Odd Jobs

by John Updike

  He is invited to come onto television and have his say, as if his book, his poor thick unread book, were not his say. He is invited to come into the classroom and, the meagrest kind of expert, teach himself. Last century’s lyceum circuit has moved indoors, from the open air of a hopeful rural democracy to the cloistered auditoriums of the country’s fifteen hundred accredited colleges and universities; the circuit has been, as it were, miniaturized. Though the market for actual short stories is down, in the vastness of the United States, to a half-dozen or so paying magazines, the market for fiction writers, as adornment to banquets and conferences and corporate self-celebrations, is booming. Kurt Vonnegut has observed that an American writer gets paid more for delivering a speech at a third-rate bankrupt college than he does for writing a short-story masterpiece.

  I do not wish to complain or to exaggerate. Sociological situations have causes that are not altered by satire or nostalgia. The university and the printshop, literature and scholarship have been ever close, and the erratic ways in which writers support themselves and their books seek readers have changed a number of times since the Renaissance days when poets sought with fulsome dedications to win the support of noble patrons. The academization of writing in America is but an aspect, after all, of the academization of America. The typical writer of my generation is college-educated; in fact I am rather a maverick in having avoided graduate school. Academically equipped and habituated, it is natural for, say, John Barth and Joyce Carol Oates to teach and to lecture. They know a lot, and the prestige of their authorship adds a magic twinkle, a raffish spin, to their knowledge. Writers such as they stand ready to participate in the discourse of civilized men and women, just as, in pre-war Europe, writers like Mann and Valéry and Eliot could creditably perform in the company of scholarly gentlemen. Until the arising, not so many centuries ago, of a large middle-class audience for printed material and with it the possibility of professional writers supported by the sales of their works, writers had to be gentlemen or daughters of clergymen or courtiers of a kind; like jesters, writers peeked from behind the elbow of power. If, in a democracy without a nobility or much of a landed gentry, the well-endowed universities step in and act the part of patron, where is the blame? Who longs for the absinthe-soaked bohemia that offered along with its freedom and excitement derangement and despair, or for the barren cultural landscape that so grudgingly fed the classic American artists? Is not even the greatest American writing, from Hawthorne and Dickinson to Hemingway and Faulkner, and not excluding Whitman and Mark Twain, maimed by the oddity of the native artist’s position and the limits of self-education? Perhaps so; but we suspect in each of the cases named that the oddity is inextricable from the intensity and veracity, and that when the writer becomes a lecturer, a certain intensity is lost.

  Why should this be? To prepare and give a lecture, and to observe the attendant courtesies, takes time; but time is given abundantly to the writer, especially in this day of antibiotics and health-consciousness, more time than he or she needs to be struck by his or her particular lightning. There was time enough, in the life of Wallace Stevens, to put in eight-hour days at his insurance company in Hartford; time enough, in the life of Rimbaud, to quit poetry at the age of nineteen; time enough, in the life of Tolstoy, to spurn art entirely and to try to educate the peasants and reinvent religion. We feel, in fact, that if a writer’s life does not have in it time to waste—time for a binge or a walk in the woods or a hectic affair or a year of silence—he can’t be much of a writer. In a sense none of his time is wasted except that in which he turns his back on nature, shuts down his osmotic function, and tries to lecture. Mann, in his lecture on Freud—given at the celebration of Freud’s eightieth birthday, in Vienna in 1936—warned his audience, “An author, my friends, is a man essentially not bent upon science, upon knowing, distinguishing, and analysing; he stands for simple creation, for doing and making, and thus may be the object of useful cognition, without, by his very nature, having any competence in it as subject.” The artist, in his experiences, passions, prejudices, and ignorances, is a delegate from reality, a distillation or an outgrowth of it, and in all humility offers himself as an object of study rather than as an expert, even on the topic of himself. Decipherment of the inner hieroglyphics that reality has stamped upon him, to use Proust’s metaphor, is his business, and he should undertake no task that might impair his deciphering. Asking a writer to lecture is like asking a knife to turn a screw. Screws are necessary to hold the world together, the tighter the better, and a screwdriver is an admirable tool, more rugged and less dangerous than a knife; but a knife with a broken tip and a dulled or twisted edge serves all purposes poorly. Of course, if a knife is repeatedly used as a screwdriver, it will get worn into the shape of one; but then don’t expect it to slice any more apples.

