Authors: Adam Begley
T
HERE WAS PLENTY
of magic in
Brazil
(1994), but not the right sort, at least according to the critics. Two years later came
In the Beauty of the Lilies
, which was much more favorably reviewed. Of the novels he wrote in the nineties, it’s easily the most ambitious, and in some ways just as adventurous and daring as his rash excursion into South American fantasy. His second-longest and most expansive novel,
Lilies
tracks four generations of the Wilmot family across the twentieth century and across the continent, from New Jersey to Hollywood to Colorado, where a climactic conflagration closes out the narrative. The story begins in 1910 with a nugget of Updike family history, a reimagined version of a seminal crisis: his grandfather Hartley’s loss of faith. This was material Updike had first begun to research for the genealogical chapter of
Self-Consciousness
, but here he succeeds where elsewhere he had repeatedly failed: at last he managed to write straight historical fiction that satisfied him intellectually and aesthetically. Relocating the Updike saga from Trenton to Paterson, he juxtaposed a Presbyterian minister’s apostasy with the making of a motion picture (D. W. Griffith’s
The Call to Arms
, starring Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford) and the doomed 1913 Paterson silk strike—a dose of theology, film, and history that establishes the thematic parameters of the novel.
The granddaughter of the lapsed clergyman becomes a world-famous movie star. Although she achieves her apotheosis in Hollywood as Alma DeMott, she was raised as Essie Wilmot in a “sweet small town” very much like Shillington, her childhood an idealized recapitulation of Updike’s own. Essie is the twin sister he never had, another stutterer, cherished and self-cherishing, reveling in the joy of being herself, protected by an innocently solipsistic religious faith, and most ecstatic in the dark at the Roxie, the town’s movie house. Her parents, unlike his, are as loving with each other as they are with their daughter, and that added comfort, which makes her doubly secure in “her power, her irresistible fire,” does nothing to blunt her urge to escape, to make the successive leaps from young beauty pageant contestant to starlet to celluloid goddess. She becomes a celebrity in a way that no writer ever does, but her ambition and the fulfillment of that ambition are analogous to what Updike experienced in his flight from Shillington to Harvard and beyond. This was the first time he had poured so much of himself into a woman’s body, and the result, especially as Essie is growing up, is a thoroughly convincing portrait of a sympathetic character with humanizing flaws. Her narcissism hardens in adulthood, starkly exposed by her failings as a mother and her radically self-serving theology. On her climb to the pinnacle of fame, Alma plays opposite Bing Crosby in a musical comedy, and recognizes in her costar an “inhuman efficiency”: “She observed in him what she already sensed in herself, the danger of becoming a performer purely, of coming alive in proportion to the size of the audience, and being absent-minded and remote when the audience was small”—a trait Updike, too, would have recognized.
Alma’s only child, the sorely neglected Clark (after Gable), drifts until he falls under the spell of a charismatic preacher, the self-appointed messiah of a Colorado religious commune. After several years at the Temple of True and Actual Faith, Clark earns the fifteen minutes of fame he never sought. Escalating friction with the local authorities leads to a Waco-style debacle, complete with helicopters, armored vehicles, swarming FBI and ATF agents, tear gas canisters, and the imminent threat of collective immolation—all avidly filmed by the television networks for the evening news. On impulse, perhaps assisted by divine revelation, perhaps conditioned by Hollywood cliché, Clark plays the hero.
The extreme violence at the end of
Lilies
is unlike anything in Updike’s fiction. The shooting goes on for eight pages, the only sustained scene of mayhem he ever attempted, and, except for the murder-suicide in
Witches
, the only fatal violence of any kind that isn’t distanced by an exotic setting (as in
The Coup
and
Brazil
, both of them, like
Witches
, rife with extravagant make-believe). The realist novels and stories Updike set in America are almost entirely devoid of even the threat of violence, but here, in the context of a military-style assault, we’re caught in the cross fire of a protracted gunfight with multiple victims and the kind of gore usually associated with splatter porn. We see a woman shot from close range, her head “spouting blood . . . the hole spurting like a water bubbler, pulse after pulse until it quickly dribbled down to an ebbing red nub.”
