Updike on the self
I’ve been revisiting the memoir Self-Consciousness by John Updike, which I first read when it was published in 1989. Updike is best known for his novels, but I consider them his weakest genre. I much prefer the short stories and the personal essays, the latter being the form this particular work takes.
Self-Consciousness is where I first encountered Updike’s reflections on the Vietnam War, entitled “On Not Being a Dove” (I wrote at length about the work here). After my political conversion, it meant even more to me than when I had first read it, because of Updike’s descriptions of his own discomfort at finding himself at odds with the liberal literati who were such a large part of his pleasant New England surroundings:
…Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk [LBJ] from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world…
I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would. Those who would not, let them move North. But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that? And so on.
I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.
That should give you a good idea of Updike’s pellucid, graceful, and pointed style. His novels are known for their sexual boldness, but in his essays we find a different sort of boldness: a searching honesty about himself and the world, or at least an attempt at such.
Besides the Vietnam essay, my favorite selection in the book is the last one, “On Being a Self Forever.” It’s not easy to describe exactly what this essay is about, because it is so wide-ranging: a summing up of the trajectory of Updike’s persona, a meditation on religion and the possibility of an afterlife, and a hymn to the unfailing beauty of the natural world, all written by one of the greatest stylists in the English language.
It is difficult to find an excerpt from the essay that gives an idea of its flavor; it is a true tour de force. But here’s one I happen to like, in which Updike tries to describe our relation to the automobile, and wonders if people of the future can possibly understand what it was like:
Will the future understand, for instance…how much of our lives was spent in automobiles, and how largely their little curved caves of painted metal, speeding through a landscape of imploring advertisements and commercial desolation, and the powerful instant responses of their knobs and pedals, and the fine points of their amenities and costliness, and their aura of controlled explosion were part of our coming of age, our mating, our fulfillment of obligations, our thrusts of creaming? An average American male became a man at the age of sixteen with his possession of a driver’s license, and every seventeen years thereafter he drove the distance to the moon. Not just the robust but the timid and the crippled and the myopic and the senile and the certifiably insane daily hurtled about on the highways only inches and a flick of the wrist removed from murderous collision. Every pair of hands resting on the steering wheel held the power of death; the wonder is not that accidents occurred but that most of us daily lived through that siege of rushing miles. We even felt, while speeding along a curious peace. But for a handful of sportsmen and Amish farmers, we had forgotten, in a few generations, the horse, and how ubiquitously horse power, horse manure, horseflesh, and horse suffering and the smell and whinny and clip-clop of them had covered the city streets, the same streets we then choked and blanketed with millions of big self-propelled scarabs.
I’m not sure why I chose that particular passage. Almost any would have done just as well—such as the following, in which Updike explains something about writing and fame, two things he knew a great deal about:
Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat.
Updike’s writing life was a long, productive, and mostly successful attempt to keep his own eyes from getting fat—to continue to observe his fellow humans and the universe itself as clearly and honestly and even lovingly as he could, and to write about them without an inflated sense of his own self-importance.
He was a nice man. When I was very young and naive, I wrote to him and he wrote back.
I have ambivalent feelings about Updike. I remember some quote to the effect that he was “addicted to tap-dancing in prose,” and I can see that, but his virtuosity makes me gasp, and as his life work begins to take on perspective after his death, I can see that in writing about adultery the way he did, he was not advocating for it. He was a religious writer, and, obliquely, a moralist.
I’m talking about his fiction here. I don’t know many of his essays, though I’m enormously grateful for his “On Not Being a Dove.” I go back to it after social evenings with people who would turn on their heels and walk away if they knew my views! Updike was brave indeed to come out about the Vietnam War.
I’ll have to read those essays.
A sidelight: the head of the local literary organization — a friend of mine — tells me that Updike was the nicest writer who’s ever come through our city — modest, interested in others, obliging.
I’ve never been much of a reader of fiction. I’ve always preferred non-fiction, especially history. That’s a pretty fertile ground which would keep me occupied for several lifetimes.
I spend so much time on the internet (another fertile ground which would keep me occupied for several lifetimes) that I don’t have much time to read actual books. But I still keep buying them. I have quite a backlog.
I have a longtime friend who is a huge Updike fan. I’ll have to check him out one of these days. But I also really need to read Heinlein.
I remembering reading an Updike piece years ago for a writing class. In my critique, I said I thought Updike was a soft, whiny, privileged white man past his prime unable to come to terms with mortality and other aspects of the real world. Glad he could make a living at it.
Sorry–too early the submit button. The instructor gave me a ‘damning’ grade for the paper, a ‘C’, and told me I could re-write if I wished for a higher grade. In other words, when I corrected my opinion of the great man, my revision would be rewarded.
I should mention that I took the class as a middle-aged white man, so the threat of a ‘C’ didn’t reduce me to jelly. I passed on the revision and the class.
Thanks Neo. I never became a fan of Updike’s fiction, but you have motivated me to seek out his essays.
LAG, you describe a fairly high percentage of the modern American male population. If you neutered your description it could have even wider application.
LAG: Updike become “privileged” through his own work as a writer. He did not grow up privileged.
Soft? Well, he wasn’t a laborer or a soldier or a policeman; I guess he wasn’t tough. But he was toughest on himself, and he admired those who fought for the common defense (read “On Not Being a Dove”; that’s a good part of what it’s about).
Whiny? Absolutely not. He described his infirmities (psoriasis; stuttering) without much self-pity at all, but rather with an observing and almost scientific eye, and a sharp sense of his own flaws.
Unable to come to terms with his own mortality? Again, please read “On Being a Self Forever.” I think he came to terms with mortality better than most people.
As for why you may have gotten that “C”—I don’t really know, since I didn’t read your essay. If you made those assertions about Updike and were able to support them with examples from Updike’s writing, and were articulate in your expression of your opinions, then I suppose you deserved more than a “C.” But if those opinions were unsupported by the text, then it’s not a matter of “correcting” your “opinion of the great man” (or agreeing with the professor’s opinion), it’s a matter of having evidence for what you wrote about Updike.
It sounds like a worthwhile book. Thanks for the tip.
Amazon has a few used copies for under three bucks. Shipping is free is you include the book in an order for more than $25 (or have Amazon Prime).
From Wikipedia…””Updike famously described his own style as an attempt “to give the mundane its beautiful due.””
Ever been around a person of noteriety and great success who seems to hang on to interest in ordinary people? Like you meet them and six months later he remembers your kids names or other things about you that you just wouldn’t expect? I’ve met a couple people like this and they are very genuine and refreshing. Mr Updike strikes me as possibly being in that category.
” …Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk [LBJ] from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world…”
Oh so, true and still true today.