As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I’m too Christian for Harold Bloom’s blessing. So be it. [i]
The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been blamed and broken and half-blinded by the scandal of life, is such the existentially godless man. [ii]
I. In Place of an Introduction….
After 491 pages, the reader comes to the final two words in John Updike’s magisterial In the Beauty of the Lilies: “the children.” The words are stated without emphasis or misdirection, except from the high ground of grief: “the children,” those holy innocents born into the bad new days of what seems to be a doomed American quest, a reckoning, and what could be read as a self-glorifying death wish since what passes for religion can only cult-like culminate in violence. What is true Christianity has been handed over to the philistines.
Even so, those words at the ending, “the children,” are John Updike’s idea of a happy ending.
II. He takes the reader beyond self consciousness, and beyond self-importance, into the sheer wonder at the miracle of existence….
One of the delightful experiences as a college professor was Saturday mornings devoted to “Parents Weekend.” Mothers and fathers, grandparents, siblings, would arrive and be on time, albeit often confused. Schedules in hand, you see, but for newbie parents easy to mistake an English professor for a Math professor, even if only one of them has a pocket protector!
My job?
Not glibly to snitch but to let the parents know that I was in loco parentis and doing what I could to familiarize them… that I knew their daughter or son… and explain a few things about the class in which the young person was enrolled.
There was some stumbling with that phrase “in loco.”
Noting that a good number of students had been Christian home-schooled, some parents were “on the look-out,” which meant unique conversations:
“So, my daughter says you’ve assigned Erasmus. Isn’t he a secular humanist?”
The sticking point?
In some cases the home-schooler may not have read something by Erasmus, say “In Praise of Folly,” but an abstract in which the editor referred to Erasmus as a secular humanist and not a Christian humanist, or what Erasmus termed the “philosopher of Christ.” Thus the editor’s interpretation assumed a status which for the home-schooling parent was akin to gospel, and thus the student’s refusal to read Erasmus in his own words because he’s a secular humanist or too much a Renaissance Man.
Of course there’s religion and then there’s religion and there are books and there are dirty books… which raises the question: Can one write about life, even life’s carnality and concupiscence, while maintaining Christian aspects?
There were some problems also with Chaucer and those ribald tales told on the way to Canterbury. Who can forget she of the red stockings, deaf and gap-toothed, married five times and the earliest at the age of twelve?
Morally questionable, no?
But the editor’s abstract is presumably a voice of authority, albeit in parsing Erasmus, censoring for some reason. So it goes in academic circles, but these days more ”woke-ly infectious” (if those are the right words), which at other college venues translates into whether or not Shakespeare is a racist or a misogynist and/or other epithets.
I mention this because I became fond over the years of the many contradictions regarding parents’ expectations about religion and literature, which included a smallish broo ha ha with a fundamentalist father when he learned his daughter would be reading a John Updike novel in an upper division American Literature course devoted to American Contemporary fiction—the father arguing that although he had never read Updike he believed him scandalous and a writer of a titillating, stylized pornography. Those are my words not his… which was singular: “dirty.”
He had heard such from someone somewhere.
And he has a point and a good one, and I am not without empathy. As with many writers whose personal life and writings own a certain kind of “smudginess,” greasy fingers on the pages, Updike is no exception. His embrace of realism as an artistic criterion (often concerning the breakdown of marriage) is often passé these days and with gray humor. One question that emerges is whether a narrative Updike presents to his readers is a full and authentic report of human experience, which includes the particulars of the times and places of the narrative’s action, which would argue that Updike is a formal realist. Like his characters, he also put himself through many personal hardships. He had faults, and they were “smudgy” and blurred.
For sure the origins of human creativity will never be solved, and in my research I have not discovered whether John Updike and George Booth ever “conversed” in the hallways of the New Yorker, both cartoonists of a certain stamp, an everyman or everywoman or every couple beset by modern complexity, perplexing each other. If only Updike had included cats and dogs and a mother-in-law in the attic.
At his death, his ambition was a novel with drawings about St. Paul in his early adolescence updated and cartoonish, meandering along with a golf bag hung on his shoulder with that two iron canted over his head and a test to see if God could hit a two iron. Think of it as a Booth cartoon ossified, grace in an eighty-yard worm-burner.
