BOOKS

...To keynote his lyrical closing sermon, Tom summons from memory the language of Christianity's greatest theologian, Paul: "If Christ be not risen, we of all men are most miserable...

...As Tom reminisces about their courtship, Updike roars in with paragraphs which parallel Tom and Jane's sexual explorations with her father's lectures on the development of Western moral systems...

...Grace, in Tom's Reformed tradition, does not build on nature...

...It presents a thoroughly comprehensive review of Negro American autobiography over a period of nearly a hundred and fifty years, moving from the important slave narratives (of Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, John Thompson, Moses Grandy, Frederick Douglass, et al) through the time of Booker T. Washington and DuBois and Weldon Johnson into the period of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, of Malcolm X and George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver...

...Since there is no special correspondence, however, between Spinoza and kissing or Kant and caressing a breast through a sweater, this potentially provocative analogy runs its extended course without any real effect...

...Butterfield's book is an enormously impressive performance...

...To cope with these anguishing realities, Marshfield invokes "[a] belief in God which has made my life one long feast of inconvenience and unreason...

...The Alicia episodes, which were published before the entire novel as a self-contained short-story, flesh out the first of Tom's homiletic topics: that adultery is the divinelyREVIEWERS Bernard bergonzi, British critic and professor of English at the University of Warwick, is the author of Hero's Twilight and, most recently, The Situation of the Novel and T. S. Eliot...

...Updike's description of Harry Angstrom's soaring golf drive in Rabbit Run was an ecstatic explanation of human union with God...

...Rosenblatt's extrusion from his purview of social-historical and political perspectives is so unremitting that books which are in point of fact drenched in the terrors of American history-Wright's Native Son, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ellison's Invisible Man-are, on his reckoning, often made to appear strangely discarnate with respect to the cultural environment in which they are so deeply rooted...

...Rosenblatt's account, the world of Weldon Johnson's "ex-colored man" and Wright's Bigger Thomas and Baldwin's John Grimes and Ellison's nameless protagonist is a world of unreason and absurdity-a virtual madhouse that, almost inevitably, calls forth the Gothic tale of terror...

...In "The Deacon," published in Women, Museums, and Other Pieces, he played masterfully on the two meanings of "church" using the edifice as a metaphor for the ecclesia...

...Roger Rosenblatt, in his account of the kind of story Negro American fic-tionists have tended to design, and Stephen Butterfield, in his survey of the adjacent terrain of Negro autobiography, have given us two interesting and useful books, and books which may help in some measure to redeem critical discussion of Black writers from its customary commitment to "Agit-Prop" rather than to analytical discrimination...

...Alicia provides the sexual-sacramental goodies which Marshfield's marriage lacks, but he finds no need to concern himself with her future...

...The ensuing reconciliation is celestially-ordained and final in the short story, but only brief in the novel...

...Marsh-field has been banished to an unstructured desert retreat house because he has seduced (or has been seduced by) all kinds of women who came to him for spiritual guidance...

...Rosenblatt's field of study is far too restricted and his reticence about the fundamental presuppositions controlling his inquiry is far too carefully kept for his work to be considered any sort of essay in genuinely systematic "theory...

...He also muses about his own two sons, one a disciplined athlete, the other a young hedonist: "A spartan and a sybarite, the trunk stands declared in its forking...

...These ramblings quickly disclose that the minister had been living in a faithful, if emotionally sterile, marriage with Jane Chillingworth, the daughter of his seminary ethics professor...

...Precisely, I worshipped her, adored her flaws as furiously as her perfections, for they were hers...

...it is Updike's substance of things hoped for, his evidence of things unseen.for, his evidence of things unseen...

...The central figure of this blatantly kerygmatic novel is a profligate parson, the Reverend Tom Marshfield...

...It is, indeed, an immense body of literature that he has scanned: nothing of significance has been neglected, and the book will surely remain the definitive synoptic study of its field for many years to come...

...daniel morrissey is the personal clerk of a federal judge in Chicago...

...During this month of enforced recollection Tom spills out graphic details of his fall from (or into) grace in a daily series of written reflections...

...Tom as much as admits that his escapade with Alicia was sinfully devoid of any real concern for her welfare, but he makes it out to be salvific...

...As a compendium of Protestant faith, this work fits the Biblical definition...

...belief is...

...But this prolific chronicler of American anxiety has also enjoyed setting human affairs in a subtle religious perspective...

...Now with A Month of Sundays, Updike's neoorthodox Christianity comes full-blown out of his literary closet...

...It is an essay in historical criticism which offers a wonderfully spacious view of the major shifts and mutations in the development of Negro thought and ideology since the middle years of the nineteenth century...

...it overwhelms it...

...He conceives it most essentially to be a story of inversions and transpositions, of contrariety and paradox: it is a story in which people . . . behave savagely in order to be considered civilized, rise in order to fall, sin in order to gain salvation, are rewarded for virtue by damnation, assert their presence by disappearing, are old when they are young, act as children in old age, are emancipated so that they may be enslaved, see when they are blind, hate in order to love, die in order to live...

...nathan a. scott, jr., is Shailer Ma-thews Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago...

...When Alicia confronts Jane and pushes for a divorce which would ruin his career as a churchman, Marshfield weasels back to his wife...

