by John Updike
In reference to this intimidating vastness, the book was initially called Majesty; vestiges of the title can be seen in the epigraphs, and in the recurrence of the adverb “majestically,” usually applied to the city’s skyscrapers. My novel might be mistaken, it was feared, for one more biography of the Queen of England, and I am happy with the new, though less resonant, title in that it makes clear this is Roger’s version—that is, Roger Chillingworth’s side of the triangle described in The Scarlet Letter, the one classic from the lusty youth of American literature that deals with society in its actual heterosexual weave. (Hawthorne, indeed, of our classic writers, seems to be, recessive and shadowy as he was, the one instinctive heterosexual—which suggests how uncertain, how vitiated by Puritan unease and the love of freedom, the mating part of the American character is.) I gave Dimmesdale’s version, in an of course updated, askew, and irresponsible way, in A Month of Sundays, over ten years ago, and should no doubt some day try to confront Hester’s version. Here, though, we have the villain of the piece, and also the character who encloses the others and modulates, with his arcane potions and malign remedies, their story.
In shaping this story with him, I might add, I have done more adjusting and fine-tuning than, if memory serves, for any other novel. Regulating the recurrence of adjectives and tinkering with the eye and hair color of characters, numbering the incarnations of Pearl,‡ meshing theology with pornography and fitting the segments of my imaginary city together, I felt at times like one of the mechanics hopelessly engaged on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the first computer, whose visionary principles quite outraced the era’s resources of machined metal and pasteboard, of cogwheels and jacquard cards. The word processor, in its magical ease of insertion and transposition, and computerized typesetting, in freeing the author from the old constraints of the Linotype’s slug-by-slug replacements, invite the prosist to tinker, perhaps excessively. A novel is, like a computer, a system for the storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information; but its basic analog is the ancient interaction between the human voice and ear, and all our mechanical ingenuities aim at the hope of inducing in another brain a wave, an excitement, an emotion, a movement of the spirit.
UNSOLICITED THOUGHTS on S. (1988).
By the time I came to write this third installment of what had developed into a trilogy of comic novels based on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the set had acquired certain formal characteristics: each book must be the first-person narrative of a spiritual pilgrim; American religion and its decay since Puritan New England would be a theme; the prose should be antic—“all out”—and bristle with some erudition; there must be footnotes. Marshfield’s footnotes, in A Month of Sundays, were comments upon his Freudian slips, which were in most cases the actual typing errors of his creator; Roger’s Version, in academic style, cited some original texts and references. I was well into S. before the Hindu and Buddhist terms, proliferating as I became an increasingly enthusiastic disciple of Indian religions, suggested the convenience of a glossary. This appended list served as the obligatory footnote; like any footnote, it forms part of the text, and should be read through. The accidents of alphabetization, if happy, are as legitimate as any of the other accidents we bind into a fictional narrative; from abhayamudra (“the gesture dispelling fear”) and abhinivesha (“the will to enjoy; the will to live”) to yoni and yuganaddha the glossary as I worked on it conspired with me, it seemed, to underline and echo the tangled, tinkling themes of the novel. The glossary became the novel’s music, the poetic essence, mechanically extracted, of the preceding narrative, and its final entry, rather than the dying fall of Esther’s last letter—her insincere/sincere “Ever”—to Charles, the book’s true conclusion:
yuganaddha a state of unity obtained by transcending the two polarities of samsara and nivritti and perceiving the identity of the phenomenal world and the absolute
O happy hovering last chord!—“the identity of the phenomenal world and the absolute.” By yuganaddha the Sanscrit gurus meant either that there is no supernatural, or else (as in a novel’s hyperspace) everything is supernatural. What is, is absolute. The net of religious and philosophical terminology leaves reality exactly where it was before. Or does it?
A “NOTES AND COMMENT” for The New Yorker, published March 23, 1987.
