by Begley, Adam
He certainly wasn’t doing it for the money: The New Republic paid very poorly. After receiving a paltry eight cents per word for a literary piece in 1975, he complained. The editors came back to him with an offer of $250 per review, not nearly enough to keep him on board. But writing about art was a different matter. He was happy to review the Renoir show for a tiny fraction of what The New Yorker would have paid for a book review of similar length. Starting in 1990 he switched his allegiance to The New York Review of Books (despite several sharply negative reviews of his work that had appeared in its pages), where the pay was better and the circulation wider.
On trips to Manhattan, the Updikes sometimes stayed with Michael Arlen, who lived with his wife, Alice, in a sumptuous apartment on Fifth Avenue, a dozen blocks north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the luxurious accommodation at “the Arlen Arms” couldn’t quite make up for what Updike saw as the city’s sad decline. He wrote in 1987, “I feel confident in saying that disadvantages of New York life which led me to leave have intensified rather than abated, and that the city which Le Corbusier described as a magnificent disaster is less and less magnificent.” If the tone of this pronouncement seems peevish, it chimes with a number of grievances nurtured during the decade, grumbles about conglomerate ownership of publishing houses, the shrinking pool of American readers, and hostile feminist critics.
It echoes, too, the caustic tone of the novel he began even before the publication of Witches. Roger’s Version (originally titled Majesty) is narrated by a latter-day incarnation of Hester Prynne’s cuckolded husband, the sinister Roger Chillingworth. The modern-day Roger, called Lambert and also a cuckold (at least in his imagination), is a depressive divinity school professor with a “sullen temper” and a mordant wit who debates theological points great and small with a young computer scientist intent on discovering scientific proof of the existence of God. Once again, Updike is playing with the love triangle from The Scarlet Letter: Roger imagines in pornographic detail an affair between the computer programmer, Dale Kohler (the Dimmesdale figure), and his wife, Esther (as in Hester). The novel stretches in directions Hawthorne could not have conceived, and required extensive research into the workings of a computer lab, theories about the origin of both organic and inorganic matter, and heresies of the Early Church.
To achieve the “informational abundance” of this ambitious, formidably intelligent novel, Updike turned to experts amused by the prospect of assisting a famous writer. He consulted no less an authority than Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, who took a keen interest in the idea of a computer whiz trying to catch a glimpse of God courtesy of binary code and graphic interface. Dertouzos advised him on technical details as well as larger scientific issues and vetted portions of the manuscript. He told Updike about physicists in his lab who were trying to explain all physical phenomena with computational theories, young men who liked to “play God” at their terminals—real-life counterparts of Dale Kohler. Updike studied articles on cosmology in Scientific American and Sky & Telescope. He exchanged letters with a college classmate, Jacob Neusner, director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University, concerning Genesis Rabbah and the writings of Tertullian, subject of Roger’s scholarly investigations.
Roger’s Version reshapes The Scarlet Letter’s romantic triangle into a quadrangle—a configuration more appropriate to a novel profoundly invested in binary systems and computation, and more congenial to an author already deeply invested in foursomes. Character number four is Verna, daughter of Roger’s half sister; nineteen and a single mother of a biracial child, she’s paired with her uncle, whom she calls Nunc, in binary opposition to Dale and Esther. Verna lives in a housing project in a dilapidated precinct of a northeastern city so obviously based on greater Boston that it seems oddly coy of Updike to leave it unnamed. As part of his research for the novel, he wandered through unsavory Cambridge neighborhoods, notepad in hand, scribbling observations about the clothes and hairstyles of the citizens he passed on the sidewalk. He took snapshots, gritty black-and-white vistas of urban decay. He pored over government documents on food stamp eligibility. Having decided after Witches to “attempt a city novel”—this was in fact his first novel set in a major metropolis—he paid meticulous attention to the cityscape, taking his notepad with him to the top of the Prudential Tower and scrawling notes labeled according to the points of the compass. Making good use of fresh data, he sent Roger and Verna to eat lunch in a “crassly swank” rotating restaurant atop a skyscraper; their dialogue is punctuated by detailed topographical descriptions of the 360-degree panorama.
The novel skips back and forth across the socioeconomic divides of Reagan’s America. Roger lives in a leafy academic enclave near the university; his neighbors do aerobics on their redwood deck to an upbeat Bach fugue. In a grim neighborhood on the other side of town, Verna and eighteen-month-old Paula live on welfare in a yellow-brick building that smells of “urine and damp cement and rubber-based paint, paint repeatedly applied and repeatedly defaced.” Lusting after his nubile niece, inching his way to incest, Roger pays several visits to their dismal one-room apartment. Before the flirtation is consummated, Verna announces that she’s pregnant again, and Roger convinces her to have an abortion. Now thoroughly entangled, he agrees to take her to the clinic. On the appointed day, he chauffeurs her “beyond the project, deeper into that section of the city where [he] never used to go.” In the dingy anteroom, surveying the other “prospective mothers,” he spots a black girl with wet cheeks and an otherwise impassive face, “an African mask, her lips and jaw majestically protruding.” Later, seeing that her tears have dried, he marvels at this “princess of a race that travels from cradle to grave at the expense of the state, like the aristocrats of old.” It’s typically mischievous of Updike to insert a flagrantly provocative sentence about race and welfare into a scene that puts liberal thinking on abortion (which he endorsed) into action: Roger believes that Verna should terminate her pregnancy on the grounds that the abortionist would be “killing an unborn child to try to save a born one.” When Verna’s habit of smacking Paula lands the child in the emergency room with a broken leg, the wisdom of preventing any increase in a small dysfunctional family currently subsisting “at the expense the state” seems unimpeachable. (Small comfort to Updike’s liberal readers.)