Published only eighteen months after
Lilies
, his next novel was fittingly postapocalyptic:
Toward the End of Time
is set in the year 2020, after a nuclear war with China has devastated large tracts of a now-defunct United States of America. Industrial pollution has given rise to “metallobioforms,” a plague of deadly inorganic pests proliferating on the “blasted, depopulated planet.” In the skies, new objects have appeared, including an abandoned space station and a mysterious “halo of iridescence,” a vast torus that floats beyond the clouds. And the narrative itself forks at times, making “quantum leaps of plot and personality,” taking us to places far away and long ago, parallel universes briefly illuminated. But these sci-fi embellishments are peripheral to the central drama, which is recorded in a year’s worth of journal entries kept by a retired investment adviser named Ben Turnbull. That drama is nothing more exotic than Ben’s panicky fear of growing old and dying. Oates, reviewing the novel in
The New Yorker
, described Ben as “morbidly narcissistic,” and indeed, in the midst of planetary disaster, he recites with raging egotism complaints about his deteriorating health and the impotence, literal and figurative, of the elderly. (At sixty-six he seems far older.)
In the Beauty of the Lilies
was in many respects a thoroughly conventional novel, but writing it pushed Updike into new territory. Conversely, the wildly unconventional
Toward the End of Time
hardly required him to step out the door. The social chaos implied by the postapocalyptic, “post-law-and-order” environment is little more than a rumor for Ben; he and his neighbors in Haskells Crossing, an affluent seaside community north of Boston, find their privileged lives largely undisturbed: “I am safe,” he says, “in my nest of local conditions, on my hilltop in sight of the still-unevaporated ocean.” Ben’s lofty white mansion with its majestic saltwater view is a portrait of Haven Hill, faithful to the last detail. The best passages in the book lavish attention on the flora and fauna of the eleven acres of grounds around the house: the garden beds, the driveway winding down through the woods to the mailbox, the pond.
Updike was uncharacteristically nervous about the similarities between his life in Beverly Farms and Ben’s in Haskells Crossing. For the first time since the publication of
Couples
, he went out of his way to distance himself from his fiction. Declaring forcefully that autobiography is “one of the dullest genres,” he stressed the “considerable trouble of invention” that went into the making of his narrator. He stooped to listing comically trivial differences between Ben and himself: “He comes from the Massachusetts Berkshires and not from Pennsylvania’s Berks County. He has more children and grandchildren than I.” (Ben’s five children from his first marriage have given him eleven grandchildren, two of whom have a Togolese father.) Updike’s odd and oddly ineffective attempt to disavow the obvious autobiographical basis of the novel has in all probability nothing to do with the fact that Ben is distinctly unappealing, mostly because of his sexual rapacity. If you’ve already foisted on your readers characters as abrasive as Tom Marshfield and Roger Lambert, presenting them with the nasty, lecherous, and self-pitying Ben Turnbull scarcely seems an occasion for awkward disclaimers.
Updike was more likely worried about the portrait of Ben’s second wife, the crisp and forbidding Gloria, a fanatic gardener and fearsome nag, five years younger than he and exasperated with his doddery behavior. She is, if possible, less appealing than her husband. According to Ben, “Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence on her own concept of world order mark her impress on the world.” The novel begins with her crusade against the doe that eats her tulip shoots and euonymus hedge. She wants the deer killed—and Ben narcissistically translates this as a murderous impulse aimed at him: “In her guilt at secretly wishing me dead, she took an overactive interest in my health, from vitamin pills laid out beside my morning orange juice to a constant nagging about what I put in my mouth.” With her ice-blue eyes, perfect smile, and crown of ash-blond hair, Gloria, in his estimation, is a “soigné vulture” eagerly awaiting his demise and her rich widow’s reward: “well-heeled freedom.”
Martha’s comments on the manuscript suggest that if she recognized herself in this caricature of a shrewish, controlling wife, she wasn’t going to let on.
*
Most of her notes dealt with horticultural issues (correcting details such as the proper time of year to prune clematis), but she did permit herself to question the passage where Ben crows about having had sex with three different women in one day—this when he was married to his first wife (the suggestively named Perdita) and immersed in “suburban polygamy.” Martha wrote:
Well, it’s your call, but you already told us, the Readers, in a previous novel, about the time you fucked 3 women in 1 day. It’s boasting too much, perhaps?
Updike let the passage stand.
Martha bravely proclaimed the book a delight to read, a verdict even its most generous supporters would have hesitated to endorse.
