Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  I do not want to repeat here what is spelled out in the long afterword to Buchanan Dying, and in a number of paragraphs on Buchanan to be found in my two most recent non-fiction collections, Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999). Buchanan was a Pennsylvanian, and one of the history books’ losers: these were my incentives to love him enough to risk research. It was pleasant and, the mind ever accumulating rust, salutary for me to delve into the history of antebellum America, and to feel how one’s ignorance widens along with one’s researches, wherein book would lead to book ad infinitum. When I thought I knew enough, I began; of course more could be known, but the kind of fact which a fiction writer depends upon, the witnessed and experienced particular, does not come swimming out of memory where memory, however saturated with texts, has never been. The fearful effort of constructing a simulacrum of, say, Ann Coleman’s suicide—itself far from historically certain—produces a glaze, a sweat on the surface of it quite absent, one hopes, from my narrator’s freely recalled details of the Eastern United States in the mid-Seventies. And yet, just as I am chastised by Professor Boyer for not knowing enough of the “social history” (whatever that is—isn’t all history social?) of Buchanan’s lifetime, a young reviewer called David Lipsky chastised me for getting wrong many details of the Ford Administration years (1974–77). Apple computers did not exist, he wrote me, and futons were not yet fashionable; video games were not evolved beyond the rudimentary, nonchirping Pong; boom boxes had yet to appear; and Pachelbel’s Canon in C, the theme song of Genevieve and Alf’s romance, did not become popular until 1980, when it made the soundtrack of the film Ordinary People.

  I could swear that my informant is wrong on some of these details, but where he is not, he bears out Alf’s assertion that he remembers nothing. We remember, certainly, less than we think, and the engines of distortion begin to work long before events pass into the distances of history. Journalists simplify what they learned an hour ago, eyewitnesses hallucinate, stenographers misspell, and each consciousness plays Hamlet in its own botched, truncated version of the drama. And there are nuances and elusive flavors in the living present, even the somewhat abstracted present of political events, that, like jellyfish, are too delicate to be lifted from the support of their vast momentary context; what will historians make of the Clinton/Monica/Starr/Hillary constellation, and contrive to know how the second presidential inauguration was both very serious and, in its workings and significance to the public, not serious at all—a watery farce of personality tics transposed to the national stage? The worst-case scenario, history may forget, would have given us President Al Gore, a less-than-earthshaking eventuality.10

  My own life story has the quirk that, for almost the entire period of the Ford Administration, my concerns were so exclusively personal that I subscribed to no newspaper and learned of national events (which luckily were in a minor key) quite by the way. A quirk of Buchanan’s Administration is that, between Lincoln’s election in early November 1860 and the incumbent’s surrender of the presidency in March 1861, an almost unprecedentedly hectic atmosphere generated conferences of which a remarkably full record, in the form of memoirs and documents and letters, exists. The Cabinet meetings in my novel are taken from the record. The drama of a legalistic, compromise-minded President elected by Southern interests being brought, crisis by crisis, to a minimum sticking point in defense of the Union, and the drama, furthermore, of a man early traumatized in life being led, through a long lifetime of cautious and evasive dealing, into the center of the supreme national trauma—such drama is there, in Buchanan’s story, whether or not I had the wit to bring it out.

  Some fakery is present in any fiction; among my own novels I count one set in the African Sahel, where I have never been, and one set in a Brazil I never experienced, and most recently an excursion into medieval Denmark. These are all as real as I could make them, while aware, on the reader’s behalf, that their reality is in a large proportion fantastic. The act of writing and the format of fiction in themselves aërate the most mundane reconstruction with the fizz of the unreal. We shorten, we skirt, we skim, all to deliver back to the reader his own reality. Of the two worlds of Memories of the Ford Administration, my own pleasure and recognition attach more readily to the contemporary one, as, for example, in the scenes concerning Alf’s involvement with Ann Arthrop. I am charmed by the little illuminations they generate as they unfold: “Ann answered my knock instantly, as if poised by the door; she was already in a bathrobe, in a room where but one dim bedside lamp, its parchment shade decorated with a pointing Labrador, added its beige glow to the moonlighted pressing on the drawn curtains.” A glimmer ricocheting off the surface of known things is where the fiction writer finds his poetry and his raison d’être. He rotates the contemporary details his mind has unwittingly stored. Yet I could not have written the episodes of the Ford era without the frame of the NNEAAH,11 of Retrospect, of my impudent assumption of the historian’s robes.

  I do not, may I add, consider Allan Nevins’s prose purple,12 or anything but a regal shade of that color; I emerged from my own labors in mauve ink awed by the ability of narrative historians like Nevins and Roy Nichols and Philip Klein to take all their vast musty reading and give it the momentum and particularity of fiction. Insofar as history lives in the telling, and persuades us we are there, it is a species of fiction.

  LETTER to Rosemary Herbert, Book Review Editor of the Boston Herald, anent Gertrude and Claudius (2000).