Still, though, “smudged” and peculiar to Updike, who very likely wrote his name in wet cement more than once or twice or thrice, and all those moments blissful for a cartoonist manqué, “smudgy.”
But during our ten-minute Saturday morning sit-down, I suspect I never changed the man’s mind completely, but I made the attempt by stating that the true heart of good writing is imitation. Imagine holding up a mirror and reflected in that mirror is an image of a more free-wheeling America at mid-century or so, the late 1950s and 1960s, and wonder whether the spirit of the age is not one of the beginnings of overwhelming graphic infidelity and devastation caused by the sexual revolution, among other things. I did not hum the lyrics to “Mrs. Robinson” or reference the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” that movie of seduction and plastics.
I hoped for the student’s father to understand that Updike was a moralist and that his themes were serious in picturing the reality around us. I mentioned that in 1989 Updike wrote and published Self-Consciousness, six Emersonian autobiographical essays tantamount to an early memoir. He was at that interesting age of fifty-five and about to give up smoking. The last of the essays is titled “On Being A Self Forever,” in which Updike makes the point that his Christian faith is what enabled him to proceed with confidence as a writer. [iii] And there’s that word “forever,” a modifier meaning “eternally or always or everlastingly” and whether spring will ever arrive in Minnesota, my home state before Michigan. As I write this, it’s in full bloom in the upstate of South Carolina… spring and summer that is.
It’s the last of the essays in which he takes up the subject of the after-life, arguing that those who “scoff at the Christian hope of an afterlife have on their side not only a mass of biological evidence knitting the self-conscious mind tightly to the perishing body but a certain moral superiority as well,” which he then queries is “terribly, well, selfish, and grotesquely egocentric. Where, after all, given the vast spaces disclosed by modern astronomy would our disembodied spirit go, and once there what would it do?” [iv]
He goes on adding that the yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: It is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval [of earthly life], to witness and experience even though life as we know it is inextricable from change.
What’s at issue, however, is that all mysteries have been subject to modernist dissolution: God, having been in the general and intellectual mind thoroughly dissolved into psychology and anthropology and liberal ethics even though, quoting Emerson, Updike argues that evidence of God’s being lies with that of our own: God is our only shield against death which is also a need for our “I” to have its “Thou.”
And then I said to my student’s parent that Updike always made the argument that he was a religious writer and an apologist for Christian theism. I noted that his In The Beauty of the Lilies tackles a swath of American history in stunning fashion, covering eight decades, and can be read as history informing the novel. Thus it’s important to note that history is an extraordinary tapestry with multitudes of strings, one of which is the Wilmot family, but only God’s hand can span the whole of that history,
But to what critical end?
The decline of Christian faith, the conflicts between labor and corporate America, and the rise of iconic Hollywood, the Roxie Movie Theater as a sort of new church, all of which is a nervous precursor to the millennium and our own age. I asked only after our ten minutes together whether our kaleidoscopic social media contributes to or is a detraction to our Christian faith? Please do not follow me on Facebook, I added facetiously.
I invited the father to stay over and come to class Monday morning, when we would be surveying and discussing the first long section of the novel. And to his credit, he did, and came to class and then to my office where we reached a warm détante. But he couldn’t grasp why Updike titled the novel In The Lilies Of The Valley.
It’s from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I said, that controversial War Between the States, with Christ in the wine press and which inspired the northern cause to reunite the country. But it’s more than just a patriotic song. I said there’s a phrase which by an angular sort of way is important for the novel: “His truth is marching on.” It’s important to note that there were events taking place in the southern states before and during the war years but note how the war could be understood as a striving to create a beloved and faithful community devoted to religious truth marching on.
Is it possible, I suggested that short time in my office, that although the conflict on bloody battle fields was some time ago, it could be argued that the social and cultural conflict in our day and age is also opposed to the “truth” and the creation of a beloved community.
He stood, we shook hands, and he said, “I suppose you could be right.” And then he added, “Professor, I like the way in which you’re living your life.” What professor could ever ask more from a parent!
