Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

Style as I understand it is nothing less than a writer’s habits of mind—it is not a kind of paint applied afterward, but the very germ of the thing. One has certain models of excellence, certain standards of prose evolved with the help sometimes of teachers and editors, and certain readerly expectations that one hopes, as a writer, to satisfy. Just as one’s handwriting tends to come out the same way every time, with certain quirks of emphasis and flow, so does one’s writing, with its recurrent pet vocabulary and concerns.

  I usually begin a new project excited by the idea of not sounding like Updike. Rabbit, Run, for instance, was an attempt to provide a prose more freewheeling and uninhibited than that in my New Yorker stories, which in general have an en brosse quality, sticking up in little points. When I began to write Rabbit, Run in the present tense, it was a conscious effort to escape the me who writes in the past tense and tends to get mired in elaborate backward-looking syntax. With Rabbit and his subsequent brothers, there was little looking back, just an impressionistic momentum and a fresh grasp of the language; lots of sentences that would be ordinary in the past tense take on a hasty poetry in the present; even the “he says” expresses something different.

  And so forth, story to story, book to book. The mandarin explosions of A Month of Sundays and The Coup sought relief from the drab Rabbit terrain. In Seek My Face, I tried to write the way Jackson Pollock painted, in long stringy loops. Nevertheless, there will be a sameness due to the limits of a single personality. One’s effort as an artist is to extend those limits as much as possible. When I read my old prose, usually aloud before audiences, I am aware of phrases I would not use now, things I have forgotten I ever knew, imitations of Proust and Henry Green that would not be so naked now, but in general I am comfortable. As in a real voice and body, changes occur—but organically, within one identity.

  LETTER included as an afterword to the introduction of Updike in Cincinnati: A Literary Performance, edited by James Schiff (2007).

  Dear Jim:

  I am happy to repose in your too-generous account of my public readings and appearances; would that it were exactly so. Since you ask in the course of your description, “Why does he do so much of it?,” permit me a response, though you answer the question well enough on your own. For one thing, I don’t think I do a lot of it—almost none in recent years, and, overall, less, surely, than Vonnegut, Mailer, Oates, Wolfe, and a dozen poets. My reasons, as best as I can understand them myself, are

  1.) I may not need the money, but I feel I need it. For two days or, in the Cincinnati case, three of travel and amiable socializing I receive twice or more the payment than for a short story that took many days of intense and chancy mental effort to compose. Chancy—a story can always be rejected, and come to nothing. As long as posing as a writer pays better than being a writer, a child of the Depression, as was I, will be tempted.

  2.) I get to see, in the margins of my appearance, a bit of the country, this wonderful federal republic that it is my job to know and love. And I meet a lot of bright professorial people and hopeful young students that I would not otherwise; just the deportment and dress of a student audience tells you something about where you are. And how would I otherwise get to hang out with great guys like Jim Schiff, Bill Pritchard, and Don Greiner?

  3.) I began late—until 1965 or so I read in public only in a few New England venues—and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could do it, without much stuttering. The microphone and the attentive audience allay a stutterer’s basic fear, the root of his vocal impediment—the fear of not being heard. The speaker tries, at a cocktail party or in a telephone conversation, too hard to be heard, to be understood, and anxiety jams his throat and blocks speech. Instead, a soothing honey of attention and responsive laughter eases the platform performer’s voice box, and he luxuriates in a degree of attention not experienced since his parents stopped hearkening to his first babbling.

  4.) Reading something aloud is a good way to test it, to see if the words do flow as when heard in one’s head. My effort while reading is to pronounce the words slowly and distinctly, letting them speak for themselves. You have to have faith, in the surrounding silence as you drone on, that the listener—any listener—is with you.

  5.) I have been known to write out speeches and give them, à la Tom Wolfe, but really that seems too much effort for fifty minutes or an hour in the limelight, between the dinner with the English faculty beforehand and the book-signing afterward. Also, it bends my mind in a crippling way; there is something fishy and forced about opinions manufactured on mighty topics (e.g., “Are public libraries good things?” and “Is the planet going to the dogs?”). My fiction and poetry are my fullest and most honest attempt to describe my realities and contribute to society’s net wisdom. If reading a selected sample, with what comments occur to me, is not enough for the audience, let it go down to the cineplex instead.

  I had a great time in Cincinnati, but why is there no shrine to Doris Day?

  All best,

  John Updike

  THE COURAGE OF BALLPLAYERS: A comment solicited, in 2002, by Curt Smith and the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum for a coffee-table book celebrating the national pastime.

  What baseball means to me is standing as a child on third base of our local softball field and praying that no ball would be hit my way. Even a softball seemed hard to me, and what came up to the plate in a hardball game looked like a bullet. An imperfectly aimed bullet. My admiration for the men who play this game has been intensified by this early revelation of the courage it takes. The courage, too, to stand alone, surrounded by green space, and have your mistakes show in full view of the stadium.

