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Moral Ambiguity In John Updike'S Short Stories

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Moral Ambiguity In John Updike'S Short Stories

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A t r o x u n m m v y M ic fO T n iro 300 North Zoob Rood Am Aibor, Michigan 40106 McOOY, Charles Robert, 1928- HGRAL AMBIGUITY IN JGH4 UPDIKE'S SHORT STORIES. University o£ Southern California, Ph.D., 1974 Language and Literature, modem Xerox University Microfilms, a ™ A r b o r . M ic h ig a n woe ©Copyright by CHARLES ROBERT McCOY 197*4 i THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. MORAL AMBIGUITY IN JOHN UPDIKE’S SHORT STORIES by Charles Robert McCoy A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 197>t UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THK OAADUATS SCHOOL UNIVKRSITY PARK LOS ANOSLSSk CALIFORNIA S 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by Charles Robert McCov under the direction of Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of the degree of D O C T O R OF P H IL O S O P H Y '7n<v±o Date DISSERTATION COMMITTEE j & y L - C. CCr*^. \ . . . CUram M s : CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .................................... 1 Chapter I. UPDIKE’S LIFE AS AN AUTHOR................ 4 Updike's Aesthetic ..................... 22 II. THE SAME DOOR............................. 34 Youth.................................. 41 "The Happiest I've Been"................ 42 Newlyweds.............................. 54 "Snowing in Greenwich Village" ......... 58 The Young Family....................... 63 "Toward Evening"... ..................... 71 Miscellaneous Stories ................... 79 Conclusion............................. 93 III. PIGEON FEATHERS........................... 96 "Flight".............................. 98 "Pigeon Feathers"....................... 106 "The Astronomer"......................... 115 "Lifeguard"...............................119 IV. THE MUSIC SCHOOL............................138 "The Music School" and "Harv Is Plowing N o w " ................... 143 ii Chapter Page "Giving Blood" and "Twin Beds In Rome" . . 15U "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails" and "The Rescue"........................... 163 "The Stare" and "The Morning"...............173 V. BECH: A B O O K ................................. 182 "Rich in Russia"......................... 191 "Bech in Rumania; or, The Rumanian Chauffeur".............................192 "The Bulgarian Poetess" .................. 195 "Bech Takes Pot Luck"......................199 "Bech Panics".............................202 "Bech Swings?"........................... 207 "Bech Enters Heaven"..................... 212 VI. MUSEUMS AND WOMEN........................... 216 VII. CONCLUSION................................... 237 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................ 2U3 iii INTRODUCTION Although John Updike has received considerable critical attention, an almost-obligatory comment has been that "he writes well but has nothing to say.” Curiously, this complaint almost always occurs in articles which con clude with hopeful longings that this "promising” writer may one day produce a great American novel, a tacit admis sion at least that he is worth watching. Some of his critics, acknowledging his great verbal skill, regret that he has failed to control the larger formal structures of the four genres he regularly publishes: verse, critical prose, short story, and novel. Others complain that he has not dealt with what they call the "larger issues” of our time, concentrating instead on the personal, the senti mental , the trivial. Even so, John Updike is virtually always included in anybody's list of the top five American writers, the ones ". . . who have tried to keep a grip on our experiences as we've wobbled along in the past decade or two, the writers to whom we turn to find out something of where we are and what we're feeling . . . ."1 Yet, his reputation has an 1Richard Locke, rev. of Rabbit Redux, by John Updike, The New York Times Book Review, 1 November 1971, p. 1. 1 instability far beyond that which one might attribute to his popular success* his relative youth* the competition for attention of other media* or the perilous times. It is my belief that much of the range of opinion regarding Updike's fiction has resulted from a basic mis understanding of his technique* which clearly involves intentional ambiguity. Updike has called attention to this himself, noting that his fiction has a "yes, but1 1 quality and maintaining that he doesn't want his writing to be any less ambiguous than life itself. To a detractor, this may sound like special pleading, a universal excuse for faulty vision or for failed commitment, but I believe that it is the essence of his particular style of realism and that* far from being a born-too-late nineteenth century tradi tionalist* he is an experimental writer very close to the mainstream of modern literature. I do not propose to deal with each of his critics in detail, only to cite certain examples of their reading as I try to suggest another way* nor do I propose to deal with all his fiction. Rather, I will restrict my attention to issues of moral ambiguity and related stylistic and struc tural matters in his five collections of short fiction: The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Bech: A Book (1970), and Museums and Women (1972). The issues are these: Is the medium (style, tech nique) an essential part of the message (theme)? Are his short stories morally ambiguous precisely because Updike's authorial second-self sees moral uncertainty as the major problem of Everyman in a world of receding faith, crumbling institutions, and autonomous values, a world where for many there is no essence, only existence? I propose to show that the answer to these omnibus questions is "yes" by examining each of his collections of short stories for representative examples of intentional moral ambiguity. First, I will briefly review Updike's life and career, since there is such a close identification between the personae of his stories and their author, and I will attempt to characterize his aesthetic, derived largely from his nonfictional prose. Finally, and mainly, I will apply his aesthetic to his developing use of moral ambiguity more or less chronologically through his col lected short stories. I hope to demonstrate that, although occasionally Updike may be charged with an unclear vision or a failure in execution, moral ambiguity in John Updike's short stories is precisely intended and is, indeed, the author's most salient characteristic. CHAPTER I UPDIKE'S LIFE AS AN AUTHOR In The Paris Review interview with Charles T. Samuels published in the winter of 1968, John Updike disavowed "any essential connection" between his life and his art, but he did acknowledge "a submerged thread connecting certain of the fictions, and I guess the submerged thread is auto biography."^ My purpose here is not to trace the thread of autobiography in the fabric of his art, but only to indi cate some of the materials which may legitimately be considered in assessing the importance of certain aspects of his experience in his short fiction. Although John Hoyer Updike reached only his forty- second birthday on March 18, 1974, writing has been a major occupation or preoccupation for well over half his life, and he has produced a prodigious amount of miscellaneous prose, poetry, and fiction in that span. His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was a stunning reversal of the de rigueur Kunstlerroman; instead of still another portrait of the artist as a young man, Updike produced a remarkable *"The Art of Fiction XLIII: John Updike," The Paris Review, 12 (Winter 1968), 92. All subsequent references to this interview will be identified in the body of the text as PR. story of a day in the lives of a group of aged pensioners and their "keeper," set in a future time we have not yet reached. However, he did publish a great many short stories on either side of The Poorhouse Fair which featured "coming of age" motifs, and his writing continued for many years to display a tone of innocence and expectancy usually regarded as the wasted property of the young. Updike's life as an author has six basic time-place divisions which figure prominently in his art: (1) his boyhood in and near Shillington, Pennsylvania; (2) four years at Harvard University; (3) a post-graduate year at Oxford; (4) nearly two years in New York City while working on the staff of The New Yorker; (5) over a decade of family life in Ipswich, Massachusetts; and (6) a State Department tour of Russia and her satellite countries. In 1973 he made a trip through Africa as a Lincoln Lecturer which has already begun to bear fruit in the pages of The New Yorker, primarily in the form of essay-reviews of African novel ists, but also in fiction ("Ethiopia," January 14, 1974). Curiously, his five years at Harvard and at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in England are less obvi ously present in his work than the brief tour behind the Iron Curtain in the winter of 1964-65, which provided materials for three of the stories in Bech: A Book (1970). Despite the attention received by Couples (1968), which 6 utilizes an Ipswich locale, most of Updike's best work is rslatsd either to the time or the place of his boyhood: The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), The Centaur (1963), Olinger Stories (1964), Of the Farm (1965) and many additional stories, collected end uncollected. Updike has commented on his Shillington boyhood fre quently in interviews, in his long poem "Midpoint" (1969), 2 end especially in "The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood" (1962). Although this work, prepared for an anthology of boyhoods edited by Martin Levin, is described by Updike as having "the undercooked quality of prose written to order, under insufficient personal pressure" (AP, p. ix), it is an excellent source of insight into his life as an artist. The dogwood tree of the title was planted in 1932 by John Updike's parents and maternal grandparents beside a large white house in Shillington, Pennsylvania, to com memorate his birth. "The tree was my shadow, and had it .died, had it ceased to occupy, each year with increasing volume and brilliance, its place in the side yard, I would have felt that a blessing like the blessing of light had been withdrawn from my life" (AP, p. 151). Updike uses the spreading, blossoming tree to mark his growth as an 2 Assorted Prose (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), S . lSl-187. All subsequent references to this selection 11 be identified in the body of the text as AP. incipient artist. Eventually the tree's symbolic shade encompassed nearby Reading, the city called Alton in The Centaur and Brewer in the Rabbit novels, and a tiny farming community eleven miles away with the too-perfect name of Plowville, which is called Firetown in Of the Farm and The Centaur. Of course, Shillington itself was renamed Olinger and is the pastoral center around which all of his works revolve, even from such unlikely distances as Charlotte Amalie and Bucharest* Updike describes his boyhood in Shillington as "spent in a world made tranquil by two invisible catastrophes: the Depression and World War II" (AP, p. 153). "Tranquil" may seem a remarkable adjective to use for the years 1932 through 1945, but from Updike's point of view it is correct. The Depression was invisible because it was everywhere, especially in a small town, and the War was invisible because it was elsewhere. For the mass of middle Americans who lived on farms and in small towns, the period was one of economic immobility and shared insecurity which gave rise to an age of dreams that might well have seemed tranquil to a growing boy with no other experience. The fact that he was an only child, the center of attention of four adults, surely contributed to the impression of tranquility. The big house was all that remained of his grand parents' Depression-lost prosperity. His parents and his grandparents consolidated their households for economy, with his father, Wesley, identified as the breadwinner through his low-paying but steady job as a high-school science teacher. His mother and her parents kept up a vegetable garden, a small orchard, and a family-sized flock of chickens. "I do not remember ever feeling the space for a competitor within the house. The five of us already there locked into a star that would have shattered like crystal at the admission of a sixth” (AP, p. 15*0. There were not even pets to compete for attention inside the star, although there was an outside cat, named Tommy, who "came to us increasingly battered and once did not come at all. As if he had never existed: that was death.” And there was "a squirrel, Tilly, that we fed peanuts to; . . . The excitement of those tiny brown teeth shivering against my fingertips: that was life” (AP, p. 154). Updike clearly suggests that the memory of those two animals, who "did not dare intrude into our house” (AP, p. 154), symbolizes the fact that the four adults of his family protected him from both death and life. Even so, he was fascinated by the chopping block where his grandmother beheaded chickens, describing it in "The Dogwood Tree" and in "Midpoint," but he never witnessed the event. Further, he would visit the spot in the pavement where a man was reported to have been killed long before by a horse-drawn milk wagon, but his understanding of the fact of death remained always during his childhood beyond his vision, perhaps until the experience on the Plowville farm that gave rise to his famous short story "Pigeon Feathers." His parents would take him on nature hikes, but he resented both the walks and the lessons on flora and fauna: "I was a smal1-town child. Cracked pavements and packed dirt were my ground" (AP, p. 158). Even so, he shared one Thoreauvian quality: he "travelled widely" in Shillington. He got to know the back alleys and the sheds and barns that lined them, the high-school grounds he could see from his back porch, the poorhouse at the end of the street, and the cemetery hill with its "perfect view of the town . . . the cars twinkling down on Lancaster Avenue, the trolleys moving with the dreamlike slow motion distance imposes" (AP, p. 160). This dreamlike slow motion is also the effect of the distance of time, of course, except that it also permits the rapid overlay of highlighted images. The patchwork quilt of recollections in "The Dogwood Tree" can almost all be relocated in Updike's fiction: the unexpected pagoda on top of Mount Penn in Reading is the goal of one of Rabbit's "runs"; the smell of menthol from the Luden's plant is 10 recaptured with Proustian effect in The Centaur; the hill with its single too-modern Bauhaus dwelling is transported to Tarbox for Piet Hanema's building site in Couples. Updike's memory of his school days is a rich source of fiction. There was the inevitable class queen: "Every thing I did in grammar school was meant to catch her attention" (AP, p. 168). He dreamed of rescuing her from innumerable perils, but "the distance between us remained as it was" (AP, p. 169), and is frozen forever in such stories as "The Alligators" from The Same Door (1959). Unlike most of his contemporaries, for whom high-school loomed as a distant, frightening impossibility in their elementary school days, Updike had a private familiarity with Shillington High through his father. "My father's job paid him poorly but me well; it gave me a sense of, not prestige, but place. As a schoolteacher's son, I was assigned a role; people knew me" (AP, p. 166). This experience, of course, is reported faithfully beneath the mythic trappings of The Centaur (1963). Updike's predilection for portentous moments in his fiction doubtless has many sources— it is as likely to be from his training as a graphic artist as from any personal epiphany— but his report of one particular moment from his childhood is typical of the vision which I believe informs his art. He was playing what was known in Shillington as 11 "roof ball" when he suddenly became aware of an enormous cloud, the largest he had ever seen. His description of the event is apropos the theme of many of his short stories: "It is as if the soul is a camera shutter set at ’ordinary’; but now and then, through some inadvertence, it is tripped wide open and the film is flooded with an enig matic image" (AP, p. 172). The enigmatic images of Updike's youth often concerned what he has called the "Three Great Secret Things: (1) Sex; (2) Religion; and (3) Art." These are, of course, the three classic avenues to immortality: sex assuring at least a diluted perpetuation of the self through the generation of children, centering on the body; religion promising the eternality of the self after death, centering on the soul; and art, which holds all the public records for longevity but which must rely on the fickle selves of others to keep it alive, centering on the mind. As one might expect in a piece written for an anthology of boy hoods, Updike writes only briefly of sex in "The Dogwood Tree," but what he says is revealing. "Sex was an un likely, though persistent, rumor" (AP, p. 180). Once, dared to do so by others, he kissed a female Crow, the name given those who were sent elsewhere when the class took its singing lessons, and he repeated the kiss each day at the same spot on their way home until his mother heard of it 12 and, "with a solemn weight that seemed unrelated to the airy act, forbade it" (AP, p. 167). Inconsequential as this may seem, Updike's fiction is laced with episodes in which the mother disapproves of her son's girlfriend, fiancee, wife, and even second wife, notably in the short story "Flight," from the collection Pigeon Feathers (1962), and especially in Of the Farm (1966). Although sex is treated as anything but a secret in Updike's later fiction, radically so in Rabbit Redux (1971), its force continues to be enigmatic and it is treated ambiguously. The second "Great Secret Thing, Religion," has been more obviously present in his fiction from the beginning, and, although it has been somewhat dis placed by sex as a theme recently, it has been treated with the ambivalence associated with mid-twentieth century atti tudes. Several stories and novels, notably "Lifeguard," in Pigeon Feathers (1962), and Couples (1968), blend the mysteries of sex and religion. Bryant N. Wyatt argues in his dissertation "Super naturalism in John Updike's Fiction" that "the most significant [of Updike's thematic interests] is his concern with supernaturalism, specifically with Christian belief." Although this view is much too parochial to be supported by the texts, an interest in the human consequences of the ^Diss. University of Virginia 1970, p. 1. 13 eternal struggle with the fundamental questions of faith and doubt unquestionably pervades Updike's fiction. Unlike the typically certain Christian who witnesses his faith, Updike even questions how he came to be concerned with the supernaturalism of Christianity: "How did the patently vapid and drearily businesslike teachings to which I was lightly exposed succeed in branding me with a Cross?" (AP, p. 181). He was not particularly encouraged to attend Sunday school or church regularly, either by his parents or by the Lutheran Church of his boyhood, but he was regularly exposed at home at least to the possibilities of faith: All four adults in that house [in which] I grew up charged their very quiet lives with a kind of drama, suspense. They were Bible readers, especially my grandfather and my mother, and there was something of viewing their lives as an unfolding book, as a scroll that was being rolled out and constantly examining it for significance, for terms, for God's fingerprints. The disappointment he felt at the failure of the organized religion of his boyhood to supply reassuring answers is reflected in the experiences of the protago nists of several stories, such as "Pigeon Feathers," and especially of Peter Caldwell in The Centaur, "Yet," Updike writes in "The Dogwood Tree," "the crustiness, the in hospitality of the container enhanced the oddly lucid thing contained" (AP, p. 182). u From a filmed interview with John Somers, "John Updike," Indiana University, 1966. m With disarming candor, Updike suggests that his basic religiousness comes from the contemplation of the mystery of the ego and the terms of his belief are not a little transcendental. As Emerson wrote in "Nature” (1836), "Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to 5 those inquiries he would put." Updike's first reading of his personal hieroglyph was essentially religious: That God, at a remote place and time, took upon Himself the form of a Syrian carpenter and walked the earth wilfully healing and abusing and affirming and grieving, appeared to me quite in the character of the Author of the grass. The mystery that more puzzled me as a child was the incarnation of my ego— that omnivorous and somehow preexistent 'I'— in a speck so specifically situated among the billions of history. Why was I I? The arbitrari ness of it astounded me; in comparison, nothing was too marvelous. (AP, p. 182) The whisper of Walt Whitman contained in "Author of the Grass" is more clearly enunciated in "Midpoint" (1968). Over thirty lines from "Song of Myself" are interspersed with Updike's own Whitmanesque poetry in Section IV, "The Play of Memory," including Whitman's two fundamental equa tions: "For every atom belonging to me,/ as good belongs to you" and "And nothing, not God,/ is greater to one than g one's self is." As we shall see, many of the religious 5 Rpt. in Willard Thorp, ed., Great Short Works of the American Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1968T7 pnr.--------- g Midpoint and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), p. 31. ] IS elements in Updike's short fiction which appear to be existential are perhaps closer to transcendental in nature. The last of the "Three Great Secret Things, Art," antedates both Updike's discovery of sex and of the Cross that branded him, although the close examination of material objects required by the study of Art early con vinced him that there was an essential connection between Art and Religion: I sought in middling textures part icles of iridescence, scintillae in dullish surfaces; and pictured art as descending, via pencil, into dry exactitude. The beaded curtain of Matter hid an understanding Eye.' In "The Dogwood Tree" Updike evokes the artistic ambitions of his boyhood in a remarkable passage in which he describes returning to his mother's home in Plowville as an adult and staring at a photograph of himself taken as a boy, only to feel "disappointed to receive no flicker . . . of gratitude .... That boy is not a ghost to me; it is I who am a ghost to him. ... He saw art— between drawing and writing he ignorantly made no distinction— as a method of riding a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of 7 Midpoint, p. 5. Updike is enchanted by "The beaded curtain of Matter" in this poem. Canto III, "The Dance of the Solids," is closely based upon the September 1967 issue of Scientific American and was published in the January 196$ issue oi that magazine. The entire 41-page poem is informed by pointillist imagery, including Updike family snapshots which are maximally screened so that their images can only be perceived at a distance. 16 time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts" (AP, p. 185). Clearly, the man staring back at the boy in the photo graph has successfully ridden the line of his art out of Shillington into uncounted numbers of unseen "hearts," but it is as futile to speculate how the unborn will receive him as it is to wonder how it can matter to the unliving. There was a long foreground of experience still to be gained at the end of his boyhood before John Updike could appear familiarly on the cover of Time magazine (April 26, 1968). The drawing lessons described in "Midpoint" resulted in a desire to emulate Jan Vermeer, but in an ability to draw excellent cartoons. He began practicing caricature seriously after the Christmas of his twelfth year when an aunt sent a gift subscription to The New Yorker, thereby exposing him to what he has called "the best of all possible magazines" (PR, p. 89) and its high quality cover illustrations, "filler" drawings, and topical cartoons. As a student at Shillington High he became a mainstay of its weekly Chatterbox, first as a sports cartoonist, then as its editor, contributing countless drawings, articles, and light verse. Updike's mother sent off liberal samples of her son's writing and drawing with his straight-A transcript and, calculating that more 17 prizewinning authors had attended Harvard than elsewhere, recommended that of the scholarships tendered he should O accept Harvard's. Nevertheless, Updike has reported that "The reason he took a scholarship to Harvard (instead of one to Cornell) was that he wanted to do cartoons for the famous Lampoon, which had nurtured Robert Benchley and other of his idols."8 The Lampoon provided a rich apprenticeship for one whose dream was to "make" The New Yorker. He was elected to the Lampoon immediately and during his four years furnished seven color cover drawings, over one hundred cartoons and occasional illustrations, sixty poems, and twenty-five articles and short stories. Of these genres his cartoons seem to hold the greatest early promise and it is not surprising that Updike won a scholarship for a post graduate year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, but his short fiction shows an even greater growth in competence. The Paris Review interview opened with a question about the Harvard years because, as the interviewer Charles T. Samuels noted, Updike had not said much about that 8Time, 26 April 1968, p. 73. 8Jane Howard, "Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?" Life, 4 November 1960, p. 79. 18 period of his life, either in interviews or in his fiction. Updike replied: My time at Harvard, once I got by the compression bends of the freshman year, was idyllic enough, and as they say successful; but I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly. . . . All that I seem able to preserve of the Harvard experience is in one short story, "The Christian Roommates." . . . Foxy Whitman, in Couples, remembers some of the things I do. Like me, she feels ob scurely hoodwinked, pacified, by the process of becoming nice. ' I distrust, perhaps, hallowed, very O.K. places. . . . The Lampoon was very kind to me. I was given, beside the snug pleasures of club solidarity, carte blanche as far as the magazine went— I began as a cartoonist, did a lot of light verse, and more and more prose. There was always a lot of space to fill, (PR, pp. 86-87) Some of the material in the Lampoons of Updike's era has the rough appearance of space filled but certainly not time killed. Updike occasionally initialled a cartoon that appears to have been made to order, short order at that, but there is a general pattern of growth toward meticu lousness in everything he attempted. It is clear both from the Lampoon materials and his later career that he was not wasting his time any more than the butterfly does in its pupal stage. Harvard may have surfaced only once in his professional short stories, but the intellectual experience is everywhere present, including the metaphorical 19 "resentment" of the metamorphosing artist suggested in his reply to Samuels of the Paris Review.^ The next stage of his development bore more specific fruit in his short fiction than his Harvard years, although it was only a year of postgraduate study on a Knox Fellow ship to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. This does not mean, of course, that the experience was more important in the long view, only that it paralleled his initial success as a published writer for The New Yorker. Indeed, having successfully ridden "a thin pencil line out of Shillington," he had still not committed himself to a career upon graduation. He had thought of seeking work as an animator for Walt Disney or as a maga zine cartoonist (PR, p. 88), and he had agreed to spend a year studying art by accepting the Fellowship, but before the month of his graduation was out he had written and sold his first short story to The New Yorker. It is safe to assume that the Updike who arrived in England later that year was a good deal less interested in perfecting his 1®There is something by Updike in every issue of the Lampoon (published each month except January in the September through June academic year) from November 1950 through June 195*4. He was President (Editor) of the Lampoon from December 1952 until February 195*4. For more information on this period see my article: "John Updike's Literary Apprenticeship on The Harvard Lampoon," Modern Fiction Studies, 20 (Spring l$7l47T 20 drawing skills than he was in improving his fiction tech nique. Following his return from England, Updike moved to New York City where he worked as a staff member of The New Yorker from August 1955 to March 1957, This twenty-month period provided an extremely valuable literary apprentice ship. As he said in the "Foreword" to Assorted Prose, wherein is collected some of his early nonfiction, "The New Yorker paid me to gad about, to interview tertiary celeb rities, to peek into armories, and to write accounts of my mild adventures for its insatiable department ’The Talk of the Town'" (AP, p. vii). This genre requires close observation and economy of expression in an editorial voice that could synthesize a collection of observers, yet be individual enough to be interesting; the theme, essentially and perpetually, is the city, which can best be seen in lyric glimpses. Updike's collected paragraphs often have no more reason for existing than to make the point of the pointlessness of so many of our concerns, a theme he has lovingly pursued in his short fiction. The "occasions" he reported permitted experiments with metaphor that no doubt contributed to his taste for what some critics have called an embarrassment of riches in figurative expression. In March 1957 Updike moved to Ipswich, a city of 10,000 about thirty miles northeast of Boston. Several of the houses there date from the era of the city's best-known resident, Anne Bradstreet, who died in 1672, and the Updikes lived in one until the spring of 1971. This house was a thirteen-room "salt box,” one of several opened to visitors on the city's annual Seventeenth Century Day in August. Many of the residents don pilgrim dress on that day, including John Updike, and act out an historical pageant he wrote for the celebration in 1968, Some of the later stories are set in an Ipswich-like small town, such as "The Hillies” and "The Corner," both published in 1969, but many more utilize no more than family circumstances which exactly correspond with those of the Updike family circle. Indeed, a recent piece of short fiction, "Daughter, Last Glimpses Of," published in The New Yorker for November 5, 1973, seems to be a fictionalized account of the leaving from home of his first child, Elizabeth, conceived in America, born in England ("Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car"), acci dentally burned by a cigarette ash on her first day in the United States ("Home"), read to ("Should Wizard Hit Mommy?"), dreamed of ("Incest"), skied with ("Man and Daughter in the Cold"), and generally observed in many other stories. Others in the Updike family besides 22 Elizabeth and David, and of course his wife Mary, are Michael, born in 1959, and Miranda, born the following year. Finally, Updike's tour behind the Iron Curtain in the winter of 196U-65 on a State Department U.S.S.R.-U.S. Cul tural Exchange Program to Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, and his return visit to London during the winter of 1968-69, provided the impetus for a radical! different collection of seven short stories published as Bech: A Book in 197 0. Updike's Aesthetic Arthur Mizener has stressed the essential division between Updik's form and his content with some under standing of what he calls the "transcendent quality" of Updike's prose. He is comparing Updike and Salinger: The basic attitudes of their work and the dilemmas of their heroes are very similar; both writers have a strong impulse to mix memory and desire and to make them come alive in the present. Behind this common impulse is a common concern for the double nature of reality— as indeed there is in Mr. Eliot, too .... The solid and grimy actualities of New York and "Olinger" where the desires of Salinger and Updike took shape as they grew up . . . are the basic stuff of reality for both of them. And for both of them the meaning of this actuality is some transcendent quality, some ineffable and gaudy element that con stitutes a larger and more permanent life that inheres in the universe and is known to men— obscurely 23 and figuratively— in the slowly accumulated wisdom of myth and religion.H This ambivalence has been noted by others, of course, but most have disapproved the combination. Mizener, how ever, while withholding anything resembling enthusiasm, suggests that the apparent discontinuity of substance and style is "one of the clearest marks of the American 12 temper." By this he means that even some of our acknowledged great writers— and he cites Melville and James— have used an inherited, artificially "literary" style rather than to produce and control one out of their own "sense of life." Thus, even though we live all our lives among our own "solid and grimy" actualities, "and our most highly metaphysical commitments are attached to 13 them and must be expressed in terms of them," Mizener seems to speak for many of those who object to Updike's style: This conflict between subject and style is so striking because Updike's essential subject, though it calls for a certain amount of romantic irony, is uncomfortable with symbolic elaboration that has the slightest amount of self-conscious literary elegance about it. What it requires is sincerity, earnestness — however eloquent— because Updike is a romantic for whom the instinctive, unselfconscious grasp of "what feels right," not the self-conscious sophistication ^ The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), p. 247. 12 Mizener, p. 250. 13 Mizener, p. 251. 24 of the "educated" sensibility, is the source of life and the means to salvation. I do not agree, however, that this is deunaging if correct. The objection that Updike's characters live and speak in a world of elaboration beyond what they can possibly know is really only another way of defining romantic irony. It is my contention that a basic element of Updike's technique in his short fiction is the advancing of an unsophisticated protagonist one step closer to an educated sensibility, for better or for worse, through his awakening to the ironic possibilities of a morally ambigu ous situation. This is why the Lord sent an angel rather than a postman to a particularly unsophisticated virgin bride to deliver an Annunciation, tossing in the elabora tion of a capital "A" just to be sure there would be no mistaking the message. The elaboration of style represents not the perceived but the perceivable; otherwise, there could not be growth in a character's understanding, only action and reaction. Irony requires as much knowing on the part of someone— the reader, the audience, another character— as unknowing on the part of the character who is experiencing revelation, or it simply won't work. The artist has only one way to ^Mizener, pp. 253-254. 25 guarantee the knowing without being dully obvious and that is through style. John Updike does not need to be reminded of the potential "conflict between subject and style" by the critics. He is fully aware of it; indeed, it is an essen tial part of his own aesthetic. For example, his short story "The Crow in the Woods" is a stunning display of the inevitable conflict between the artist's blessed vision and the blurred nearsightedness of practical affairs. The protagonist is Jack. His wife is Clare. "In a reflex of gratitude" for her having made love with him even after having returned late from a formal dinner party, suffused with the occasion and not a little wine, he has risen at dawn to care for their baby, permitting his wife to sleep. The snow which had begun falling as they had returned the previous night has worked its magic on the landscape: All the warm night the secret snow fell so adhesively that every twig in the woods about their little rented house supported a tall slice of white, an upward projection which in the shadowless glow of early morning lifted depth from the scene, made it seem Chinese, calligraphic, a stiff tapestry hung from the gray sky. Jack wondered if he had ever seen anything so beautiful before. The snow had stopped. As if it had been a function of his sleep. 15John Updike, "The Crow in the Woods," Pigeon Feathers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 221. All subsequent references to this collection will be cited in the text as PF. As he performs the homely duty of changing his daughter's wet diaper, Jack reflects on the details of their glamorous night out, but the specific activities are unimportant in comparison with Jack's impression: "The mixed sexes chattered immersed in an incoherent brilliance like chandelier facets clashing" (PF, p. 222). Even as they departed into the beginning snowstorm, the meta phorical accuracy of Jack's way of seeing things is demonstrated: "On the front porch the departing guests discovered at midnight a world thinly disguised in snow. The universal descent of snow restricted the area of their vision; outdoors had a domed intimacy" (PF, p. 222). Recalling this as he works with his daughter, Jack perceives that everything in his daughter's room is magni- fied, expanded, illuminated: The whiteness edging the windows made decisive and cutting the light of the sun, burning behind the sky like a bulb in a paper lampshade. The child's room had become incandescent; the wallpaper, flowered with pale violets, glowed evenly, so that even the fluff- cluttered corners brimmed with purity. (PF, p. 223) The story, short as it is, abounds with luxuriously- illuminated description. Updike even describes Jack's morning bowel movement in richly metaphorical terms, almost as if he were challenging critics of the "conflict between subject and style": "He stood under a small shadow of amazement looking down at the oval of still water in which 27 floated his several feces like short rotten sticks, strangely burnished" CPF, pp. 223-22*0. As he struggles to prepare breakfast for their child, Clare comes downstairs and quietly takes over. Jack is free to return his gaze to the scene which had initially stirred him: "The woods at their distance across the frosted lawn were a Chinese screen in which an immense alphabet of twigs lay hushed .... There was no depth, the sky a pearl slab, the woods a fabric of vision in which vases, arches, and fountains were hushed" (PF, p. 225). Clare places an egg before him, but he continues to watch the woods: Something happened. Outdoors a huge black bird came flapping with a crow's laborious wingbeat. It banked and, tilted to fit its feet, fell toward the woods. His heart halted in alarm for the crow, with such recklessness assaulting an inviolable surface, seeking so blindly a niche for its strenuous bulk where there was no depth. It could not enter. Its black shape shattering like an instant of flak, the crow plopped into a high branch and sent snow shower ing from a quadrant of lace. Its wings spread and settled. The vision destroyed, his heart overflowed. "Clare!" he cried. (PF, pp. 225-226) Clare glances outside, "where she saw only snow," then to his forgotten breakfast: "Her lips moved: 'Eat your egg'" (PF, p. 226). The quality of Jack's realization— which is so stunningly correct that one hates to do more than point to it— is increased by the ironic contrast between his aesthetic sensibility and his wife's earthy practicality. It's the curse of the artist's vision— Robert Frost com mented on it with, as a matter of fact, fewer poetic devices in lyrics like "Dust of Snow,” "Desert Places," and "Stopping by Woods"— to be able to perceive a snow- covered woods as "a Chinese screen in which an immense alphabet of twigs lay hushed," only to be told to move along by a horse, or to "eat your egg" by a wife. Although Updike's position on this question is per haps best understood from the point of view of his stories, each one of which may be read as a refutation of the critics who demand more eggs and fewer Chinese screens from him, he has also attempted to describe his aesthetic in nonfictional prose. A very important early statement was "The Sea's Green Sameness," published in New World Writing for 1960 and rather ignored there until 1972, when it was reprinted in slightly different form in Museums and Women. When the piece first appeared Updike was not even thirty, although he had published a collection of light verse, The Carpentered Hen (1958), a novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), and a collection of short stories, The Same Door (1959); and the novel which permanently dictated that attention would be paid, Rabbit, Run, was in press. Even so, the tone of the piece is one of exhausted metaphysical skepticism. 