Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism Read online

  2012 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition

  Copyright © 1991 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64585-6

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: © H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Fairly Personal

  FIVE DAYS IN FINLAND AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-FIVE

  THE PARADE

  FIRST WIVES AND TROLLEY CARS

  YOUR LOVER JUST CALLED: A PLAYLET

  MEDIA

  Being on TV—I

  Being on TV—II

  Books into Film

  A Nameless Rose

  Overboard on Overboard

  ENVIRONS

  Fictional Houses

  Can Architecture Be Criticized?

  Is New York City Inhabitable?

  A Sense of Transparency

  A Short and Happy Ride

  ESSAYS ON ASSIGNED TOPICS

  Women

  Mother

  The Female Body

  Beauty

  Spirituality

  The Fourth of July

  Our National Monuments

  The Importance of Fiction

  High Art Versus Popular Culture

  Popular Music

  The Boston Red Sox, as of 1986

  Ted Williams, as of 1986

  Mostly Literary

  TRIBUTES

  Edmund Wilson

  Mr. Volente

  Mr. Palomar

  John Cheever—I

  John Cheever—II

  John Cheever—III

  John Cheever—IV

  SPEECHES

  How Does the State Imagine?

  How Does the Writer Imagine?

  Should Writers Give Lectures?

  Emersonianism

  Howells as Anti-Novelist

  INTRODUCTIONS

  To Indian Summer, by William Dean Howells

  To Nature’s Diary, by Mikhail Prishvin

  To The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka

  To Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen

  To Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara

  To The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene

  To Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, by Karl Barth

  MORALISTS

  The Gospel According to St. Matthew

  Many Bens

  The Ugly Duckling

  The Heartless Man

  The Virtues of Playing Cricket on the Village Green

  AMERICANS

  Twisted Apples

  The Sinister Sex

  Cohn’s Doom

  Summonses, Indictments, Extenuating Circumstances

  Back in Midland City

  Last Blague

  What You Deserve Is What You Get

  Beattieniks

  Leaving Home

  No More Mr. Knightleys

  Louise in the New World, Alice on the Magic Molehill

  Back to Nature

  PHILIP ROTH

  Doing His Thing

  Yahweh over Dionysus, in Disputed Decision

  Bound to Please

  Wrestling to Be Born

  And Nothing But

  FRENCHMEN

  Art and Artillery

  Between Pinget’s Ears

  Illuminating Reversals

  Michel Tournier

  Small Packages

  IRIS MURDOCH, PAIRED WITH OTHERS

  Baggy Monsters

  Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard

  Back to the Classics

  BRITISHERS

  Genius Without a Cause

  Among the Masters

  To the Arctic

  Lost Among the Romantics

  A Romp with Job

  Spark but No Spark

  Bad Neighbors

  The Jones Boys

  Seeking Connections in an Insecure Country

  THE OTHER AMERICANS

  Living Death

  Latin Strategies

  The Great Paraguayan Novel and Other Hardships

  Resisting the Big Boys

  THE EVIL EMPIRE

  How the Other Half Lives

  Out of the Evil Empire

  Russian Delinquents

  Visiting the Land of the Free

  Doubt and Difficulty in Leningrad and Moscow

  OTHER COUNTRIES HEARD FROM

  Chronicles and Processions

  Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns

  Three Tales from Nigeria

  Chinese Disharmonies

  In Love with the West

  Far-Fetched

  As Others See Us

  Studies in Post-Hitlerian Self-Condemnation in Austria and West Germany

  Rational Faith

  Mutability and Gloire

  Dutchmen and Turks

  Levels and Levels

  ODD COUPLES

  A Pair of Parrots

  Memory Palaces

  In Dispraise of the Powers That Be

  Ungreat Lives

  Old World Wickedness

  VN Again and Again

  Nice Tries

  HYPERREALITY

  The Flaming Chalice

  Ecolalia

  In Borges’s Wake

  Modernist, Postmodernist, What Will They Think of Next?

  States of Mind

  Final Fragments

  Slogging Sammy

  Still Stirring

  Still Staring

  Writer-Consciousness

  A Materialist Look at Eros

  LANDSCAPES AND CHARACTERS

  A Long Way Home

  The Local View

  Hymn to Tilth

  Damp and Dull

  Empire’s End

  Schulz’s Charred Scraps

  BIOGRAPHIES

  The Process and the Lock

  Eliot Without Words

  Goody Sergeant; the Powerful Katrinka; K.S.W.

  Witty Dotty

  Was B.B. a Crook?

  The Bimbo on the Barge

  HARD FACTS

  Something Substantial and Useful About It

  Bull in a Type Shop

  Art’s Dawn

  Computer Heaven

  Evolution Be Praised

  Deep Time and Computer Time

  Appendix: LITERARILY PERSONAL

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Preface

  NOT LONG AFTER ASSEMBLING my last eight-years’ accumulation of essays and criticism, Hugging the Shore, I acquired a word processor, a writing instrument so dazzling that I composed a poem to it, on it, beginning

  Wee.​word.​processor,.​is.​it.​not

  De.​trop.​of.​you.​to.​put.​a.​dot

  Between.​the.​words.​your.​nimble.​screen

  Displays.​in.​phosp​hores​cent.​green?

  and ending

  My.​circuits.​have.​been.​scrambled.​by

  Your.​being.​brighter,.​far,.​than.​I.

