The Witches of Eastwick
Corwin, Phillip
I pondered over this: the seeming disparity between the chant and the other more or less identical folk/pop songs. A few days later at a workshop a theologian asked us to reflect on what our...
...John Updike Knopt', $15.95, 307 pp...
...from Constantinople it passed, via the marauding Crusaders "and the Knights Templar network, to Lirey, France...
...It focused primarily on the lives of the black women who helped create and nurture this unique art form: the Barret Sisters, Zella Jackson Price, and Willie Mae Ford Smith...
...Around the time of the cathedral concert a documentary film about Gospel music called Say Amen, Somebody was released in New York...
...She shrugs and gives him a blank look...
...in other words, alien to all traditional artistic categories, the image on the us the particulars of white, middle-class social life in the rural Northeast...
...Perhaps no major writer in English since Yeats has been able to create literature out of personal experience to the extent Updike has...
...Perhaps no major American writer since Faulkner, or Hawthorne, has been able to find such richness in regionalism and parochial superstition...
...Michael Zeik E XCEPT for my picture in a high school yearbook, there is not a holy relic in the house...
...The man has wounds...
...This music sets every cell, every fiber and molecule of your being on fire...
...Also contrary to all artistic tradition, the wounds appeared on the wrists, not the _9 hands, of the crucified...
...REPORT ON THE SHROUD OF TURIN John H. Heller Houghton Mifflin, $15.95, 225 pp...
...Books: OH, WHAT THE HEX I I N a memoir written in 1962, entitled~ Tile WITCHE| OF EASTWICK "The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood," John t Updike told how his three great boyhood fascinations were sex, religion, and art...
...Halfway through the film it becomes apparent that these women are not just singers, they are healers, shamans, and ministers...
...Susan Osborn, at her best, demands this vulnerability of both her audience and herself...
...Like ingredients in a _9 witches' brew, they have been mixed again and again and then poured into different molds: small-town Pennsylvania, small-town Massachusetts, middle-class marriage, the roving life of an author, Africa...
...They put us on the spot and make us feel as if we are the ones performing...
...Vulnerability, in other words, is vulnerability...
...They have not radically altered in the past twenty-two years, through twenty-eight books...
...What are the chances that we, the audience take when we choose, or allow, ourselves to listen...
...Alas, it is the conception, the interspersed commentary, that is multi-dimensional...
...However, it also beckons that which might more easily have been left untouched and unquestioned...
...But only rarely when listening to Susan Osborn...
...The time is the 1960s during the Vietnam war and the rising American drug culture...
...Again and again John Updike has told I Getting the picture II I INQUEST ON THE SNROUD OF TURIN Joe Nickell Prometheus Books, $14.95, 178 pp...
...The church scenes are filled with teary, emotionally charged parishioners (not to mention the people in the movie theater...
...A few days later at a workshop a theologian asked us to reflect on what our earliest images were of what it was to be a "good man" or a "good woman...
...Predictably, Darryl and the three witches become involved, and then disinvolved...
...Susan Osborn, like the women in SayAmen, Somebody, is a healer...
...The linen cloth can be traced back 627 years to the town of Lirey, France...
...ROBIN H. BIDGOOD (Robin H. Bidgood is a free-lance writer...
...Its history prior to 1357 is conjectural...
...Yet Updike's achievement seems to be more one of artistic virtuosity than of coming to terms with a great theme, and often he dazzles with a superficiality that reminds one of a Fourth of July sparkler -- sparks but no heat, light but no illumination...
...What can...
...In an early Updike story, "The Astronomer," the narrator relates a visit to him and his young wife by a learned astronomer...
...Maybe...
...It seems to me that faith, the essence within that enables us to listen, to hear not only music but Life, involves both angst and joy...
...Sukie, who can turn milk into cream, has"permanized" Commonweal: 340 her ex-husband in plastic and uses him as a place mat...
...Moreover, their supernatural powers call into question, in a playful way, the role of spiritual energy in the modern world...
...Or, if it matters...
...In a demanding and hostile tone Willie Mae's son asks, in essence, why she thinks she, a woman, had the right to play minister, i.e...
...Her concerts, when she taps into that primordial, unfathomable energy are not just concerts, they're rites of passage...
...And while this music is entertaining I would by no means call it nice, and certainly not non-threatening...
...her former husband hangs in the cellar of her ranch house "among the dried herbs and simples and was occasionally sprinkled, a pinch at a time, into a philtre, for piquancy...
...Listening to this music, this high-powered pulling out of all the stops, this no-holds-barred Gospel music, empties and invigorates you in a way that other art forms rarely achieve...
...There is, deposited in a vault in Turin, a long linen cloth, fourteen by three and a half feet wide, on which appear two faint images, head-to-head, exhibiting respectively the front and back of a nude man...
...First photographed in 1898, the images produced a "positive," not a "negative," imprint...
...the characters themselves, and their situations, lack transcendence...
...In spite, or perhaps because, of its challenging nature, Gospel is revitalizing and healing...
...At the end one wonders, in the words of one of Updike's coven, which witch is which...