Despite the sociology and the scientific bells and whistles, despite the long, abstruse passages devoted to Dale’s doomed experiment on the computer lab’s VAX 8600, Roger’s Version is a book about theology; “an essay about kinds of belief,” Updike labeled it. While little Paula is staying overnight in the hospital “under observation,” Verna tempts Roger onto her musty futon, where he’s graced with an epiphany:
When I was spent and my niece released, we lay together on a hard floor of the spirit, partners in incest, adultery, and child abuse. We wanted to be rid of each other, yet perversely clung, lovers, miles below the ceiling, our comfort being that we had no further to fall. Lying there with Verna, gazing upward, I saw how much majesty resides in our continuing to love and honor God even as He inflicts blows upon us—as much as resides in the silence He maintains so that we may enjoy and explore our human freedom. This was my proof of His existence, I saw—the distance to the impalpable ceiling, the immense distance measuring our abasement.
Verna’s abortion doesn’t figure in Roger’s tally of the couple’s sins—sins that reveal, paradoxically, the majesty of faith. This is a faith that thrives on the absence, or at least the silence and distance, of the divinity. The theological motto Roger lives by is distilled from his favorite theologian, Karl Barth: the god who stood at the end of some human way would not be God. Dale’s technology-driven attempt to flush out our creator by digitally replicating creation is trumped by a truth perceived in abasement and founded on faith alone. That, anyway, is the gospel according to Roger.
Reviews of the novel were respectful and for the most part favorable, with much pr
aise for Updike’s prodigious capacity for assimilating scientific knowledge. But one critic, Frederick Crews, a professor of English at Berkeley and the author of an influential Freudian exegesis of Hawthorne’s work, took the opportunity to write a scathing essay in The New York Review of Books lamenting what he saw as the wrong turn Updike took sometime in the sixties, a swerve that eventually transformed him, on the evidence of Roger’s Version, into a crank and a militant snob. Crews accused Roger (and Updike) of “class-based misanthropy.” Leaving poor Roger out of it, he also complained of the author’s “belligerent, almost hysterical callousness” and his “outbursts of misogyny”; he called Updike “morally obtuse” as well as “morbid and curmudgeonly”; he hinted darkly that he was a closet nihilist. Updike, in sum, bore the brunt of Crews’s displeasure; Roger got off lightly.
What turned Updike into such a miserable, twisted soul? According to Crews, the damage came from Updike’s having “radically divorced his notion of Christian theology from Christian ethics.” He also divorced his wife “after twenty-one years together,” a fact Crews seems to have gleaned from the “many stories and novels that dwell upon that trauma.” It’s not entirely clear how fiction alone could have formed Crews’s opinions about the author’s private life, yet he confidently asserts that Updike quashed the voice of his conscience, while at the same time clinging to a “me-first Salvationism.” In his conclusion, Crews locates “a certain bleakness at the center” of Updike’s mind, which is perhaps less gratuitously insulting than John Aldridge’s claim that “Mr. Updike has nothing to say.” Bleakness may be preferable to blankness, but both essays reek of personal animus and willfully punitive misreading.
Attempts at character assassination by reputable critics are alarming but rarely fatal. Updike survived Aldridge when he was young and relatively unknown. By the time Crews published his mean-spirited polemic, Updike’s work had been reviewed in newspapers and magazines more than two thousand times, with the raves easily outnumbering the rest. An author of his stature could afford to shrug off even the ugliest assault. When Joyce Carol Oates commiserated over Crews, Updike calmly replied that being called a racist curmudgeon made him feel quite detached from himself. And yet there was a hint of gloom in Updike’s remarks at the time of the novel’s publication, a murmur of discontent. Perhaps Crews had seen the New York Times interview in which the novelist volunteered that his fiction contained his “sense of futility and of doom and of darkness . . . of death being behind everything in life, a sort of black backdrop.” Bleak indeed.* Was he unhappy at age fifty-three, at the peak of his success, living with his new wife in his splendid white mansion with its distant look at the sea?