29 The writer is ostensibly attempting to describe with a difference what is easier to accept as "The Sea's Green Sameness." The sea is the Caribbean, the point of view is a sandy beach; there are but two "characters"— the artist and nature. Updike is attempting to express, not without some diffidence, an aesthetic theory of composition. It is difficult to abstract his remarks, but basically he is using the sea's apparent infinite sameness as a metaphor for the challenge Nature casts before the Artist, who attempts to pull out of it something which is different, representative, true, or beautiful, or, hopefully, all of these. I sit opposite the sea. Its receding green surface is marked everywhere by millions of depressions, or nicks, of an uncertain color: much as this page is marked. But this page yields a meaning, however slowly, whereas the marks on the sea are everywhere the same. That is the difference between Art and Nature.16 The essential difference, of course, is that the sea can express itself only in its own terms, while the artist can— indeed, must— use the medium of his art. Updike demonstrates this in a richly descriptive paragraph which need not be quoted. He interrupts: Enough, surely. It is a chronic question, whether to say simply "the sea" and trust to people's 16 For convenience, I will cite the later version of this piece, as reprinted in Museums and Women (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 1$£. Subsequent references to this essay will be cited in the text by MW. 30 imaginations, or whether to put in the adjectives. I have had only fair luck with people's imaginations; hence tend to trust adjectives. But are they to be trusted? Are they— words— anything substantial upon which we can rest our weight? The best writers say so. Sometimes I believe it. But the illogic of the belief bothers me: From whence did words gather this intrinsic potency? The source of language, the spring from which all these shadows (tinted, alliterative, but still shadows) flow, is itself in shadow. But what, then, am I to do? Here am I, a writer, and there is the sea, a subject. (MW, p. 160) Before he replies to his own rhetorical question in a way distinctly Updikean, he provides a marvelously compact history of the "excuses" men have used for writing, sug gesting that the original incantor of tales was excused by his ignorance of nature; that is, he told stories to propitiate the dangers which lurked beyond his campfire, or to guarantee success in hunting or battle: "Homer swung his tide on this momentum" (MW, p. 161). This was followed by Christianity, money, beauty, self, reality, and Groping As An End In Itself. The effect of this history is to suggest that there is no excuse for writing any longer; everything has been done. The sea, his subject, seems null, all its mysteries solved by science, its surface infinitely nicked by all the adjectives ever tossed its way; "Yet, surprisingly, I do have something new to contribute to human knowledge of the sea. It has just come to me. A revelation" (MW, p. 163). 31 What is more important to this thesis than the "some thing new" is the fact that it came as a revelation, for it is my contention that the strength of many of Updike's short stories derives from his discovering a revelation in an apparently null or morally ambiguous situation. The discovery he reports in "The Sea's Green Sameness" is not unlike the two-dimensional effect created by the snow in "The Crow in the Woods": If you lie down, put your head in the sand, and close one eye, the sea loses one dimension and becomes a wall. The black rim of the perfectly smooth top seems as close to me as the pale, acidulous bottom. A curious sideways tugging in the center of the wall, a freedom of motion inexplicable in a wall whose out lines are so inflexibly fixed, makes the vision strange. (MW, p. 163) This phenomenon is correctly reported, but of course it is as empty of human significance as the snow-filled woods were before Jack saw them as "a Chinese screen in which an immense alphabet of twigs lay hushed," and before the crow crashed into the illusion making a third dimen sion. So too Updike continues: But it does not lead me to imagine that the wall is a fragile cloth which a blow of my hands will pierce. . . . But I do feel— and feel, as it were, from the outside, as if I were being beckoned— that if I were to run quickly to it, and press my naked chest against its vibrating perpendicular surface ... I should feel upon the beating of my heart the answer of another heart beating. (MW, p. 163) Even though he is immediately disenchanted upon opening his other eye and lifting his head from the sand, 32 "I seem to hear in the sigh of its surf encouragement from the other side of the wall of its appearance— sullen, muffled encouragement, the best it can do, trapped as it is also— encouragement for me to repeat the attempt, to rush forward in my mind again and again" (MW, p. 164). In his final paragraph, Updike admits that he has in this example reverted "to the first enchanters, who expected their nets of words to imprison the weather, to induce the trees to bear and the clouds to weep, and to drag down advice from the stars" (MW, p. 16*+). But he contends that he expects far less: I do not expect the waves to obey my wand, or support my weight. . . . All I expect is that once into my blindly spun web of words the thing itself will break: make an entry and an account of itself. Not declare what it will do. This is no mystery; we are old friends. I can observe. Not cast its vote with mine, and make a decree: I have no hope of this. ... I wish it to yield only on the point of its identity. What is it? Its breadth, its glitter, its greenness and sameness balk me. What is it? If I knew, I could say. (MW, p. 164) Since he cannot know absolutely, he can only spin his "web of words"— not "blindly," as I hope to prove-- and permit "the thing itself" to break in and yield its own identity. And what is his subject when he is not writing about the sea? "My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It 33 is in middles that extremes clash* where ambiguity rest- 17 lessly rules.” Updike believes that since our lives are ruled in large part by our responses to situations which are at best morally ambiguous* we should not ask more than that of our literature. In a response to a Time interviewer when Rabbit * Run was published* Updike said, "There is a certain necessary ambiguity. I do not wish my fiction to 18 be any clearer than life." 17 John Updike in Jane Howard* "Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?" Life, 4 November 1966, p. 74D. 18 John Updike in "Desperate Weakling," anonymous review of Rabbit* Run, Time, 7 November 1960, p. 108. CHAPTER II THE SAME DOOR Updike's first volume of fiction was The Poorhouse Fair, which was published January 12, 1959. His first collection of short stories, The Same Door, appeared seven months later on August 17, 1959, but the stories were without exception originally published in The New Yorker prior to the release of The Poorhouse Fair. They range in time from "Friends from Philadelphia," his first profes sional story, accepted by The New Yorker in June, 1954, and published on October 30, 1954, to "The Happiest I've Been," which appeared in the issue of January 3, 1959. The sixteen stories are not formally unified in the fashion of The Dubliners or Winesburg, Ohio (or Updike's own later compilation, Olinger Stories), but they are united by a consistent attitude toward life, whether narrating the experience of a naive boy in a small town, as in "Friends from Philadelphia," or of a self-consciously sophisticated man in the big city, as in "Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?" Although this has not been noted elsewhere, perhaps because of its obviousness, the title of the collection is surely derived from the twenty-seventh stanza of Edward 34 35 FitzGerald's "translation” of "The Rub£iy£t of Omar Khayyam": Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about; but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.l The youthful characters in the stories that make up The Same Door find that even though they pursue the meaning of existence fervently, consulting both "Doctor and Saint," they come away from their experiences in a continued state of doubt; in other words, they retire from the arenas of experience essentially unchanged through the same doors they entered. Omar's persona repeatedly identifies with the tran sience of nature (the blowing rose) and of artifice (the potter's cups), resolving the implicit moral uncertainty hedonistically: "Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,/ Before we too into the Dust descend; ..." ^Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 330. The writer of the dust-jacket copy for the Knopf edition suggests other sources for the title: "There is a superstition that you should enter and leave a house by the same door; thus John Nordholm, the alternately shy and brash hero of the first story in this collection, is the narrator of the last. Yet there is also a sense in which all of these sixteen short stories knock at the same door— a door that in 'Dentistry and Doubt' swings open and that in 'Toward Evening' remains shut." The first suggestion is possible in a remote way, but it hardly unifies the col lection. The second suggestion is impossible; there simply is no "sense" shared by these two stories which will allow the metaphor to operate. (stanza 2<t). Updike's protagonists find themselves in similar states of moral uncertainty, more often as a result of interpersonal experiences than from a simple relation ship with nature or art, and occasionally they, too, resolve their situations hedonistically, but they also sometimes conclude with declarations of faith and even more often find themselves on the threshold of another ambi guity. This effect is not unlike that associated with the Joycean epiphany as it is generally understood. Fiction which is epiphanous appears by its very nature pointless to some readers because the thought settles into repose rather than resolution. Resolution, of course, often with an ultimate "0. Henry" twist, was the staple of the plotted or epical story from its inception, primarily because authors and their public (and especially their critics) did not conceive of the form as being capable of more than reporting a minor action, briefly told. This is not to say that the nineteenth century American masters of the form— Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James— did not achieve remarkable effects beyond plot, but they were writing for a much more select "literary" audience. Indeed, their widespread fame is as much a product of their rediscovery by twentieth century academia as it is a sustained popu larity. 37 Updike's short stories belong less to the epical thread of development that began with Poe and Hawthorne and reached its twentieth century epitome with Hemingway and Faulkner than with the lyrical strand that began with Turgenev and Chekhov in Russia and continued with Mansfield and Woolf in England and Porter and Welty in America. Indeed, Eileen Baldeshwiler concludes her recent article on "The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History" with a discussion of the fiction of John Updike. She contrasts the lyrical mode with the typical narrative, which is "marked by external action developed 'syllogistically' through characters fabricated mainly to forward plot, culminating in a decisive ending," by noting that the lyrical story "concentrates on internal changes, moods, and feelings, utilizing a variety of structural patterns depending on the shape of the emotion itself, [relying] for the most part on the open ending, and is expressed in the 2 condensed, evocative, often figured language of the poem." As we shall see, this definition is exactly applicable to the bulk of Updike's short stories. Speaking of Updike specifically, she notes that "the reader is struck by the variety and disparity of the materials and by the ^Studies in Short Fiction, 6 (Summer 1969), ‘ ♦43. 38 faultlessness of their integration* a union created far below— or above— the level of story-line, theme, or motif."3 Although only three of the eleven stories collected by Updike in Olinger Stories (196*0 are from The Same Door (seven are from Pigeon Feathers, 1962), one of his comments in its Foreword will be noted here for the light it sheds on the aesthetic of the lyrical short story. Observing that he had been told that one of his stories ("Friends from Philadelphia") "seems to have no point," Updike wrote: "The point, to me, is plain, and is the point, more or less, of all these Olinger stories. We are rewarded unexpectedly. The muddled and inconsequent surface of | | things now and then parts to yield us a gift." The unexpected gift is the gift of insight, or as James Joyce called it, an epiphany. As Theodore Spencer jioted in his Introduction to Stephen Hero, Joyce’s first version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the aesthetic theory of epiphany "implies a lyrical rather than a dramatic view of life. It emphasizes the radiance, the effulgence, of the thing itself revealed in a special 3 Baldeshwiler, p. 453. ^Olinger Stories (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. vii. Emphasis Updike's. 39 moment, and unmoving moment, of time."** Spencer's use of the phrase "the thing itself" recalls Updike's own aes thetic statement quoted from "The Sea's Green Sameness" at the end of the preceding chapter: "All I expect is that once into my blindly spun web of words the thing itself will break: make an entry and an account of itself" (MW, p. 164). The epiphanous, lyrical short story is so solidly established as a literary tradition that one might well question the acumen of those critics who have complained g that Updike writes well but "has nothing to say," and that his stories are "pointless." Although Stephen Hero was not published until 1944, it was probably written between 1904 and 1906. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with the word "epiphany" deleted but the concept considerably expanded, was published in 1916. More importantly, the fifteen short stories collected as The Dubliners were written between 1904 and early 1907, at the same time Joyce was working on Stephen Hero, and published as a collection in 1914. These stories are nothing if they are not ^James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), p. 17. ®John Aldridge, "The Private Vice of John Updike," in his Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (New York:David McKay, 1966), p. 1/0. similar views have been expressed by Norman Podhoretz, Guerin La Course, D. J. Enright, and Truman Capote. **o epiphanous, ironic, and intentionally ambiguous; not only do they lack plot and action in the traditional sense, they are dominated by elements of par .lysis and decay. Nothing happens in the traditional sense, but the epiphanous moment of realized inaction is unquestionably brilliantly con ceived and executed. The point is that we have had a long tradition of short fiction in the lyrical vein in English in this century. Critics have had over fifty years to get used to stories without action, without plot, without resolution, but not without insight and revelation, and they might be expected to have placed Updike in this tradition rather than to have demanded that he produce something foreign to his aesthetic. Therefore, I hope to show in this chapter that much of the merit of Updike's short fiction may be found in the range of implication which results from his skillful use of epiphanous ambiguity, very often as in Joyce reflecting the continuing conflict between the faith of traditional religion and the doubt of secular morality. Most of the short stories in The Same Door— and, indeed, all of his collections— are informed by an aesthetic not unlike the one described by Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, featuring a "sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in 41 the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable 7 phase of the mind itself." To lessen the danger of "epiphany hunting," I shall restrict my detailed analyses to representative stories from each of the three major categories in this collection: "Youth," "Newlyweds," and "The Young Family." Five "Miscellaneous" stories will be alluded to only briefly. Youth The three stories set in Updike's pastoral invention, Olinger, PA, are his first professional story "Friends from Philadelphia," "The Alligators," and "The Happiest I've Been." "Friends from Philadelphia" is an exceedingly important story in Updike's career, for it was his first effort at the beginning of a five-year test he had assigned himself to determine whether or not he could develop into a writer. It was written immediately after his having been graduated in June 1954 and accepted for publication before the month was out. "The Alligators" is important because it introduces the fictional town of so many of Updike's short stories and of The Centaur. The name of the town, "Olinger," evokes the nostalgic desire to cling to the safety of childhood and adolescence and is worthy of Thomas Wolfe, who called up similar expostulations in Look 7 Joyce, p. 211. 42 Homeward, Angel and in his short fiction. It is the town or neighborhood of everyone's pastoral childhood which calls upon us to linger in its secure embrace. However, the best of the Olinger stories in this collection is "The Happiest I've Been," which records the occasion of a young man's leaving Olinger. "The Happiest I've Been" "The Happiest I've Been" was first published in The New Yorker for January 3, 1959 and it is the final story in The Same Door. Even though this entire collection is informed by the process of maturation, which would place this story rather early in the chronology of developing protagonists, it is more important to treat it first and fully as the epitome of Updike's growth as an artist over the four and one-half years since the publication of "Friends from Philadelphia." Updike retreats to a more remote period in the life of his autobiographical pro tagonist to create what is perhaps the finest story in the collection. His protagonist, John Nordholm (etymologically "Up-dike"), is nineteen, a college sophomore home for the Christmas holidays. His story is narrated from the first person point of view at an indefinite distance, far enough to give the superlative of the title ironic perspective. The tone of the story is reminiscent of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the concluding line of which— "So we beat 13 on> boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."— might have served as well as the quotation Updike uses from Bergson as one of the two epigraphs for this collection: And yet, how many of our present pleasures, were we to examine them closely, would shrink into nothing more than memories of past ones! What would there be left of many of our emotions, were we to reduce them to the exact quantum of pure feeling they contain by subtracting from them all that is merely reminis cence?® There is even a scene in Fitzgerald's novel describing Gatsby's last afternoon before leaving for France, an endlessly remembered, passive afternoon with Daisy cradled in his arms, that closely parallels a key scene in which John Nordholm gains an unexpected gift while similarly holding a girl in a sympathetic embrace, and the fake New Year's Eve party John and his friend attend is an adoles cent echo of the perpetual party at Gatsby's, but it is the sweet sorrow of parting, the "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" (in Fitzgerald's phrase), and the cherished recollection of the occasion which place the story in this romantic tradition. Robert Detweiler has commented on the Wordsworthian quality of this story: "... with increasing self- consciousness comes the loss of natural, spontaneous joy, Q The Same Door (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), p. iii. All subsequent citations of stories in this col lection will be identified in the text as TSD. 44 so that the stylizing mind must reconstruct its pleasures g artificially out of the past." In a recent essay entitled "Emotion Recollected in Tranquility: Wordsworth's Legacy to Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway," Marion Montgomery expands the definition of "Wordsworthian" to include the mainstream of modern lyrical fiction. Noting that the aesthetic stated in the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" anticipates that of the modern novel, Montgomery observes that the revolution in fiction has been in the direction of the lyric as defended by Wordsworth, who proposes that "It is not the action or situation which gives importance to the emotion, but the emotion which gives importance to the action and situation." The fiction writer has moved toward submerging himself into a character. . . . Imagery, symbolism, juxtaposition of scenes in the manner of the two terms of a metaphor become more important to the architecture of fiction than does plot or any generally accepted set of values against which to measure action. Given the absence of larger intellectual and religious structures with which an author can identify himself— myth and accepted social order— it is no doubt inevitable that the tendency is for fiction to move toward becoming autobiographical in content, lyrical in mode. Although neither Montgomery nor Detweiler makes the connection regarding Updike, there is a clear thematic link between the time-lapse recollections Wordsworth makes in the "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" and Q John Updike, Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 214 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972), p. 25. *°"Emotion Recollected in Tranquility: Wordsworth's Legacy to Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway," The Southern Review, NS 6 (July 1970), 711. >45 the remembrance by John Nordholm of that time past he characterizes as "The Happiest I've Been," a shared blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened .... (11. 37-41) Montgomery does provide a useful definition of epiphany, however, in connecting Wordsworth and Joyce: The effect on the mind of absent things as though present, says Wordsworth, leads to the poem. Or, we might add, to the epiphany in fiction, which is fiction's high lyric moment— the moment of a character's self-awareness or the reader's awareness of a character's obliviousness.H The emotion John Nordholm recollects in tranquility does not have the tight focus of the epiphanies in "Friends from Philadelphia" and "The Alligators," but there is one sharply recalled moment at the conclusion of the story which, although insignificant in itself, serves to identify the threshold of awareness. John's friend Neil, asleep beside him in a car headed toward Chicago on the Penn sylvania Turnpike, awakens and lights a cigarette. John, the narrator recollecting this moment in at least the tranquil atmosphere of the short story, observes: "A second after the scratch of his match occurred the moment of which each following moment was a slight diminution . . . (TSD, p. 241). ^Montgomery, p. 712. Although this is the second longest story in the collection— twenty-two pages— its "action" can be sum marized in five sentences: After extended farewells to his family, John starts out one evening for Chicago in the automobile of his close friend, Neil Hovey. Instead of going directly to the Turnpike, Neil stops off at a New Year's party that had been moved up a few days so that he and John could attend. At the end of the party they take two left-over girls home; Neil pets with one, and John comforts the other, who is being dropped by the party's host. At dawn they start for Chicago with John driving and Neil asleep. The story "ends" when Neil awakens and lights his cigarette. Despite the clue of the title, optimistic critics like Alice and Kenneth Hamilton and Rachael Burchard find support in the moral ambiguity of this story for their identification of Updike as a religiously-oriented posi tivist. The Hamiltons note that John "feels pride in Pennsylvania— his state— pride that his friend trusts him, and pride that his life, like that of the countryside, lies before him to journey through. 'I had seen a dawn,' 12 he says.” Burchard cites the same passage: John Nordholm ... is ready to break the ties of childhood and home and to begin his adult life looking 12 The Elements of John Updike (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans,~T97 0), p. i1. •*7 for something many of his schoolmates will obviously never seek. They are content with each other, with their small-town perspective, and with the prospect of a dull status quo. . . . There is no particularly religious search in this story, but John . . . realizes that life is beginning: "We were on our way. I had seen a dawn."^^ Even though these critics are among the most sympa thetic to Updike’s art, they seem to miss the point of this particular dawn. To describe an occasion as "The Happiest I’ve Been" from the perspective of a long con tinuum of "diminution" is hardly to be construed as the record of a new life from the advent of spiritual resur rection. Burchard is right in saying that John is "ready to break the ties of childhood and home," but to assert that he will spend "his adult life looking for something many of his schoolmates will obviously never seek" is to ignore the fact that, whatever he is searching for, he has already found his happiest memory in an unsought past time among his small-town schoolmates. Richard Todd, in a recent review of Updike's latest collection of short stories, Museums and Women (1972), recalls this story as "what was then his richest, most 14 accomplished story." Todd, who asserts that he has to 13 John Updike: Yea Sayings (Carbondale and Edwards- ville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 141. ^"Updike and Barthelme: Disengagement," Atlantic, December 1972, p. 126. "struggle to say how wonderful a story [it] seemed," describes John's happiest moment as "an expansive feeling for the landscape, the trip, and, in no small part, the pleasure that two people have trusted him enough to fall asleep at his side" (p. 126). This seems to come much closer than either the Hamiltons or Rachael Burchard, but the telling point is in Todd's "struggle." He continues: [The story's] power lay initially--as always in Updike— in the perfectly rendered detail. Beyond that there was the paradoxical daring of the story, its defeat of conventional expectations concerning what the passage to adulthood (which was, after all, the subject) ought to be about. Updike was making a story out of stuff trivial enough to be the stuff of one's life. This is all there was, he said, and all there would be; the implication was that life would hold no more exalted moment than the story recorded, (p. 126) Todd has to "struggle" not just because stories with little action resist summarization, but because even the "perfectly rendered detail" of trivia will seem only trivial when taken out of context. The total context, however, with its overlay of ironic recall, represents a near-perfect blend of the possible human relationships within which one must judge himself: family, community, friends (casual and close), lovers (casual and close), and especially one's own concept of self. John Nordholm recalls as the time he is willing to describe as "The Happiest I've Been" the occasion when by chance all of 49 these factors were in perfect equilibrium and he felt buoyed, balanced, secure in his awareness of self. He first feels the tug of "diminution" on the morning after the pseudo-New Year's party where he gains the sense of sureness from which to measure his "happiest" time. He is on the way to a real New Year's party at the home of the girl he loves, a girl who would marry him if he asked, yet he recalls— "years later"— the circumstances of an un expected party in the company of a childhood friend and a girl he has just met, neither of whom he will ever see again. It is impossible to trace all the subtle connec tives of this story, but look at John's relationship with his friend Neil Hovey, for example. We learn far more about Neil than would be necessary for a simple story of maturation. Neil is the friend John "had always been most relaxed with" (TSD, p. 220), yet it is not until the next morning when Neil allows him to drive his father's car— for the first time— while he sleeps beside him that John discovers the extent to which Neil can relax with him. When, after saying goodbye to John's family, Neil proposes that they stop at Larry Schuman's party, John replies, "'Sure ... I don't care,'" and the narrator continues, "In everything that followed there was the sensation of my being picked up and carried" (TSD, p. 224). 50 This sense of dependence which is banished by the night's experience is stressed in Updike's description of John's friendship with Neil: We were about the same height and had the same degree of athletic incompetence and the same curious lack of whatever force it was that aroused loyalty and compli ance in beautiful girls. ... We had gained a humane dimension that made us gentle and humorous among peers but diffident at dances and hesitant in cars. Girls hate boys' doubts: they amount to insults. Gentleness is for married women to appreci ate. (This is my thinking then.) A girl who has received out of nowhere a gift worth all Africa's gold wants more than just humanity to bestow it on. (TSD, p. 223) The curious source of their "humane dimension" is another connecting link, this time with the understanding of the hidden implications of the future of love and marriage, as well as something of its past, which has grown out of the fact that both Neil and John have lived with grandparents: "This improved both our backward and our forward vistas; we knew about the bedside commodes and the midnight coughing fits that awaited most men, and we had a sense of childhoods before 1900, when the farmer ruled the land and America faced west" (TSD, p. 223). Thus, when the evening begins, John is aware of him self as self-conscious, shy, somewhat dependent; virginal, he romanticizes virtue. He even feels a "little queasy" when he hands over his share of the money for the alcohol he doesn't drink to a former classmate now old enough to buy it legally, since "vice had become so handy" (TSD, 51 p. 227). Except for the liquor and the fact that one of the attending couples is married* "the party was the party I had been going to all my life" (TSD* p. 227). Updike lavishes detail on the party itself; it is filled with importance only for those who are suffering romantic crises* although there are several of those* all viewed with ironic detachment by John: "Sitting alone and ignored in a great armchair, I experienced within a warm keen dishevelment* as if there were real tears in my eyes. Had things been less unchanged they would have seemed less tragic" (TSD, p. 228). It is the unchanged familiarity of the party which gives John a base from which to measure his connections with the world. Feeling a bit sorry for himself, he sits watching the others as a detached outsider. He is particu larly drawn to the spectacle of Margaret Lento. Margaret* who is being dropped as a girlfriend with agonizing slow ness by Larry Schuman* the party's host* because she does not measure up to his parents' social expectations, is dancing drunkenly like a lower-class Zelda: "The pity and the vulgarity of her exhibition made everyone who was sober uncomfortable; our common guilt in witnessing this girl's rites brought us so close together in that room that it seemed never, not in all time* could we be parted" (TSD, p. 232). 52 When the party breaks up some time later, after the host has driven off with a girl pointedly not Margaret, Neil and John drive Margaret and her friend to their homes, and they pair off, Margaret and John in the back seat, Neil and a mute, nameless and faceless girl with whom he has developed a "spiritual" communion, in the front. They stop first at Margaret's. While she prepares coffee with which to send them on their way, John sits in a breakfast nook and ritually reads all the words he can see, while Neil and his companion disappear into the living room. John answers Margaret's questions wittily, showing some of the ambivalent balance he is beginning to achieve as the night advances: '"Oh, I like everybody,' I told her, 'and the longer I've known them the more I like them, because the more they're like me. The only people I like better are the ones I've just met'" (TSD, p. 236). With this encouragement, Margaret presses for John's opinion of Larry Schuman. As they talk John realizes that Larry had become nothing to him in a little over a year: To me, considering so seriously the personality of a childhood friend, as if overnight he had become a factor in the world, seemed absurd; I couldn't deeply believe that even in her world he mattered much. . . . The important thing, rather them the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone. (TSD, p. 238) 53 One might consider this remarkable image as standing for what I perceive to be the merit of this story and indeed much of Updike's short fiction; the plot is a worthless stone around which Updike weaves the basket of imagery which bears his meaning. His description of this conversation— indeed, of the entire experience— surely captures the "hum and buzz of implication," to use Lionel Trilling's phrase, as well as any American writer in recent time. In his well-known essay, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," which Updike may well have read as an undergraduate, Trilling describes "a culture's hum and buzz of implication" as the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning.15 Even though John acknowledges that the "important thing . . . was the conversation itself," the "evanescent" moment is an "unutterable expression of value." When Margaret brings another cup of coffee, she sits beside John rather than across from him, lifting him "to such a pitch of gratitude and affection the only way I could think to express it was by not kissing her, as if a kiss were 15In The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: The Viking Press, 195T), p. 207. 54 another piece of abuse women suffered" (TSD, p. 238). She draws his arm around her against the cold and falls asleep. Aroused later by the sound of a milkman, they quickly resume their journey, dropping off the faceless girl (who marries Neil "years later") and stopping to allow John to take the wheel of the car, to drive to that moment after which "each following moment was a slight diminution." John recalls this moment as a time when he felt "safe in a landscape where no one cared" (TSD, p. 240). His changed perception, altered as a result of having been trusted fully, causes him to see the "10 A.M. sunlight as it existed in the air in front of the windshield" as if it blessed "irresponsibility" (TSD, p. 241). The point is really as clear as the air, although the story is couched in ambiguity: there is a point of maturity to which everyone ascends, a point at which he discovers his inde pendent existence as a person. Because one must neces sarily descend from this moment of dissociated freedom into the realm of responsibility— John is on the way to his fiancee's home, leaving his own home and childhood behind— he might well call it, in all its seeming insignificance, "The Happiest I've Been." Newlyweds Although Updike returns to the theme of the "blessed irresponsibility" of the single person in several of the 55 stories in Pigeon Feathers, the bulk of the better stories in this collection are concerned with the conflicts of early marriage. Half the stories in The Same Door feature young married couples, all but one of whom live in New York City. In four of the stories the couples are essentially newly wed; in the other four they have a single child, an infant daughter always. In all eight the marriage is in a period of adjustment under a strain such as would be felt by "a perceptive man caged in his own weak character," a descrip tion assigned to the protagonist of "Sunday Teasing" but appropriate to virtually all of the male partners. In each story there is a moment in which the male protagonist realizes that his life is in a balanced state of moral ambiguity. Sometimes the scale is tipped in the direction of understanding, but not resolution. Always there is heightened awareness for the reader, if not for the pro tagonist. Of the stories concerning newlyweds— "The Kid's Whistling," "His Finest Hour," "Sunday Teasing," and "Snowing in Greenwich Village"— I shall discuss only the last one in detail. "The Kid's Whistling" is a slight piece about a commercial artist working overtime painting signs during the Christmas season. He is ostensibly annoyed by the whistling of his seasonal assistant, the cessation of which 56 he blames for his failure to do a good job on his "Toyland” sign, but the story is complicated by the visit of the artist’s wife. The key to the story's complication may be found in the songs the kid whistles, or rather stops whistling. The wife, who has come to the shop to try to seduce her husband home, flirts with the boy on the way out in a petulant reaction to having failed. When the boy, embarrassed, does not resume his whistling, the titles of the "set” he had run through prior to the wife’s entrance sweep over us with a retroactive irony: ’ ’ Lady Be Good," "After You've Gone," and "If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight." The superlative in "His Finest Hour," unlike that in "The Happiest I've Been," is ironic. It is less successful than the other "newlywed” stories, perhaps because Updike has to devote so much space to the development of the future characters of the couple to assure that their recollection of his "finest" hour is clearly meant to be ironic. The experience is one which is thrust on the husband despite all the efforts of his weak will to avoid it. The couple receives an "unexpected gift," but it is not the gift of understanding. Rather, it is a roomful of leftover banquet flowers sent by their chef-neighbor to show that he bears them no ill will for interfering to protect his wife from his own drunken attack. 57 "Sunday Teasing" is a remarkably subtle study of the interplay of conflict between a husband and a wife of differing religious outlooks. Everything that happens during their particularly desultory Sunday is colored by Arthur's teasing Macy by quoting First Corinthians 11:3: ". . . the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man" (TSD, p. 102), Arthur remembers with the delight of a tease his mother's anger when his grandfather would remind her of this verse, with its implied interpretation of woman's subservience, but Macy is more confused than angry. She can't defend herself because she does not understand why her husband is teasing her, although she senses that her marriage is in some way threatened. Updike avoids the explicit statement of this point, but the skillfully managed details make it clear: The film they discuss ("Camille"), the public display of Arthur's harsh Puritanism before a Jewish friend, the book Arthur is reading (The Tragic Sense of Life), the theme of the short story of love's dissembling which offends Macy and delights Arthur, all take on heavy irony when Arthur insists that Macy do her imitation of Garbo as Camille when he puts her to bed with a slight fever: "'You're fooling me.'" Arthur returns to the kitchen to wash the dishes, where "Sunday's events repeated themselves in his mind, 58 blending like nacreous flakes around a central infrangible instant, becoming the perfect and luminous thought: You don't know anything" (TSD, p. 111). The object "anything" is hyperbolic, of course. Arthur certainly knows his wife's weaknesses, but he does not realize until the end how hypocritically un-Christian his teasing has been. The story is called "Sunday Teasing" not just because it takes place on that day of the week, but because the elements of Arthur's cruelty are unquestionably connected with "the sacred groves of his mind" (TSD, p. 105). "Snowing in Greenwich Village" "Snowing in Greenwich Village" introduces Richard and Joan Maple, who appear as the couple "on a pilgrimage toward divorce" in so many later stories, especially those collected in The Music School (1966). The undertone of sexual competition of "The Kid's Whistling" pervades this story as well. Little happens in the narration as Updike is again concerned with probing the possibilities of inter acting personalities, especially from the point of view of the sensitive but weak male. The Maples invite Rebecca Cune, an old friend and now a close neighbor, to visit their new apartment in the Village. Rebeccaj who has "a gift for odd things" (TSD, p. 73), runs through her repertoire of oddities while Richard, displaced as the center of attention, imagines 59 himself as outside the scene watching himself as if he were playing a role. At the end of the evening Richard walks Rebecca home* pressed to do so by Joan. She invites him up to look at her apartment, which he does briefly. As they say goodnight there is a brief encounter charged with sexual tension, but it comes to nothing except Richard's conclusion: "Oh but they were close" (TSD, p. 81). This is Richard's evaluation, of course, but Updike has structured the story so that we believe with Richard that it was, indeed, close; however, he has drawn the characters with such subtle ambiguity that we must ask ourselves at the open end of the story, "Close to what?" Although the last line echoes the first— "The Maples had moved just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close" (TSD, p. 69)— Updike is most certainly not speaking geographically! Look at the characters. Joan is least significant, but she is the necessary wife against whom Richard measures his moral choice regarding adultery, although his own concept of self is clearly more important to him than his husbandly duty to Joan. Rebecca is enigmatic, though hardly silent. She dominates the conversation with her tales of queer acquaintances and peculiar experiences, which fascinate Joan and irritate Richard: "Rebecca's 60 gift, Richard realized, was not that of having odd things happen to her but that of representing, through the implicit contrast with her own sane calm, all things touching her as odd. This evening too might appear grotesque in her retelling” (TSD, p. 76). Richard's observation of Rebecca is a key to the ending of the story, but Updike in a few deftly placed strokes of narration, characterizes Richard so that we are not quite confident of the accuracy of his perceptions. For instance, when he returns after depositing Rebecca's coat on the bed— a hostly chore so ordinary that it should have been unselfconsciously automatic— Rebecca is describ ing having lived for a time in an apartment with an unmarried couple. "Richard asked, 'You lived with them?' The arch composure of his tone was left over from the mood aroused in him by his successful and, in the dim bedroom, somewhat poignant— as if he were with great tact delivering a disappointing message— disposal of their guest's coat" (TSD, p. 70). It is hard to imagine any other modern writer having the audacity to describe the placing of a guest's coat on a bed as "somewhat poignant," but Updike uses Rebecca's coat and at least the presence of several beds to great effect in this story. The immediate point is that Richard is dramatizing himself, as host in this scene, as husband later, and finally as potential lover. 