  Thanks for your interest, and for your questions. In my limited experience of interviews, spoken ones never take less than an hour and leave you limp. There is always the anxiety that what you say is not being heard or understood, even with a tape recorder going. In any case it becomes a social experience rather than a literary experience. So let me respond in this way to your questions, more or less in order.

  In fact it was pleasant, for a writer accustomed to isolation, to be in Shakespeare’s company, and to have him as a collaborator, much as he collaborated with the authors of old and foreign plots to make the bulk of his plays. The larkiness of the project became quickly absorbed in the hard work it entailed—reading the pre-Shakespearean sources of Hamlet, working up the Middle Ages (castles, costumes), and trying to make sense of the play itself, which is not easy. It is full of inconsistencies, blithe elisions, and loose ends. I wanted my little novel to dovetail smoothly into the beginning of Shakespeare’s action, and to contain nothing in utter contradiction to the text, though I invented a complicity between Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius that underlies the play rather than lies on its surface.

  Yes, writing is risk-taking, and you are never quite certain how well it will work out. But in that it resembles every earthly enterprise.

  Just as Shakespeare had to give Elsinore a more or less Elizabethan cast, so I had to animate the plot with emotions that might be called suburban and modern. (I was reminded lately, by the way, that the word “suburbs” occurs in Shakespeare: Portia asks, “Dwell I but in the suburbs / Of your good pleasure?”) But the characters’ feelings became real to me in the context I created. The status of women in the Middle Ages possibly made Claudius’s possession of his dead brother’s queen as brutally matter-of-fact as his seizure of his brother’s crown; but Shakespeare didn’t see it that way, and neither did I.

  I love Gertrude, and always have. Everything she says is to the point, and much of it is witty. Her description of death, to her disturbed son—“Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die, / Passing through nature to eternity”—is so beautiful I used it as an epigraph for my novel Brazil, another attempt of mine to retell an old story. It wasn’t Shakespeare who saw her as “stewed in corruption,” it was her fastidious son.

  As to the voices, I couldn’t have them speak blank verse—it would become parody—but I did try to give their utterances something of the formal dignity and speedy concision of Shakespeare’s stage language. I curbed modern expressions, most regretfully when I struck out the eld
er Hamlet’s saying it was time his son came back from Wittenberg and “got real.”

  After a while, these imaginary houses and castles you construct for your characters become real to you, so that you move around in them with a friendly familiarity; but I wouldn’t call in an architect to examine the blueprints, or an inspector to check the wiring. Life in a Medieval Castle, by Joseph and Frances Gies, was a help, but in the end you must be your own designer. I liked the secret passageway, the way back, and the way her father’s oriel room became Gertrude’s private room—or “closet,” as Shakespeare says.

  Again, there are a number of guides to costume through the ages, and old Hollywood movies, whatever their defects in other regards, were often beautifully researched in details of dress. “Wadmal” is in the dictionary; and the arrival of silk in Northern Europe is an incident in my drama. Authentic ancient food is less frequently documented than clothes (and is hard to imagine, pre-refrigeration), but I came across a French book, A History of Food, by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, that was helpful. As with other details of bygone living, you do enough research to feel the ground solid under you, and then take your leap of imagination. Henry James thought the whole process was bogus, and he was no doubt right: the authenticity that the present has is sacrificed. But, then, even the present—which the writer must fashion, in the end, out of his own subjective experience—can include factual mistakes. I suspect some of my costumes in Gertrude and Claudius are too late for my timeframe, around A.D. 1250.

  Though Hamlet begins as if there is going to be a lot of political action, Shakespeare in the end made Elsinore the site of a domestic drama: an intensely verbal son “working through” his relation to his dead father and live mother and, through her, with the female sex. Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia is more shocking, to me, than Claudius’s usurpation. Claudius’s hopes of making it all good, and his love of Gertrude, and hers of him—in some productions she protects Claudius from Laertes and his mob with her body—are all there, in the play, asking for acknowledgment. My novel is an attempt to make the acknowledgment. Several Shakespeare commentaries, especially one by the Spanish thinker Salvador de Madariaga, helped me see that Hamlet is in fact the callous, egocentric villain of Hamlet.

  INTRODUCTION to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels (1995).

  The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow. An outsiderish literary stance is traditional; such masterpieces as Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn deal with marginal situations and eccentric, rootless characters; many American writers have gone into exile to find subjects of a congenial color and dignity. The Puritanism and practicality of the early settlers imposed a certain enigmatic dullness, it may be, upon the nation’s affective life and social texture. The minimization of class distinctions suppressed one of the articulating elements of European fiction, and a close, delighted grasp of the psychology of sexual relations—so important in French and English novels—came slowly amid the New World’s austerities. Insofar as a writer can take an external view of his own work, my impression is that the character of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was for me a way in—a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit’s eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight; his life, less defended and logocentric than my own, went places mine could not. As a phantom of my imagination, he was always, as the contemporary expression has it, there for me, willing to generate imagery and motion. He kept alive my native sense of wonder and hazard.