  In fact the machine does have a staring quality that introduces an element of social embarrassment into the prolonged, tenuous intimacy of composing
a novel, and that drives one back to pencil on paper. But for odd jobs, the odd literary jobs—the prefaces and puffs, the “few paragraphs” on beauty or baseball—that a persevering writer, aging into a shaky sort of celebrity, gets increasingly asked to do, the machine is ideal, rattling off clean copy at the stab of a switch, accommodating revisions in a seamless electronic twinkling. An element of technological suavity is introduced into one’s hitherto clumsy literary labors, with their bleary carbons and slow-drying whiteout and anxious marginalia. Almost irresistible become the seductive invitations on the perfumed stationery of ad-chocked ladies’ magazines for a feuilleton on femininity, the brisk demands from conglomerate-owned publishers for a fresh introductory slant onto their new printing of an alleged classic, the charmingly hand-penned notes from the guiding spirits of highbrow quarterlies, the disarmingly misspelled and dot-matrixed pleas for a credo from college monthlies, the imperious phone calls from the English-accented secretaries of editorial powerbrokers in their Manhattan aeries, the urgent requests that bring the white Federal Express trucks roaring up the driveway and once again over the freshly seeded edges of the lawn. With his wonderful new tool of ease how can a writer say No?

  Clearly, the present writer said Yes not infrequently. In one especially affirmative phase, toward the end of 1988, as I was trying to muster my scattered resources and commence a novel, I found myself obligated to write an introduction to an album of New Yorker covers, a study of our national monuments from the engineering angle for Popular Mechanics, a hymn to winter golf for Golf Digest, and an essay upon the Gospel of St. Matthew for a book on the New Testament—an anthology of amateur exegeses called Incarnation, a wispy Christian sequel to an Old Testament bodice-ripper titled Congregation—not to mention an adaptation of an old short story of mine into a brief play, a commentary upon a poem of mine for a children’s anthology, a speech on computers to be given at M.I.T., and definitive reviews of a Chinese Communist sex novel, a historical treatise upon a certain John Hu who happened to go crazy in eighteenth-century France, and two giant tomes devoted to the further glory of George Bernard Shaw. Except for the tiny commentary on the poem, written in kiddy-talk, and the cover introduction, senseless without the covers themselves, and the golf piece, saved for some more sporty collection, all these efforts are contained in Odd Jobs, including the Popular Mechanics article, which I had considered leaving out but which on being reread held my interest, with its piquant nuts and bolts, its saga of leveraged heft and large-scale chiselling in the cause of patriotic symbolization. Do not think, however, that I have lazily included every odd job performed since mid-1982: I left out forewords to the collected lyrics of Cole Porter and the supposedly best short stories of 1984, several essays on photographs, a number of pedagogic textbook commentaries, two funeral orations, a few New Yorker “Notes and Comments,” all essays on golf and art, and more than a few saucy little speeches, including one jovially introducing George Plimpton so he could as jovially present the MacDowell Medal to a slightly less jovial William Styron.

  The very first item, the account of my five days in Finland, came about curiously: a new Condé Nast magazine, Traveler, invited me to contribute, and, since I had already scheduled my sentimental visit to Finland, I thought to write for them a kind of parody of a travel piece. But The New Yorker, to whom, in obedience to my contractual obligations, I showed the result first, surprisingly accepted it, and thus my nonevents and angst-ridden excursion popped up in its deadpan pages, under the commodious heading “Our Footloose Correspondents.” Several Finnish schoolchildren, thinking I was attacking their excellent country, sent me indignant postcards. My travel confidences are followed herein by two stray pieces of semi-fiction, to give them a home between covers, and the wee self-plagiarized play. In the cases of “The Importance of Fiction” and “Can Architecture Be Criticized?” an irritation with myself for accepting the assignments may have galvanized my style and hyperbolized my assertions. Otherwise, my conscience is clear enough. After all, what is a writer for but to write? Some novelists—Bellow, Styron, Pynchon—seem able to confine themselves to well-spaced presentations of book-length works to a grateful public; I, even though (or perhaps because) I have lived most of my life in small towns, need a certain frequent reassurance of proofs coming and going, of postage and phoning, of input and output. The discreet fuss of periodical publication gives me citizenship in the corporate world and connects me, not too bindingly, with a network of literary colleagues. I cannot live within the anchorite’s cell of a novel all the time. And, raised in a Depression atmosphere of financial anxiety, I have trouble turning money from the door; today’s eager profferer of two dollars a word may be tomorrow’s bankrupt venture in targeted marketing. Just now, as I write these words, New England Monthly, which ran several of the frothier concoctions below, has its folding noted in the morning paper, and an hour later a Federal Express truck huffs and puffs to my door with a billet-doux from Gentlemen’s Quarterly: “We would very much like to have something by you in the magazine. We had thought of a couple of essay ideas—art, the business of art, galleries, museums, etc.—but we wonder if you might not rather write a piece on golf?” Alas, even the courteously cajoling editor seems to sense that I may have said my fill on these thoroughly stroked pet topics. My best defense, in fending off odd jobs, remains a widespread ignorance.

  One accepts editorial invitations in the hopes of learning something, or of extracting from within some unsuspected wisdom. For writing educates the writer as it goes along. “I always write a thing first and think about it afterwards,” E. B. White wrote, “because the easiest way to have consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down.” The pieces herein that I feel fondest toward are, perversely, those prodigals that gave me most trouble: the eye-grinding forays into vast prose tracts of Emerson and Howells, of Tolstoy and Shaw and Ben Franklin. I returned with a piece of the boundless kingdom of the written word a little better mapped in my mind. Without being a reader the way some professors, editors, and chairbound agoraphobes are readers, I am shyly happy among texts. Quotations, and even quotations within quotations, please me. How nicely, it seems to me, “Fictional Houses” frames up its topic, of the real within the imaginary! How real, to me, became, in Stephen Gould’s exposition, the precipitous, layered terrain where Victorian theology and geology collide! My ability to get excited by such verbal constructs perhaps goes back to my childhood cartooning—my yen to draw talk balloons in ruled-off panels. Then I became a college English major. Now, having shied from graduate school and the conventional literary sideline of teaching, I feel a need for quick-fix seminars, and write term papers for pay instead of for grades.

  Of the odd jobs I do, writing New Yorker reviews feels the least odd; the generous space the magazine provides, the weight of attention its editors and fact-checkers selflessly bring to bear upon the columns my name alone claims, the cheerful welcome granted to a little fun and freestyle generalization in the prose all make the reviews feel like a profitable subdivision of creativity. To date I have written two hundred and one signed reviews for the magazine, plus dozens of “Briefly Noted”s. In my four collections of non-fictional prose, I count (not including introductions) three hundred sixty-nine books reviewed. At the modest estimate of ten hours per book, that comes to 3,690 hours, or 461.25 eight-hour days, amounting to ninety-two five-day weeks, or, less holidays and vacations, just about two working years. I consider it time not ill spent. At this task I have been allowed to create an alter ego, a kind of sage younger brother, urbane and proper, with none of the warts, tics, obsessions, and compulsions that necessarily disfigure an imaginative writer, who must project a world out of a specific focus and selected view—whose peculiarities, indeed, are his style, his personality, his testimony, his peculiar value. It is reassuring, not only to such a monster but to his ideal readers, to be able to claim as kin a business-suited, levelly judgmental critic—a kind of lawyer in the family. The establishment and certification of th
is figure (no more or less fictional, somehow, than the heroes of Rabbit, Run and The Coup and Self-Consciousness) has given me much methodical pleasure over the decades and lent the comfort of respectability to my near and dear.

  Respectability, however, comes with a price for a would-be artist. As eminent a critic as Malcolm Cowley once, after some kind words about a review of mine of James Joyce’s letters, wondered if I ought to be doing this sort of thing at all. I wondered, too. Creativity is a delicate imp; it should dwell under toadstools and garb itself in cobwebs and not be smothered beneath a great load of discriminatory judgments. Too much left-brained control takes the emptiness, as a Zen golf instructor might say, out of your swing. And there is a rhythm, of artful qualification—a scorpion circling, sting poised above his back—that critical sentences acquire, and which can infect descriptive prose with a circumlocutory smugness. It is almost impossible to avoid, in writing a review, the tone of being wonderfully right; whereas any creative endeavor launches itself on the winds of uncertainty and accident, and will certainly go wrong in some drifts and be judged wrong in others. I found the writing of these reviews a bit hectic—locating the quote you want, patching up the transitions, rushing along before the book quite fades from memory—but reprehensibly safe from the fear of blasphemy, the fear of doing a great thing poorly that makes every venture into fiction and poetry a tentative and fretful affair, rife with delaying maneuvers and second cups of fortifying tea. How much better to do a great thing worthily than to do many things well enough! “Man of letters” is not, to me, a term of much praise; it suggests the uniform yet lightweight solidity of a mannequin, a humanoid artifact posed in the big windows of cultural display, crisply dressed in this season’s fashions but its body consisting, from toeless feet to alertly tilted head, of a single plastery substance, ground-up letters. A mannequin’s eyes are dead; there is nobody home; men of letters live in limbo. So I am relieved to see that, under The New Yorker’s new management, fresh young untamed blood is being infused into the Books Department and my dutiful reviewing pace can at last be slackened. Though the present editor, Robert Gottlieb, and the editor for my Books pieces, Ann Goldstein, are as hospitable and assiduous as their predecessors, William Shawn and Susan Moritz, and though Edith Oliver, the Books dispatcher, is as recklessly on-cheering as ever, the heat is somehow off. In keeping with the valedictory mood of my late fifties (see this page), the bulk of my reviewing feels behind me, and a perspective looms from which all of it was, if not a mistake, an aberration. My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal.