Is John Updike playing a trick on us? Or on himself? The esteemed big man of letters catapulted out of smalltown life via Harvard and then moved to Manhattan, where he became the literary darling of The New Yorker magazine crowd, which still publishes his work.
Updike often seems to be pretending, his writing more clever than insightful. He remains irritatingly impersonal and out of reach. In his brief memoir “Self-Consciousness,” he paints himself sympathetically as a troubled boy afflicted with a stammer and an aggravating case of psoriasis, which provoked his mother to overprotect him. He was her only child.
But the reader who immerses himself in the lavishness of Updike’s prose may suspect otherwise. Rather than the sickly boy Updike professes to have been, it seems more likely that the author always knew he was part of an elite group destined for great success beyond the confines of his home in rural Pennsylvania.
His mother was a frustrated writer who met with limited success late in her life. Her frustration seems to have been mainlined into Updike who has spent the past half century producing an almost inconceivable volume of work in a variety of forms: fiction, nonfiction, essays, book reviews and literary criticism.
“Due Considerations” is almost 800 pages long and includes several interesting essays and brief reflections on a wide variety of topics: the writer’s growing faith that is always laced with an uncomfortable skepticism; his lifelong attachment to his weekly poker group; his love of cartoonists and his early artistic ambitions; his travels with his wife around China; and his growing patriotism and sadness as he watched from a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn as the Twin Towers fell.
His scope here is spectacular. His literary essays critique the complete works of Isaac Babel; biographies of Byron, Iris Murdoch, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Mark Twain. There are more than 60 of his finest book reviews reprinted here, mostly culled from The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Updike has flashes of laserlike insight that punch off the page, but much of his writing has a dronelike quality that lacks intimacy and direct confession. His narrative voice often feels obtuse, patriarchal and conservative, and rigidly fixed to the notion that truth can be obtained in only one way — through the sole filter of reason and objectivity.
But, as Molly Ivins once shrewdly pointed out, objectivity is for the most part an illusion; just ask anybody who’s ever interviewed five witnesses to an automobile accident. Updike seems to shun uncertainty; he remains shielded, sometimes even from his own intentions.
In the book’s preface, Updike uncharacteristically questions his own earlier criticism of his colleagues, dismayed by what he now sees as his own tightfistedness. He asks, “Why did I so humorlessly resist the cartoonish brio of Don DeLillo’s Bruce Wayne-like protagonist’s oft-interrupted limo ride westward on Forty-seventh Street? Why was I such a rudely squirming student in the classrooms of Denis Johnson’s and Norman Rush’s teacher- heroes, and sympathized so stingily with their romantic life and spiritual dilemmas?”
Updike may not really know, but the sensitive reader can sense Updike’s reluctance to crawl down another writer’s throat; his inability to let himself fall temporarily under anyone’s spell or release himself to the magical feeling of falling in love with someone else’s vision of the world. He remains trapped by his own antiquated notions of manners and masculinity, and an overriding concern with appearing appropriate. Updike’s self-conscious posing becomes tiresome.
The much-acclaimed author seems to be struggling with the contradictions of a false self. He is an extremely disciplined writer who works every day and attends Episcopalian church services on Sunday. He has said in interviews that he attempts to find all there is to praise about others, yet he often seems withholding and competitively charged.
His need to remain in control combined with his desire for privacy seems to mute the immediacy of voice that makes writing irresistibly compelling. Perhaps the genesis of his confusion began in New York. When he arrived there decades ago as a young writer, he befriended many of the literati. Several of his peers were Jewish and enmeshed in various phases of psychoanalysis attempting to deal with their own feelings of victimhood and persecution. Writing was their escape from a world that did not welcome them; perhaps even their revenge.
Not so for Updike, who approached his work as a literary craftsman; not a patient or victim. He quickly fled the intense New York scene for the respite of suburbia with his first wife and baby in tow. It was here that he began to write about the people he had known growing up. The Rabbit series, for which he is most famous, is predominantly the tale of Harry Angstrom, an everyman, whose life had peaked by the time he left high school.
There is a piece in this book of nonfiction prose that explores the poetry of Karl Shapiro and Updike’s apparent admiration for him. Shapiro defined his own poetry as that of being the poetry of a Jew. Shapiro writes, “No one has been able to define Jew, and in essence this defiance of definition is the central meaning of Jewish consciousness.”
It is Shapiro’s embrace of paradox; combined with his own openness to his vulnerability and irrationality that is, for the most part, missing from much of Updike’s work. When Updike writes about Shapiro, the reader can almost detect the vaguest hint of envy of the distinctively Jewish chaos and acute self-consciousness that enveloped Shapiro, and fueled his work, but in true Updike fashion, he quickly moves on.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
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NONFICTION
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike, $40
