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Build Your Own Canon: Thoughts On Updike

Updike has written so many books you can carve several writerly careers out of them. The Updike I hate is pretty much the Updike everybody hates. He is decimated beautifully by David Foster Wallace in Consider The Lobster and I don’t need to add to that. The Updike I love is the Updike David Foster Wallace loves: the writer of the early non-Rabbit works: of The Farm, the Centaur, The Poorhouse Fair, Assorted Prose, and what are now called The Early Stories.   I do have a couple of things to say about this Updike, who keeps being eclipsed.

It feels like there is some committee conducting interviews for a post called Great American Writer and that the Rabbit novels are Updike’s submission to this committee. What’s more depressing is that the committee seems impressed.   If you assigned Time magazine to write a novel, they would have come up with something like the Rabbit series.  The problem is that this kind of writing requires empathy and humor, neither of which Updike has in abundance.

The emotions he was put on earth to capture were not the robust emotions of Augie March but something else. Updike is the great writer of American nostalgia. I think of nostalgia as a kind of character defect, a choice to live in an idealized past rather than the real present.  But for Updike nostalgia is an exalted, complex emotion: it is the wistfulness which departing high school seniors feel for their home town; it is the tenderness which the dying feel for the world. I would suggest that, as the poignant underside of all our moving around, nostalgia is also a central emotion to most Americans. Although it is very worldly, Updike’s nostalgia is spiritual in that it is radiant and unconflicted, at least in the normal sense of conflict in fiction: the dissonance of our warped wants. I think the last two stories in Pigeon Feathers are his greatest realization of this vision of fiction, but I will quote Of The Farm:

At my mother’s insistence, we went to the shopping center. The garish abundance, the ubiquitous music, the surrealistic centrality of automobiles made me feel, emerging from my father’s dusty car, like a visitor from the dead. I remembered these acres as a city dump adorned with pungent low fires and rust-colored weeds. In the supermarket nothing smelled, because even the turnips were bagged in cellophane, and the air had the faintly sour coolness of plastic. The greed my mother exercised in the aisles with my money exasperated me. I burned to return to Peggy, fearing that by some cruel rerouting of time she would have aged or vanished and I would be left with nothing but this present, this grim echo of my mother and this lonely child impersonating me–how eager to please we are, setting out in life! –amid this acreage of brightly shoddy goods.

And what this means to me, as a writer, is that every writer is the cartographer of a particular place—partly geographic, partly emotional. It is the job of the writer to intuit this place and to realize that publishers, critics, and canonizers might not quite understand it.   

      

On Updike's Of the Farm

Even people who don’t like him give Updike a blue ribbon for his prose. Even people who like Updike acknowledge that he is not the most empathetic of authors. (Pity the characters who are not horny, divorced, hyperverbal white males for whom spirituality is a way of becoming more self-centered, not less.)

Of The Farm is so interesting because some of the prose is, in my unaccomplished opinion,  bad and the some of the characters are vivid.

I encounter sentences that work so hard to be precise they feel distended and a tone that can be almost comically reverent yet also unempathetic. And the two sharpest characters are an old woman and a young boy.  Examples to follow.

Scroogey Thoughts On A Christmas Carol

Reading A Christmas Carol, I can see why people who don’t like Dickens don’t like Dickens. It plods to its conclusions like a powerpoint.  It’s sentimental and moralistic. And, yes, there are the overelaborate metaphors, the show offy lists.

And then there’s this:    

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon change for anything he put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
    Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I think I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat emphatically that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

I am familiar with this style from my college days. I didn’t study it; I practiced it. It is what happens when you have three pages of material for a five page paper and it’s two in the morning.

But then, in Saint Paul years later. you you get a phone call from a friend who will say, “It’s really nasty out. I think I saw Albert actually pulling Ellen across the street because he wanted to come in” and then you will look down at the Dickens and see the phrase “misanthropic ice” and remember that you are someone who loves Dickens.   

R.I.P. Carol Bly

I’d meant to argue with her more. In our oblique local culture, Carol Bly was direct. I disagreed with her deepest assumptions about politics. She believed that conservatives were not simply wrong, but less evolved than liberals.  (On the other hand, I recently exclaimed, “Awesome! A Gerald Ford stamp!”) But Carol Bly’s insistence that the fiction we create should include politics has led me to think about what including politics in fiction might mean. I don’t think she would agree with the conclusions I’ve come to, that politics is almost always ironic in fiction, that it is undercut by the delusion and self-interest and instability and opacity and forgiveness that fiction explores. (Then again, that might just be the kind of sloppy opining that gives blogs a bad name.)

Her directness helped me in other ways. She was an early supporter of my literary magazine Two Cities, subscribing immediately and writing me notes about what I could do better. She critiqued a story of mine and told me that, if you write one story about someone, you always have to ask, “why this day?” The point may be obvious, but I didn’t know it then and always remember it now. She cared about writing and how it was taught and took on the workshop early.

She was less effective, and less celebrated, than she might otherwise have been because her natural mode was the lecture and to lecture is to condescend and to condescend is, in some small way, to make an enemy. Her weakness was not that she cared but that she seemed to assume that she was the only one who cared. 

Lecturers aren’t good listeners and she had, to my own imperfect ear, a tin ear which made her more personal pieces goofily endearing but which hobbled her more polemical pieces. 

She cared about outstate Minnesota and, in Letters From The Country,  treated seriously what others have treated sentimentally.  I hope this book lasts. The personal essay was her first and best form. The “personal” gave her writing detail and her voice humility. The “essay” honored her directness.   

The start of an essay I had left bookmarked for years until I picked up the book this morning: 

I have been thinking about the positive side of Minnesota blizzards. Another of the blessings is that extended-family occasions come to a halt. Thank goodness. The extended-family dinner is a threat to the pleasure and ease of the American farm family, yet it is hard to say so.

And this, about the small town in rural Minnesota where she lived with Robert Bly:

Before a storm, Madison is full of people excitedly laying in food stocks for the three-day blow. People lay in rather celebratory food, too. Organic-food parents get chocolate for their children; weight watchers lay in macaroni and Sara Lee cakes; recently-converted vegetarians backslide to T-bones. 

". . . she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree."

I know this sounds crazy but the humor in Jane Austen reminds me of the humor in the Andy Griffith Show: a slight pressure against the normal. It is spiked, but warm and forgiving. Jane Austen, sometimes through surrogates, is Sheriff Taylor; Marianne, Deputy Fife. 

bel·low v. "to give a bull's loud roar"

I found the beautifully designed, electrically-bright new Paris Review Interviews in my stocking recently.  This, from Saul Bellow: "I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things i knew intimately.  Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable."  Earlier: "When I began to wrote Augie March, I took off many of these restraints. I think I took off too many, and went too far . . . "

For the record, I liked The Dangling Man a lot and couldn't get through The Victim. I also have never read Herzog and am now asking myself why. 

Best Two Word Synopsis of MacBeth

A friend of ours is teaching MacBeth to his junior high school class. When they complained about the difficulty of the play, he had them put their heads on their desks and asked who didn't want to continue. Only three raised their hands. 

Upon encountering the line, "he unseamed him from the nave to the chops," one student took a second to vizualize what was being described and blurted, "He gangster."

Note: The poster is from a Royal Shakespeare production. I know with books using the cover is a tacit fair use. Is this true with theatrical posters?

Jane Austen Powers

It's fun to notice how Jane Austen land-mines the prose in this passage from Sense and Sensibility with metaphors for gluttony:

“When breakfast was over, she walked out by herself, and wandered about the village of Allenham, indulging the recollection of past enjoyment and crying over the present reverse for the chief of the morning.
    The evening passed off in the equal indulgence of feeling. She played over every favourite song that she had been used to play to Willoughby, every air in which their voices had been oftenest joined, and sat at the instrument gazing on every line of music that he had written out for her, till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness could be gained; and this nourishment of grief was every day applied.”   Italics mine.

Dollars and Sensibility: Jane Austen and the American Class Snuggle

Jane Austen writes well about class because she writes about the scaffolding of class: money. She devotes the first pages of Sense and Sensibility to answering the question my trusts and estates professor used to ask repeatedly: who gets the cookies? She describes the process by which greed is painted over as need, when the step brother rationalizes his stinginess toward his family. She bothers to consider the logistics of giving and accepting gifts, as a horse is offered by a suitor.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not seeing a lot of talk of family money or its lack in modern American fiction, and I personally find it hard to write about those things.

I think the British are just more honest about class than we are. In America, we all like to think that we are essentially middle class. In some ways we are, but Jane Austen proves that even intramural class struggles are fraught. At the very least, there are the people at whom the buy-your-spouse-an-Audi-for Christmas commercials are targeted and the rest of us. There are people who enfeebled by money or embittered by its lack. But that's just the start of an complicated mess of delusion and nuance and irony. I’m not looking for agitprop but I would like to write in ways that reflected how money and its absence shape us.

Little Marx On Paper: the Groucho Letters

My periodic hand-wringing about whether I should continue blogging is prompted by thoughts such as writers in the past didn’t waste their time blogging. They devoted every working second to their great projects, thickening Ulysses, adding to Augie March, refining To the Lighthouse. What I forget is that before blogging there were journals, notebooks, literary journalism, commonplace books, and letters. My journal entries have thinned to a few presumably therapeutic yowls.  Other than the odd review for Rain Taxi, I don’t do the kind of literary journalism that used to be common for aspiring writers.   Most of the regular non-local readers of this blog are people I’ve either corresponded with back when people did such things or would be corresponding with if people still did such things now.

This has all been entertainingly confirmed by the Groucho Letters, which house many of the gripes and enthusiasms (Ben Hecht, E.B. White) which might find their way onto a modern blog.  Being Groucho Marx, he simply wrote to the people who bugged him.  This, to President of Chrysler, in 1954:

Each year the motor manufacturers hammer home the idea of more horsepower. I realize a reasonable amount of power is necessary, but I think it would be much smarter if emphasis were placed on safety rather than additional speed . . ..  I also think that if a device could be installed on the carburetor (I understand there are such things) that would eliminate the belching of carbon monoxide through the city streets, the Chrysler Corporation would create an enormous amount of good will . . .