It was a commonplace even
back a few decades ago to insist that American writers,
at their best, were beautiful and damned, to borrow a title
from one of the most beautiful and damned of all. They either
drank themselves to death too soon, or wrote themselves
out too rapidly, became self-made cartoons like Hemingway
or Life magazine pundits like Steinbeck, retreated
into silence like Salinger or embarrassed us with noise
like Mailer. The great American novels were one-offs—The
Red Badge of Courage, The Great Gatsby—preceding
either a sad long decline, or else a final stellar explosion.
This was so much part of the
myth of American writing that it had, in a reverse twist,
almost become a kind of deferred virtue of American
writing. We might not have the longest arcs but we lit the
brightest lights; the intensity of the radiance rose from
the brevity of the explosion. So quick bright things come
to confusion. (The few apparent exceptions to the rule of
early bloom and sudden destruction, or else long late wither,
were either writers excused as monastic recluses in the
Deep South or the deeps of England—monks, like Henry
James and William Faulkner—or else, as with William
Dean Howells or Edith Wharton, those who kept a note of
self-announced minority about themselves, even when, as
with Howells and Wharton, there was nothing really minor
in them at all.)
What then are we to do about John
Updike? A bright light and a very long arc, youthful blossoming—the
cover of Time at thirty-six—followed by a rich
middle-aged variety topped by a late harvest of what the
reviewers call “arresting departures.” So quick
bright things become slower, older, ever brighter things.
Of all modern American writers, Updike comes closest to
meeting Virginia Woolf's demand that a writer’s only
job is to get himself, or herself, expressed without impediments.
Short stories and essays, book reviews and poetry, art criticism
and even the occasional bit of commentary and reporting,
all this wrapped like ivy around the red brick wall of those—what
is it? Twenty-eight(!) novels. No part of the possibilities
of writing seems to have eluded him. Waiting nervously in
a dentist’s office one bumps one’s shins against
Updike on dinosaurs in National Geographic; apprehensively
turning the pages of the New York Review of Books
in fear of being beaten up by a brutish British critic,
one finds five perfect columns on Renoir or Chuck Close—and
always the same shining serene sentences, the same puckish
note of bemused praise, which he learned from E. B. White
and the old New Yorker, and never disposed of (let's
come back to that), the spirit of purposeful, slightly schoolboyish
intensity: the feeling that this subject, whatever it may
be today, is to be taken seriously, not slightingly, much
less sneeringly, but still lightly, for reader’s
pleasure, not instructional pain. The willingness to write,
to say “Yes” not merely to editors but to the
writer's encompassing job of registering experience of all
kinds, has something so inspiring in it to younger writers
that it can seem like an achievement in itself. His rival
and companion over the past fifty years, Philip Roth—and
the “intertextual” comparison of those two grizzled
vets, novel by novel and sex act by sex act, will make for
several good, fat unreadable Ph.D. theses in the near future—has
accomplished something similar, for sheer dint and grit.
But Roth has over the decades withdrawn from all the littler
labors of writing to become one more of those diligent American
monks, a man at his hassock in his studio in Connecticut,
a novelist tout court and a novelist alone, where
Updike continues to amaze us as a man of letters, a pitchman
for writing, up on the balls of his feet wherever readers
may be found.
This has been so much the case that, I suspect, it is a
source of exasperation to Updike; certainly one senses in
his response to worshipful younger writers like Nicholson
Baker in Baker’s wonderful fan letter, U and I,
a note of frustrated bewilderment: stop admiring the inscriptions
and read the damn books. For—and this is what makes
Updike unique—the micro-gift for prose is matched
by a macro-gift for scale, with getting it all in. Updike
wrote once that he admired Kerouac, and though this seems
absurd—the perfect sentence-maker against the non-sentence
non-writer—it is true, surely, in their twin desires
to pay attention to American reality as it really is. The
wires of poet and reporter cross in Updike as they do not
even in his God, Nabokov: the language-loving, witty, inventive
meta-fictioneer who delights us postmodernly in The Coup
or Gertrude and Claudius is the same writer as the
attentive, news-minding chronicler who gives us Terrorist
and the Rabbit novels.
Updike remains both conjurer and chronicler, each gift
serving the other. Updike began his pro writing career back
in the fifties reporting for the “The Talk Of The
Town” the jump-off section of short pieces that still
begins the New Yorker, and there is something of
the willing journalist in him still. His readiness, not
to mention ability, to write a novel like Terrorist
reminds us always of the roots of the novel in news, and
of Updike’s seismographic ear for the tremors of his
time—just as Skeeter, the black militant in Rabbit
Redux sprang credibly, as they say, right out of the
headlines of his dark Nixonian era into Updike’s pages.