III. Updike on Liberal Preaching….
One should consider Updike’s own thoughts on faith expressed during an interview with Jan Nunley in 1993 and printed in the Episcopal Life also in 1993. Here Updike explains what he calls “betrayals,” clergy who do not practice what they preach, including one liberal pastor who confirmed him but didn’t really attach any factual reality to the “confirming” process. He adds that the very “hollowness of [his voice] frightened me.” [v]
He was distressed, he notes, because without the supernatural assurances in the confirmation process, we might as well all be dogs and cats and cockroaches. What was at one time rigorous catechizing had become too relaxed. Thus those books that have clerical characters in them are present since he’s trying to force a message on the reader while giving human behavior theological scrutiny in his fiction, but also resonant with the crisis theologians of the 1950s and 1960s… Karl Barth especially, and about which more in a bit.
“Faith,” Updike then adds, “is a response to anxiety about death, the natural product of having a mind that can foresee a future and such should lead us to theologians and ministers we can trust and who lead us to “pray in that space behind our eyelids.” [vi]
To which his interviewer responded, “That’s very incarnational” (sic).
He became, he said, a Barth aficionado and hadn’t altered his views.
But also about which one must own a high tolerance for ambiguity.
For Updike the solution to theological betrayal was that movement called crisis theology or neo-othodoxy, which tended to argue that liberal theology, the social gospel movement, failed to touch on the real issues of life. The solution is not a simple thing. But, in a nutshell, Barth teaches that decisions are forced upon a “man” when he is placed before that dreadful antinomy between time and eternity, the world and the awful transcendence of God whose mystery is boundless but whose word comes to man not as an idea but a revelation; i.e., the words in the Gospels which “reveal” a contact with humanity from the Cross. For Barth, et al, the result is that God has bridged the impassable chaos of sin but coming to us in a manner far beyond human wisdom.
Updike’s familiarity with the neo-orthodox theologians of crisis is prescient insofar as many of his characters suffer discontent, which can be understood as the embodiment of a loss of faith, and for whom the reality of God has disappeared from their lips.
What novel were we reading in that upper division English class which would meet on the following Monday morning and to which I had invited my student’s father to extend his stay and visit class? As I’ve already mentioned in passing, In the Beauty of the Lilies… and in my genteel opinion the novel is a masterpiece and an appreciation of Christianity, but in which the carnality of human beings runs strong. So, there are tensions from those who might be put off by Updike’s Christian faith and those who might be put off by carnal realism.
IV. Updike as Non-Ordained Servant….
Still, by what additional claim can we make a thesis that Updike was a religious writer and if so what kind religion?
One might remark his own argument that his art is Christian in that his faith urged him to tell that the truth, however painful and inconvenient, and that the truth is good and useful.
One might, also for the moment, look to the liberal Episcopalian pastor Eccles and the “rigid in creed” Lutheran pastor Kruppenbach, in Rabbit, Run, that 1960 novel which established Updike as a major American novelist.
The issue with Reverend Kruppenbach, who for all purposes is an extremist Calvinist, is that his pulpit is a stage for bullying. When Rabbit Angstrom attends church (noting for the moment that the two pastors dislike each other, and both are ineffective, Eccles because he doesn’t really believe in anything), Rabbit scarcely listens. Reverend Kruppenbach’s rigidity, however, does confront the issue of a “rabbit” running forward in life toward instant gratification, better and theologically known as “sin.” When Rabbit gives in to his inner desires, Updike’s point is to reveal a social fabric collapsing tragically, if not opening a pit of horror which prepares a reader for Updike’s later Couples, which takes adultery into the suburbs at a point in time which ironically takes place on the day of Kennedy’s Dallas murder. But even with national grieving a weekend party is not cancelled, so profound are the couples’ appetites. Updike’s point? He wanted to make the book offensive and abrasive.[vii]
Or his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, published in 1957, mid-century which in looking inward to our American history asks what will become of us having lost our faith and a concluding sort of question also in a bit. Connor in the novel, and busily running the home, is a secular humanist and a believer in an emerging new faith, faith in progress and mankind. Hook, on the other hand, a ninety-four year old Christian who represents an orthodox conservatism places his faith and hope in God and not some modern utopian future. Connor’s theology, if that’s the right word, is not redemptive; Hook’s orthodoxy is redemptive.