  POST-HUBBLE ASTRONOMY: A gloss on “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe,” a short story published in Harper’s in 2004 and reprinted, with this commentary, in Physics Today, April 2005.

  It is not true that developments in physics go ignored by professional humanists or by the common man. The basic facts get to us all and frame the way we think and even, in this instance of the fictional Martin Fairweather, feel. The picture physics paints of the material universe is arresting enough to make the newspapers but far from flattering to our individual identities. Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil.

  ON “THE AMERICAN IDEA”: Written, in 2007, for the sesquicentennial issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which featured a symposium on this theme.

  The American idea, as I understand it, is to trust people to know their own minds and to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with a necessary respect for others. Totalitarian governments promise relief for deprived and desperate people, but in the end are maintained in power by terrorism from above rather than the consent of the governed. Empowerment of the individual was the idea in 1857, the year of The Atlantic’s founding, and after a century and a half of travail and misadventure among human societies, there is no better idea left standing. The idea of individual freedom, undermined by a collectivist tide in the first half of the last century and disregarded by radical Islam today, now spreads through an electronic culture of music, television, and the Internet, even under governments fearful of losing control.

  Not only are ordinary citizens to be trusted, in the American idea, but leaders of government, too. Those who have lost the people’s trust can be voted out. To be sure, there is a lag in the process, but a process more immediately responsive to the people’s will might have ousted Lincoln and Washington in their unpopular moments. A certain trust in a nation’s overall soundness and stability is implied in the contract between the governed and the governors. American democracy speaks not just in votes and policies, but in the buoyancy, good nature, and mutual tolerance of its people. These qualities persist even in difficult times—and what times are devoid of difficulties, of contention and conflict and challenge? The American idea builds them in, creating not a static paradise but a productively competitive section of the earth’s humanity.

  Th
e challenges ahead? A fury against liberal civilization by the world’s poor, who have nothing to lose; a ruinous further depletion of the world’s natural assets; a global warming that will change world climate and with it world geopolitics. The American idea, promulgated in a land of plenty, must prepare to sustain itself in a world of scarcity.

  COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS delivered at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on May 23, 1993.

  Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, Mr. Chancellor, fellow-honorees, members of the platform, members of the faculty, gratified parents, and grateful graduating students: you are about to see a vow being broken. Decades ago, in the innocent purity of my avant-garde beginnings, I vowed never to give a commencement speech. I had heard a number in my progress through the American educational system, and as an occasional honoree at college ceremonies since I have heard a number more, always with the nagging thought, Is this necessary? The commencement speech, like the weather forecast on television, is a ceremonial space in American life, a spirited spouting of words whose value is not factual content but homage to the empyrean, to the heavens that send us rain and sunshine, good fortune and bad, out of those invisible tiers where atmosphere becomes stratosphere, and stratosphere becomes virtual vacuum.

  At this moment, you graduating seniors are brim-full of yourselves—your twenty-plus years of life have reached a culmination that gives your brief personal history a certain drama and shape, arrowing as it has toward this very point in time. You are surrounded by buildings and scenes you will rarely if ever see again, and by friends most of whom, incredible as it seems, will fade forever from your lives. You are each pregnant with the person you will become, and this pregnancy is preoccupying and disquieting, dreadful and wonderful. At this sensitive moment of morning sickness, then, appears a more or less elderly, in some remote sense eminent, person, who will talk to you about himself, or herself, or his or her favorite cause. In my idealistic youth I vowed never to be that person.

  But here am I, and my topic, predictably, is myself. In trying to imagine my audience today, I reflected back upon my own few graduations—from a small-town high school in Pennsylvania in 1950, from Harvard College in 1954. The world of the early Fifties was, compared with the world you know, in some ways touchingly innocent and underequipped. Our electronic expertise extended little beyond knowing how to turn on a radio. Television existed, but as a black-and-white novelty; the screen was small and round, and we had not grown up with it. Popular music came out of jukeboxes, and its stars—Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters, Nat “King” Cole—were admired by our parents as well as ourselves; it was not until Elvis Presley’s emergence in 1956 that the generational divide in musical taste established itself as a canyon in our cultural landscape. The movies, too, catered to all ages, and their repertoire of sanitized, romantic imagery had been brought, in the Thirties and Forties, to a high pitch of expressiveness and penetration; my generation’s aspirations, ethical values, and notions of social etiquette were in large part shaped by the movies. The bias of the men in Hollywood who made the movies was intensely patriotic and populist-conservative; that is, the American people, we learned, had a heart of gold. We had witnessed, as children, the United States send its men and women across the world’s two great oceans to defeat two cruel fascist empires; we had little reason to question that heart of gold. By “we” I suppose I have come to mean young white males; in 1954 women were expected to marry, and African-Americans to know their place. Further, homosexuals were expected to stay in the closet, Latin Americans to stay south of the border, sin to stay in the red-light district, and abortions to stay in the back alley. Keeping the Communists at bay was the main political agenda, and the principal domestic question was “Why is the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit so unhappy?”

