Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. It was in England’s Oxford. Someone kindly had us to tea, and into the stiff little party bounced a well-knit sandy man with light quick eyes and an intensely handsome chin; unhesitatingly he assumed his right to dominate the conversation. He was full of a tender excitement, the excitement of those certain they are loved, and anxious to share, before it spills over and is wasted, the bubbling treasure of themselves. He described to us his sitting in Paris writing at an outdoor table while around him in the Tuileries little boys were going pee-pee; he read us, with an excessive Irish accent, the opening and then the closing words of Finnegans Wake, to show that they interlocked.

  Now I had never read Cary, but had myself recently tasted the emboldening black blood of print. When he stated that Joyce’s influence was enormous, I churlishly grunted disagreement; he cited e. e. cummings, and I absurdly shook my head No. His eyebrows lifted, and for a second I lived within the curiosity of those very quick eyes. They flicked away, and somewhat later I began to read him, and found him to be—above all in his two African novels—a splendid writer, peculiarly alive to nuances of power and competition such as my jealous rudeness that afternoon. For years the incident embarrassed me in memory, and in 1957 Cary heroically suffered his prolonged death, and I lost forever my chance to apologize.

  Quite different was my preparation for meeting James Thurber, in London later that year. As a boy I had hoarded pennies to buy Thurber’s books, and owned them all; he was for me the brightest star in that galaxy of New York wits I yearned to emulate, however dimly. A college acquaintance who knew of my adoration arranged the meeting: into her flat Thurber was led by his wife Helen. He was taller than I had expected, not Walter Mitty but a big-boned blind giant, and his upstanding hair was snowier than photographs had led me to expect, and there could have been no anticipating the alarming way his eyes caromed around under the refracting magnification of his glasses.

  He sat, talking and drinking tea until I wondered why his bladder didn’t burst. We listened, I raptly at first and finally becoming, to my own amazement, bored. Though Thurber cocked his head alertly at my poor fawning attempts to make conversation, these attempts did not appreciably distract him from the anecdotes of Columbus, Ohio, he had told a thousand times before, and that I had read ten years before, in their definitive, printed versions. Pages of The Thurber Album and My Life and Hard Times issued from his lips virtually intact.

  His performance, though remarkable, was, alas, a performance; I had been privileged to join an auditory audience slightly less anonymous than readership, and there was no question of living for even a second in his curiosity. Fifteen years later, with another adored writer, Jorge Luis Borges, I was to reëxperience the disappointing revelation that blindness and fame and years do island a man, do isolate him within a monologue that, if he is a literary man, he had delivered to you already, in finer and grander form—“grander” because literary obsessions appear to have been selected from an infinite field, whereas personal obsessions seem to betray a mere narrowness. Sad to say, my love of Thurber’s works was slightly stunted ever after his generous teatime monologue.

  All the writers I have met—and they have not been many; I must be one of the few Americans with a bachelor-of-arts degree who has never met either Robert Lowell or Norman Mailer*—carry around with them a field force that compels objects in the vicinity to conform to their literary style. Standing next to E. B. White, one is imbued with something of the man’s fierce modesty, and one’s sentences haltingly seek to approximate the wonderful way his own never say more than he means. Whereas Thurber’s humor bore a trace of the tyrannical, a wish to impose confusion from above, White’s seems to stem from an extreme of attentiveness that would grant to things the graceful completion they lack in reality. Once I barged through a door in The New Yorker offices, and powerfully struck an obstacle on the other side; White had been hurrying down the hall, and stood there dazed. Reading in my face my horror, my fear that I had injured this sacred and fragile person, this living embodiment of the magazine’s legend, he obligingly fell down as if dead.

  A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. And I have seen John Cheever, for ten days we shared in Russia, turn the dour world of Soviet literary officials into a bright scuttle of somehow suburban characters, invented with marvellous speed and arranged in sudden tableaux expressive, amid wistful neo-Czarist trappings, of the lyric desperation associated with affluence. As if transported to the moon, people in Cheever’s neighborhood lose half their bodily weight. My most traumatic experience of gravitational attraction came with John O’Hara. I had consented to read at a White House entertainment for the National Honor Students; crossing the lobby of the Hay-Adams, I spied brooding on a chair a broad-shouldered presence strongly reminiscent of the back of a book jacket. Deferentially I moved closer. “Mr. O’Hara?” said I.

