Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  I inkled that this diatribe was meant to lead up to some discussion of his new novel, with its jacket of red, gray, and blue stripes, but, having neglected to read more than the first pages, which concern a middle-aged ex-athlete enjoying a beer with his elderly father, I was compelled to cast my interrogation in rather general terms. Viz.:

  Q: Are you happy?

  A: Yes, this is a happy limbo for me, this time. I haven’t got the first finished copies yet, and haven’t spotted the first typo. I haven’t had to read any reviews.

  Q: How do you find reviews?

  A: Humiliating. It isn’t merely that the reviewers are so much cleverer than I, and could write such superior fictions if they deigned to; it’s that even the on-cheering ones have read a different book than the one you wrote. All the little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. Still, the ideal reader must—by the ontological argument—exist, and his invisibility therefore be a demonic illusion sustained to tempt us to despair.

  Q: Do you envision novels as pills, broadcasts, tapestries, explosions of self, cantilevered constructs, or what?

  A: For me, they are crystallizations of visceral hopefulness extruded as a slow paste which in the glitter of print regains something of the original, absolute gaiety. I try to do my best and then walk away rapidly, so as not to be incriminated. Right now, I am going over old short stories, arranging them in little wreaths, trimming away a strikingly infelicitous sentence here, adding a paper ribbon there. Describing it like this makes me sound more Nabokovian than I feel. Chiefly, I feel fatigued by my previous vitality.

  Q: I’d like to talk about the new book, but the truth is I can’t hold bound galley pages, my thumbs keep going to sleep, so I didn’t get too far into this, what? Rabbit Rerun?

  A (eagerly, pluggingly): Redux. Latin for led back. You know Latin: Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The next installment, ten years from now, I expect to call Rural Rabbit—you’ll notice at the end of this book Janice talks about them getting a farm. The fourth and last, to come out in 1991 if we all live, is tentatively titled Rabbit Is Rich. Nice, huh?

  Q (turning tape recorder down to pianissimo): Not bad. Pas mal. Not bad.

  A (gratefully, his shingling hand itching): Thanks. Thanks a lot.

  Farewell to the Middle Class

  (Hitherto Published Only, Strange to Say, in Japanese, as One of a Series of Ads for Suntory Whisky, on the Strength of its having been Written under the Influence of Alcohol)

  TODAY I WAS TOLD I had made half a million dollars. My wife calls me a half-ass millionaire. The man on the other end of the phone seemed a little disappointed that I couldn’t react. He had swung the deal and felt closer to it than I did. I expressed a doubt, just to make conversation, and that produced a series of phone calls on his part that produced another hundred thousand dollars. The second time he called, my wife kept shouting “Give it away!” from the other room, and I could hardly hear him, and explained that he had given my wife a headache, and he laughed, thinking I was making a joke. I wasn’t.

  Sad, yes. I couldn’t think of how to keep the government from taking the major share. The contract wasn’t even signed, and I was a tax dodger. I couldn’t think where to put the money. Our savings accounts were full to the insurable maximum. My wife had a new electric dishwasher, and I had a new pair of Fiberglas skis. We lived in an old house in the middle of an old neighborhood, making a little more than our neighbors but too lazy to spend it and taking a (if you examine it closely) snobbish pride in our worn-out sneakers, our dented cars, our threadbare backyard full of broken toys and unharvested dog dung.

  Tonight I am a rich man. Tomorrow my wife is thirty-eight. I went out in a blizzard and bought her, rapidly, at the five and ten and then the local electric shop, a Joan Baez record, an electric waffle iron, and a four-slice toaster. In the old days, I would have bought her either the toaster or the waffle iron, but not both. I also bought some four-ninety wine. I said to the liquor-store proprietor, with whom I have grown intimate over the years, that people who paid five bucks for a bottle of wine must be nuts. Then I bought some. It was all a routine, half-planned on my part. He laughed, though. And the strange thing is, the wine was terrific, really distinctly better than three-dollar Bordeaux, or two-dollar Almadén. Fuller, smokier, with more grape, more landscape, more sorrow in it. We drank it all and, drunk, horsed around with the kids, who were feeling sorry for the old toaster and old waffle iron. The smaller girl took these appliances up to her bed and tucked them in. The snow kept coming. I had to cancel a church meeting that was going to be held at my house—too many old people on the committee to make it up the slippery curb.