Toward the End of Time
summoned more bile from critics than any previous Updike novel, and it was the last, with the possible exception of the 9/11-inspired
Terrorist
(2006), to spark much controversy. Decidedly mixed reviews greeted the remaining four novels:
Gertrude and Claudius
(2000), a nimbly entertaining prequel to
Hamlet
;
Seek My Face
(2002), a guided tour of the New York art scene courtesy of the leading female abstract expressionist, now seventy-eight and raging, like Ben Turnbull, against the indignities of old age;
Villages
(2004), a doggedly autobiographical retelling of Updike’s progress from Shillington (renamed Willow, in honor of the novel he attempted sophomore year at Harvard) to Beverly Farms (Haskells Crossing again), complete with the two wives, both scantily disguised; and
The Widows of Eastwick
(2008), a downbeat, valedictory sequel. Only
Gertrude and Claudius
, clever and engaging (yet slight), stirred any real enthusiasm. On the whole, the novels of Updike’s last decade were more likely to be met with polite indifference than hostility. He was by now a landmark on the literary landscape so familiar and venerated that even a spiteful reviewer felt obliged either to salute his cumulative achievement or to regret that after a lifetime of acclaim he no longer measured up. His oeuvre could be a liability; as he pointed out, “Among the rivals besetting an aging writer is his younger, nimbler self, when he was the cocky new thing.”
[I]t doesn’t do to think overmuch about prizes, does it? Being a writer at all is the prize.
—Updike to Oates, 2006
In the fall of 1997, Updike’s literary reputation was buffeted in rapid succession by Michiko Kakutani, the most prominent reviewer in America, and by a relative youngster, David Foster Wallace, who exploded onto the scene a year earlier with his gargantuan second novel,
Infinite Jest
. Kakutani dismissed
Toward the End of Time
as “particularly sour, ugly and haphazardly constructed”; she wondered how such a gifted writer could produce such a “lousy” novel. Wallace was even more scathing: “It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.” Updike was spared immediate pain from this one-two combination. He’d learned to shrug off the “irrepressible Michiko”; he told a friend that since he had seen her “blow her top” so often, it was hard to take her seriously. The
Times
, as if to compensate for Kakutani, ran in its Sunday books section a breezy, enthusiastic endorsement from Margaret Atwood: “As memento mori and its obverse, carpe diem,
Toward the End of Time
could scarcely be bettered.” As for Wallace’s review, he didn’t read it until years later.
The thirty-five-year-old Wallace presented himself as the spokesman for a new generation. “The fact is,” he confided, “that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans.” He claimed to have discovered, among (female) friends of his age, a range of unflattering opinions on Updike, including “Just a penis with a thesaurus” and “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” and the familiar accusation of misogyny. Worse, he announced with calm conviction that Updike, Roth, and Mailer, “the three Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated American postwar fiction,” were now in their “senescence”—a verdict so perfectly tailored to Updike’s insecurities that it seemed sadistic. Wallace complained that Updike’s prose, his “great strength for almost forty years,” had deteriorated to the point where it seemed “less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.” (Writing about Renoir, Updike had observed, “Old artists are entitled to caricature themselves.”)
A dismaying echo of Wallace’s criticisms came wafting across the Atlantic in early 1998—dismaying because it issued from the pen of James Wood, a thirty-two-year-old Englishman regarded by many as the best literary critic of his generation. In his review of
Toward the End of Time
, Wood judged the novel to be “idly constructed . . . and astonishingly misogynistic.” He added, “Of course it is ‘beautifully written’ if by that one means a harmless puffy lyricism.” Zeroing in on the novel’s “puerile misogyny,” he dismissed, in this case, the argument that the author “is not identical with his misogynistic characters.” Wood saw little daylight between Updike and Ben, but stopped short of declaring that Updike actually hated women. Instead, he added his voice to the chorus of critics who objected to the sexual content of Updike’s fiction; “a lifelong distraction,” he called it. In an essay about a later collection of stories,
Licks of Love
(2000), Wood argued that sexual obsessions “have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute, now, the equivalent of an artist’s palette: this is how Updike chooses to paint the world.” There’s certainly plenty of evidence to support this claim: Tom Marshfield, Roger Lambert, and Ben Turnbull are all guilty of thinking of women as sex objects, worthy of attention only insofar as they are instruments of male sexual gratification; Rabbit rarely thinks any other way. A list of Updike’s priapic characters, men whose fascination with women amounts to sexual obsession, would be very long indeed. But Wood chose to ground his criticism in aesthetics rather than the politics of feminism, to keep his focus on the “artist’s palette.” He called the world Updike painted “distasteful and limited” and suggested that it needn’t be: “Misogyny can animate, and very powerfully and interestingly, as in Philip Roth’s work.” But by bringing in Roth, whose novel
Sabbath’s Theater
(1995) had provoked shrieks of outrage as well as hosannas, Wood drains his argument of any force. He finds Roth’s misogyny compelling and Updike’s distasteful—it’s only a matter of which palette suits the critic’s palate.