  O’Hara held out his hand. “Pull,” he said. I hesitated. “My back,” O’Hara explained. I pulled. He grunted in pain and did not budge. “Again,” said O’Hara.

  This time he made it, wincing, to his feet. Our laconic but characteristic dialogue continued. He, too, was attending the White House function. I offered him a ride in the limousine that had been sent for me, since I was one of the entertainers. I explained to the suspicious driver that this gentleman was John O’Hara, a very great writer and a guest of the President. The driver with maximum grudgingness made space for him in the front seat, while my wife and I settled regally in the back.

  Within the few seconds of this encounter I had been plunged into a cruel complex of stoic pain and social irony—a Negro chauffeur and a stammering light-verse writer had transformed a millionaire author into a front-seat hitchhiker. Mortified by the situation, feeling all its edges grating on O’Hara’s acute nerves, I fled conversationally to the state of Pennsylvania, which we had in common. O’Hara moved us to a plane both higher and more concrete—the number of Updikes in Princeton, New Jersey. At the White House he showed a distinct preference for the company of Marianne Moore, bending his big ear to her tiny precise voice like a schoolboy listening to a transistor radio he has smuggled into class.

  These not entirely fanciful reminiscences (which have omitted how I met Bernard Malamud in a museum lavatory, or how James Dickey entertained me one hungover 6 a.m. with a concert of country guitar music that fetched tears to my hillbilly eyes) mean to suggest that writers, like everyone else, see a world their personalities to some extent create. Denis de Rougemont claims that Chateaubriand could never have written Stendhal’s essays on seduction because seduction was simply no problem for Chateaubriand. The cosmos of delay and obfuscation rendered in The Castle surely in part reflects the special environment Kafka’s neurotic mannerisms spun around him. And we all recall how Hemingway scouted the world for those marginal places where violence might feed his style.

  Also, as one who in a small way is himself now and then “met,” I suggest that forces within the writer-reader personal encounter foment unreality. The reader comes equipped with a vivid, fresh, outside impression of works the writer remembers wearily from the inside, as a blur of intention, a stretch of doubting drudgery, a tangle of memories and fabrications, a batch of nonsensical reviews, and a disappointed sigh from the publisher. The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer’s physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

  Evasive temperaments are drawn to the practice of fiction. Their work is done far behind the heat-shield of face and voice that advances against a room of strangers. The performance can be a shambling and ingratiating one as much as a cocksure and intimidating one, but performance it is: a pity, for these anonymous devoted readers who press affectionately toward a blind man are his lovers, who have accepted into themselves his most intimate and earnest thrusts. I would like to meet, I suppose, Vladimir Nabokov and
Henry Green, but recognize the urge as superstitious, a seeking of a physical ritual to formalize the fact that we already are (I write as a reader) so well met.

  Voznesensky Met

  (A New Yorker Notes and Comment: August 1967)