Each of his early novels, and many of the later ones, have
been, as Updike has allowed, shaped to a presidential period—Truman's
in The Centaur, Eisenhower's in Rabbit, Run,
Kennedy's in Couples, to which one could add the
discomforts and anxieties of the Carter era in Rabbit
Is Rich and the bewilderments of Reagan in Rabbit
at Rest (not to mention the more obvious Memories
of the Ford Administration). The same will to get it
down as it was happening that made Howells move to New York
to write about unions and violence and brought Trollope
out of the cathedral close to write about Disraeli and parliaments
and politicians inspires Updike too.
But if the persistent journalist in him is one of the things
that has kept his novels alive, it is the satirist and humorist
in him that have kept his sentences aloft. Despite the “lyrical”
surface of his prose, he is a realist, never even marginally
a romantic. He is genuinely unfazed by, unseduced by, all
of the myths of American romanticism—gorgeous Daisys
and vast sinister Western landscapes are equally absent
from his books. His girls and women are real with scratchy
pubic hair and vaginas (albeit shaped like ballet slippers)
and his American landscape of car dealerships and fast-food
retreats, has no place for doomed, exciting, existential
gunmen. Salinger and Fitzgerald anticipated Updike’s
kind of tenderness, the ability to summon a world in a phrase,
the bouncing love of the surface of existence—yet
Updike has written tartly of Salinger’s self-enclosure,
his need to make a world and a family more beautiful than
can be hoped for in the real world; and I sense in his criticism
of Fitzgerald, too, once more an unconvinced disdain for
all those improbably beautiful girls whom, he remarks sensibly,
the writer loves too much to give the reader any space to
love them for himself. He is, for all those perfect shining
sentences, a realist; the sentences sing, but they don't
ennoble.
And though it has been too long since his parodies and
casuals have graced the pages of the New Yorker,
still, the urge to amuse (and mock) remains strong in him.
Updike the humorist is probably the least known, or recognizable,
Updike of them all, but something of the White-cum-Thurber
sound of the old “Talk”—that bemused,
high-spirited, ironically smiling but resolutely well-wishing,
not merely un- but anti-malicious comic tone—still
lingers in his work. There is at least the material of comedy
implicit in almost every sentence he writes: the dancing
recognition of the likeness of the unlike, the will to treat
the organic mechanically—his sexual congresses are
blissful but funny, never “transcendent,” because
they are so entirely acts of organic machinery, wise
souls made into copulating machines. The simple common sense
which regularly inflects his judgments of big writers and
dubious ideas has its origins in a humorous tradition too;
in his criticism he catches the notes of Wolcott Gibbs and
Brendan Gill as much as of Edmund Wilson.
And he is a moralist, too, of a surprisingly old-fashioned
kind. Throughout all that varied work, one theme has risen
and been repeated over and over. Updike’s great subject
is the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with
the materials produced by mass culture. His subject is how
the death of a credible religious belief has been offset
by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and
family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort
is blessed—and very nearly successful, almost close
enough to grace to count—and yet in the long run doomed,
since the fact and shadow of death hangs over it all. Unlike
his European contemporaries, who see the same space and
the attempted filling as mere aridity and deprivation, Updike
is close enough to, and fond enough of, the source of postwar
material abundance to love it fully, and for itself. (And
he knew enough of the decade of deprivation that preceded
the big blossoming never to be jaundiced about plenty.)
He views the material culture of American life with a benign
appreciative ironic eye—like Wayne Thiebaud viewing
his cakes. But he has no illusions about it either, for
its ability to cover the failure or wish away mortality.
His recent novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, which
this reader suspects will emerge as his Golden Bowl
or Our Mutual Friend, the late masterpiece overlooked
or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by
another generation, makes this almost schematically apparent:
The death of American religion is matched by the rise of
the American movies. The longing for the transcendent and
numinous, wherever it appears —in cult camps in Oregon
or in a computer lab in Cambridge—is to be respected,
caressed, but not to be deceived about.
It is in the longing for the numinous, and the awareness
that it can only be remade in our time from the normal,
that, I suspect, his wonderful writing on art, placed in
two fine volumes already and still being written, is far
from a workingman's diversion. Updike recognizes in the
struggle of the modern artist to make art at all the same
spiritual struggle that fills his characters’ lives,
carried on in the thinner air of avant-garde experiment
and with consequences that are blessedly semipermanent,
very nearly death-defying feats. In the attempts of modern
artists to wrest meaning from the flotsam and detritus of
the world—in Cubist collage or Schwitter’s Merz,
or even in the less referential attempts of a Cézanne to
register the apple as the apple appears to him, not in smooth
certitudes of chiaroscuro, but in stabbing, apprehensive
touches of direct color—Updike sees a trace, perhaps
even a chart, of the common search to find religious meaning
in experience previously deemed marginal or merely material.