61 Joan looks so pale that Richard asks, "'How do you feel?' not so much forgetting the presence of their guest as parading his concern, quite genuine at that, before her. 'Fine,' Joan said edgily, and perhaps she did" (TSD, p. 73). This exchange is typical of Updike's technique. The reader will have to decide how genuine Richard's concern is and how accurate Joan's assessment of her health is on the basis of evidence other than direct narration. Look at the function of Rebecca's coat and the various implica tions of "bed" in the story (not to mention the possibili ties of her last name, Cune). We have already seen that Richard has dramatized placing Rebecca's coat on his bed, but when he returns to the living room he finds her seated on the floor, "one arm up on the Hide-a-Bed that the previous tenants had not yet removed" (TSD, p. 70), telling of the sleeping arrangements in her previous menage, of the flirtations the male had made with a sexy neighbor, and of her friends' offer to follow her to her new one-room apartment and sleep on the floor. At the end of the evening, when Richard has been invited up four flights of stairs to look at Rebecca's apartment, Rebecca's coat and her bed conspire to make Richard again uncomfortable. "Richard's suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned 62 to certain guilt. Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman's fanny" (TSD* p. 79). When they enter the room, Rebecca complains that "'It's hot as hell in here,' swearing for the first time in his hearing" (TSD, p. 79), but she does not remove her coat. "As he moved further forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right . . . a double bed [that] had the appearance not so much as a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it. . ." (TSD, p. 80). It is a small room with so little to look at except Rebecca or her stage-like bed that the potential connection is indirectly but inevitably made. Rebecca eases the moment by showing Richard the view: "Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. 'Looks like a furniture store,' he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat" (TSD, p. 80). Richard small-talks his way to the door. "It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unneces sarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating posi tion. . . . 'Well--' he said. 'Well.' Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless" (TSD, p. 81). 63 Possibly. Richard breaks the spell with a badly uttered joke and escapes down the stairs: "Oh but they were close." The key to how close they were may be found in the unremoved coat. There can be only one reason for Rebecca's not removing her coat in her own hot-as-hell apartment: She hopes for the symbolic disrobing encounter which would occur if Richard helped remove her coat. How ever* Richard— guiltily titillated by the walk upstairs behind Rebecca and by the dominant presence of the double bed— has measured her well. Rebecca's gift for telling anecdotes about her peculiar friends is both her strength and her weakness* for she has gained her unique personality at the expense of others. Richard* so deeply concerned with his own self-image* is caught in Prufrock's dilemma: Should he risk the pleasure of gratifying his ego by acting out his fantasies on the soft stage of her double bed? Should he rather reinforce his own self-image with a debonair exit? Threatened with becoming an anecdote* he botches his choice, and Rebecca laughs at him. The Young Family The marriages in the four stories in which there is a child seem less threatened than the four just discussed, perhaps because of the child* but they are by no means secure. Of the four— "Ace in the Hole," "Incest," "A Gift 64 from the City," and "Toward Evening"— only "Toward Evening" will be discussed at length. "Ace in the Hole," the earliest of the "young married" stories complicated by the presence of a child, is clearly the germ out of which Rabbit, Run (1960) grew, but it would be a mistake to assume that it has no importance beyond that. The story, only Updike's second piece of profes sional fiction, is remarkably authentic, even though Granville Hicks airily dismisses it in favor of Rabbit, Run because in it "Updike showed us only a young man who has 16 unhappily outlived his days of athletic glory." More recently Wesley A. Kort has drawn an almost exactly oppo site conclusion: The frustrations of parenthood, for example, are also passages to peace. This interrelationship can be seen in "Ace in the Hole." Here we find a former basketball star who is now a fired used car salesman. In addition he finds his offices as father and husband burdensome; he is tensed by his child's crying and by his wife's criticism. But in the hole Ace begins to dance, and at the end he feels good again.17 The story is so clearly ironic that it is difficult to imagine how one could conceive of its conclusion as a "passage to peace," but Kort's willingness to do so is 16 "Generations of the Fifties: Malamud, Gold, and Updike," in The Creative Present, ed. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons (Garden City, .Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1963), p. 234. 17 Shriven Selves: Religious Problems in Recent American fiction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), p. 76. 65 evidence of its moral ambiguity. Robert Detweiler is much more perceptive: "Updike has forced more news about one dead end along the American way of life into one brief story than many writers manage to report in a whole 18 novel." His judgment that Updike had, "amazingly, already found his metier" in this story should be tempered with the knowledge that both the hard-cover version he used as his text (1959) and the Crest reprint (1964) are con siderably improved over the original which appeared in The New Yorker on April 9, 1955. The improvements are to be located in the fabric of detail; the "story" does not vary: Fred "Ace" Anderson, ex-high school basketball star, comes home from losing his job at a used car lot, stopping on the way to pick up his baby daughter at his mother’s house. His wife Evey arrives exhausted from her work; they quarrel over his being fired and the deteriorating state of their marriage. Ace soothes his wife's anger by turning on the animal charm that probably attracted her to him in the first place, and the story concludes with a seductive dance. Even though Hicks and Kort are at nearly opposite ends of an evaluative continuum, they are really both wrong. Ace is neither unhappy nor peaceful— he has simply retreated to the time of his greatest happiness, when he 18John Updike, p. 19. 66 was the scoring leader of the Olinger High basketball team. This point is underscored by the song they dance to in the original version: "Bonapart's Retreat.” The retreat to adolescent irresponsibility is completed in Ace's final perception: "he seemed to be great again, and all the other kids were around them, in a ring, clapping time” (TSD, p. 26). This conclusion shows Ace as a double moral failure. He not only has failed to meet his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and an adult, he has deliberately reverted to the happier time of his youth, encouraged to do so by his mother, who disapproves of Evey since her son "had” to marry her, and by a number of reminders of his basketball greatness. Unlike other stories which end in the protagonist's self-discovery, "Ace in the Hole" ends in pathetic ignorance, though the dead end of this all- too-typical marriage is clearly marked for the reader. The protagonist of "Incest" is a sensitive young man who is so bored by his "day" that he cannot bring himself to share it with his wife, who would welcome any change from the routine of caring for their somewhat spoiled infant daughter. The husband, Lee, instead describes to his wife Jane his dream of the night before, a dream in which he caressed a woman in a theater where a misty Technicolor version of Remembrance of Things Past was 67 playing. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Lee has preserved the dream with its combination of literary allusion and sexual implication as a kind of verbal fore* play he hopes will lead to a mutually satisfying con summation. The story advances through several hours of creeping domestic action and essential exposition, introducing the idea of incest through the shared similarities of Jane, her mother, and their daughter. Updike blends the three generations of women neatly, subtly advancing the sexual theme of the story. After the daughter is asleep Lee doggedly continues to woo his wife, but when bedtime comes it is clear that it is too late: "This was the sort of day when you sow and not reap" (TSD, p. 160). His wife falls asleep after reading only a page of Swann * s Way (Lee has reached volume four), and he slowly drifts into sleep, the story concluding with a one-page report of his present dream. The act of "incest" in the dream is safely meta morphosed into a blend of the several activities Lee had either participated in or witnessed as his daughter's day drew to a close, including urinating in the stool next to the tub in which his wife bathed their daughter. The faithful report of a dream is inevitably ambiguous, but the implication of the finely-wrought details of the story is 68 inescapable. Lee's teasing Jane about Remembrance of Things Past creates a polarization which leaves both out as readers. Jane believes that it is better to finish the novel than not to have begun it, but she has barely started and will never finish at her present rate of a page a day. It is Lee who has reached the fourth part and who is deeply concerned with knowing "how the book ends." Thus, the theme of Proust's masterpiece serves rather grandly as a metaphor in this short story. The truth of Lee's fantasy seems to be that he is deeply dissatisfied with the reality of his life at work and at home, preferring instead to retreat into the intellectual realms of dreams and litera ture, especially if the sensuous world of marital inter course evades him. He is intellectually superior to "Ace" Anderson of the preceding story, but his problem is essentially the same. "A Gift from the City," the last of the "Young Family" stories, is the longest in this collection, but in many respects it is the simplest. That is, it is cast in what appears to be the conventional conflict mode which pits a protagonist against an exterior force culminating with the antagonist vanquished and the protagonist living "happily ever after." Nevertheless, although the story is more leisurely and expansively developed than any other in this collection, it is no less morally ambiguous. The "gift" of 69 the title, for instance, is specifically defined at one point midway through the story as money given an indigent, yet by the "happy" ending it has become another of Updike's unexpected gifts of irony. The protagonist, faced with continued demands upon his charity, is unable to adjust to the ubiquitous need and greed of the city, and he accepts too readily the suggestion of others that he is being cheated by the one he has aided. James, the protagonist, accepts without proof the allegation that a Negro he has aided is a crook because it relieves him from having to continue wrestling with the moral problem of accommodating his native honesty, sympathy, and his need to belong, to the impossible demands the city makes on his relative affluence and charitable ness. The power of James's sympathetic imagination is evident throughout the story; to surrender one's sympathy to the hostile environment of the city is a loss, not a gift. The story requires careful reading lest the irony escape. A measure of the demand an intentionally ambiguous style makes upon the reader may be taken from Rachael Burchard's interpretation of this story in her John Updike: Yea Sayings: A young Negro— a skilled liar and a crafty thief— learns of the man who readily gives a handout. Clever, alert, and imaginative, the beggar talks Jim and his wife out of one ten dollar bill after another 70 until the two finally realize that they have been duped. They are victims of life as it is— not as it ought to be. The city is a place of good and evil, intermixed, inseparable. Living honestly and loving one's fellowman doesn't exempt a man from involvement in the unfathomable puzzle. Ms. Burchard's assertion that James and his wife "are victims of life as it is— not as it ought to be" is almost exactly wrong. James is a "victim" of life as it ought to be. Accepting his wife's analysis that the Negro is a fraud in the face of equal evidence and his own inclination that he is not, James appears to accept life as it is. But the story is open ended; it is not an easy case of appearance corrected by reality in the nick of time. The Negro is not "a skilled liar and a crafty thief," nor is he "clever, alert, and imaginative." The point of view of the story is primarily in the third person, although the limited omniscience which permits access to James's thoughts makes it seem first person. At any rate, the narrative commentary of the implied author must be taken at face value: "The Negro's sense of exit seemed as defective as his other theatrical skills. ... at the root of the Negro's demonstration there was either the plight he described or a plight that had made him lie. In either case, the man must be borne" (TSD, p. 181). 19 John Updike: Yea Sayings (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 137. 71 The effect of such either/or description— and there are many similar lines throughout— is to create a sense of moral ambiguity. What is important* really, is not whether the Negro is true or false, but how he is perceived by James and, especially, how James alters his own perception of self. James's "unexpected gift," his epiphany, is an ironic truth which leaves him with a sense of loss. "Toward Evening” "Toward Evening" is perhaps too delicate to succeed except for those who are especially attuned to Updike's lyre. It seems more a plotless sketch than a short story, yet there is a hint of conflict strong enough to make the reader, who has learned so much about the protagonist, sense the presence of the familiar division between the demands of the family and the private pleasures of the mind. One thing is certain: The story is clearly an embodi ment of the acknowledged influence of the art of Marcel Proust upon John Updike insofar as the spillover from an intense, recent reading can be called influence. "Toward Evening" was published in early 1956, less than a half year after Updike's excited discovery of both Proust and Kierkegaard while working in Manhattan as a staff writer for The New Yorker. 72 Updike recalls that discovery in an encomium published in the Proust anniversary edition of Horizon (Autumn 1972). He describes the circumstances of his life in the year in which "Toward Evening" was written, circumstances which are essentially identical to those of Rafe, the protagonist of the story: I was twenty-three, newly a father, newly employed. Since boyhood I had wanted to live in New York. I had wanted to be a writer and now a few poems and short stories were being published. In this atmo sphere, then, of dreams come true, I opened my wife's tattered college copy of Swann's Way; . . . While our baby cooed in her white, screened crib, and ... my young wife fussed softly in our triangular kitchen at one of the meals that, in the magical wav of marriage, regularly appeared, I would read: . . .20 Here he quotes a long, typical passage from the book, which, in Updike's words, "encapsulates the work's great theme: the metamorphoses wrought by Time [which carry] into the tragic, temporal dimension Proust's peculiar sensitivity to changing perspectives. Perspectives change in space ... in the heart . . . and [in society.] Ex ternal reality is but a cluster of moments no two of which 21 subtend the same angle." In addition to this quality of Proust's art, which is specifically identifiable in "Toward Evening," Updike was delighted to discover the matrix of his own developing 20 John Updike, "Remembrance of Things Past," Horizon, 1U (Autumn 1972), 102. 21 Updike, "Remembrance," p. 103; emphasis Updike's. 73 style: "Proust's tendrllous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes . . . that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not 'better' 22 writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system." The imagery of "Toward Evening" results from Updike's own conscious concern with what he calls "Proust's peculiar 23 sensitivity to changing perspectives." Rafe, the pro tagonist, is carrying home a boxed mobile for his baby's crib. A mobile, of course, is nothing if it does not provide more or less continuously changing perspectives. It is clear that the interest in the mobile is strictly Rafe's, for his wife Alice turns away at the moment she discovers it is not a "genuine Calder," and his daughter "wanted to put the birds in her mouth and showed no interest in, perhaps did not even see, their abstract swinging" (TSD, p. 66). But Rafe is sensitive to patterns from the beginning. On the bus coming home he is fascinated by a beautiful girl who stands reading A 1'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs: 22 Updike, "Remembrance," p. 103. 23Ibid. 74 Her feet* in gray heels* were planted on the sides of an invisible V. Numberless Vs were visible wherever two edges of the pencil-stripe of her suit met: . . . At the base of her throat* where a V seemed promised* something more complex occurred* involving the sheathed extremities of opposed collarbones* the tapered shelves of their upper edges* the two nervous and rather thoroughbred cords of her neck* and between them a hollow where you could lay a teaspoon. (TSD* pp. 62-63) Rafe continues his careful assessment of her every feature until "he felt that even studying her hand was an intrusion in the ellipse of repose focused on the twin points of face and book" (TSD* p. 63). When he turns away from these spatial patterns, Rafe becomes aware of a temporal pattern in the numbers of the buildings the bus is passing, a pattern which exposes with great economy the breadth of his exterior interests through inner associa tion: The clearly marked numbers of the east side of the street ran: 1832* 1836* 1850 (Wordsworth dies), 1880 (great Nihilist trial in St. Petersburg), 1900 (Rafe's father born in Trenton), 1902 (Braque leaves Le Havre to study painting in Paris), 1914 (Joyce begins Ulysses; war begins in Europe), 1926 (Rafe's parents marry in Ithaca), 1936 (Rafe is four years old). Where the present should have stood* a block was torn down* and the numbering began again with 2000, a boring progressive edifice. (TSD, pp. 63-64) Disappointed with the prospect of the future, Rafe returns his gaze inside the bus* where he concentrates on an advertising poster which was "printed on a finely corrugated cellulose sheet in which had been embedded two positions of a depicted man's eyeball* arm, and lips" 75 (TSD, p. 64). The device is supposed to show the man "reacting” ecstatically to the flavor of a cup of coffee as the viewer's perspective shifts back and forth, but the illusion is defeated by the curvature of the bus roof and Rafe's closeness: "Both arms, both eyeballs, were always present, though with seesaw intensity as Rafe ducked his head up and down" (TSD, p. 64). He looks again at the girl as she leaves the bus: "Proust jutted from her pocketbook. Her face wore the enamelled look of a person who has emerged from a piece of fiction into the world of decisions" (TSD, p. 64). He shifts his gaze to a seated rider: "Bit by bit, in con fused order, as word of a disaster first filters in over the wires, he became conscious of the young Negress seated beneath him" (TSD, p. 65). These two descriptions, of Rafe's last glimpse of the departing jeune fille and of the comparative disaster seated beneath him, are reminiscent of Proust's dazzling similes, connected to one another by the ghostly image of the dual man in the coffee ad. Rafe looks down at the girl: Her baby-flat nose was a good glossy place for his attention to rest. When she recrossed her legs, he noticed the unpatterned breadth of turquoise skirt, the yellow coat clashing with it, the tense hair painfully pulled straight, the hard-to-read fore shortened curves of her face, the hands folded, with an odd precision, in her turquoise lap. She was wearing blue half-gloves; they stopped at the base of her thumbs. (TSD, p. 65) 76 The gloves trigger a ’ ’ safe" flight of erotic fancy involving the girl* but Rafe's concentration soon returns to reality* for "the pure life of the mind* for all its quick distances* is soon tedious" (TSD* p. 65). When Rafe arrives home the entire bus trip has been reduced to "the thought that he had never seen gloves like that before" (TSD, p. 65). After the failure of the mobile* his indifferent daughter falls asleep and his unimpressed wife prepares dinner. Rafe calls out to Alice, "'I saw some funny gloves today,'" but "there was no answer from the kitchen, just the disappointed sound of pans" (TSD, p. 66). The bus trip* which had been such a rich experience for Rafe* filled with Proustian "changing perspectives," is irrevo cably lost to Alice. During dinner their lives are briefly illuminated by an accidental star* but again it is perceived solely from Rafe's remarkably sensitive point of view: A curious illusion was unexpectedly created: his wife* irritated because he had failed to answer some question of hers— her questions about his life at the office* so well meant, so understandable in view of her own confined existence* numbed his mind to the extent that not only his recent doings but her ques tions themselves were obliterated— dropped a tri angular piece of bread from her fingers, and the bread, falling to her lap through a width of light* twirled and made a star. (TSD* p. 67) The conclusion of the story is unusual* but not surprising* told as it is from the point of view of a 77 protagonist who perceives a piece of bread as a star. After dinner, Rafe sits alone, looking out across the Hudson at a view that is dominated by a neon sign advertis ing Spry. As the sign blinks through the endless stages of its simple message, Rafe wonders how the sign came to be there, and he creates in imagination a little scenario, only 300- odd words long, but packed with detail (the file of past Spry ads weighs 186 pounds), characterization (the man in Public Relations is "not bold enough to take J.G, with a grain of salt"), and coincidence (two of the executives have "daughters at Sarah Lawrence threatening marriage"). It concludes: On a November Tuesday, the kind of a blowy day that gives you earache, the sign was set in place by eighteen men, the youngest of whom would someday be an internationally known stage actor. At 3:30, an hour and a half before they were supposed to quit, they knocked off and dispersed, because the goddam job was done. Thus the Spry sign (thus the river, thus trees, thus babies and sleep) came to be. (TSD, p. 68) Jack DeBellis suggests that Rafe exemplifies "a 2U creative imagination that goes wasted," but it is the primal creation that concerns Rafe, not the problem of profiting from or even communicating his own creativity. By equating river, trees, babies, and sleep with the Spry 2ti "The Group and John Updike," Sewanee Review, 72 (Summer ld64), 534-535. sign, Updike's character is implying that a creative intel ligence not unlike Rafe's lies behind all existence. The problem for Rafe and Updike is, of course, the problem of every sensitive person whose perception leads him to the edge of the void of understanding. The message, clearly, is written in the stars; what it says is another matter. The God of Genesis, like the workmen erecting the Spry sign, "knocked off" when "the goddam job was done." Rafe, too, is absent from the final paragraph of the story, having been brought to sleep by his creative ruminations: Above its [the Spry sign's] winking, the small cities [earlier in the evening visible as clusters of lights atop the New Jersey Palisades] had dis appeared. The black of the river was as wide as that of the sky. Reflections sunk in it existed dimly, minutely wrinkled, below the surface. The Spry sign occupied the night with no company beyond the also uncreated but illegible stars. (TSD, p. 68) Rafe has imagined the scenario which might well have been acted out in the creation of the Spry sign, so reasonable are its hints of realistic detail, but in truth all that is clear is what the sign says, not how it came to say it. Thus, the legible sign is "also uncreated" insofar as Rafe or anyone truly knows. For all his sensi tivity and intelligence, Rafe's reflections are at last absorbed in the black river of uncertainty which renders even the stars illegible. 79 Miscellaneous Stories The remaining five stories in this collection do not fit readily into any of the previous categories* nor do they submit to any rubric more precise than ''miscellane ous*" although the principal character in each is a young adult male. Two of the stories* "A Trillion Feet of Gas" and "Intercession" may be dismissed in a few words as the least successful in the collection* but the others* "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth," "Dentistry and Doubt," and "Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?" are rather fine examples of the lyric short story, each concluding with a moral ambiguity at least slightly different from those previously discussed. None will be treated at length, however. "A Trillion Feet of Gas" is simply too diffuse to succeed. There is a pair of newlyweds in this story, too, but they are out of their natural environment and their problem— how to get rid of an overstaying guest from England— is soon lost in an excess of exposition. Besides the guest from England, there is another young couple to be characterized, their parents, and a wealthy Texan house guest of the older couple— the one who owns all that gas— which adds up to more characters than this particular short story can accommodate. Consequently, the dialogue is almost all indirectly reported and the result is no more 80 interesting than gossip about another social class. The ambiguity is, alas, accidental, not intentional. "Intercession” is much better; in fact, it seems less than it really is, partly because of the strength of the other stories in the collection and partly because it depends for its structure upon a game of golf. As the title implies, there is an epiphany not unlike that experi enced by Rabbit in his game of golf with Reverend Eccles in Rabbit, Run (1960), but because the background of the protagonist is undeveloped in comparison with Rabbit's, the metaphor of the game of golf seems mock-heroic rather than serious. For example, the protagonist, a cartoonist who feels guilty for being able to play golf while others are work ing, desires desperately to hit the ball well in order to squelch a cocky youth with whom he is playing: All he wanted was that his drive be brilliant; it was very little to ask. If miracles, in this age of faint faith, could enter anywhere, it would be here, where the causal fabric was thinnest, in the quick collisions and abrupt deflections of a game. Paul drove high but crookedly over the treetops. It was dismaying for a creature of spirit to realize that the angle of a surface striking a sphere counted for more with God than the most ardent hope. (TSD, p. 206) It stretches one's religious sensibilities somewhat to hear God and golf compared but Updike, a gifted parodist, is being quite serious here. In an essay-review written over a decade after the appearance of this story 81 and of Rabbit, Run, he discusses at some length the mystical aspects of the game: Like a religion, a game seeks to codify and lighten life. Played earnestly enough (spectatorship being merely a degenerate form of playing), a game can gather to itself awesome dimensions of subtlety and transcendental significance. . . . Golf ... is of games the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the walls between us and the supernatural are rubbed thinnest.*5 Observe the similarity of the images, written ten years apart: "where the causal fabric was thinnest," and "wherein the walls between us and the supernatural are rubbed thinnest." That moment— the intercession of the story— occurs after the challenged boy has disappeared, for then the protagonist hits a superb golf shot as a first lesson in the mysterious way in which prayers are answered. As Updike wrote in his recent essay-review, "There is a goodness in the experience of golf that may well be, as Mr. Murphy would have it, a pitha, ’a place where something breaks into our workaday world and bothers us forevermore 26 with the hints it gives.'" There is just enough ambiguity in the ending of "Intercession" for us to assume that its protagonist is at least beginning to be bothered by the pitha the day has provided. 25"Is There Life After Golf?" rev. of Golf in the Kingdom, by Michael Murphy, The New Yorker, 25 JuTy 1372, p. /6. 26Ibid. 82 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth" is perhaps a better story of an encounter between generations, but not only because its ambiguous ending is this time caught on the upswing. The structure of the story is provided by the discussion in an English class of the famous passage from Macbeth which begins "Tomorrow, and tomorrow," supplying the title of the story, but not concluding "and so forth," providing at least some of the irony. This title is very fine because it catches the contrast between Mark Prosser, the young teacher who takes his job, his literature, and this particular passage quite seriously, and his students, who, being required to memorize the whole passage, are inclined to accept too literally its conclu sion and, since after all it is only "a tale told by an idiot/ Signifying nothing," are quite willing to wrap it up with a "you know," or an "etcetera," or a "so forth." A pair of Prosser’s bright students conspire to set him up as their third straight victim in a game of vanity. One, the prettiest girl in school, allows herself to be caught passing a note to the other in which she says that she loves the teacher. Mr. Prosser reads the note, asks the girl to remain after class, and continues the discus sion of Macbeth. After class, instead of pursuing the flirtation foolishly as the students had hoped, Prosser 83 lectures the girl firmly but kindly about note passing and especially about the imprecise use of the word "love”: These days . . . it's come to mean nothing but a vague fondness for something. In this sense, I love the rain, this blackboard, these desks, you. It means nothing, you see, whereas once the word signified a quite explicit thing— a desire to share all you own and are with someone else. (TSD, p. 38; emphasis added to point up the echoes of Macbeth's speech) When he dismisses her, he is surprised by the serious ness of her apology: "The girl was almost crying; he was sure of that" (TSD, p. 38). Later, as he prepares to leave, he learns that two other teachers had been vic timized by the same girl, discovering so as they made fools of themselves by bragging of the girl's infatuation. Prosser says nothing, except to himself as he leaves the building: "The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that" (TSD, p. HO). Even though the open end of this story, repeating as it does an earlier line, forces a reconsideration of the theme by carrying the reader back, it avoids resolution. We must take our clues from the reported actions and thoughts of the characters and decide for ourselves. Many who read this story accept as its moral Prosser’s apparent fall from hubristic heights. Indeed, one might well assume that the last line is a first step in a line of reasoning Prosser will use to lift himself above the humiliation of the other teachers, but the inescapable irony seems to me to be that the girl had 84 been almost crying, but not from an emotion she brought with her to the encounter after class. There is no doubt that she had allowed herself to be used as the bait in a tender trap, but she had not counted on the gentleness of her teacher's remonstrance. As Robert Detweiler so aptly wrote, A young girl can use her budding sexuality to play an irritating trick on her instructors, but she will also respond to an honest encounter. The experience holds a gift for pupil and teacher. He takes her seriously ... in spite of her immaturity; and she answers with an acknowledgment of respect for him that was hidden hitherto behind the facade of mis chief . 27 Updike calls attention to the moral ambiguity of the next story in its title, "Dentistry and Doubt," for what is doubt except a response to moral uncertainty? However, in this story the central character, a cleric, looks for "God's fingerprints" in nature as well, and the story ends with a bird augury rendered more ambiguous by Updike in revision. The central figure of the story is Burton, an American cleric who is in Oxford writing a thesis on Richard Hooker, sixteenth century divine. The dentist who is filling his teeth asks several "small-talk" questions as he works; Burton's reflections on the questions and his answers establish his inner conflict. The dentist's office looks ^John Updike (New York: Twayne, 1972), p. 20. 85 out upon a courtyard with a bird feeding station and Burton sees the activities of the birds as natural symbols of his own discontent. His discontent stems from his tendency to inquire into everything that he does for evidence of the existence of God: That morning . . . the Devil had been very active. Skepticism had mingled with the heat and aroma of his bed; it had dripped from the cold ochre walls of his digs .... Even his toothbrush, which on good days presented itself as an acolyte of matinal devotion, today seemed an agent of atheistic hygiene, broad casting the hideous fact of germs. (TSD, pp. 43-44) When the dentist learns that Burton is writing about Hooker, he asks him to quote something and he cannot. Before he can react to this failure with guilt, he is occupied with the question of pain as the dentist starts drilling. He mentally works through a familiar chain of arguments to explain the need for pain, beginning with Creation, but when he reaches the Devil he becomes con fused and concentrates instead on the black birds outside: "They kept falling out of the sky and the tree tops, but he noticed few ascending" (TSD, p. 47). The dentist identifies the birds as starlings and complains that they greedily "’take everything they can away from the wren'" (TSD, p. 48). Burton, who had not noticed the wrens before, begins to concentrate on them: "He thought of the world as being, like all music, founded 86 on tension. The tree pushing up, gravity pulling down, the bird desiring to fill the air, the air compelled to crush the bird" (TSD, p. «I9). His tooth filled, Burton prepares to leave, but at the door he recalls something from Hooker and quotes it as the story ends: ’ "I grant we are apt, prone, and ready, to forsake God; but is God ready to forsake us? Our minds are changeable; is His so likewise?'" Dr. Merritt smiled. The two men stood in the same position they had hesitated in when Burton entered the room. Burton smiled. Outside the window, the wrens and the starlings, mixed indistinguishably, engaged in maneuvers that seemed essentially playful. (TSD, p. 50) Burton's thought that the world is founded on tension may be regarded as the key to this story. The two men occupy the same positions at the doorway at the beginning and at the end of the story. In between, the forces of faith and doubt are like "the bird desiring to fill the air, the air compelled to crush the bird." The quote he recollects from Hooker, so reflective of his own change able mind, seems to supply a final tug of faith upward: "'Our minds are changeable; is His so likewise?'" However, the final sentence, which contains the only substantive revision of this story from its original magazine version, seems to indicate that Updike has again strengthened the moral ambiguity of his closure. The New Yorker version of October 29, 1955, ended: "Outside the ! 87 window, two wrens, one by pretending to locate a crumb and the other by unobtrusively flicking a real crumb away, 28 outmaneuvered a black bird." Given the fairly obvious bird imagery already cited, which except for the last sentence is unchanged between versions, this earlier version suggests that somehow Burton and the dentist have, like two clever wrens, wrested a crumb away from the Devil. Ignoring the fact that the wrens are obviously working in concert while the dentist is essentially unaware of Burton's real needs, this crumb might be considered the at-last remembered quotation from Hooker, restoring Burton's faith as the dentist has restored his tooth. But the pattern of tension so care fully developed in the story is much too insistent to be so easily resolved. Burton's doubt is too deepseated to be cured by a visit to the dentist, although the "truth" of the quotation by Hooker might well be his salvation— if he can just keep it in mind. The revised ending, on the other hand, is consistent with Burton's state of doubt. If the wrens symbolize good and the starlings evil, then to see them at last as "mixed indistinguishably" is perhaps a much more realistic projection of Burton's inner condition into the outer OQ "Dentistry and Doubt," The New Yorker, 29 October 1955, p. 30. 88 world. I can only conclude that Updike altered the ending of the collected version to strengthen the theme of moral ambiguity already present. The final story to be considered from this collection is "Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?" It is the most literary and most verbally sophisticated of all, combining in its two central characters the combined experiences of Updike’s youth, college, overseas, and Manhattan years. The story was considerably revised for the collected version giving it a greater inner consistency so that, once again, the ambiguity of the ending, so confusing to one of the characters, is given a particular ironic set. The story cannot be paraphrased meaningfully because its essential merit is in its language. For example, the long opening paragraph is clearly a parody of Henry James: "In the capacious room there was nothing of no intrinsic interest, nothing that would not serve as cause for a narrative ..." (TSD, p. 82). But it is more than a parody; this plum-colored room may be right out of the pages of a James novel, but it is also integral to the characterization of the protagonist, whose patrimony includes not only enviable social position but threatening personal wit. The protagonist is Fred Platt, son of a well-to-do businessman. Even though his father has offered him a 89 high-paying position in his firm, Fred is looking for work which will utilize his talent and, presumably, preserve his self-respect. His talent is ostensibly as a writer, although it is clear that most of his creative energies are expended in "the invention of impeccable but fruitless puns" (TSD, p. 95). He is seeking a position in an advertising department directed by a college classmate he had once befriended. When they meet in a bar for lunch, everything Fred attempts in his desire to recapture their earlier friendship fails, and their conversation is filled with tension, irony, and humiliation. The ending of the story is a fine example of Updike's use of moral ambiguity. Among the several things about Fred which make his friend Clayton uncomfortable is the fact that Fred has lived for a time in Paris and habitually drops French expressions into his rapid patter. When their lunch has concluded with an awkward scene over the check, they pause outside the restaurant, Fred making it clear that he is "travelling in another direction" (TSD, p. 99). Clayton asks him seriously if he really wants a job in advertising, but Fred laughs it off: For a moment Fred was sorry; he had an impulse to walk a distance with Clayton, to forgive everything, but Clayton, helplessly offensive, smiled and said, "Well. Back to the salt mines." "Well put." Fred lifted his hand in a benign ministerial gesture startling to passersby, "Ye are 90 the salt of the earth. La lumifere du monde. The light of the world. Fils~~3~e Saint Louis, montez au ciel!" Clayton, bewildered by the foreign language, backed a step away and with an uncertain jerk of his hand affirmed, "See you.” "Oui. La roi est un bon homme. La crayon de ma tante est sur la table de mon chat. ~Rerci. MercIT Meaning thank you"! Thanlcs again.r t (TSD, p. 100) This ending is at once cruel and pathetic from Fred's point of view. A sense of its ambiguity may be gotten by looking at the only two critics who devote so much as a paragraph to the story. Richard E. Fisher, in his essay "John Updike: Theme and Form in the Garden of Epiphanies," uses this story in his discussion of Updike's interest in "virtuous innocence," but he somehow sees Clayton as the butt of Updike's satirical attack: "The Clayton Claytons of this world have sold out, have lost their critical ability and said 'yes' to the dictators who limit the 29 range of what creativity is left . . . ." Robert Detweiler, on the other hand, concentrates his brief attention on the character of Fred: "Fred Platt is one of Updike'8 few thoroughly unpleasant character crea tions . . . but he is also pathetic. Caught in the web of his own perverse personality, he cannot really meet anyone 29Moderna Spr&k, 56 (Fall 1962), 257. 91 else on honest terms; and he seems doomed to isolation in 30 his shallow social superiority." Both Fisher and Detweiler obviously see the moral ambiguity in the story, but each abstracts from it his own meaning. Of course, that is one of the effects of a deliberately ambiguous style, but it seems to me that Updike is much less concerned with showing that Clayton has "sold out" to the forces of conformity or that Fred is "thoroughly unpleasant” than in making both characters authentic and in making their encounter real. Fred belongs irrevocably to his class, Clayton to his. Both suffer somewhat from the discomfort of self-identification, but Clayton considers himself saved from despair because his values are derived from the American, protestant work- ethic. If Lionel Trilling is right in his most recent book, Sincerity and Authenticity, the Clayton Claytons of this world may one day no longer feel envious of the educated and the wealthy. Trilling suggests that the supreme position occupied by the doctrine of sincerity, of knowing and being true to one's self, which has dominated western culture for at least four centuries, is being rapidly replaced by the doctrine of authenticity, the acceptance of that which is and the rejection of that which was. In John Updike, p. 27. 