MORE MATTER: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM, by John Updike.  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. $35.00.

In a book review reprinted in his new collection More Matter: Essays and Criticism, John Updike characterizes Theodore Dreiser as being, “in our honorable American way, a writer of starts and stops, of elephantine gestation periods and quasi-religious periods of hesitation and meditation.” One can hardly read this without thinking that Updike is here, with a characteristically genteel and charming wink, reminding us that his own long literary career has been utterly free of those Dreiserian “starts and stops.”  And what better evidence can there be of Updike’s continuing productivity than this immense compendium itself, which is, for the record, Updike’s fiftieth book (if you don’t count several foreign collections whose contents overlap those of his American titles) and his fifth volume of miscellaneous non-fiction (as distinguished from his assemblages of pieces on golf and art)?  Bringing together, as the jacket flap informs us, “eight years’ worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and . . . paragraphs on [Updike] and his work,” More Matter includes considerations of, among much else, Lana Turner, the Titanic, Mickey Mouse, Queen Elizabeth II, Gene Kelly, the Song of Solomon, suntans, cosmology, New York City, Isaac Newton, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Norman Rockwell, dogs, the Fifties, Robert Benchley, and the Frick Collection.  Updike reprints his foreword to John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967-1993 and reviews U & I, Nicholson Baker’s offbeat book about him; he shares with us his roster of the ten greatest works of literature written during the last millennium (no surprises) and a list of “five remembered moments of utter reading bliss.”  Among the scores of fiction writers reviewed here can be found both famous names (Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas Llosa) and not-so-famous (Orhan Pamuk, Alexander Kabakov, Antonio Benítez-Rojo).

     The book’s size (over 900 pages) and variety, and the range of publications in which its contents originally appeared, testify to the energy and dedication with which the nearly seventy-year-old Updike has persevered in applying himself to a freelance writing career of a sort that few contemporary American authors of his stature would be bothered with.  What, one wonders, could account for this two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner’s willingness to churn out exhibition notes for a Boston museum exhibit of New Yorker cartoons, to provide Playboy with captions for cheesecake photos of Marilyn Monroe, and to ponder, at prescribed word lengths, the often trifling topics proposed by editors of in-flight magazines and newspapers in Tokyo and Sao Paolo? Is it humility?  The Protestant work ethic?  An inability, even after all these years, to shake off the neophyte writer’s reluctance to turn down an assignment?  Or is it a wish to fill his work schedule with mundane tasks that will enable Updike – a man who, despite his deeply melancholy view of the universe, plainly feels compelled to be upbeat – to avoid contemplating too deeply the darkness he descries at the heart of the human condition?

     Updike’s preface sheds some light on this question.  “I set out,” he tells us, “to be a magazine writer, a wordsmith . . . and I like seeing my name in what they used to call ‘hard type.’”  Over the years, he tells us in one essay, the pages of Updike prose have accumulated to the extent that “my own books have crowded all the others out of one room and have pressed on into another.  Boxes of them weigh down the attic joists and molder in the basement and the barn.  Their swelling bulk threatens to separate me from the point of it all.”  Yet part of the point seems to be that he has made the mistake of thinking that piling up all those books – and thereby creating for himself an illusion of permanence, of immortality, a hedge against time – was the point of it all.  Only “late in life,” he confesses, has he come to realize that in filling those shelves with his own books he was constructing not a protective dike against the sea of time but, rather, his own tombstone.  Or, to use his own words, he’s finally noticed

that paper decays, that readership dwindles, that a book is a kind of newspaper, that the most polished composition loses edge to the flow of language and cultural context, that no masterpiece will outlast the human race, that the race is but an incident in the fauna of our planet, that our planet is doomed to die in a hiccup of the sun, that the sun will eventually implode and explode, and that the universe itself is a transitory scribble on the surface, so oddly breached fifteen billion years ago, of nothingness. . . .  Nevertheless, the living must live, a writer must write.

