Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Than public means, which public manners breeds—

  and adds this comment: “All the tragedy of the fastidious man who has to make his living in the theatre is in that last unforgettable line.”

  Perhaps it needed the rise of a bourgeois audience to generate a fully conscious conflict between the artist’s needs and manners and his public’s. While we are aware that the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and, to a lesser extent, that of Michelangelo were led into many aborted and ephemeral projects by their aristocratic and papal patrons, it is not until Rembrandt that an artist pursues and improves his art at the distinct price of leaving his patronage behind. As Rembrandt’s painting became broader, rougher, more daring, and ever more deeply humane, his commissions from the solid Dutch burghers dried up. What did they want with these light-encrusted portraits of wrinkled Amsterdam Jews, these Biblical scenes featuring big-bellied, unmistakably middle-aged women? They wanted, very sensibly, idealized portraits of themselves, with no more psychological depth than was needed to make the likeness vivid.

  Another writer with distinguished Albany connections, Henry James, enjoyed the most sustained and rounded career of any American novelist, yet he, too, could be said to have outdistanced his public. Though his fluent style and tireless intelligence won him in his early twenties the loyalty of editors, his audience was at best limited, and his efforts to widen it proved futile; his attempt, for five years, to write for the London theatre ended in disaster—he came onto the stage after the premier performance of Guy Domville in 1895 and was unmistakably booed—and as his style became more ornate and his plots more rarefied his novels passed in many quarters for curiosities, the butt of parodies and patronizing reviews. The New York edition of his fiction, whose prefaces and revisions formed a labor of literary love and self-summation without parallel in the annals of the novel, was described by James in the last year of his life as “really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done to it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid to it.” As to his material rewards, James added, “No more commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and all—they of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved.” Throughout his magnificently productive and thoughtful career, he needed for sustenance his share of the fortune amassed here in Albany by his Irish immigrant grandfather.

  But at least James had no difficulty getting published; William Kennedy, who is among us tonight as this city’s foremost literary exponent and ornament, whose novel Ironweed won two of its year’s three main prizes for fiction, has confided in accepting one of them that this novel was rejected by publishers thirteen times. The annals of modernism abound in such horror stories: no less a first reader than André Gide turned down, for Éditions Gallimard, Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s sublime Remembrance of Things Past, whose publication Proust then undertook to finance himself; and not only did James Joyce’s Ulysses have to be privately printed in France, but his exemplary book of short stories, Dubliners, now standard fare for high-school students, went unpublished for ten years while Irish and English printers dithered over a few of its excessively accurate details.

  Now, how does this make us feel, here in 1985? Superior, I think, and anxious. Superior because obviously we, had we been in the audience, would not have booed poor Henry James; we, had we been editorially empowered, would have accepted Ironweed, and Swann’s Way; we, had we been alive in 1851, would have recognized Moby-Dick to be the great American epic it is. And anxious because we naturally wish to shelter authors, in their selfless delicacy and rapture, from the crass vagaries of obtuse editors, obtuser reviewers, and still obtuser book-buyers. One approach is to fund governmental and academic sponsorship of the arts. In 1965 Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into being the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities; in 1984 the Senate-Assembly of your great state of New York, Governor Cuomo assenting, passed an act stating that “the general welfare of the people of the state will be enhanced by the establishment of a center devoted to writing and the allied arts,” some specified objectives of which center are to hire writers, offer scholarships, foster coöperation among writers’ programs and workshops, offer programs for the teaching of the craft of writing, and, even, to “offer at least one lecture annually by a distinguished writer on an aspect of the creative imagination which will further the objectives of the institute’s programs and which will enrich the community’s exposure to the arts.”

  One wonders, really, whether such a proposed whirlwind of worthiness will ever do more than provide a few sinecures and some cheerful fellowship for writers who otherwise might have to develop a new profession. The more widespread solution, to bourgeois pro-art anxiety in the wake of modernism, has been academic patronage. On this recourse, as it pertains to the art of music, Mr. Richard Sennett was recently eloquent in last year’s December Harper’s magazine:

  The emergence of the university as the primary patron of and shelter for the artist, a transformation that occurred in America, Great Britain, and, to a lesser degree, the rest of Western Europe after the Second World War, profoundly changed the conditions under which artistic experimentation occurred. This was true not only in music but also in dance and theatre, as well as in literature and the visual arts. It represented a new stage in the social history of art: the artist was protected from the stupidity, the desire for pleasure, tears, and amusement, the wavering attention and sudden, unpredictable enthusiasms of an audience—which is no more and no less than a spoiled mixture of humanity itself. In 1958 the composer Milton Babbitt wrote an article for High Fidelity that the magazine decided to call “Who Cares If You Listen?” The title was an apt, unvarnished description of the mentality of tenured art: the artist should be thought of as a researcher, and his listeners, if any, should feel the same thrill that people at a dinner party feel when an honored guest deigns to explain what earned him the Nobel Prize in physics.

  Mr. Sennett goes on to doubt that the results of such a tenured art have been, at least in music, very wonderful, or even, as one might expect, very adventurous: “Security brought about a new kind of provincialism, the provincialism of the college town.… And so avant-garde became predictable. It was a logical turn of events, once the campus salon replaced the music hall.”