...He has, it is true, an undeniable talent for the kind of montage to which the New Criticism gave a great prestige, for the plotting of the story that fictions would tell were they endowed with the dialectical cleverness of Criticism...

...Yet, though his rigorous abstinence from any sort of Geistesgeschichte may produce the illusion of rigorous aesthetic analysis, the fact of the matter is that his "decoding" procedures work so equally well on materials radically incommensurate in literary substance and he keeps so carefully neutral an "objectivity" in relation to his subject that his analysis, say, of Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Uncalled and Ellison's Invisible Man is quite uncalculated to support any significant distinction in value as between the two novels-and thus, at last, his book, for all its sophistications, may not advance any more genuinely critical an assessment of the work of Negro writers than the crudest manifestos issued by some exponent of Black Aesthetic...

...And, in this mode, he is a superb reader, so gifted that no one who talks henceforth about his material (most especially about Langston Hughes' Simple fables) can do so without reference to many of his brilliant insights...

...A Month of Sundays sanctioned complement to marriage...

...And -in the manner of a Dorothy Van Ghent or a Reuben Brower-it is this latent, veiled, imperspicuous story in the literature produced by Negro American novelists that Mr...

...Indeed, Mr...

...Rosenblatt wants his book to be thought of as presenting "a theory of black fiction," but the texts and writers closely studied are too limited in number for any claim so large as this to be taken very seriously...

...Rosenblatt is after...

...Like a clerical Warren Beatty, Marshfield finds himself helpless when alone with women...

...A Month of Sundays JOHN UPDIKE Knopf, $6.95 DANIEL MORRISSEY John Updike is best known for his twin themes of adultery and aging ex-athletes...

...But it is in his diary where the distraught minister wages a personal armageddon against the gospels of sexual gratification and social activism...

...But it is also an essay in literary criticism which brilliantly recounts the various styles of self-definition that representative Negro spokesmen have forged, as they have undertaken within the terms of the autobiographical form to create through the medium of language a selfhood stout enough to withstand the fierce weathers of American culture...

...When the narrative returns to current events Marshfield describes how his family's fifteen years of domestic complacency was disturbed by an earthy fling with the church organist, Alicia Crick...

...His outlook is also unabashedly antinomian...

...Though not everyone of Updike's carefully-turned phrases scores a poetic coup, A Month of Sundays is a theological tour de force and a pleasurable, enriching book...

...He intersperses this thirty-one-day memoir with four sermons delivered to his hypothetical reader each Sunday of his exile...

...A good bit of this he can work off at the desert retreat golfing or playing cards with fellow errant clergymen...

...And, on both levels, Mr...

...Ethics are not important...

...Marshfield ultimately wrenches over the emptiness of being a professional do-gooder and the general hostility of the universe...

...And thus, though he treats a variety of material-from the period of Paul Laurence Dunbar to that of Ellison-Mr...

...There he also ponders the wretched condition of his senile father, like Marshfield a minister, but a disciple of the early twentieth-century liberalism which Tom finds insipid...

...His unstated her-meneutical premise-like that of his forebears in the New Criticism of a generation ago-seems to be that the literary text, as we first encounter it, represents a sort of inert facticity, a sort of self-alienation, from which it can be rescued only as the critic undertakes to unravel that story underneath the story actually recounted by a given fable, the story indeed that it wants most to tell but which it can body forth only with the kind of obstetrical assistance that criticism provides...

...Nor, in dealing with those writers whom he elects to consider, does he always clearly indicate why he chooses to concentrate on certain particular texts of theirs rather than on others that might equally well, and perhaps even more decisively, figure as data for "a theory of black fiction...

...and thus I attained, in the bound of a few spring weeks, a few illicit lays, the attitude which saints bear toward God, . . . that is, of forgiving Him the pain of infants, the inexorability of disease, the wantonness of fortune, the billions of fossilized deaths, the helplessness of the young, the idiocy of the old, the craftsmanship of torturers, the authority of blunderers, the savagery of accident, the unbreatheability of water, and all the other repulsive flecks on the face of Creation...

...Indeed, the two books taken together, Butterfield's and Rosenblatt's, represent a body of funded insight which will henceforth very much require to be drawn upon in any further explorations of this body of writings...

...And thus the Black hero is an anti-hero, one who makes no large impression on the human City, who faces an order so hostile as to allow him to leave only the merest trace of his having lived at all, and who is finally so petered out by his struggle for recognition and justice that he simply disappears, descending into something like the oblivion that claims the protagonist of Invisible Man-this acquiescence in self-effacement being perhaps the last, the ultimate, gesture of self-assertion...

...Butterfield's book represents a far more "scholarly" undertaking...

...Which is to say that, in Mr...

...It is a world in which time and morality are out of joint, and there is no escaping its infernal cruelties either by way of religion or education or love or any retreat into reversionary primitivism: not even laughter offers a possibility of transcendence...

...The fiction of William Attaway, Owen Dod-son, Julian Mayfield, William Gardner Smith, William Demby, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Fair, and John Williams-to mention only a portion of the material he scants-is discussed not at all...

...Exposure and exile inevitably follow, leaving Marshfield in a state of spiritual shock...