  A writer’s task is not to describe his work but to call it into being. Of these four related novels, I know principally—and that by the fallible light of recollection—what went into them, what stimuli and ambitions and months of labor. Each was composed at the end of a decade and published at the beginning of the next one; they became a kind of running report on the state of my hero and his nation, and their ideal reader became a fellow-American who had read and remembered the previous novels about Rabbit Angstrom. At some point between the second and third of the series, I began to visualize four completed novels that might together make a single coherent volume, a mega-novel. Now, thanks to Everyman’s Library, this volume exists, titled, as I had long hoped, with the name of the protagonist, an everyman who, like all men, was unique and mortal.

  Rabbit, Run was begun, early in 1959, with no thought of a sequel. Indeed, it was not yet clear to me, though I had one short novel to my credit, that I was a novelist at all. At the age of twenty-seven I was a short-story writer by trade, a poet and light-versifier on the side, and an ex-reporter for The New Yorker. I had come, two years before, to New England to try my luck at free-lancing. Rabbit, Run at first was modestly conceived as a novella, to form with another, The Centaur, a biune study of complementary moral types: the rabbit and the horse, the zigzagging creature of impulse and the plodding beast of stoic duty. Rabbit took off; as I sat at a little upright desk in a small corner room of the first house I owned, in Ipswich, Massachusetts, writing in soft pencil, the present-tense sentences accumulated and acquired momentum. It was a seventeenth-century house with a soft pine floor, and my kicking feet, during those excited months of composition, wore two bare spots in the varnish. The handwritten draft was completed, I noted at the end, on September 11, 1959. I typed it up briskly and sent it off to my publisher just as the decade ended and headed, with my family, to the then remote Caribbean island of Anguilla.

  There, after some weeks of tropical isolation, I received a basically heartening letter from my publisher, Alfred A. Knopf himself, indicating acceptance with reservations.13 The reservations turned out to be (he could tell me this only face to face, so legally touchy was the matter) sexually explicit passages that might land us—this was suggested with only a glint of irony—in jail. Books were still banned in Boston in those days; no less distinguished an author than Edmund Wilson had been successfully prosecuted, in New York State in 1946, for Memoirs of Hecate County. My models in sexual realism had been Wilson and D. H. Lawrence and Erskine Caldwell and James M. Cain and of course James Joyce, whose influence resounds, perhaps all too audibly, in the book’s several female soliloquies. Not wishing, upon reflection, to lose the publisher who made the handsomest books in America, and doubting that I could get a more liberal deal elsewhere, I did, while sitting at the elbow of a young lawyer evidently expert in this delicate area, consent to a number of excisions—not always the ones I would have expected. It was, I thought, a tactful and non-fatal operation. The American edition appeared toward the end of 1960 without legal incident; in England, Victor Gollancz asked for still more cuts and declined to publish the Knopf text as it was, but the youthful firm of André Deutsch did. The dirty-word situation was changing rapidly, with the legally vindicated publication of Lawrence’s Lady Chaterley’s Lover and Henry Milller’s Tropic of Cancer. Censorship went from retreat to rout, and when I asked Penguin Books, late in 1962, if I could make some emendations and restorations for their edition, they permissively consented. For ten pages a day that winter, sitting in a rented house in Antibes, France, I went through Rabbit, Run, restoring the cuts and trying to improve the prose throughout. This text was the one that appeared in the Modern Library (and eventually in Knopf hardcover); I have made a few further corrections and improvements for this printing. Rabbit, Run, in keeping with its jittery, indecisive protagonist, exists in more forms than any other novel of mine.

  Yet my intent was simple enough: to show a high-school athletic hero in the wake of his glory days. My father had been a high-school teacher, and one of his extracurricular duties was to oversee the ticket receipts for our basketball games. Accompanying him, then, at home and away, I saw a great deal of high-school basketball, and ten years later was still well imbued with its heroics, as they are thumpingly, sweatily enacted in the hotly lit intimacy of jam-packed high-school gymnasiums. Our Pennsylvania town of Shillington was littered
, furthermore, with the wrecks of former basketball stars, and a thematically kindred short story, “Ace in the Hole,” and poem, “Ex–Basketball Player,” had preceded Rabbit into print:

                 Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

                 He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46

                 He bucketed three hundred ninety points,

                 A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

                 I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

                 In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

  To this adolescent impression of splendor my adult years had added sensations of domestic interdependence and claustrophobia. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still-tight social weave. Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my only intention: the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our heart’s stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace. The title can be read as a piece of advice. (My echo of a British show tune from 1939, by Noel Gay and Ralph Butler, was unintentional; just recently I was given the sheet music of “Run, Rabbit,—Run!” and read the lyrics’ injunction “Don’t give the farmer his fun, fun, fun. / He’ll get by without his rabbit pie.”)