In observance of this law of a dying species, I have hardly mentioned, much less reviewed, Updike in the past, and he has observed the same continence with regard to me. But, lately, as I turn the pages of The New Yorker, where his poems, short stories, and book reviews have been appearing for so many years, I note an occasional dig at me. Apparently, I do not sufficiently love the good, the nice America, is the burden of his épingles. In sere and yellow leaf, Updike is now in superpatriot mood and on the attack. For instance, apropos the movie star Lana Turner (whom, to his credit, he appreciates): “Fifty years ago we were still a nation of builders and dreamers, now whittlers and belittlers set the cultural tone.” O vile Whittlers! O unGodly Belittlers! Of whom, apparently, I am one.
Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer, I now find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we have the money, the credentials, and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that passes all understanding. Finally, according to the mainline American press, Updike has now got it all together, and no less an authority than The New Yorker’s George Steiner (so different from Europe’s one) assures us that Updike now stands alongside Hawthorne and Nabokov, when, surely, he means John P. Marquand and John O’Hara.
Prior to immersion in next year’s Pulitzer Prize novel, I read Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989), written in the writer’s fifty-seventh year. Self-consciousness is a good theme, if meant ironically. After all, save to self, we are, none of us, worth much fussing about, run-of-the-mill poor, bare forked animals—or was it radishes?—that we are. Anyway, I hoped that he would make some self-mocking play on his own self-consciousness as opposed to Socrates’ examined life. Hope quickly extinguished. There is no examination of the self, as opposed to an unremitting self-consciousness that tells us why he was—is—different—but not too much different—from others and what made him the way he is—always is, as he doesn’t much change in his own story, a small-town Philoctetes whose wound turns out to be an unpretty skin condition called psoriasis. “Yet what was my creativity, my relentless need to produce but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing overproduction?”
John Updike’s father was of Dutch-American stock; his mother German. He was born in 1932, in modest circumstances at Shillington, Pennsylvania. The mother was a would-be writer, constantly typing away and sending out stories that returned to her like so many boomerangs. The son would soon outdo the mother, his stories returning home in the pages of The New Yorker.
The Shillington that he describes is a sunny place, despite the Depression of the 1930s and some labor strikes; more than once, Updike edgily refers to the election by the nearby city of Reading of a socialist mayor. Happily, for his school of Biedermeier novels, the world outside himself seems never to have caught his proper interest until the dread 1960s, when “bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth . . . were selling this nation out.” But that was long after he was a “plain child, ungainly youth. Lacking brothers and sisters, [he] was shy and clumsy in the give and take . . . of human exchange.” Of contemporaries who did not care for school, “I could not understand how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign.” But then he is always true to his “docile good child nature.”
Yet under all this blandness and acceptance of authority in any form, there is a growing puzzlement. “Social position in America is not easy to be precise about,” he notes; then, warily, he tries to place his high-school teacher father: “My family sold asparagus and pansies for odd money, embarrassing me.” But unlike a Fitzgerald or an O’Hara (most Irish Catholic writers in America are born with perfect radar on how to make it all the way to the blue light at landing’s end—or pass out at the bar in the attempt), Updike seems to have missed whatever gentry there may have been in the neighborhood. All he knows is that his mother says that we are much “nicer” than a lot of other people, which is important if not very useful, as his father is a definite nonsuccess, and so Updike concludes that:
Life breeds punchers and counterpunchers, venturers like my father and ambushers like me: the venturer risks rebuff and defeat; the ambusher . . . risks fading away to nothing. . . . All those years in Shillington, I had waited to be admired, waited patiently . . . burrowing in New York magazines and English mystery novels for the secret passageway out, the path of avoidance and vindication. I hid a certain determined defiance. . . . I would “show” them, I would avenge all the slights and abasements visited upon my father—the miserly salary, the subtle tyranny of his overlords at the high school, the disrespect of his students, the laughter in the movie house at the name of Updike.