A writer we know writes:
An American visitor to a Communist country, if the visit partakes at all of publicity and official status, acquires symbolic values for which his native cultural conditioning has ill prepared him. As an American, be he or she fat or thin, conservatively contented or radically unhappy, he is looked upon, by the regime, as a potentially tricky mini-invasion of unfriendly forces, and, by those dissatisfied with the regime, as a symbol of freedom and opposition. It was as such a symbol, and not on the basis of my agricultural expertise, that I was invited to plant a “peace tree” on a scruffy slope in Prague last spring, in the company of a few American escorts from our embassy and of many more or less young and excited Czechs. They were members and devotees of the Jazz Section of the Czechoslovakian Musicians’ Association, led by Mr. Karel Srp, who led me through the ancient and apolitical procedure of settling a scrawny young sapling (a maple, I think) into a muddy hole in the ground. The sapling erect and on its own, we went inside a very crowded small room in a drab but extensive housing project and drank a toast to something or other (perhaps simply one another) and dispersed, the Jazz Section members and followers to their various duties and fates and I to my next appointment and act of cultural display.
The ceremony, in my swift and distracted experience of it, reminded me of college days—the day when some hastily organized prank was being played. The Jazz Section offices were small rooms holding jazzy posters, flushed young faces, a jabber of hectic and ill-focused excitement, and the smell of white wine in paper cups. Without knowing the language, I could sense the joke in the air, that perennial young-people’s joke of seeing “how much” they could “get away with,” of “how far” things could “go.” As a Western writer I was one of the prank’s props, but not a terribly important one—the prank would go on, in its multitudinous improvised forms, whether I was there or not. Its perpetrators, however, were, some of them, much more than college age, and its possible cost for them was not just a scolding from the dean but years in prison and a life of joblessness. Yet such a reckoning seemed quite remote on the cloudy day of our innocent, amiable, mysterious little occasion.
At the end of the summer (during which the sapling presumably took root on its unpromising-looking slope, in the small thicket of trees previously planted by such other momentary arborists as Kurt Vonnegut and Wendy Luers), Mr. Srp and four other directors of the Jazz Section were arrested, along with the group’s treasurer and landlord, and charged with conducting illegal economic activities. Among their previous offenses, for which they had already been fined, was listed erecting a monument without a permit—a small stone commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the United Nations, set among the “peace trees.” Repressive arrests of conspicuous cultural experimenters and symbol-cultivators are common enough in the Communist world, but this was surprising, because it went against the present tentative trend, set by the Soviet Union’s First Secretary Gorbachev, of glasnost, of more openness and permissiveness in the Socialist world, and because the Jazz Section had for fifteen years been ingeniously functioning in a “gray area” of the government’s cultural controls.
Jazz itself is not officially condemned and, as readers of Milan Kundera know, has a long and vigorous history in this very musical part of the world. The Jazz Section evolved, after its founding in 1971, from a union of dues-paying musicians to a kind of fan club for not only jazz but rock and the art of the capitalist West; it organized festivals and exhibits and—utilizing the printing privileges granted all official unions and clubs—published pamphlets and books; it became a gray-area purveyor of alternative culture. Its shaky semi-authorized status has been tenaciously mai
ntained: when the musicians’ union, under government direction, disbanded the Jazz Section in 1983, it immediately reconstituted itself, with the same officers, as a local, Prague section; and when, in the next year, the entire Prague division of the union was disbanded, the section responded that its charter allowed disbanding only after a two-thirds vote of its membership.
