculous statement Updike devotes a whole page to again emphasizing
Gertrude's oft cited submission to men, to a description that summarizes the
quality of much of the book:
Whereas
Fengon was content to loiter in a twinned concupiscence, telling Geruthe
over and
over, with his tongue and eyes and rethickened horn, all the truth
about
herself that she could hold. He uncovered in her not just the warrior but
the
slave. Had he bid her lie down in pigshit she would have squeezed her
buttocks
together in the clench and rejoiced to be thus befouled. At night, reliving
the
afternoon's embraces, she would lick her pillow in hunger to be with her
lover
again—her redeemer from lawful life's deadening emptiness, her own self
turned
inside out and given a man's bearish, boyish form. Her father's court
held no
more eager slut than she.
Had Hamlet read this version of his mother's secret
life, instead of returning to Elsinore, he might have stayed in Germany.
Los Angeles,
2000
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (January 2009).
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