  The situation as described is perhaps an extreme one. The homely art of fiction, with its roots in penny journalism and the common coin of spoken language, could never become so sequestered; nor, in my opinion, should it. The creative imagination is not born in a vacuum. Its first impulses bloom under the stimulus of parental and institutional praise, and even the most precocious musical genius needs a piano in the house and, now, records and tapes. Creativity, as I construe it, is a tripartite phenomenon. There is the artist, keen to express himself and make an impression. But there also has to be a genre, a pre-existent form or type of object to which the prospective artist’s first relation was that of consumer, the pleasure of his consumption extending itself into the ambition to be a producer. And attached to that genre and inextricable from its growth is the audience that finds in the contents of this form some cause for consolation, amusement, or enlightenment. In Pompeii, racy frescoes served a purpose; in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, wall paintings became necessary furniture. In the nineteenth century, novels developed a wide public, and Mr. Sennett’s description of the plight and progress of classical music affords an interesting parallel: he says, “In the nineteenth century, problems in communication arose because of the moral expectations the bourgeoisie had of art. Art, it was held, could refine taste, could remove one from the sordid world of small-mindedness and material striving. The Romantic musicians struggled constantly against these restraints of ‘good taste.’ ”

  Art, then, became, for the hard-working bourgeoisie, a relief from life rather than, as for pre-capitalist tribesmen, an explanation and intensification of it. To an extent, the arts survive as an instrument and emblem of social improvement
: one goes to the museum, and concerts, and reads books, because other nice people do. One attends college partly to get the knack of the arts, so one will move at ease among other people who have mastered the same knack. Art functions as grease in the social wheels. Banks and corporations are now among the chief purchasers of contemporary paintings, which hang in their offices not only as a possibly sound investment for themselves but as a kind of soothing visual Muzak to lull the customers, to create an atmosphere of play that alleviates the terrible seriousness with which money offers itself to our management. The theatrical arts serve now as they have done for centuries as backdrop to courtships and seductions on the private as well as the business level. Art is associated with refinement, and refinement with wealth, and wealth with power.

  People once read Fanny Burney and Thackeray to learn about manners and decorum in the social class a notch or two above their own; one of the charms, certainly, of going to the movies in the Thirties and Forties was seeing how the rich lived, in their penthouses, with their tuxedos and butlers and silver cigarette cases. The recent success on television of Dynasty again demonstrates that the rich, who always look well in their clothes and always find parking places in front of hotels, remain fascinating—supermen and wonder women of the consumer society. But people who read novels now do so, I suspect, more to learn how other people act in bed than at the table; our fantasies run less toward palaces and penthouses than toward the violence and paranoia of the international thriller.

  People look to the arts, in any case, to supplement their lives, and when a genre ceases to provide supplements self-evidently desirable, then uneasy philanthropic and legislative effort to encourage the art, to foster its perpetuation and ensure its survival, enter in. Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines, and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct; they exist in our culture unaccredited, unrespectable, and un-sponsored, except by popular demand, like the novel in the nineteenth century, like the drama in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. An art form does not determine itself from abstract or intrinsic causes; it is shaped by the technology and appetite of the time. Very quickly, a dust of nostalgia and scholarship can deceptively accumulate upon a form, so that it seems to have been always dusty. Already, learned societies devote themselves to the early history of the comic strip, and the Hollywood movies of the studio era, turned out as giant artifacts by so-called film factories, can now be seen to have artistic qualities and, more surprisingly, an artistic integrity lacking in the much more artistically self-conscious movies of today. There comes a moment in the evolution of art when a certain thing cannot any more be done; Busby Berkeley musicals could not be produced at contemporary wage-rates, and we cannot now, except with a great effort of mimicry, produce images with the texture of those Victorian block-prints that, until the invention of photogravure, were turned out by the tens of thousands. So, in the collage-narratives of Max Ernst and Donald Barthelme, these prints become art. Qualities that once seemed neutral and inevitable are the second time around revealed as full of the passion of the time, as declared by a style that in retrospect brims with strangeness.

  Now, where does this rather fatalistic and determinist overview of art leave the individual creative imagination? The creative imagination, I would say, functions with a certain indispensable innocence within its implacable context. Ever renewed as each generation emerges from childhood, it wants to please. It wants to please more or less as it has been pleased, by the art that touched it in its formative years. Already, a generation of novelists flourishes, Stephen King foremost, that has been deeply penetrated by the narrative vocabulary of television; I cannot feel more than mildly alarmed, since my own generation was enslaved to the movies. The creative imagination wants to please its problematical audience, and it does so by sharing what is most precious to it. A small child’s first instinct vis-à-vis possessions is to hug what it has tight to itself; its socialization and its creativity begin when it pushes a lima bean or a slobbered toy truck toward a sibling or playmate. Perhaps we can take this development a step further back: Freud somewhere claims that a child’s first gifts, to its parents, are its feces, whose presentation (in the appropriate receptacle) is roundly praised. And, as in this primal benefaction, the writer extrudes his daily product while sitting down, on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain. The artist who works in words and anecdotes, images and facts wants to share with us nothing less than his digested life, his life as he conceives it, in the memories and fantasies most precious, however obscurely, to him. Let me illustrate all this with a brief example from the creative process I know best, my own.