  Now I stand here, frugging to the Joan Baez record, looking out my window at my neighbor’s television screen through the snowstorm. He is a train conductor and watches television every night from six to midnight. His endurance is fabulous. It is beautiful. His bluish set, more familiar to my wife and myself than the moon, is beautiful. We have watched it from our bedroom window often, before making love, after making love, before fights, after them. Its electric shadows twitch. Its blue is smeared, glorified, made abstract by the snow, the falling flurrying flying snow, falling in clumps, bunched; only God could make so much snow. Five hundred thousand flakes. My neighbor’s wife’s head, silhouetted by the set, turns, and I guess I am visible, and she is watching. I turn off the light and keep frugging. Go, Joan. Good-bye, good-bye. She is doing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in German. Sagt mir wo die Blumen sind. Good-bye, dear neighborhood of smoking chimneys and speckled roofs. My children yearn to be put to bed. One of the boys had a bath and is running around the house naked, flipping his penis; somehow he knows already we are rich and anything goes. The smaller girl comes to me and cries; she wants me to protect her in our storm of good fortune. My wife is out getting gas for the car. It didn’t need gas but she loves snowstorms, whirlwinds, births, menstrual periods, and other such inexpensive excitements. Maybe she is saying goodbye to thirty-seven, hello to middle age. She sees money as a curse, that is why I love her. Who else would have lived here so long, on this noisy nondescript corner, amid windows and semi-shaven men who mutter off to mysterious jobs before the sun is up? Lord, I have loved them. I love you too, Joan. And you, old house, and you, Old Toaster. And you, you blue-smeared snow. Let’s fuck once more. Good-bye, good-bye.

  * True in 1968 but no longer. Lowell, who seemed to be leaning above me like a raked mast, later described me to a mutual friend as “elusive and shy.” I think I was afraid he would fall on me from his height of eminence. Mailer, as much shorter than I had expected as Lowell was taller, danced about me on a darkened street corner (44th and Second Avenue, if memory serves), taunting me with my supposed handsomeness, with being the handsomest guy he had ever seen. I took it to be Maileresque hyperbole, absurd yet nevertheless with something profound in it—perhaps my secret wish to be handsome, which only he, and that by dim streetlight, at a drunken hour, has ever perceived.

  FOUR SPEECHES

  Accuracy*

  I THANK the donors of the prize and the judges of the award for this honor. Its receipt makes me both glad and uneasy—uneasy perhaps because the writing of fiction is so rewarding in itself, so intimately necessary, that public bonuses seem bestowed under some misapprehension, to somebody else, to that fantastical and totally remote person whose picture very occasionally appears in the Sunday book supplements and whose opinions of art, life, and technology are so hopefully solicited by the editors of undergraduate magazines. On his behalf, as it were, I gratefully accept; and since he has been asked to say a few words, I will mention, in the manner of writing fiction, a virtue seldom extolled these days, that of accuracy, or lifelikeness.

  It may seem too daring of me to touch on this when my book appeared, to many, a bewildering, arbitrary, and forced mixture of uncongenial elements, of mythology and remembrance, of the drably natural and the book
ishly supernatural. I can only plead that the shape of the book formally approximates, for me, the mixed and somewhat antic experience it was trying to convey. The book as well as the hero is a centaur. Anyone dignified with the name of “writer” should strive, surely, to discover or invent the verbal texture that most closely corresponds to the tone of life as it arrives on his nerves. This tone, whose imitation induces style, will vary from soul to soul. Glancing upward, one is struck by the dispersion of recent constellations, by how far apart the prose masters of the century—say, Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Hemingway—are from one another. It may be partly an optical illusion, but modern fiction does seem, more than its antecedents, the work of eccentrics. The writer now makes his marks on paper blanker than it has ever been. Our common store of assumptions has dwindled, and with it the stock of viable artistic conventions. Each generation—and readers and writers are brothers in this—inherits a vast attic of machinery that once worked and decorative dodads whose silhouettes no longer sing. We must each of us clear enough space in this attic so that we in turn can unpack. Does plot, for example, as commonly understood and expected, mirror Providential notions of retribution and ultimate balance that our hearts doubt? Is the syntactical sentence plastic enough to render the flux, the blurring, the endless innuendo of experience as we feel it? No aesthetic theory will cover the case; what is needed is a habit of honesty on the part of the writer. He must, rather athletically, instill his wrists with the refusal to write whatever is lazily assumed, or hastily perceived, or piously hoped. Fiction is a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality. Reality is—chemically, atomically, biologically—a fabric of microscopic accuracies. Language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications; I miss, in much contemporary writing, this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence toward what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs. The intensity of the grapple is the surest pleasure a writer receives. Though our first and final impression of Creation is not that it was achieved by taking pains, perhaps we should proceed in the humble faith that, by taking pains, word by word, to be accurate, we put ourselves on the way toward making something useful and beautiful and, in a word, good.