And write he does.  Yet while many readers of this book will doubtless admire Updike’s industry, some may also find themselves reflecting that such compulsive productivity can make it easier for a “wordsmith” to neglect vital aspects of his vocation – among them every writer’s ongoing obligation to critically examine (and, if warranted, to modify) the way he thinks and writes about the world.  This Updike has never done.  Consistency is his hallmark.  Reading through these polished pieces, one almost wants to see him thrown by some overwhelming emotional experience – by some profound passion or rage that shakes him to his roots and demands literary expression, but that his accustomed literary manner (suave, stately, civilized) is incapable of doing justice to. To put it a bit differently, he’s such an impressive writer than you can get angry at him for appearing to be quite satisfied with not being an even more impressive writer.  You want him – dare one say it? – to bite off a bit more than he can chew.  

     Perhaps part of the reason why Updike hasn’t done this is that he’s had a uniquely smooth professional ride – quite as smooth, indeed, as one of his sentences.  In these days of publishing-world volatility, when writers routinely find themselves changing publishers with every book, Updike’s long-time affiliations with both The New Yorker and Knopf are a wonder to contemplate.  It is hardly surprising that these associations have had a profound impact on his work.  In a London Sunday Times article about short-story writing that he has reprinted here, Updike admits that from the beginning of his career, “a large part of my artistic conscience was an implant from New Yorker editorial policy.  A good story was, basically, one that they accepted.” It’s interesting to try to imagine how different a course Updike’s career might have taken had he not early found and long maintained a cozy home at The New Yorker.  Minus that berth, would he have developed into a greater novelist – or would he have landed, say, at Golf  magazine and spent the last half-century or so churning out first-rate copy about divots, birdies, and sand traps?  Did The New Yorker, in other words, make him the best writer he had it in him to be by holding him up to high standards, or did the magazine get him into the lethal habit of clipping his own imaginative wings?

     A new wrinkle this time around is that the Updike of More Matter (whose title, of course, coyly alludes to Gertrude’s plea to Polonius for “more matter, with less art”) is the Updike of The New Yorker’s Tina Brown years.  What this means is that the book contains fewer long, sober appreciations of respected European novelists than his earlier miscellanies and more pieces on showbiz, their topics suggested by Brown.  Other longtime contributors walked away from Tina Brown’s New Yorker; it tells us much about Updike that he not only stayed on but was plainly grateful to be allowed to stay.  “I tried, albeit somewhat arthritically,” he confesses, “to dance to her tune.”  But why should John Updike feel compelled to dance to Tina Brown’s tune?  For heaven’s sake, if an author in his position can’t afford to act on principle, to speak in candor, to voice uncomfortable truths, and to write what he really wants to, what author can?  

     That having been said, some of the pieces collected here make one grateful for Updike’s continuing willingness to take on assignments that sound infra dig.  There’s almost never an air of condescension or a feeling of casualness in his treatment of popular culture, and he often elicits provocative insights from seemingly unpromising material.  Introducing a volume of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs of people taken shortly before or after their death (yes, you read that correctly), he writes that

Our own time, which celebrates the living body – in exercise, diet, gladiatorial games, and pornography – with more frankness and zeal than any culture since the pagan Roman, is very squeamish about the body once dead: we will it to disappear, in closed coffins or the little cardboard urns the crematorium supplies.  No longer open to the invitations of sex appeal and consumerism, the body becomes trash.  The piety of the previous century clung to the Christian tenet, unemphasized in today’s churches, that the body is the person, with a holy value even when animation ceases.  This faith, embodied in these memorial images, tells us more than we want to know about corporeality, and challenges our modern mysticism, the worship of disembodied energy.