...I have somehow managed to practice the faith without too much paraphernalia...
...it hastens from you all that is vital, alive, and burgeoning...
...The team, by the way, had only a few Catholic~members...
...II Shroud was itself a "negative...
...Susan Osborm was herself in attendance, and at one point she said: "You know, my image of a good woman was someone who was nice all the time, at all costs...
...Since even the New York Times - - evidently worried by the possibility of a mass religious conversion of its reading audience -- saw fit to write an editorial on the Shroud, I can presume that most of you know what has been going on...
...From the vast array of his objections, I present the four that stuck in my mind...
...First of all, the New Testament itself is completely silent on the existence of such a remarkable burial cloth...
...The Middle Ages, of course, are notorious for the manufacture of religious relics...
...White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad...
...Thirdly, the particular weave of the cloth was unknown until medieval times...
...Edessa, in Anatolia, safe from the persecutions of the pagan Roman Empire, had a Christian community which in the first century A.D., boasted of an image of the Lord' 'not made by human hands...
...He has done it each time with shimmering, learned bursts of words, wit, and in this case, witchery...
...And the ability to truly listen (and a performer "listens" just as much if not more than her audience), this receptiveness to the New is not too different from an openness in our beings that often results in pain and ultimately wounds...
...and the Shroud, insists Joe Nickell, ex-professional magician and private detective, is one of them...
...I also have a problem with certain details of the Fatima story...
...Jane, a cellist, can fly through the air...
...In essence, this novel is yet another charming, clever, deft spell conjured up by an incredibly prolific imagination in Updike's continuous battle against the demons of the Enlightenment...
...The confusion, the scrambling pasts and spirits, and the rubble of footnotes (which turn into literature) areall central for Updike...
...a treasured amusement, but no treasure...
...The wounds are the wounds of crucifixion...
...a man's job...
...There is a definite backlash that they must contend with as a result of their "calling...
...The problem with that brief story, however, is also the problem with Updike's new novel...
...The narrator has been reading Kierkegaard...
...Enter Darryl Van Horne, a pushy Manhattanite who sets up an alchemist's lab in an old mansion, and promises to refurbish it in a way that may prove an environmental threat both to the marshes and mentality of Eastwick...
...She doesn't say much, actually.., but that doesn't stop her from singing...
...What are the chances that she takes, or a Gospel singer takes, when they sing and totally open themselves to this power...
...For there is in Updike's work, and in this novel as well, invariably a war between rationalism and mysticism, between what is known, felt, and sensuously apprehended on the one hand, and what is beyond reason on the other...
...After the astronomer leaves, the narrator says: "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 everything in the room with them, including the rubble of footnotes bound into Kierkegaard...
...PORTRAIT OF JESUS Frank C. Tribbe Stein & Day, $19.95, 281 pp...
...Alexandra, for her part, whose former husband rests"on a high kitchen shelf in a jar, reduced to multi-colored dust, the cap screwed on tight," can create thunderstorms...
...she say...
...the rest were Jews, I June 1984:341...
...Now for the other side of the story, In 1978, the church permitted a team of forty scientists to study the Shroud for a period of five days, using almost every conceivable-type of modern technology...
...And yet the men in this film, the lovers and sons and brothers of these women, are clearly intimidated by their music and their power...
...In fact, the sexually active trio of witches are all artists of a sort: Alexandra is a sculptress, Jane is a musician, and Sukie is a writer...
...The chant, and the cathedral pieces, on the other hand, go far beyond mere entertainment...
...But at the end, one is hard pressed to take seriously the spirits and parts and rubble of Kierkegaardean implications...
...All this is by way of personal background, before telling you that I am thoroughly impressed with the phenomenon of the "Shroud of Turin...
...After the conversion of Constantine, the image was supposedly transferred to the capital...
...Suddenly it struck me: those songs, those identical folk tunes she sings are " n i c e , " nonthreatening, both for Susan and her audience...
...P h i l l i p Cor'win His new novel, about three witches and the intrusion of a mysterious, wealthy stranger from New York City into their small Rhode Island town, maintains Updike's three perennial concerns...
...So, like Willie Mae Smith, she often deals with an almost unbridled power whose origin and outcome are largely unknown...
...As a preeminent novelist of manners, Updike makes meaningful every nuance of behavior that occurs in Eastwick, and like Jane, sprinkles every happening for pungency...
...These women are the movers and shakers of the soul and they stop at nothing (or rather the spirit within stops at nothing), until the psychic residual, both in themselves and their audience, is cleared away...
...They are challenging...
...But why...
...Secondly, the first French bishop who went on record regarding the Shroud, denounced it as an artistic forgery...
...And last, the alleged blood stains on the linen are merely particles of ferrous oxide, a standard base for red pigment...
...They are the trinity of his dubious faith, the elusive grail of his erudite and mercilessly detailed quests...
...Nice at all costs...
...So, for Willie Mae, as for the other women in the film, being a professional Gospel singer is not all glamour and limelight and ecstatic Sunday morning ritual...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 11