As much as Rabbit fleeing Reading, Cézanne or Picasso flees
the regularities of perspective and illusion in search of
something larger. In his essay (collected with the unfortunately
too-jocose title of “What MoMa Done Tole Me”)
on his early experience of the then still spectator-sized
Museum of Modern Art, he makes this likeness explicit:
|
A
religion reassembled from the fragments of our daily
life, in an atmosphere of gaiety and diligence: this
was what I found in the Museum of Modern Art, where
others might have found completely different—darker
and wilder—things. Gaiety, diligence, and freedom,
a freedom from old constraints of perspective and
subject matter, a freedom to embrace and memorialize
the world anew, a fearless freedom drenched in light:
this was what I took away, each time, from my visits
of an hour or so, usually in the afternoons, my day’s
journalism done, before heading south to my wife and
apartment and daughter on West Thirteenth Street.
I took away, in sufficient-sized packets, courage
to be an artist. . . |
In this way, his writing on art, far from being a minor
chapel in the church of Updike, actually occupies, I suspect,
a central place. More, I suspect, than among the countless
writers he has sung and (mildly but unmistakably) chided,
it is among the painters whom he has praised that he finds
a pursuit that chimes with his own deepest ambitions for
his art: to save something shining from the great garbage
disposal of time. Certainly, a note of almost religious
happiness rises from his art writing. However much it may
be frowned on by the pros for being insufficiently “serious”
or “critical,” i.e., contextual or historical,
it has always seemed to this ex-pro truthful in its unashamed
enthusiasms, the desire to match the artist evocation for
evocation, representational trick for trick. (In the decade
when I wrote about art for the New Yorker, supplying
context and history up the reader’s wazoo and beyond,
Updike would emerge a couple of weeks later in the New
York Review of Books with a few diffident and amateurish-seeming
pages which always seemed, frustratingly, closer to the
true mark, more infused with the artist’s own ambitions
and resonating with the real feel of the thing.)
With all the other, dutiful things said, it is this note
of happiness, there in unalloyed form in his art
writing, that rings throughout Updike’s prose, and
that draws us to it, makes us happy when we read it. It
is not a fatuous happiness, or a happiness made unaware
of death—it is his preoccupation with death and dying
that is most steady in his work, if anything is—but
neither does it cede too much to mere mortality. One has
a sense of someone who—as much as, though with more
wit than, Andy Warhol—has spent a good deal of his
life liking things. Women’s clothes, their
hair, American voices, the hybridization of American accents,
the way girls smell in football season; the way that the
hyper-cold of the airline baggage compartment can be felt
like a secret in the bag as you unpack—all of these
images and moments, recalled at random from his work, are
not just reported but quietly rhapsodized, registered with
love.
Since this happiness is, in a certain sense, banished
by some of what I take to be his tougher-minded religious
beliefs, which are hard and Protestant, not to say Pennsylvanian,
I am inclined to believe that the act of writing, like the
act of art-making, is such a source of quiet glee to him
that it holds off death for a while at arm’s length.
And I wonder, too, if he does not still find in the act
of sentence-making—not “construction,”
or “plotting,” but getting one sentence down
right about one specific thing—something of the serenity
that illustrators still find in the act of confronting
a sketch pad with a pencil. Surely some touch of his original
ambition to be a cartoonist or illustrator lingers still
for him in at least the act of writing. Certainly in the
few times that we have shared a stage or a table—most
often with the avid, nerve-rattled, high-voiced junior introducing
the elegant silver-haired senior partner—I have been
impressed by this slightly monarchical inwardness, a cordial
but still remote, dancing-eyed detachment, as though at
any moment he might disappear into the corner, cross-eyed,
to register on paper, as sketch or note, some small improbability
unnoted by everyone else in the room. (And, as I hope that
sentence shows, the mere thought of this proximity is enough
to set off pastiche, if not parody, in the junior writer’s
sentences.)
Having said all that, one
thing I am sure of is that, while his triumphs have been
mostly in prose, his emotional proximity to painters and
poets has been one of the things that has kept his prose
the thing it is. Updike's affinity for painting and poetry—the
still felt desire to have been a painter or poet—is
perhaps the secret fuel that keeps the prose shining and
still in motion. One would want, therefore, in the end to
triangulate him, as he once did T. S. Eliot, above all,
among the poets, some near and some far: with Richard Wilbur,
for a stubborn graceful adherence to craft and finish in
a time of improvisation and amnesia; with Wallace Stevens,
for the intimation of the numinous in the ordinary Sunday
mornings of the mid-Atlantic states; and with Shakespeare
himself for the ability to get himself expressed fully,
unimpeded, and for the desire, even in the face of time,
to set down, for readers still unborn, all the sweetness
of our common life.
—Adam
Gopnik, from the May/June 2008 issue of Humanities.
Adam Gopnik is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker,
and is the author of the books Paris To The Moon and
Through the Children’s Gate.
Photo
© Rick Friedman / Corbis |