Here, Updike’s genuine absorption in his subject yields pithy and perceptive results.  The same is true of his review of a very different book, Camille Paglia’s Sex, Art, and American Culture.  Paglia, he writes, “is a reassuring author for a man to read.  She is as loyal to the male gender as an Italian matriarch is to her father, husband, and son, even if all are involved in the Mafia.”  In this piece, as elsewhere, his mixture of positives and negatives feels almost exactly right: while acknowledging that “the weary reader” of Paglia’s confident, high-voltage prose “longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation,” he praises her humor, describes the first chapter of her earlier book Sexual Personae as “magnificent” (it is), and observes astutely that “Paglia’s awareness of the life-enabling religious impulses moving beneath the quirks of human culture is her most valuable and refreshing trait, though it leads her to overvalue the chimeras of pop culture.”  Justly noting that the quip-happy, publicity-hungry Paglia “is in danger of getting trapped in a shtick,” he concludes that “one cannot help applauding her, as a unique performer on the cultural stage, while wondering if performance, in even this dim-witted age of diluted Dionysianism, is all there is.  Her solemn compiling of her own notices in Sex, Art, and American Culture implies that stirring up press attention is in itself an achievement.  Maybe so, but ars et longa, and buzz is short.”  

     It’s a lively and well-balanced summing up, though one might add a further point in Paglia’s favor: that whatever her excesses, failings, and even absurdities, she rarely takes on a topic about which she doesn’t have strong feelings.  If More Matter too often shows Updike occupying the role of the dutiful wordsmith, churning out consistently fine prose about subjects often remote from his passions, Paglia is never less than ardently engaged in her material.  If Paglia’s stirring up of press attention ultimately means nothing, moreover, Updike’s sheer productivity – the proliferation of his name in “hard type” – is, of course, equally meaningless.  Paglia’s hot-from-the-oven grab-bags of rants, screeds, slams, diatribes, and jeremiads don’t just amount to the beginning of a five-foot Updikean shelf designed for long-term endurance (“ars et longa”) – they add up to something the likes of which Updike gives us only intermittently: a graphic portrait of what really grips the author’s mind and stirs the author’s heart.

     Updike is likewise engaged by Andy Warhol, writing entertainingly that

the Andy Warhol retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the perfect show for time-pressed Manhattanites; they can breeze through it at the clip of a fast walk, take it in through the corners of their eyes without ever breaking stride, and be able to talk about it afterwards entirely in terms of what they got out of it. Indeed, you can honorably discuss the show without attending it at all, if you’ve ever seen a Brillo box, a Campbell’s soup can, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and a silver balloon.  Here they are again, the dear old Warhol icons, full of empty content, or contented emptiness….Not only does, say, a duplicated and garishly paint-smeared image of Liza Minnelli or Truman Capote not invite close attention, it sends it skidding the other way.  Busy power-people should love this show; it repels lingering, and can be cruised for its high spots, which are all but indistinguishable from its low spots.

Funny stuff.  But what sets Updike apart from some other less than worshipful critics of Warhol is that he doesn’t just sneer at him (and, one might add, at upscale Manhattanites, whose desperate busyness and susceptibility to hype he never misses an opportunity to mock) and leave it at that. One might imagine that there are few cultural figures as unalike as Updike and Warhol, but in fact there’s a part of Updike that identifies with Warhol, just as part of him identifies with the genius-cheering, testosterone-celebrating Paglia.  In Warhol, Updike sees someone as bemused as he is by sex, as unashamedly riveted by pop culture and the magical boob tube (“Being on TV,” Updike once observed in a sentence that Warhol himself might have written, “is like being alive, only moreso”), and as spiritually parched by the withdrawal of the Sea of Faith.  “Surely,” Updike comments about Warhol – a Catholic boy who, he notes, made daily pilgrimages to a Manhattan church – “the profound hollowness we feel behind [Warhol’s] canvases is a Catholic negativity, the abyss of loss faith.  Protestantism, when it fades, leaves behind a fuzzy idealism; Catholicism, a crystalline cynicism.”  This is as useful an insight into the products of Warhol’s Factory as any
I’ve read.

