Slow Beauty and No Talk

MARK HELPRIN LOOKS well-scrubbed. His face, in a vaguely romantic photograph on the back of the dust jacket, is clean-cut and clean-shaven; the face of a liberal, New York-bred college graduate. It comes as no surprise is that he went to Harvard. What is more of a surprise is that he once served in the British merchant navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force. In the title story, "A Dove of the East," and in others scattered throughout the book, Helprin re-creates the people and places of his travels. The settings of these stories, unlike present-day America, are places where the past is intricately woven into the present--Helprin's range includes France, Russia, Israel, Italy, and Jamaica--and they provide both a framework and a source of inspiration for his overriding aim: to uncover the link between, the modern short story and the oral tale of long ago. This book, his first collection of short stories, is his attempt to give to the written form of the story--a finite, completed form, not open to change--the feeling of a story which has been expanded and embroidered by generations of retelling.

Present-day America does appear in a few of his stories, but even here Helprin usually blunts the edge of reality by recounting events through the cloud of memory. His continual shifting of location and characters is baffling at first; how can he have something important to say about the life and customs of each place, about the young Hebrew scholar and the aging Catholic priest, the Canadian orphan with musical aspirations and the illiterate Italian aristocrat? Slowly, it becomes apparent that Helprin is experimenting with the application of his theme--the mixture of past and present--to different situations.

The extraordinarily diverse people of his stories are linked by a common conflict between the desire for independence and the need for the security of roots and tradition, family and land; it is essentially the conflict between the part of human nature that revels in the freedom of modern society and the part that longs for the bygone world where everything was certain and there were no frightening decisions to be made. An orphaned girl finds that to achieve her individual goals in today's America she must cease to cling to memories of her father and their harrowing experience of hiding in wartime Holland. A young couple begins a new and isolated life in Nevada, believing that "the only marriages that work [are] those where you say the hell with it, and then move out to Nevada or Alaska, or Brazil," only to discover that they are terrified by their separation from the values of society.

However, Helprin's vehicle for adding the present to the past--and imposing the past on the present--is primarily his language, style, and structure. He is often more concerned with the form of his stories than with the particular situation and emotions involved, and the result is that some of his stories lack any hold on solid experience. It is not surprising that his most successful stories are those in which he manages to blend a mastery of technique with a thorough knowledge of his subject--as he does in the third story, "Ruin," where he imparts an understanding of human dependence on land and nature in Jamaica with jarring intensity.

Helprin uses a poetic style to capture the tone of the narrative ballad or the epic poem. This gives his plots and characters a remote quality: they are seen through a haze of words. The richness of his language can be a source of delight, and in some of his stories, like "A Jew of Persia," it is effective in creating an atmosphere:

And so they continued to live out their lives in Ha Tikva Quarter, a place where all the functions of human existence combined ungraciously and the people were struck like bells in no chorus, camel bells upset and sad but active in contrast to the still green palms, a tree with a lisp in the wind and infinite patience, variegated sun shadows, shelterer of doves, the green rafters of Tel Aviv.

ELSEWHERE, HIS concern with words leads him to neglect other aspects of his story, and the whole tends to dissipate into airy lyricism. "The Legitimacy of Medium Beauty" is simply one long and structureless description, where character development is reduced to a series of pretty but uninformative images:

She was Mary from Atlanta, who thought in wide circles about porches and the past and small towns in summer--facts and memories of detail which transfixed her at the wheel of her open car and made her arms shake and her back cold, although these things were not remarkable, and neither was her life. Neither was her life, a life of love although she did not know for what, unless it was for small pictures which occurred to her or which she saw in quiet moments alone staring at the whiteness of the castled city or across the Bay to reddened mountains and leonine hills with yellowed brush tumbling from their sides.

Here, and in other stories, the remoteness and haze are carried to an extreme. The characters become flat, or stylized to the point of implausibility. In "Lightning North of Paris," Helprin is unable to bring to life the garret affair between two Americans in Paris, a composer and a ballet dancer; wrapped up in his descriptions of the composer's wild moments when he writes "music which if played for pigeons would have made them rise in intolerance and bend in a sheet of white and gray across the plane of Paris sky," Helprin is happily oblivious of the fact that he has added nothing new to what earlier and better writers have already said about the theme of American artists in Paris.

Helprin also has problems with dialogue, and manages in most of his stories to keep it to a minimum. Fourteen out of the twenty stories are very short--four or five pages in length--and some suffer from a long, descriptive introduction; expectations are created which are left unsatisfied by the brief action at the end. One of the strangest stories in the collection, "Katrina, Katrin'," begins with a valiant struggle to reproduce the everyday speech of office workers on a New York subway platform, then abruptly shifts to a long, narrative story-within-a-story, a form with which Helprin is more comfortable. Yet, Helprin is also experimenting with pure narrative as a form: it presents the opportunity to recount a series of events chronologically, in the tradition of the storyteller, adding a dimension of distance and wonder to the small occurrences of a routine and mechanized world. In some of these stories he succeeds admirably, notably in "Willis Avenue," the memory of an unfulfilled love in a typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx. Unfortunately for Helprin, however, dialogue provides one of the best means of allowing characters to take their own definite shapes, and he is forced to make up for the lack by directly describing the thoughts and feelings of the people he creates. The result is that it is the narrator's presence, rather than that of the characters, which is heavily felt.

HELPRIN HAS a striking ability to make the remote and unusual seem familiar and understandable, and, on the whole, his stories are most effective when he centers them around places and people which are geographically or simply ideologically distant. By means of the timeless themes of the human need for roots, for the security of family and culture, for the love of the land, he makes them seem a conceivable part of modern experience.

Perhaps the most moving story--and the most delightful--is the first one, "A Jew of Persia," where the folktale situation of a woodsman's encounter with the Devil is firmly set into twentieth-century Israel. When the situation is reversed and he is writing about everyday America, Helprin often feels compelled to use style and language to give his story an exotic strain. Helprin is not unique in his desire to blend the old and the new--he is following such writers as John Fowles and Isaac Bashevis Singer--but he has managed, through the juxtaposition of form and content, to throw some new light on the difficulties and rewards of integrating the tradition and slow beauty of the past into the hectic pace of the present.