The Last Empire (14 page)

The story begins in the grounds of a baronial estate in Paterson, New Jersey. Shillington territory. But this is not your usual Rabbit story. On the lawn, D. W. Griffith is making a film with Mary Pickford. We hear little more about this film, but the modern note has been struck. Now we must defer satisfaction, as Updike gives us a list of things, visible and invisible, in the immediate neighbourhood—like New York City only fifteen miles to the east of Paterson “lying sullenly snared within the lowland loop of the Passaic River.” One wonders what editor Shawn might have made of that “sullenly.” Surely, there must have been a house ukase against the pathetic fallacy. But Updike has always liked to signal with his adverbs as he conforms with his adjectives. Besides, he is now off the
New Yorker
page and on to his very own page.

The first section is titled “Clarence.” The Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, whose address we are given as well as the church’s dimensions, physically and spiritually, along with those of Clarence himself, “a tall narrow-chested man of forty-three,” etc., etc., who has, at this moment, suddenly, almost idly, lost his faith. A promising beginning which might have been more effective without the weeds of description that precede it. Even so, there
it
is, on the third page—the Problem. In order to refute a lapsing parishioner, Clarence has been reading the atheist Robert Ingersoll’s
Some Mistakes of Moses
, and, in the process, in a flash of utter darkness, he comes to the conclusion that Ingersoll was “quite right.” Shaken, Clarence makes his way home through a forest of description and into his house with its “leaded rectangles of stained glass the color of milky candies and the foot of the dark walnut staircase that, in
two turnings punctuated by rectangular newel posts whose point had been truncated . . .” We are spared nothing, rectangular or otherwise.

Clarence ponders free will versus predestination, the sort of thing that at a church school like St. Albans, to the south of Paterson in Washington, D.C., most boys had pretty much wrapped up before the onset of puberty—or Grace, whichever took place first. We meet wife and mother, Stella, supervising the cook in the kitchen. Tonight there will be supper for some important Presbyterians. Money for the church will be discussed. Clarence listens to kitchen chatter: “The eavesdropping clergyman, numbed by his sudden atheism . . .” Then we’re off to a description of lots and lots of things in the house including a Tiffany-glass chandelier, with scalloped edges. Updike never quite knows what to do with his lists of random objects or physical human characteristics. In this, he resembles a more graceful James Michener, whose huge books are simply compendia of thousands of little facts collected by researchers and deposited helter-skelter in his long “novels.”

Updike also provides us with reading lists of those books that encourage and discourage Christian faith. Clarence is suffering from a mini-vastation, somewhat diluted by Updike’s sudden introduction of “real people” into the book, or at least of real names culled from contemporary newspapers. There is Mary Pickford at the start. Then a son of Theodore Roosevelt gets married. We are given the list of ushers, dazzling society names of the day. Updike will keep on doing this for the entire sixty-year period covered by his narrative. But a technique that worked so well for John Dos Passos in
USA
simply stops dead what story Updike has to tell.

Updike, unlike his alleged literary models, Henry Green and Proust, describes to no purpose. In fact, Green, as I recall, describes hardly anything, relying on a superlative ear for a wide variety of speech patterns, while Updike’s characters all speak in the same tone of voice, their dialogue a means to get them from one plot point to the next. As one trudges through these descriptions, one wishes that Updike had learned less from his true models, Marquand and O’Hara, and more from the middle James, who, as a lord of the pertinent and the relevant, knew that nothing need be described or, indeed,
told
unless it suggests, while never naming, the presence in the deep of monsters, as the author, off-page, turns ever tighter the screw.

Although in
The Spoils of Poynton
mother and son fight over the contents of a great house, we are never told just
what
is being fought over. James leaves the details to the reader’s imagination. But such continence has never been the way of the commercial American writer, no matter how elevated his theme or resourceful his art. For Updike, Poynton is a Sotheby’s catalog.

