Authors: Adam Begley
A year after his election, and nine months after his Foggy Bottom briefing, Updike was back in Washington for an occasion that testified to his rising stature: he had been invited to dine at Lyndon Johnson’s White House and entertain National Honor Students with a reading. He and Mary flew down and checked into the Hay-Adams. In the hotel lobby he spied a fellow Pennsylvanian—and fellow member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters—John O’Hara. Famous for a considerable oeuvre stretching back three decades to his first novel,
Appointment in Samarra
(and notorious for his social insecurities and his obsession with the Ivy League—hence Hemingway’s well-known quip about starting a fund to send O’Hara to Yale), the sixty-year-old author was reaching the end of his career, a millionaire celebrity with a prickly temper and a flagging literary reputation, despite the popularity of the film versions of two prewar triumphs,
Pal Joey
and
BUtterfield 8
. Updike, an avid reader of the older man’s
New Yorker
stories, approached him with a deferential, “Mr. O’Hara?” After a “laconic and characteristic dialogue,” it was established that they would both be attending the same function. Because Updike was providing entertainment, the White House was sending a limousine for him. He asked O’Hara if he’d like a ride—which seemed a good idea until it became obvious that the celebrated author would have to sit in the front with the driver (“the Negro chauffeur”), while the Updikes “settled regally” in the backseat, a social irony Updike found mortifying, conscious as he was of O’Hara’s “acute nerves.” The anecdote, which Updike served up in an essay a few years later, when he himself was basking in the klieg-light publicity surrounding
Couples
, captures the moment when a writer on the way up bumps awkwardly into a writer on the way down.
The weighing of reputations had become for Updike a new sideline. A month before his encounter with O’Hara he had published
Assorted Prose
, the final section of which reprints seventeen book reviews that originally appeared in
The New Republic
,
The New York Times
,
The American Scholar
, and
The New Yorker
. Collecting them was a statement of intent; he wanted to be known as a critic as well as an artist. One of the earliest reviews is of J. D. Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey
—a brilliant example of how to gently pan a writer one admires, neatly balancing praise and blame:
As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its privacy, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life. It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static.
Having placed Salinger on a pedestal as proud as Hemingway’s, he topples him with a tender, regretful shove, accusing him of a grave writerly sin, a self-indulgent obsession with certain of his characters, namely the Glass family.
Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. . . . He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. “Zooey” is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddamns, too much verbal ado about not quite enough. The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding.
The review ran on the front page of
The
New York Times Book Review
, and despite Updike’s evident respect, it outraged some ardent Salinger fans. Damning but not malicious, it set a precedent that distinguished Updike among reviewers; even when he disparaged a book, he never adopted a hostile tone. His jabs were cushioned by kindness—or at the very least a show of forbearance.
On a few occasions he tumbled unresisting into parody, as in his review of Samuel Beckett’s novel
How It Is
, which concludes, memorably, after a few pages of punctuationless meandering in the style of the text, “the end of review the END of meditating upon this mud and subprimate sadism NO MORE no more thinking upon it few books have I read I will not reread sooner SORRY but that is how it is.” The attraction of unkind, ungentle reviewing is immediately apparent, but unlike many critics, Updike preferred to write about books he liked.
Assorted Prose
, for instance, contains valentines to Nabokov and Muriel Spark. Nabokov was one of Maxwell’s writers, and he and Spark both wrote for
The
New Yorker
, but there’s no doubt that Updike’s enthusiasm was genuine and disinterested.
