TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031389/03138900.058

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 112 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 77

A Burden of Answered Prayers

By Paul Gray

    SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS     by John Updike     Knopf; 257 pages;
$18.95

    For more than 30 years, John Updike has borne, with
considerable poise and good humor, a terrible burden. He is one
of those people whose prayers were answered. Growing up a
beloved only child in Shillington, a small town in southeastern
Pennsylvania, he dreamed of becoming a writer, of seeing his
work appear on the pages of The New Yorker. And -- presto! --
these things occurred and were then followed by unanticipated
consequences: lots of money, critical recognition and fame.
Worse fates have befallen people, and Updike adjusted as best
he could: he cashed the checks, entertained intrusive
interviewers and basked modestly in the limelight. But several
years ago, his equanimity slipped when he heard that someone,
somewhere, was planning to write his biography. "To take my
life," he thought, "my lode of ore and heap of memories, from
me!" If anyone was going to tell Updike's story, the author
decided, it ought to be Updike.

    Self-Consciousness is neither a straightforward
autobiography nor a decisive pre-emptive strike against future
chronicles. There will surely be biographies of Updike someday,
all of which, if they are any good, will draw heavily from this
book of revelations. Updike's candor is not of the scandalous
or titillating sort. Rather, the six essays assembled here piece
together a fascinating self-portrait of an evolving sensibility,
of a mind learning to love the world from which it feels, for
several reasons, estranged.

    The love came early, prompted by the sensations and
surroundings of childhood. Visiting Shillington, Updike
unexpectedly finds himself at loose ends for a couple of hours
and wanders about through a soft spring drizzle, trying to
recapture his past. He enters familiar ground: "The street, the
house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple;
this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical
secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into
a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book." His
first attempts to put this secret into words were, he gently
suggests, sometimes misunderstood: "My own style seemed to me
a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity
of envisioned phenomena and it surprised me to have it called
luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is exactly
what it wasn't -- other-indulgent, rather."

    The blights on his happy childhood seem small, but, Updike
argues, they inexorably determined the life he would lead. As
a boy, he developed psoriasis and a sporadic stammer; he could
savor reality's entrancing parade but never feel comfortable
joining it himself. The recurring rashes on his skin kept him
apart, drove his attention inward: "You are forced to the
mirror, again and again; psoriasis compels narcissism, if we can
suppose a Narcissus who did not like what he saw." One of the
hallmarks of his fiction became elaborate celebrations of the
status quo. Updike thinks he knows why: "An overvaluation of the
normal went with my ailment, a certain idealization of everyone
who was not, as I felt myself to be, a monster."

    Similarly, his stammer posed a problem: how to get the
attention he craved without risking public humiliation. In
retrospect, the solution seems obvious: "The papery
self-magnification and immortality of printed reproduction --
a mode of self-assertion that leaves the cowardly perpetrator
hidden and out of harm's way -- was central to my artistic
impulse." Redemption beckoned: "To be in print was to be saved."

    One of the many ironies weaving sinuously through this
haunting memoir is the recognition that writing did not leave
the author protected from the world after all. "Celebrity," he
writes, "is a mask that eats into the face." Updike uneasily
recalls his much publicized refusal, during the 1960s, to oppose
U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a stance that left him odd man out
among friends, fellow authors and members of his children's
generation: "Authority to these young people was Amerika, a
bloodstained bugaboo to be crushed at any cost. To me, authority
was the Shillington High School faculty, my father and his
kindly and friendly, rather wan and punctilious colleagues, with
whose problems and perspective I had had every opportunity to
empathize."

    He wonders consistently about his own failings: "The
critics who found me callow might be right: I had been lucky
and, as the lucky will do, had become hard-hearted." But this
book betrays no coldness, only the wry detachment of someone
trying to tell the truth about himself while being
simultaneously "aware of a possible cliff-high vantage from
which my self-solicitous life was negligible."

    That neglect may stem from indifferent fellow passengers on
this planet or, more seriously, eternity. Updike does not want
to conclude that his -- or anyone's -- existence means nothing
in the long run. His belief in God, his Sunday church-going, his
hope for some form of a hereafter are all discussed and
underline how unconventional his fiction has been by
contemporary standards.

    His books are peopled by liberal sophisticates in
comfortable, man-made environments. One of the pleasures of
reading Updike has been his meticulous attention to the ways,
particularly sexually, we live now. But these sleek surfaces
reflect hidden depths. He writes, "It was and is still my fate
to like the settings and the personalities that enlightenment
creates without wanting, myself, to be thoroughly enlightened."
Looking back on his career, he criticizes himself for having
been too pliant and obedient, too willing to "go along" with the
exigencies of reality. But in the process he displays his self,
the stubborn core that countered and threw waves back against
the current of his times.