James only needed to describe—was it one crucifix?—to represent a house full of rare furniture and objects worth killing for. The naturalistic Dos Passos used movielike cuts and intercuts of headlines to act as useful counterpoint to a narrative that takes place in public, as opposed to strictly private, time. Since most people get the news of their day through press and television, why not use or at least mimic these sources? The naturalistic Updike seems to think that just about any item will do in the way of color, and, in a sense, he is right; one has only to consider the huge popularity of Michener’s myriad-fact novels with an unsophisticated reading public that likes to think that valuable time is not being wasted on a made-up story, that the reader is really getting the inside dope on, let’s say, Detroit and the auto business or, in Updike’s case, on the United States’ second most profitable export after aerospace—showbiz and Hollywood. But whereas a few million
small facts are the object of the Michenerian enterprise, Updike is more conventionally ambitious. He wants to dramatize the forces that have driven the United States ever leftward, even further away from the marching, lily-born God, away from family values and obedience to Authority, away from
The New Yorker
’s benign fact-checkers and sentence-polishers, so sadly absent now when he really needs them.

After James’s disasters in the theater, he famously returned to prose with a new sharp intensity. He had learned that nothing is to be noted unless it is absolutely essential to the dramatic revelation of even the vaguest figure in the carpet. As far as I know, Updike has never submitted himself to the strict discipline of relevance one learns from theater. And yet, parenthetically, his one attempt at a play,
Buchanan Dying
(1974), though probably unstageable as written, is a superb work of mimesis, the last thoughts of the enigmatic president from Pennsylvania whose cautious inertness helped bring on the Civil War and imperial Lincoln. The effect is startling and unique, unlike . . .

“Dialogue and meditation” is how Updike, inaccurately, describes the manner of his early “model,” Henry Green. Updike himself writes long, long descriptions interspersed with brief snatches of dialogue. In theory . . . no, no theory! . . .
ideally
, both description and dialogue should forward narrative, as in most pop writing. Realistic storytellers in English oscillate between the
démeublement
of Raymond Carver and the richly detailed settings, physical and psychic, of James Purdy. For a true master of effects, either way works. But if, like Updike, one means to go into the wholesale furniture business, one had better be prepared to furnish, in appropriate manner, great Poynton itself. I realize that in a world where democracy is on the rise everywhere except in American politics, one style can never be better than another, ’cause my feelings are just as deep as yours and how can you criticize my voice, my style which is Me? To which some of us old meanies
must respond, well, dear, if you choose to send your letter to the world then here’s the answer, assuming the letter was not returned to sender for lack of correct address or sufficient postage.

Years ago, in unkind mood, Norman Mailer referred to Updike’s writing as the sort of prose that those who know nothing about writing think good. Today, theory, written preferably in near-English academese, absorbs the specialist, and prose style is irrelevant. Even so, what is one to make of this sentence: “The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness . . . to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlike he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe”? Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?

Plot, four generations of the Wilmot family. After Clarence’s loss of faith, he sells encyclopedias, perseveres in his failure, as did Updike’s own father, each to be avenged by a descendant; though not by Clarence’s son, Teddy, who occupies the next chunk of time—and novel-space. Now we go into the Updike time machine. “And then it was a new decade, and drinking was illegal all across the nation, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer accused the IWW of causing the railroad strikes. . . . Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were married in a Hollywood dream come true, and Europe twisted and turned with coups and riots and little wars” (which ones?), “and the Democrats at their convention put up James Cox and another Roosevelt, and Bill Tilden . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .”

Teddy doesn’t know what to do with his life. He is passive and not very bright. He works in a bottle-top factory; studies accounting. Meanwhile, he struggles for light beneath his author’s thick blankets of research, intended to give us the sense of a world and a time in which Teddy himself has neither place nor perceptible interest: “And now the sordidness of illusions was leaking out of Hollywood itself. . . . Fatty Arbuckle, unsolved mystery of director William Desmond Taylor . . .” But there is some point to all this news from outside, because, in the next slice of the Wilmot saga, Teddy’s daughter, Esther or Essie, will become a Movie Star and avenge—“ambush,” as Updike did—a world that paid no attention to his father, her grandfather. When Teddy goes to work in Addison’s Drug Store (Stephenson’s back in Shillington), we are given page after page of what is sold in the store. Then Teddy marries a crippled girl with a
strong character. Teddy gives up being a soda jerk and becomes a career postman. He endures a happy marriage, until his wife, as fictional characters tend to do, falls through one of the interstices in Updike’s web of Passing Parade notes on world events: “Jews and Arabs fought in Jerusalem; Chinese and Russians battled along the Manchurian border.” Social notes from all over. Teddy smokes Old Golds.