  The Future of the Novel†

  FIRST, let us ask, to what extent is The Future of the Novel a non-question, a non-issue repeatedly raised by literary journalists about a non-thing, the Novel? Do we worry ourselves with the future of the Poem? Surprisingly, not. Yet verse, compared to narrative prose, would seem to be the more fragile device, far more vulnerable to the clamorous counterclaims of television, the cinema, and traffic noise, far less likely to survive into an age of McLuhanism, Computerization, and whatever other polysyllables would dull our sensibilities and eclipse our humanistic heritage. In fact, poetry has survived. Great poets appear, do their work, and die. Waves of excitement and revolution occur, and are followed by lulls of consolidation and repose. An Ezra Pound or an Allen Ginsberg issues proclamations and generates apostles; relatively isolated and soft-spoken figures such as our Wallace Stevens and your Philip Larkin also meditate, and create. No doubt some decades are more fruitful of enduring verse than others; but each generation seems to supply its quota of poets and, odder still, of poetry readers. A certain slender ardent audience for poetry persists, and indeed in the United States seems to be widening; and if we include as “poets” (and why not?) the ubiquitous pop lyricists in the style of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, the audience is very wide indeed. The appetite for song—for things singingly said—would seem to be so fundamental to human nature that no foreseeable turn of technology or history could soon root it out.

  Now, might we not assume the same of prose narrative? Perhaps; but the impression does linger that the Novel is not quite a category of human expression as eternal as Poetry, or the Dance, or the Joke, but is instead, like the Verse Epic, like the dramatic form called Tragedy, a genre with a life cycle and a death—a death, indeed, that may have already occurred.

  Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, defined the word “novel” as “a small tale, generally of love.” What he had in mind, of course, were the Italian novelle, written in great quantity from the 14th century to the 17th, of which Boccaccio’s were the most famous, and from which Shakespeare derived the plots of, among other plays, Romeo and Juliet and Othello. The novel form in England was greatly enriched and broadened: Richardson brought to it the imitation of the epistle and Defoe the imitation of the journal; with Fielding and Jane Austen it becomes an inhabitable microcosm of society; and with Dickens the many-chambered Novel is expanded to include a courtroom for the indictment of social abuse. In the 19th century, length—physical bulk, the rendering of the sonorous music of passing time—becomes so intrinsic to the idea of the once-modest novella that Tennyson speaks of the ideal novel as one that will just “go on and on and never end.” Throughout, however, and right down to the classics of modernism, love is a pervasive, perhaps obsessive, thread. The French say, “Without adultery, there is no novel,” and while this may be more true of their novels than yours, it is indeed difficult to imagine a novel, even one by Lord Snow, without its—as the phrase goes—“romantic interest.”

