Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  P.S.: Brief as it is, this speech, addressing the stated question with all the honesty and good nature at my command, sticks in my mind as an epitome of discomfort in its delivery. The audience—writers and workers in the literary vineyard, assembled from many countries but predominantly New Yorkers—seethed with barely suppressed anger and was audibly impatient with any utterance other than a straightforward condemnation of the Reagan administration. The common-law wife of Daniel Ortega, the then President of Nicaragua, spoke from the floor in impassioned English about American “genocide” in her country and asked the panel, which included a German and a Pole, what we were going to do about it. The panel’s chairman, E. L. Doctorow, after hearing my remarks, acknowledged the existence of blue mailboxes but said that if you looked carefully you could find a missile site around the corner; the fact of the United States possessing missiles, even unlaunched in their silos, was so self-evidently evil to him as to admit no counter-comment. Rhoda Koenig, reviewing the PEN Congress in New York, called my speech “a fairy tale,” but what seemed fabulous to me was the goblin air of fevered indignation and reflexive anti-Americanism that may, for all I know, poison the atmosphere whenever the New York literary community gathers in numbers larger than two or three. If, for most of those citizens present, the United States had proved to be a land of educational and economic opportunity, with almost unparallelled guarantees of free expression, there was, once my mouth shut, not a whiff of acknowledgment, let alone gratitude.

  How Does the Writer Imagine?2

  THE CAREER OF HERMAN MELVILLE, whose name adorns our lecture series and the history of Albany, invites us to reflect upon the vicissitudes of literary creation. He was born in the summer of 1819 on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, into those circumstances so frequent in the biographies of writers—circumstances of fallen gentility. His father, Allan Melvill, was the younger of the two sons of a formidable orphan, Thomas Melvill, who participated in the Boston Tea Party and was appointed Collector of the Port of Boston by George Washington. Major Melvill, as he was called, held this sinecure for forty years, and shrewdly accumulated a fortune while doing so. His sons, however, inherited the habits, the good self-regard, and the optimism that money bestows without inheriting the gift of making more of it themselves. Allan as a youth went to Europe on the then-obligatory Grand Tour, and stayed for some years; he learned French, collected books and prints, and posed for a dandified portrait. Returning, he entered the import business and for all of his unfortunate commercial life was associated with the clothing trade. In 1814 he married Maria Gansevoort, of a prominent and wealthy family of this city. For four years the young couple lived in Albany, sharing a house with her mother and brother, and their first two children were born here. Allan’s rich relations had set him up in the dry-goods business, but he managed to find the attractions of Albany resistible, and in 1818 moved to New York, where he fathered Herman and five more children, moved from house to house, lived and invested beyond his means, and borrowed heavily against his expectations from both his father and his wife’s family. Sued by creditors, he took refuge back with the Gansevoorts in Albany; returning from a trip to Boston and New York in search of more credit, he walked across the iced-over Hudson in below-zero weather, took ill, and died early in the year 1832, when Herman was twelve. Throughout January, the dying man had raved like a maniac; this sad spectacle made a lasting impression upon his second son, whose work and career were both to be ever haunted by the fear of madness.

  The years that Herman spent in the Albany area after his father’s death could not have been very happy ones. The tangled reins of the family affairs had passed into the widow’s rather frantic hands; she moved the family to nearby Lansingburgh, and added an “e” to the name of Melvill. Within a month of Allan’s burial, Herman and his older brother, Gansevoort, were taken out of Albany Academy; the older boy was to assume management of the father’s bankrupt business, and Herman was set to work as a clerk at the New York State Bank. Though his education was fitfully resumed at the Academy and at Albany Classical School, his adolescence was basically spent at labor; after the bank, he worked as a bookkeeper for his brother, and worked on his uncle Thomas Melvill’s farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and later taught school near there. His other uncle, Peter Gansevoort, assisted the dishevelled Melvilles as best he could, but, after a deceptive period of success, young Gansevoort Melville ran matters into bankruptcy again, and headed, as his father had done a decade before, for New York City. Herman, who as a child had been described by his father as “very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but … of a docile & amiable disposition,” in 1838 studied surveying to qualify as an engineer; but nothing came of this, and in the summer of 1839, by his older brother’s arrangement, he shipped out as a crew member on a ship to Liverpool. Returning four months later, he taught school in Greenbush, New York, visited his uncle Thomas in Illinois, and, failing to find a job in New York City, shipped out from New Bedford on the whaling ship Acushnet early in 1841. For the next four years he was at sea or, having deserted one ship and mutinied on another, adventuring in the South Seas.

