Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Now, what of the rest of us, who huddle with our known names on the sidelines, practicing relatively retrograde and impoverished art forms while this great glowing pillar of polychrome flickering rotates at the hot center of our culture? Well, there are some consolations to being in the shade. It is cooler there, and people can’t always see what you are doing. As Aldous Huxley pointed out, freedom thrives upon the inattention of the powerful. Those of us who are riding the inky old print media into its sunset have, like the last threadbare cowboys, a certain grimly jaunty independence. We may do what we can do, and in our friendly limbo are under no obligation to assert that Coca-Cola is beneficial for not only the physical but the spiritual health of the nation, or that Mobil is watching out for our best interests night and day. We are free in our obscurity to try to tell the impure truth. We are free from committee meetings, from story conferences; no banker invades our sound stage in his anxiety to protect his investment, no character will refuse to speak the lines we give him. We are free to explore and transmit complex sensations, to attempt that permeation of the ego’s cell walls which empathy and love and altruism as well as art achieve. In a world where virtue and even the word “virtue” are hard to find, the hand-woven fictional or poetic text offers a boundless field for striving toward the excellent and the exact. Quite wonderfully, it can always be better, and only its end effect matters. There is a fair amount of folderol in a writer’s life, but the proof, finally and deliciously, is nowhere but in the pudding. So, to be brief, I am well content at my desk, and grateful that the world has allowed me to stay at it. This kind award comes as something extra, which I take as a symbol of society’s wish to cheer the imaginative writer on in his private task, as a caretaker of sorts, these last few centuries, of all of our cherished and threatened privacies.

  PREFACE to the catalogue of an exhibit of my own papers in Houghton Library at Harvard University in the spring of 1987.

  Coming into Cambridge last November to view the proposed contents of this exhibit, I had expected to greet old friends—yellowed manuscripts and elaborated proofsheets the sight of which, like so many retasted madeleines, would cause to well up fond memories of bygone moments and outgrown selves and faded sites, towns and houses and rooms, where I had once labored. Instead, I found myself facing a shuffled multitude of hostile strangers—aborted stories I had totally forgotten, tortuous changes that had utterly slipped my mind, old editorial tussles mercifully quite erased from recollection. Who was this writer? And what did he have to do with me? I was overswept by a panicky sense of the fundamental unseemliness of such an exhibition, such a display of the bedraggled gray underwear that literary enterprise wears beneath the plumage and silks in which it fancies itself trotting forth. The false starts, the misspellings, the factual errors, the repetitions, the downright ungrammar, the marginal chastisements severe and gentle, the craven thrift and cunning with which a pitifully slender store of inspirations is hoarded and recycled—all set out in cases, like the mummified bits gathering dust in Egyptian museums, crumbs of bandage and skin and bone and once-magical embalming honey proclaiming in their abject confusion and hapless desiccation the scarcely believable fact that once life, human life, had passed this way and striven for perpetuation.

  Some writers, like the late Vladimir Nabokov, have made a point of destroying all manuscripts and intermediate stages of their works of art, thus presenting to posterity an implacably clean face. Others, like Theodore Dreiser, have been so solicitous of their remnants as to keep carbons of even their love letters. In a less self-conscious time than ours, before authorship was seen as a means of generating academic treasure, the accidents of the printshop and the attic were allowed to carry away the smudged and frayed by-products of the making of books; combustion and careless housemaids also relieved the world of much that might now be regarded as precious. Now, in an age unprecedented in its ability to generate “papers,” an indeterminate potential value attaches itself to every scrap, and prodigies of storage and cataloguing are achieved. The egoistic fantasy that everything one does is, like the sparrow’s fall, worth observing has been, in my case, rather wickedly encouraged by the Houghton Library, which twenty years ago suggested that I deposit in the library’s meticulous, humidified care the refuse of my profession.

  My gratitude goes to Rodney Dennis for proffering this suggestion and putting up with its messy aftermath, and my admiration goes to Elizabeth Falsey for selecting points of interest and making coherent cases of them. I myself find other writers’ drafts and worksheets fascinating; one draws closer, bending over (say) Keats’s initial draft of “Ode to a Nightingale” in the British Museum, to the sacred flame, the furnace of mental concentration wherein a masterpiece was still ductile and yielding to blows of the pen. But inspecting such material is (like most science) a form of prying; we should not forget that what we glimpse here is the long and winding middle of a human process whose end is a published thing—shiny, fragrant, infinitely distributable—and whose beginning is the belief on the author’s part that he or she has something to say, something to deliver. The creative process is lit from two directions—by the remembered flash of the first innocent and thrilling vision, and by the anticipated steady glow of the perfected, delivered result, in its crisp trimmings of manufacture. It takes strong light and high hope to bring the writer through the dreary maze of writing. Most of writing is reading—reading again, to regrasp what is there. As writers go, I am not much of a reviser, but, seeing these numerous papers spread out, I quailed at how multiple and fallible are the procedures that work toward the straightforwardest of texts, which then when published is still not safe, as long as the author lives, from further revision. And after the author has died, in instances as worthy as those of Faulkner and Joyce, zealous scholars go on, removing alleged typos and restoring squeamishly deleted passages until no such thing as a final text seems to exist, and the very books on the shelf, though bound in thick leather with marbled endpapers, have a somewhat tentative air.