     Indeed, there is much to be said for this book, whose author – a working man of letters in the nineteenth-century mold – has rarely if ever appeared to be in thrall to literary trends, to covet the kind of media celebrity that some other writers of his generation have sought, or to use his criticism to settle scores.  If aspiring writers may not find in these pages the foremost living model of critical candor, courage, and passion, they can nonetheless learn a great deal from Updike about how to shape a sentence and read a text.  They can also learn the value of having an eye for particulars – for Updike, who cut his teeth as a New Yorker staff writer, churning out detail-laden unsigned pieces for the magazine’s front pages, has always excelled at homely and telling specifics.  In his most recent novel, Toward the End of Time, the protagonist Ben Turnbull, who like his creator tends to be skeptical about modern progress, observes that “plastic [snow] shovels are an improvement – can you believe it?”, and describes the difference between plastic and metal models with a precision that seems guaranteed to win smiles of recognition from any blizzard-bedeviled denizen of the northern latitudes.  Similarly, reviewing Stephen Jay Gould’s Questioning the Millennium, Updike offers a down-to-earth explanation of our inclination to consider 2000, and not 2001, the first year of the new millennium: “Popular instinct, conditioned by odometers, votes for the rollover of nines into zeroes as the critical moment.”  Throughout his work, he provides a lesson in looking closely and steadily at the quotidian, the obvious, even the vulgar.  Reviewing a biography of Helen Keller, for example, he begins by noting that her name remains in currency today thanks largely to jokes whose “bad taste vents our deep fear of being reduced to her condition, a kind of burial alive.”

     “The impulse of praise – or its inverse, lament and execration – motivates literature at its deepest and most simple and noble,” writes Updike; “even those who see nothing to praise admire in others the results of this impulse.”  If that parenthetical reference to “lament and execration” feels like a grudging nod toward literary reality, it’s because Updike the novelist, despite his gloomy worldview, feels a powerful inner compulsion to be a yea-sayer.  So does Updike the critic.  “We are here to give praise,” he insisted in an earlier book, in answer to an editor’s question about the meaning of life.  An attractive sentiment; yet he often seems, in both his fiction and non-fiction, to have trouble reconciling this programmatic positivity with his obvious inability to feel terribly positive about the world.  Though he occasionally sheds his cheery, chirpy façade and offers us glimpses of grouchiness about various contemporary social and cultural phenomena, he never really brings out the heavy artillery.  For Updike, seemliness is paramount. And this, to my mind, is his distinctive failing as a writer: that he has exalted charm and mannerliness above all else, and allowed his reluctance to stray too far afield from sweetness and light to prevent him from tapping fully into the depths of his interior gloom.  Perhaps the ultimate irony of Updike’s oeuvre is that, for all his prolificity, it may be fair to speak to him of having, in some elemental way, rendered himself mute. Compelled to be upbeat, clubbable, well-bred, he has shied away from articulating systematically and at length the morbid critique of modern life that is all too implicit in his novels, as well as in much of what he has brought together here.