He was also on the receiving end. Mixed reviews of his work were not uncommon, but outright attacks were rare, at least until the mid-sixties, when his fame made him a target (and
Assorted Prose
had established him as a critic, and therefore fair game, on the theory that if you dish it out, you have to learn to take it). On November 21, 1965,
Book Week
, the book section of the
New York Herald Tribune
, ran an astonishingly spiteful review of
Of the Farm
by a University of Michigan professor, John Aldridge, who considered himself a specialist in American literature. (He was a stalwart champion of Norman Mailer’s work.) The overt aim of Aldridge’s essay was to demote Updike to “the second or just possibly the third rank of serious American novelists.” He begins by acknowledging “Mr. Updike’s charming but limited gifts” and later allows that he “does on occasion write well,” but these gestures in the direction of civility are buried by an overload of ad hominem reproach. Even the compliment to Updike’s writing turns into an insult: writing well is revealed as the author’s “private vice,” a phrase that captures the insidiously personal drift of Aldridge’s argument. Consider this unrelenting barrage:
He does not have an interesting mind. He does not possess remarkable narrative gifts or a distinguished style. He does not create dynamic or colorful or deeply meaningful characters. He does not confront the reader with dramatic situations that bear the mark of an original or unique manner of seeing and responding to experience. He does not challenge the imagination or stimulate, shock, or educate it.
There’s no attempt to disguise the animus at work here—on the contrary, the repetition of the personal pronoun at the beginning of each sentence makes the intent refreshingly clear: he (Aldridge) wanted to inflict pain.
The assault had long-term repercussions. The final thrust of the blade was the revelation that “behind the rich, beautiful scenery of [Updike’s] descriptive prose” lay a hidden secret: “Mr. Updike has nothing to say.” That this was merely an echo of a Norman Podhoretz slur (“To me he seems a writer who has very little to say”) did nothing to ease the pain. Aldridge’s essay not only left a lasting scar on Updike’s admittedly sturdy ego, but also formed the basis of many subsequent attacks. It lies behind Harold Bloom’s oft-quoted quip about Updike being “a minor novelist with a major style”; Dorothy Rabinowitz’s discovery of a “vacuity” at the heart of his stories; and Gore Vidal’s conviction that Updike “describes to no purpose.” No matter how many prizes he won, no matter how many reviewers confirmed his position at the forefront of the first rank, Aldridge’s dissent continued to rankle; that short, scathing put-down—“nothing to say”—never lost its sting.
*
I believe it hurried him along a path he had just begun to explore. He started to allow a wider spectrum of his immediate experience into his fiction. Little by little, he embraced the notion that the personal is political—a phrase coined later in the decade, after civil rights marches, antiwar protests, and the women’s liberation movement had crowded into the consciousness of even the most solipsistic citizen, when the interpenetration of private life and public policy had become obvious, a truism. Updike had always assigned unusually high value to his personal experience; he seemed to cherish whatever happened to him. Now he was beginning to place that experience in a national and international context.
Mary was a catalyst in this regard. Like her father, she had a strong commitment to the civil rights movement. After attending lectures on the theory and practice of nonviolence with a view to participating in the voting rights protests in the South, she flew down to Montgomery, Alabama, with another woman, a close friend from Ipswich; spent the night; then joined the last two days of the third and largest march from Selma, a protest that eventually attracted some twenty-five thousand supporters. Mary and her friend flew back from Montgomery late at night, landing in Boston in the small hours of the morning, exhausted and exultant.
A month later she persuaded John to come along on a protest march from Roxbury to the Boston Common. The object of the march, led like the Birmingham marches by Martin Luther King Jr., was to denounce segregation in schools, jobs, and housing. The experience is described, with only a few fictional flourishes (and a capsule version of Mary’s adventures in the South), in a Maples story, “Marching Through Boston.” After a dozen years of feeding voraciously on private moments, Updike for the first time chose a public event—an event destined to become an item in the newspapers, part of the historical record—as the basis for a short story. Needless to say, this didn’t mark the end of his investigations into domestic life, but from now on, headlines were to play an increasingly prominent role, especially in his novels.