  SEVERAL TIMES, a few years ago, we dined with Andrei Voznesensky in the dining hall of the Writers’ Union in Moscow. The Union’s building, on Vorovsky Street, was Tolstoy’s Moscow mansion, and the model for the home of the Rostovs in War and Peace. One drives in through the gates through which the Rostovs and a wagonload of possessions fled Napoleon’s approaching armies; straight ahead, past a bust of Tolstoy, are the yellow doors to the long, parqueted ballroom. The dining hall—to the right, in a wing of the building—is still pleasantly redolent of Czarist days. Walnut panelling reaches to the ceiling; a carved staircase leads up to a balcony. Here, in the same smoky atmosphere of clashing silver and prolonged table talk that one finds in any New York club for the privileged, come and go the local members of the immense Soviet literary Establishment. We met a few of them: the perky young Yunost editor, full of chaffing and “routines”; the cheerful translatoress, spouting the latest names in beatnik poetry; the tough yet comradely gray-haired lady who sat on the editorial board that had declined to publish Doctor Zhivago; the war novelist who after three vodkas began to look through us toward something desolating he had once seen; the round-faced art critic whose subtlest thoughts had to be couched, protectively, in French; the Union official, all a-twinkle—gold teeth, gold spectacles—a volley in his laugh and an executioner’s chop in his hands. In this company, Voznesensky was a pet, a shy, shrugging pet, with a cold sore on his lower lip, politely sipping water at each toast offered in vodka, but nevertheless, amid so many literary foremen and mechanics, the real thing, a poet—a poet whose voice had already broken through to Russian youth and was on the verge of being heard in the West. Now his breakthrough has been made, and has led him to a perhaps disastrous defiance of the Writers’ Union, which tried, as far as its fundamentally anti-artistic function permitted, to cherish him.

  We worry that our side might do him in. Introducing him at a poetry reading in this country last May, Robert Lowell confided to the audience that he thought both he and Voznesensky had “really terrible governments.” Such a remark could not hurt Lowell but would certainly arrest the attention of the Russian Embassy watchdog who invariably attends displays of Russo-American cultural exchange. Now the Times has zealously and, we suppose, rightly, published the outraged letter from Voznesensky denouncing the Writers’ Union’s clumsy and mendacious cancellation of his scheduled reading at Lincoln Center in June—a letter that Pravda declined to print. Perhaps the time is ripe for open opposition to the “atmosphere of blackmail, confusion, and provocation”—as Voznesensky put it—in which the heirs of Tolstoy and Chekhov and Pushkin do their work. The Writers’ Union’s control over publication is absolute. Yet a poet of Voznesensky’s fame and genius is not defenseless; the Soviet system, unlike ours, admits that it needs artists, as blazoners of the ideals of the state. Hence, along with the censorship, there are the summer dachas and assured incomes and pleasant dining halls and erratic indulgences. Stalin sheltered the maverick Mayakovsky; Khrushchev let Yevtushenko keep writing. The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial was carried to its foregone conclusion, but a petition of dissent was signed by Russia’s best writers. Thaw cannot be imported from the West. If Voznesensky carries his point, it will not be thanks to indignant editorials in this country or petitions signed by writers smug in their pre-bought freedom. If he cannot carry his point, let him at least survive. His mere survival, like Pasternak’s, would be a victory.

  Studying his photograph in the Times (our own delicate experts in propaganda have selected one that looks especially worried), we remember him across the table trying, in his then fragmentary English, to communicate. His pale face appeared faintly bloated, like a nun’s squeezed in her wimple. His manner was both boyish and elderly, his thinning hair studiously licked down, his nose an innocent ski jump. Only a certain steadiness in his heavy blue eyes betrayed awareness that to be Pasternak’s spiritual son, the hope of poetry in a nation hungry for poetry, was a mighty thing. One does not advance in post-Stalin Russia without some steel. Voznesensky, the gentlest of men until he stands to recite, becomes then a prophet, clangorous and stern; the reunion of Russian and modern poetry demands an ambitious campaign. To speak and write honestly in the Soviet Union is still a more difficult enterprise than an American can imagine.

  Bech Meets Me

  (The New York Times Book Review Persuades Henry Bech, Literary Man for All Thin Seasons, to Conduct an Interview: November 1971)

