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found a clean, happy baby waving its hands and feet he exclaimed:
'You must be Moses, you must be King of the Jews.' "
If
the foreground of 0
h W hat a Paradise
consis ts of head–
lines, then the background (what lies behind the polluted pond) is
not a series of characters or events but the sound of a voice. This
speaker is notable for elegant language, precise imagery, relaxed
pace, but most striking in el usiveness: just who, we wonder again
and again, is speaking or thinking? Lemuel Sears, the aging and
nostalgic protagonist, merges with the anonymous narrative "I"
in unobtrusive ways. We no sooner meet Sears, for example, than
we are treated to a little catalogue of vanished things:
He was old enough to remember when the horizons of his
country were dominated by the beautiful and lachrymose
wine-glass elm tree and when most of the bathtubs one stepped
into had lions' claws. He was old enough to remember the
promise of dirigible travel, and he would never forget march–
ing into one of the capital cities of the Holy Roman Empire ...
The implication is that the narrator too recalls and misses these
details. Later, Sears goes skating on the not yet polluted Beasley's
Pond. This time the accompanying memories are presented as if
they arise specifically in Sears's mind. He thinks of Brueghel
skating scenes, then of an aural association: "The voices [of the
skaters] ... had an extraordinary lightness that reminded him of
voices from a Mediterranean beach before, through the savagery
of pollution, that coast was lost to us." The unvoiced connection
between the polluted Mediterranean and the polluted pond is
typical of the very unheadlinelike indirection of the background
voice(s) throughout.
Sometimes the constant invocation of history and memory,
the public and personal past, becomes annoyingly predictable
and digressive, as in the excursus on fried food or the everlasting
comparison of anyone woman to all the others ("she was the
kind of woman who always ... "). Still, the point is made:
it is through memory that pain and pleasure are most keenly
felt and truly expressed. Sears, and certainly the narrator,
is less a person of action than an assemblage of recollections.
Thus one of the offshoots of the pollution motif in 0
h What
a Paradise
is conservation-not only of a pond but of imagin-
