I recently read
half a review of the work of the late American writer John Updike, and gave up
in some disgust. A usually perceptive critic seemed to think that delivering up
a welter of uninhibited four-letter words served as a way of revealing the
misogynistic underbelly of Updike’s hyper-polished prose. This isn’t the first
time Updike has been attacked for an habitually clinical depiction of sex, taken
to mean that he fails to understand women – a perception that possibly cost him
the Nobel Prize. He did win many other awards, but it still remains a mystery to me
that this extraordinary writer, once dubbed America’s Dickens, never got the
Big One, even if one objects to a certain cool cynicism of vision. This sort of
thing didn’t prevent the 2019 Nobel committee choosing Peter Handke, whose
politics sound abominable, or prevent a number of previous committees choosing
men who wrote like angels but in real life treated their women like dirt.
Two things
here. The first is that Updike does indeed describe sex and the minutiae of
women’s bodies with crystalline accuracy
– the same unflinching, character-revealing and comprehensive gaze he brings to
bear on the interior of a car, or the contents of a garage. He picks out things
which (I presume) most men do register in their lovers’ secret recesses, but
don’t go so far as to delineate them in richly, at times comically,
metaphorical prose. I’m not sure what Updike’s feminist objectors would prefer:
romanticised stereotype, the glutinous clumsiness of the Fifty Shades variety, or the coy avoidance of a Jane Austen? Not
only feminists have had issues: David Foster Wallace, while claiming to admire
Updike’s craft, objected to the ageing protagonist of Toward the End of Time, Updike’s solitary futuristic novel, paying
exaggerated attention to the state of his genitals. On re-reading the novel, I
think it’s Wallace who exaggerates, making me wonder what his problem might have been. I think I am safe in saying many if
not most men pay a good deal of necessary attention to their goolies, ageing or
not, even if unlike Updike they don’t talk about it much. In short, Updike is
as forensically observant of male anatomical quirks as of female, suggesting he
is driven by something other than a covert desire to demean women. Indeed, I’d
suggest almost the opposite. I also recently re-read Rabbit is Rich, one of four novels concerning car salesman Harry ‘Rabbit’
Angstrom, and was struck afresh by what an appalling human being he is – and there
is no way that Updike isn’t perfectly deliberate in this.
So here’s the second thing. Because in story after story Updike portrays his men as complexly flawed, often downright stupid and gauche in their relationships, and only borderline sympathetic, it has become too easy to collapse the characters into the writer, and to judge Updike as being equally impoverished in his understanding. On the contrary: I suspect that Updike is placing that myopic masculinity at the very centre of the American cultural crisis that he portrayed life-long in such analytic, fascinated, still-half-loving detail. Behind this lurks the gnarly and perennial question about how far knowledge of a writer’s life should affect one’s judgement of the art, and vice versa.
So here’s the second thing. Because in story after story Updike portrays his men as complexly flawed, often downright stupid and gauche in their relationships, and only borderline sympathetic, it has become too easy to collapse the characters into the writer, and to judge Updike as being equally impoverished in his understanding. On the contrary: I suspect that Updike is placing that myopic masculinity at the very centre of the American cultural crisis that he portrayed life-long in such analytic, fascinated, still-half-loving detail. Behind this lurks the gnarly and perennial question about how far knowledge of a writer’s life should affect one’s judgement of the art, and vice versa.
But all this
is beside my main point here. Revisiting other of Updike’s works,
marvelling at the consistency of their deft and intricate quality (excepting The Coup, aberrantly set in Africa and a
truly awful book), it’s something else altogether that has struck me.
Updike’s settings are predominantly urban and suburban, and he can hardly be
called an ‘ecological’ writer – yet I’ve become aware of many telling instances
in which the natural and animal worlds insert themselves into the narratives. At
times this seems almost unthinking: Nature is just there, like flowers in the gardens, part of the enveloping intimate
detail Updike excels at – but almost the more telling for its apparent
unconsciousness. Here’s an illuminating little passage from Seek My Face, a 2002 novel decidedly
about art, not nature:
The ‘sixties liberated her from lipstick and those
frizzing ‘forties and ‘fifties perms as well as from girdles and garters; she
let her hair grow long and flat down her back, bundling it into a quick
ponytail to paint or do housework, she had all sorts of artful clips and hinged
round combs, tortoiseshell, and ivory before endangered elephants became an
issue.
Not only
does this, with extraordinary economy, capture his artist-protagonist’s life as
refracted through a cultural history of hairstyles; it also alludes to a
history of animal life and an economy of exploitation: so common is it that we
almost forget that a “ponytail” is equine mimicry, that “tortoiseshell” is
originally more than the colour of a cat, or even more allusively that girdles
were once made with whalebone. In this one brief mention of elephants, a wider cultural
shift of attitude towards the wild and trade in animal parts becomes integral
to his character’s biography.
It would, of
course, be a mistake to think that Updike ever included a word or image unthinkingly:
he is way too precise. That his scattered evocations of the natural – the peonies
outside the window, the woods beyond the fence – are one with some serious
consideration of human-natural relations, is indicated by this long passage
from Villages (2004).