92 Trilling’8 view, this is the basic intellectual orientation of an industrial society, always toward change, never conservation: "Nowadays, of course, we are all of us trained to believe that the moral life is in ceaseless flux and that the values, as we call them, of one epoch are 31 not those of another." Fred, clearly, is caught up in the tide of this shift; we see him first in his father's "plum-colored room," which is filled with mementoes of the past, but he is not com forted by them. He believes in doing things out of friendship and hopes for some quality of his earlier association with Clayton to assert itself. Detweiler calls his personality "perverse," but his impulse throughout is to forgive Clayton; it is only Clayton's "helplessly offensive" "'Well. Back to the salt mines'" that prompts his absurd goodbye. It is important to remember, before evaluating Fred's "shallow social superiority," in Detweiler's phrase, that Fred is just as critical of his father's cliches as he is Clayton's, and that he is equally critical of his own clever, but "fruitless puns." I believe that the key to understanding this story is to accept it as a lyrical, open-ended, epiphanous statement of moral ambiguity. The story does not take sides, except 31Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1969-70"(CambridgeT Mass.: Harvard University t*ress, 1972), p. 1. 93 through our possible identification with Fred through point of view. I should think Updike would be pleased if our intellectual reaction is, "Yes. That’s the way it is,” and our emotional reaction is essentially sympathetic with Fred. If the standards of sincerity are eroding as fast as Trilling suggests, then Fred’s fate may well be our fate. Conclusion Nearly three-quarters of a century has passed since James Joyce developed the theory of the literary epiphany and demonstrated it in the collection of stories called The Dubliners. John Updike has adapted the epiphany to his particular style of short fiction with considerable success, perhaps because now, following the Freudian revolution, moments of spiritual illumination are even more treasured by man than they were in Joyce's time after the Darwinian revolution. Lionel Trilling summarized this condition well in Sincerity and Authenticity: To emphasize the intractable material necessity of common liffe and what this implies of life's wonder- lessness is to make all the more wonderful such moments of transcendence as may now and then occur. This, it will be recognized, is the basis of Joyce's conception of the "epiphany,” literally a "showing forth." The assumption of the epiphany is that human existence is in largest part compounded of the dull ness and triviality of its routine, devitalized or paralysed by habit and the weight of necessity, and that what is occasionally shown forth, although it is not divinity as the traditional Christian meaning of the word would propose, is nevertheless appropriate to the idea of divinity: it is what we call spirit. Often what is disclosed is spirit in its very 94 negation, as it has been diminished and immobilized by daily life. But there are times when the sudden dis closure transfigures the dull and the ordinary, suffusing it with significance.32 Or, as John Updike said, "We are rewarded unexpect edly. The muddled and inconsequent surface of things now 33 and then parts to yield us a gift." The epiphanies of Joyce's Dubliners stories and of Updike's stories in this collection grow out of a sensitive but weak character's struggle with the moral ambiguity of his life. What is disclosed to him is not so much good or bad as it is real, authentic. Thus, there is a necessary illumination in virtually all the stories in The Same Door. It is essential for John Nordholm to discover the necessary diminution of all pleasure in "The Happiest I've Been" and for all those young married males to learn with Arthur of "Sunday Teasing" this "perfect and luminous thought: You don't know anything." All these young protagonists, searching for answers to the essential moral ambiguity of their lives, are venturing near the conclusion of Omar Khayyam: Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about; but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went. 32Trilling, p. 89. 33 Olinger Stories, p. vii. 95 It is John Updike's strength as a writer that he can take his readers with him in and out of that same door. Perhaps this is so because of the modesty of his ambition. As he wrote in "The Sea's Green Sameness," "All I expect is that once into my blindly spun web of words the thing itself will break: make an entry and an account of 34 itself." I believe, and have attempted to demonstrate, that he achieved this goal quite well in The Same Door. 3U Rpt. in Museums and Women and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 164. CHAPTER III PIGEON FEATHERS On Monday, March 19, 1962, the day after Updike turned thirty, Alfred A. Knopf brought out his second volume of short fiction, Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. Although in comparison with The Same Door the stories are less even, less carefully done in some respects, this collection has received a good deal more attention, perhaps because of the excitement generated by his novel Rabbit, Run published sixteen months previously. The nineteen stories were first published, mostly in The New Yorker, between January 1959 and January 1962, and they are printed in the order in which they were written. The stories range from a brief account of "wonderful things" told in the first person and entitled "Archangel" to a pair of cluster-stories told in a first-person voice more obviously that of John Updike: "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car." In between there are a number of stories loosely fitting the subdivisions of the preceding chapter: Coming of Age ("A Sense of Shelter," "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I 96 Love You,” and five others), and Young Marrieds ("Wife- Wooing,” "The Persistence of Desire,” and six others). In addition to these fifteen and the three experimental models previously cited, Pigeon Feathers contains Updike's first story of separation or estrangement, the epistolary "Dear Alexandros." Since estrangement becomes the major focus in The Music School and since the general theme of moral ambiguity has been discussed at length in the preceding chapter, I shall concentrate in this chapter on the question of personal immortality, which is the theme of the titular story of the collection and, in a way, the entire collection. Death, in its real and in its metaphorical sense (death in life) and the search for personal immortality were dominant themes in Updike's early fiction. Joined by the seventeenth century conceit which treated acts of sex as little deaths, these themes have remained central to Updike's art. The Poorhouse Fair (1959) centers on the debate on immortality between Hook, the ninety-year-old schoolteacher, and Conner, the humanist prefect of the old folks home. The Centaur (1963) uses the Chiron-Prometheus myth of transferred immortality to reshape and restate the basic Christian question of salvation. Piet Hanema of Couples (1968) is terrorized by the thought of oblivion and he pursues the question of immortality with the thrill and 98 energy of a seducer. But nowhere does Updike demonstrate a character's apparent personal belief in his own immortal ity then undermine it with very carefully created inten tional ambiguity better than in his short stories. Of the nineteen stories in this collection, the question of personal immortality is more or less explicit in six and I shall discuss only these and only three of them at length. "Flight” "Flight” has been described as "overwhelming. . . . the finest thing in the book"1 by Stanley Edgar Hyman, and "patronizing" by William Peden. These critics and others have noted the similarity of the protagonist Allen Dow with Peter Caldwell of The Centaur (1963) and Joey Robinson of Of the Farm (1965), but it would be a mistake to regard it as just another round in the battle John Hoyer Updike has waged with his mother Linda Hoyer Updike to gain some emotional distance from her love. Even so, the story does call to mind the relationship between Elizabeth Willard and 1"The Artist As a Young Man," The New Leader, 19 March 1962, p. 22. See his "Chiron at Olinger High," Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time (New York: Horizon th?ess, T966), pp. 175-132, for a comment on the relationship of this story to The Centaur. 2 The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature (Boston: Houghton MiffTTn, 1964), p. IT.-------------- %% her son George in a hwmfeer of et^ies of thwarted escape in The frabllnera* The central event in the etcey ie seventeen-year-old Allen Dow's overnight trip to another city with three female members of his high-sehool debs to teato, One of the girls* a last-minute substitute* is Molly Bingaftahi, A romance develops between Allen and Molly* but Allen's mother* pulling out all the stops of maternal self-pity and filial responsibility* kills the affair in a melodramatic scene. Obviously, it isn’t plot whieh distinguishes this story. Indeed, it is perhaps the same ’ ’something other" which excites Hyman and dismays Peden. Peden, who includes his discussion of Updike in a seetieh entitled "dane Austens of Metropolis and Suburbia," begins with high praise but along the way descends almost to the level Of disgust: /’ Characteristic tof the patronising assumption Of Updike's characters] is 'Flight,' in whieh a young married writer, Allen Dow, returns to his home in Pennsylvania.-H After quoting the story's first sentenee, he continues* "Here begins a seemingly interminable series of remi- niscences . . . 3Ibid. Updike refers to this eritiois# in a letter' to me dated September 2S, 1973; "How odd of Fedefr .t& fulminate so furiously over what seems to be a t of several stories. I never make Allen bow a writer &f married, do I?" 100 These reminiscences, however, are essential in provid ing what the reviewer for the London Times Literary Supplement called "a sense of the unchanging awfulness of family relationships." The reminiscences create not only an atmosphere from which one might well wish to fly, they also furnish a continuum of life with which to measure the "immortality" of successive generations against the promised timelessness of life after death. The story is told in the first person, but it begins with a confession from the protagonist that "At the age of seventeen I was poorly dressed and funny-looking, and went 5 around thinking of myself in the third person." The effect of this opening is to create a sense of division which is sustained throughout the story, ultimately reduced to the separation of body and soul. The writer at the present remove can judge what he was at an earlier time: "Consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant and shy" (PF, p. **9). No doubt this acknowledged consciousness is what gives rise to Peden's complaint that Updike is patronizing, but its real effect in the story is "Bigger and Better," rev. of Pigeon Feathers by John Updike, Times Literary Supplement, 1 February 1§63, p. 73. 5John Updike, "Flight," Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 4$. All subsequent references to stories in this collection will be identified in the body of the text as PF. 101 not only to stretch Allen Dow's portion of the continuum of time but also to reinforce his sense of self-division. Allen had been made conscious of his special destiny by his mother some five or six years earlier than the recalled central action. They had hiked to the top of the hill overlooking Olinger and his mother had announced, "'There we all are, and there we'll all be forever.' She hesitated before the word 'forever,' and hesitated again before adding, 'Except you, Allen. You're going to fly'" (PF, p. 50). Of course, she is speaking metaphorically, but the hesitation before "forever" and the image of flight, plucked impulsively from a few birds that "hung far out over the valley" (PF, p. 50), combine to stress the contrast between eternal oblivion and the passage of angels. Allen accepted his mother's image as "the clue I had been waiting all my childhood for" and he felt "captive to a hope she had tossed off and forgotten" (PF, p. 50) when she failed to develop the image into a sustained theme. He cynically exploited "both the privileges of being extra ordinary and the pleasures of being ordinary" (PF, p. 51) and covered his inconsistencies by claiming that he was learning to fly. Once when he used this excuse his mother responded "with red-faced ferocity, 'You'll never learn, you'll stick and die in the dirt just like I'm doing'" 102 (PF, p. 51), It is precisely at this point that Updike turns even further back in time for the series of remi niscences Peden calls "seemingly interminable," but which are vital to the story. The reminiscences cover eight pages and function as a unit. However, the theme of mortality and the function of memory as a means of escaping it run throughout. Of his maternal grandfather: "There was something public about him; now that he is dead I keep seeing bits of him attached to famous politicians" (PF, pp. 51-52). Of his mother's attitude toward her father's having frustrated her youth: "When I was a child ... I could feel it around and above me, like a huge root encountered by an earthworm" (PF, p. 55). Of his grandmother, whose spirit he would seek in an overgrown asparagus patch: "In the center of the patch ... I would fall under a spell, and become tiny, and wander among the great smooth green trunks expecting to find . . . my grandmother. She herself had believed in ghosts, which made her own ghost potent" (PF, p. 56). Of his father: "There are now one or two dozen ex-students . . . who carry around with them some piece of encouragement my father gave them, or remember some sentence of his that helped shape them" (PF, p. 57). Of his mother: "My mother's genius was to give the people 103 closest to her mythic immensity. I was the phoenix" (PF, p. 58). Allen Dow's mother clearly expected her son to rise in flight out of the ashes of the "inheritance of frustration and folly" that had descended from his grandfather (PF, p. 59). She is so intense in her hope of being redeemed in the life of her son that she attacks viciously his friend ship with Molly Bingaman, fearing that he would wish to settle down to an ordinary life with her. The theme of immortality is sustained as a part of the central event in the story, the making and breaking of his friendship with Molly. Reflecting on their all-night conversation on their first night away from home at the debate tournament, Allen recalls that they had discussed his fear of death: I must have been describing the steep waves of fearing death that had come over me ever since early childhood . . . and I ended by supposing that it would take great courage to be an atheist. "But I'll bet you'll become one," Molly said. "Just to show yourself that you're brave enough." I felt she overestimated me, and was flattered. Within a few years ... I realized how touchingly gauche our assumption was that an atheist is a lonely rebel; for mobs of men are united in atheism, and oblivion— the dense lead like sea that would occasionally sweep over me— is to them a weight as negligible as the faint pressure of their wallets in their hip pockets. (PF, p. 62) The question of Christian immortality is thus intro duced obliquely into the story, while the theme of the divided self is sustained: "The entire town seemed ensnarled in my mother’s myth .... It was as if I were 104 a sport that the ghostly elders of Olinger had . . . agreed in time to donate to the air; this fitted with the ambigu ous sensation I had always had ... of being simultane ously flattered and rejected" (PF, p. 67). Allen's mother capitalizes on this "ambiguous sensation" in her successful denigration of Molly. The story ends with a powerful scene that brings the several elements of the story together in a doubly ironic closure. Allen has been out with Molly against the wishes of every one, including the Bingamans. While his mother is nagging him for his weakness, his dying grandfather begins to sing upstairs: "'There is a happy land, far, far away, where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day"' (PF, p. 72). His song is interrupted by a terrible fit of coughing; "loud with fear he called my mother's name. She didn't stir" (PF, p. 72). Her strength in remaining unmoved by her dying father's cry overwhelms Allen, who realizes that he is too weak to withstand her, and he gives up Molly. His mother gets the last word: "In a husky voice that seemed to come across a great distance my mother said, with typical melodrama, 'Goodbye, Allen'" (PF, p. 73). This ending creates a double irony. True, Allen's mother's goodbye was as melodramatic as her earlier pre diction that he would fly was impulsive, but it is nonetheless a cry of victory. Allen's mother seems almost 105 to symbolize the Christian paradox: she can gain her son's life only by sending it away. She is clearly much more dependent upon the abstraction of his becoming than upon the reality of his being. Thus, her final words, uttered in tones of loss, are really the acknowledgment of victory; bereft of Molly Bingaman, Allen Dow will fly. In his unpublished dissertation "Supernaturalism in John Updike's Fiction," Bryant N. Wyatt asserts that "the impetus of the protagonist is clearly toward a break with his past, in which his mother has been the dominant force, and toward the assertion of his existential self in C choosing and fashioning his future." However, the structure of the story and its narrative tone belie this assertion. Allen Dow is telling the story of how two earlier events in his life fitted into a family continuum which has given him not only existence but identity. He stresses how characteristics of his dead grandparents live on in his mother and in himself, and that "her incessant resurrection of mysterious grievances buried back in the confused sunless earth of the time before I was born" (PF, p. 58) served not only her own mythic needs but gave him an identity in time. It is clear that he has not broken his mother's domination; like Dedalus, Allen Dow will fly with his parent's wings. ®Diss. University of Virginia 1970, p. 165. 106 Even though "Flight" is laced with images of immor tality and oblivion, Updike does not take a position on the question. Allen Dow is embarrassed at recollecting his childhood fear of extinguishing death, but he also realizes that "perhaps prolonged fear is a ground of love" (PF, p. 52). There is no evidence that he has joined the mobs of men united in atheism or that he is any less troubled by the question he could feel "around and above me, like a huge root encountered by an earthworm" (PF, p. 55). In the next story the question becomes even more explicit and the answer ever more ambiguous. "Pigeon Feathers" "Pigeon Feathers" is the longest and perhaps best known of all Updike's collected short stories. Although the comparatively lightweight "A 6 P" from this collection has been more widely anthologized, "Pigeon Feathers" has received far more serious critical attention than any other story. Fully two critics accept the story as a simple affirmation of Christian faith for every one who recognizes that its undeniable epiphany for the protagonist is undermined with doubt for the reader. Nearly everyone quotes the final sentence of the story as standing for the tower of faith miraculously built upon the rock of the protagonist's despair, but I suggest that it is not a final statement at all but only the last in a series and that the 107 tone of the series makes the closure ambiguous and thereby ironic. The protagonist is called David Kern this time; his story is told in the third person, with omniscience limited to his point of view. He is fourteen when his faith is first tested shortly after his family has moved from Olinger to a small farm near Firetown; he is fifteen when, a few months later, his certainty of personal immortality seems restored by his experience with the pigeons. The strength of this story lies in the credibility given David's crisis of doubt and faith, a credibility Updike achieves through carefully balanced structure and meticu lously rendered detail. David Kern is upset by being displaced from his familiar surroundings, suffering from what sociologist Eric Hoffer has called "drastic change." He attempts to work off some of his disorientation by arranging his parents' collection of books, but their "odor of faded taste made him feel the ominous gap between himself and his parents, the insulting gulf of time that existed before he was born" (PF, p. 117). He attempts to bridge that gap by reading and chances on H. G. Wells's rationalist life of Jesus in The Outline of History. He is horrified not so much by Wells's "fantastic falsehoods" but by the "fact that they 108 had been permitted to exist in an actual human brain” (PF, p. 119). He tries to defeat the blasphemy with reasons, but can find none that will do. He reflects on his experience with prayer, but decides that what appeared to be an answer was not: "What a tiny, ridiculous coincidence this was, after all, to throw into battle against H. G. Wells’s engines of knowledge! Indeed, it proved the enemy's point: Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists" (PF, p. 120). This interim decision takes on added importance in the final scene of the story. David leaves his mother and father arguing over whether soil can be said to have soul in a steamy kitchen scene Updike describes as "infernal" to go to the feared outhouse. There he is visited by "an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede" (PF, p. 123). It is important to observe that in this scene of death as "impending oblivion," Updike's David conceives of his eternity in mortal terms. No Shake spearean silent rest for David: "You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind 109 and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called" (PF, p. 123). When David returns to the house to begin his efforts at exorcising his vision of death through reason, his parents have advanced the argument to the level of earth worms and chicken dung, providing a comic counterpoint to David's terror. David's fright has just been described in terms of Wells's nightmare visions from The Time Machine and he bursts into the kitchen as his father is complaining that his mother's organic farming methods are a retreat in time: "'I'm sure the Dark Ages were a fine place to the poor devils born in them, but I don't want to go there. They give me the creeps.' Daddy stared into the cold pit of the fireplace and clung to the rolled newspaper in his lap as if it alone were keeping him from slipping backwards and down, down" (PF, pp. 125-126). Updike uses David's parents' argument rather well to continue his theme and to represent David's confusion. His father is a practicing Christian who sees nothing incon sistent in praising the rise of science while condemning the Dark Ages when Christianity was dominant. His mother, a free-thinking Greek major in college, argues for nature's soul, pushing the once-ancient, now-modern technique of organic farming. His father punctuates his arguments with a sigh and an oft-repeated phrase: "This reminds me of 110 death.” His mother is moved to tears: "'You talked Pop into his grave and now you'll kill me. Go ahead, George, more power to you; at least I'll be buried in good ground"' (PF, p. 127). David abandons them both and looks up the word ''soul” in the dictionary. The definition affords a temporary shelter for him, but he asks for more: he lifts his hands into the darkness above his bed, begging Christ to touch them, returning them beneath the covers, "uncertain if they had been touched or not. For would not Christ's touch be infinitely gentle?" (PF, p. 128). The next day he attends his catechism class, where his questions are unsatisfactorily answered: "'David, you might think of Heaven this way: as the way the goodness Abraham Lincoln did lives after him'" (PF, p. 133). David feels betrayed by Christianity at being given such an impersonal definition, and he begins reading his grandfather's old Bible, searching for a line which would promise him a conscious immortality. His mother observes him, questions him, and he at last consents to discuss the problem with her. His mother is no help at all, for she "had assumed that Heaven had faded from his head years ago. She had imagined that he had already entered, in the secrecy of silence, the conspiracy that he now knew to be all around him" (PF, p. 136). Ill Catechized by her son, she confesses believing in a God who made everything, happily pointing to the evidence in nature surrounding them. But when he asks her who made God, she replies, "Man," and David abandons the discussion in disgust: "'Mother, good grief. Don't you see'— he rasped away the roughness in his throat— 'if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror?'" (PF, pp. 137-138). David's father comes home and his mother betrays her son's confidence to him, but he treats the problem lightly: "'If they'd taken a buckshot gun and shot me in the cradle I'd be better off. The world'd be better off. Hell, I think death is a wonderful thing. I look forward to it'" (PF, p. 139). It is important to observe that David had welcomed his vision of extinction originally: "there, in the outhouse, he had struck a solidness qualitatively different, a rock of horror firm enough to support any height of construc tion. All he needed was a little help; a word, a gesture, a nod of certainty, and he would be sealed in, safe" (PF, pp. 128-129). Successively, he looked for help in the dictionary, prayer, the Bible, the church, his parents, but nothing seemed certain: "Nowhere in the world of other people would he find the hint, the nod, he needed to begin to build his fortress against death" (PF, p. 139). 112 Reason has failed and David must turn to the other avenue to God: revelation. Had David opened his grand father's Bible as fortuitously as he had opened his mother's Wells, he might have hit upon Daniel's reply to Nebuchadnezzar: "There is a God in heaven that reveals secrets" (Daniel ii.28). But the apocalyptic literature insists always that the revealing is done at the will of God and is not conditioned by human effort. Thus David waits, trying "to drown his hopelessness in clatter and jostle," preferring groups in the belief that "the larger the crowd, the greater the chance that he was near [a soul who believed what was necessary], if only he was not too ignorant, too ill-equipped, to spot him" (PF, p. 140). At last his moment comes. He is asked to shoot some pigeons roosting in the barn and fouling the stored furniture below. He doesn't want to do it, but agrees irritably when his parents begin analyzing his reluctance. Updike's description of the scene in the barn is very fine: "A barn, in day, is a small night" (PF, p. 144), complete with stars— pinpricks of light shining through the shingles— and a blue moon— an air vent in the thick stone wall through which the pigeons enter and leave the barn. In this microcosmic world of darkness David kills six pigeons: 113 Out of the shadowy ragged infinity of the vast barn roof these impudent things dared to thrust their heads, presumed to dirty its starred silence with their filthy timorous life, and he cut them off, tucked them back neatly into the silence. He had the sensation of a creator; . . . out of each of them he was making a full bird. (PF, pp. m6-m7) But it is not until the burial of the dead in his mother's wasteland that David receives the nod he has been waiting for. Looking for the first time at a bird up close, he discovers the intricate and elaborate design of their feathers: "Across the infinitely adjusted yet some how effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture . . ." (PF, p. 149). He rises from the birds' grave "robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worth less birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever" (PF, p. 150). This is a dramatic, seductive ending, but it is ambiguous enough also to be tested against one's sense of irony. While David was killing the birds he had the sensation of being a creator. The analogy is clear: Death is as necessary a part of God's design as the per fected patterns of the pigeons' markings. David's death, too, will round out his life, making a "full bird" of him. But his next inference is faulty. It's a violation of the rules of logic for David to conclude that the God who had 11U lavished such design on the bodies of "worthless birds" would necessarily allow his soul to live forever. Indeed, David perceives his analogy at the precise moment he is doing to the birds what he earlier feared would be done to him, burying them in a narrow hole in the earth, pouring dirt in upon their heads. When David read the definition of "soul" in the dictionary as a first step in his search for comfort against his fear of extinction, "The careful overlapping words shingled a temporary shelter for him. 'Usually held to be separable in existence'— what could be fairer, more judicious, surer?" (PF, p. 126). The comfort that time did not last out the night. As he concluded earlier when he felt unable to defeat H. 6. Wells's "engines of knowl edge" with his feeble experience: "Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists" (PF, p. 120). He is only "robed" in certainty, and a robe may quickly be discarded. It is essential to observe that this story is typically open-ended and that the momentum of the story's structure carries one in the direction of an ironic reversal of David's last— not necessarily final— certainty. However, as David also observes along the way, faith may rest as solidly on hope as on certainty; after all, "churches stood everywhere" (PF, p. 119). Updike is not 115 attempting a tightly-argued eschatological statement; rather, he is writing a compelling story of a sensitive boy’s crisis of faith utilizing all the devices of inten tional ambiguity at his command to illustrate the condition of doubt against which all belief must be at last tested. "The Astronomer" David Kern's ontological anxiety, at least temporarily soothed by the pigeons' feathers, is visited upon the protagonist of this story, a protagonist who is really just Allen Dow and David Kern grown up. His name is Walter and he makes his living working with words in New York City. He and his bride Harriet live in a sixth-floor apartment overlooking the Hudson. The action of the story is limited to the visit of Bela, an Hungarian astronomer they had known since their undergraduate days. As usual Updike has written a stunning closing sentence, but the opening sentence of this story is quite important in establishing tone and centering attention on the theme: "I feared his visit" (PF, p. 179). The identity of the pronoun is delayed for two long paragraphs and the fact of his visit for nearly three pages while the first-person narrator expands upon the nature of his fear. Walter fears Bela's visit because he is certain that a few words from the atheist astronomer will destroy the religious revival he has delicately constructed one by one 116 out of the Princeton University Press editions of Kierke gaard' s works over the summer: "It was a spectacle unlike any I had ever seen in print before, and it brought me much comfort during those August and September evenings" (PF, p. 180). Bela is described as "having transcended . . . the clouds of human subjectivity— vaporous hopes supported by immaterial rationalizations" (PF, p. 181) and he does, indeed, sweep away Walter's summer's security in a word moments after entering the apartment. He observes that Walter has been reading Plato's Meno and dismisses its demonstration of the existence of indwelling knowledge with a joke. Walter is too insecure in his faith to respond, "And thus quickly, at a mere wink from this atheist, Platonism and all its attendant cathedrals came tumbling down" (PF, p. 182). However, even though Walter feels his faith— "existen tialism padded out with Chesterton" (PF, p. 182)— slipping away during the evening, he experiences an unexpected epiphany when Bela, reminiscing about his travels in America years before, reveals that he was once frightened by a sudden sense of isolation in the New Mexico desert. Updike studiously avoids having Walter gloss his discovery but this conclusion is inescapable: Walter's grip on his tenuous faith is restored by the revelation that the man 117 whom he had feared precisely because he was at home in interstellar vacancies was himself frightened by a little terrestrial nothingness. One recalls immediately Robert Frost's "Desert Places," which concludes They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars— on stars void of human races. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. Updike manages the desert places of his story with a remarkable blend of thematic structure, characterization, and metaphorical description. For example, although there is an ironic reversal from the first sentence, it is kept from being a too-perfect shift by an intentional scattering of the plot's loose ends at the end of the story. It is demonstrably true that Walter had every reason to fear the astronomer's visit, but there is no countering evidence that Bela is at last frightened by Walter. Instead, Walter gains at least momentary strength from the discovery that once through the seemingly impenetrable blackness of his friend's intellect a spark of human light in the form of a sudden and inexplicable fear had shone. Updike sustains this theme by describing the astronomer, the setting, and the action in astronomical terms, working toward another powerful closure. Bela is described as giving "an impression of abnormal density . . . his brilliance was carried around with him as undiminished potency" (PF, p. 181). Walter fears that his 118 prayers and churchgoing will dwindle "to the thinnest filaments of illusion" in Bela's presence and that the astronomer seemed to see through his "own evanescent body into gigantic systems of dead but furious matter, suns like match heads, planets like cinders" (PF, p. 182). Their conflict takes place in an apartment poised above the darkened Hudson, which reflects the light from the Jersey shore as a sky full of trembling, fragmented stars (PF, p. 180). Only five sentences follow the revelation that Bela had once been frightened. The story may appear to have been abandoned to some, for one of his five sentences con fesses, "That is all I remember" (PF, p. 196). But because Updike has maintained his metaphorical structure so well, the coffee table debris he now concentrates on suggests the chaos out of which the order of the universe formed or was formed: The mingle on the table was only part of the greater confusion as in the heat of rapport our unrelated spirits and pasts scrambled together, bringing every thing in the room with them, including the rubble of footnotes bound into Kierkegaard. In memory, perhaps because we lived on the sixth floor, this scene— this invisible scene— seems to take place at a great height, as if we were the residents of a star sus pended against the darkness of the city and the river. What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of dark ness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? (PF, p. 186) This remarkable final sentence, demonstrating its meaning in its syntactically suspended verb, refers 119 ostensibly to the scene in the apartment, but Updike does not let us forget that it also refers to Bela's remembered moment in the black hills of New Mexico. The image is an abstraction of the patterned heaven, of course, whose stars may be taken as proof of everything or nothing. Updike again avoids concluding that Walter's epiphany served to cement his faith in his own personal immortality; rather, he has demonstrated how "unrelated spirits and pasts scrambled together" can illuminate a moment which takes on its own increasing value in memory. Walter's more mature "fear" is no less convincingly rendered than David Kern's adolescent "horror"; only the conclusion of his story is ambiguous, and intentionally so. "Lifeguard" In the preceding three stories the protagonist has expressed his concern for his own immortality in a situa tion in which he is dependent upon the reactions of others, primarily against his own self-concept. "Lifeguard" is quite different; it is a plotless monologue in sermon form told by a narrator who describes crowds of people but identifies none of them, not even his physical lover. The narrator is a divinity student who works during the summer as a lifeguard. His tone is so sarcastic that some readers fail to see the pathos of his situation and regard him as a posing egotist. But the irony is all at 120 his own expense and the religious certainty one might expect in a divinity student is riddled with ambiguity. Indeed, the story opens with a sentence which may well carry an intentional double meaning: "Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow" (PF, p. 211). Not only do we perceive before story's end that he is speaking more out of despair than vanity, it becomes equally clear that he is not at all "beyond doubt." For nine months of the year he studies the soul; during the summer, he studies the body and ruminates upon the soul. Because he sits tanning in the sun on an ele vated "throne" watching over his kingdom by the sea, there is a sense in which he is "splendid." His muscular body is trained, ready to answer a cry of help. His mind has also been rigorously trained to save the souls of the members of the congregation he may one day face. The "easy burden of [his] sermon" is "that there is no discrepancy between" his two studies and "that the texts of the flesh complement those of the mind" (PF, p. 213). Because the story lacks action, suspended as it were with the student on his throne above the crowds, the proof of his text is argued by intellect, not incident, although the narrator confesses having violated the seventh command ment in glossing the text of the flesh. The debate between the body and the soul is carefully researched and closely 121 argued. The divinity student has read through "immense pages of Biblical text barnacled with fudging commentary" (PF, p. 212), dismissing in a phrase or two an even dozen theologians, ancient and modern, and a handful of "literary flirts like Chesterton, Eliot, Auden, and Greene" (PF, p. 212). The lifeguard gives equal time to the crowds of people who come to his beach, working backwards in time from the oldest, who arrive earliest, to the youngest, who arrive later because they have more dawns to waste than the elderly. He is reminded of death by their patterns of arrival and by their existence as crowds: Each of our bodies is a clock that loses time. Young as I am, I can hear in myself the protein acids ticking; I wake at odd hours and in the shuddering darkness and silence feel my death rushing toward me like an express train. (PF, p. 214) Not yet ordained, he sits on his pulpit at the beach attempting "to lift the whole mass into immortality" (PF, p. 217). He confesses that even though he feels death rushing toward him, his own immortality is "easy to imagine; indeed, the effort of imagination lies the other way— to conceive of my ceasing" (PF, p. 218). But when he contemplates the historical multitudes of the dead as he views the crowds before him on the beach as their micro- cosmic avatars, he retreats from certainty in existential exasperation: 122 The race is no longer a tiny clan of simian aristo crats lording it over an ocean of grass; mankind is a plague racing like fire across the exhausted conti nents. This immense clot gathered on the beach, a fraction of a fraction— can we not say that this breeding swarm is its own immortality and end the suspense? The beehive in a sense survives; and is each of us not proved to be a hive, a galaxy of cells each of whom is doubtless praying, from its pew in our thumbnail or esophagus, for personal resurrection? Indeed, to the cells themselves cancer may seem a revival of faith. No, in relation to other people oblivion is sensible and sanitary. (PF, p. 218) But in relation to oneself, oblivion is unthinkable, and the divinity student as lifeguard is continually reminded of the mortality of his flesh in the feelings of lust which arise as he views the parade of nymphs before him. He argues that his two selves become one in his lust: "Are not our assaults on the supernatural lascivious, a kind of indecency? ... To desire a woman is to desire to save her. . . . The God-filled man is filled with a wilderness that cries to be populated. . . . Every seduc tion is a conversion" (PF, pp. 216-217). Because he equates love with a sense of rescue, he urges in his peroration that we be joyful: Be Joyful is my commandment. It is the message I read in your jiggle. Stretch your skins like pegged hides curing in the miracle of the sun's moment. . . . Romp; eat the froth; be children. I am here above you; I have given my youth that you may do this. I wait. (PF, p. 219) But the sadness and insecurity of his position is exposed with an ironic openness no ordained minister would dare use to close his sermon. After he has demonstrated 123 that there is no discrepancy between his two selves with the skill of John Donne working out one of his Paradoxes and Problems, the divinity student-lifeguard, now one, concludes: "Someday my alertness will bear fruit; from near the horizon there will arise, delicious, translucent, like a green bell above the water, the call for help, the call, a call, it saddens me to confess, that I have yet to hear" (PF, p. 220). Updike manipulates the tense of his final clause so that the "call" may be taken in a dual sense: a cry for help and a summons to a religious vocation. The narrator, for all his skill in creating an homiletic sermon out of the stuff of the world, is not yet "beyond doubt." Curi ously, even though all of the insights, all of the irony of the story must be attributed to the unnamed narrator, some commentators are so put off by the "blasphemy" of his equation of flesh and spirit that they think of him as suffering from an "immense egotism that feeds on theology when theology ought instead to show him the way to Q humility." Anyone who has traced the journey of Aurelius Augustinus from Manichaeanism to The City of God and 7 Bryant Nelson Wyatt, "Supernaturalism in John Updike's Fiction," Diss. University of Virginia 1970, p. mo. g Robert Detweiler, John Updike (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972), p. 69. 