John Updike's Memoirs

...The melodic perfect prose is not, after all, a freak of talent, like a radio announcer's mellifluous voice or an actor's handsome face, unconnected to larger gifts...

...and having in that manner given the left and the peaceniks their say, he took out his trunk of still-beloved prowar arguments and unfolded each aging but intact debater's point and held it up for admiration...

...Metaphors tumble from his lips because unexpected links between wildly different things are always leaping to his attention, in token of the universal One...

...Updike means to invoke that idea in "On Not Being a Dove...

...But what a writer he is...

...His first wife was a Unitarian minister's daughter, and the Unitarians were relentlessly liberal and antiwar and upper class, which was irritating no end to the New Yorker writer from Harvard who pictured himself as a man of the masses from coal country...

...On the same grounds, transcendentalism doesn't necessarily lend itself to communityminded good cheer...

...Possibly his resentments contained a touch of socialism, too, since he mentions twice, by way of demonstrating the class consciousness of the region, that nearby Reading, Pa., had a Socialist mayor in those days...

...Those painful dental problems drag him to the operating chair of a violent dentist who pounds heartily at his jaw until the author finds himself thinking, "Hit me again!," which are precisely the words that might have served as subtitle to "On Not Being a Dove," except that in the author's figurings, a phrase like "On Not Being a Dove" doubtless already communicated the same implicit plea...

...Updike's purpose, though, is self-examination, which is not the same as examination of the war—or at any rate his purpose turns to self-examination whenever dovish rejoinders threaten to overwhelm his well-loved hawkish beliefs...

...In which case, what is it that he believes, ultimately...

...Twenty years ago he entertained notions about the war, his theories about credibility and power and the village officials of South Vietnam and so forth, which influenced him...

...Not everything in the book observes the same high standards of composition...

...Or so he maintains, since it may be that, when it comes to telling the upper class from the lower, Updike's Pennsylvania resentments have left him inadequately prepared...

...Updike, at least in certain moods, is fairly appalled at his own behavior, but he is not much concerned over others...

...Meditations on his mother's aging and on his own turn halting and abrupt, as if he meant to forecast a future loss of powers...

...America had to be tough...

...Therefore he claims every right to require that others serve their country, too, namely by risking death in foolish imperial ventures in Vietnam...

...The five remaining chapters in Self-Consciousness discuss the author's psoriasis, his stuttering, his childhood, his grandchildren (who are half West African, which occasions some thoughtful observations on race prejudice), plus intimations of his own mortality...

...Having evoked his class resentments, he plunges deeper into his own motivation by descending from the sociological to the religious...

...Finally the crystalline neatness of his observations and the interconnectedness that he everywhere detects give way, in proper transcendental fashion, to bursts of ecstasy...

...where I would prefer an Emersonian, he is a Lutheran...

...How would that shine a better light on American participation in Indochinese events...

...A kind of shingle hangs at the front of the book, consisting of epigrams from Ralph Waldo Emerson and other sources, which, studied with sufficient care, explains all...

...Plus there is the problem that social resentments...

...The sage of Concord would have no part of political movements like abolitionism and temperance, not because he disagreed, necessarily (Emerson favored 116 • DISSENT Books the first, had no opinion of the second), but because his business was his own self, not anyone else's...

...But none of this has to do with moral evolution, or progress toward perfection or the Emersonian oversoul, or the Protestant march from Moses to Washington and beyond...

...The chapter is also lush with serpentine sentences and brilliant images, so that you find yourself wondering, as often happens in reading Updike, whether to frolic in the richness of the prose and wit or to bother yourself with trying to decipher the underlying message...

...He writes with spectacular precision because he sees that way...

...What if antiwar arguments did carry a hidden message of snobbish superiority over the unsophisticated, law-abiding hicks of the lower class...

...Transcendental vision was, for him, the latest of mankind's steps toward oneness with the universe, the steps that, as main currents in American Protestantism had always understood, advanced from Moses to Jesus to Luther to Cromwell to Washington—and beyond...

...Beautiful prose is a consequence, not a given...

...He is in this respect Emerson's opposite...

...Emerson in certain moods was the same way...

...But yes, having been left without proper dental care as a child dui World War II because of the exodus of dentists into the armed forces, he figures that he, too, though psoriasis kept him out of the service, has nonetheless served his country through years of toothy pain in adult life...

...There is a quality that seems to me amoral...

...Updike is more of a conventional Protestant than Emerson, since he continues to attend Sunday services and maintains, in proper Congregationalist or Episcopalian manner (he mentions these two churches), that God is both one and three, which is not the same as maintaining, with Emerson, that God is everything...

...he is awake to his flaws as father and husband...

...If transcendental and Christian ideas have no meaning that unfolds over time, if they only have effects, like marijuana, good for merry moments and minor consolations, why take them seriously...

...Power is a dirty business, but whoever said it wasn't...

...It is a Shiite whip across the author's own naked, scaly back...