While Owen shaves ... he hears the mockingbird,
mounted on its favourite perch at the tip of the tallest cedar, deliver a
thrilling long scolding about something or other, some minor, chronic
procedural matter. All these local levels of Nature – the birds, the insects,
the flowers, the furtive fauna of chipmunks and woodchucks scuttling in and out
of their holes as if a shotgun might blast them the next instant – have their
own network of concerns and communications; the human world to them is merely a
marginal flurry, an inscrutable static, an intermittent interference rarely
lethal and bearing no perceived relation to the organic bounty (the garbage,
the gardens) that the human species brings to Nature’s table. They snub us, Owen thinks. We should be
gods to them, but they lack our capacity for worship – for foresight and the
terrors and convoluted mental grovelling that foresight brings with it,
including the invention of an afterlife. Animals do not distinguish between us
and the other beasts, or between us and the rocks and trees, each with its
pungence and relevance to the struggle for existence. The earth offers haven to
scorpions and woodchucks and quintillions of ants; the stars guide the Canada
geese and arctic terns, the barn swallows and monarch butterflies on their
immense annual migrations. We are mere dots beneath their wings, our cities
foul and barren interruptions in the discourse of predator and prey. No, not
interruptions, for many species accept our cities as habitats, not just the
rats in the cellar and the bats in the attic, but the hawks and pigeons on the
skyscraper ledges and now the deer brazenly, helplessly stalking through
suburban back yards, both pets and pests.
It’s
undeniable that the writer has thought through the question of humans’
embeddedness in Nature – whether or not Owen is ventriloquising Updike, and whether
or not one agrees with this view. A religious person, for example, would not:
and indeed Owen grapples with this issue again, late in the novel and late in
his life:
We feel made for a better world, and the fault is
ours that this is not Eden. ... [F]ear and loathing can be explained as, like
pain, a survival device selected and refined by Darwinian evolution. Because we
fear death, we try harder to live. As long as our genes get through, Nature
doesn’t care how we suffer.
We are, in
this perspective, no more significant than insects swirled about in the
cauldron of an insensate cosmos. Even once-ecstatic
sex, in the jaded elderly reminiscing of the ironically-named Hope, protagonist
of Seek My Face, is reduced to “Bug-behavior,
the repulsive intricacy of insect genitals and strategies, strategies in which
the death of the individual is quite casually folded. Poking, biting,
squirting, dying.” The equally elderly narrator of Toward the End of Time echoes her:
There was no God, each detail of [my] rusting,
moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as
carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile.
Dust to dust: each hammer stroke seemed dulled by cosmic desolation...
In another
mood or mode, however, this very brevity can bring about a brief but meaningful
rapture:
I was an insignificant insect rapturously enrolled,
for these brief bright instants of my life, in a churning, shining, birthing,
singing, dying cosmic excess. From the quasars to the rainbow shimmer on my
dragonfly wings, everything was an extravagance engraved upon the obsidian
surface of an infrangible, eternal darkness.
The cosmos
may be unfeeling, but nor, in the main, do humans care how Nature suffers. The
thoughtless side-effects of human rubbish, mechanisation, and predatory
exploitation infects everything. These undercurrents really surface in Toward the End of Time which, as I mentioned,
is set in the future – 2020 to be precise. A sort of cataclysm has occurred,
though its nature is left vague: there has been a huge war, which has, among
other effects, wiped out the Siberian tigers, left the American midwest a
radioactive dustbowl, and “an electronic infrastructure had been one of the
first casualties of urban catastrophe and global underpopulation”. It is the
culmination of the industrial toxicity underpinning the often pleasant but
ultimately brittle suburban American life that Updike chose as his lifelong artistic
patch. There are now little self-perpetuating robots, breeding in the trash-heaps,
secretive and voracious, but surviving humans carry on life rather as before
(it’s very different from Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road). The first-person narrator, Ben Turnbull, drawing toward the end of
his own time, lives only somewhat more isolated than his suburban predecessor
characters – enough however to be more than usually aware of the resurgence of
wild nature and the flux of seasons. The first section is entitled “The Deer”:
the insouciant animal raids the garden dahlias and poops on the lawn, much to his
wife Gloria’s anguish. She wants to kill it. Ben is more sympathetic,
paradoxically because he thinks “Rapacity, competition, desperation, death to
other living things [are] the forces that make the world go around.” A deep apocalyptic sense has the odd effect of
making one feel both more precious and aware, and also more futile: “Alas, time’s
arrow points one way, toward an entropy when all seas will have broken down all
rocks and there is not a whisper, a sub-atomic stir, of surge.” The novel’s
final section, “The Dahlia”, closes with several pages, quite cosmologically technical,
contemplating that ultimate condition of entropy, of the galaxies collapsing in
on our “scorched planet”, from which all life will have long vanished, or been
swallowed by a red star. But Ben, like all of us, is numbed by the aeons
involved, by the impossibility of
comprehending the disappearance of time itself.
My own mind quails. The blue shift is tens of
billions of years from heating the interstellar space by so much as a degree
Fahrenheit. I am safe in my nest of local conditions, on my hilltop in sight of
the still-unevaporated ocean. Nevertheless, I am uneasy. All the vegetation in
my view is gray, leafless. The sea has no colour; its uniformity of surface,
scarcely rippled, offers the very image of entropy. The firmament is heavy, a
mere webbing of lambent mortar between giant clouds as shapeless and motionless
as paving stones. Plagues stalk the scabs of land, perpetuated by
microorganisms that understand only annihilation; and nations, too, all
illusions of gloire and civilizing
mission hopelessly decayed, compete like animals in a cage where food for only
half of them is supplied. The very short view alone is bearable.
That myopia is,
perhaps, the core dilemma, both the saving and the destruction, of the human
consciousness. It is all, to be sure, profoundly unsettling, yet so clear-eyed
it is beautiful. The measured and delicate prose is itself the very antithesis
of entropy. Updike, I think, no matter how materialist and ultimately bleak he
seems, was attentively in love with all the foibles of American life, and implicitly,
unflinchingly, constantly asked the only question that matters: How do we achieve a meaningful life in the
face of oblivion?
*****
Visit Dan Wylie on www.netsoka.co.za