124 sanctification may question the "oughtness" of the way to humility. The narrator is not unaware of the gift of faith, of surrender: "Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved" (PF, p. 214). But his purpose is not to submit his reason to parable, at least not yet: "Forgive me. I am not yet ordained; I am too disordered to deal with the main text. My competence is marginal, and I will confine myself to the gloss of flesh with which this particular margin, this one beach, is annotated each day" (PF, p. 214). Earlier he had noted that the theologians he studied in order to be able to annotate the text of flesh before him had in the end all struck "the note of the rich young man who on the coast of Judaea refused in dismay to sell all that he had" (PF, p. 212). Surely the young man on the coast of New England who could parallel so neatly the two margins into a conceit would not gloss this text with Jesus's first explication: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God" (Mark x.25). Rather, he would ask with the disciples, "Who then can be saved?" He knows well the answer Mark recorded: "With men it is 125 impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible" (Mark x.27). This is the call he has yet to hear. Admitting that his reason is inadequate to create an acceptable system of immortality which would dissolve his anxieties— "What of the thousand deaths of memory and bodily change we endure— can each be redeemed at a final Adjustments Counter?" (PF, p. 218)— and believing that his humanity should be taken in its wholeness as an inevitably ambiguous blend of body and spirit, he sees this Sunday morning existential vision: I seem to be lying dreaming in the infinite rock of space before Creation, and the actual scene I see is a vision of impossibility: a Paradise. For had we existed before the gesture that split the firmament, could we have conceived of our most obvious posses sion, our most platitudinous blessing, the moment, the single ever-present moment that we perpetually bring to our lips brimful? (PF, p. 219) Like David Kern in "Pigeon Feathers," the divinity student-lifeguard is looking for a sign, listening for a call: "I wait." In the meantime, unable to accept any of the idealized distillations of man's essence, he concludes that Paradise is impossible and accepts the continuous moment of man's existence as his nearest approach to personal immortality. 126 "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car" The final two "stories" in Pigeon Feathers appear from their titles a cleaning out of the files. Stanley Edgar Hyman calls them "contrived . . . shapeless impressionist g assemblages that their titles suggest." But J. A. Ward assesses them as "the two best stories in this volume,"19 and Michael Novak rather irresponsibly describes the last piece as "one of the most perfectly worked pieces of prose in the English language."*1 The works are also given major emphasis in a pair of dissertations, Bryant Nelson Wyatt's "Supernaturalism in John Updike's Fiction" and Catherine Hiller's "Personality and Persona: The Narrators in John Updike’s Fiction," perhaps because the narrator of both clusters is so obviously John Updike himself. Because these cluster stories are more autobiographi cal than fictional, they lack the carefully structured intentional ambiguity so prevalent in his other fiction. However, their units are subtly interconnected and they do advance Updike's investigation of the question of personal 9,,The Artist As a Young Man," The New Leader, 19 March 1962, p. 23. 10"John Updike'8 Fiction," Critique, 5 (Spring- Summer 1962), 38. llwUpdike's Quest for Liturgy," The Commonweal, 10 May 1963, p. 192. 127 immortality. The three sections of "The Blessed Man of Boston* My Grandmother's Thimble* and Fanning Island*" ranging from a page and a quarter to thirteen pages to four, are all connected by a thwarted desire to recapture the essence of man's earthly existence from minimal clues: a passing glimpse of an old Chinese man who seemed the embodiment of blessedness; the narrator's grandmother's final possession* a silver thimble given his wife as a marriage gift; the fragments of a vanished civilization found on a tiny* uninhabited equatorial island by Captain Fanning. Updike sees each clue as a challenge to render the lives they suggest fully through his art. Over one half the short section entitled "The Blessed Man of Boston" is composed of a single sentence of nearly 200 words repre senting the method whereby he would attempt to capture the man'8 happiness: "all set sequentially down with the bold simplicity of intrinsic blessing* thousands upon thousands of pages; ecstatically uneventful; divinely and defiantly dull" (PF, p. 228). But he abandons the task as impos sible: "We would-be novelists . . . walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves" (PF, pp. 228-229). He has better luck with the meaning of his grand mother's thimble than with a blessed expression briefly 128 glimpsed, because it represents something carried within his own skin. By accident he stumbled upon the thimble and "it seemed incumbent upon me, necessary and holy, to tell how once there had been a woman who now was no more" (PF, p. 229), except of course as she existed in her descendents and in their memory of her. In a long-disused convention, Updike asks a blessing on his art in a context that gives a tone of utter seriousness: "0 Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection" (PF, p. 229). The paragraphs utter the old woman, bent and confused in her final days, but when memory leads to the time that preceded Updike’s birth, he slips into summary: "As with the blessed man of Boston I should here provide a catalogue of her existence" (PF, p. 239). But the difficulty of resurrection does not lessen the need, and Updike closes this section sounding very much like his divinity student- lifeguard: Picking up that thimble ... I felt at my back that night a steep wave about to break over the world and bury us and all our trinkets of survival fathoms down. For I feel that the world is ending, that the mounting mass of people will soon make a blackness in which the glint of this silver will be obliterated; it is this imminent catastrophe that makes it impera tive to cry now . . . that once there was a woman .... (PF, p. 241) The idea of the obliteration of a people brings Updike to the third of his "unwritten stories," "Fanning Island." 129 The first story was projected in imagination backward in time from the moment the happy man in Boston was glimpsed. If written, it would stop with his witnessed appearance of blessedness. The second story, however, would cover at least four generations of his family— his grandmother, his mother, himself, and his children— to be ended only by the catastrophe which seemed so imminent. The third story is simpler because it would be "a story of life stripped of the progenitive illusion” (PF, p. 242); that is, it would be a story of the gradual diminution of a party of Polynesian men cast ashore by accident on a remote island. Updike summarized the plot as an acting out of Pascal's famous ”image de la condition des hommes.” Even so, in his sample outline paragraph, Updike has the narrator— the youngest who had survived by eating his father's flesh— echo so many of his protagonists: "The horizon seemed always about to speak to us; for what had we been brought here? We lived, and though we saw others turn cold . . . those who remained were not sure that they would die” (PF, p. 245). Thus, all three segments deal with man's hope for survival, for immortality of some kind, either through the biographer's art, the process of genera tion, or, in the absence of either, hope. Updike closes this story with a comment ostensibly about the last section, "Fanning Island," but in reality 130 about the entire cluster and its theme: "I thought that this story, fully told, would become without my willing it a happy story, a story full of joy; had my powers been greater, we would know. As it is, you, like me, must take it on faith" (PF, p. 2*+5). Immortality, then, is a story which must be taken on faith. Its joy is a product of the imagination and Updike has once again taken a position of uncertainty on the question of personal immortality. The longer cluster— "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car"— reflects more upon why and how he has taken this prevailing position than on the position itself, although there are certainly passages directly concerned with the question of personal immortality. The four sections are subtly linked by the image and the idea of the first, that dirt packed by the passage of human feet is a comforting sign of man's presence and his endurance on earth. In the series Updike again uses the name David Kern for his protagonist, though his circum stances and experiences so exactly coincide with Updike's that it is virtually impossible to conceive any narrative distance between them. "Packed Dirt" is only three pages long and it serves to establish nature as the common denominator of the four units. The narrator is reassured "by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage 131 of human feet" (PF, p. 246). Packed dirt symbolizes the innocence of childhood, when "The earth is our playmate . . . and the call to supper has a piercingly sweet eschatological ring" (PF, p. 247). This remarkable image comes early in the collage, just as the experience it describes comes early in life, and it sets the tone of all the imagery: As our sense of God's forested legacy to us dwindles, there grows, in these worn, rubbed, and patted patches, a sense of human legacy— like those feet of statues of saints which have lost their toes to centuries of kisses. One thinks of John Dewey's definition of God as the union of the actual and the ideal. (PF, pp. 248-249) He suggests that the preciousness of the comfort he had taken from packed dirt was greater in that it was an accidental product of the passage of time, giving it "a repose of grace that is beyond willing" (PF, p. 248). This leads him to the willed if not willful grace of the ceremony of "Churchgoing," for "Belief builds itself unconsciously and in consciousness is spent" (PF, p. 249). The rituals of churchgoing "are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts" (PF, p. 249). This metaphor serves far more than as a "cute" linking of this section with "Packed Dirt," it moves the landscape of his idea inside where it can rise to the destructiveness of con sciousness, or perhaps of conscience. Before this critical I 132 scene, however, the narrator describes one of those transcendent moments when a life is exchanged for a death. He opens the section entitled "A Dying Cat" with this assertion: "Matter has its radiance and its darkness; it lifts and it buries. Things compete; a life demands a life" (PF, p. 253). While out walking as his wife awaits the birth of their first child in England, the narrator comes upon a dying cat which had been struck by a car. He helps the cat die, an experience he describes as like receiving "supernatural mail"; but as is so often the case with Updike, "The incident had the signature: decisive but illegible" (PF, p. 253). When he lifts the cat to place an explanatory note under it, "it suffered my intru sion a trifle stiffly. It suggested I was making too much fuss, and seemed to say to me, Run on home" (PF, p. 256). He does, reading himself to sleep with a singularly appropriate book: G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. The next morning he awakens to learn that the exchange has been completed: "a perfect female infant had been born. To me" (PF, p. 257). The idea of man everlasting through exchange is carried on in the final, very long section: "A Traded Car." The vehicle of the metaphor is the exchange of one car for another; the tenor is the exchange or renewal of faith in personal immortality. The figure is further 133 complicated by the substitution in imagination of a seductive woman for the narrator's wife. The triangulation works this way: David Kern has decided to trade in his beloved and faithful car— the first he had ever owned— on a new one: "The deal was consummated while my soul had its face turned" (PF, p. 258). There is a month's "grace" before the new one can be delivered. He attends a party where he is deeply moved by the seductive blandishments of a woman not his wife. Even though he takes out his illicit stimulation on his wife, he finds that he cannot sleep out of lust for the other woman. He moves unerringly from the contemplation of adultery to the conviction of sin: "To feel a sin was to commit it; to touch the brink was to be on the floor of the chasm. The universe that so easily permitted me to commit adultery became, by logical steps each one of which went more steeply down than the one above it, a universe that would easily permit me to die” (PF, p. 260). The night is filled with horror only more sophisti cated than that suffered by a fourteen-year-old David Kern in "Pigeon Feathers," not less terrifying. Only this time it leads him beyond temporary anxiety: "Each second my agony went unanswered justified it more certainly: the God who permitted me this fear was unworthy of existence" (PF, p. 261). 134 The next day, his birthday, he feels "death like a wide army advancing" (PF, p. 262) and before the day is out learns by telephone that his father has been hospitalized with a serious heart condition. In his "churchgoing" suit he drives his soon-to-be-traded car home to Pennsylvania; the message from the dying cat is repeated: "Run on home." When he arrives his mother reports that his father has lost all his faith: "Since I had also lost mine, I could find nothing to say" (PF, p. 267). Strangely, some critics take this narrative admission as a conclusion that Updike's long struggle with doubt through the pages of Pigeon Feathers has ended in dis belief, but this is not supported by the remainder of the story. When he visits his father in the hospital, he is afraid that his loss of faith will show, but it doesn't. His father only confesses that he isn't ready to die, echoing precisely his son's fear of the night before. A homely religious volunteer enters the room and awkwardly attempts to work through a routine designed to bring the church's official comfort to its ailing members. But the comforter is comforted: the inept, stammering girl is lifted by David's father's spirit. He praises her work, conelud ing: "You're a wonderful woman to be doing what you're doing." 135 And she left the room transformed into just that. As a star shines in our heaven though it has vanished from the universe, so my father continued to shed faith upon others. (PF, p. 276) Perhaps the reality of faith is like the reality of the star. We may reason that a star has burned out, vanished, but our eyes tell us that it is there. Just as a terrestrial traveler may find his way home using the light of a vanished star as a guide, David Kern runs on home to New England relieved of his depression by having visited his father. When he had first learned of his father's illness, he was relieved of the fear of his own death: "All day death had been advancing under cover and now it had struck, declared its position. My father had engaged the enemy and it would be defeated" (PF, p. 262). When he drove his mother to the hospital he used his own car rather than his father's because he didn't want to take his place: "My father's place was between me and Heaven; I was afraid of being placed adjacent to that far sky" (PF, p. 268). But after witnessing the transformation of the hospital missionary he too is changed: "He told me I was a good son and a good father; he clasped my hand. I felt I would ascend straight north from his touch" (PF, p. 277). His return trip is briefly described but as a mystical ascension. In a striking metaphor Updike reminds us of the natural common denominator of the collage, of the source of his terror, and of the possibilities of relief: 136 "It seemed to me for this sunset hour that the world, is our bride, given to us to love, and the terror and joy of marriage is that we bring to it a nature not our bride's" (PF, pp. 277-278). As he drives the car seems to evolve into something "soft and organic and consciously brave" maintaining a steady forward motion even though "its soul the driver had died" (PF, p. 278). The story concludes as does the earlier collage, with a brief "explanation" of why it was written. Soon the car will be traded, "utterly dissolved back into the mineral world from which it was conjured, dismissed without a blessing, a kiss, a testament, or any ceremony of farewell. We in America need ceremonies, is I suppose . . . the point of what I have written" (PF, p. 279). I doubt that anyone would want to take Updike seri ously to task for this conclusion for to do so would be to challenge the most basic function of literature, but there is a sense in which these two clusters— more natural and humanistic than supernatural— are less satisfying than, say, "Pigeon Feathers" or "Lifeguard" with their implicit ambiguities, and Updike gives us a reason for this in "Churchgoing." The problem with ceremonies is that they are "hopelessly compromised by words"; "those intimations of divine joy . . . are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them" (PF, 137 p. 249). Nevertheless, as long as we continue to receive our supernatural mail, our intimations of immortality, in the form of glimpses of blessedness, mementoes of the past, or accidents of nature, perhaps Updike's blend of form and content into intentional ambiguities is the most appropri ate expression for his time and place. The certainty of essence may continue to elude him, but the stories in Pigeon Feathers show amply well that the quality of existence has not. CHAPTER IV THE MUSIC SCHOOL The Music School, published September 19, 1966, con tains twenty short stories, all of which were originally published in The New Yorker. The earliest story, "In Football Season," was published in August 1962 and is the last story of the adolescent Olinger years. The latest New Yorker story is "Harv Is Plowing Now," which appeared April 23, 1966. It is important to note that during the period represented by these stories, Updike published two children's books, two collections of light verse, the Olinger Stories collection for Vintage (1964), Assorted Prose (1965), The Centaur (1963), and Of the Farm (1965). The difference between the stories in The Music School and those in Pigeon Feathers is the same as that between Of the Farm and The Centaur. In the earlier novel there was a mythic pattern of grace earned through the sacrifice of others; Of the Farm concludes with Joey Robinson's sacri fice for his mother, but with no sense of grace, only loss, confusion, and ambiguity. In Pigeon Feathers and The Same Door the epiphanies of the young protagonists are, although ambiguous, at least bittersweet. In The Music 138 139 School the moments tend to be more melancholy, even cyni cal. "Modern man is man demoralized," wrote Updike in an uncollected review-essay: First went supernatural faith, then faith in kings, then faith in reason, then faith in nature, then faith in science, and, most lately, faith in the sub conscious. The texture of prose and the art of narration have changed to fit the case; indeed, since "Don Quixote" fiction has to some extent thrived on disillusion. But in this century the minimal pre supposition of human significance, the power of one human to touch another's heart, seems too much to be assumed. Love is, a current epigram has it, "the friction of two epiderms," and, if Freud is to be believed, we spend our emotional lives vainly seek ing, amid a crowd of phantoms, to placate our parents' ghosts. Such solipsism renders obsolete the inter connectedness of action that comprises "plot" and the trust in communication that gives a narrative voice and pulse. Formless tales blankly told may be the end result . . . . 1 In the stories examined so far it is clear that Updike has chosen to eschew plot in the usual sense, and the stories in The Music School are even more lyrical— almost essayistic— in tone. But they are not at all formless and are certainly not blankly told. It is just that the "narrative voice and pulse" is moved to a subtler plane of language which sees the disillusioned protagonist reduced to inaction by his perceiving too well the patterns of interconnectedness but not the final meaning of the design. "The power of one human to touch another's heart" ^John Updike, "Two Points on a Descending Curve," The New Yorker, 7 January 1967, p. 91. mo is very much assumed in The Music School; the stories are almost all variations on the theme of estrangement. There was loss in The Same Door, of course, as youth abandoned the joys and identities of childhood, and there was threatened estrangement in Pigeon Feathers as tradi tional beliefs were tested, but in both volumes the possibilities of the future cushioned the loss. In The Music School there is a continual defeat of one's expecta tions with a variety of adjustments to a new reality. In the essay-review cited above, Updike the critic noted that "The end of realism is lyric shapelessness; the fallen world is no longer measured by its distance from the ideal. Tragedy is dwindled to a mournful pang, a surrender, almost complacent, to universal indifference." Updike was acknowledging this condition of modern fiction with some regret, almost as if he were echoing the reception given The Music School a few months before by some reviewers. However, although these stories fall far short of Aris totle's definition of tragedy, or Arthur Miller's for that matter, they are not shapeless and their pain is more than a pang. Indeed, the "worst" story in the collection, "Four Sides of One Story," offends my taste because it is a parody of the Tristan-Iseult story. It rather proves the general critical point Updike wishes to make, but it also 2Ibid., p. 92. 1U1 damages somewhat the collective impression of the realism of the other stories. Of course the loss, the estrangement of Updike's modern lovers cannot equal that of the Tristan-Iseult legend for the cups they drink contain only cocktails, not magic potions. But the anguish of love frustrated is more severe than a heartburn. Updike parodies the Tristan- Iseult legend as a part of his complaint against the descent of love in the fiction of the West, and his con cern with the subject is quite serious. In a long essay on the work of Denis de Rougement, Updike discusses the view that there is an inescapable conflict between passion and marriage which almost inevitably results in a sense of estrangement if not the reality: It would seem that . . . de Rougement is dreadfully right in asserting that love in the Western world has by some means acquired a force far out of proportion to its presumed procreative aim. . . . Might it not be that sex has become involved in the Promethean protest forced upon Man by his paradoxical position in the Universe as a self-conscious animal? Our fundamental anxiety is that we do not exist— or will cease to exist. Only in being loved do we find external corroboration of the supremely high valuation each ego secretly assigns itself. This exalted arena, then, is above all others the one where men and women will insist upon their freedom to choose— to choose that other being in whose existence their own existence is confirmed and amplified. . . . The heart prefers to move against the grain of cir cumstance; perversity is the soul's very life. 142 Therefore the enforced and approved bonds of marriage* restricting freedom, weaken love.3 This, then, is the prevailing theme of the bulk of the stories in The Music School: the protagonist feels his ego threatened by the loss of love, either within or without marriage. Because he is continually assessing his situa tion in terms of his "fundamental anxiety," his mortality, he wavers uncertainly, waiting for illumination. The result is a tone of moral ambiguity, but the emphasis in this chapter will be on the structural devices of inter connection. I shall concentrate on just four pairs of stories, for reasons which will become apparent as they are considered, which means that I must forgo discussing three very fine stories: "The Christian Roommates," "The Bulgarian Poetess," and "The Hermit." There is estrangement in each— between the conformist and the nonconformist room mates, between Henry Bech and a briefly-met soulmate, and between the hermit and all society— but the conflict in these stories does not involve marriage, which was Updike's major interest in this period, as witnessed by this collec tion, its immediate fictional predecessor, Of the Farm (1965), and the next novel to appear, Couples (1968). 3 "More Love in the Western World," Assorted Prose (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 293"! 143 "The Music School" and "Harv Is Plowing Now" These two stories are alike in that they attempt to place the protagonist's concern with estrangement into a context of events only remotely connected with the inform ing situation— the protagonist's deteriorating relationship with a woman. In "The Music School" the events are recent and local, but are perceived as having far-reaching implications. In "Harv Is Plowing Now" the events are distant, even prehistorical, but are felt personally. In both the process of connection serves as a metaphor for the human condition and both contain open invitations to close reading and explication: "Harv Is Plowing Now" opens, "Our lives submit to archeology,"** and a key line in "The Music School" is "in the end each life wears its events with a geological inevitability" (MS, p. 184). Both repay a bit of digging. "The Music School" is narrated in the first person by a character who identifies himself as a novelist— or at least as a would-be novelist, for the only book he de scribes is one he didn't write. In a way, the story may be regarded as a collection of scenes or situations a novelist might well use if he could "only connect" them. Twice the | i John Updike, "Harv Is Plowing Now," The Music School: Short Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 175. All subsequent references to stories in this collection will be identified in the body of the text as MS. 1*»»» narrator says, "I do not understand the connection, but there seems to be one" (MS, pp. 185, 187), almost as if Updike is challenging the reader to observe the connections he so clearly understands but so subtly states. The scenes are these: (1) a party at which a young, guitar-strumming priest describes the change in his Church's attitude toward the Eucharistic wafer; (2) a newspaper account of an inexplicable sniper murder of an acquaintance; (3) the music school in the basement of a huge Baptist Church, where he waits while his daughter practices; (4) a sample of what the unwritten novel might have contained; (5) a communal confession of the entire congregation of the Lutheran country church of his youth; and (6) a brief, stunning return to the first scene. The present moment of the story occurs in the music school as the protagonist waits for his daughter: "From all directions sounds— of pianos, oboes, clarinets— arrive like hints of another world, a world where angels fumble, pause, and begin again" (MS, p. 186). Listening to those "first decipherings of that unique language which freights each note with a double meaning of position and duration" (MS, p. 186), he attempts to find a connection between the morning's report of murder and the previous evening's dis cussion of the changed Eucharistic wafer, and between the fact that he is charged with taking his daughter to 145 practice because this is the day his wife visits a psy chiatrist and the fact that she requires the therapy because he is unfaithful to her. The key seems to be in the conclusion of his comments on the mysteries of learning to read and play music: "How great looms the gap between the first gropings of vision and the first stammerings of percussion! Vision, timidly, becomes percussion, percus sion becomes music, music becomes emotion, emotion becomes — vision" (MS, p. 186). The "vision" which connects this circle begins and ends with separately recalled incidents from the party of the night before. Initially, just as he is fascinated by the "double meaning of position and duration" of the musical notes he is hearing, the protagonist is bemused by the dualities suggested by the Church's changed attitude toward the Eucharistic wafer. The wafer is doctrinally both bread and flesh, but where formerly it was allowed to melt on the tongue, now it was thick and must be chewed: Now, amid the flowering of fresh and bold ideas with which the Church, like a tundra thawing, responded to that unexpected sun the late Pope John, there has sprung up the thought that Christ did not say Take and melt this in your mouth but Take and eat. The word is eat, ancl to dissolve the word is to dilute the transubstantiated metaphor of physical nourish ment. (MS, p. 183) The "vision" is the realization that the host must be chewed, but the metaphor ij not concluded until the circle is complete. 146 The "percussion” occurs in the reported scene of the murder of the acquaintance, who dies at the feet of his children after being struck by a single bullet fired through a window. The victim was a computer programmer, of interest to the protagonist because he had once intended to write a novel about such a man, a man who had died of adultery. Even though the protagonist thought of the programmer as belonging to a new species of men who "seem to have solved, or dismissed, the paradox of being a thinking animal and, devoid of guilt, apparently partici pate not in this century but the next" (MS, p. 185), he chose his profession for his hero because "it was the most poetic and romantic occupation I could think of" (MS, p. 187), so conceived because he imagined the programmer at night "devising idioms whereby problems might be fed to the machine and emerge, under binomial percussion, as the music of truth" (MS, p. 187). The "music," then, is also dually conceived; it is the faltering sounds he presently hears (which is compared with the priest's skillful playing of the guitar) and it is the "music of truth." The "emotion" is felt throughout, but it peaks while the protagonist reflects on the unwritten novel, sandwiched between revelations that both he and his wife are seeing psychiatrists in an attempt to understand his adultery. 1U7 Even though the proposed title of the novel— N + 1— was mathematical and opened with the hero and his paramour embracing under an artificial star, the basic structure was physical: love, guilt, a nervous breakdown, death. The final connective scene between the "emotion" and its subsequent "vision" is the remembered public confes sion. The Baptist music school reminds him of the Lutheran Church of his youth, with its consubstantial, chewable host, where "there was a kind of accompanying music" (MS, p. 189) in the percussive noise of the communicants as they scraped to position themselves on their knees. Their backs to the altar, they would read the service from books propped before them on the pews: "But if we thus examine ourselves, we shall find nothing in us but sin and death, from which we can in no wise set ourselves free" (MS, p. 189). Their freedom, of course, was obtained at the communion rail in the form of the host. Updike moves quickly from that distant memory to his conclusion: I am neither musical nor religious. Each moment I live, I must think where to place my fingers, and press them down with no confidence of hearing a chord. My friends are like me. We are all pilgrims, falter ing toward divorce. (MS, pp. 189-190) The motif is partly restated: "Some get no further than mutual confession ['vision'3 . . . some move on, into violent quarrels and physical blows ['percussion']; and 148 succumb to sexual excitement ['emotion']. A few make it to the psychiatrists ['vision']" (MS, p. 190). The final "vision" is provided by the entrance into the priest-dominated party of the night before of a woman who had advanced beyond the psychiatrists to the lawyers. Entering the room without knocking, "her eyes and hair . . . flung wide with suffering," she took two backward steps, then regained her composure and sat down. "And in this grace note, of the two backward steps and then again the forward movement, a coda seems urged" (MS, p. 190). Her faltering arrival is like the sounds of the music school, of course, which "arrive like hints of another world, a world where angels fumble, pause, and begin again" (MS, p. 186). Having given a reprise of the main theme, Updike quickly concludes: The world is the host; it must be chewed. I am content here in this school. My daughter emerges from her lesson. Her face is fat and satisfied, refreshed, hopeful; her pleased smile, biting her lower lip, pierces my heart, and I die (I think I am dying) at her feet. (MS, p. 190) The protagonist is the poet, the romantic who is "dying of adultery," pierced by the percussive contrast of seeing his daughter emerge from her angelic fumbling nourished, innocent, hopeful. He is content while in the music school, but he is only there because of the dis harmony in his marriage. His position is rendered even 149 more pathetic by his memory of the communion of his youth and the realization that this confession will bring him no sense of grace. He is, at best, only a faltering pilgrim, not an angel. His novel of adultery unwritten and humili ating to contemplate, he can only escape into the endless patterns of metaphor, searching for connections, for meaning. Even though I have cited, directly and indirectly, most of the connective devices in this complex story, let me summarize the host-eating metaphor: It is recalled (with music) from the party; the victim was shot while dining with his children; the protagonist never wrote his novel because "the moment in my life it was meant to crystallize dissolved too quickly” (MS, p. 185); his daughter, unlike her, does not beg for candy after her lesson, but sits quietly as they drive home toward "the certainty of supper" "as if the lesson itself has been a meal" (MS, p. 187); the computer problems are "fed" to the machines and emerge as "the music of truth"; the con- substantial host of his youth is recalled so vividly it makes his saliva flow; the world is the host which must be chewed. These are only obvious out of context, for in context they share seemingly the same space with motifs of adultery, confession, music, and death, all laced together in a remarkably sensitive, nontraditional story. 150 "Harv Is Plowing Now" is not so complex a story, but its informing metaphor is as bold as a seventeenth-century conceit. The opening, thesis sentence is "Our lives submit to archeology," and the concluding sentence is the title of the story. Between are stratified sections which reveal the connection between the two. Essentially, the excava tions of the Sumerian city of Ur, which revealed an entirely different civilization under an eight-foot layer of clay deposited by the legendary Flood, are compared with the periods of the narrator’s life, with a time occupied by a woman the equivalent of the Flood. The woman is not identified as either a wife or a lover and there is no clear indication of what caused the end of their rela tionship, other than the sensitive but weak character of the narrator. As he examines the metaphorical debris of their lives together, he uncovers a variety of images which would indicate a long but not very secure relation ship, although he warns that "great caution should attend assertions about evidence so tenuous" (MS, p. 179). Among the memories are "children’s faces, voices, and toys" (MS, p. 179), but no further indication of family life. Of the layer of experience lower than the Flood that was the woman, the narrator selects a handful of images, the most notable of which is Harv plowing. Updike describes the stone farmhouse of the Plowtown period of 151 his life and, from the homely fact that it lacked elec tricity and central heating, creates a metaphor which reinforces the sense of duality in life so essential to a story of estrangement. Recalling huddling near an oil- fired space heater, he suddenly realizes that coal oil and kerosene are the same thing: "What was kerosene in the lamps became coal oil in the stove: so there are essential distinctions as well as existential ones. What is bread in the oven becomes Christ in the mouth" (MS, p. 176). This duality is continued outside the farmhouse, for across a shallow valley there is a mirroring farm with an identical house: "... thin blue smoke from the chimney of the far house would seem to answer the smoke from the chimney of ours and to translate into another dimension the hissing blaze of cherry logs I had watched my father build in our fireplace" (MS, p. 176). This passage takes on added significance in the scene by the beach, but the most important memory is that of Harv, the neighbor of the mirrored house, plowing: The linked silhouettes of the man and the mule moved back and forth like a slow brush repainting the parched pallor of the winter-faded land with the wet dark color of loam. It seemed to be happening in me; and as I age in this century, I hold within myseTf this memory, this image unearthed from a pastoral epoch predating my birth, this deposit lower than which there is only the mineral void. (MS, p. 177) Like the plowman in the foreground of Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus," Harv serves as a pastoral norm against 152 which to measure even the wildest flights of fancy. His plowing is the fundamental turning of the soil in spring time so essential to rebirth, regeneration, resurrection. At this point Updike interrupts to describe a differ ent turning of the soil, the delicate excavation of the archeologists, comparing their work with his own painstak ing digging for understanding: "At Ur ... a pick driven an inch too deep might prematurely bring to light a bit of gold ribbon, or a diadem, or a golden beech leaf more fragile than a wafer" (MS, p. 179). The comparison is made in an epic simile: So, too, the days of my life threaten, even where the crust appears to be most solid, to crumble and plunge my vision into a dreadful forsaken gold. At the touch of an old hope, the wallpaper parts and reveals the lack of a wall. . . . The entire world seems a negative imprint of her absence, a kind of tinted hollowness from which her presence might be rebuilt, as wooden artifacts, long rotted to nothing, can be re-created from the impress they have left in clay, a shadow of paint and grain more easily erased by a finger than the dusty pattern on a butterfly's wing. (MS, pp. 179-180) Because of the elaborateness of this passage, the dialogue of the following scene on the beach seems under stated, yet its terseness is exactly right in showing not only the tension of the occasion but the complete hope lessness of his situation. The estrangement is complete, irrevocable. Updike prepares us for his final archeo logical image by bridging the Flood-period with a "time- warp" to the past: 153 The nervous glitter of her eyes* looking past my shoulder into the fire, translates into yet another dimension the fire my father had set to burning aeons ago. She looks at last at me. The fire goes out in her eyes. (MS, p. 180) After this chilling encounter, he looks up at the stars, which "bear in upon my guilt and shame with the strange, liquidly strong certainty that, humanly considered, the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass" (MS, p. 182). However, this feeling that his present layer of existence is "infinitesimal, lost, invisible, nothing" (MS, p. 182) suddenly frees him: "I await resurrection. Archeology is the science of the incredible" (MS, p. 182). He has fallen through the void where the woman was and survived: I move, and pause, and listen, and know. Standing on the slope of sand, I know what is happening across the meadow, on the far side of the line where water and air maintain their elemental truce. Harv is plowing now. (MS, p. 182) Thus, despite all the elaborate images of loss and emptiness— each fragment of his experience "seems hollow in the same way" (MS, p. 178)— the narrator is able to return again to the beginning of the fertility, the mythic memory of plowing which he has always perceived as happen ing within himself. Both of these stories of estrangement are dominated by images of guilt, shame, humiliation, and even despair, 154 yet both conclude that this is a world where even "angels fumble, pause, and begin again." But both stories also resemble some of Updike's earlier fiction in that their protagonists are sensitive but weak males, almost aes thetes, who are able through elaborate manipulation of metaphor to create substantial beauty out of painful experience. They are especially notable for their very skillfully constructed patterns of interconnection, like contrapuntal music. "Giving Blood" and "Twin Beds In Rome" These two stories return to Richard and Joan Maple of "Snowing in Greenwich Village." Unlike the Updikes in New York, they had no baby in "Snowing," but now they have moved along to New England with them and have an identical family of four. Richard, who was only on the threshold of misbehavior in the earlier story, seems to have stepped over now and their nine-year marriage is threatened with estrangement. But their pilgrimage toward divorce is also faltering; both stories open with the Maples traveling to a city on a "life-saving" mission, bickering and accusing one another. In both stories, after it becomes clear that they have been lying to one another, they are forced to lie apart, and an ironic shift in their relationship follows. 