The worry for Updike was a gradually forming consensus; again and again, reviewers handed down a three- or four-part indictment that began with misogyny, then accused him of being too prolific, too fond of his own gorgeous prose, and too nostalgic (read: out of date). He’d been typecast. Wood could write, “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book,” and be sure to elicit a knowing chuckle. His warnings about the perils of too fancy a style were themselves pretty swank: “The sentences have an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract.” Ten years earlier, praising
Rabbit at Rest
, he had remarked that Updike’s “plush attention to detail” amounted to “a nostalgia for the present”; now he lamented a different, more common brand of nostalgia: “If Updike’s earlier work was consumed with wife-swapping, his late work is consumed by nostalgia for it.” All this carping pointed in only one direction, Wood’s blunt verdict: “Updike is not, I think, a great writer.”
*
With the new millennium looming and the critical tide running against him, Updike called Henry Bech into action. In “Bech Noir,” written as the reviews of
Toward the End of Time
began to appear, he sent his alter ego on a killing spree. Hitting back after “a lifetime of provocation,” adopting as his motto the biblical phrase “Vengeance is mine,” Bech slays his harshest critics one by one, rubbing them out ruthlessly, just as they had ruthlessly panned his work. Spiteful to the end, one of them says with his dying breath, “Bech . . . believe me . . . your stuff . . . won’t last.” Indulging himself with a less far-fetched fantasy in “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden,” the author shipped his hero off to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature—a gesture of ramifying irony. Updike’s motives were so mixed that only fragments showed, among them the impish urge to make mischief: if his moment had passed, if, age sixty-five, he was unlikely ever to wear the laurels, why not take himself definitively out of the running with a piece of calculated effrontery? Bech, we learn, receives the Swedish prize not on merit but because certain committee members were casting protest votes. In “Bech Presides,” he’d already taken a swipe at prize committees. A fellow writer asks Bech if he ever wanted to be a literary judge:
“No,” Bech admitted. “I always duck it.”
“Me, too. So who accepts? Midgets. So who do they choose for the prize? Another midget.”
Bech detects sour grapes behind this show of bravado. Updike, too: himself the recipient of countless awards, he was careful not to belittle the beneficiaries of Sweden’s bounty, nor to let any hint of envy creep into his public remarks on new laureates. (The Italian Dario Fo won in 1997; the following year it was the turn of Portuguese novelist José Saramago, whose
Baltasar and Blimunda
Updike had reviewed without much enthusiasm, but politely, for
The New Yorker
.)
Accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in November 1998, Updike spoke to a crowd of over eight hundred at the Marriott Marquis hotel in midtown Manhattan. (Martha was in the audience with two of her sons and a “glamorous” daughter-in-law; none of the Updike children was invited.) In the speech, delivered with his habitual teasing charm, he noted that medals for lifetime achievement are engraved on the reverse side with a subliminal message: “the time has come to retire.” A new award piled onto his towering stack of honors only reminded him of that other, magnificent prize he hadn’t won. The Nobel was the uncontested peak of his profession, and every October he fell short. Though he bottled up his disappointment, he found it hard to disagree with the pundits who wondered whether the antic Dario Fo was truly more deserving than he. As William Maxwell put it forty years earlier, if Updike didn’t get the prize, it would be “the Swedes’ fault, not his.”
Crowning Bech with laurels, killing off Bech’s critics, having one of them tell Bech that his work was destined for the dustbin—these gags cut in various directions, but all are related to Updike’s anxiety about his own fame, present and posthumous. He whined to an interviewer that his books were no longer stocked in airport bookstores: “There’s no Updike at all. I’m a vanished man, a nonentity as far as mass readership goes.” Another symptom of his anxiety: he revived a long-simmering literary feud. Several weeks before the ceremony at the Marriott Marquis, nagged by the thought of prizes unbestowed and readers who got away, he dashed off a review for
The New Yorker
of Tom Wolfe’s
A Man in Full
(1998).