     If Updike is routinely quicker to praise than to bury, he tends to be particularly gentle with fellow American eminences of (roughly) his own generation.  Perhaps, as an active member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he feels a fraternal disinclination to pan a fellow Immortal. Whatever the case, his appraisals of books like Norman Mailer’s feeble The Gospel according to the Son are surprising in their generosity and tact; Updike gives Mailer such an easy ride that one wonders fleetingly whether the two celebrity authors (and Harvard graduates) have signed some kind of mutual non-aggression pact.  But then one realizes that while Mailer’s high-profile, recklessly “existential” involvement in the life of his times could hardly seem more different from Updike’s own careful, retiring, low-key emphasis on building up a body of work for posterity, the former writer’s frenzied preoccupation with the perils, mysteries, and triumphs of heterosexual congress and his occasional dalliance with the sacred are in fact very much up the latter’s alley.  Updike is, one might say, the Apollonian Prisoner of Sex to Mailer’s Dionysian. (Or, to borrow terms from Advertisements for Myself, the square to his hipster.)  By contrast, Gore Vidal’s consistently sneering references to Christianity, heterosexuality, and America – Updike’s Trinity, one might say – compel Updike to slip off his genial mask.  Vidal, he amusingly suggests, sneers at all things sacred because he believes “that sneering becomes him.”  Perhaps so, though one might add that Updike, for his part, plainly believes that false modesty – as reflected in such tongue-in-cheek titles as Picked-Up Pieces, Odd Jobs, and More Matter, as well as in his insistence that “I write not criticism but book reviews” (though the present book’s inevitable subtitle is Essays and Criticism, not Essays and Book Reviews) – becomes him.  (It doesn’t.)

     For all Updike’s seemly yea-saying, a few of these pieces are, as it turns out, genuinely offensive.  Some writers offend with vitriol; when Updike offends, it is sometimes with a touch of ethnic or regional condescension (as exemplified by his Mafia crack in the Paglia piece) that cagily skirts the boundary separating permissible humor from clear-cut slur, and sometimes with a gentility that can seem, under certain circumstances, inappropriate and insensitive.  For instance, in a few paragraphs intended for The New Yorker’s “Notes and Comment” section (but for some reason never published there), he describes some homeless people whom he saw on the New York subway.  When he writes about the “little bundles, wrapped up in plastic and vinyl, that upon closer inspection turn out to be sleeping people,” Updike’s heart is (presumably) in the right place, but his prose remains sumptuous, mannerly; he might well be describing paintings or pieces of porcelain.  Where one would like to see a powerful eruption of anger or frustration – an indictment, a manifesto, a cry of futility, something – one instead finds a beautifully worded expression of aloof dismay, of seemly disapproval, that brings to mind the sympathetic tut-tutting of a queen touring a slum.  Updike collected some of his art criticism in a book whimsically entitled Just Looking; one can get the dismaying impression that this is also his position toward such phenomena as homelessness.  Or perhaps it is truer to say that Updike – whose own writings suggest that he is less than comfortable when he strays beyond Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, the quaint, quiet town in which he has lived for many years – comes off as being especially uneasy in New York.  One thinks of Conrad in Africa.  Updike believes, with his theologian hero Karl Barth, in a God distant beyond comprehension; he would appear to feel the same way about Manhattan.

     In another unsettling Gotham-related piece, “One Big Bauble,” Updike celebrates the birth of Christ by preaching racial purity to Germans.   Describing Christmas in the Big Apple for Lufthansa’s in-flight magazine, Bordbuch, he writes that the city is “home to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of people of sub-Saharan African blood, and black-faced Santa Clauses, in white beards and mustaches, can be seen on many a street corner.  How many of these are, behind their beards, Black Muslims does not bear looking into.  In an age of weakening Christian orthodoxy, the vigorous dogmas of political correctness and ethnic diversity are enforced everywhere.”  What on God’s green earth, one wonders, was Updike thinking here?  One might venture to point out that the percentage of practicing Christians among blacks in Manhattan is probably higher than it is among whites, but so what?  The passage is odious, period – and it reminds us that if there’s anything uglier than crude, trailer-park bigotry, it’s that bigotry’s genteel counterpart.  This passage from Bordbuch is one of a number of moments in More Matter when one reflects that Updike might have done well to pause for (to coin a phrase) a quasi-religious period of hesitation and meditation.  And it provides yet another reminder that, despite the remarkable facility and grace that characterize virtually every line of Updike’s published prose, there is something truly dismaying about the consistency with which he has dedicated himself to constructing a well-crafted oeuvre of late-Victorian proportions while devoting too little serious reflection to the question of what, in the end, really matters.

THE HUDSON REVIEW, Spring 2000