V. Updike on Karl Barth….
Kindness differs from righteousness as the grasses from the stars. Both are infinite. Without conscious confession of God, there can be nor recreation of righteousness. But kindness needs no belief. It is implicit in the nature of Creation, in the very curves and amplitude of God’s fashioning. —John Updike, Of The Farm, p. 154
Apart from interviews and the six autobiographical essays in Self-Consciousness, Updike’s biographer Adam Begley writes that with Updike’s worry about his health, a routine medical examination revealed that his lungs were “slightly emphysematous” which suggested he had “death in his lungs.” Seeking a cure for the gray moments, “the blanket of funk,” and to give himself brightness and air, he began to read Barth’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans and a reading which supplied Updike with an enduring tenet, a buttress, and that the idea of God is wholly Other but not as a Someone judgmentally standing at the end of time, but Who reaches for us through time, through the revelation of the Cross.
Barth became Updike’s favorite theologian which led to Updike becoming an usher at the First Congregational Church in Ipswich and also shepherding his children to Sunday school. [viii]
Here, too, is Updike responding in an interview on what aspects of Barth attracted him and influenced his writing:
“I think it was the frank supernaturalism and the particularity of his position, so unlike that of Tillich and the entire group of liberal theologians—and you scratch most ministers, at least in the East, and you find a liberal—whose view of these [Biblical events] is not too different from that of an agnostic. But Barth was with resounding definiteness and learning [and was] saying what I needed to hear, which was that it really was so, that there was something within us that would not die, and that relieved by faith alone—more or less—he doesn’t just say that but what he did say joined with my [Christian] heritage enabled me to go on.” [ix]
We know that Updike countered that inevitability in his own life by reading Barth, who showed Updike how saving faith could overcome the nothingness fast becoming part of American life. And again if we read his long autobiographical poem Midpoint, we arrive at these suggestive lines of praise:
Praise Barth, who told how saving Faith can flow
From Terror’s oscillating Yes and No.” [x]
Updike’s biographer further notes that when writing his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, 1957, Updike was reading Barth daily. [xi] Updike himself has said that the novel is an answer to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the future is non-existent.[xii]
VI. In the Beauty of the Lilies….
The novel owns four parts beginning in 1910 and ending in 1990 covering four generations of the Wilmot family which in scope suggests something of an epic. What’s stunning about the novel is its close placement to the 80 years of American history charted along one family history. For those familiar with Updike’s fondness for novels that portray a sort of kaleidoscopic quarrel with those decades, there’s an easy a similarity to Updike’s rabbit tetralogy which forces the reader to reassess what is meant by the American Dream.
1. Clarence:
The first chapter is simply titled “Clarence,” and in the spring of 1910 the days were hot especially on the spacious grounds of “Belle Vista Castle in Paterson, New Jersey where a motion picture was being made.” At the moment in which Mary Pickford faints during the silent movie filming, the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot down at the rectory felt “the last particles of his faith leave him” (5). At the age of forty-four he was recalling for the moment Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses, which Clarence was reading in the hope of refuting it for a perturbed parishioner. The agnostic question that came forth in Clarence’s mind was to wonder if what Ingersoll taught was right, that the God of the Pentateuch was an “absurd bully”?
Updike writes that Clarence’s mind had become like a “many-legged wingless insect that had long and tediously been struggling up the slippery porcelain walls” of a sink “before a wash of water swept it down the drain.”
What the new century has brought upon Clarence is a loosening of the old ways, which meant that so much of the previous divine content had begun to corrode away: “All the metaphysical spirit had leaked away, but for cruelty and death, which without the hypothesis of a God became unmetaphysical,” while atheism had become a purifying sweep and Clarence’s own life was losing all special value and would soon become a mere wink of the earth’s time. Life and death would have no biblical blessing in a universe fast becoming sheerly horrible and disgusting. And grace, which Clarence had pictured as an interplay between God and man, had now become mocking and scourging.
Pastor Wilmot argues to his Presbyterian Church Moderator that his faith had become undone first by reading historical critical attacks on the Bible… when the moderator tells him to pace himself and give himself a year because he doesn’t really need to believe in anything to service the Church. The meetings leave his throat parched. He does so but the year ends with Pastor Clarence forfeiting his ordination papers.
During the following years, his despair deepens and to support his family, he undertakes door-to-door encyclopedia sales at which he is an abject failure. His only place of solace is a new church-like sanctuary, the movie theater, which parallels the rise of the movie business, and which is perhaps a powerful metaphor inspiring devotion but not faith.
Clarence becomes a movie-goer, a disaffected stranger if not an underground man, and for Updike a description of how it is that we live life now mediated and manipulated as a solution to a malaise but mundane since the ancient faith has become attenuated.