  UPDIKE’S OFFICE is concealed in a kind of false-bottomed drawer in the heart of downtown Ipswich (Mass.), but the drowsy locals, for a mere 30 pieces of silver, can be conned into betraying its location. A stuck-looking door is pulled open; an endless flight of stairs, lit by a team of dusty fireflies, is climbed. Within the sanctum, squalor reigns unchallenged. A lugubrious army-green metal desk rests in the center of a threadbare Oriental rug reticulate with mouse-paths; the walls are camouflaged in the kind of cardboard walnut panelling used in newly graduated lawyers’ offices or in those Los Angeles motels favored by the hand-held cameramen and quick-tongued directeurs of blue movies. On these sad walls hang pictures, mostly souvenirs of his childhood, artistic or otherwise. On the bookshelves, evidently stained by a leopard in the process of shedding his spots, rest repellent books—garish schoolboy anthologies secreting some decaying Updikean morsel, seven feet of James Buchanan’s bound works adumbrating the next opus, some daffodil-yellow building-trade manuals penumbrating Couples; and, most repellent of all, a jacketless row of the total oeuvre, spines naked as the chorus of Hair, revealing what only the more morbid have hitherto suspected, that since 1959 (The Poorhouse Fair, surely his masterpiece) Updike with Alfred A. Knopf’s connivance has been perpetrating a uniform edition of himself. Beclouding all, the stink of nickel cigarillos, which the shifty, tremulous, asthmatic author puffs to sting the muse’s eyes into watering ever since, at the Surgeon General’s behest, he excised cigarettes from his armory of crutches.

  Updike, at first sight, seems bigger than he is, perhaps because the dainty stitchwork of his prose style readies one for an apparition of elfin dimensions. An instant layer of cordial humorousness veneers a tough thickness of total opacity, which may in turn coat a center of heartfelt semi-liquid. Shamefacedly I confessed my errand—to fabricate an “interview” for one of those desperate publications that seek to make weekly “news” of remorselessly accumulating Gutenbergian silt. Shamefacedly, Updike submitted. Yet, throughout the interview that limped in the van of this consent, as the pumpkin-orange New England sun lowered above the chimney pots of a dry-cleaning establishment seen darkly through an unwashed window, Updike gave the impression of (and who wouldn’t?) wanting to be elsewhere. He kept interjecting his desire to go “home” and “shingle” his “barn”; it occurred to this interviewer (the Interviewer, as Mailer would say), that the uniform books, varied in tint and size as subtly as cedar shakes, were themselves shingles, with the which this shivering poor fellow hopes to keep his own skin dry in the soaking downpour of mortality.

  I observed, feinting for an opening, that he has stopped writing about Jews. He replied that the book about me had not so much been about a Jew as about a writer, who was a Jew with the same inevitability that a fictional rug-salesman would be an Armenian. I riposted that he was a writer, though a Wasp. With the languid shrug of the chronically pained, he bitterly inveighed against the term Wasp, which implies, he said, wealth where he had been poor, Calvinism where he had been Lutheran, and ethnic consciousness where he had had none. That his entire professional life had been spent among Jews and women, that his paternal grandmother had been partly Irish, that he had disliked James Gould Cozzens’ last novel, that false loyalties were the plague of a divided Republic, that racism as an aesthetic category was one thing but as
an incitement to massacre another, etc.

  With the chinks in his armor gaping before me like marigolds at the height of noon, I lunged deftly as a hummingbird. Didn’t I detect, I asked, in his later work, an almost blunt determination to, as it were, sing America? Would he describe himself, I asked, switching the tape recorder up to fortissimo, as (a) pro-American, (b) a conservative? His turtleish green eyes blinked, recognizing that his shell was being tickled, and that there was no way out but forward. He said he was pro-American in the sense that he was married to America and did not wish a divorce. That the American style and landscape and impetus were, by predetermination, his meat; though he had also keenly felt love of fatherland in England, in Russia, in Egypt. That nations were like people, lovable and wonderful in their simple existence. That, in answer to the second prong of my probe, there were some things he thought worth conserving, such as the electoral college and the Great Lakes; but that by registration he was a Democrat and by disposition an apologist for the spirit of anarchy—our animal or divine margin of resistance to the social contract. That, given the need for a contract, he preferred the American Constitution, with its 18th-century bow to the pursuit of individual happiness, to any of the totalisms presently running around rabid. That the decisions of any establishment, though properly suspect and frightfully hedged by self-interest and the myopia power brings, must be understood as choices among imperfect alternatives; power participates in the weight and guilt of the world and shrill impotence never has to cash in its chips.