  My pleasure in this exhibit depends upon my sensation of detachment; its items were typed and scribbled by a series of ever-older young men whom I no longer know well, but with whom I once evidently enjoyed a close relation. On the basis of that relation I have been invited to say a word in this catalogue, which I here do, and now have done. A parable: More than once, walking on a soft and nearly unpopulated beach, I have been frightened by my own footprints behind me. They seemed left by feet much bigger than mine, and there was no escaping them. Nevertheless, I kept walking forward, the fright built into the experience along with the sun, the sand, the lapping milky-green sea, and the pink cliffs ahead, where the pelicans were dive-bombing, their own bodies the bombs.

  A “SPECIAL MESSAGE” for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of The Witches of Eastwick (1984).

  Next to the small Pennsylvania town in which I grew up there was an even smaller town called Grille, and in the middle of Grille, so I was told, a “witch doctor” practiced his mysterious arts. No shingle advertised the office, but the building was in plain sight; the sex of the supposed practitioner has been exorcised from my mind, but pow-wow doctors—makers of spells and animistic little cures—were an undoubted fact in Berks County not many decades ago, and may be yet.† It is a land of gloomy hilltop forests and abandoned quarries and barns bearing hex signs; my grandmother was a great one for observing the minor superstitions, involving cats and salt, ladders and umbrellas. The supernatural never seemed far off, especially after the sun had set, and the friendly street I walked to school on every day yet had its quota of mysterious old women peeking out from behind their curtains, ready to pounce upon the child so careless as to set a foot on their little carpets of front lawn. I wonder, now, if the famous German discipline—for the presiding spirit of the land was certainly German, though its language was English and many of the place-names were Welsh—isn’t maintained in large part by threats from the spirit world. At any rate, as a boy I
ran scared.

  New England, land of clear thinking, welcomed me to college. One of the very few books I bought and read on my own, in my four years at Harvard, was a translation of the French historian Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière, entitled Satanism and Witchcraft. Michelet’s romantic vision of the witch as the persecuted perpetuator of pagan nature-worship and a gentle rebel against the medieval church’s tyranny stayed with me. To Michelet the decades since have added the reading of Huysmans’s À rebours and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and those several novels by Muriel Spark that confidently touch upon the demonic. The 1960s saw witchcraft hit the media and go political. War protesters chanted and “tripped” and tried to put a spell on the Pentagon, and self-anointed enchantresses and warlocks from London to Los Angeles advertised their satanic commitments and supernatural powers; the gruesome climax came with the Manson murders of August 1969.

  It is curious fact of witchcraft study that, though members of contemporary cults and covens readily pose nude for the tabloids and fill volumes with their philosophy (in which astrology and health diets dance hand-in-hand with worship of a Satan hard to distinguish from Santa Claus), and though such relatively recent episodes as the fin-de-siècle black masses in Paris that Huysmans described and the affair, in the 1670s, of the Marquise de Montespan—a mistress of Louis XIV’s who attempted to secure his love with obscene rites—are undoubtedly historical, a fog of unknowing descends as the alleged Dark Age heyday of witchcraft is approached. Modern scholars like Norman Cohn (in Europe’s Inner Demons) strenuously argue that there were never any covens or organized Devil-worship, that all confessions to the contrary were the product of torture or demented delusion. His opponents in this argument include Michelet, who was carrying forward certain earlier suggestions among nineteenth-century historians that witchcraft was an underground survival of the ancient pagan religions, and Margaret Murray, the Scots anthropologist whose book of 1921, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, with its successor, The God of the Witches (1933), claimed, by the light of Frazer’s Golden Bough, an extensive historical reality for the perennial rumors of witchcraft. While scholarly debates raged, modern British and American women were founding covens along the lines of Miss Murray’s anthropology, and by 1970 (roughly the time of my novel), a Witches’ International Craft Association had come into existence, along with a Witches’ News Service, a Witches’ Lecture Bureau, and a Witches’ Anti-Defamation League. My heroines are not members of these organizations; their witchcraft is an intuitive and fitfully articulated collusion, sprung from their discovery that husbandlessness brings power. Witchcraft is the venture, one could say, of women into the realm of power. What women in the Middle Ages besides witches and queens wielded power that men needed to fear?