A reluctant and comically self-involved protester, Richard Maple is more inclined to mockery than indignation. Feverish on the day of the march, he struggles to turn his attention outward. Though he registers with uncanny precision the effects of the timed-release medicine he’s taken for his cold (“Within him, the fever had become a small glassy scratching on the walls of the pit hollowed by detonating pills”), he seems barely capable of focusing on the purpose of the protest. Chilly at first, then drenched as they listen on the Common to speeches by King and Ralph Abernathy, he starts parodying, on the drive home, the revival meeting oratory of the speakers, then slips into a minstrel show accent and an Uncle Tom persona: “Ah’ze all raht, missy, jes; a tetch o’ double pneu
mon
ia, don’t you fret none, we’ll get the cotton in.” Joan asks him to please stop, but he finds he can’t. It’s a peculiar, unsettling performance only partly redeemed by the fact that he really is ill, and that at some level he identifies with the people he’s mocking: “He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him . . . as if he had indeed given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for attention from the depths of oppression.” Richard is crying for attention, and he’s also goading Joan, needling her because he’s trapped (shackled) by his marriage. And yet any identification between Richard Maple and slaves and their descendants is grotesque. To call his behavior politically incorrect is of course an anachronism; it’s nonetheless willfully contrarian and intentionally offensive. When Joan tells him he’s embarrassing the children with his Uncle Tom act, she might as well be saying that he’s embarrassing the reader. Even in 1965, an author who put into the mouth of a white character the words, “Ef Ah could jes’ res’ hyah foh a spell in de shade o’ de watermelon patch, res’ dese ol’ bones . . .” could count on making a sizable portion of his audience (his enlightened
New Yorker
audience) cringe.
This is pretty much a transcription of Updike’s own behavior. The sound of civil rights oratory triggered his urge to mimic and mock. He would launch into his blackface routine with the apparent aim of amusing the children (and himself) and irritating his wife. That doesn’t make him a racist or an opponent of the civil rights movement—he and Mary were charter members of the Ipswich Fair Housing Committee—but it does remind us of his delight in malicious teasing, and his resistance to righteous protest, however noble the cause. “I distrusted orthodoxies,” he wrote in his memoirs, “especially orthodoxies of dissent.” Though the rumor that a black family had been prevented by subterfuge from buying an Ipswich property inspired him to join a local campaign to promote equal-opportunity housing, broader protests made him uneasy. As he would soon prove in
Rabbit Redux
and
The Coup
, he was perfectly capable of identifying imaginatively with individual black people, whether American or African, yet marching in a civil rights demonstration provoked in him, like a kind of allergic reaction, a perverse and self-defeating display of callow humor.
A similar pattern was repeated in his more famous refusal to oppose the war in Vietnam, a saga that began in the summer of 1966, when he obligingly replied to a request from a pair of British editors who were collecting statements by writers from around the world (among them Italo Calvino, W. H. Auden, Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing, and Harold Pinter) for a book entitled
Authors Take Sides on Vietnam
. Here is Updike’s contribution in its entirety:
Like most Americans I am uncomfortable about our military adventure in South Vietnam; but in honesty I wonder how much of the discomfort has to do with the high cost, in lives and money, and how much with its moral legitimacy. I do not believe that the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh have a moral edge over us, nor do I believe that great powers can always avoid using their power. I am for our intervention if it does some good. Specifically, if it enables the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political future. It is absurd to suggest that a village in the grip of guerrillas has freely chosen, or that we owe it to history to bow before a wave of the future engineered by terrorists. 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. Until such a will is expressed, and as long as no willingness to negotiate is shown by the other side, I do not see that we can abdicate our burdensome position in South Vietnam.
From today’s perspective, it’s hard to understand why this cautious, moderate, even-tempered statement should have caused so much fuss—and why
The
New York Times
, when it reported on the book’s publication in England, should have proclaimed that Updike was “unequivocally for” American intervention. And yet that’s what happened. He then wrote a letter to the
Times
(a
long
letter, more than three times the length of the paragraph he’d sent off to England), clarifying his position and politely defending himself against the newspaper’s misrepresentations. Publicly explaining his private political views was a novel situation for him (his occasional “Comment” pieces in
The New Yorker
had been unsigned); it was a role for which he had little appetite and less aptitude. The more he embroidered his original statement, hedging and qualifying, the more apparent it became that he wasn’t in fact opposed to the war—which in those “quarrelsome times” meant that he supported it. If his aim was to stake out some reasonable middle ground, he failed. And the failure stung. More than two decades later, he still felt the need to explain himself, to justify his position, notably in an essay included in
Self-Consciousness
, “On Not Being a Dove.” (The convoluted title is implicit acknowledgment of the awkwardness of his stance.)