...The South Vietnamese village officials were going to suffer if communism won...

...Happy almost to tears" is his phrase...

...The self-consciousness of Updike's title is historical consciousness, too...

...But the admission counted for little because chilliness is not, in transcendental eyes, the worst of sins...

...The issues that mattered to other people, the moral and political concerns, were not necessarily any business of his...

...where I would prefer a Socialist, he is a Jacksonian...

...Updike writes in a specific tradition, or at least he has written Self-Consciousness in such a tradition...

...The self that emerges from Self-Consciousness may display, from a perspective like mine, all sorts of deplorable traits...

...his gravest worries were reserved for his country and the times...

...Emerson regarded himself as a reasonably good man, by and large...

...His virtues are the flood of images, the metaphors that leap from stone to stone, the vividness, the elation, finally the fidelity to self—even if his is a self that, for reasons of its own, instead of mobilizing him for radical causes, sends him wandering down to the village green to put his stubborn, sinful head in the stocks for all of us louts and boors to mock at and despise...

...but Emerson the grand product of Protestant radicalism was not a paltry man, and he got over his scoffing, and as soon as the issue turned serious, he never doubted what was proper, and he enrolled in the abolitionist ranks, and in the ranks of American Indian supporters, and of many a commendable cause...

...He has suffered continuously throughout his life: his skin sends him trekking to distant beaches in search of pain-relieving sunlight...

...his gums rebel...

...Called on to vote every four years, the man who horrified friend and foe by rolling Nixonian phrases around his tongue— credibility must be maintained, power is a dirty business—marched straightaway to the polling booth and pulled the ancestral Democratic lever for Hubert Humphrey, the non-Nixon, in 1968 and for George McGovern, the anti-Nixon, in 1972...

...Good Emersonian that he is, Updike notices in every fresh detail of the visible world new evidence of the splendors of the universe and the oneness of all things...

...But Updike has no use for the old-fashioned pulpit radicalism of historical progress...

...where he grew up during the Great Depression and learned to nurse populist resentments against the coal-owning elite...

...q WINTER • 1990 • 117...

...Second thoughts and selfcontradictions, sometimes only half-acknowledged, crop up...

...True political allegiances, the ones that participated in humanity's long progress toward perfection, were faithful reflections of his own self...

...It's not that he lacks a historical imagination...

...Peevishness, in a word, drove him to his desperate views...

...114 • DISSENT Books "On Not Being a Dove," viewed in the pages of Commentary with the too-speedy glance that magazines induce, almost seemed an ordinary conservative political memoir, rendered more than ordinary by Updike's elegant style...

...He compares hardships that he endured in a dentist's chair with the hardships endured by soldiers in Vietnam...

...Curmudgeonhood is saintly...

...Falseness, not frigidity, is the single abomination...

...Reasonably enough, given these several reservations and regrets, his own fervor for the war turns out to have been so feeble that never once did he lift a finger, as far as can be judged, on the war's behalf, apart from making himself unpopular among friends and family...

...In judging himself, he seems to discount his Harvard education and his threehundredyear Dutch-descended American ancestry...

...When the author left home and attended Harvard and met his colleagues at the New Yorker and took to arguing the prowar line at literary parties on Martha's Vineyard, he somehow saw the liberal and radical intellectuals as yet another elite, and he stuck by his lower-class loyalties in the form of defending Lyndon Johnson, whose schoolteacher background reminded him of his own hardworking, long-suffering father...

...History is history, and metaphysics are metaphysics, in Updike's eyes...

...Emerson, as his friends used to complain, was a cold fish, which he readily admitted...

...And from Christian doctrine he descends to the personal...

...He goes too far...

...pain afflicts him...

...The author virtually concedes, sotto voce, that trying to justify the war was a doomed business, and deserved to be...

...But he doesn't suffer for the world...

...Emerson's self was, like anyone's, in certain respects empty of moral concerns and not less true in being so...

...My own view is that, with Updike, the surface style counts for more than the depth, though by that I mean nothing pejorative...

...He is a man who gazes downward, wagging a finger at his social inferiors, while believing himself to be gazing upward, shaking a fist at the haughty elite...

...Transcendentalism is a quasi-mystical idea, but it is not generally speaking a warm one...

...He was, in short, a loyal son of the masses...

...Perhaps there is nothing, which may be why Updike's fidelity to self seems to have let him avoid the agonies of conscience that so many others went through in regard to the Vietnam War...

...He recalled inanities of the antiwar movement...

...It was false political allegiances that he objected to, allegiances that arose from political or personal hysterias or ambitions or from showing off or from social pressure...

...And as if that, too, were not enough, he finally descends, at the chapter's conclusion, from the peevish to the periodontal...

...He writes eloquently because he is at a peak of emotion...

...Great chunks of American history, the Dutch colonization of New York and New Jersey, the German immigration, the political traditions of Jacksonian Democracy, which Updike's grandfather still upheld when the author was young and which affected him far more than did the remote socialism of industrial Reading—these bits from the past figure, in his self-examination, as pieces of his own personality...