155 "Giving Blood" is the longest story of the eight dis cussed in this chapter, but it is infinitely easier to deal with than, say, "The Music School" because its time-line is straightforward and orderly. Even the conversational reiteration of the events of the night before, exaggerated as one might expect from a couple in marital conflict, is essentially uncomplicated. There is a hidden agenda— Richard hopes to elicit tacit "permission" to advance his flirtation with Marlene Brossman by accusing Joan of his own misdemeanor— but Joan quickly senses the gambit and puts Richard on the defensive. The Maples are on their way to Boston to give blood for a distant relative of Joan. Richard, who is asthmatic and underweight, has never donated blood before and is apprehensive as well as cranky from lack of sleep. Even so, his strategy is to take the offensive about his obvious misconduct of the night before, but Joan calmly exposes him: "'You're not subtle. You think you can match me up with another man so that you can swirl off with Marlene with a free conscience'" (MS, p. 20). Thwarted, he tries to turn it into a joke, but Joan blocks that as well, so he falls back on the last refuge of a defeated male, cruelty: "'It's your smugness that is really intolerable. Your stupidity I don't mind. Your 156 sexlessness I've learned to live with. But [your smugness] really does gall"' (MS, p. 20). Joan, who repeatedly deflates his rhetoric with a simple phrase, plunges him "fathoms deep into the wrong": "'I asked you not to talk,' she said. 'Now you've said things that I'll always remember'" (MS, p. 21), and they enter the hospital in a state of uneasy truce, their lives considerably out of balance. The balance begins to be restored as they fill out their medical histories. Richard resists a temptation to clown about his "statistics to eternity" in the realization that some of them "were shared by the hurt soul scratching beside him" (MS, p. 22). As a result, "Mr. and Mrs. Maple were newly defined to themselves" (MS, p. 22). In the donation room they agree to be taken together and lie down head to head at right angles, so that each one's view of the other is foreshortened, different from any previous impression. This unusual orientation creates an effect, not unlike that reported by Updike in "The Sea's Green Sameness," which combines with their realization that they are "chastely conjoined" (MS, p. 28) to end their bickering and initiate in its stead a bashful courtship based upon this new, shared experience: "Romance is, simply, the strange, the untried" (MS, p. 31). 157 The romantic mood is sustained as they drive home: "He felt tender toward her in the eggshell light, and curious toward himself" (MS, p. 32). They stop for lunch at a pancake house: "A bashfulness possessed them both; it had become a date between two people who have little as yet in common" (MS, p. 33). After some small talk in which each praises the other for being brave in the blood dona tion room, he promises never to dance with Marlene Brossman again and Joan responds with the tacit permission he had previously sought: "'I don’t care'" (MS, p. 34). Coming unexpectedly after his resolution, this irritates him and he tries to regain their peace by clowning, pretending that he is an awkward suitor and saying grandly, "’I'll pay”’ (MS, p. 34). But he finds only a single dollar in his wallet and immediately reverts to the unpleasant character he was at the start of the story: "'I work like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats and at the end of it what do I have? One goddam crummy wrinkled dollar'" (MS, p. 34). Joan, who has gotten the best lines all along, "... her face having retreated, or advanced, into that porcelain shell of uncanny composure," replies: "'We'll both pay'" (MS, p. 34). 158 But for Richard’s outburst, Joan's closing remark might be taken as an affirmation of a sacrificial communion — after all, they had both bled together in a common cause. The irony, however, is apparent, although there are many finely interconnected motifs along the way which contribute to its impact. Is it a retreat or an advance to allow one’s face to fall into a ’ ’ porcelain shell of uncanny composure”? Richard is still struggling with the emptiness of his life in suburbia, searching for pleasure but com plaining all the while that he is "emotionally, mentally, [and] physically exhausted” (MS, p. 18). He accuses Joan of being excessively concerned with the appearances of morality, but he is clearly a poseur and a clown. Irritable and excited, Richard is unnerved by Joan's calm, which he calls smug but which is obviously her defense against his excesses. In the blood-letting scene both retreat from their present positions— Richard on the offensive, Joan not so much defensive as simply impregnable— to an earlier, innocent time when their views of each other and of life had a childlike perspective. Updike accomplishes this shift through a skillful pattern of images: A3 they walk through the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital, "Richard seemed to himself Hansel orphaned with Gretel” (MS, p. 22)i they remember their childhood diseases; 159 Richard recalls a job held years before when "he was young and newly responsible" (MS, p. 25); Joan lies with "her stocking feet toed in childishly" and her hair is parted so straight that "it seemed her mother had brushed it" (MS, p. 25); after the needles are extracted and they hold their arms up, a piece of cotton pressed to the wound, "It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a class room" (MS, p. 29); the plastic sacks of blood resemble doll pillows; to show that he was not faint, Richard does a little shuffle-tap step, "all that remained to him of the dancing lessons he had taken at the age of seven" (MS, p. 31). These images, combined with the bashful courtship in the pancake house, serve to remind the Maples of the moral innocence of their past lives when a mutual sacrifice of blood would have had all of the refreshing qualities of communion. This reminder of the past makes their sudden return to the present— Richard complaining of his lot, Joan withdrawn into her porcelain shell— not just ironic, but pathetic. The ending of "Twin Beds In Rome" is equally ironic, but only the larger picture of the Maples' pilgrimage toward divorce is pathetic. In this story they have travelled to Rome as the latest in a long series of attempts to "kill or cure" their marriage: "Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, 160 together” (MS, p. 76). The endless sparring of the previ ous story has advanced, or declined, to a state in which "their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, [and] had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading inti macy" (MS, p. 76). On the bus trip from the airport to their hotel— during which they pass the Colosseum looking "like a shattered wedding cake" (MS, p. 78)— Richard makes Joan cry by reminding her that "'Nothing lasts forever'" (MS, p. 77). She responds by denying that she would like to go back to the way things once were, contending that they "'have come very far and have only a little way more to go'" (MS, p. 78). When they arrive at their hotel they discover that they have been given a room with twin beds, which seems to Richard an unfair skewing of the kill-or-cure test since they had always shared a double bed. However, he accepts as a compromise her offer to let him join her if he cannot sleep. But it is Richard who sleeps soundly. The next day they walk the streets of Rome, where Richard first complains of aching feet and finally of a severe pain in his abdomen, which he confesses is probably psy chosomatic. Leaning against Joan, they walk back to their 161 hotel in the rain. The poseur Richard Maple* who was first described in "Snowing in Greenwich Village" as one who imagined himself as a character in a novel* sees the rain and Joan* having somehow caused the pain* as "the pressures that enabled him to bear it. . . . The rain masked him, made his figure less distinct to passersby, and therefore less distinct to himself* and so dimmed his pain" (MS, pp 8**-85). After an hour's nap the pain is gone, but somehow it seemed to mark the watershed in their relationship and they resume their sightseeing as if at last the decision to part had been made: "They became with each other, as in the days of their courtship, courteous, gay, and quiet" (MS, p. 86). They walk the streets of Rome, comparing impressions, and even the tense of their conversation regarding the problem is altered as Joan remarks: "'Darley, I know what was wrong with us. I'm classic and you're baroque'" (MS, p. 86). "Released from the tension of hope" (MS, p. 86), Joan is transformed. Her face, her gestures, even her breathing suggest a woman who is happy. The story closes with Richard's becoming aware of her change, "and, jealous of her happiness, he again grew reluctant to leave her" (MS, p. 86). The adjectival phrase, of course, makes this closing doubly ironic. This insight, that one may destroy out of 162 jealousy the happiness he ostensibly wishes for his loved one, is reported in a variety of ways in Updike's fiction, at length in Couples (1968), but seldom is it more effec tively presented than in this story. Much of the story's ironic impact comes from the fact that the point of view is essentially Richard's, but our empathy is almost exclusively with Joan, not because she weeps at his cruelty, but because she responds to his childishness with maturity. She is intuitive and intelligent and Richard acknowledges these qualities in her: "Perhaps this was what made leaving her, as a gesture, so exquisite in con ception and so difficult in execution" (MS, p. 82). Their differences are subtly present in everything they do in Rome. Richard is delighted to learn that during their first night in separate beds, when Joan would reach over to give him a comforting pat, he would ask her to leave him alone in his sleep, accepting it as an uncon scious indication of his true wishes, but apologizing nevertheless: "'Isn't that funny? I hope I didn't hurt your feelings'" (MS, p. 81). Joan's reply is at once an example of her wit and her wisdom: "'No. It was refresh ing not to have you contradict yourself'" (MS, p. 81). Richard sees himself against the backdrop of Rome as a figure of some importance, but Joan is fascinated by the fact that birds and weeds live in the cracks and crevices 163 of the fabled Roman Forum. In the beginning of the story Updike describes their marriage: "Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die" (MS, p. 76). While in Rome they step into an ancient church and find that they are stepping on tomb- effigies almost but not quite worn completely away by centuries of footsteps: "One face, sheltered from wear behind a pillar, seemed a vivid soul trying to rise from the all but erased body" (MS, p. 82). These two images suggest that the ambiguity of the story's ending will be resolved with a painful continuation of the Maples' "undying" marriage, as indeed it is in the Maple stories collected in Museums and Women six years later. "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails" and "The Rescue" The preceding two stories are distinguished by Updike's essential sympathy with Joan Maple's position, although they are told from Richard Maple's point of view. In "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails" and "The Rescue" the problem of estrangement is reported from a feminine point of view, although the first story shifts to the point of view of a male psychiatrist very briefly in the concluding paragraphs. Even so, both stories demonstrate the woman's perspective in the estrangement process from radically different points. In the story written first, "My Lover 164 Has Dirty Fingernails," the woman has already been unfaith ful to her husband— it is her lover from whom she is estranged. In the later story, "The Rescue," the woman is only at the earliest stage of estrangement, suspicion, from which she is rescued at least temporarily. Both pro tagonists are deeply introspective, in widely contrasting environments: a psychiatrist's office and a ski slope. In many respects "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails" is a companion piece to "Harv Is Plowing Now," which was written immediately after it. The protagonist of "Harv Is Plowing Now" is very similar to the lover, Paul, described by the woman of this story, and she is like the woman on the beach. But this story is heightened by a third party, not a husband or a wife, but a nameless psychiatrist, who may well represent an almost mythic— and threatening— social force, the "norm." The protagonist comes in to the city from the suburbs, for which we must read "country," every Thursday for a session with a psychiatrist in an attempt to understand why she is unhappy, ostensibly because she has broken off a long affair with her married lover. Updike describes the setting with care, although— or because— it is undis tinguished, for it serves as a symbol of society's choice for the woman at the end of the story. The place is bland, its only color a blue carpet which "seemed a peculiarly 165 intense shade of silence” (MS, p. 16*4). The light is doubly refracted and the colorless people inside the room are nearly indistinguishable. His hair is gray, hers silvery blonde; they are both "impeccably groomed" in light gray and white. In standard therapeutic fashion, the woman does most of the talking, except for the psychiatrist's brief analy sis at the end of the session, but of equal importance to what she says is what she thinks, for there is an inter esting reversal of roles. From the beginning, when, "In addition to the possibility of vanity" she reads into his "casually overhanging forelock a suggestion of fatigue" (MS, p. 165), she attempts to understand her relationship to him using the meagerest of clues: "She did not know what to make of it" (MS, p. 165); "she wondered if it was wrong of her ... to desire his approval" (MS, p. 166); "she felt him in constant danger of doing something in correct" (MS, p. 167). Her analysis of the psychiatrist serves as a counter point to her analysis of herself; both combine at the end of the story to provide a rather effective contrast to his analysis of her. All three center on her relationship with Paul, her married lover. She reports that she has seen Paul once since the preceding Thursday, at a party, and that he had protested 166 at being "hurt” by her wearing a dress known to be a favorite of his. The dress, which the psychiatrist insists on being described, was light, informal, colorful. Her lover used to say that she resembled a farm girl in it. This leads to a reiteration of what the protagonist has identified as her "rural fantasy" CMS, p. 167), mixed in with a general free-association about clothing, much as her lover had sometimes drawn her clothes back into their love- making "'so they'd get all tangled up between us'" (MS, p. 169). After reporting a city shopping trip which had made him uncomfortable, she recalls the time when, after she had not seen him for some weeks in an attempt to end the relationship, she had discovered a hole in his T-shirt which had so excited her that she abandoned her resolution not to love him almost on the spot. It is at this point that she recalls her lover's sometimes-dirty fingernails. The psychiatrist selects this observation as a starting point for a chain of associations which, although more "professional" than "free," indicates that his perception of her problem is less apt than that of the reader, who has the advantage of access to her introspection. He concludes that she feels guilty at being the dynamic party, creating a need to observe that her lover's fingernails were dirty, and that the city represents life to her, while earth is death: 167 "'By conquering him, by entangling him in your own clothes, you subdue your own death'" (MS, p. 172). The protagonist feels sorry for the analyst: "There it was, he had made his little Thursday effort, and it was very pretty and clever, and used most of the strands, but it didn't hold her; she escaped" (MS, p. 172). She immedi ately challenges his judgment by asking if earth couldn't just as well mean life. He weakly agrees that '"In this sort of language, opposites can mean the same thing"' (MS, p. 172). The protagonist then vigorously embarks on her own analysis of the triangular relationship she believes exists among herself, her lover, and her psychiatrist. She complains that she is unhappy, that she wants to know why, and that the analyst is not telling her. Although she is aware that she might be expected to fall safely and clinically in love with him as a result of her therapy, she contends that the opposite has happened: "'I keep getting the feeling that you have fallen in love with me. . . . So I feel tender toward you, and want to protect you, and pretend not to reject you, and it gets in the way of everything. You put me into the position where a woman can't be honest, or weak, or herself'" (MS, p. 173). It is not immediately clear which of these three she prefers, or even if she regards them as mutually exclusive, 168 but she is surprised that she has not begun to cry, as she expected to, after her outburst. When the analyst comments on her "'insistence on protecting men1" (MS, p. 174), she denies that she was like that with Paul: '"I knew I was giving him something he needed, but I did feel protected. I felt like nothing when I was with him, like the— center of a circle'" (MS, p. 17*+). This is a remarkable image, worthy of the "nothing" paradox so prevalent in Renaissance literature. The center of a circle is, indeed, nothing in itself, but it is everything as far as the circle is concerned. The pro tagonist pities the psychiatrist's "jealousy," contending: "'. . . at least I loved somebody who loved me, no matter how silly you make the reasons for it seem"' (MS, pp. 173- 174). Her time is up. As she leaves in response to his question, "'Next Thursday?"', she gives him a parting smile, "a big countryish smile," which he notes— "with an interior decorator’s eye"— matches her ensemble and her hair, and confesses, "'I'm sure you're right. ... I am neurotic'" (MS, p. 174). The psychiatrist permits himself a sigh after she closes the door: "He was winning, it was happening; but he was weary. Alone, in a soundless, psychic motion like the 169 hemispherical protest of a bubble, he subsided into the tranquil surface of the furniture" (MS, p. 174), This conclusion is especially fine. The psychiatrist may be winning, in his terms, but his victory is bound to be as hollow as the bubble with which he is finally compared. His vision is that of the interior decorator and he takes as his assignment the decoration of her psyche so that she, too, will subside into the "tranquil surface of the furniture" of a life where "opposites can mean the same thing." The protagonist assumes, and perhaps rightly so, that the dirt under the fingernails of her sloppily-dressed lover should be taken as a sign that he was concerned with values other than the artificial city qualities assigned to clothes and interior decor. The underlying assumption is, of course, that the protagonist should feel guilty about her infidelity, but Updike seems to be suggesting that her life with her lover was superior to the colorless, empty life which is the goal of her therapist. Updike makes the most of the extremely limited setting of this story and of the guarded relationship between the two characters. The clothing motif, for example, is used not only to establish character in the usual, passive sense, but it also functions actively to link the present scene with the most recent rendezvous and with the two 170 lovemaking scenes. The summer dress of orange-brown earthen tones, the holey T-shirt, and the clothes which the lover drew back into their lovemaking all provide an active contrast to the bland, colorless, and almost iden tical costumes of the psychiatrist and his patient. "The Rescue" is a longer but much simpler story because it lacks the essayistic dimensions of "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails." The story is not without subtlety, however. For instance, the title ostensibly refers to the rescue of a woman who has suffered a leg injury on a ski slope, but it is clear that a more important meaning is the protagonist's rescue from the grip of the suspicion that her husband is sleeping with a divorcee friend who has accompanied them on a skiing trip. Norman and Caroline Harris, their twelve-year-old son, and Alice Smith are skiing together in New Hampshire. On the trip north Caroline had begun to imagine that "There had been, between Alice and Norman, a lack of flirtation a shade too resolute," while on her son "the woman had inflicted a curiously fervent playfulness, as if warm messages for the father were being forwarded through the son" (MS, p. 192). Now the two women have been bracketed together by chance as the father and son take the first lift-chair that comes along. The males only briefly look 171 back after starting down the mountain and are not factors in the story except in idea. In imagination Caroline assesses Alice, becoming more and more certain that she has been betrayed, and accepts as confirmation Alice's unhesitating willingness to follow the men down the expert slope while she would prefer the novice trail. "'I don't want to be a sissy,' Caroline said, and these careless words apparently triggered some inward chain of reflection in the other woman, for Alice's face clouded, and it was certain that she was sleeping with Norman" (MS, p. 195). Caroline feels so shamed by this presumed inadequacy that she cavalierly starts down the difficult slope. They come upon a fallen skier being comforted by her daughter. "In her haste to be with the men, Alice would have swept by, but Caroline snowplowed to a halt" (MS, p. 196). Alice is all business, Caroline all sympathy. She volunteers to stay while the daughter goes for help, "conscious ... of frustrating Alice and of declaring, in the necessary war between them, her weapons to be compassion and patience" (MS, p. 197). It is Alice who at last wonders if the men will worry, while Caroline concentrates on comforting the injured woman. When help finally arrives it turns out that Alice has been timing them and Caroline begins to doubt that her 172 husband^ "whose pajama bottoms rarely matched his tops, could love anyone so finicking" (MS, p. 201). When the first ski patrolman on the scene falls spectacularly, Caroline fears for his safety, but Alice remarks to him "as one boy to another," "’That was a real eggbeater'" (MS, p. 202). That cinches it; Alice's tough, finicking lack of femininity restores Caroline's confidence in Norman, and when they reach the men at the bottom of the run, "Caroline actually skated— what she had never managed to do before, lifted her skis in the smooth alternation of skating— in her haste to assure her husband of his inno cence" (MS, p. 202). There is, of course, no more evidence of his innocence than there was of his guilt. Caroline has measured her virtues against those of Alice and of the injured woman, who was also estranged from her husband, and has regained her self-confidence. Her traditional virtues of "compas sion and patience" are the virtues also of Joan Maple and, to a lesser extent, the protagonist of "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails," virtues which may, for better or for worse, be responsible for the pilgrims only "faltering toward divorce," not running. It seems to me that Updike has demonstrated a remark able understanding of the woman's role in the present shift in American attitudes toward love, marriage, and the 173 family. His women are threatened by estrangement, but they are also capable of making a remarkable adjustment to it. They are neither callous nor all-suffering stereotypes, which is not to say that there is not serious psychological displacement when the estrangement is complete; witness the next two stories. ’ ’ The Stare” and "The Morning" It is difficult to discuss these two stories without making them sound melodramatic, almost "confessional." Both are introspective accounts told in the third person of a man's reaction to an estrangement clearly of his own making. In both the anticipation of the unlikely return of the loved one is established, then the essence of the loss is disclosed by flashbacks triggered by ineffable associa tions. They are almost exactly the same length, but "The Stare" moves more rapidly because it contains a variety of locations and minor figures, whereas "The Morning" is strictly limited to a single location and a single figure. In "The Stare" the protagonist has returned to New York, the site of a lengthy affair with a married woman. The affair had run its course when both of their spouses had learned of it and, both of their households in turmoil, "the rich instinct that had driven him to her had been reduced to a thin need to hide and beg" (MS, p. 61). She 17** had asked him, "'Don't you love me?"' and he had felt compelled to reply, "'Not enough'" (MS, pp. 60-61). He had meant it as a matter of mutually understood fact, but she had taken it as a death blow. Now, even though he had moved away from the City, he was still haunted by her final, hostile stare. The story opens and closes with the protagonist believing that he has glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye. He has returned on business and is seated in a restaurant with his associates, speaking of ghosts, when he catches a glimpse of her. In the instant between recogni tion and turning he imagines their successful reconcilia tion, but it is someone else. When he returns his atten tion to his companions, his eyes smart "from the effort of trying to press this unknown woman's appearance into the appearance of another" (MS, p. 58). When the conversation resumes he feels "as if trapped between two mirrors" facing "a diminishing multiplication of her stare" (MS, p. 58). Updike immediately follows this opening scene with a flashback in which he begins to explicate the woman's enigmatic stare: "It was, as a look, both blunt and elusive: somewhat cold, certainly hard, yet curiously wide, and even open— its essential ingredient shied away from being named" (MS, pp. 58-59). It is clear that the quality of the stare alters during the months of their 175 developing Intimacy; even the protagonist's wife comments that the woman has become more beautiful* which he accepts as a justification of his infidelity. However* the essential quality of the stare remains elusive* even though it is her most distinctive feature. Returning to the present * the protagonist walks back from his lunch alone to an office on loan to him for the day. Again he thinks he sees her* but when he catches up with the woman it turns out to be "a wrinkled painted woman with a sagging lower lip" (MS* p. 61). Twice during the day he catches additional false glimpses* but nevertheless he is so certain that she will appear that he rehearses his explanation for requesting his hotel room be changed to a double. Repeatedly that evening he catches glimpses, sil houettes* distant views of women who are not his lover: "Statistically, it began to seem wonderful that out of so many faces not one was hers. It seemed only reasonable that he could skim* like interest, her presence from a sufficient quantity of strangers" (MS, p. 6*0. He walks the streets to tire himself for bed* trying to distill the essence of the stare he fully expects to see again: "What was the thing he had never named* perhaps because his vanity refused to believe that it could both attach to him and exist before him?" (MS* p. 65). 176 He returns to his hotel and as he awaits his elevator, "a face cut into the side of his vision at such an angle that his head snapped around and he almost said aloud, 'Don’t be frightened. Of course I love you'" (MS, p. 65). The story is not a simple tale of an awakening to the realization that what one thought was a unique quality is shared by many, for the false glimpses are never of the stare, only of some peripheral quality— a way of walking, similar hair, "a certain momentary plane of her face" (MS, p. 64). The protagonist remains self-deluded to the end in his anticipation, but he at least has begun to question the meaning of the stare. Indeed, he seems to need to encounter the stare again more than the woman, for the unnamed quality appears more and more to be accusatory. The protagonist's last unspoken words— "'Of course I love you.'"— represent the answer he now feels that he should have given to her question, "'Don't you love me?'" Updike seems to be suggesting that the reply he gave— "'Not enough.'"— which meant at the time "Not enough to give up my family and marry you," has taken on another dimension of meaning. Haunted by her accusatory stare, he is beginning to perceive that the lack was in himself, not in his beloved. This revelation also informs "The Morning," which is not complicated by spouses. The protagonist is a student; 177 his lover is a nurse. They became estranged when the nurse* hinting of marriage* "misread his word 'unable' to mean 'unwilling' and took offense" (MS, p. 106). Now* months later* he daily passes through in anguished anticipation the mornings, when she formerly would come to him for love- making prior to her afternoon-evening shift. Twice he hears footsteps outside his door, but twice more he is disappointed— and relieved: "He had lived so long with the vain expectation of her coming that it, the expectation, had become a kind of companion he was afraid of losing" (MS, p. 107). The theme of the story is much the same as that of "The Stare," a simplification of de Rougement's thesis: "love begins in earnest when we love what is limited" (MS, p. 108). But even though the protagonist's anguish at his loss is very finely detailed, the merit of this story lies in its demonstration of the connections between one man's lonely isolation and the world from which he is also estranged. First of all, Updike establishes the barrenness of his room: "Each morning he awoke to the same walls and was always slightly surprised at the sameness of the cracks and nail holes and replastered patches, as if this pattern were a set of thoughts to which a night's solid meditation had not added the merest nick of a new idea" (MS* p. 101). There is more— he keeps a strand of 178 her hair under a cushion as relic of their lives together— but the point is clear that only she ever made the room habitable. Unable to study during his mornings of anticipation, he looks out the window. Updike very skillfully pulls the distant skyline into the room with a wealth of description that testifies to "the world of activity the city, like the surface of the sea, concealts]" (MS, p. 102). Languorous, self-pitying, the protagonist becomes at least momentarily aware of a world in which his botched romance was of little consequence, "the airy realm of fresh ideas, eddying notes, scholarly ambition, and purpose" (MS, p. 102). When this happened, however, he would panic with jealousy: "A kind of demon of disconnection would abruptly occupy his body .... He realized within himself the intricate scaffolding of mechanical connection and chemical cooperation that upheld his life, and felt its complexity as a terrible tenuousness" (MS, p. 103). It is a similar micro-macro-cosmic connection, with the protagonist in the middle, that informs his relation ship with the nurse. She came to him as a woman of the world, wearing dresses of the colors of nature, shifted to flesh tones, then departed for work dressed immaculately in white as if she had reassumed a "virginity emblematic of the (to a man) mysterious inviolability of a woman" (MS, 179 p. 105). Unfortunately, when they occasionally ventured into the world of restaurants and colorfully dressed women, she became one of them: "He impossibly expected of her conversation the same total frontal fit her body gave him. The woman separated from him by a restaurant table was a needless addition to the woman who was perfect" (MS, p. 106). He had dreaded the loss of the mornings marriage would bring. Now he has lost the mornings and the woman. When noon comes he is reprieved for another day. "Perhaps tomorrow he would be weaker and, therefore, less caring, stronger" (MS, p. 109). He resumes his life outside the room and sees "with a blurring double sense of being a fraud and defrauded both, that a passable life could be patched together out of afternoons and evenings" (MS, p. 109). Even though this story, like so many others in this collection, is fraught with a painfully realized psycho logical displacement, its conclusion suggests that healing will result from the recognition that, of the multitude of connections which necessarily occur in a man's life, this one has gained its value in separation. Updike seems to be saying in these stories that an illicit relationship is vastly superior to none at all for the satisfaction of physical needs, but that no physical connection at all is 180 best for the satisfaction of the romantic needs of the ego. Following de Rougement's thesis, Updike has shown that only in the love relationship can modern man choose someone or something which will corroborate the value his ego has placed upon the self. Marriage necessarily restricts one’s choosing. Therefore, the only secure love is one which is unconsummated. There is such a love in this collection besides the Tristan-Iseult parody and that is Henry Bech's hemi- spherically displaced love for "The Bulgarian Poetess," a story to be discussed in the next chapter. The next best thing to the unconsummated ideal love seems to be the estranged love of so many of Updike's protagonists. Certainly what once seemed inadequate to the protagonists of "Harv Is Plowing Now," "My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails," "The Stare," and "The Morning" is, in the present moments of their stories, greatly to be desired. Yet each one is also coming to understand that what was can never be, except in sustaining memory. Updike achieves the remarkable effects of these stories by showing not only the connections between lovers in all their varieties— from suspicion to infidelity and from estrangement to divorce— but also between the pro tagonist's present state and an earlier, innocent time, and between his lonely isolation and the world from which he is 181 also estranged. The experience of giving blood, traveling to Rome, listening to fumbling angels in a music school, searching for a stare, etc., all are linked by Updike through metaphor to a vaster world whose meaning is elusive. There is a figure in "The Morning" which at once suggests the difficulty of the assignment and Updike's success in handling it. The student stares out across the rooftops and occasionally gets a sense of the hope that must have set in motion and sustained what has become an incredibly complex world: "The skyline then spread itself before his eyes like one of those laborious Asiatic pictorial conceits that compose an elephant out of naked maidens, or depict a tree of gods whose faintest twig doubles as a smile and whose smallest bud is also a fingernail" (MS, p. 102). I think that, just as the Asiatic artist was more concerned with the total transcendent qualities of his art than with the "cuteness" of each smiling twig, John Updike has demonstrated in this collection of stories that his metaphors are not suspended upon the branches of inaction but are an essential part of a transcendent whole. CHAPTER V BECH: A BOOK Although the earliest of its seven stories, "The Bulgarian Poetess," first appeared in The New Yorker on March 13, 1965, Bech: A Book was not published until 1970. This earliest story is in many respects the finest in the collection (it won First Prize in the Forty-eighth Annual 0. Henry Memorial Awards) and it was collected in The Music School (1966), but this does not mean that the other stories and the Foreword and the Appendices are weak efforts to make A Book out of Bech. In fact, four of the remaining six stories also first appeared in The New Yorker in 1966, 1968, and 1970, with "Rich in Russia," the first story in the collection, not appearing until over four years after "The Bulgarian Poetess." "Bech Panics," which is surely the second best story in the collection, and "Bech Enters Heaven," the last and weakest, were written just for Bech: A Book as were the Foreword and the Appendices. These last items— "Bech Enters Heaven," the Foreword, and the two Appendices— are perhaps as responsible as any thing else for Bech: A Book's generally favorable reception. 182 183 If so, their irony is self-fulfilling, for in them Updike takes a few gentle slaps at the New York literary estab lishment. The "Heaven1 1 Bech enters is The National Institute of Arts and Letters, not The American Academy of Arts and Sciences nor even The American Academy of Arts and Letters, as Malcolm Cowley crustily instructs us in a Saturday Review article defending the Institute against Updike^ final story.* Updike was the youngest member of the Institute (limited to 250 persons, about half from Literature) when elected in 1964, displaced as junior member by Philip Roth in the 1970 election which presumably included Henry Bech. Because election is for life, there are bound to be a number of superannuated poets and critics in attendance, some of whom were elected on indications of promise which were never fulfilled. Updike has some fun describing these characters as well as some bizarre recent initiates, but it is not essential to be "in" on their identities. What is important is that the reader perceive that the honor Bech has received is not only hollow, it threatens to extinguish his already faltering spark of creativity. What matters is Bech, not the Establishment, and we are moved ^Malcolm Cowley, "Holding the Fort on Audubon Terrace," The Saturday Review, 3 April 1971, pp. 17+. 184 less to laughter than to pity by his final question: "He had made it, he was here, in Heaven. Now what?" The prospect is dismal, indeed, for Bech is a self acknowledged failure and his election confirms it. Because Updike is in no sense a failure, it is clear that Bech is functioning not as an alter ego at the end but as a character, and the "apparatus" of the book is an integral part of Updike's study of Bech's character. This is not to say that Updike has not feared the loss of his gift. He uses, for example, the second stanza of Wallace Stevens' "To The One of Fictive Music" as epigraph to The Music School, a poem which concludes: "Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:/ The imagination that we spurned and crave." Another line in the poem refers to "the venom of renown," which is as much a factor in Bech's fall as the loss of imagination, but Updike confessedly was only purging himself of "anxieties and tensions," not realities. On November 4, 1970, after Bech: A Book had survived the reviewers, Updike was interviewed at length in a classroom setting at Union College and the book was given major attention because it was so appropriate to the 2 John Updike, "Bech Enters Heaven," Bech: A Book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 187. All subsequent references to stories in this collection will be identified in the body of the text as B. 185 subject of the seminar: Writers and Writing. Updike opened his remarks with a generalization: For a writer, life becomes overmuch a writer’s life. Things happen to you that wouldn't happen to anybody else, and a way of using this to good advantage, of course, is to invent another writer. At first, he is very much an alter ego, but then, in the end, not so. At any rate, I have used the writer in Bech as a subject in order to confess sterility in a truthful way.... In my book, I tried to— and I believe I did— package and dispose of a certain set of anxieties and tensions which I have as a practicing writer. . . . Mine is merely a kind of complaint about the curious position that the American writer now finds himself in; he is semi-obsolete, a curious fellow without any distinct sense of himself as a sensible professional.3 Much later in the interview someone asked Updike about the other apparatus, the Appendices. He confessed that "the bibliography was also a matter of scoring off various grudges" (FP, p. 105), but that its primary purpose was "a light-hearted attempt to give Bech a concrete bibliographical existence as a writer" and to "re-establish a distance between Bech and myself" (FP, p. 105). Appendix A is composed of "corroborating excerpts" from Bech's Russian notebook, cited as footnotes to "Rich in Russia," and a witty unsent but copyrighted love letter which serves 3 Frank Gado, ed., First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing (Schenectady, New York: Union CoXTege Press, 1973), p. 83. Subsequent references to Updike's contribution to this volume will be identified in the body of the text as FP. 186 to stretch his unfortunate love affairs into the past not included in the book. Appendix B is a bibliography which traces Bech’s career through his opportunistic twenties in World War II, the success of his thirties, and the decline of his forties. It’s fun to see Leslie Fiedler assigned a student guide and John Aldridge relegated to a favorable review in the Kansas City Star, but the bibliography probably does not ’ ’ work" for the average reader, who could certainly skip it with little loss of impact from the stories them selves. The Foreword, on the other hand, shouldn't be missed and probably wasn't for most readers since it is only three pages long. It is important because it establishes the role of John Updike in the book, but it is also symptomatic of Bech's problem. It is a letter to "John" from Bech, dated December 4th-12th, 1969. Even though the editor did not include "a list of suggested deletions, falsifications, suppressions, and rewordings, all of which have been scrupulously incorporated" (B, p. vii), one cannot imagine that anyone except a severely blocked writer would take nine days to write so little. Bech runs through a list of the Jewish writers he is made to resemble— Mailer ("eclectic sexuality, bravura narcissism, thinning curly hair"), Bellow, P. Roth, 187 Singer, Malamud, H. Roth, Fuchs, and Salinger— but notes that the stories contain "something Waspish, theological, scared, and insultingly ironical" (B, p. v) that derives from John Updike. Yet he has to admit that, "Until your short yet still not unlongish collection, no revolutionary has concerned himself with our oppression, with the silken mechanism whereby America reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage" (B, p. vi). There follows a remarkable explication of what Bech means by "cozenage," which need not be quoted because that is, in effect, the theme of the book, but one should take a moment to imagine how Updike must have savored calling himself a "revolutionary." The Foreword concludes with a bit of wordplay which reveals Updike's hand in the work. Immediately after punning on the word "prune"— "Here and there passages seem overedited, constipated; you prune yourself too hard" (B, p. vii)— Bech reminds Updike that he "never— unlike retired light-verse writers— make[s] puns" (B, p. vii), then puns again: "I don't suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm" (B, p. vii). Bech's Jewishness seems to derive less from the fact that Updike has generally been less seriously considered than his Jewish contemporaries than it does from Updike's belief that making Bech a Jew would advance both the humor and the pathos of his situation: "All the graces we think of as Jewish reflect a totality of embrace of the world. It's something you feel in the Jewish sensibility that isn't elsewhere .... They arrived at the written page equipped with this belief in the instinctual importance of human events" (FP, pp. S^-SS). Without this belief, Updike asserts, one isn't going to be a writer in the first place. Of course, Updike the Wasp has this quality in abundance, but he also counts heavily on the Jew-as- victim syndrome in establishing Bech's character. Even so, Updike avoids merely creating a portrait of the artist as a decaying middle-age Jew; instead, he has universalized Bech's experience so that the reader can identify with his angst as readily as he can with, say, Stephen Dedalus's. In many respects Bech: A Book may be considered a reaction to the criticism John Updike has received or, perhaps more importantly, has not received. Although the book abounds with warnings against taking it too seriously — and it is splendidly witty— Bech: A Book is a sensitive report of the present state of the art of writing and of the condition of writers in America, as telling in its fictive format as, say, Tony Tanner's City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 with all its scholarly apparatus. Tanner, for example, finds that recent American writers have become increasingly concerned with entropy, 189 "the irreversible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness," a state of "everything running down," in Susan Sontag's I f words. Similarly, Bech, in a London interview granted to push his latest book, The Best of Bech, observes, "that the ability to read, and therefore to write, is being lost, along with the abilities to listen, to see, to smell, and to breathe. That all the windows of the spirit are being nailed shut" (B, p. 142). Entropy. Earlier in the inter view, Bech talked of fiction as an equivalent of reality, and described how the point of it, the justification, seemed to lie in those moments when a set of succes sive images locked and then one more image locked and, as it were, superlocked, creating a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality, e.g. the lightning ladder of chemical changes in the body cell that translates fear into action .... And the down-grinding thing is the realization that no one, not critics or readers, ever notices these moments but instead prattles, in praise or blame, of bits of themselves glimpsed in the work as in a shattered mirror. (B, p. 142) Although the progress of the story in which this interview is given, "Bech Swings?," is toward his realiza tion that "He had become a character by Henry Bech" (B, p. 169), the interview must be taken seriously. Comic values are always obtained through contrast. Bech could * * City of Words (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 141. 