  In 1958 I was a young man of twenty-six who had recently presumed to set himself up in a small New England town as a free-lance writer. My obligations to my career and my family, as I had framed them, were to sell six short stories a year to The New Yorker magazine. I had already written and sold a number based upon my Pennsylvania boyhood and my young married life in New York City; one winter day I happened to remember, with a sudden simultaneous sense of loss and recapture, the New Year’s Eve parties my old high-school crowd used to have at a certain home, and how even after most of us had gone off to college we for several years continued the custom, which now served as a kind of reunion. The hero of my story is a college sophomore, already committed to a college girlfriend and to aspirations that will take him forever away from his home town. He tells us of a moment in this hectic gathering of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds:

  The party was the party I had been going to all my life, beginning with Ann Mahlon’s first Hallowe’en party, that I attended as a hot, lumbering, breathless, and blind Donald Duck. My mother had made the costume, and the eyes kept slipping, and were further apart than my eyes, so that even when the clouds of gauze parted, it was to reveal the frustrating depthless world seen with one eye. Ann, who because her mother loved her so much as a child had remained somewhat childish, and I and another boy and girl who were not involved in any romantic crisis went down into Schuman’s basement to play circular ping-pong. Armed with paddles, we stood each at a side of the table and when the ball was stroked ran around it counterclockwise, slapping the ball and screaming. To run better the girls took off their heels and ruined their stockings on the cement floor. Their faces and arms and shoulder sections became flushed, and when a girl lunged forward toward the net the stiff neckline of her semi-formal dress dropped away and the white arcs of her brassiere could be glimpsed cupping fat, and when she reached high her shaved armpit gleamed like a bit of chicken skin. An earring of Ann’s flew off and the two connected rhinestones skidded to lie near the wall, among the Schumans’ power mower and the badminton poles and empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles. All these images were immediately lost in the whirl of our running; we were dizzy before we stopped. Ann leaned on me getting back into her shoes.

  The story is called “The Happiest I’ve Been.” It was accepted and paid for, and has been reprinted in a few anthologies. While writing it, I had a sensation of breaking through, as if through a thin sheet of restraining glass, to material, to truth, previously locked up. I was excited, and when my wife of those years read the first draft, she said, “This is exciting.” Now, what was exciting? There is no great violence or external adventure in the story, no extraordinary characters. The abrupt purchase on lived life, I suggest, is exciting. In 1958 I was at just the right distance from the night in Shillington, Pennsylvania, when 1952 became 1953; I still remembered and cared, yet was enough distant to get a handle on the memories, to manipulate them into fiction.

  That is part one of creativity: the ego and its self-expression. For part two, the genre, there was the American short story, The New Yorker short story indeed, of which many had been written in the decades preceding 1958, but none, my happy delusion was, quite in this way about quite this sort of material. Non-Southe
rn small towns and teen-agers were both, my impression was, customarily treated with condescension, or satirically, in the fiction of the Fifties; the indictments of provincial life by Sinclair Lewis and Ring Lardner were still in the air. My mission was to stand up and cry, “No, here is life, to be taken as seriously as any other kind.” By this light tiny details, such as the shaved armpit gleaming like a bit of chicken skin or the two triangular punctures in an empty oil can, acquire the intensity of proclamation. Things turn symbolic; hidden meanings emerge. The blurred sexuality of this playful moment is ominous, for it is carrying the participants away from their childhoods, into the dizzying mystery of time.

  As to the third part of the creative process, the audience beyond the genre, there was The New Yorker reader of my imagination, pampered and urban, needing a wholesome small-town change from his then-customary diet of Westchester-adultery stories and reminiscences of luxurious Indian or Polish childhoods. I believed, that is, that there was a body of my fellow Americans to whom these modest doings in Pennsylvania would be news.

  Such was the state of my imagination as I wrote this story; actually, many stories not unlike it appear in the magazine now, and perhaps always have: but in my possibly mistaken sense of things the material was fresh, fresh to me and fresh to the world, and authentic. By authentic I mean actual. For the creative imagination, as I conceive it, is wholly parasitic upon the real world—what used to be called Creation. Creative excitement, and a sense of useful work, has invariably and only come to me when I felt I was transferring, with a lively accuracy, some piece of experienced reality to the printed page. Those two triangular holes and that bit of chicken skin are pearls of great price, redeemed from the featureless sweep of bygone experience. The wish to do justice to the real world compels language into those semi-transparent layers that make a style. No style or form exists in the abstract; whatever may be true in painting or music, there is no such thing as abstract writing. Words even when shattered into nonsense struggle to communicate meanings to us; and behind the most extreme modernist experiments with the language of fiction—Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; the late writing of Gertrude Stein; the automatic writing of Dada—some perception about the nature of reality seeks embodiment.