Part Three. We shift from Teddy to Essie/Alma. I found myself curious that Updike did not choose to shift from third to first person in his studies of four generations. Since all his character writing is in essentially the same tone of voice, he might have dramatized—well, differentiated—his four protagonists by giving each a distinctive voice. But he remains in the lazy third person: Now she thinks this . . . now she does that . . . now Japan invades Manchuria.

In Essie’s section, the Shillington/Basingstoke movie house is central, and Essie, now a beauty, is thrilled by what she sees on the screen, ideal life writ large in celluloid. Ambitious, for a dull Wilmot, she enters a beauty contest, where she meets a photographer from New York. “There was something mystical in the way the camera lapped up her inner states through the thin skin of her face. She had known as a child she was the center of the universe and now proof was accumulating, click by click.” She becomes a model. An actress. A star, as Alma De Mott.

But for Updike, Essie is early blighted. Even before Hollywood and stardom she is taken in by liberals—Commies, too. Plainly, sinister osmosis was taking place at the movie house in her hometown. The liberal image of America the Bad was like some insidious virus contained in the celluloid, bacteria which, under the optimum condition of hot light projected through its alien nesting ground on to the screen, bred discontent in those not sufficiently vaccinated against Doubt by benign school and good church. So ravaged was Essie by Red films like
Now, Voyager
(“Why ask for the moon when we have the stars?”) that she actually objected to the loyalty oaths inflicted on so many Americans by President Truman’s administration, oaths that the self-conscious Updike cannot, like his father, find objectionable. When Essie’s little brother, Danny, says, “I hate Communists,” she says, “What do you know about anything? Who do you think beat Hitler’s armies?” And so the
green twig was bent by the product of MGM and the Brothers Warner.

Before Essie leaves New York for Hollywood, Updike helpfully tells us the names “of the big Hollywood movies at the end of the Forties.” He also lists the foreign films that ravished Essie. Curiously, he forgets to rate the Italian neorealists for Leftist content. In New York, Essie is taken up by a queer cousin, Patrick. He is worldly, knows his Manhattan: like all homosexuals, he is “sensitive” but “frustrating . . . and not just sexually; some inner deflection kept him on the sidelines of life, studying painting but not wanting to paint himself, and even sneering at those that did try”; but then “the arts, especially minor arts like window dressing, were dominated by them.” Patrick manages her career for a time: “A comforting accreditation . . . to have a poof bring her in.”

Before Alma makes it to the silver screen, she serves time in live television. Updike tells us all about what it was like; but then there is a firm in New York that will do intensive research on any subject a writer might want—from the Golden Age of Television, say, to the flora and fauna of Brazil. I am certain that Updike, the artist, would never resort to so brazen a crib; even so, many of his small piled-up facts are so rotelike in their detail and his use of them so completely haywire that—well,
vichyssoise qui mal y pense
.

“Alma would play opposite, within the next few years, both Gary Cooper and . . . Clark Gable.” Boldly, Updike tells us a lot of personal things about Cooper and Gable which he could only have got from fan magazines or showbiz biographies. Updike is now frugging wildly into Collins Sisters territory. But where the Bel-Air Brontës are well advanced in the art and arts of popular fiction and write
romans à clef
with phallic keys, Updike, ever original, disposes with the keys. Confidently, he tells us about “Coop’s” aches and pains, about Clark’s career anxieties and sex. Updike has now made it to the heart of the heart of pop fiction: “there was in Gable a loneliness too big for Alma to fill. Where Cooper was a sublime accident (he reached over, while the wind rushed past and the sun beat sparkling dents in the Pacific below, and cupped his hand around her skull) . . . Gable had never been anything but an aspiring actor. . . .
He had been so long a star he had forgotten to find mortal satisfactions.” Why ask for the butterscotch when we can have the fudge?