190 have "put on" the interviewer for immediate laughs, but a more meaningful ironic humor is derived from his treating the questions seriously (although he does tease with the questioner) only to learn upon reading the article that what he said was too true, that the interviewer had not listened carefully enough to separate the wisdom from the self-deprecating jokes. Of course, Updike is permitting Bech to do what he would prefer not to do himself, talk at length to a reporter, because in his experience, as in Bech's, what appears in print is not always what was intended, even if it is what was said. When Updike was first invited to be interviewed by the Paris Review, he declined: "Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. Also, I really don't have a great deal to tell interviewers; the little I learned about life and the art of fiction I try to express in my work" (PR, p. 85). Since the burden of my thesis is to demonstrate that "the thing itself" is "locked in" with a "tightness perhaps equivalent to the terrible tight knit of reality," let us look at some of the "moments" whereof Bech speaks, and to try to brake, ever so slightly, the "downgrinding" entropy. 191 "Rich in Russia" The framing device of "Rich in Russia" is the pretense that the story is being delivered as a lecture to a 1969 college class only mildly interested in Bech’s 196*+ cul tural exchange behind the Iron Curtain. The story— as are all seven— is told in the third person by the implied author John Updike, who has easy access to Bech's mind when convenient. The framing device is not overdone and one soon becomes so given over to the story that the footnotes, which were added to The New Yorker version for this col lection to support the total impression of an author taken over by the "scholarship industry," are also ignored. The irony of the story depends upon a contrast between Bech's American penury (the interviewers assign an ethnic value to his remaining in the same tiny New York City flat for twenty years, although he cannot afford to move) and his temporary affluence in Russia. He has been traveling in Russia for a month on an all-expenses paid tour, unable to spend several hundred dollars of rubles given him in lieu of royalties. Not permitted to export the money, he and his companion-translator-spy Kate search for consumer goods he might take back to America with him. What Bech discovers too late in their search (they buy a cardboard suitcase and fill it with furs) is that the warm, sympathetic Kate was also an asset he had failed to 192 cash in: "He went to kiss Ekaterina on the cheek Cat the airport], but she turned her face so that her mouth met his and he realized, horrified, that he should have slept with her" (B, p. 20). Updike makes it clear that it wasn't just the fact that he had missed a sexual opportunity that disturbed him, but that he had (again) failed to respond to the human needs of a fellow traveler. The furs are for a variety of more or less cold women back home, but Kate has neither need nor desire for such things: "'Material things do not interest me, Henry. In the war we all learned the value of material things. There is no value but what you hold within yourself'" (B, p. 18). Updike cleverly strengthens the theme of the writer emasculated by his need to sift his personal experience for fictive values by relegating Bech's sense that he might be falling in love with Kate to a journal entry in Appendix A: "Feel insecure away from her side, listen to her clear throat and toss in hotel room next to me. . . . [R]emember her blush when she tied half my torn hanky to that super natural bush. What was her wish?" (B, p. 198). His opportunity passes and he moves on to Rumania. "Bech in Rumania; or, The Rumanian Chauffeur" In this story the failure to communicate adequately, which was on a personal level in the first story, is expanded to a cultural level. When Bech deplanes in 193 Bucharest he is not recognized by Embassy officials because he is wearing an astrakhan hat purchased in Moscow. Even tually he is identified and handed over to a translator- host, Petrescu, "a man humbly in love with books, a fool for literature" (B, p. 23). They make a duty call on the unfriendly head of the Writer’s Union, then embark on what the Embassy fears is a "safe" itinerary to keep the "liberal" Bech from exerting too much influence on young authors. Petrescu dutifully takes Bech to all the assigned places, driven by a boorish State chauffeur who discomfits both Bech and Petrescu with his helter-skelter, one hand on the horn driving. Even though he becomes car sick, Petrescu praises the driver's skills and it becomes apparent that, if the driver is not an agent, he is at least a representative of the worst features of Communist bureaucracy. As they go about the country, Bech perceives that the driver stands for simple-minded devotion to specific rule, whereas Petrescu represents the man who, even though he must be cautious to preserve the limited free access to Western literature, is free in spirit as only a lover of the humanities can be. When Bech leaves Bucharest, he pounds Petrescu's back vigorously, "for the man had led him to remember, what he was tempted to forget 194 in America, that reading can be the best part of a man's life" (B, pp. 47-48). Making it appear an accident, Petrescu arranges a meeting between Bech and the country's leading writer, "the hottest Red writer this side of Solzhenitsyn" (B, p. 47) in the view of the Embassy. The irony is that, even though they spend several hours together in an American-style nightclub, their cultural exchange is limited to two phrases. Bech asks the Rumanian what he writes about, through his wife, who speaks some English and seems quite close to Petrescu. He receives a one word reply, "Peasants," and the counter question. Bech replies directly: "'La bourgeoisie'" (B, p. 45), and they part forever. Thus, even though the chauffeur has been circumvented, Bech learns precious little about Rumanian art and teaches only slightly more about American writing. The theme of frustrated communication is poignantly repeated in the last line of the story. Bech is aboard another plane, this time enroute to Bulgaria: He realized that for four days he had been afraid. The man next to him, a portly Slav whose bald head was beaded with apprehensive sweat, turned and con fided something unintelligible, and Bech said, "Pardon, je ne comprends pas. Je suis Am£ricain." (B, p. 48) 195 "The Bulgarian Poetess" In the first two stories the development of Bech's character has been somewhat set aside in favor of the careful development of incident* perhaps because it had been basically established in the earliest of the stories* "The Bulgarian Poetess," which was written soon after Updike's return from his winter 1964-65 trip behind the Iron Curtain. However, even though this third story was not rewritten for its placement in the time scheme of Bech: A Book* Updike has written the later stories with such skill that the Bech who deplanes in Sofia seems a logical advance. Updike uses mirror images extensively in this story so that it will be apparent that Bech is involved in self- examination* self-discovery. When he first meets Vera Glavanakova* the poetess* he is "disarmed by her unexpected quality of truth" (B, p. 49) and he immediately begins his self-assessment: He is fortyish* unmarried, with "thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose, the author of one good book and three others .... His reputation had grown while his powers declined" (B* p. 49). He feels that he has passed through a mirror that dimly reflected the capitalist world when he is told that Vera and some others were writers he might ask to meet because they were "'among the more progressive'" (B, p. 52). 196 At his first meeting with writers the reflection of the highly polished table is used effectively, but the major mirror image occurs when the most enthusiastic reader of Bech, who praises his first novel Travel Light for taking "'us truly into another dimension'" (B, p. 5*0, is revealed as the translator of Alice in Wonderland, which he praises in exactly the same words. After Vera arrives, however, the imagery increases in frequency and it becomes clear that Bech, who senses that at last he has met the "central woman ... he had always expected . . . to appear" (B, p. 59), looks at her in order to see him self, both as a writer and as a man. He mentally reviews the "loves" he has felt on his trip, including an entire class of dancing girls practicing in a room which was "doubled in depth by a floor-to- ceiling mirror" (B, p. 60). In all of his loves there was a desire to rescue them, "But the Bulgarian poetess pre sented herself to him as needing nothing, as being complete, poised, satisfied, achieved" (B, p. 61). His host detects Bech's interest in Vera and arranges for them to meet for one hour before he attends a ballet. Updike performs an interesting shift in his plot line at this point, as if he is attempting to make the form reflect the content and the imagery. Instead of describing Bech's meeting with Vera in its normal position, he places Bech in 197 the theatre watching Silver Slippers, then returns to the earlier meeting in a flashback. The reason for this is apparent from the plot line of the ballet, which requires a princess to put on enchanted silver slippers then leap through a mirror to dance with a wizard on the other side: "And when the princess, haughtily adjusting her cape of invisibility, leaped through the oval of gold wire, Bech's heart leaped backward into the enchanted hour he had spent with the poetess" (B, p. 65). Essentially, their conversation establishes Vera as a warm, sympathetic human being, but we learn much about Bech as well. He is pressed to describe how he writes, which pains him because he doesn't write. In response to Vera's inquiry about the role of love in his works, he admits that it is there, '"But as a form of nostalgia. We fall in love, I tried to say in the book, with women who remind us of our first landscape'" (B, p. 68). Readers will recall this theme from Updike's "Harv Is Plowing Now." He looks into her eyes and observes that his image is not reflected, almost as if "in their depths his image . . . was searching for the thing remembered" (B, p. 68). The story closes very rapidly for, as the ending begins, "Actuality is a running impoverishment of possi bility" (B, p. 69). She attends his goodbye cocktail party, but he cannot get near her until the very end: 198 "The mirror had gone opaque and gave him back only himself" (B, p. 70). She gives him an inscribed copy of her poetry, "with much love." He gives her a copy of The Chosen: "Dear Vera Glavanakova— It is a matter of earnest regret for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world" (B, p. 70). Vera is de Rougement's Unattainable Lady, "the woman- from-whom-one-is-parted; to possess her is to lose her."^ Bech cannot pass through the mirror to the other side. Updike does not spoil this bittersweet ending by having Bech reflect on what he sees of himself when the mirror goes opaque. This becomes clear in the remaining stories. Updike's technique in this story is very much like that described by Bech in discussing Travel Light with Vera: he had sought to show people skimming the surface of things with their lives, taking tints from things the way that objects in a still life color one another, and how later he had attempted to place beneath the melody of plot a counter-melody of imagery, inter locking images which had risen to the top and drowned his story . . . . (B, p. 67) One suspects that Updike, like Bech, wishes the last phrase to be challenged, since it represents a criticism he has lived with for twenty years, but it is obvious that the ^Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, quoted by John Updike in "More Love in the Western World,* rev. of de Rougement's Love Declared, Assorted Prose (Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 286. 199 interlocking mirror images of this story do not drown it, just as it is clear that Updike, unlike Bech, is not a blocked writer. "Bech Takes Pot Luck" Bech's character expands more than his consciousness in this witty story of his first experience with marijuana. He has been back from his Cultural Exchange for over two years but he continues to be "lionized," although with a difference. It is August; he has rented a beachfront cottage on a Massachusetts island, where he is vacationing with his most recent mistress, Miss Norma Latchett, and her divorcing sister, Bea, and Bea's three children. They are discovered by Wendell Morrison, a devotee from Bech's semester stint as writer in residence at Columbia Uni versity. Wendell, who wants advice from the master on his recent efforts, makes himself invaluable, especially in entertaining the children, and soon becomes a household regular. Much of the pleasure one receives from this story is in the fencing interchanges between Bech and Wendell, but the central event occurs when the four adults share a pipeful of marijuana, ostensibly to learn whether Norma, who is unhappy with her life and craves experience, is capable of taking the more dangerous "trip" afforded by LSD, which Wendell could supply. 200 The children are bedded down on a porch after a "pot luck" supper and the four begin their experiment. Bech seems most affected by the narcotic and makes several maliciously witty remarks at Wendell's expense, but he simply accepts them as words of wisdom from his master, his "guru." Bea is mildly affected, but Norma doesn't get high at all. While Bech, who has become nauseated, is in the bathroom vomiting, Norma and Wendell drive off to his apartment, to flush the LSD down the "pot" because Wendell is so chagrined at making his mentor ill. But Bech assumes that their purpose is sexual and in a state of euphoria begins the seduction of Bea which results in his dropping Norma and taking on Bea as his new mistress. Along the way in the story we learn of the pleasure and the guilt Bech feels when he is accosted by admirers and of his terrible sense of being out of touch, out of step with the generation of the sixties: Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the coarse morality competitiveness imposes. . . . Their politics burlesqued the liberal beliefs dear to Bech; their literary tastes ran to chaotic second-raters . . . and away from those saints of formalism— Eliot, Valery, Joyce— whose humble suppliant Bech had been. (B, p. 73) This generation is given specific form in Bech's relationship with Wendell, who at Columbia wrote lower case fantasies of orgies topped off with someone defecating on a polar bear rug. Even so, after watching Wendell function 200 The children are bedded down on a porch after a "pot luck'1 supper and the four begin their experiment. Bech seems most affected by the narcotic and makes several maliciously witty remarks at Wendell's expense, but he simply accepts them as words of wisdom from his master, his "guru." Bea is mildly affected, but Norma doesn't get high at all. While Bech, who has become nauseated, is in the bathroom vomiting, Norma and Wendell drive off to his apartment, to flush the LSD down the "pot" because Wendell is so chagrined at making his mentor ill. But Bech assumes that their purpose is sexual and in a state of euphoria begins the seduction of Bea which results in his dropping Norma and taking on Bea as his new mistress. Along the way in the story we learn of the pleasure and the guilt Bech feels when he is accosted by admirers and of his terrible sense of being out of touch, out of step with the generation of the sixties: Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the coarse morality competitiveness imposes. . . . Their politics burlesqued the liberal beliefs dear to Bech; their literary tastes ran to chaotic second-raters . . . and away from those saints of formalism— Eliot, Valery, Joyce— whose humble suppliant Bech had been. (B, p. 73) This generation is given specific form in Bech's relationship with Wendell, who at Columbia wrote lower case fantasies of orgies topped off with someone defecating on a polar bear rug. Even so, after watching Wendell function 201 with an ease and grace he had never been able to achieve* Bech concludes that "The new generation was immersed in the world that Bech's, like a foolish old bridegroom full of whiskey and dogma, had tried to mount and master" (B, p. 79). Wendell's naive competence, Bech's aggressive uncertainty, Norma's unbearable phoniness, and Bea's quiet attractiveness are all explored in the smoking scene. "Pot luck," of course, means sharing what is available, but it also means accepting the consequences of one's actions, no matter what comes. Wendell is initially offered pot luck food in exchange for his "pot," but the "pot luck" Bech takes is Bea, in exchange for Norma. Interestingly, the style of the smoking scene is in the formless mode Bech abhors, but it is remarkably effective: Norma turned to [Wendell, who had just said some thing absurd about Lord Krishna] and grinned. Her tropism to the phony like a flower's to the sun. Wide warm mouth wherein memories of pleasure have become poisonous words. Carefully Bech asked the other man, "Why does your face resemble the underside of a colander in which wet lettuce is heaped?” The image seemed both elegant and precise, cruel yet just. But the thought of lettuce troubled his digestion. Grass. All men. Things grow in circles. Stop the circles. "I sweat easily," Wendell confessed freely. The easy shamelessness purchased for an ingrate generation by decades of poverty and war. (B, p. 91) Updike, the "retired light-verse writer" who gave us the basic "pot" pun of the title of this story, uses great tact in laying off the "grass" pun at this point, for the 202 suggestion of transcendental cycles is of much greater value, not only to this story but also to the total collec tion. Norma's character is beautifully summarized by the "tropism" observation, as is Wendell's by the "easy shamelessness." But it is Bech who matters, and we see him perfectly as an author, balancing his imagery searching for perfection, and perhaps more importantly as a man, troubled by the use an ungrateful generation makes of his suffering in the Depression and in World War II. Conse quently, one should not be surprised by the serious turn his character takes in the following story. "Bech Panics" In "Bech Panics" Updike again uses a classroom framing device, this time the pretense that he is showing certain key color slides of Bech's visit to a southern girls' college as a lecturer. This permits the narrator to provide an either/or speculation regarding Bech's relieving his angst by sleeping with one of the instructors in the college. Bech "had felt uneasy, idle, irritable, displaced" (B, p. 99) for some time after replacing Norma Latchett with her sister Bea as mistress. Although Bech had dreamed luxuriantly of the differences between the two, Bea, once established, is just as "slangy, bossy, twitchy, somewhat sluttish" (B, p. 102) as her sister, and when the 203 opportunity arises to earn a thousand dollars for a couple of days in the lion's den, he accepts. The death panic he felt while contemplating the grass cycle sweeps over him when he arrives at the campus and his nose is assaulted by the stench of horse manure, of which his hostesses seem blissfully unaware: "profound duplicity seemed to underlie the landscape. Along with the sun's reddening rays and the fecal stench a devastating sadness swept in. He knew that he was going to die. That his best work was behind him" (B, p. 108). Updike interrupts with a brief expository flashback which serves to identify Bech as a self-educated, free spirit whose early work reflected his consciousness of freedom. Even though he performs well for the students, he feels anything but free: "his real attention was turned inward toward the swelling of his dread, his unprecedented recognition of horror" (B, p. 110). Even though he cannot keep down the panic growing within him, Bech answers the students' questions, "stooping with the pain inside him, dazed to hear himself make a kind of sense" (B, p. 111). Unfortunately, as he explains his theory of language, derived from "the gaunt Titans of modernism" (B, p. 108), he realizes that the post-war literary renaissance he had expected had not taken place and that "all the efforts of 204 his life— his preening, his love-making, his typing” (B, p. 115)— were a monumental waste. He sees the girls spread out before him as "massed fertility ... an ocean of doubling and redoubling cells within which his own conscious moment was soon to wink out" (B, p. 112). When he dines with eight of the girls, he is attacked as a racist by one of the two black girls in the school because he had used the word "Negress" in one of his novels. Language fails him in the argument and, noticing a "spatter of freckles" across the girl's nose, "he saw, in a sliding succession of imagery that dumped him back into terror, an Irish overseer raping a slave," and a series of other cruelties through "aeons of evolution, each turn of beak or stretch of toe shaped by a geological patter of individual deaths" (B, p. 114). The next day he finds himself confessing his angst to Ruth Eisenbraun, an instructor at the school, then walking alone on the edge of the campus, contemplating his condi tion. Again he senses "Life chasing its own tail" (B, p. 125), and he throws himself onto the earth and begs "Someone, Something for mercy" (B, p. 125). Updike's Bech has repeatedly saved himself from excesses of egocentrism with jokes at his own expense; this time the pantheistic god of nature supplies an answer and relieves the tension in a manner totally befitting Bech's character. There is 205 no reply to his prayer except the "gradual realization that the earth is populated infinitely" and that "a research team of red ants were industriously testing a sudden morsel, Bech's thumb, descended incarnate" (B, p. 125). The story concludes in whimsy. Ruth offers to help Bech by sleeping with him, and he either does or he doesn't. It is the essence of panic, not excluding exis tential crises, that the sufferer reach out for anything resembling hope that comes his way. But an artist is more than a man; crisis affects his imagination as much as his being, and Updike has given Bech an either/or answer to Ruth's offer of sexual comfort, both caged in ambiguous images so that one can find "evidence" for the other answer in both statements. For example, in the paragraph in which Bech tearfully refuses Ruth, Updike, who had earlier shown Bech impotent when alone with Bea yet adamantly erect when her son Donald had sleepwalked his way into their bed, suggests in his word-play that the monk-like Bech who refused did so in imagination only: "[Ruth's body] seemed to him another poem abysmal in its ignorance, deceitful in its desire to mitigate the universe. Poetry and love, twin attempts to make the best of a bad job. Impotent; yet in his stance, his refusal to embrace, we must admire a type of rigidity, an erect pride in his desolation ..." (B, p. 129). 206 On the other hand, the narrator speculates, he may have taken Ruth to bed. Since this slide is missing, he paints a word picture of their intercourse, describing Bech's phallus as "a counterfeit bone, a phantasmal creature, like Man, on the borderline of substance and illusion, of death and life" (B, p. 130). He establishes a sexual rhythm, then breaks it off, as it were, in mid- stroke: "Enough. Like Bech, we reach the point where words seem horrible, maggots on the carcass of reality, feeding, proliferating; we seek peace in silence and reduction" (B, p. 130). The narrator finds another slide, showing Bech the next morning. He awards the first prize in the poetry contest he has been asked to judge and his citation indi cates that he has recovered enough to get through another day, whether or not Ruth had applied "to his wound the humid poultice of her flesh" (B, p. 130). But the story closes with Bech deplaning in New York and Bea sensing "that something had happened to him, that there wasn't enough of him left for her to have any" (B, p. 132). This story is a close second to "The Bulgarian Poetess" in quality, second perhaps because its moral is so openly aired, but close because of its basic profundity and because of the careful interplay of plot, character, and imagery. Typical of the skill with which Updike has 207 constructed this story is his handling of the whole ques tion of the duplicity of language. Bech breaks his rule against public appearances in the first place because his telephone caller, a Southern Belle, lards her offer of hard cash with a thick layer of Virginia unction. Caught up in Bech's panic upon his arrival, we forget about her, assuming that she is a mere agent of the plot. However, she reappears to drive Bech from the campus to the airport. It is most appropriate that she had had to rush off to Roanoke for her sister's wedding, since Bech perceives that the only words of his that would be meaningful to either of the Latchett sisters would be an invitation to a wedding. The lady apologizes for missing all of Bech's appearance in the same beguiling voice: . . . it was one of those sudden affaihs, and jes got back this mawning! Believe me, suh, Ah am mohtifahd!*" (B, p. 131). But Bech merely touches his inside pocket to be sure that his check is in it, and assures her: '"Neveh you mind' .... The land scape, unwinding in reverse, seemed greener than when he arrived, and their speed less dangerous" (B, p. 131). This may be taken as a clue to a kind of adjustment to panic which is explored more fully in the next story. "Bech Swings?" Updike calls attention to the double meaning of his title by adding a question mark to it, but it seems fairly 208 clear at the conclusion of Bech's "swinging” trip to London that he has at last swung all the way from an incipient but blocked author to the permanent status of celebrity, a star of low magnitude fixed firmly into place in the final story, "Bech Enters Heaven." Bech has been invited to London to help puff his British publisher's edition, The Best of Bech, a mis-named volume brought out to capitalize on the success of the Penguin edition of Bech's first success, Travel Light. Again Updike opens and closes his story with Bech aboard a plane. The airplane, permitting as it does tre mendous shifts in space while occupying little narrative time, is as useful to the writer of episodes as the tele phone is to the scenarist, but Updike derives full value from his trips by using them to advance Bech's character, not just to transport his body, or to connect scenes within the story, as he does in "Bech Swings?" The story opens with Bech observing the daffodils as his plane descends; next we see him rise from the bed of Merissa to observe another plane descending over a different park filled with daffodils; then we learn that he has used the fact that all he has seen of London has been daffodils as an entree to Merissa's bed, all of which is linked to the story's opening statement of Bech's problem: "Bech arrived in London with the daffodils; he knew that he must fall in 209 love. It was not his body that demanded it, but his art” (B, p. 133). Although it should be clear to anyone that a man who has to fall in love for the sake of his art is in trouble, Updike craftily weaves enough exposition into this daffodilly opening so that the story can stand on its own. Indeed, one of the successes of Bech; A Book as a collec tion must be the skill with which Updike repeatedly estab lishes the same Bech in remarkably different ways so that he is in the end as fully revealed as the hero of a novel. In brief, the Bech who missed his chance in Russia, found and necessarily parted from his "central woman" in Bulgaria, ran through a pair of New York sisters, and slept or didn't sleep with a girls' college instructor believes that "One more wasting love would release his genius from the bondage of his sagging flesh" (B, p. 135). He is picked up by a mysterious Merissa at his welcoming party and is escorted by her to all of the "in" spots, including her bed. During the daytime he is inter viewed by a young man who promises to write a "definitive testament" about Bech for a London paper. These alternat ing sessions advance the story remarkably well. The interviewer uncovers the principles of the art Bech wishes to resurrect and Merissa finds out how much falling in love was really his body's need. Traveling between the two, 210 Bech begins to examine phrases critically as they occur to him and to plot his next novel, whose title— Think Big— comes to him as he gazes down on shoppers from a double- decker bus. His introspection is more a neurotic self- consciousness than an "emotion recollected in tran quillity*" however* and he becomes more and more fearful of impotence in both arenas. Bech thinks big but remembers little, and Updike brings his swinging trip to a pathetic close by putting him aboard a plane home with two newspapers* one containing the interview which emasculates Bech as an artist* the other containing a column called "Merissa's Week," which celebrates him as a "darling American author" (B, p. 168). Updike masterfully blends lines from both interviews into his closing paragraph that Bech recognizes as entre preneurial half-truths from his own conversations, giving the ending a particularly poignant impact: "Still gaining altitude, he realized that he was not dead; his fate was not so substantial. He had become a character by Henry Bech" (B, p. 169). The process by which lionization renders the artist impotent is extremely well developed in this story* not only in the interplay of the art-body love theme* but in the individual sub-plots as well. The de Rougement theme is reiterated in his relationship with Merissa: "He tasted 211 it, the sugary nip of impossibility. For he was best at loving what he could never have" (B, p. 155). Fearing his sexual impotence— "he could not rise, he could not love her, could not perpetuate a romance or roman without seeing through it to the sour parting and the mixed reviews" (B, p. 16*0— Bech attempts to explain his problem to Merissa, but she interrupts: "'Well, Henry, you must learn to replace ardor with art'" (B, p. 164). He rises to her bait, loses the argument, and gains access, proving at least that the corollary to her maxim is true. Similarly, in his interview with the newspaper re porter Bech refuses to invite him up to his room, fearing that to do so would be to "simulate pederasty and risk the fate of Wilde" (B, p. 140). Then, at their last meeting, when Bech is exhausted from a night with Merissa, the reporter asks him if he feels any affinity with Ronald Firbank. He replies, "'Only the affinity ... I feel with all Roman Catholic homosexuals'" (B, p. 165). The reporter responds ambiguously, "'I was hoping you'd say something like that'" (B, p. 165), then closes his article with a devastating comparison of Bech to Firbank. When Bech reads of his "butterfly similes and overextended, sub- stanceless themes," he lets "the paper go limp" (B, p. 168) in a wittily symbolic acceptance of his impotence. 212 Bech recalls that Firbank was dead at forty and realizes that his fate is not so substantial. To complete the ironic transformation from man into artist into character, he must be buried alive, which is what happens in the final story. "Bech Enters Heaven" Even though "Bech Enters Heaven" is the weakest story in the collection, it is perhaps as cleverly done as entombment can be. The process of petrifaction is com pleted with Bech's ceremonious installation into an unnamed pantheon made up mainly of superannuated figures so desiccated by time and inactivity that they resemble card board cutouts to Bech. The story is as brief as an obituary, but it is not a mere summary of what we have already learned. Updike devotes over half his pages to Bech's attendance with his mother of the 1936 installation ceremony, which compounds the macabre humor because some of the figures he recalls from that earlier visit are present over thirty years later. The divided story casts Bech's life into halves like bookends to hold forever in place the slim production of his middle years. We meet at last the de rigueur Jewish mother who stands behind so many of our writers, a bowl of chicken soup in hand, exhorting them to success: "Homily, flattery, and humiliation: these were what his mother 213 applied to him, day after day, like a sculptor's pats" (B, p. 175). Mrs. Bech is not as successfully dreadful as, say, Philip Roth's mothers, perhaps because Updike allows her to feel a momentary qualm as she comes away from the installation believing that she has set her son on the right track, but she certainly is adequate for a short story. Updike also gives an effective distillation of life in a big city Depression ghetto: Bech studied "matters of rote given significance by the existence of breadlines and penthouses, just as the various drudgeries of their fathers were given dignity, even holiness, by their direct connection with food and survival” (B, p. 17 2). School was a sanctum of faith, at least in the children's future, that kept many families afloat: "None but very young hearts could have withstood the daily strain of so much intrigue, humor, desire, personality, mental effort, emotional current, of so many achingly important nuances of prestige and impersonation” (B, pp. 170-171). Mrs. Bech takes her son out of school to attend the ceremony simply because she had received two free tickets to it and she hoped it might turn his attention in a proper, professional direction. Thirty-four years later, four years after his mother's death in a nursing home, Bech 214 is greeted by his sponsor, the same person who had supplied the free tickets vears before: "Jesus Christ, Bech, I've been plugging you for years up here, but the bastards always said, 'Let's wait until he writes another book, that last one was such a flop.' Finally I say to them, 'Look. The son of a bitch, he's never going to write another book,' so they say, 'O.K., let's let him the hell in.'" (B, p. 184) In a nice touch, Updike equates the gathered greats with the children in P. S. 87. Bech is seated, alpha betically, next to a poetess who writes and speaks in dimeters, Mildred Bellouessovsky-Dommergues. During the ceremony she "persistently tickled the hairs on the Bech's wrist with the edge of her program" CB, p. 185). Years before, when Bech was generally teased as a grade-skipping prodigy, "the girl in the adjacent desk-seat tickled the hair on his forearms with her pencil" (B, p. 171). Mildred, who has gone through more husbands than Bech mistresses, may be preparing an answer for Bech's final question, "'Now what?,"' but Updike, who said to his Union College audience that since he had written Bech as a kind of catharsis he would turn to something else (FP, p. 83), has suggested the perfect answer. He made Bech an author- interviewer, repaying his generosity with the Bech: A Book materials by allowing him to interview John Updike on the occasion of the publication of Rabbit Redux in 1971. 215 Perhaps a livelier but equally inescapable pantheon for the enshrinement of Henry Bech is in John Updike's large and growing collection of born losers. The anti- heroes of his novels come to mind first as comparisons because Bech is so fully developed— Joey Robinson in Of The Farm, Conner in The Poorhouse Fair, and certainly Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run— but of course many of the protagonists of his short stories fit at least loosely into this category, although many of the stories end on a note of ambiguity which allows some room for the moderating influence of the reader. Bech's failure, however, traced through a full complement of seven stories, is completely realized. Even so, Bech is a winning character, not unlike George Caldwell in The Centaur. He is a cross between Candide and Peter Schlemeil, a man whose pangs result from self-discovery, not exposure. Most importantly, he is not just an alter ego for John Updike. In accepting the self- imposed challenge of creating a character different in so many respects from himself— Bech is single, older, Jewish, urban, a failure— Updike has demonstrated that he has the skill to go well beyond the limits of his own personal experience in creating character. % CHAPTER VI MUSEUMS AND WOMEN John Updike's largest and most varied collection of short fiction, Museums and Women and Other Stories, was published in the fall of 1972. Although it contains several fine pieces, it is not at all as distinguished as any of the four collections discussed earlier. Indeed, it does not contain other as-yet-uncollected stories from this period— essentially from 1967 through 1971— which are clearly superior to many of the items included. There is an attempt to group the twenty-eight titles into three sections, but only one— "The Maples"— has a cohering theme and it is one already discussed, estrangement. Ten of the selections are identified as "Other Modes," but it is not clear how they differ from at least six of the fourteen stories which fill the first half of the book. Unquestionably eclectic, the volume Museums and Women most resembles is Assorted Prose (1965). That is, the stories have that smooth journalistic tone which signals something worth reading once, only, in the pages of The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, etc. 216 217 The collection, then, is not so much a failure as it is a disappointment because the high level of achievement so notable in the earlier four collections is not sus tained. Some of the short, experimental pieces are more notable for their difference than for their success; some of the familiar introspective pieces contain images that seem less like metaphysical conceits than far-fetched attempts at cleverness. One must remember, however, that this was the period in which Updike was writing his two longest novels, Couples (1968), and Rabbit Redux (1971), and most of the stories for Bech: A Book (1970). Clearly, there was no decline in his powers; indeed, the short, clever pieces may well have been written to relieve the pressure of the longer composi tions. It is interesting to note that there have been far fewer of these expanded "Talk of the Town" pieces in the past two years as Updike's contributions to The New Yorker book review section, already notable, have increased to an average of one per month. To say that Museums and Women adds little to Updike's reputation as an author of short fiction is not to say that it detracts from it. Since the collection confirms rather than advances his stature, I will not comment on the indi vidual stories at length. 