The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Letter to The New York Times: “I discover myself named . . . as the lone American writer ‘unequivocally for’ the United States intervention in Vietnam.” He notes that he is not alone. Apparently James Michener, “an old Asia hand,” and Marianne Moore, an old baseball hand, thought that the Commies should be stopped by us anywhere and everywhere . . . or, in Updike’s case, by them, the Americans obliged to fight. He finds such opponents as Jules Pfeiffer and Norman Mailer “frivolous.” Mailer had written, “The truth is maybe we need a war. It may be the last of the tonics. From Lydia Pinkham to Vietnam in sixty years, or bust.” Mailer was being Swiftian. But Updike is constitutionally unable to respond to satire, irony, wit, rhetorical devices that tend to be offensive to that authority which he himself means to obey.

  Updike takes offense at a “cheerful thought by James Purdy: ‘Vietnam is atrocious for the dead and maimed innocent, but it’s probably sadder to be a live American with only the Madison Avenue Glibbers for a homeland and a God.’ ” Rabbit will go to his final burrow without ever realizing the accuracy of Purdy’s take on the society in which Updike was to spend his life trying to find a nice place for himself among his fellow Glibbers.

  For a certain kind of quotidian novelist, there is nothing wrong in leaving out history or politics. But there is something creepy about Updike’s overreaction to those of us who tried to stop a war that was destroying (the dead to one side) a political and economic system that had done so well by so many rabbits. Updike is for the president, any president, right or wrong, because at such a time “it was a plain citizen’s duty to hold his breath and hope for the best.” For thirteen years? Then, with unexpected passion, he sides with what he takes to be the majority of Americans against those members of the upper class whom he once emulated and now turns upon: “Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas (Johnson). These privileged members of a privileged nation . . . full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders.” At some point, unclear to me, the Viet Cong must have bombed San Diego. “At a White House dinner in June of 1965, I saw what seemed to me a touching sight: Johnson and Dean Rusk . . . giving each other a brief hug in passing—two broad-backed Southern boys, trying to hold the fort.”

  After the thrill of watching those whom Unser Gott had placed over us, Updike turns manic (“My face would become hot, my voice high and tense and wildly stuttery”). He grieves for “the American soldiers, derided and mocked at home. . . .” This is purest Johnson. Whenever LBJ was attacked for having put the troops in Vietnam for no clear reason, he would charge those who questioned presidential mischief with disloyalty—even treason—against our brave boys, when, of course, it was he and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Ford and Nixon who supported the sacrifice of our brave boys in a war that none of these presidents could ever, with straight face, explain; a war whose longtime executor, Robert McNamara, now tells us that he himself never did figure out. But in the presence of Authority, Updike is like a bobby-soxer at New York’s Paramount Theater when the young Frank Sinatra was on view. Out of control, he writes, “Under the banner of a peace-movement . . . war was being waged by a privileged few upon the administration and the American majority that had elected it.” The reverse was true. Finally Wall Street marched against the war, and Nixon surrendered, weightier matters, like impeachment, on his mind.

  “Reading a little now, I realize how little I knew, for all my emotional involvement, about the war itself, a war after all like other wars. . . .” But it was not like other wars. No matter, the March Hare has turned his attention to other legitimacies, such as God. “Western culture from Boethius to Proust had transpired under the Christian enchantment.” What an odd pairing! Plainly, Updike doesn’t know much about Boethius. It is true that after his execution by the Emperor Theodoric in A.D. 525, he was taken over by the Christian establishment (Latin team) as a patristic authority, even though, in his last work, The Consolation of Philosophy (a “golden volume,” according to Gibbon), he is mostly Platonist except when he obeys the injunction “follow God” in imitation not of the tripartite Christian wonder but of Pythagoras. As for the half-Jew Proust, so emotionally and artistically involved in the Dreyfus case, Christianity in action could hardly have been “enchanting.” But Updike, in theological mood, is serenely absolutist: “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.” This is very interesting.

  At times, reading Updike’s political and cultural musings, one has the sense that there is no received opinion that our good rabbit does not hold with passion. “The fights for women’s rights and gay rights emerged enmeshed with the Vietnam protest and have outlived it. Though unconsciously resisting the androgyny, which swiftly became—as all trends in a consumer society become—a mere fashion, I must have felt challenged.” As American women have been trying to achieve political and economic parity with men for two centuries, how can these activities be considered “mere fashion” or a new consumer trend? For Updike, fags and dykes are comical figures who like their own sex and so cannot be taken seriously when they apply for the same legal rights under the Constitution that fun-loving, wife-swapping exurbanites enjoy. Reality proved too much for him. “I found the country so distressing in its civil fury” that he, along with current wife and Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, fled to London “for the school year of 1968–69.” The year, one should note, of the three “decadent” best-sellers, Portnoy’s Complaint, Myra Breckinridge, and his own Couples.