Updike therefore layers these two notions together: Reverend Wilmot’s developing loss of faith and Griffith’s silent movie, The Call to Arms, filmed in Patterson, the two issues almost simultaneous one to the other.
The best remark is to note how the appearance of silent films created a paradigm shift providing cheap entertainment, which also overcame the language barrier for immigrants arriving on our eastern shores. More so, many of the movies’ subject matter dramatized power struggles between individuals and antagonistic corporations. It’s further interesting that in the time period Updike has placed his novel, some twenty-five striking silk workers in Paterson organized a work stoppage while demanding an eight-hour work day and improved working conditions. The context, therefore, is something of a historical pageant, what with the cheap silent movie entertainment, the Paterson silk strike, and Reverend Wilmot’s loss of faith, and with the odd conjunction that about the time the Reverend felt the last particle of his faith leave him, the sensation as distinct as a visceral surrender, a set of sparkling bubbles escaping upward.
W. Griffith was using his new movie-making apparatus which brought Marty Pickford to such stardom that she became a popular icon known as America’s Sweetheart, later winning an academy award for her performance as Norma Besant, the object of many a local man’s prurient attention in The Coquette and the seductive manipulation by the camera, which transported viewers everywhere.
Men in top hats were invariably villains, and girls attracted to slick young men from a superior class were usually ruined. Those one or two reelers unwound their stories with dizzying speed, but watching those manufactured visions took no strength. But when the film was over and the pale lights of the world came back on, those isolated like Clarence stood dazed and sated, pursuing the same adventures as in the film but now awake as if from some dream.
What’s left, then, for a scholarly conservative now facing social and financial consequences for his wife and three children, 16 year-old Jared, 12 year-old Ester, and 10-year old Ted?
Clarence, feeling the late summer heat, walks past the clattering mills now that the strike is over, the silk warping and weaving thread-by-thread, yard-by-yard. He struggles to breathe but still walks erect, a “touch of the Wilmot panache,” but his face is drained while enduring his failure or what he calls his “fall,” his disgrace but to which his last words are “Have mercy.”
When Updike places that two-word fine point on the very end of the chapter, he “introduces” a very strong religious statement. It’s a request by Clarence to God to treat his departing soul with kindness and forgiveness.
2. Teddy:
“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.” —from a letter by William James to H. G. Wells
With Clarence’s death the Wilmot family moved to Basingstoke, a small town in Delaware. The central interest is with the youngest son, Ted, an introvert who becomes involved with an equally introverted young woman, Emily, partially deformed with a stunted foot and with a family socially looked down upon. The reasons are unclear, but there are rumors in Basingstoke that Emily’s mother is racially mixed, part black. Emily becomes Ted’s girlfriend, and on their dates they attend the movies, including Greta Garbo’s Flesh and the Devil, which unabashedly portrays the romantic chemistry between Garbo and John Gilbert. There’s a publicity still with Garbo on her back and Gilbert pressing his lips to her cheek. It’s amorous but with a melancholic enigmatic somberness.
Apart from his name sake, there’s nothing Teddy Wilmot shares with the bombastic “Big-Stick Theodore.” As the chapter begins, however, the narrator starts by writing that “What he could never stop remembering was his father coming home to the house on Twenty-Seventh Street after a day of treading sidewalks for nothing, not having sold a single subscription” (109).
Spiritually, furthermore, he’s deeply aware of his father’s draining humiliation. One consequence of the family’s equal descent into humiliation is Teddy’s introversion; with the cold whispering outside and a rattling window sash he would sit at night trying to study but also arranging his baseball cards and stamps in proper order. Often, because he had to get up early for his paper route, he would fall asleep in his clothes.
He was too tired to make sense of anything, equally so because through the thin walls of his bedroom he could hear his neighbors whose lives, he thought, were “at the mercy of passions…. [They] cried aloud or fought with each other for no… reason” and which seemed to carry the same news as in the papers, and much like the world his father went out and into to confront appetites and rages.”
His father’s slow death had a name: tuberculosis.
The time in history is 1920 or so, and Teddy is living in close association not only with the 1918 flu pandemic but history after World War I; mortality was high with the epidemic but so were World War I casualties, among whom is his brother, Jared, wounded in such a way to lose the use of an arm.