Not exactly Richard III. Rather the inner rebellion of a shy, ambitious, small creature—a rabbit?—preparing to abandon its nice safe burrow for a world elsewhere, for a place across the water in nearby sinful Manhattan.
Shillington was to remain central to Updike’s intense consciousness of self. In footnotes to his memoir, he solemnly quotes from his own work to show just how he has used the “real” life of his small town in fiction. Over and over again he writes of the Lutheran Grace Church, the elementary school, the post office, of youthful revels at Stephens’ Luncheonette. Not since Sinclair Lewis has a naturalistic writer been so merciless to his reader as Updike. Endlessly, he describes shops and their contents, newspaper advertisements, streets that go here, there and everywhere except into the—this—reader’s mind. Places and people seem to interest him only when reduced, as cooks say, to receipts not dishes. Certainly all the words he uses are there on the page, but what they stand for is not. Only he himself is recorded with careful attention, as he notes his aim of “impersonal egoism,” and “always with some natural hesitation and distaste” when it comes to memoir-writing; yet he soldiers on, and we learn that only after the family moved from Shillington does he masturbate—and so a lifelong adhesion to heterosexuality begins, at least in the mind. With jouissance, he comes into his kingdom, love in hand.
As a fellow New Yorker writer, S. J. Perelman, puts it in a letter to Ogden Nash in 1965, “J. Updike . . . read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I didn’t personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed pages. But Cheever brought me tidings that all dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike’s.” Of course, Perelman was a bit of a grouch; and who could have foretold that in three years’ time this onanistic “youth” would write Couples, a celebration of marriage and its saucy twin, adultery, the only important subjects of middlebrow fiction, saving God Himself and His America? It should be noted that Christianity seems always to have been a fact for Updike, starting with the Grace Lutheran and other churches of Shillington; later, as an outward and visible sign of niceness and of belongingness, he remains a churchgoer when he moves up the social scale to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he achieves that dream of perfect normality which is not only American and Christian but—when in the company of other upwardly mobile couples—ever so slightly bohemian.
Although Updike seems never to have had any major psychic or physical wound, he has endured all sorts of minor afflictions. In the chapter “At war with my skin,” he tells us in great detail of the skin condition that sun and later medicine would clear up; for a long time, however, he was martyr to it as well as a slave to his mirror, all the while fretting about what “normal” people would make of him. As it proved, they don’t seem to have paid much attention to an affliction that, finally, “had to do with self love, with finding myself acceptable . . . the price high but not impossibly so; I must pay for being me.” The price for preserving me certainly proved to be well worth it when, in 1955, he was rejected for military conscription, even though the empire was still bogged down in Korea and our forces were increased that year from 800,000 to three million—less Updike, who, although “it pains me to write these pages,” confesses that he was “far from keen to devote two years to the nati
onal defense.” He was later to experience considerable anguish when, almost alone among serious writers, he would support the Vietnam War on the ground that who am I “to second-guess a president?” One suspects that he envies the clear-skinned lads who so reluctantly fought for the land he so deeply loves.
“I had a stammer that came and went.” But he is ever game: “As with my psoriasis, the affliction is perhaps not entirely unfortunate.” Better than to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth is to be born at the heart of a gray cloud with a silver lining. The stammer does “make me think twice about going onstage and appearing in classrooms and at conferences,” but “Being obliging by nature and anxious for approval, I would never say no if I weren’t afraid of stuttering. Also, as I judge from my own reactions, people who talk too easily and comfortably . . . arouse distrust in some atavistic, pre-speech part of ourselves; we turn off.” Take that, Chrysostom Chatterbox! Characteristically, he is prompt to place a soothing Band-Aid on his own wound: he quotes Carlyle, who observes of Henry James: “a stammering man is never a worthless man.” Whatever that means. (Also, pace Carlyle, the Master did not stammer; he filibustered elaborately, cunningly, with pauses so carefully calculated that if one dared try to fill one, he would launch a boa-constrictor of a sentence at the poor mesmerized, oh, dear, rabbit! of an auditor.) Finally, Updike confesses to unease with certain groups that your average distinguished author must address. He is afraid of New York audiences especially: “They are too smart and left wing for me. . . .” This seems to mean politically minded Jews, so unlike the nice Southern college audiences with whom he is most at home.