  Today, Rabbit seems at relative peace. He addresses a letter to his grandchildren full of family lore. Along the way, he has acquired an African son-in-law. He is full of Shillington self-effacing gracefulness on what—if any—race problem there might still be in the grand old United States, converted during the Reagan years—golden years for bunnies—to a City on a Hill where he can now take his ease and enjoy the solace of Religion, pondering “the self [which] is the focus of anxiety; attention to others, self-forgetfulness and living like [sic] the lilies are urged.”

  Between Self-Consciousness (1989) and the current In the Beauty of the Lilies, Updike has published three novels, a book of short stories, and one of critical pieces. He is, as Dawn Powell once said of herself, “fixed in facility,” as are most writers-for-life; a dying breed, I suspect, as, maw ajar, universal Internet swallows all. Meanwhile, Updike has written his Big Book, the story of four generations of American life, starting in 1910 and ending more or less today in—and on—television, as practically everything does in what the bemused Marx thought might be our “exceptional” republic.

  Before the outbreak of the Civil War, John Brown, a yeoman from Connecticut, destined to be forever connected with Osawatomie, Kansas, set himself up as a unilateral abolitionist of slavery in a state torn between pro- and antislavery factions. Updike probably first encountered him, as I did, in the film Santa Fe Trail (1940), where he was made gloriously incarnate by Raymond Massey. With a band of zealots, Brown occupied the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The nation suddenly was afire. Inevitably, Brown was defeated and hanged by the state of Virginia, thus making him a martyr for the North, while a song, “John Brown’s Body,” was set to a rousing old English folk tune. The poet Julia Ward Howe, listening to troops sing the demotic words to “John Brown’s Body,” in a Delphic fever of inspiration, wrote her own words for what would later be known as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” one of the few stirring pieces of national music to give the “Marseillaise” a run for its Euro-francs.

  Updike has chosen for his title one of the least mawkish, if not entirely coherent, quatrains from Howe’s lyrics. “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea / With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me / As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free / While God is marching on.” Precisely why God has chosen this moment to go marching—on to where?—
is a secret as one with the source of the sacred river Alph. But, no matter, this is rousing stuff. It is patriotic; it favors the freedom of black slaves at the South; it is botanically incorrect—no lilies at Bethlehem in December, as opposed to all those iconographic lilies during April’s immaculate conception. But the text fits Updike’s evening mood; it also provides him with an uplifting sonorous title, though a more apt title could have been found in the quatrain that begins, “I have seen Him in the watch-fires of an hundred circling camps; / They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.” Updike has well and truly builded us a novel that might well and truly be called “The Evening Dews and Damps.” He has also written easily the most intensely political American novel of the last quarter-century.

  The story begins in the grounds of a baronial estate in Paterson, New Jersey. Shillington territory. But this is not your usual Rabbit story. On the lawn, D. W. Griffith is making a film with Mary Pickford. We hear little more about this film, but the modern note has been struck. Now we must defer satisfaction, as Updike gives us a list of things, visible and invisible, in the immediate neighbourhood—like New York City only fifteen miles to the east of Paterson “lying sullenly snared within the lowland loop of the Passaic River.” One wonders what editor Shawn might have made of that “sullenly.” Surely, there must have been a house ukase against the pathetic fallacy. But Updike has always liked to signal with his adverbs as he conforms with his adjectives. Besides, he is now off the New Yorker page and on to his very own page.

  The first section is titled “Clarence.” The Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, whose address we are given as well as the church’s dimensions, physically and spiritually, along with those of Clarence himself, “a tall narrow-chested man of forty-three,” etc., etc., who has, at this moment, suddenly, almost idly, lost his faith. A promising beginning which might have been more effective without the weeds of description that precede it. Even so, there it is, on the third page—the Problem. In order to refute a lapsing parishioner, Clarence has been reading the atheist Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses, and, in the process, in a flash of utter darkness, he comes to the conclusion that Ingersoll was “quite right.” Shaken, Clarence makes his way home through a forest of description and into his house with its “leaded rectangles of stained glass the color of milky candies and the foot of the dark walnut staircase that, in two turnings punctuated by rectangular newel posts whose point had been truncated . . .” We are spared nothing, rectangular or otherwise.

  Clarence ponders free will versus predestination, the sort of thing that at a church school like St. Albans, to the south of Paterson in Washington, D.C., most boys had pretty much wrapped up before the onset of puberty—or Grace, whichever took place first. We meet wife and mother, Stella, supervising the cook in the kitchen. Tonight there will be supper for some important Presbyterians. Money for the church will be discussed. Clarence listens to kitchen chatter: “The eavesdropping clergyman, numbed by his sudden atheism . . .” Then we’re off to a description of lots and lots of things in the house including a Tiffany-glass chandelier, with scalloped edges. Updike never quite knows what to do with his lists of random objects or physical human characteristics. In this, he resembles a more graceful James Michener, whose huge books are simply compendia of thousands of little facts collected by researchers and deposited helter-skelter in his long “novels.”