  I would suggest that this is a genre trait of the Novel rather than an undistorted reflection of our lives. There are areas of concern in our lives apart from love; yet as a literary practitioner, and as a sometimes compulsory reader of unsuccessful novels, I have observed that it is difficult to make them interesting in a novel. Disease and pain, for instance, are of consuming concern to the person suffering from them, but while we will follow for eight hundred pages the course of a romance, and suffer with each love pang, the course of a physical disease, and the description of pain and discomfort, however sympathetic the character afflicted, weary us within a few paragraphs. Similarly, the amassment of sums of money, fascinating in reality, acquires interest in a novel only if the acquisition of wealth advances the hero or heroine toward that eventual copulation that seems to be every reader’s insatiable and exclusive desire. Indeed, it is part of the peculiar democracy of fiction, and one way in which the air of its world is fresher than our own, that although in real life we do find wealthy and famous men more interesting than poor and obscure ones, in novels we do not. Even intelligence does not recommend a fictional character to us. No, in the strange egalitarian world of the Novel a man must earn our interest by virtue of his—how shall I say?—his authentic sentiments.

  So we arrive at the not very spectacular inkling that the Novel is by nature sentimental. I use the word without pejorative intent, but merely as descriptive of the kind of coinage with which we transact our business in one literary realm. This coinage is not legal tender, I think, in the New Testament, or in Beowulf, or in Prometheus Bound, or to any predominant degree in the Odyssey or Paradise Lost. It is current, though not the only currency, in The Divine Comedy, and it would seem to have been introduced in Italy, with the breakup of the Middle Ages, and to be concurrent with the rise of capitalism. That is, when human worth began to be measured in terms of capital, and men became counters upon a board of productivity, the uneconomic emotions went underground, into literature. We can scarcely imagine it: but with the massive cosmic drama of Fall and Redemption always before him, and the momentous potentialities of sin and repentance always alive within him, medieval man may well have needed less reassurance than we that his emotions were substantial and significant, that his inner life and outward status were integrated. Even today, religious fundamentalists are not notable novel-readers.

  This scale of generalization is uncomfortable for a novelist, concerned as he properly is with the strict small circumstance, the quizzical but verifiable fact. I wish to describe, merely, the Novel as a product of private enterprise, for which a market is created when the state, or tribe, or church, withdraws itself from the emotional sector of the individual’s life. Erotic love then becomes a symbo
l, a kind of code for all the nebulous, perishable sensations which we persist in thinking of as living. Living and loving: the titles of two novels by the splendid Henry Green, and an equation, but for one transposed vowel, to which all novel readers consent—the housewife reading away the dull afternoon, the schoolboy concentrating amid the stupid family din, the banker sitting prim in the homeward commuting train. All are members of a conspiracy to preserve the secret that people feel. Please do not suppose that I am describing only penny fiction, trash. The most elegant and respectable of modern novels, from Remembrance of Things Past to Lolita, enlist in this conspiracy with all the boldness of their virtuosity. Even as all-including and unyielding a masterwork as Ulysses is finally about lovers; Leopold and Molly Bloom are great lovers, great in compassion and fidelity, fidelity to each other and to their inner sensations, their authentic sentiments. Perhaps the reason Stephen Dedalus is slightly tedious in this novel is that he is not in love. Not to be in love, the capital N Novel whispers to capital W Western Man, is to be dying.

  So much for the past; what of the future? The Novel’s Victorian heyday has passed. If my impression is correct, that capitalism put sex in a treasure chest, the chest, after so many raids upon it, is battered to the point of collapse. The set of tensions and surprises we call plot to a great extent depends upon the assumption that bourgeois society discourages and obstructs free-ranging sex. In the 19th-century novels and the 20th-century movies, the punishment for adultery is death. Yet even in Madame Bovary, one feels, reading it, that the heroine in swallowing arsenic is being hysterical, that there is nothing in her situation a sudden inheritance of money wouldn’t solve. In the novels, say, of Evelyn Waugh, adultery has become a dangerous pleasantry, and by now I think even the aura of danger is fading. As Denis de Rougemont has pointed out, the conventional obstructions to love no longer impress us; a somewhat extravagant situation, such as in Lolita, alone can bestow dignity upon a romantic passion. Freud, misunderstood or not, has given sex the right to be free, and the new methods of contraception have minimized the bail. Remove the genuine prohibitions and difficulty, and the three-dimensional interweave of the Novel collapses, becomes slack and linear. The novels of Henry Miller are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue. They are closer to the Arabian Nights than to Tolstoy; they are not novels but tales.