Thus Teddy moved through adolescence, without a father whom he knew had fallen out with God, but with an older brother, an extreme extrovert and a braggart whose sole purpose is to go to “Noo Yawk and make a ton of do-re-mi” (119), which meant pursuit of the bitch-goddess regardless of suspect means.
Noting for the moment again that an event had taken place in Paterson, the filming of The Call to Arms and that ironic moment in which Mary Pickford loses consciousness; it’s national news. America’s Sweetheart is beginning the process of becoming divinely enlarged in the public consciousness as is Greta Garbo. It’s Hollywood in the 1920s: stars and scandal, glamour and aspirations but where the silent movies explored social and moral issues, such became relics when the talkies began shedding an older morality symbolized by flappers, Colleen Moore with bobbed hair and skimpy skirts and of course the Latin lover epitomized by Rudolph Valentino.
The issue often in family life is whether such and such a child is or is not mature enough to sit quietly in the theater and watch what parents might think is specious entertainment.
And although the depression is a few years away, for the Wilmot family the issue is that move on the part of Clarence’s family to a small town in Delaware to live with Clarence’s sister, Esther. The family’s mobility is depressingly downward and embodied in Clarence’s two sons, the very quiet, delicate and uncompetitive Teddy and the pushy Jared, the semi-criminal businessman. The difference, if that’s the right word, is between Jared’s sense of manhood which requires a kind manly seizing life by the throat and in which there are victors and losers. And Teddy, diffident and uncomfortable with the popular notion of manhood but aware that the only way to be an American is to become like brash Jared in pursuit of the bitch goddess success and its cash value nexus.
Teddy becomes instead a mailman and much to the family’s chagrin marries the club-footed daughter of that local immigrant greenhouse owner.
What then is the religious point? The loss of faith, and with the rise the cinema a projection of image inspiring devotion and the consequence: the decline of traditional religious belief.
It’s a modern life and although introverted Teddy and his wife retain an orthodox conservatism, their daughter Essie becomes so fascinated with the movies that she is no longer content to be a spectator but desires to become a movie star, with the venue being beauty pageant contestant to starlet. What we understand as faith—Essie holds to the psychological belief that God loves her—has become displaced, but that displacement would surely be lamented by her grandfather Clarence.
Updike imagines the world of man without the world of God. But the forceful point is that for Jared, if there’s money to be made, there’s no ethic informing how that money is to be made. Jared embraces the American push for financial success but in a market place absent of an ethic.
Teddy, by comparison seemingly weak but more thoughtful, carries the thesis in the first book into the second book, believing that liberal organized religion led to his father’s decline and death. If that organized religion has become liberal, as in the sense of the social gospel movement, the consequence as in the life of Jared is an easy congeniality with capitalism.
The tide of 20th century American life, in other words, illustrates a faith that is not the faith of the fathers but a vulgar adoration of “the bitch-goddess success.” Add to that economic context, and all around in the public square are the anti-Christian tracts of Ingersoll and Darrow, and if there is anything religious it’s the easygoing liberal brand of Protestantism which Hollywood serves up with happy movie tales but which are more like a drug that dulls the awareness of religious collapse. In an unusual sort of thinking, given that cultural status of the decade, it’s more truly Christian not to be a Christian of the philistine sort, since the only people who take faith seriously, such as the introverted Teddy, are those who know that impossibility of believing at all; fractious 1920s for certain, but with Teddy a memorable but difficult progress toward true manly maturity, marriage, and fathered with conscience.
He marries the love of his life who is club-footed and again becomes a postman. The two make a happy family with a daughter who becomes the subject matter of the next chapter.
3. Essie:
Let us not mock God with metaphor
analogy, sidestepping transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
— John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”
For Updike, then, the issue is not whether faith has become absent but whether traditional worship has been severed from its biblical witness and replaced by worship of possessions, especially the automobile, and entertainment especially the rise of the movie industry with its flickering (now technicolor) projection of images divinely enlarged on the big screen.
In this third section, then, Esther, or Essie, the daughter of Ted and Emily, who does not inherit her mother’s deformity or her father’s introversion, becomes the central character and a third generation Wilmot. She is beautiful, confident, and a bit arrogant deciding as a little girl that she wished to become a movie star.