  Updike also provides us with reading lists of those books that encourage and discourage Christian faith. Clarence is suffering from a mini-vastation, somewhat diluted by Updike’s sudden introduction of “real people” into the book, or at least of real names culled from contemporary newspapers. There is Mary Pickford at the start. Then a son of Theodore Roosevelt gets married. We are given the list of ushers, dazzling society names of the day. Updike will keep on doing this for the entire sixty-year period covered by his narrative. But a technique that worked so well for John Dos Passos in USA simply stops dead what story Updike has to tell.

  Updike, unlike his alleged literary models, Henry Green and Proust, describes to no purpose. In fact, Green, as I recall, describes hardly anything, relying on a superlative ear for a wide variety of speech patterns, while Updike’s characters all speak in the same tone of voice, their dialogue a means to get them from one plot point to the next. As one trudges through these descriptions, one wishes that Updike had learned less from his true models, Marquand and O’Hara, and more from the middle James, who, as a lord of the pertinent and the relevant, knew that nothing need be described or, indeed, told unless it suggests, while never naming, the presence in the deep of monsters, as the author, off-page, turns ever tighter the screw.

  Although in The Spoils of Poynton mother and son fight over the contents of a great house, we are never told just what is being fought over. James leaves the details to the reader’s imagination. But such continence has never been the way of the commercial American writer, no matter how elevated his theme or resourceful his art. For Updike, Poynton is a Sotheby’s catalog.

  James only needed to describe—was it one crucifix?—to represent a house full of rare furniture and objects worth killing for. The naturalistic Dos Passos used movielike cuts and intercuts of headlines to act as useful counterpoint to a narrative that takes place in public, as opposed to strictly private, time. Since most people get the news of their day through press and television, why not use or at least mimic these sources? The naturalistic Updike seems to think that just about any item will do in the way of color, and, in a sense, he is right; one has only to consider the huge popularity of Michener’s myriad-fact novels with an unsophisticated reading public that likes to think that valuable time is not being wasted on a made-up story, that the reader is really getting the inside dope on, let’s say, Detroit and the auto business or, in Updike’s case, on the United States’ second most profitable export after aerospace—showbiz and Hollywood. But whereas a few million small facts are the object of the Michenerian enterprise, Updike is more conventionally ambitious. He wants to dramatize the forces that have driven the United States ever leftward, even further away from the marching, lily-born God, away from family values and obedience to Authority, away from The New Yorker’s benign fact-checkers and sentence-polishers, so sadly absent now when he really needs them.

  After James’s disasters in the theater, he famously returned to prose with a new sharp intensity. He had learned that nothing is to be noted unless it is absolutely essential to the dramatic revelation of even the vaguest figure in the carpet. As far as I know, Updike has never submitted himself to the strict discipline of relevance one learns from theater. And yet, parenthetically, his one attempt at a play, Buchanan Dying (1974), though probably unstageable as written, is a superb work of mimesis, the last thoughts of the enigmatic president from Pennsylvania whose cautious inertness helped bring on the Civil War and imperial Lincoln. The effect is startling and unique, unlike . . .

  “Dialogue and meditation” is how Updike, inaccurately, describes the manner of his early “model,” Henry Green. Updike himself writes long, long descriptions interspersed with brief snatches of dialogue. In theory . . . no, no theory! . . . ideally, both description and dialogue should forward narrative, as in most pop writing. Realistic storytellers in English oscillate between the démeublement of Raymond Carver and the richly detailed settings, physical and psychic, of James Purdy. For a true master of effects, either way works. But if, like Updike, one means to go into the wholesale furniture business, one had better be prepared to furnish, in appropriate manner, great Poynton itself. I realize that in a world where democracy is on the rise everywhere except in American politics, one style can never be better than another, ’cause my feelings are just as deep as yours and how can you criticize my voice, my style which is Me? To which some of us old meanies must respond, well, dear, if you choose to send your letter to the world then here’s the answer, assuming the letter was not returned to sender for lack of correct addre
ss or sufficient postage.

  Years ago, in unkind mood, Norman Mailer referred to Updike’s writing as the sort of prose that those who know nothing about writing think good. Today, theory, written preferably in near-English academese, absorbs the specialist, and prose style is irrelevant. Even so, what is one to make of this sentence: “The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness . . . to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlike he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe”? Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?

  Plot, four generations of the Wilmot family. After Clarence’s loss of faith, he sells encyclopedias, perseveres in his failure, as did Updike’s own father, each to be avenged by a descendant; though not by Clarence’s son, Teddy, who occupies the next chunk of time—and novel-space. Now we go into the Updike time machine. “And then it was a new decade, and drinking was illegal all across the nation, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer accused the IWW of causing the railroad strikes. . . . Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were married in a Hollywood dream come true, and Europe twisted and turned with coups and riots and little wars” (which ones?), “and the Democrats at their convention put up James Cox and another Roosevelt, and Bill Tilden . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .”