TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/031389/03138900.058

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 108 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.