A broken-down F. Scott Fitzgerald, having decided to give up trying to be a person (“It was strange to have no self”) and become “a writer only,” declared that “the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.” Updike’s own view was considerably sunnier. His memoirs, begun while he was writing Roger’s Version, end with an essay, entitled “Being a Self Forever,” that includes testimony to his “good-tempered” disposition. He presents himself as someone whose natural state is a qualified happiness, his good temper balanced against a recurring sense of being “smothered and confined, misunderstood and put-upon.” He was not without complaints. Two of the first four chapters of Self-Consciousness are devoted to physical afflictions: his psoriasis, his stammer, and his asthma. One chapter is devoted to the awkward business of “not being a dove” during the Vietnam War (and to his bad teeth). But all these troubles were overcome, the various ailments treated or brought under control, and the ideological tension diffused by the fact that the war eventually ended. In other words, despite his cheery disposition, he was quite often annoyed by circumstances that he recognized and understood—but that made him grumpy all the same.
“Happiness,” he writes in Self-Consciousness, “is best seen out of the corner of the eye.” Yet he goes on to take a forensic look at one blissful moment, a walk back up the drive from his mailbox to his house on a sunny Sunday morning. He lists the components of his happiness: postcoital satisfaction (“My wife and I had just made love, successfully all around, which at my age”—his mid-fifties—“occasions some self-congratulation”); pleasure in his property (“a cobalt-blue sky precisely fitted against the dormered roof-line of my house”); a keen interest in his professional activities (“preparing the final draft of this long-savored and -contemplated book”); eager anticipation of an afternoon visit from Liz, Tete, and his two grandsons (the second, Kwame, still an infant); and the prospect of his “invariable” breakfast, granola and orange juice. “Can happiness,” he asks, “be simply a matter of orange juice?”
He notes that his sense of well-being is complicated by his “inner remove,” the writer’s habit of stepping back and squinting at everything, including his own bourgeois contentment. If America, as he once memorably put it, “is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” his job was to unravel the conspiracy and skeptically examine its constituent parts. He felt disdain for his well-protected life, his careful management of his worldly affairs, his self-pampering concern for tranquillity and material comfort. Adding a theological dimension to his disdain, he quotes from the Gospel: “He that gains his life shall lose it.”
Although Crews suggested that Updike’s religious beliefs were turning him into an insufferable grouch, and although Updike himself conceded that when he wrote about organized religion in his novels, the tone was sometimes “kind of acid,” his personal faith had in fact been less troublesome to him since his late thirties, and was now the source of some security, a mostly reliable reassurance. Never robust, his faith at least began to have the virtue of longevity. He held fast to the idea that God was the “guarantor” of his existence, “a protector and a reference point.” He held fast to crisis theology, his views unaltered since the days when he countered paralyzing dread by immersing himself in Barth and Kierkegaard. Visiting Florence with Martha in the fall of 1999, he woke up in the night feeling “fearful and adrift”; he prayed for sleep. A sudden, furious thunderstorm came up and comforted him with the sense of “exterior activity”; he felt that “the burden of being was shared.” The storm, he decided, was “an answered prayer.” These episodes of late-night panic grew less and less frequent over the decades. In his early seventies he reported nothing more distressing than the odd anxious moment at four in the morning. Perhaps the mere endurance of his beliefs and his faithful attendance at church helped cure him. Perhaps, as he aged, his dread of dying and being dead gradually lost its cruel edge, the fear, blunted by passing years, too familiar at last to frighten.
On that Sunday morning when he experienced a sudden access of happiness strolling up the driveway from the mailbox, he was wearing, he tells us, his “churchgoing clothes.” He and Martha had joined St. John’s Episcopalian Church in Beverly Farms. A replica of an English country church set back from the road behind a low stone wall, it was just a brisk ten-minute walk from the house. John almost always went on his own, and favored a pew on the baptistery side. A frequent lector at services, he occasionally supplied introductions to the lessons he read. But though he helped out with St. John’s annual book fair, he was no longer an active churchman as he had been at the Congregational church in Ipswich. He dodged the committee work—“I have stayed out,” as he put it, “of the business end of St. John’s.”
Golf, another reassuring constant in his Beverly Farms life, provided equally essential uplift. Sometimes, choosing the fairway over the pew at St. John’s, he arranged his second round of the week for a Sunday morning. Having joined the venerable Myopia Hunt Club, he now mostly played on its gorgeous, undulating, tree-lined links. His foursome might have a sandwich in the clubhouse looking out over the eighteenth hole, before their round or after. The dining room, with its understated old-school club décor, became a favorite spot for family dinners—on John’s birthday, or if Linda was visiting from Plowville, special occasions
his children remember as relaxed and jolly.
“RELAXED AND JOLLY” is what his next novel, S., should have been, to judge from the premise. The concluding installment of his Scarlet Letter trilogy, it’s a chance for Hester—reinvented as Sarah Worth, a rich, snobby housewife from the North Shore of Boston who leaves her philandering husband for the spiritual adventure of life at an Arizona ashram—finally to have her say. S. is funny in places and sharply satiric, but for the most part it’s thin and stretched and uncomfortably manic, as though Updike were straining for an effect beyond his reach, or trying to reconcile incompatible aims. He had hoped to pay fitting tribute to Hester Prynne, whom he thought of as the only flesh-and-blood female in American fiction before Henry James’s heroines.