Dental problems occupy many fascinating pages. But then I am a sucker for illness and debilities and even the most homely of exurban memento mori. Finally, relatively late in life, he develops asthma! This splendid coda (to date) of the Updike physical apparatus is something of a master stroke, and, as I once coughed along with Hans Castorp and his circle, I now find myself wheezing along with Updike; but then I, too, am mildly asthmatic.
The psychic Updike is dealt with warily. The seemingly effortless transition from the Shillington world to Harvard and then to the New Yorker staff is handled with Beylesque brevity. He notes, but does not demonstrate, the influence on him of such Christian conservative writers as G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis and Jacques Maritain, while the names Karl Barth and Kierkegaard are often treated as one word, Barthegaard. He tells us that, as a novelist, “my models were the styles of Proust and Henry Green—dialogue and meditation as I read them (one in translation).” Which one? We shall never know. But for those of us who reveled in the French translations of Green, I can see how attractive those long irregular subjunctive-laden “tender explorations” must have been for Updike, too. Although every other American novelist of the past half-century seems to regard Proust as his “model,” one finds no trace of Proust in Updike’s long lists of consumer goods on sale in shops as well as of human characteristics that start with external features, followed by internal “meditations” on the true character of the Character.
Despite all of Updike’s book-reviewing, one gets the sense that books have not meant much to him, young or old; but then he was originally attracted to the graphic arts (he attended the Ruskin School at Oxford), and the minor technical mysteries of lettering nibs and scratchboard. . . . “And my subsequent career carries coarse traces of its un-ideal origins in popular, mechanically propagated culture.” This is endearing; also, interesting—“I was a cultural bumpkin in love not with writing, but with print.” And, like everyone else of the time, with the movies, as he will demonstrate in his latest novel.
Easily, it would appear, he became an all-round writer for The New Yorker “of the William Shawn era (1951–87) . . . a club of sorts, from within which the large rest of literary America . . . could be politely disdained. . . . While I can now almost glimpse something a bit too trusting in the serene sense of artistic well-being, of virtual invulnerability, that being published in The New Yorker gave me for over thirty years. . . .” During much of this time, he seemed unaware that the interesting, indeed major, writers of the period did not belong to his club, either because they were too disturbing for the mild Shawn or because they could not endure the radical editing and rewriting that the quintessential middlebrow magazine imposed on its writers. “I shook with anger,” Perelman wrote in 1957, “at their august editorial decisions, their fussy little changes and pipsqueak variations on my copy.” Nabokov, published at Edmund Wilson’s insistence, needed all of Wilson’s help in fighting off editorial attempts to make his prose conform to the proto–Ralph Lauren house impersonation of those who fit, socially, in the roomy top-drawer-but-one. Unlike that original writer, Nabokov, Updike, ever “the good child,” throve under strict supervision and thought himself on Parnassus, a harmless, even beguiling misunderstanding so long as the real world never confronted him, which, of course, it did.
* * *
The Vietnam war jolted Updike into the nearest he has yet come to self-examination as opposed to self-consciousness. “I was a liberal,” he notes at some point. That is, he didn’t like Nixon when he was at Harvard, and he voted for Kennedy. But now he strikes the Pecksniffian note as he invokes class distinctions. Of liberals at Harvard, “they, Unitarian or Episcopalian or Jewish, support Roosevelt and Truman and Stevenson out of enlightenment, de haut en bas, whereas in my heart of hearts, I however, veneered with an education and button-down shirts, was de bas. They, secure in the upper-middle class, were Democrats out of human sympathy and humanitarian largesse, because this was the party that helped the poor. Our family had simply been poor, and voted Democrat out of crude self-interest.” He is now moving into McCarthy, Wallace, Buchanan country. Resentment, for Updike a slow-blooming plant, is starting to put forth lurid flowers, suitable for funeral wreaths to be laid upon his carefully acquired affluent niceness as well as upon the sort of company that it had earned him, which, almost to a man, stood against the war that he accepts and even, for a time, favors. Suddenly he starts scrabbling in search of peasant roots to show that he is really dans le vrai—unlike those supercilious silver-spoon-choked snobs who dare “second-guess” presidents.
