Self-Consciousness, by John Updike
Barnes, Fred
John Updike is different from other writers. I got a glimpse of how different one winter afternoon in 1978 when he came to Cambridge to chat for a couple of hours with Nieman Fellows at Harvard. I...
...Our family simply had been poor, and voted Democrat out of crude self-interest...
...Over the years, in trips to New York and to colleges and conferences, he's gotten to know most every literary figure in the country...
...I asked Updike if, as a frequent reviewer of books, he found it unpleasant to criticize writers he knows personally...
...Not being an inhabitant of the New York literary world—he lives north of Boston—Updike said it should be easier for him to take on other writers...
...I had voted for Lyndon Johnson, and thus had earned my American right not to make a political decision for another four years...
...I'd guess he voted for Reagan once, in 1984, and then for Bush...
...it was there that I felt the real news was...
...He said "genuine elections" should be held in South Vietnam, noting that it was "absurd to suggest that a village in the grip of guerrillas has freely chosen...
...Antiwar agitation, "from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [President] Johnson by the Eastern establishment...
...This collection of six autobiographical essays confirms my impression that Updike is more than just a prolific novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, and literary critic...
...About some mundane aspects of middle-class life, Updike is downright lyrical...
...If the Communists win a fair election, he wrote, "we should pick up our chips and leave...
...He calls statements by Norman Mailer and Jules Feiffer "frivolous...
...C7 Next Month (for sure) Whittaker Chambers, Journalist SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: MEMOIRS John Updike/Alfred A. Knopf/257 pp...
...Okay, I admit I've read only four of his novels...
...So his list of reviewable authors is narrow, chiefly the unknown and the dead...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...That's enough for me...
...At his local North Shore beach, "to be waved past the ticket booth by its pith-helmeted guardians, who knew us by sight and name, and to proceed to the town lot to which our taxes and beach sticker entitled us, and to park, and unload our lunch-basket, our toys, our towels and mats and paperbacks, and to walk down the boardwalk in procession, myself the leader and evident support of so much healthy flesh—what pagan, bourgeois bliss...
...To my surprise, he said yes—and without paying lip service to artistic integrity, literary values, conscience, and so on...
...After they'd entertained visiting Soviet writers in New York and Connecticut, "Miller looked at me and said sighingly, 'Jesus, don't they make you glad you're an American?' " Says Updike: "I was glad...
...I had moved to New England, in part, to be closer to Ted Williams," he says...
...Though the New York Times reported at the time (1966) that he was the only American writer "unequivocally for" the war, Updike says he wasn't either unequivocal or alone...
...He is a Boston Red Sox fan...
...He loves a day with wife and kids at the beach, partly because the sun makes his psoriasis patches fade...
...Those who would not, let them move north...
...Updike is a populist and a patriot...
...The United States, he writes, is "an easy country to love...
...He doesn't mention how he has voted since 1972...
...If this isn't unusual in an Eastern literary figure, I don't know what is...
...Pacifism is a luxury a generous country can allow a small minority of its members, but the pacifism invoked in the anti-Vietnam protest was hypocritical and spurious," he says...
...Also extraordinary...
...He seethed at antiwar literary types to the point of lifting his ban on attacking fellow writers, or at least their elitist politics...
...Updike, by the way, doesn't call himself a hawk, but talks of "not being a dove...
...I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would," he writes...
...When asked by a British editor to spell it out, his salient sentence was this: "I am for our intervention if it does some good—specifically, if it enables the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political fortune...
...He was loyal, and so was I." Updike is also a Democrat, or at least was...
...His father submitted without protest to a loyalty oath for state employees...
...The antiwar crowd distorted pacifism...
...It was there that I felt comfortable...
...18.95 Fred Barnes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 51...
...Under the banner of a peace movement, rather, war was being waged by a privileged few upon the administration and the American majority that had elected it...
...Another "source of my sense of grievance" was that he hadn't voted "for Abbie Hoffman or Father Daniel Berrigan or Reverend William Sloane Coffin or Jonathan Schell or Lillian Hellman or Joan Baez or Jane Fonda or Jerry Rubin or Dr...
...But it isn't, he said...
...His happy childhood in Shillington, Pennsylvania, as the only child of a father who taught school and a mother who wrote unpublished novels and short stories, helped make him that way...
...They, secure in the upper-middle class, were Democrats out of human sympathy and humanitarian largesse, because this was the party that helped the poor...
...Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas," Updike writes...
...His view of the war was fairly simple...
...There was even a time when playwright Arthur Miller understood, Updike says...
...He's a likable, reasonably normal, heterosexual writer who's not at war with mankind, organized religion, America, or our bourgeois culture...
...But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing . . . was south, or west, away from Communism...
...He had no trouble swearing that he was loyal to the United States," Updike writes in the most riveting essay in the book, an account of his defiant hawkishness on Vietnam...
...rr he Vietnam war and its strident, 1 elitist opponents brought out Up-dike's loyalist streak...
...Spock or Eugene McCarthy...
...His attitude struck me as being awfully kind and genteel...
...Updike says he has a "taste for American life," and not the upper-class or bohemian variety...
...But he didn't become a Democrat the way the folks he met as an undergraduate at Harvard did...
...James Michener and Marianne Moore backed the war, and so did W. H. Auden...
...Updike's most appealing trait—political trait—is his unequivocal anti-Communism...
...He voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and, implausibly, for George McGovern in 1972...
...A trip to the Soviet Union and another to Eastern Europe gave Updike "a hardened antipathy to Communism...
...He sees himself "as a literary spy within average, public-school, supermarket America...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