The government’s piecemeal attempts at discipline, never addressing the issue of free speech, have had a flavor of desperation. In 1985, section member Petr Cibulka was sentenced to a seven-month prison term for “insulting the nation” after complaining that a restaurant failed to serve a low-cost meal as required by law. In 1986, section member Jaroslav Švestka was sentenced to two years’ “protective supervision” for “harming the interests of the republic abroad.” And a few days ago, I read in the papers, five of my comrades from that spring afternoon were pronounced guilty of “unauthorized commercial activity.” The proceedings had some Kafkaesque touches; when Karel Srp, testifying in his own behalf, said he had written one hundred thirty letters to the Ministry of Culture requesting clarification of its anti-Jazz Section actions, a government witness explained that “We could not answer letters from an organization that does not exist.” The judge, professing his admiration of their “contributions to Czechoslovak culture” and protesting that “we don’t want in any way to limit cultural movements in our country,” handed down sentences not only less than the maximum eight years’ imprisonment but significantly lighter than those the prosecutor asked for. Karel Srp was sentenced to sixteen months, minus the six months he had already been in prison; the group’s secretary, Vladimir Kouřil, was given ten months minus the six; and the three others received suspended sentences. While the judge delivered his verdict, a crowd of over a hundred people, most of them young, clapped hands in the corridors and afterward sang “Give Peace a Chance.”
The Jazz Section has been punished, but with an awkward ambivalence, as the neo-Stalinist Czech regime, installed in the wake of a runaway liberalization twenty years ago, now tries to swing into line with the Soviet Union’s turn toward openness. The Jazz Section has suffered, but not in silence; international protest has been joined by braver open protest within Communist Czechoslovakia. I am told that the unofficial monument, so subversively remembering the founding of the United Nations, has been removed; I don’t know if the surrounding set of trees still stands. Trees can be cut down, but eventually others take their place. Eastern Europe is a forest where the growing will not stop.
ANOTHER “NOTES AND COMMENT,” published May 5, 1987.
Birds do it. Bees do it. U.S. Marines in far-off lonely American embassies do it. Jim Bakker, evidently, did it. So, the strong implication is, did Gary Hart. Why do we care? Recent news developments demonstrate, if we ever doubted it, that we do care, out of all due proportion—nocturnal pairings and a ride to Bimini in the good ship Monkey Business easily eclipse such grave questions as whether or not the President of the United States, in his zeal to see hostages released and the Sandinistas deposed, knowingly broke the law. A startled young woman, gouged from her private life by a storm of publicity (which also brought to light many old photos taken of her wearing a bikini), is a more interesting object than the Constitution, even in this year of the Constitution. The affair (so to speak) is not merely, however, a testimony to the cheesecake in our hearts. Something new was injected into Presidential politics early in the administration of Harry Truman: the President has his thumb on the red button. The man we elect can push us into nuclear war and sudden death. Eisenhower’s was a slow and experienced old thumb we trusted; but the Presidents since, search as the electorate will, have been nervous-making: Jack Kennedy was bright and handsome and jaunty but young, with a thing about “Cuber” and Khrushchev; Lyndon Johnson groaned with good intentions but seemed only to know Texasstyle arm-wrestling; Nixon was a bundle of suspicions and tics; Ford kept tripping over himself; Carter had that high twangy voice and a scary way of popping his eyes during press conferences; Reagan … well, Reagan has been soothing, but has he been minding the store? The issue was not whether Lee Hart could trust Gary but whether we could: he had an unsteady glitter to his eye, and maybe his hair was a little too long over his ears. We have to look these men over. With the limited accommodations the world has to offer nowadays, we all, more or less, get into bed with the President.
REMARKS intended for the May 1989 ceremonial of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, left undelivered in deference to a fire scare that interrupted the proceedings, and published, three months later, with a timely new first paragraph, in, yes, The Wall Street Journal.
We live in a nation where art rarely impinges upon the realms of government and power, aside from musical entertainment at White House dinners and the design of postage stamps. Americans are therefore naïve about government sponsorship of the arts, as if shown by the shocked indignation in culture-bearing circles at some Congressmen’s shocked indignation at the Mapplethorpe photograph exhibit and the NEA-sponsored image of a crucifix suspended in a container of the artist’s very own urine. The ancient law that he who pays the piper calls the tune has not been repealed even in this permissive democracy, and the cultural entrepreneurs so eager to welcome NEH and NEA money into the arts may now be aware that they have invited a dog—woolly and winsome but not without teeth and an ugly bark—into their manger.
