The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  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.

  Despite all of Updike’s book-reviewing, one gets the sense that books have not meant much to him, young or old; but then he was originally attracted to the graphic arts (he attended the Ruskin School at Oxford), and the minor technical mysteries of lettering nibs and scratchboard…. “And my subsequent career carries coarse traces of its un-ideal origins in popular, mechanically propagated culture.” This is endearing; also, interesting—“I was a cultural bumpkin in love not with writing, but with print.” And, like everyone else of the time, with the movies, as he will demonstrate in his latest novel.

  Easily, it would appear, he became an all-round writer for The New Yorker “of the William Shawn era (1951–87)…a club of sorts, from within which the large rest of literary America…could be politely disdained…. While I can now almost glimpse something a bit too trustingin the serene sense of artistic well-being, of virtual invulnerability, that being published in The New Yorker gave me for over thirty years….” During much of this time, he seemed unaware that the interesting, indeed major, writers of the period did not belong to his club, either because they were too disturbing for the mild Shawn or because they could not endure the radical editing and rewriting that the quintessential middlebrow magazine imposed on its writers. “I shook with anger,” Perelman wrote in 1957, “at their august editorial decisions, their fussy little changes and pipsqueak variations on my copy.” Nabokov, published at Edmund Wilson’s insistence, needed all of Wilson’s help in fighting off editorial attempts to make his prose conform to the proto–Ralph Lauren house impersonation of those who fit, socially, in the roomy top-drawer-but-one. Unlike that original writer, Nabokov, Updike, ever “the good child,” throve under strict supervision and thought himself on Parnassus, a harmless, even beguiling misunderstanding so long as the real world never confronted him, which, of course, it did.

  The Vietnam war jolted Updike into the nearest he has yet come to self-examination as opposed to self-consciousness. “I was a liberal,” he notes at some point. That is, he didn’t like Nixon when he was at Harvard, and he voted for Kennedy. But now he strikes the Pecksniffian note as he invokes class distinctions. Of liberals at Harvard, “they, Unitarian or Episcopalian or Jewish, support Roosevelt and Truman and Stevenson out of enlightenment, de haut en bas, whereas in my heart of hearts, I however, veneered with an education and button-down shirts, was de bas. They, secure in the upper-middle class, were Democrats out of human sympathy and humanitarian largesse, because this was the party that helped the poor. Our family had simply been poor, and voted Democrat out of crude self-interest.” He is now moving into McCarthy, Wallace, Buchanan country. Resentment, for Updike a slow-blooming plant, is starting to put forth lurid flowers, suitable for funeral wreaths to be laid upon his carefully acquired affluent niceness as well as upon the sort of company that it had earned him, which, almost to a man, stood against the war that he accepts and even, for a time, favors. Suddenly he starts scrabbling in search of peasant roots to show that he is really dans le vrai—unlike those supercilious silver-spoon-choked snobs who dare “second-guess” presidents.

  “Was I conservative? I hadn’t thought so, but I did come from what I could begin to see” (after a third of a century?) “was a conservative part of the country…. The Germans of Berks County didn’t move on, like the typical Scots-Irish frontier-seeking Americans. They stayed put, farming the same valleys and being buried in the same graveyards….” Presumably, this stay-put mindset ought to have made him isolationist and antiwar when it came to military adventures in far-off places where other Americans, whom he knew little of, fought Asians, whom he knew nothing of. But, startlingly, he chooses to interpret the passivity of his ancestral tribes as the reason for his own unquestioning acceptance of authority: if the president wants you to go fight the Viet Cong in order to contain the Viet Cong’s mortal enemy, China, you must not question, much less second-guess him: You will go fight when and where he tells you to, unless you are lucky enough to be kept safe at home by psoriasis. For the first time, the apolitical, ahistorical Updike was faced with what pop writers call an Identity Crisis.

  “By my mid-thirties, through diligence and daring” (if one did not know better, one might think the second adjective ironic), “I had arrived at a lifestyle we might call genteel bohemian—nice big house (broad floorboards, big fireplaces)…. We smoked pot, wore dashikis and love beads, and frugged ourselves into a lather while the Beatles and Janis Joplin sang away on the hi-fi set. I was happy enough to lick the sugar of the counterculture; it was the pill of antiwar, anti-administration, anti-‘imperialist’ protest that I found oddly bitter.” He notes that the frugging technocrats et al. of his acquaintance simply sloughed off the war as an “administration blunder.” But writers, artists, even the very voices to whose sound Updike frugged, began very early to object to the war, while “I whose stock in trade as an American author included an intuition into the mass consciousness and an identification with our national fortunes—thought it sad that our patriotic myth of invincible virtue was crashing, and shocking that so many Americans were gleeful at the crash.” This is worthy of Nixon at his unctuous best; yet to give that canny old villain his due, Nixon wouldn’t have believed a word he was saying. Incidentally, who was “gleeful” at so much mindless carnage? And what honest citizen would not be grateful that a “myth” of any kind, no matter how “patriotic,” be dispelled?

  When intellectuals, for want of any other word, were asked to contribute their views to a book called Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, Updike admitted that he was “uncomfortable” about our military adventure, but wondered “how much of the discomfort has to do with its high cost, in lives and money, and how much with its moral legitimacy.” This is wondrously callous. Of course, television had not yet shown us too many lives, much less money, being lost on prime time, but Updike weighs them as nothing in the balance when compared to the moral decision made by our elected leaders, who must know best—otherwise they would not be our elected leaders. Loyal to authority, he favors intervention “if it does some good,” because “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.” But the American government had stopped the Vietnamese from holding such elections a decade earlier, because, as President Eisenhower noted in his memoirs, North and South Vietnam would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh and “we could not allow that.” Updike’s ignorance—innocence, to be kind—is not very reassuring, even when he echoes Auden on how “i
t is foolish to canvass writers upon political issues.” Our views, as he says, “have no more authority than those of any reasonably well-educated citizen.” Certainly, the views of a writer who knew nothing of the political situation in Vietnam weren’t worth very much, but, as an American writer identified with our national fortunes, Updike does acknowledge that writers are supposed to be attuned to the human as well as to the moral aspects of engaging in war, particularly one so far from our shores, so remote from our interests. As Updike’s wife at the time told him, “It’s their place.” But by then it was too late. Mild Rabbit had metamorphosed into March Hare.

  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….” Butit 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.