  On his return to Lansingburgh, Melville, whose previous literary activity had consisted of a few pseudonymous articles for the local newspaper, sat down and wrote a book, Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands, now known under its American title of Typee, which became a great success in both England and the United States. He followed it with a sequel, Omoo, which also enjoyed a significant, if lesser, success, and then a third book, Mardi, which, though beginning in the same ebullient and popular manner as the others, branched hugely into fantasy, allegory, and intellectual extravagance. The fat volume, in one hundred ninety-five chapters, did not please critics or readers, and Melville, seeking to recapture his public, very rapidly wrote Redburn and White-Jacket, two more accounts based upon portions of his ocean venturing. His sixth book, Moby-Dick, like Mardi, diverged from its surface narration of a sea-tale to include philosophic and poetic digressions and, like Mardi, was generally accounted a disappointment, though it found some enthusiastic readers. Universally deplored and mocked, however, was Melville’s next book, his seventh in seven years, the novel Pierre, and its harsh failure left wounds that never healed; his family became concerned about his health, and his search for a way out of financial insecurity began. From 1853 to 1856 Melville wrote a number of sketches and short stories for magazine publication, and a kind of novella, Israel Potter, based upon an old document. In 1856 he composed what was to be his last attempt to wrest a living from authorship, the novel The Confidence-Man, and undertook a therapeutic trip to Europe and the Holy Land. He was at his return not yet thirty-eight years old; except for some Civil War poems published in Harper’s Magazine and later collected in a volume, his public career as an author was over.

  For three seasons Melville attempted the lecture circuit, with indifferent success; in 1863 he sold the farm in Pittsfield where the bulk of his oeuvre had been written, and moved to New York City. For twenty years, until 1885, he worked as a customs inspector in that port, and sank into nearly total obscurity, he who had once been famous as the “man who lived among cannibals.” He read widely, leaving a library full of interesting marginalia, and privately published two small volumes of poetry and a long poem, Clarel, whose expense was covered by his Albany uncle Peter Gansevoort. He died in 1891, leaving Billy Budd in manuscript; his reputation, totally eclipsed but for a few scattered admirers and a dim historical recall of Typee’s old splash, was revived in the 1920s, and Melville’s name now presides at or near the very summit of American literary renown.

  What does Melville’s story tell us of the creative imagination but that it lies at the mercy of earthly circumstances? He wrote, in his dozen productive years, with extraordinary intensity, spending such long hours at his writing table that his health and sanity were feared for and his eyes became, in his words, “tender as young sparrows.�
�� Yet his youth held few hints of precocity or of literary concern; in 1850 he told Hawthorne, “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then & now, that I have not unfolded within myself.” The pre-Typee silence of this “amiable and docile” youth—compare Poe and Hawthorne and Bryant, all scribbling and published by their very early twenties—foreshadows the eventual return to silence, when Melville again succumbed to fatalism and intellectual passivity. At the age of twenty-five, however, he found himself brimming with the exotic material of his recent adventures, and sensed a public eager for the kind of adventure tale that he could provide. “The book is certainly calculated for popular reading, or for none at all,” he wrote the publisher of Typee. The English edition coming first, he permitted the American text to be bowdlerized of “all passages … which offer violence to the feelings of any large class of readers.” These included not only “indelicate” sexual passages quite appropriate to the Polynesian setting but unflattering accounts of the South Seas missionaries: “I have rejected every thing, in revising the book, which refers to the missionaries,” Melville wrote his publisher. “So far as the wide & permanent popularity of the book is concerned, their exclusion will certainly be beneficial.” A certain Walter Whitman, reviewing the book in the Brooklyn Eagle, praised it as summer fare: “A strange, graceful, most readable book this … As a book to hold in one’s hand and pore dreamily over of a summer day, it is unsurpassed.” Its successor, Omoo, was even more consciously shaped to avoid offending the prejudices of a large audience, and to at least one reader, the wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, seemed “very inferior to Typee, being written not so much for its own sake as to make another book apparently.”

  In writing Mardi, Melville himself began to chafe against the requirements of making yet another book. Writing his English publisher, John Murray, he confessed, “Proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding along with dull common places.” Chastened by the self-indulgent book’s failure, he returned to facts and commonplaces in Redburn and White-Jacket, but with a good deal of resentment and bitterness and self-scorn. He wrote his father-in-law that the books were “two jobs, which I have done for money—being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood.” To Richard Henry Dana, Jr., whose Two Years Before the Mast was a classic of the genre in which Melville first composed, he claimed to have turned out these books “almost entirely for lucre” and in his journal marvelled that a favorable reviewer of Redburn should “waste so many pages upon a thing, which I, the author, know to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with.” And he told Evert Duyckinck that he hoped never to write another book like it, though it “puts money into an empty purse.” When an author, he goes on, “attempts anything higher—God help him & save him! for it is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon—for a hollow purse makes the poet sink—witness ‘Mardi.’ ”

  Yet his spirits and energy remained high, and in the middle of writing the next sea-adventure, Moby-Dick, he met Hawthorne, whose example and presence, for the year that they lived as neighbors in the Berkshires, emboldened Melville to plume his pinions for another flight, and to rewrite his text into an exuberant, exfoliating, exhaustive masterpiece. However, as with Mardi, the reviews were sour and the receipts meagre, and he settled again to court a popular audience. To his publisher he promised, “My new book [is] very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new & elevated aspect of American life.” Alas, Pierre, weirdly fetching up all the resentments and tribulations he had endured in the households of his mother and his wife, disastrously miscarried, as did The Confidence-Man, its attempt to convey riverboat atmosphere and frontier humor all but smothered beneath a misanthropy that verges on pathology. Rage had overtaken the sunny-humored natural stylist of Typee and Omoo, and he ceased to court an audience that had ceased to respond.