  The ideology of my portrait descends from the impression of pathos and heroic subversion that Michelet communicated to a college student in the early Fifties. Many of the details of ritual and of the Devil’s hollow appearance (for from the testimony of witch trials he would seem to have often been a man in a mask, with an artificial phallus) come from Margaret Murray’s assemblage of evidence. The business of feathers and pins emerging from the mouths of the bewitched was suggested by the strange case of Christian Shaw, as described in Witch Hunt: The Great Scottish Witchcraft Trials of 1697, by Isabel Adam. Books by Charles Williams, Richard Cavendish, Erica Jong, Pennethorne Hughes, Montague Summers, Colin Wilson, Peter Haining, Ronald Holmes, A. F. Scott, and others contributed to my picture. But I would not have begun this novel if I had not known, in my life, witchy women, and in my experience felt something of the sinister old myths to resonate with the modern female experiences of liberation and raised consciousness.

  Moreover, I once moved to a venerable secluded town, not far from Salem, where there had been a scandal. I was never able to discover exactly what had happened—those old-timers who knew went vague and sly when pressed—but its aura, as it were, still hung in the air above the salt marshes, and haunted me. Among my literary debts let me acknowledge one to the French writer Robert Pinget; his novels admirably capture the spookiness of communities that hold in the crevices of faulty, shifting communal memory a whiff of sulphur, a whisper of the unspeakable. Emboldened by Pinget’s example, I have tried here, in my own style, to give gossip a body and to conjure up human voices as they hungrily feed on the lives of others. The appetite is not trivial; we write and read novels to satisfy it.

  A “SPECIAL MESSAGE” for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of Roger’s Version (1986).

  A few years ago, yielding to the times, I bought a word processor, and one evening, in shutting it off, I saw on the screen a curious facelike configuration that sparked into sudden being and then slowly faded away. I had the impression of a mournful countenance gazing out through the scrambled numbers, a squared-off, green-on-green Veronica; and perhaps this was the seed of Roger’s Version. To this seed adhered the new cosmology that was in the air and the newspapers not long ago, and my feeling that, after composing in The Witches of Eastwick yet one more novel cozily concerning a small town, I should attempt a city novel. And even an academic novel—for if with The Coup I dared essay an African novel without being an African, why not an academic novel without being an academic? Interviewers have often enough elicited from me my aversion to that particular vocation, and in truth I do think it cruel to ask a creative spirit to continue being creative while conforming to the needs of students, faculty committees, and the ingrown collegiate milieu. Yet I have been a student, pose now and then as a writer and creature from outer space within academic settings, and treasure learned professors among my friends. Also, teaching runs in my blood; not only was my father a highschool teacher, whose travails were embroidered in The Centaur, but, on my mother’s side, my grandfather, the John Hoyer whose name I bear, taught at one-room schools in the Pennsylvania countryside. He walked miles each way, and (my mother recently told me) caught my grandmother’s eye on those long walks, and (she says) carried his entire year’s wages, in the form of the last century’s thin gold coins, in his pocket. His long life overlapped with the first twenty years of mine, and his elegant, explaining, elocutionary voice still echoes in the language-processing part of my brain and no doubt modified some of its loops; indeed, all the people I grew up among aimed, with their various voices, to be instructive.

  An academic novel must be, to an extent, about information, and this requires the ingestion of some by the novelist, who should have at least an inkling of how his characters’ heads are stocked. For the sake of Roger Lambert, I delved into ecclesiology and the maze of early heresy, and betook myself to a seminary library to search out Tertullian’s Latin in dusty, untouched volumes. For his antagonist and alter ego Dale Kohler, there was the tough nut of computer science to crack, or at least take a crack at: the binary electricity of it, and the overlay of Boolean math that shapes the adders and half-adders, and the mind-boggling elaboration of these relative simplicities into the various computer languages and the storms of computation that crackle behind such miracles as vector and raster graphics. Dale’s supply of cosmological and evolutionary data represented long-standing interests of mine, and needed a mere brushing-up. But even relatively brainless Verna knows things about, say, pop music and the welfare system that I do not and that I had to grope my way toward, often by asking simple-minded questions of people in my vicinity. And the city itself, nameless and cavalierly distorted but perhaps not unrecognizable, had to be visited and paced off and viewed from above. All this self-education, of course, is pleasurable in itself; as Joyce Carol Oates once said to me, doing the research for a novel is so blameless. The novelist in the library stacks is safe, for the moment, from editors and critics and the intense embarrassment that attends the bringing of his brain-child into the cold light of publication.

  The informational content of this novel had to be high; the debates between Roger and Dale are meant to be real debates, on issues that are, to me, live an
d interesting. And the book as a whole, in its novelistic life as an assembly of images, concerns information itself: the intersection of systems of erudition, and the strain of the demands that modern man makes upon his own brain. Pre-scientific hunting man, too, had a busy brain, extensively stocked with plant and animal lore and with memorized mythology—indeed, our utilized memory is surely inferior to his. But he was not oppressed, as are we, by torrents of freshly manufactured input (much of it televised trivia but importunate nonetheless) and by our nagging awareness of vast quantities of information, in books, films, tapes, and journals, that we should, ideally, master. We have surrounded our consciousness with vastness—vast libraries, vast galaxies, vastly complex molecular and atomic entities—and in the miniaturized guts of a computer the complication of God’s (so to speak) world meets an equivalent complication we have created.