  Perhaps, in this electronic age, one should attempt to speak in terms of input and output and static. Invited to lecture, the writer is flattered. He feels invited up, after years of playing on the floor with paper dolls and pretend castles, into grown-up activity, for which one wears a suit, and receives money or at least an airplane ticket. He furthermore receives society’s permission, by the terms of the contract, to immobilize an audience of some hundreds or at least dozens of fellow human beings. I must be, he can only conclude, an interesting and worthy person. With this thought, on this particular frequency, static enters the wave bands where formerly he was only hearing the rustle of paper dolls—static, alas, that may be slow to clear up. Input and output are hard to manage simultaneously. A writer on show tends not to see or hear much beyond his own performance. A writer whose thinking has become thoroughly judgmental, frontal, and reasonable is apt to stop writing.

  For a work of fiction is not a statement about the world; it is an attempt to create, out of hieroglyphs imprinted by the world upon the writer’s inner being, another world. The kind of precision demanded concerns how something would be said, how someone or something would look, or how closely the rhythm of a paragraph suggests the atmosphere of a moment. The activity—if I may confess this without offending our secular fair—feels holy; it is attempted with much nervousness and inner and outer circling, and consummated with a sense of triumph out of all apparent proportion to the trivial or even tawdry reality that has been verbally approximated. Compared with such precision, everything that can be said in a lecture feels only somewhat true, and significantly corrupt. Lecturing deprives the author of his sacred right to silence, of speaking only on the firm ground of the imaginary. To the mind whose linguistic habits have been shaped by the work of mimesis, assertions and generalizations, however subtly and justly turned, seem a self-violation; and if the violation is public, as a lecture is, the occasion partakes of disgrace—one has deserted one’s post and forsaken one’s task for a lesser, however richly society has wrapped the occasion in plausibility and approval.

  But how understandable it is, after all, for society to assume that the writer has something to say. To assume the opposite—that the writer has nothing to say—seems scandalous, though it is somewhat true, at least to the degree that we all have nothing to say, relative to the immense amount of saying that gets done. Most human utterance is not communication but a noise, a noise that says, “I am here,” a noise that says, “You are not alone.” The value, for the author, of a lecture is that he confesses, by giving one, that he, too, needs to make this noise. The Flaubertian pose of God the creator (“paring his fingernails,” James Joyce added in a famous specification—“within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”) yields in these post modern times to the pose of a talkative good fellow, a fellow speaker, contributing his bit to the chatter that holds the surrounding silence at bay.

  Giving a lecture gets the writer out into the world, and in its moment of delivery enables him to savor the ancient bardic role. It confronts him with an audience, and healthily deprives him of the illusion that h
e is his own audience—that his making, like the Lord’s, takes place in a void. In the literary art, however abstruse or imagist, surreal or impersonal, communication is hoped for, and communication implies the attempt to alter other minds. This is the shameful secret, the tyrannical impulse, hidden behind the modernist pose of self-satisfying creation. A Western writer who has travelled even a little in the Third World has encountered the solemn, aggressive question “What is the writer’s social purpose?” In other words, “How do you serve your fellow men?” It seems embarrassing and inadequate to reply honestly that—if one is a fiction writer—one serves them by constructing fantastic versions of one’s own life, spin-offs from the personal into the just barely possible, into the amusingly elaborated. Giving a lecture reminds the writer of another dimension of his task, that of making contact with his nation. His work in a sense is one long lecture to his fellow countrymen, asking them to face up to his version of what his life and their lives are like—asking them, even, to do something about it.

