by John Updike
Some of the more far-out stories are unduly precious to me, but readers of Museums and Women will not find here the illustrations of pond life, Jurassic life, horse-harness technology, or the baluchitherium that adorned the relevant pages; after a long, would-be cartoonist’s flirtation with graphic elements, I have decided that pictures don’t mix with text. Text, left to its own devices, enjoys a life that floats free of any specific setting or format or pictographic attachments. Only a few Greek letters and a lone bar of music (in “Son”) have posed a challenge to the hardworking keyboarders of the volume at hand.
The technology reflected in these stories harks back to a time when automatic shifts were an automotive novelty and outdoor privies were still features of the rural landscape, and it stops well short of the advent of personal computers and ubiquitous cell phones. My generation, once called Silent, was, in a considerable fraction of its white majority, a fortunate one—“too young to be warriors, too old to be rebels,” as it is put in the story “I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me.” Born in the early Depression, at a nadir of the national birthrate, we included many only children given, by penny-pinching parents, piano lessons and a confining sense of shelter. We acquired in hard times a habit of work and came to adulthood in times when work paid off; we experienced when young the patriotic cohesion of World War II without having to fight the war. We were repressed enough to be pleased by the relaxation of the old sexual morality, without suffering much of the surfeit, anomie, and venereal disease of younger generations. We were simple and hopeful enough to launch into idealistic careers and early marriages, and pragmatic enough to adjust, with an American shrug, to the ebb of old certainties. Yet, though spared many of the material deprivations and religious terrors that had dogged our parents, and awash in a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, we continued prey to what Freud called “normal human unhappiness.”
But when has happiness ever been the subject of fiction? The pursuit of it is just that—a pursuit. Death and its adjutants tax each transaction. What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted. Discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear—these are the worthy, inevitable subjects. Yet our hearts expect happiness, as an underlying norm—“the fountain-light of all our day,” in Wordsworth’s words. Rereading, I found no lack of joy in these stories, though it arrives by the moment and not by the month, and no lack of affection and good will among characters caught in the human plight, the plight of limitation and mortality. Art hopes to sidestep mortality with feats of attention, of harmony, of illuminating connection, while enjoying, it might be said, at best a slower kind of mortality: paper yellows, language becomes old-fashioned, revelatory human news passes into general social wisdom. I could not but think, during this retrospective labor, of all those New Yorkers, a heedless broad Mississippi of print, in which my contributions among so many others appeared; they serviced a readership, a certain demographic episode, now passed into history—all those birch-shaded Connecticut mailboxes receiving, week after week, William Shawn’s notion of entertainment and instruction. What would have happened to me if William Shawn had not liked my work? Those first checks, in modest hundreds, added up and paid for my first automobile. Without The New Yorker, I would have had to walk. I would have existed, no doubt, in some sort, but not the bulk of these stories.
They were written on a manual typewriter and, beginning in the early Sixties, in a one-room office I rented in Ipswich, between a lawyer and a beautician, above a cozy corner restaurant. Around noon the smell of food would start to rise through the floor, but I tried to hold out another hour before I tumbled downstairs, dizzy with cigarettes, to order a sandwich. After I gave up cigarettes, I smoked nickel cigarillos to allay my nervousness at the majesty of my calling and the intricacy of my craft; the empty boxes, with their comforting image of another writer, Robert Burns, piled up. Not only were the boxes useful for storing little things like foreign coins and cufflinks, but the caustic aura of cigars discouraged visitors. I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me—to give the mundane its beautiful due.
FOREWORD to Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories (1979).
The Maples presented themselves to the writer in New York City in 1956, dropped from his sight for seven years, and reappeared in the suburbs of Boston in 1963, giving blood. They figured in a dozen stories since, until the couple’s divorce in 1976. Their name, bestowed by a young man who had grown up in a small town shaded by Norway maples, and who then moved to the New England of sugar maples and flame-bright swamp maples, retained for him an arboreal innocence, a straightforward and cooling leafiness. Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed. Also, that people are incorrigibly themselves. The musical pattern, the advance and retreat, of the Maples’ duet is repeated over and over, ever more harshly transposed. They are shy, cheerful, and dissatisfied. They like one another, and are mysteries to one another. One of them is usually feeling slightly unwell, and the seesaw of their erotic interest rarely balances. Yet they talk, more easily than any other characters the author has acted as agent for. A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple. Let this collection preserve one particular dead tongue, no easier to parse than Latin.
NOTE on “The Indian,” a short story published in The New Yorker in August 1963 and reprinted, with this commentary, eight years later as a special number of The Blue Cloud Review, a publication of the Benedictine Missionaries of Blue Cloud Abbey, Marvin, South Dakota.