The most dramatic government-sponsored event in arts and letters in the last year has been the promulgation by a head of state, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, of a death sentence upon a writer, Salman Rushdie, who was not then and had never been a citizen of Iran, but who instead was writing postmodernist fiction within the United Kingdom. The affair at worst may yet result in murder; at the least it has achieved, for Rushdie, a severe and apparently permanent impairment of his personal freedom. What are American artists to make of this astounding event? The concept of blasphemy seems quaint here, and almost as quaint the notion that artists might have to pay a price in blood for what they write, paint, or compose. But it is perhaps salutary and, in the root sense, encouraging to be reminded that art is a significant activity, with possibly grave consequences, and that our freedom to be artists as best we can is not one that all societies automatically grant.
Nor, even in a society as generally indulgent as ours, is the artist asked to pay no price whatsoever for the delightful, cathartic exercise of his creative faculties. Neglect and relative poverty, to begin with, are the likely prices we pay for embarking upon the cloudy path of artistic self-expression. Further along that path, critical attack from one’s differently persuaded colleagues in art may await, and boycott, banning, and blame from the larger society’s enforcers of decency and positive values. In a capitalist society, art is expected to pay its way, and the demands of the marketplace work their own constraints. To reach market, one must negotiate with middlemen and envision a consumer, with his needs and prejudices. Friendly censors, in fact, offer guidance at almost every turn of a professional artistic career, and even the most amiable artist must at some point choose between an inner imperative of private vision and the outer imperatives of group acceptance. In America little appears sacred, in the sense that the Koran is sacred to the spokesmen for Islam, but success is sacred and tempts many to an insincere conformity.
None of this, of course, compares to Rushdie’s ongoing ordeal, or to that of Václav Havel and Frantisek Stárek in Czechoslovakia, or Albert Mukong in Cameroon, or of hundreds of artists under totalitarian regimes around the globe. But in all cases the artist’s defense against a society’s impositions and seductions must be the same—the problematical but deeply felt subjective answer to Pilate’s ancient question, “What is truth?” Each individual holds an impression of life, and the discourse of the arts attempts to revise the art consumer’s impression by the light of the artist’s impression. It is perhaps in the nature of modern art to be offensive: it wishes to astonish us and invites a revision of our presuppositions.
A crucial offense that The Satanic Verses gave its enemies, indeed, concerns, precisely, revision—the possibility that the Koran itself was in a few verses revised.
One attitude to art, and not purely an old-fashioned one, construes it as a voice of the gods, flowing out through momentarily inspired mortals. It is magic, and the truth it proclaims is absolute, and mankind’s duty is to defend and repeat what it has thus received. The other attitude expects revision in the arts, experimentation in the sciences, criticism in the public forum, and frequent change in the personnel if not the forms of government. All change, all revision, is something of an affront, and it leaves certain sacred securities behind. However, it contains not only destructive and dismissive tendencies but an optimism, a faith that the human sensibility can suffer revision and survive and even be the healthier for it. No doubt Rushdie knew his book would offend Muslim orthodoxy, just as James Joyce expected in Ulysses to offend the Irish Catholic Church, and Nabokov in The Gift to offend the orthodoxies of Russian Communism, and Hawthorne in his gently polemical works to offend the lingering representatives of Puritan theocracy. No doubt the artists who offended Senators Helms and D’Amato hoped to offend someone. But in this century, if we are not willing to risk giving offense, we have no claim to the title of artists, and if men and women are not willing to face the possibility of being revised, offended, and changed by a work of art, they should leave the book unopened, the picture unviewed, and the symphony unheard.
I would see art and government kept separate not to protect government funds but to protect the arts, for even the most enlightened patronage still exerts a controlling effect, and even the most well-intentioned and subtle control nevertheless contaminates the freedom of exploration and expression that we require from the arts, a purity of inner determination that distinguishes their enterprise from all others.