  The very book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that contains the description of the Godlike artist paring his fingernails ends with this altruistic vow of the hero, Stephen Dedalus, Stephen the artificer: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The authorial service, by this formulation, connects the experience and the race, whose conscience and consciousness must be, repeatedly, created. Joyce’s emotional and aesthetic loyalty to an Ireland where he couldn’t bear to live is heroic, as is his attempt, in the two long and unique novels which succeeded Portrait of the Artist, to re-create the bardic persona—to sing, that is, in epic form, the entire history of his city and nation. And Proust, too, amid the magnificent unscrolling of his own snobbish and hyperesthetic life, sings hymns to French cathedrals, French place-names, and the visions of French history. Kafka, doubly alien, as a German-speaking Jew within a Czech-speaking province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a writer furthermore for whom publication was a kind of desecration, yet had the epic touch; his parables of rootlessness are securely rooted in the landscape and civic machinery of Bohemia and Prague, where, in spite of the dreariness and caution of the present Communist regime, he is revered as a national prophet.

  One could go on with this catalogue of tribal resonances, for a mark of a great writer, as Walt Whitman observed, is that a nation absorbs him, or her, in its self-knowledge and self-image. The confident writer assumes that his own sensibility is a sufficient index of general conditions, and that the question “Who am I?,” earnestly enough explored, inevitably illuminates the question “Who are we?”

  But if giving a lecture calls the writer down from his ivory tower and administers a healthy dose of humanity, what benefit does the audience receive? Why invite this person to give a type of performance he is instinctively reluctant to give, and does not give very well? His expertise, as we have said, is nebulous, and his public manner is owlish and shy. Thomas Mann, in preparing the way for his own lecture on Freud, gracefully suggested that the author is especially called to celebrations, for “he has understanding of the feasts of life, understanding even of life as a feast.” I would suggest, furthermore, that feasts traditionally require, within their apparatus, a figure of admonition, a licensed representative, sometimes costumed as a skeleton and wearing a grinning skull-mask, of those dark forces that must be invoked and placated before the feast can be wholly enjoyed. It used to be that in America, at even the blithest of celebrations—at weddings, say, or at the opening of a new automobile agency—a clergyman, dressed in chastening black, would stand and, with his few words and declared presence, like a lightning rod carry off all the guilt and foreboding that might otherwise cloud the occasion.

  As the church’s power to generate guilt fades, the writer, I suggest—the representative of the dark and inky realm of print—has replaced the priest as an admonitory figure. In this electronic age, when everyone is watching television and even book critics (as Leslie Fiedler has confided) would rather go to the movies, books make us feel guilty—so many classics gathering dust unread, so many new books piling up in bright heaps, and above this choking wasteland of print the plaintive cries of sociologists waving fistfuls of tabulated high-school tests and telling us how totally illiterate we are all becoming. Gutenberg is dead, but his ghost moves among us as a reproachful spectre. What better exorcism, that the feast of life may tumble on untroubled, than to invite a writer to lecture? The rite is now complete; my role has been discharged. Book-fair celebrants, consider now banished all spiritual impediments to your barter and display; your revels may begin.

  Emersonianism4

  THE CRITIC WARNER BERTHOFF, in his essay “American Literature: Traditions and Talents,” concedes that “the American circumstance has indeed managed to yield its originating masters,” then challenges himself to name them. As if slightly surprised, he responds, “I should speak at once of Melville, or Whitman, and of Emerson, who remain, in their several ways, the freshest of our writers, as well as the most provocatively intelligent; their wit, so to speak, is still the liveliest potential cause of wit in others.”

  One searches one’s own wits, reading this. Melville and Whitman, of course. Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass, both published in the 1850s to a reception of mockery and indifference, are American classics if any exist. Or so, at least, we feel now, having inherited our high opinion from the modernist critics of this century, who in Melville’s case had to perform a considerable work of resurrection. But our received opinion, tested against the texts themselves, does seem just: the words sing, burn, and live; they have the stimulating difficulty of reality itself, and the pressure and precision of things that exist. With something like rapture, each author’s voice makes solid connections, and however widely their raptures range Melville and Whitman persuasively strive to give us the substance promised by their titles: grass and a whale, earth and the sea are delivered.