“The Indian” was written early in the 1960s around the germ of a gentleman, himself not an Indian, who hangs around Market Street in Ipswich with a proprietary and watchful air. In this short story I coined the name “Tarbox”—an authentic if rarely encountered Yankee name—for the small New England town that for all its charm seems to me to be the arena of the Decline of the West. Indeed, readers of my novel Couples would do well to have this little preliminary evocation of Tarbox in mind. The idea of the Indian, as Leslie Fiedler keeps telling us, is central to the American mythology, and we are all haunted by these dispossessed—and were long before the New Left seized upon the Indian Wars as a (not especially apt) metaphor for our Asian adventures. The key word in the first paragraph is the “unpossessed” of “unpossessed abundance.”15 The North American abundance was of course already, in a shadowy way, possessed, and it does not seem unlikely to me that Chief Musquenomenee, that “shadowy chief” who is buried “presumably upright,” in fact haunts our shabby and garish downtowns, waiting for the astonishing ramshackle construction Caucasian Man has imposed upon the world to collapse, and to restore to him—primitive man—his primal inheritance.
NOTE on Bech: His Oeuvre, privately printed by William B. Ewert in 2000.
I had thought that the publication of Bech at Bay in 1998 would close the book, as it were, on the character of the Jewish-American writer Henry Bech, born as a fictive person in 1923 and as a literary creation in 1964, in the short story “The Bulgarian Poetess.” He survived that brush with a Communist beauty to figure into eighteen more stories, collected in three small but tasty volumes: Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and the above-mentioned Bech at Bay, which contains the two longest Bech stories ever and ends with a highly fantastic apotheosis in Sweden. Yet within the year the scheme of one more Bech story abruptly came to me and, amid the press of much other business, I executed it, scribbling the first draft on airplanes taking me to Kansas City and back, and sending the typescript off to The New Yorker on the day before Christmas. They published it with equal dispatch, in th
e issue of January 25, 1999. I am delighted that to my friend Bill Ewert it appeared worthy of becoming a little book in itself. To me it seems one of the purer Bechian flights, holding at its center the humbling but shining truth that artistic creation is at best a sublimation of the sexual instinct, and subsidiary to it. Bech almost never appears in my fiction without an erotically charged companion; he is first seen with his mother and last with his infant daughter, and is more or less in love steadily meanwhile. In this he is not only a representative writer but, I think, a representative human being. Art is his pastime, but love is his work.
REPLIES to three questions posed by Le Nouvel Observateur upon the publication, in September 2005, of the French translation of Licks of Love (2000), a collection of twelve short stories and a novella, “Rabbit Remembered.”
Q. The stories in Licks of Love are nostalgic in tone, and their characters’ best days are mostly over. What do you feel nostalgic about?
A. They are the work of an elderly man; what else can you expect? The past, Proust pointed out, is Paradise. We cannot help revisiting Paradise, and the writer has his own magic carpet woven of words to take him there. I feel nostalgic about almost everything I have experienced—people I knew, brand-name products I consumed, movies I saw, books I once read, certain tints of weather that return to me unexpectedly. It is marvellous, to have lived, and the longer one lives the more marvellous it seems. As a child I used to hear a horse-drawn wagon come down the street, and coal noisily pour down a chute; I watched a man haul a block of ice into our kitchen and put it in a wooden “icebox”; I listened every day to the gracious, unhurried voice of my grandfather, a man born in the middle of the American Civil War. Is this not marvellous? Not to mention the presence of my young mother and father in the background. In Licks of Love the details are lit by love, love for what we can no longer have. Two examples: the title story, “Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War,” about a kind of cultural-exchange mission that once felt dangerous and useful, and “How Was It, Really?,” about the difficulty of remembering the daily details of a bygone marriage.
Q. You have written more reviews for The New Yorker than any other writer. How, as a reviewer, would you approach Licks of Love? Which details would you linger over?
A. Oh, my. I never set out to be a reviewer, and certainly try to hush up my reviewer’s voice when I am writing creatively. But I did feel, as best I remember, happy, writing “Rabbit Remembered,” to be back in Rabbit’s territory, even with my hero only haunting it. There is a kind of human event I find only in that territory—a warm confusion, perhaps, deriving from the somewhat desperate comedy of my first, childish impressions of family life—and I loved watching Annabelle and Nelson get together (the very consonants of their names hinting at a genetic connection) and riding with them into the new millennium, to the tune of a traffic jam and a Christian-rock concert in the shell of a once thriving small-city downtown. As to the other, mostly suburban stories, they embody for me tender encounters of the kind that keep the world turning. Besides the stories singled out above, I would bestow special praise upon the first paragraph of “The Women Who Got Away” and the poignant coda of “Metamorphosis.”
Q. What is your America? Is the America that you love gone forever?
A. It is true, I have trouble, writing about America, in reminding myself that everybody now has cell phones, that sex without condoms is flirting with death by AIDS, that everybody under forty has grown up with computers and computer games, that people get cash day and night by feeding a plastic card into a machine, and so on. The America that automatically presents itself to my imagination is a semi-rural one where the telephone and the movies are the latest thing, and Jack Benny and Benny Goodman dominate the airwaves, and the spectres of Protestant morality still exercise a powerful pull. In a way, my imagination has not “kept up,” however zealously I read contemporary fiction and gossip magazines. But history proceeds, I console myself, less like a parade than like an onion or a cabbage, wrapping its older layers in thin newer ones. But the older ones gave it its essential shape, and the America I love, the land that trusts its citizens to know what is best for them and to pursue happiness without undue impediments, is still there for me. And it is there for whole classes of people—notably people of color and women—who were, not many decades ago, matter-of-factly disenfranchised. With all its faults—vulgarity, self-indulgence, youth-worship, romanticism in thought and ruthlessness in practice—it is still a template for the world, as the races and nations inevitably mix.
THE ORIGINAL ENDING of Self-Consciousness, rescued from the files for a 1990 collection of “literary outtakes” compiled by Larry Dark.
…Even toward myself, as my own life’s careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefulness is the most sublime virtue.
OPPOSITIONAL OTHER: Pfauggggh! Fearfulness and selfishness, that’s all I’ve been hearing. What a little Fafner you are—“I have and I hold!” Clinging to a creed demolished everywhere you look, to a patriotism as obsolete as blood sacrifice, to a storybook small town that never existed, least of all in the dingy Thirties; toadying to any establishment that comes your way, from a high-school faculty to a Communist Writers’ Union; so anxious to please and afraid of a little normal opposition your tongue and lungs can’t get the words out; so afraid of losing a flake of your precious dragon’s hoard of you-ness you resist every change from the condominium next door to the junking of the Electoral College and even think ending the Cold War may be a bad idea; in love with the status quo under the delusion that you’ve done well by it; obsessed with a painless harmless skin disease as if without it you’d be a raving male beauty; and now in this present chapter of egocentric rambling even slyly confessing to wanting, on the basis of medieval or at best eighteenth-century metaphysics, to preserve your miserable, spotty identity forever! What about the big picture! Where in all these millions of words you boast about is there any serious consideration of the large issues that concern humanity in the mass? Nuclear war! Holocaust! The industrial-military complex! Birth control! The rust belt! The national deficit! AIDS!
SELF: Well, I have written a play about a President and a novel about a coup. But morality and politics in general, it seems to me, were definitively handled in the works of George Bernard Shaw. All that a lively intelligence, generous spirit, and tireless style could do along these lines, he did. In any case the large ground is heavily trod. My own concern gravitates to the intimate, where the human intersects with something inhuman, something dark and involuntary and unsubmissive to man-created order. After all that Kierkegaard and Barth that I once consumed, it is hard for me to be reverential about the purely human. Nevertheless, I unfailingly vote; I contribute to charities, and even sometimes respond to especially shaming solicitations by mail; I recognize that the good and legal thing, in a well-policed society, is generally also the convenient thing—
O. O.: Scandalous! To put down—in limp parody of Fifties mandarinism—the core concerns of human society and enterprise as issues of convenience, and to find reality only in your chaos of intimate particulars, this babble of random and cagey candor sliding in slippery, unconscionable fashion from point to misremembered point—aaargggh! The title of this opus should be Self-Serving. Self-Promotion. One more slyly aggressive tome that the poor dear librarians think they have to buy. One more egotistical tax upon the stifling bookstores and groaning forests. You have your nerve, whining about the whale and the buffalo and how you and your alphabet blocks rose above dog eat dog.
No argument. I am weary of Self-Consciousness. What I have written here discomfits me: it is indiscreet and yet inaccurate, a greedy squandering of a life’s minute-by-minute savings, a careless provisional raid upon the abyss of being. Fiction, which does not pretend to be true, is much truer. This stuff is embarrassing. The reviewers
will jump all over it. I think I’ll save myself a peck of trouble and not publish.
SELF: Oh, go ahead. It was written, after all, only by Updike; it has nothing to do with me.
ON ONE’S OWN STYLE: Statement contributed to The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, by Ben Yagoda (2004).