Here the story takes on suggestive if not salacious qualities when at age 18 she gets what is usually called “her first real break.” A photographer has noticed, or discovered, her at a beauty contest and asks to photograph her topless. Essie hesitates but agrees.
She hastens off to New York where she has a wealthy cousin; she stays with him and he offers to help advance her career. As with the photographer, she suspects he expects “favors,” but when she attempts a seduction he reveals his homosexuality. Safe, more less, Essie begins modeling, building a “cover girl” resumé but also doing small work in films, usually as the natural and unpretentious girl next door, whom we recognize as a very innocent sort of Doris Day or early Judy Garland or perhaps Mary Ann. The film point develops a common cliché when the male protagonist is caught in a love triangle and must choose, in alluring contrast, between the sweet girl next door and a more glamorous woman with fewer morals.
Essie renames herself, remakes herself, into Alma DeMott and becomes a minor celebrity who costars with Gary Cooper and Clark Gable… the former giving her fatherly advice about the film industry and an affair with the latter.
Alma, at age 29, begins to fear her time as an actress is declining. Harry Cohn makes an appearance first as a film producer and the president of Columbia Pictures Corporation. Alma’s career is extended with roles in musicals but complicated by a pregnancy. She names her son Clark, after Gable, recently deceased, but with her comeback her son is neglected.
Alma or Essie owns a unique mantra: believing that there is a God who loves her as she deserves, the result is her climb from beauty pageant to movie stardom.
4. Clark:
History looms large in this final section to the novel and suggestive of a reckoning of a certain kind. By analogy, Waco provides a chilling undercurrent with the 1993 standoff at the Branch Davidian compound and a stumbling sort of approach to the millennium.
Clark is the fourth Wilmot descendant, the misanthropic son of Alma who presumably has had a promiscuous relationship with another movie star, Clark Gable.
Son Clark in the late 1980s has become aimless working shiftlessly for his uncle, Jared, Teddy’s brother, at a ski resort in Colorado owned by Jared. There’s an altercation with another worker which sends Clark into more aimlessness during which Clark meets a young woman whom he knows only as Hannah who lives in a religious commune. Clark agrees to stay on largely because he has nothing else to do. Hannah is available as are most of the women in the “cult,” but there is also something about the group’s stance on modern American life.
The group is led by Jesse, no last name, whose language is charismatic, albeit dithyrambic, and also controlling. It’s religion but apocalyptic and similar to the group of Davidians who moved to a tract of land outside and west of Waco.
At issue is the religious argument calling for the reform of the Seventh Day Adventist movement which according to various biblical prophecies especially from Revelations and the end of times. Much like the Waco Branch Davidians, Clark’s Colorado group has according to Jesse received a new message from God which included a prophecy of apocalyptic events revealed to Jesse a character much like Vernon Howell who changes his name to David Koresh the leader of the breakaway Waco Davidians.
Koresh, then, as a spiritual leader, insisted to his followers that he had “genetic” ties back to the biblical king David and Cyrus the Great.
Koresh encouraged his congregation to believe that they were to pave the way for the Second Coming of Jesus, the end of times,
What’s interesting for Clark is the group’s antithetical stance on Modern American pop culture, including movies, which at novel’s end reverses the story of Clark’s grandfather who abandoned religion and embraced the movie culture.
The conclusion then:
It’s religion but extreme and centered around a megalomaniacal leader bewitching with supposed divine wisdom. It’s heartbreaking more so if one recalls how on a morning in April 1993 when the television news broadcast over and over the blazing burning buildings just outside Waco.
There’s no hidden meaning in Updike’s novel; there is no good luck or joy. Jessie orders Clark and the male members of the commune to kill all the women and children. It’s a call to arms, which is reminiscent of the novel’s early vignette and Griffith’s movie. Clark, however, rebels and shoots Jesse, saving most of the women and children. He’s later shot and killed. The siege is played over and over and over on the television news, which broadcasts a portrait of the country a few years before entry into the millennium now just approaching—a country enhanced, if that’s the right word, by the spiritual emptiness of American life
The whole is not a complacent saga covering four generations of the Wilmot family, but is stunning for its approach of the millennium, now just short of a quarter-century past. What Updike has accomplished in this masterpiece is a thoughtful assessment of of the American Dream and the American Soul, in both of which a traditional conservative faith has played a crucial role but now largely absent.
The scene shifts in the final pages to Teddy, who sits in his living room, shaken with the notion of his grandson shot to death and then charred to cinders. He wonders if the remains could be transported and Clark buried next to his grandmother. “Families,” Teddy remarks to himself, “are mysterious things.”
An aging Teddy gets his national news at 6:00 on Channel 12. He grieves at all the terrible items in it. Something has happened to basic human decency and self-respect. Teddy prefers Brokaw, who seems to suffer the news most sincerely and without so many commercials about denture fixatives.
Teddy sits in his blue easy chair, about worn out. Next to him is a velvet wing chair and a matching velvet stool “Em used to rest her poor leg on.”
Updike writes that many of the news clips were like watching a movie twice, a silent movie even. It made Teddy’s stomach hurt to think of people inside those burning buildings.
Then there’s a commercial about a cruise ship. Then Brokaw returns with close-ups of a guilty-looking man shot trying to get out, but who would live, and then a woman with a freckled face, and then a concluding “zoom” of four or so women with smoky faces coming out of the storm hutch with fear on their faces, thinking they’re going to be shot.
They step into the open, squinting, blinking, carrying or holding on to the hands of their children, too many to count.
“The children.”
Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, has written that Updike saw his writing as an act of worship depicted in the descriptions of ordinary human life. There are contradictions in the inner dynamic of his religion; his God is a God who chastises but blesses the goodness and beauty of created life, and whose truth marches on, and of course there are those lilies, the children, the holy innocents and the most significant part of our society. They have the most to teach us about weakness and vulnerability.
That to me seems holy, even if there are smudges on Updike’s Christian belief… Barthian in its aching gap between God and His creatures. But go to any book store these days and to the very small section devoted to theology. There’s a bit of Zen and some Buddhist mysticism but very likely nothing on the principles of Jesus applied to today… those principles asking us to suffer the children.
Notes:
[i] See Stephen H. Webb, ”John Updike the Blogger: Reading Karl Barth with John Updike” in First Things, August 15, 2014.
[ii] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans. Barth’s commentary is often referred to as a bombshell landing as it did in the midst of Protestant Liberalism and Religious Socialism following World War I. His larger thesis, directed against natural theology, is that God’s saving grace cannot be known outside of God’s revelation in Christ, specifically in the Cross. The commentary overthrows any attempt to make God collective with human culture or, more precisely, German nationalism.
[iii] Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, narrates the time in which Updike, a recent Harvard graduate then studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art on a Knox Fellowship in Great Britain, wrote to his mother to explain he was trying hard to be a good Christian. To ward off doubt, he turned to theology reading Chesterton, Maritain, and Lewis. When his new wife’s parents came to visit, the father, a committed Unitarian, and Updike quarreled. Theological discussions between Updike and his father-in-law became prickly, the father-in-law’s defense of Unitarianism so antithetical to Updike’s own Book of Concord Lutheranism and his Christian belief that Unitarianism was too mild and that the human need for transcendence should not be met with embarrassment. See Adam Begley, Updike, pp. 108-109.
[iv] John Updike, Self-Consciousness, “On Being a Self Forever,” p. 214.
[v] See Conversations with John Updike, ed James Plath, p, 249
[vi] See Conversations,“Thoughts of Faith Infuse Updike’s Novels,” ed. Jan Nunley, p. 199.
[vii] See Elinor Stout, “Interview with John Updike: in Conversations, p. 75. Updike continued to emphasize that he is a professing Christian and that Couples is another evaluation of the American value system which was becoming more and more anti-Christian.
[viii] Begley, pp. 222-223.
[ix] See Jeff Campbell interview in Conversations, p. 102.
[x] John Updike, Midpoint, p. 38. Updike also praises Kierkegaard about whom he writes, “splintered Hegel’s creed / Upon the rock of Existential need.” Elsewhere in the short story “Dentistry and Doubt,” the first person narrator Burton explains that the books he has been reading include Barth, Lewis, The Portable Medieval Reader, Raymond Lully and Bertrand Russell along with, nonchalantly, Belloc and Chesterton, all books, Burton adds, “witness to a futility that undercut all hope in theory.” See Updike: Collected Early Stories, p. 37.
[xi] Begley, p. 175.
[xii] See Updike’ “Introduction” to the 1977 edition, p. xx.
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