  But Emerson? Is there not something dim at the center of his reputation, something fatally faded about the works he has left us? When, I ask myself, did I last read one of his celebrated essays? How much, indeed, are Emerson’s works even assigned in literary courses where the emphasis is not firmly historical? I sometimes receive in the mail anthologies designed for instruction in colleges and high schools, and a check of their indices reveals little Emerson, and then often no more than one or two of his shorter poems, or a paragraph or two quoted in explication of Walden, or a footnote explaining how the living writer Ralph Ellison’s middle name came to be Waldo. An Approach to Literature, a massive double-column anthology edited by Cleanth Brooks, John Thibaut Purser, and Robert Penn Warren, contains not a word by Emerson, nor does Donald Hall’s fifteen-hundred-page assemblage, To Read Literature. The countercultural wave which lifted Thoreau and Whitman into renewed fashionability left Emerson scarcely touched; he was not revolutionary, or ecological, enough. Recessive, fantastical Hawthorne is an indispensable anthology presence in a way Emerson is not; even Longfellow and Whittier, it may not be reckless to say, left texts more vivid in the communal memory than the literary remains of Emerson, who, so dominant and dignified a presence among his contemporaries, now clings to immortality almost because he cannot be extricated from them.

  For, however much a cause of wit he has proved or will prove to be among ourselves, he was undoubtedly in his living prime a most fertile cause of wit in others. He was a great encourager and inspirer, a center of excitement in Concord and Boston and a bestower of boldness and energy wherever he spoke. In 1842 the twenty-three-year-old Walter Whitman heard him lecture in New York: “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” the poet said;* “Emerson brought me to a boil.” And when in 1855 Whitman sent the busy Emerson a privately published sheaf of poems, a booklet in its eccentric appearance begging to be tossed aside as the work of a crank, Emerson astoundingly read it and recognized its epochal worth, as the answer to his
platform prayers for a new literature and an untrammelled new consciousness. “I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ ” he wrote Whitman. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed.… It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.” The unstinting tone of this praise, volunteered to a stranger, is generous; the terms of the praise reflect back upon the giver. Emerson was too bent upon the business of encouraging and fortifying others to feel envy. His long and patient patronage of Henry David Thoreau is well known. Less well known is Emerson’s kindness to the half-mad, religiously obsessed Jones Very of Salem; for all the young man’s eccentricities, Emerson not merely held frequent discourse with him but himself edited and saw to the publication of Very’s Essays and Poems in 1839. The volatile, brilliant Margaret Fuller also presented a troublesome friendship to Emerson. “I want to see you, and still more to hear you,” she wrote him in 1838. “I must kindle my torch again.” She taxed him with “a certain inhospitality of soul” toward her and provoked him to address her in his journals with an imaginary rebuff that began, “You would have me love you. What shall I love?” But he fended off her appeals for more than he could provide and made something positive of their intellectual association in the so-called Hedge’s Club and her editorship of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial. Many others, men and women, basked in the Emerson circle at Concord; though he complains in his journals of the constant infractions upon his time, it was not only his nature but his mission to be encouraging. His address in Boston on “Man the Reformer” proclaimed a “new spirit” and called upon men to “begin the world anew.” Books, he had asserted in his famous address on “The American Scholar,” “are for nothing but to inspire.” In his call for renewal, in his capacity for appreciation and for generating excitement, Emerson stands in catalytic relation to the classic period of American letters as Ezra Pound does to the modernism of the early twentieth century. “A village explainer,” Gertrude Stein called Pound, and the Sage of Concord was that par excellence. He lectured everywhere, and knew everybody. In New York, one of his best friends was the senior Henry James, and on his last European jaunt in 1872 the young Henry James was one of his escorts in Paris. Twenty years earlier, having travelled by railroad and steamboat to speak in St. Louis, he especially enjoyed the companionship of the Unitarian minister William Greenleaf Eliot, the grandfather of T. S. Eliot. Our impression that Emerson laid benedictory hands upon all the heads of at least the Northeast American literary tradition is compounded by the fancy that Emily Dickinson is Emerson’s spiritual daughter: like him she wrote poems to bumblebees and felt herself drunk upon the intoxicating light of the divine sun. Her accomplishment proves the truth of his assertion, in “The Poet,” that “Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve as well as would all trades and all spectacles.” What better encapsulation of his doctrine of “Self-Reliance” than this stanza of hers: