Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. “Performances, access to the creator, personalization,” whatever that is—does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an “access to the creator” more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author’s works, be they one volume or fifty, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?

  In my first fifteen or twenty years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author’s photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book—a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.

  In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another—of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us—our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant “Aw, shucks,” disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.

  The printed, bound, and paid-for book was—still is, for the moment—more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. “When books are digitized,” Kelly ominously promises, “reading becomes a community activity.… The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.”

  Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.

  So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

  IN DEFENSE OF THE AMATEUR READER: Remarks upon accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, for Hugging the Shore, in January 1984.

  Winning a prize for criticism from a circle of critics is a wonderful thing, and I thank you. I do not presume to call myself a critic, while paradoxically harboring the hope that some of what I write might be dignified with the name of criticism. I am a free-lance writer who writes on occasion about books, bringing to the task a rusty liberal-arts education, an average citizen’s spotty knowledge of contemporary issues, and a fiction writer’s childish willingness to immerse himself in make-believe. My embarkation, twenty-five years ago, on my first book reviews was prompted, perhaps, by a dim sense that the humanities and arts need repeated injections of amateurism.

  In this country now, public considerations of literary effort fall into two camps: there are those who, in newspapers and magazines, review the new books that are simultaneously appearing in the bookstores, and there are those who, in universities and colleges, present to students works of established merit. The former, in that even an adverse review constitutes publicity, function as arms of the publishing industry, as the latter function as employees of the educational industry. A task of the educational professionals is to advance literary theories, preferably with some shine of the newly invented or imported, whereby the students can process in their required papers works already exhaustively discussed by prior generations. A task of the journalistic professional is to suggest that, regardless of the ups and downs of individual cases, the world of books—the world of new books—is an exciting one, and bookstores are places, like Greece and the savings bank, that one really should visit. The two camps are not exclusive—professors review books all the time—and between them do mighty work in keeping the book industry humming. But one’s elusive fear, amid so much industry, is that an aura of duty will oust all joy from the situation.

  Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots—places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. Art, out of its own freedom, should excite and flatter our sense of our own. Professionalism in art has this difficulty: to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring—an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

  A man who reads a book for no particular profit becomes, while he reads, a gentleman, a man of leisure, a dandy of a sort; one would hate to see this dandyism entirely squelched, whether by the analytic mills of the universities or by the scarcely less grim purveying of animated information and automated thrills reflected by the best-seller lists. An occasional sport, a White Hotel or Name of the Rose, does show up in these lists to remind us that a certain whimsy, an ineluctable hankering for the elegant and unclassifiable, does persist in the soul of that rough beast, the book-buying public; but in general the list is all too predictable, and the industry as a whole is all too dependent upon the list. This potentially mirthless situation we self-appointed critics—and who will appoint us if not ourselves?—can ameliorate by being, within measure, self-amusing, by indulging our own tastes and pursuing our own educations, by seeking out the underpublished wallflower on the edge of the dance floor and giving her a twirl, by reminding ourselves that literary delights are rarefied delights, that today’s blockbuster is tomorrow’s insulation, that books are at best a beacon in the darkness but at second best a holiday that lasts and lasts.

  A POETICS OF BOOK REVIEWING, codified for the foreword to Picked-Up Pieces (1976).

  My rules, drawn up inwardly when I embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:

  1.) Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

  2.) Give enough direct quotat
ion—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

  3.) Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

  4.) Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

  5.) If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

  To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

  AN AMERICAN VIEW OF ENGLISH FICTION: Comment solicited by the Times Literary Supplement (London) in the spring of 1964, when Murdoch and Spark and the world were young.

  It is difficult for me to conceive of English fiction as something susceptible to telescopic examination of the sort we give a star: in most ways I feel closer to Muriel Spark than to Norman Mailer, though I may not be typical in this. At any rate my sense of instantaneous participation, as a reader, in English writing makes it absurd for me to say what is so obvious: that I enjoy, admire, and hope to have learned something from, say, E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh. It is perhaps less obvious, and more useful to say, that in my early reading the very beautiful and surprising novels of Henry Green were a revelation to me comparable only to my first readings of Proust and Kafka—and that if I were able to rub a lamp and have a new book by any living Englishman, it would be a book by him. To this I could add that, for a superbly cadenced examination of emotional states, I have read nothing recently to compare with Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. And, while we are at it, let me express my enduring affection and admiration for a generation of English writers—that of Chesterton, Belloc, Shaw, and Conrad—who, while no longer held in the esteem their living presences could command, have remained readable in a way true of no American writer between Henry James and Hemingway.

  In general, it seems to me possible that Americans trying to write can learn from their English cousins the valuable lesson of modesty. I do not mean to suggest that the English have “much to be modest about”—I mean that a certain vague assurance that society has a place (however modest) for him enables the English writer to utilize his gifts with a directness and ease denied the American. For the American writer, feeling the lack of such assurance (in fairness, it is not part of the American style to hand out assurances to anyone), must rather desperately try to rise above society, as a priest or Messiah, or stand outside it, as an expatriate or crank, or crouch beneath it, as a mock-criminal or pseudo-Negro. Or try all three poses in rapid alternation. In America, the strenuous task of being a writer always threatens the task of writing: the books of some of our fiction writers are indeed not so much a series of tales as a succession of self-aggrandizing protests, a row of hastily hewn props to keep an ever-tottering reputation from sinking out of view. In England I suspect it is easier to get an honest day’s work done.

  Adversely, let me say that no literature is as non-existential as the English. That is, the Englishman does not really seem to be aware of any intrinsic problem in human existence. It can all be patched up and muddled through. Hence the survival of satire—an instrument for piecemeal correction. Hence the extraordinary fluency with which novels of social circumstance are still produced—as if society were the universe. Hence the virtual absence of radically formal experimentation—although Nathalie Sarraute has clasped hands across the Channel with Ivy Compton-Burnett. Hence, finally, the uniquely sweet and seductive voice, which would call us back from the edge of the abyss in whose depths answers might lie—would call us back, from our shadowed armchairs, to green meadows where the May Queen still reigns.

  COMMENT, solicited by the editors of Poetry in 2006, on the effects of “poetry’s failure in the marketplace” on the Updike oeuvre.

  Had poetry paid as well as fiction, I would have written more of it. In the first decade of my free-lancing, the checks from The New Yorker for my (mostly light) verse were not, in my budget, insignificant. Back then, Robert Frost and Ogden Nash were living examples of the professional poet. I wouldn’t call poetry’s present marketplace position a “failure,” since no contemporary poet expects to make a living by it. He or she teaches, rather, or has an independent income. While making my living elsewhere, I have never stopped writing and reading poetry, as the exercise of language at its highest pitch. But let me add that I am dismayed by the recent rise of the term “literary fiction,” denoting a genre almost as rarefied and special and “curious” in its appeal, to contemporary Americans, as poetry.

  FOREWORD to the 1982 edition of The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures.

  This my first book yet had a long foreground of verse written since my early teens in imitation of Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley, Arthur Guiterman, Richard Armour, Robert Service, E. B. White, and others; the magical progression from frisson to words and thence from words to print first seemed feasible, to me, as a matter of stanzas and rhyme, and more poems than the number collected here were published in such available display cases as the Shillington High School Chatterbox, The Harvard Lampoon, and Jerry Kobrin’s hospitable column in the Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle. So when, in the June of my graduation from college, The New Yorker accepted “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” a long campaign bore fruit and an old dream came true. This was in 1954. In the following three years—spent in Moretown, Vermont; Plowville, Pennsylvania; Oxford, England; New York City; and finally Ipswich, Massachusetts—I ruthlessly exploited with my offerings the editorial breach I had made, and The New Yorker, perhaps bemused by the apparition of so eager a young practitioner of the dying art of light verse, accepted enough to make me feel that I had become a professional writer.

  The oldest poem in The Carpentered Hen is, if memory serves, “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked,” written in high school, under the influence of science fiction. “The Population of Argentina” is one of many composed at Harvard, though not one of the three included in Max Shulman’s Guided Tour of Campus Humor (Hanover House, 1955). The translation of a Horatian ode was done in my senior year for a competition, which it did not win; but years later, Garry Wills, then a classics scholar, chose it for his anthology Roman Culture (Braziller, 1966). The latest poems here are “Planting a Mailbox,” penned in observation of a rural rite soon after my hopeful move to a small New England town, and “A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects,” written one letter per day while I lay on the sands of Crane Beach in the summer of 1957. The infant son the alphabet was dedicated to now is twenty-five; twenty-four years have passed since Harper & Row, then Harper & Brothers, brought out The Carpentered Hen in a pretty mint-green jacket, and twenty-three years since my first novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf, who now, as a present to me on my fiftieth birthday, issues this new edition of my slim and no doubt expendable f
ledgling volume. Thank you, Alfred. Thank you, all, from the Chatterbox on.

  Light verse did not need to exist as long as its qualities of playfulness and formality and mundane perception were present in the high verse of Donne and Marvell, Dryden and Pope. Even Blake, in such quatrains as those of “Infant Sorrow” and “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau,” had the trick of it. But with the onset of Romanticism an alternative convention emerged in the society verses of W. M. Praed (Don Juan’s tune minus Byron’s bass) and became mixed, in Carroll and Lear and Calverley, with parody of Victorian solemnities. Calverley, the most exquisite of these, had a pedantic, Horatian streak also present, some generations and an ocean removed, in that American promulgator of the deft art Franklin P. Adams. Light verse as practiced by F.P.A. and Guiterman, and then by White and McGinley and Morris Bishop, can now be seen as a form of Georgian poetry; the modernism of Eliot and Auden and Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens leaves no space where wit can strike its own separate music.

  Polishing my post-adolescent jingles, I took small notice of these historical trends. But I did notice, around the time of John Kennedy’s assassination, that the market for comic, topical rhymes was slowly drying up, and my inspiration docilely dried up with it. Light verse makes up the bulk of this collection and exactly half of my next, Telephone Poles (1963); the fraction in Midpoint (1969) and Tossing and Turning (1977) is progressively smaller. I write no light verse now. Yet the aesthetic bliss of generating such lines as “My stick fingers click with a snicker” or “Superphosphate-fed foods feed me” or “thusiastically, and thus,” is as keen as any I have experienced, and this week of preparing The Carpentered Hen for its new venture forth—changing a few words, readjusting the order slightly—has been one of peaceful communion with an estimable former self. Of course, in my early twenties I attempted not only light verse. The second poem here, and the second accepted by The New Yorker, is “serious” and has enjoyed a healthy anthology life, though its second stanza now reads strangely to students.1 The lines welcoming my first child to the month of March (in fact she arrived late, on April Fools’ Day, the joke being on me) and those describing the inside of an English train compartment and Room 28 of the National Portrait Gallery seek to express what perhaps flickers at the edge of the light verse as well—the forebodings of a shy soul freshly embarked upon the uncharted ocean of adult life. “The blue above is mostly blue. / The blue below and I are, too.”