218 The first fourteen stories are remarkably eclectic, although if there is any dominant note it is the estrange ment theme of The Music School, with the notable addition of many more examples and images of death. Occasionally Updike uses experience of the time of his life generally treated in The Same Door, but only as a nostalgic flashback to illustrate a present moment, never for its own intrinsic qualities. Several of the stories use the family motifs of Pigeon Feathers as a background to the husband-wife rela tionship of the father and mother of four children, except that now the children are old enough to have threatening self-identities functioning in an atmosphere of impending estrangement. The title story, "Museums and Women," for example, is a familiar combination of several elements, marred somewhat by Updike's opening insistence on the typographical simi larity of the two words. There is the museum of his youth visited with the mother of "Flight": "She was not content. I felt that the motion which brought us again and again to the museum was an agitated one, that she was pointing me through these corridors toward a radiant place she had despaired of reaching."^ There is the attempt to evoke the *John Updike, "Museums and Women," Museums and Women and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19^25, p. 6. Ail subsequent references to the stories in this collection will be cited in the text as MW. 219 almost mystical quality of things at rest* seen in "My Grandmother's Thimble" and passim* in his description of the small bronze statuettes: "[they] seemed caught in a tarnished fate from which I yearned to rescue them" (MW* p. 5). There is the encounter with the estranged beloved* as in "Harv Is Plowing Now" and "The Persistence of Desire," and the Tristan-Iseult love theme of Denis de Rougement: "'God, it's terrible to love what you can't have. Maybe that's why you love it'" (MW, p. 16). Although the story ostensibly intends to mark the similarities between two disparate groups* the first person point of view is so insistent that attention is focused on the narrator. There are several museums and several women* but they fade before the presence of the narrator. These citations of the familiar are not intended as an implica tion that the story doesn't "work." Divorced from the context of scores of stories by the same author* this one is less familiar than representative, and with Updike "representative" means very good indeed. The problem the reader faces is precisely the problem the narrator of "Museums and Women" faces. Midway through his story he drops the explicit comparison of museums and women after reflecting on having seen in a museum once a small stone statue of a sleeping beauty reclining on a mattress. It seemed to him that the essence of the piece 220 was to give the viewer the sense that he was the very first to have discovered the girl asleep on her tufted marble mattress, and he concludes: "In museums ... we seek the untouched, the never-before-discovered; and it is their final unsearchability that leads us to hope, and return" (MW, p. 12). Then, after his linked experiences in museums with the woman from whom he is estranged, he closes his story by looking back upon the entrance of the museum he is leaving and noting that "nothing about museums is as splendid as their entrances" (MW, p. 17), supplying a series of images rather easily related to the physical attributes of women. The story concludes: "And it appeared to me that I was condemned ... to enter more and more museums, and to be a little less exalted by each new entrance, and a little more quickly disenchanted by the familiar contents beyond" (MW, p. 17). In the same way the reader may feel with some of the stories in this collection that he has entered that same door once too often. Yet, is there anyone writing short fiction today who could link together the several disparate parts of the title story so well through the function of metaphor? The "women" of the title are the implied author's mother, the unapproachable ideal girl of his childhood, his wife (both when he met her on the steps of 221 a museum and after their marriage), his mistress (both when he first made physical contact with her in a museum and later when he parted from her forever in the halls of yet another museum), and the exquisite sleeping beauty statue, who pulls them all together in a true museum piece. There are innumerable subtle connections between these women, all somehow involving museums. For example, the narrator first realized that he was in love with the woman who became his wife when she showed him in a museum "the S-curve of [the body of a sphinx], repeated in the tail and again, presumably, in the vanished head" (MW, p. 10). Later, after reminding us that we may "turn a corner in the Louvre and meet the head of a sphinx whose body is dis played in Boston," he uses his wife's image to point out that the woman met in one museum is the mistress parted from in another: "the women were broken arcs of one curve" (MW, p. 12). Further, remembering his museum courtship of the woman who became his wife, he recalls being frightened by her sitting on a second floor balustrade: "An apprehen sion of height seized me; this girl seemed poised on the edge of a fall" (MW, p. 10). Later, walking down the spiral ramp of what must be the Guggenheim in New York City with "a friend of a friend," the woman stumbles toward "a rather slender and low concrete guard wall that more invited than discouraged a plunge into the cathedralic 222 depths below" (MW, p. 13). The narrator holds her arm the rest of the way down, establishing the first contact in what became a lengthy and apparently painfully concluded physical liaison. Many more similar connectives could be shown in this story and in most of the others, but to no particular pur pose except to demonstrate one of Updike's acknowledged strengths. There are, however, in some of the stories themes not previously emphasized in Updike's short fiction, and I should like to note some of them briefly. For example, the second story in the collection, "The Hillies," is a remarkably compact allegory of the war between the generations, Tarbox-style. In a comprehensive opening paragraph, Updike describes the town, founded in 163** "by men fearful of attack" (MW, p. 18), a mixture of eighteenth-century clapboard houses and a hodgepodge of recent styles. The graceful Congregational Church which burned in Couples has been replaced with "a marvel (or out rage, depending upon your architectural politics) of poured concrete" (MW, p. 18). Next, Updike describes the hillies, the unoccupied children who sit on the town's hillside common looking down at Tarbox "as if the spectacle is as fascinating as Dante's rose" (MW, p. 19). They claim that they only want to be left alone, but many of the townspeople, even though they 223 recognize many of the hillies as children of their neigh bors, fear them as marauders. Updike supplies a wide range of opinions from the townspeople by quoting excerpts from the letters-to-the-editor column in the local paper. He adds his own assessment: "We need our self-respect. That is what is eroding on the hill— the foundations of our lives, the identities our industry and acquisitiveness have heaped up beneath the flag's blessing" (MW, p. 24). Even though some helpful adults have tried ineffec tually to penetrate their mystery, the only local adult who moves fearlessly among them is the town drunk. The hillies' point of view is no more clearly known than the towns people's: "'Life as it is . . . truly grooves'" (MW, p. 24). The final lines of the story are foreboding: "Fear reigns, and impatience. The downtown seems to be tightening like a fist .... And the hillies are slowly withdrawing upward .... They are getting ready for our attack" (MW, p. 25). The story is neatly rounded, opening with the estab lishment of Tarbox "by men fearful of attack" and conclud ing with their descendents ready to attack their own children. The problem and its irony are effectively pre sented, but since there are no characters as such, the mood is essayistic and we are bemused but not moved. 22k A similar piece* "When Everyone Was Pregnant," serves as a counterweight to "The Hillies." The style is even more compressed* little more than notes* but the point of view is single. The narrator is a commuting broker who reads a lot on the train when he is not reflecting on his generational era, the fifties, when all the young wives in his circle seemed always pregnant. Just as in "The Hillies" Updike captures the psychological tension of a brief period in a restricted place* he succeeds in evoking nostalgically "that time when everyone was pregnant guilt lessly" (MW, p. 92), the fifties. He does not deny that one of the products of those "not only kind but beautiful years" (MW, p. 91) is the horrible displacement of values exemplified by the hillies: "[The generation of the fifties] viewed the world through two lenses since dis carded: fear and gratitude. Young people now are many things but they aren’t afraid, and aren't grateful" (MW, p. 93). It remains to be seen, of course, whether the attitude of the hillies will become the dominant morality of the seventies; in the meantime, the implied author of "When Everyone Was Pregnant" dips not into his reading but his profession for a suitable metaphor: "Life a common stock that fluctuates in value. But you cannot sell, you must hold, hold till it dips to nothing" (MW, P. 96). The 225 babies who came from all those pregnancies "drive cars, push pot* shave* menstruate, riot for peace* eat macro biotic. Wonderful in many ways* but not ours, never ours, we see now" (MW, pp. 96-97). Several other stories are equally nostalgic. "The Deacon," for instance, is a touching story that resurrects one more time Updike's father, the prototype of George Caldwell of The Centaur. The protagonist is Miles, a fifty-year-old electrical engineer who finds it impossible to break a lifelong habit of church service, which had seen him function as a deacon in a half-dozen different Calvin ist churches across the country. "He was not, as he understood the term, religious" (MW, p. *+3), and he was uncertain of his salvation. Further, he was growing more resentful of the Heavenly hypothesis which "crushes us all to the same level of unworthiness, and redeems us all indiscriminately, elevating especially, these days, the irresponsible— the unemployable, the riotous, the out rageous, the one in one hundred that strays" (MW, p. ‘ ♦‘ O . Consequently, when he moves from Pennsylvania to New England, he stays away from church, until his Sunday fidgeting finally prompts his wife to send him: "'You want to go to church. Go. It's no sin'" (MW, p. *+5). He goes and before long is again a deacon, entrusted with the keys of the church and a great deal of responsibility. 226 One stormy night he alone arrives for a committee meeting. As he wanders through the old wooden edifice, it becomes clear that Updike means for it to stand for all Protestant Christianity. "Miles thinks, as upon a mystery" (MW, p. 47), about the prodigality of heating the building with a converted furnace: "Waste. Nothing but waste, salvage and waste. And weariness" (MW, p. 47). He looks at the minister's collection of books of sermons, "all second-hand, no, third-hand, worse, hundredth-hand, thousandth-hand, a coin rubbed blank" (MW, p. 47). Even so, though the storm shakes the building, "Miles feels the timbers of this art, with its ballast of tattered pews, give and sway . . . yet hold; and this is why he has come, to share the pride of this ancient thing that will not quite die ..." (MW, pp. 47-48). Imagine categorizing a story of one man's affirmation of the continuing strength of the ancient church as "nostalgia"! Yet Updike, confessedly a religious man, is frequently critical of the church's failure as an institu tion to meet the demands of an increasingly institutional ized society. He is especially critical of ministers who have become social service agents while preaching sermons "rubbed blank." Shortly before this story was published, Updike was interviewed on the British Broadcasting Corpora tion’s "Third Programme." In response to a comment by 227 Eric Rhode that his characters seemed frightened of religion, perhaps because Updike has a sense of the tradi tion of the past, "of the world existing as it is, and also of some anxiety, an inability to relate this to any sense of community," Updike replied: "I seem to have some expec tations of the ministry which it doesn't fulfil. . . . The church continues to exist in the modern world, and it seems 9 to me to be something rather gallant." The shortest of the fourteen stories in the opening section of Museums and Women, "The Carol Sing," is another moving example of the mixture of pathos and gallantry with which Updike views a religious institution of the past. Some of the citizens of Tarbox are gathered in the former Unitarian Church, now a Town Hall, for their annual carol sing. Updike punctuates his prose description of the place and the people with eight verses from familiar carols, giving the sense of a full evening's singing, but he con centrates on the missing voice of Mr. Burley, who had "had what you'd have to call a God-given bass" (MW, p. 1U2). Mr. Burley, a fifty-year-old bachelor as imperially favored as Richard Cory, had committed suicide by swallowing cyanide the day after Thanksgiving. "They say the cyanide ate out his throat worse than a blowtorch. Such a detail 2"John Updike Talks to Eric Rhode About the Shapes and Subjects of his Fiction," The Listener, 19 June 1969, p. 863. 228 is satisfying but doesn't clear up the mystery. Why?" (MW, p. 146). The narrator reflects on the effect of his absence; the group sings another carol, then the narrator "closes": Well, why anything? Why do we? Come every year sure as the solstice to carol tKese antiquities that if you listened to the words would break your heart. Silence, darkness, Jesus, angels. Better, I suppose, to sing than to listen. (MW, p. 147) The reader, who has perhaps sung along out of habit, returns to the verses and listens. The heartbreak comes with the realization that the universal hope of the songs had not sustained Mr. Burley: Rise, and bake your Christmas bread: Christians, rise! The world is bare, And blank, and dark with want and care, Yet Christmas comes in the morning. (MW, p. 147) The title of one final story from this first section, "I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me," which derives from Genesis xxxii.26, suggests that it too will be religious, but it is not, unless one chooses to regard eroticism as the new religion. In Genesis,, Jacob wrestles through the night with an angel, who asks to be released from his grip as day breaks. Jacob agrees, provided the angel will give him his blessing. In Updike's story, the wrestling takes the form of a dance between the male pro tagonist and a former lover, and the blessing— well, the blessing is what makes the story memorable. 229 Tom Brideson, a computer expert, has been hired away from Connecticut to Texas. Exhausted from their moving preparations, the Bridesons attend a going-away party given in their honor. One of the guests is Maggie Aldridge, with whom Tom had had an affair some time before. She is dressed in a white dress with enormous flowing sleeves, giving her the appearance of a traditional angel. Tom, egged on to do so by a dancing partner, asks Maggie for a dance. Their dance is described in terms of struggle. Like Jacob with the angel, Tom clings to Maggie between records and won't let go: "Softly fighting to be free, Maggie felt to him, with her great sleeves, like a sumptuous heavy bird that has evolved into innocence on an island" (MW, p. 5**). When they resume dancing, they fence a little in conversa tion about their affair. Tom presses her to talk about it and at last she says, dreamily, "'Five years ago you were my life and death, and now . . . you're just nothing'" (MW, pp. 55-56). Tom is paralyzed by her comment and, when someone cuts in on their dance, backs off, "relieved to let go, yet hoping, as he yielded her, for a yielding glance" (MW, p. 56). He receives only a stony stare. Soon the party breaks up. On the way home Tom's wife asks if Maggie had kissed him goodbye; he answers, truthfully, that she was 230 quite unfriendly. His wife then reports that Maggie had kissed her goodbye. Tom crossexamines her: Where did she kiss you? On the mouth. Warmly? "Very. I didn't know how to respond. I'd never been kissed like that, by another woman." "Did you respond?" "Well, a little. It happened so quickly." He must not appear too interested, or seem to gloat. "Well," Tom said, "she may have been drunk." "Or else very tired," Lou said, "like the rest of us." (MW, p. 58) Tom's reading of this kiss as the blessing he had sought is a fine example of the egoism of many of Updike's male protagonists. He is not concerned with what the kiss might have meant to the two women who exchange it, only that it is an indication that he is more than nothing in his ex-lover'8 life. This is a familiar theme in The Music School, but its essential mystery is seldom revealed so exquisitely as in this story. The theme of estrangement is continued in the five stories collected in Museums and Women under the rubric "The Maples." Their marriage's "rhythm of apathy and renewal" (MW, p. 222) has stretched from the nine years of the stories in The Music School to twelve years in "Marching Through Boston" and eighteen in the final story in the book, "Sublimating." Since the threat of separa tion has become more and more remote as the Maples have 231 adjusted eternally to what in each exasperates the other, Updike has introduced some new elements in their lives. For example, in "Marching Through Boston," Joan Maple has blossomed beautifully once again through her interest in the civil rights movement. When she returns from partici pating in Martin Luther King’s march to Montgomery, she checks each of her four sleeping children, then undresses in the darkness, removing underwear she had worn for seventy hours as Richard watches from his bed: "to the sleepy man in the bed it seemed a visitation, and he felt as people of old must have felt when greeted by an angel— adoring yet resentful, at this flamboyant proof of better things" (MW, p. 223). Even though the theme of one’s being jealous of the happiness he is expected to wish for another is the same as in "Twin Beds in Rome," it is considerably elevated in this story, and not just because of the image of Richard sleepily adoring yet resenting Joan's angelic appearance. In "Twin Beds in Rome” the essentially personal conflict is acted out against the backdrop of a dead culture; in "Marching Through Boston" the conflict, still personal but burdened with many additional social accretions (the Maples run into Joan's ex-analyst on the march, for example), is expressed in terms of a dynamic experience in actual cultural change. 232 Richard is so envious of Joan's purposeful happiness that he accompanies her on the march through Boston, even though he has a fever. Not only do they run into Joan's analyst, "a plump, doughy man with the troubled squint of a baker who has looked into too many ovens" (MW, p. 226), Richard meets a shockingly aged professor who had led him on a B+ course from Plato to Dante. The psychiatrist introduces them to his sister, who is accompanied by two teen-aged girls. Richard promptly is smitten by one of them, but resists the urge to tell her that he loves her when he looks at Joan and finds her "beautiful, like a poster, with far-seeing blue eyes and red lips parted in song" (MW, p. 231). The march ends in the rain on the Boston Common and Joan insists that they stay to hear Reverend King. All the way home and during his preparations to take his fever to bed, Richard cruelly attacks Joan with a querulous imitation of some of the Negro speakers: "'Ah'ze all riaight, Missy, jes' a tech o' double pneumonia, don't you fret none, we'll get the cotton in'" (MW, p. 233). He likes so much his adopted role that he cannot seem to stop, frightening the children with his acting: "'an' mebbe even de whaat folks up in de Big House kin shed a homely tear er two . . . .' He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him in bed, as if he had indeed 233 given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for atten tion from the depths of oppression” (MW, p. 23f; ellipsis Updike's). This ending is superb. Richard Maple, who has oppressed his wife for years because of his own self enslaved ego, in attempting to oppress his wife further by a cruel imitation of the leaders of a cause which in effect had freed her, is taken over by the role he has adopted, perhaps coming closer to understanding the nature of oppression than ever before in their relationship, perhaps even coming close to realizing its source within himself. Note that Updike uses one of Martin Luther King's favorite rhetorical devices, anadiplosis, in his description of Richard's emotion. The "birth, birth," "voice, a voice" pattern creates the expectation of a third at the end of the clause, "oppression, an oppression that . . . ." Updike creates a sense of moral ambiguity by suspend ing the pattern after the word "oppression." Richard Maple has felt a "weird tenderness" before, but he has never succeeded in sharing it with Joan, only destroying it. This time, however, when he cries out again in his Uncle Tom voice "for attention from the depths of oppression," Joan is not listening. She is "downstairs, talking firmly on the telephone" (MW, p. 234), and that is the end of the story. This beautifully balanced irony is sustained in the four remaining Maples stories, but it is especially effec tive in "Your Lover Just Called,” which sees Richard delighted at discovering his wife kissing a dinner guest. He is certain that the kiss is essentially innocent, but he uses it both as a justification for his past (and hoped for future) infidelities, and as an excuse for exercising his cruel wit on Joan. In "Eros Rampant” Joan "gets even" by having an affair of her own, and in the final story, "Sublimating," their seemingly-endless sexual war is con cluded with an uneasy truce as they agree to suspend all sexual activities with one another. After about a month’s abstinence they discuss the effects of their sublimation; Richard thinks it has improved his golf swing and Joan sees the flowers with new delight, but both confess that they dream of being dead. Joan sees the life of their family going on much the same without her, but Richard imagines all the women he has loved coming to share Joan's grief, although he doesn't tell her this: "In death, he felt, as he floated on his back in bed, he would grow to his true size" (MW, p. 278). Updike concludes his story and his collection with the Maples lying uneasily side by side, rather like the tomb effigies they had seen in Rome: "where usually she would roll over and turn her back, whether as provocation 235 or withdrawal it was up to him to decide, now she lay para lyzed, parallel to him" (MW, p. 278). She suggests that perhaps sublimation is cleansing: "'think of all that energy that went into the Crusades."' "'Yes, I think,' Richard agreed, unconvinced, 'we may be on to something'" (MW, p. 278). The contrast between what Richard says and what he believes, between what his mind, sensitive as it is to the multitudes of possibilities, is willing to accept and what his body demands is the source of the moral ambiguity with which this story closes; indeed, it is the source generally of the ambivalence which informs most of the stories of this collection and so much of Updike's short fiction. Talking with Union College students in 1970, Updike defended the emphasis in his fiction on the so-called smaller issues. He was replying to a question about his novels, but the word "book" certainly can be extended to his collections of short fiction: Positively, I see each book as a picturing of actual tensions, conflicts, and awkward spots in our private and social lives. My books feed, I suppose, on some kind of perverse relish in the fact that there are insolvable problems. There is no reconcili ation between the inner, intimate appetites and the external consolations of life. You want to live for ever, you want to have endless wealth, you have an endless avarice for conquests, crave endless freedom really. And yet, despite the aggressive desires, something within us expects no menace. But there is no way to reconcile these individual wants to the very real need of any society to set strict limits and to confine its members. (FP, p. 92) This final element, the need for a society to set limits on the behavior of its members, is perhaps the strongest new element to be stressed in the stories of Museums and Women. Several stories in addition to the ones discussed above contain this theme: "The Corner," in which neighbors gather to discuss the recklessness of the younger generation; "The Orphaned Swimming Pool," which sees a microcosmic society established around a pool temporarily abandoned to the neighborhood by a divorcing couple; "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying," a long semi-allegorical story of a young American bachelor traveling up the Nile with a tour of mixed nationalities; and even in three of the short fantasies included as "Other Modes": "Under the Micro scope," "During the Jurassic," and "The Baluchitherium." Generally speaking, the stories in Museums and Women add little to the thematic index of John Updike's canon, but they unquestionably serve as a further confirmation of his extra-ordinary skill in expressing the irreconcilable in delicately balanced and rather gorgeously decorated fictive structures. CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION It has been just twenty years since John Updike's first professional short story was written and accepted for publication in The New Yorker. Seventy-nine of his stories have been collected in the five books discussed in this thesis, but there are half again as many as yet uncollected, ranging from "Unstuck,” a 1962 New Yorker story lavishly praised by Elmer Suderman in his article "Art As a Way of Knowing,"1 to "Transaction," a heartbreaking "dirty" 2 story in the slick magazine Oui for March 1974. One brilliant story, "The Wait," which appeared in a February 1968 New Yorker, is nearly half as long as his novella Of the Farm and may remain uncollected for that reason, although it may prove to be the germ of the novella A Month of Sundays announced for summer 1974. Although Updike has repeatedly asserted that he wishes his stories to speak for themselves, he has spoken and written a great deal about the craft of writing, supplying 1Elmer F. Suderman, "Art As a Way of Knowing," Discourse, 12 (1969), 3-14. ^John Updike, "Transaction," Oui, March 1974, pp. 39- 40, 60, 84, 118, 120-122. 237 238 some guideposts for the serious student of his art which have been of much greater value than the rather desultory professional or scholarly criticism which has appeared. For example, in assessing the work of the late English novelist Denton Welch, he offered this definition of "gnostic suspense": Fiction captures and holds our interest with two kinds of suspense: circumstantial suspense— the lowly appetite, aroused by even comic strips, to know the outcome of any unresolved situation— and what might be called gnostic suspense, the expectation that at any moment an illumination will occur. Bald plot caters to the first; style, wit of expression, truth of observation, vivid painterliness, brooding musi- cality, and all the elegant rest pay court to the second. Gnostic suspense is not negligible— almost alone it moves us through those many volumes of Proust— but it stands to the other rather like charm to sex in a woman. We hope for both, and can even be more durably satisfied by charm than by sex (all animals are sad after coitus and after reading a detective story); but charm remains the ancillary and dispensable quality.3 This was written some time ago, in October 1966, three years after Norman Mailer's gratuitous remark that "[Updike] could become the best of our literary novelists if he could forget about style and go deeper into the literature of u sex." Yet it seems to me a perfect expression of the essential quality which pervades his collected short stories. Concentrating on the "Three Great Secret Things: 3 John Updike, "Books: Promising," The New Yorker, 29 October 1966, p. 2>tl. l i Norman Mailer, "Norman Mailer vs. Nine Writers," Esquire, 60 (July 1963), 67. 239 Sex, Religion, and Art," John Updike has managed to create a stunning body of short stories which are informed by their gnostic suspense. In his comparison, Updike has called attention to what has caused many critics to dismiss his stories, their "charm." Yet he points out that "style, wit of expression, truth of observation" may well provide a more durable satisfaction than bald plot and I cannot but agree. As Elmer Suderman writes in "Art As a Way of Knowing," an Updike story yields very little import, if we approach it with our reason, for it is not primarily discursive. It must rather be read as a work of art, springing from the power of language to create images that shape and form feeling for our cognition, a power fundamentally different from the normal communicative function of language. Those critics who complain that Updike has little to say often forget that the primary function of art, even of the short story, is not to make profound observations about the meaning of life but to present the forms of feeling for our examination.5 In The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers Updike presented for our examination a number of situations— not plots— in which youthful protagonists searched their experiences for epiphanous illuminations which, when they were perceived, were couched in terms of moral ambiguity. The stories were simply structured but their patterns of imagery were sketched with great subtlety. In The Music School and Museums and Women the protagonists had lost their inno cence; the illumination they sought was for some kind of ^Suderman, p. 11. 240 value in being estranged from the lives they had known. Because the gnostic suspense of these stories required the interaction of characters and situations of greater complexity, Updike devoted more attention to his stories’ internal structure. There is more "brooding musicality" in these later stories, but certainly no loss in the pre cision of his imagery. Bech: A Book is notable, of course, for its delineation of character and for its humor. Even though the stories are connected by a single theme, the seven stories of Bech each fulfill all the elements of the definition of gnostic suspense. There is no need (or space) to reiterate the evidence here; I have tried to adduce it all along in my discussion of the biographical and aesthetic backgrounds and in my analysis of representative stories from each of the collections. It is informative, however, to compare Updike's attitudes toward his art from three stages of his career. He closed his Paris Review interview with the late Charles Thomas Samuels with this remark: My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conserva tion of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. (PR, p. 117) Later, after being tagged with the catch phrase, "He writes well, but has nothing to say," Updike patiently explained both his desire to express the "middleness of 241 life” and his belief in the necessity of ambiguity. Talk ing with John Somers in a filmed interview, he said: From "little” on up I had the impression that the American middle class was somehow more interesting than it was being given credit for. There is a kind of pain and a kind of surprisingness . . . that I wished to depict, to deliver. One is accused by critics of not having enough to say, and in a way I at least don't have any slogan to impart, but I do feel pregnant with an almost unsayable intuition about the changing or perhaps decaying of [the] middle class. Life, for me at least, has a kind of "yes, but" quality. It's constantly hovering around a middle. ... To capture in some kind of full honesty this— well— muddled, sacred mediocrity of life has been productive of stories. Finally, Updike was interviewed in the May 1974 Harvard Magazine by Josh Rubins, a sometimes-playwright who was mostly interested in Updike's just-released "play," Buchanan Dying: The only way to stay alive as a writer after forty is to become wise. You've used a lot of your youthful juice and a lot of that youthful certainty that you have something, that your life— with some refraction and ornamentation— is in itself interesting. . . . I have more faith than ever in fiction. ... To capture the mermaid live, it's the only net we have, and I still have lots of things that I want to say about lived life.7 It seems to me that Updike's goals have been con sistent and have been consistently met in these five C From a filmed interview with John Somers, "John Updike," Indiana University, 1966. n Josh Rubins, "The Industrious Drifter in Room 2," Harvard Magazine, 76 (May 1974), 44. collections of short stories. Not only has he created something new without destroying something else, he has helped preserve not only some of the purity of this particular genre but also some of the sanctity of experi ences shared by large numbers of readers who struggle like his protagonists with the moral ambiguity of life. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2U3 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY1 Primary Sources Updike* John. Assorted Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knopf* 1965. _. Bech: A Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf* 1970. Buchanan Dying: A Play. New York: Alfred A. Knopf ,"1974“---- ------------- _______ . The Centaur. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. _______ . Couples. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. _______ . Of the Farm. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. _______ . Midpoint and Other Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. _. Museums and Women and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1972. The Music School: Short Stories. New York: XIFredTT KnopF, 1966'."------------ _______ . Olinger Stories: A Selection. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. _______ . Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. New York: Alfred AT Knopf, 1962. The Poorhouse Fair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ns9.-------------------- The principle of selection was to include all works mentioned in the text, even though not formally footnoted. A number of uncollected items by Updike are included because they are not in the "Checklist of Updike Criticism" in the Spring 1974 "John Updike Number" of Modern Fiction Studies. This "Checklist" is the best general bibliography presently available. 244 245 . Rabbit Redux. New York: Alfred A. Knopf* 1971. . Rabbit, Run. New York: Alfred A. Knopf* 1960. The Same Door: Short Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf* 1959. Uncollected Stories* Essays* and Reviews Updike, John. "Books: Is There Life After Golf?" The New Yorker, 48 (29 July 1972), 76-78. "Books: A New Meliorism." The New Yorker, 50 TIT July 1974), 83-86. "Daughter, Last Glimpses of." The New Yorker, 4"§ C5 November 1973), 50-53. "Books: Promising." The New Yorker, 42 TJW October 1966), 236-245. "Ethiopia." The New Yorker, 49 (14 January T5T**), 28-32. "The Gun Shop." The New Yorker, 48 (25 November T5T2), 42-47. "Nevada." Playboy, 21 (January 1974), 167-168, 24(5—242. "Remembrance of Things Past." Horizon, 14 rAut:umn 1972), 102-105. "Son." The New Yorker, 49 (21 April 1973), 53^35. "Transaction." Oui, March 1974, pp. 38-40, 60, S¥7 118. 120-122. "Unstuck." The New Yorker, 37 (3 February 1962), 54^27. "The Wait." The New Yorker, 43 (3 February T55"8), 34-96. . "What Does the Future Hold?" In "Novelists WrTte About the Novel." The San Diego Union, 12 May 1974, pp. E-l, E-6. 246 Secondary Sources Aldridge, John W. "The Private Vice of John Updike,” in Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis. New York: DavidMcKay Co., 1^66. Pp. 164- ITTH Baldeshwiler, Eileen. ”The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History.” Studies in Short Fiction, 6 (Summer 1969), 443-453. Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971. "Bigger and Better." Rev. of Pigeon Feathers by John Updike. Times Literary Supplement, 1 February 1963, p. 73. Burchard, Rachael C. John Updike: Yea Sayings. Carbon- dale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Clarke, Gerald. "Checking in with Truman Capote." Esquire, 78 (November 1972), 136-137, 187-188, 190. Cowley, Malcolm. "Holding the Fort on Audubon Terrace." Saturday Review, 54 (3 April 1971), 17, 41-42. DeBellis, Jack. "The Group and John Updike." Sewanee Review, 72 (Summer l9e4), 531-536. "Desperate Weakling." Rev. of Rabbit, Run. Time, 76 (7 November 1960), 108. Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. Twayne's United States Authors Series, Mo. 214. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972. Emerson, R. W. "Nature." Rpt. in Great Short Works of the American Renaissance, Willard Thorp, ed. New Yor£: Harper and kow, 1968, Pp. 22-57. Enright, D. J. "Updike's Ups and Downs." Holiday, 38 (November 1965), 162-165. Rpt. as "The Inadequate American: John Updike's Fiction." In his Con spirators and Poets. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour, 1966. Pp. "114-140. 247 Fisher, Richard E. "John Updike: Theme0and Form in the Garden of Epiphanies." Moderna Sprak, 56 (Fall 1962), 255-260. FitzGerald, Edward. "The RubliyAt of Omar Khayyam," Victoriyi Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Pp. 329-335. Gado, Frank. "A Conversation with John Updike." The Idol, 47 (Spring 1971), 3-32. Rpt. in his First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing. Schenectady, New York: Union College Press, 1973. Pp. 80-109. Geismar, Maxwell. "The American Short Story Today." Studies on the Left, 4 (Spring 1964), 21-27. Geller, Evelyn. "WLB Biography: John Updike." Wilson Library Bulletin, 36 (September 1961), 67. Hamilton, Alice, and Kenneth Hamilton. The Elements of John Updike. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Serdmans, 1967. Harper, Howard M., Jr. "John Updike: The Intrinsic Problem of Human Existence." In his Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin7~an3T Updike. “Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina PreiiT 1967. Pp. 162-190. Hicks, Granville. "Generations of the Fifties: Malamud, Gold, and Updike." In Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons, eds., The Creative Present: Notes on " New York: DouFleday, Hiller, Catherine. Personality and Persona: The Narrators in John Updike’s fiction. Diss. Brown University, Hills, Rust. "Fiction." Esquire, 79 (April 1973), 30, 34, 38, 40. Howard, Jane. "Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?" Life, 61 (4 November 1966), 74-82. Hyman, Stanley E. "The Artist as a Young Man." New Leader, 45 (19 March 1962), 22-23. 13-237. 1577 248 . "Chiron at Olinger High." Standards; A Chronicle of Books for Our Time. New York: Horizon Press, 19657 Pp.128-132. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero, ed. by Theodore Spencer. A New Edition Incorporating Additional Manuscript Pages, ed. by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963. Kort, Wesley A. "The Centaur and the Problem of Vocation." In his Shriven Selves: Religious Problems in Recent American fiction"! Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1^72. Pp. 64-69. La Course, Guerin. "The Innocence of John Updike." The Commonweal, 77 (8 February 1963), 512-514. Mailer, Norman. "Norman Mailer vs. Nine Authors." Esquire, 60 (July 1963), 63-69, 105. McCoy, Robert. "John Updike's Literary Apprenticeship on The Harvard Lampoon." Modern Fiction Studies, 20 (Spring 19?4), 3-12. Mizener, Arthur. "The American Hero as High-School Boy: Peter Caldwell." In his The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel. Boston: Houghton MifFTin, 1957. Pp. 247-266. Montgomery, Marion. "Emotion Recollected in Tranquility: Wordsworth's Legacy to Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway." The Southern Review, NS 6 (July 1970), 710-721. Novak, Michael. "Updike's Quest for Liturgy." The Commonweal, 78 (10 May 1973), 192-195. Peden, William. The American Short Story: Front Line in the National Defense ofLiterature. Boston: Houghton MiFf lin, 1964“ Pp7~61P7TI Podhoretz, Norman. "A Dissent on Updike." Show, 3 (April 1963), 49-52. In his Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing. New York: Farrar, Straus and-Siroux, 196^1 Pp7 251-257. Rhode, Eric, interviewer. "John Updike Talks to Eric Rhode about the Shapes and Subjects of His Fiction." The Listener, 81 (19 June 1969), 862-864. 249 Rubins, Josh. "The Industrious Drifter in Room 2." Harvard Magazine, 76 (May 1974), 42-45, 51, Somers, John, narrator and interviewer, "A Filmed Inter view with John Updike." Indiana University, 1966. Thirty minutes. Suderman, Elmer F. "Art As a Way of Knowing." Discourse, 12 (1968), 3-14. Sullivan, Walter. "Updike, Spark and Others." Sewanee Review, 74 (Summer 1966), 709-716. Tanner, Tony. "The American Novelist as Entropologist." London Magazine, 10 (October 1970), 5-18. Rpt. in his City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970. New York: Harper andRow, 1971. Pp. 141-1&2. Todd, Richard. "Updike and Barthelme: Disengagement." Atlantic, 230 (December 1972), 126-127, 130-132. Trilling, Lionel. "Manners, Morals, and the Novel." In his pie Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. FTew York: The Viking Press, 1951. p p T m - h i . _____Sincerity and Authenticity: pie Charles Eliot Norton~Lectures, 1369-1970. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,1972. "View from the Catacombs." Time, 91 (26 April 1968), 66-75. Ward, John A. "John Updike's Fiction." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 5 (Spring-Summer ’ 1962), r?-w:---------------------- Wyatt, Bryant N. "Supernaturalism in John Updike's Fiction." Diss. University of Virginia 1970.

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Creator Mccoy, Charles Robert (author)

Core Title Moral Ambiguity In John Updike'S Short Stories

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Moore, Stephen C. (committee chair), Nichol, John W. (committee member), Robb, J. Wesley (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-751329

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