“Was I conservative? I hadn’t thought so, but I did come from what I could begin to see” (after a third of a century?) “was a conservative part of the country. . . . The Germans of Berks County didn’t move on, like the typical Scots-Irish frontier-seeking Americans. They stayed put, farming the same valleys and being buried in the same graveyards. . . .” Presumably, this stay-put mindset ought to have made him isolationist and antiwar when it came to military adventures in far-off places where other Americans, whom he knew little of, fought Asians, whom he knew nothing of. But, startlingly, he chooses to interpret the passivity of his ancestral tribes as the reason for his own unquestioning acceptance of authority: if the president wants you to go fight the Viet Cong in order to contain the Viet Cong’s mortal enemy, China, you must not question, much less second-guess him. You will go fight when and where he tells you to, unless you are lucky enough to be kept safe at home by psoriasis. For the first time, the apolitical, ahistorical Updike was faced with what pop writers call an Identity Crisis.
“By my mid-thirties, through diligence and daring” (if one did not know better, one might think the second adjective ironic), “I had arrived at a lifestyle we might call genteel bohemian—nice big house (broad floorboards, big fireplaces). . . . We smoked pot, wore dashikis and love beads, and frugged ourselves into a lather while the Beatles and Janis Joplin sang away on the hi-fi set. I was happy enough to lick the sugar of the counterculture; it was the pill of antiwar, anti-administration, anti-‘imperialist’ protest that I found oddly bitter.” He notes that the frugging technocrats et al. of his acquaintance simply sloughed off the war as an “administration blunder.” But writers, artists, even the very voices to whose sound Updike frugged, began very early to object to the war, while “I whose stock in trade as an American aut
hor included an intuition into the mass consciousness and an identification with our national fortunes—thought it sad that our patriotic myth of invincible virtue was crashing, and shocking that so many Americans were gleeful at the crash.” This is worthy of Nixon at his unctuous best; yet to give that canny old villain his due, Nixon wouldn’t have believed a word he was saying. Incidentally, who was “gleeful” at so much mindless carnage? And what honest citizen would not be grateful that a “myth” of any kind, no matter how “patriotic,” be dispelled?
When intellectuals, for want of any other word, were asked to contribute their views to a book called Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, Updike admitted that he was “uncomfortable” about our military adventure, but wondered “how much of the discomfort has to do with its high cost, in lives and money, and how much with its moral legitimacy.” This is wondrously callous. Of course, television had not yet shown us too many lives, much less money, being lost on prime time, but Updike weighs them as nothing in the balance when compared to the moral decision made by our elected leaders, who must know best—otherwise they would not be our elected leaders. Loyal to authority, he favors intervention “if it does some good,” because “the crying need is for genuine elections whereby the South Vietnamese can express their will. If their will is for Communism, we should pick up our chips and leave.” But the American government had stopped the Vietnamese from holding such elections a decade earlier, because, as President Eisenhower noted in his memoirs, North and South Vietnam would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh and “we could not allow that.” Updike’s ignorance—innocence, to be kind—is not very reassuring, even when he echoes Auden on how “it is foolish to canvass writers upon political issues.” Our views, as he says, “have no more authority than those of any reasonably well-educated citizen.” Certainly, the views of a writer who knew nothing of the political situation in Vietnam weren’t worth very much, but, as an American writer identified with our national fortunes, Updike does acknowledge that writers are supposed to be attuned to the human as well as to the moral aspects of engaging in war, particularly one so far from our shores, so remote from our interests. As Updike’s wife at the time told him, “It’s their place.” But by then it was too late. Mild Rabbit had metamorphosed into March Hare.