The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (32 page)

If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way…. death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its end: it puts an end to it, it is its ultimate point: but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose…. Numbered among its other duties includedunder the general and principal heading,
How to Live,
there is the subsection,
How to Die.

Thus, Montaigne firmly reverses the Cicero–Plato notion that “to philosophize is to learn how to die” and enjoins us to meditate not on unknowable, irrelevant death but on life which can be known, at least in part. Sixteen years of observing himself and reading and rereading the thousand books in the round library had convinced him not only that life was all there is but that “Each man bears the entire form of man's estate” (III 2). At the end, Montaigne had met himself at last; and everyone else, too. On September 13, 1592, he died in bed while listening to Mass. What one would give to know what he said, how he looked, just before he, too, entered the long night.

Meanwhile, Screech now replaces Frame at my bedside. Anglophones of the next century will be deeply in his debt. Despite his insistence on the Catholicism of Montaigne, the good Screech does note that Montaigne uses the word Fortune—in the sense of fate—350 times. That is satisfying.

The Times Literary Supplement
June 26, 1992

RABBIT'S OWN BURROW

A decade ago, thanks to the success of America's chain bookstores with their outlets in a thousand glittering malls, most “serious” fiction was replaced by mass-baked sugary dough—I mean books—whose huge physical presence in the shops is known, aptly to the trade, as “dumps”: outward and visible sign of Gresham's Law at dogged work. In spite of this, the fact that John Updike's latest novel,
In the Beauty of the Lilies
, briefly made it to the bottom of the
New York Times
best-seller list is remarkable. As it is a rare week when any “serious” novel is listed, one is usually so grateful that there are still those who want to read an even halfway good novelist, one ought never to discourage those readers whom he attracts. Also, what is the point of attacking writers in a period where—save for prize-mad pockets of old London—they are of so little consequence?

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 middle-brow 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 national 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.