*
This was Wolfe’s second novel, his long-awaited follow-up to the huge commercial success of
The Bonfire of the Vanities
(1987)—which Updike claimed he couldn’t read: “The blatancy of the icy-hearted satire repelled me.” His resentment of the new novel was apparent from the first paragraph: “The book weighs in as a 742-page bruiser. . . . A book to muscle aside all the others on the ‘New Releases’ table. A book that defies you not to buy it.” This chipper tone gives way to more sober assessment; despite Wolfe’s vigor and his laudable ambition, “
A Man in Full
still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest, aspirant form.” The rub was Wolfe’s failure to be “exquisite”; “Such failure would not seem to be major,” Updike writes, “but in the long run it is.” A vulgar book—“cheesy,” Updike called it in private—is an ephemeral book, and what mattered to Updike was the long run. He was confident that Wolfe’s mass audience would eventually dwindle to nothing, but this conviction wasn’t enough to neutralize his envy. His exasperation boiled over in a letter to Oates: “Wolfe not only demands to make his millions but wants
respect
, too.”
Norman Mailer barreled in, lamenting at length Wolfe’s “final inability to be great.”
A Man in Full
, he judged, was merely a “Mega-bestseller”: “At the highest level, it’s a failure.” With Updike, he argued that no matter how popular, Wolfe’s novels were not literature.
*
Wolfe hit back, calling Updike and Mailer “two old piles of bones.” Whereupon John Irving joined the fray: on any page of a Wolfe novel, Irving claimed, he could find a sentence that would make him “gag.” Wolfe’s rejoinder made it clear to anyone still in doubt that these high-profile literary figures were embroiled in a playground scuffle: “Larry, Curly, and Moe,” he said. “Updike, Mailer, and Irving. My three stooges.”
In the midst of the name-calling, Wolfe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters—despite Updike’s staunch opposition. Although he was in New York on the day of the May ceremonial when Wolfe was “apotheosized,” Updike decided it was a spectacle he could miss.
*
Yet he did nothing to extend the quarrel. He felt queasy about scrapping with a writer who worked so hard at his fiction; he knew that jealousy and ill will had played a part in his review of
A Man in Full
.
The antagonism between Wolfe and Updike was decades old; it had taken root in 1965, when Wolfe was a young reporter and published his notorious two-part parody (or “counter-parody”) profile of William Shawn and
The New Yorker
,
“Tiny Mummies!” Making cruel fun of the man who ran the magazine Updike thought of as his home was bad enough; worse were the swipes at
New Yorker
short stories in general (“the laughingstock of the New York literary community for years”) and Updike’s in particular: “more and more tabescent.” Wolfe brandished the same adjective nearly twenty-five years later in his manifesto “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature.” Designed as a cure for tabescence, the manifesto was meant to galvanize literary novelists and get them writing robust social realism. Wolfe urged them to “do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms”—the beast being “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours.”
Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and Updike’s “The Importance of Fiction,” an essay he wrote for
Esquire
in 1985, contain between them the meat of the quarrel (as opposed to the playground insults), which is essentially a disagreement about the aim of literature. Updike argued for the importance of individual sensibility: “Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has ever invented.” He specifically denied that fiction should be read for information of the kind a journalist uncovers. “Unlike journalism . . . fiction does not give us facts snug in their accredited truth,” he wrote. The meaning of fiction emerges from a collaborative process—“we
make
fiction true, as we read it”—and the collaboration occurs between two solitary souls, one “sitting in a quiet room coding make-believe,” the other elsewhere at a later date, trying to decipher it. A pair of rhetorical questions rounds out the essay and leaves no doubt as to the author’s allegiance:
What is important, if not the human individual? And where can individuality be better confronted, appraised, and enjoyed than in fiction’s shapely lies?
For Wolfe, conversely, the aim is to expose the “status structure of society.” Not quite an afterthought, the individual matters only because of his “intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him.” The inner life of a creature who stands on just two feet hardly figures in Wolfe’s scheme; it’s the billion-footed specimen he’s after.