...Self-Consciousness is a transcendentalist text...

...He masturbated another woman in the backseat of a traveling car while his put-upon minister's-daughterWINTER • 1990 115 Books of-a-wife had to sit in the front, not noticing...

...Why is it, on the other hand, that of all crosses a body must bear, those constructed by dentists are the least ennobling...

...Achapter from John Updike's Self-Consciousness ran some months ago in Commentary under the provocative title, "On Not Being a Dove...

...On the contrary, his sense of the American past is so keen as to be autobiographical...

...His grandchildren seem to embarrass him or for some other reason stiffen his fluid tone...

...It is a public selfmortification...

...Fidelity to self, not to others, is the single road to truth...

...Those butterfingered Washington fat cats in their three-hundred-dollar suits had dropped us all into a mess of blood and shame and frustration and embarrassment, and here I was, stuck with defending them...

...even if portrayed with pinpoint accuracy, look petty and cheap against the backdrop of the Vietnam War...

...The authentic Emersonian gazes at surfaces, therefore upward at the sky and the stars, which are cold, not downward and inward, which are warm...

...He raises the question himself by citing, in still another of his self-lacerations, an early reviewer who complained that prose by Updike was beautiful, but the man had nothing to say—though nothing to say might, in the case of "On Not Being a Dove," strike some readers as an improvement...

...His Lutheranism was, he tells us, Pennsylvania Dutch in origin, meaning German, and taught him the German habit of obedience to authority, which was still another reason for rallying to the war's defense...

...Why be so damned faithful to the self, if the self has no larger historical and moral value...

...The argument against American intervention that ultimately proved more popular than Weather hostility to honky decency—the simple contention that we had no reason to be in Vietnam—seems to him, when he ever-so-briefly stops to mention it, "unexceptionable...

...In his own pages, though, surrounded by the five other chapters of SelfConsciousness, the memoir acquires quirky unexpected complications...

...and in judging his opponents in debates among the left-wing intellectuals, he seems to overlook the inconvenient reality that some people may have grown up in immigrant neighborhoods poorer and more socialistic than his own...

...It was all very well for civilized little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft evaders, but the United States had nobody to hide behind...

...He savored a Weather Underground vow to oppose "everything that is good and decent in honky America...

...Credibility must be maintained...

...The village hawk and cad who rails against peace protesters while sprawled across the dentist's chair does have a pretty good idea of how ridiculous he looks...

...What do the threeness of God and the oneness of the universe, his Lutheran and transcendentalist concepts, signify to him...

...but he wants us to know that most of all he supported the war because his authentic self—peevish, petty, resentful, obedient, wanton, like all selves, say what you will—called on him to do so...

...What is the self that requires such strict fidelity, then...

...Why persist, then, as he did, in supporting American involvement in the mess of blood and shame...

...And so forth through the litany that everyone in honky and nonhonky America remembers from twenty years ago and that most people finally rejected, though not so quickly as to prevent the deaths in Vietnam of additional hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians...

...Faithfulness to his own roots was all that counted...

...but in other respects, social morality filled him to bursting...

...At this point, the reader who hasn't already flung Self-Consciousness across the room will notice that John Updike's "On Not Being a Dove," though bearing a political title and a publishing history that began at Commentary, is not a political memoir at all and is indeed calculated to irritate and is, in fact, a hair shirt...

...Updike in his confusion is not a charming sight...

...The class analysis in "On Not Being a Dove" seems almost calculated to irritate...

...Communists, he recalled, were not to be applauded, which was true enough...

...And if that weren't enough to set the ordinary reader on edge, Updike chivalrously refrains from telling us much that is derogatory about his first wife, except that she was "smooth-pelted" and Unitarian, which may seem less than damning— while regaling us with scabrous tales about himself, the bad husband, whose pelt was, furthermore, vulnerable to scaly outbreaks of psoriasis...

...his tongue stutters...

...When someone asked him to write a statement about the war, Updike's hawkish declaration nearly hid behind a hedge of qualifiers...

...I won't vote for him...

...Yet Self-Consciousness, taken as a whole, testifies to the one transcendental strength that I can imagine matters to Updike more than all the others, namely, the ease with which transcendental perceptiveness lends itself to literature...

...He is astir with what he sees: the air sparkles, the molecules beam with light...

...where he should be full, he is empty...

...He loses no sleep over what his country may be up and doing...

...Updike looked back at the loneliness that overtook him during the high tide of antiwar indignation in the sixties and seventies, when he, one man against the mob, remained a supporter of American policy in Vietnam...

...Emerson the egoist curmudgeon could scoff at people who got hot and bothered over paltry affairs like abolitionism...

...What is there about curmudgeonhood, in Updike's case, to make it divine...

...The motives that he recalls began with class wars of eastern Pennsylvania...

...On Not Being a Dove" has its quota of humor...