  The spectacle of an artist at war with an audience’s expectations was, by Melville’s time, still uncommon. His contemporary Dickens appeared to enjoy the give-and-take with readers that periodical serialization had opened up, and with no strain upon his artistic conscience sometimes trimmed his plot in response to letters he received. This same Dickens undertook extensive tours of dramatic readings from his own work, weeping with his audience over the death of little Nell and indeed putting so much of himself into these performances that he shortened his life—a crowd-pleaser, as well as a genius, to the end. Pleasing the audience, for writers as well as for other sorts of Victorian entertainer, was the art, and, though Stendhal claimed to be writing for an audience of the future, not until Flaubert was the notion formulated of a novelistic art that existed in independence of and even in defiance of the bourgeois public.

  The idea of an artist arose, we may surmise, in tribal environments where the distinction between art’s producers and its consumers was shadowy at best. All tribal members collaborated in the dance, in the enactments of ritual, and the tale-teller and mask-maker were exemplary performers within a rite created by the group. The social function of art could scarcely be an issue when all function was social, when individual gratification was inconceivable apart from the aggregate health and spiritual soundness. The oldest surviving art objects are votive and totemic; sculptural and graphic representation began in service to religion; and an awesome submissiveness underlies the serene monotony of Egyptian and Chinese representational conventions. It should be noted, though, that even in immensely static Egypt, when a revolutionary pharaoh, Akhenaten, proclaimed a new theology—a kind of anti-clerical sun-worship—the artists of his time responded with a new, slightly more supple and naturalistic style. Furthermore, in the tombs of the lesser nobles, Egyptian mural art becomes less pharaonic, more playful and attentive to the tender details of life, to the birds and reeds, in the Nile Valley. Artistic creativity, that is, tends to frolic in the margins of its hieratic assignments, and a perennial skirmishing exists between received conventions and unstructured impressions.

  At the dawn of Western literature, with Homer, the Old Testament writers, and the bards and balladeers whose oral compositions have descended from the smoky throne rooms of northern Europe, it is difficult to discern any chink between the assignment and the execution, between the assumptions of the performer and those of the audience. A seamless intention seems bound up in these old masterworks; as in today’s symbiosis between the yelling youthful rock star and his screaming adolescent fans, the artist enunciates the inner impulses of all, and his poetry has little more personal taint than that of the jokes and riddles which mysteriously arise and circulate among schoolchildren even today. The bard proclaims the tribal record; he speaks, or so we imagine at this great distance, for all.

  So, too, the great playwrights of ancient Greece descend to us as synonymous with their culture, their popularity certified by the very survival of their texts and by their many first prizes at the Dionysia, the spring festival of Dionysius at Athens—thirteen first prizes for Aeschylus, about twenty for Sophocles (who never placed less than second in these competitions), and only four for Euripides. With Euripides, the youngest of the three, we have hints of author-audience tension in the modern style: the relative paucity of his prizes, his irreverent and even hostile treatment of the gods and their myths, his cursory handling of the conventional deus ex machina ending—as if the playwright is impatiently bowing to convention—and the something morbid and quarrelsome in the psychology of his characters all suggest an artist more intent upon saying what interests him than saying what people ought to hear. The improprieties of realism, which are to close English theatres under the Puritans and to scandalize readers of Flaubert and Zola, Dreiser and Joyce, first arise with Euripides, who is s
aid to have been tried for impiety and to have gone to live in the court of the King of Macedonia because of his unpopularity in Athens.

  The Middle Ages enlisted artists, usually anonymously, in the praise and service of God; we do not hesitate to credit the inner life of the age, rather than the genius of the individual stone-carver, with the sublime sculptures at Chartres and Rheims. Dante is the first writer since St. Augustine to whom we easily ascribe a personality, a personal history unmistakably embedded in his work. Shakespeare is our classic folk artist, who disdained no extremity of farce or fustian to keep the groundlings at the Globe entertained. He cobbled up coarse old plots, turning their absurdities into profundities and their carpentry into poetry; he concocted roles for whatever actor needed one, such as the company clowns William Kempe and Robert Armin; he casually collaborated with lesser talents and merged the proverbial wisdom of the time with his own prodigious originality. To think of Shakespeare as so immensely obliging and yet the glory of our language flatters us, of course, and suggests that being a great writer isn’t something to get all fussy and truculent about. Since he left so little biographical trace that men still write serious books maintaining he was somebody else, we have only the work as a record of the man. To those who believe this record reveals nothing, I recommend an, I fear, out-of-print book by the late Irish short-story writer Frank O’Connor, called Shakespeare’s Progress; O’Connor, with many a bold reading and pugnacious opinion, sketches a turbulent, conflicted, and resentful life behind the oeuvre. O’Connor quotes the quatrain from Sonnet 111—

  O for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

  The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

  That did not better for my life provide