  Mine was, I can see now, a rather fortunate generation. We were born into the heart of the Depression, yet our childishness sheltered us from any radical doubt of capitalism’s essential benevolence. Too young to be out of work, we were then too young to fight the Second World War but old enough to participate vicariously in its excitement and triumph. There were not many of us, thanks to the pinched domestic budgets of the Thirties, and we graduated, in the early Fifties, into a nation where prices were still low but opportunities were multiplying. It was not difficult, as we slipped into our first jobs, to buy our first automobiles for a few thousand dollars or our first house for—as mine was in 1958—$18,500. We married young and thought nothing of having four or five children. Suddenly, we were too old for Vietnam, and for the next wave of radical doubt and potential revolution. Our goals were personal and particular and we never elected a President from our number; national leadership has recently at last passed from the generation that fought the Second World War to the generation that fought or protested the war in Vietnam. What did we do? A minority of us fought in Korea, and most of us, by paying our taxes and believing our leaders, saw the Cold War through. They called us, long ago, the Silent Generation. Now we are old enough to take early retirement and paint watercolors in Arizona, but many of us still cling to positions of power, and in our silence have carried forward the work of industry and the arts, agriculture and business, advertising and bureaucracy. Of course, I love my generation; I have spent my professional life mostly writing about myself and my peers, our gradual loss of sexual and political innocence, our experience of the last four decades of history and of the timeless human experience of growth, work, change, and decay.

  My thought for you this morning is that you may not be much different. The generational rhythm dictates that grandparents and grandchildren resemble one another; you, too, are graduating into times when history is more like a short-story collection than a novel. You are concerned about finding your niche in the economy, as were we; you are looking to family life as the vehicle of happiness, as did we. And perhaps you distrust generalizations as did we. I distrust even the ones I am now making. All generations, when the dust has finally settled, are mostly silent. The world is always with us, and is never without danger and woe. History tints us, like fish that swim through colored water; but our bones are all fish bones. The human species, with its internal drives and conflicts, is a constant. A Cro-Magnon man of thirty-five thousand years ago, were he dressed in academic garb and placed on this platform, would not look out of place. We are born into history, and graduate into it, but our animal optimism and our cerebral capacity to plan our own personal futures exist independently of history. The individual is the unit of measure and of national movement; nowhere is this more true than in the United States.

  I have said that I was conditioned to believe that America has a heart of gold; mine may be the last generation that could believe this easily. But international events in the four years since you entered this university make it easier, it seems to me, and newly exciting to be American. We are no longer obliged to pour our strength into a cold war of reaction and counterblow; we have moved from a dualistic to a pluralistic world, a world in which our national gifts are by no means obsolete. What are those national gifts? At a stab, they are good humor, optimism, the ability to improvise, the willingness to learn, and respect for the individual. You graduating seniors are the latest embodiments of these qualities, the newest edition. Thanks to television and computers, and to an openness that came with the Sixties, you are savvy in ways my generation was not. What you know about the facts of life, and what you understand of tolerance and acceptance and multiform ways of being human, puts 1954 to shame. But your generational savviness, it could be, in our age of imagery and sound bites is a matter more of imagery than of the heft of real things, of earth and the tools that bit by bit move it. You cannot but learn more of the world’s heft, as you take it now into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

  REPLY to a commendation by Stephen H. Webb, presenter of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, delivered at the meeting
of the Modern Language Association, in Philadelphia, on December 29, 2006.

  Let me extend my thanks to you, Professor Webb, for your most generous words, and to all of you of the Conference instrumental in giving me this award. Any literary award prompts some guilt in me, for to have lived since the age of twenty-two as a published writer, with the lenient hours and craftsmanly pleasures the vocation bestows, is surely reward enough. The productivity that Mr. Webb mentions, although somewhat intimidating, not to say suffocating, in its accumulated fruits over these five decades, was for me a less than onerous daily duty to earn my privileges as a self-employed, and virtually unsupervised, worker in one of the last cottage industries, one wherein impulsive marks on blank paper are gradually turned into print and snugly bound pages.

  My connection with Christianity is unremarkable. Raised in the pious precincts of Berks County, fifty miles northwest of here, in a small town where the season of our Saviour’s birth was openly celebrated with civic lights and town-hall ceremonies, in a school system where Bible passages and the Lord’s Prayer began each day, and the son, furthermore, of a Presbyterian minister’s son who obligingly, with marriage to my mother, became a Lutheran deacon and Sunday-school teacher, I accepted churchgoing as part of a respectable and orderly life, and even in college and youthful periods of city residence never quite forsook the habit. I felt lost and lonely without it. As I aged, much of my life took on the aspect of answered prayers, and not to acknowledge, to the object of these prayers, my gratitude would have struck, to my sense of things, a wicked imbalance. In my twenties and early thirties, especially, I sought to firm up my supernatural inklings by reading theology and professedly Christian authors, of which there were a significant number in the 1950s.