In Praise of Messy Lives (16 page)

The writer’s obligation, surely, is to write a charismatic, interesting, illuminating novel about, really, anyone. But this idea that Updike has the responsibilities of a senator, or school principal, or pastor toward his fictional universe, an obligation for fairness and justice to all of his characters, for a clear-sighted, unwavering morality that extends over his New England and Pennsylvania towns, and even according to a surprising number of critical briefs against him, for well-rounded theological positions, perversely endures.

Updike offers his own engaging mea culpa about his relation to women in a poem: “I drank up women’s tears and spat them out / as 10-point Janson, Roman, and
Ital
.” This seems, however, more of an indictment of the way writers treat other people, male and female, than a confession of his sexist attitudes. Do writers use and arguably exploit those around them? Of course. Is there something unappealing or ruthless about this way of existing in the world? Of course, again. But this is not a commentary on Updike and his uses of female experience so much as a description of the writer’s life (see female writers like Sylvia
Plath or Mary McCarthy), and if Updike addresses this moral dubiousness honestly and head-on that should be to his credit.

From the beginning, Updike wrote about trying to defeat death or mortality through affairs, through the intensity of sex, which is one of the things David Foster Wallace in particular criticizes him for. Updike describes an affair in
Toward the End of Time
: “Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time.”

This sense of using sex, or the creation of many lives, through affairs, and mistresses, transcending the limits of one small, suburban existence through sex, runs through Updike’s writing from the beginning. In one story he has an amazing description of a man running into a former mistress: “I felt in her presence the fear of death a man feels with a woman who once opened herself to him and is available no more.”

And so it is as someone who has always resisted, written around, plotted against, and fought the idea of death that he writes movingly about its proximity in his last book, a remarkable collection of poems,
Endpoint
.

The poems, which he wrote as he was dying, have an alarming clarity to them, a cool descriptiveness. He is still interested in the ironies, still interested in the celebration and the blooming style. He wrote the following a month before he died about a CAT scan and needle biopsy, and the pleasant clouding of Valium:

In another one of his last poems he wrote, “be with me, words, a little longer.” And after three years in an Updike-less world, one wishes the same thing.

For all the years that I had been reading
Goodnight Moon
to some child or other, I had been picturing its author as a plump, maternal presence, someone like the quiet old lady in the rocking chair whispering “Hush,” and so I was surprised to see, in a bored, casual dip into Google, the blond, green-eyed, movie-starish vixen, and attendant accounts of her lesbian lover, her many male lovers, her failure to settle down, and her tragic early death.

Margaret Wise Brown, or “Brownie” as her friends called her, did not harbor sentimental notions and was not overly devoted to bunnies and chubby toddlers. In a
Life
profile the reporter expressed surprise that the tender creator of so many rabbit-themed books would enjoy hunting and shooting rabbits, and Margaret replied, “Well, I don’t especially like children, either. At least not as a group. I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he is little.”

One of Margaret Wise Brown’s offhand descriptions of childhood makes me think that she was nearer to childhood than the rest of us, inside it in a way that most of us can’t quite imagine or get to: she talks about the “painful shy animal dignity with which
a child stretches to conform to a strange, adult social politeness.” Could there be a better, more intimate expression of that awkward childhood relation to the adult world?

Also preternaturally incisive about that stage of life is her statement about the purpose of kids’ books: “to jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar.” Putting both the jogging and the comforting together is too resplendent an insight for an expert on childhood and seems to belong instead to a denizen of it.

Is it possible that the most inspired children’s book writers never grow up? By that I don’t mean that they understand or have special affection or affinity toward children, but that they don’t understand adulthood, and I mean that in the best possible sense. It may be that they haven’t moved responsibly out of childhood the way most of us have, into busy, functional, settled adult life.

Margaret Wise Brown’s life was full of what her admirers like to call whimsy and other people might call childlike behavior. She spent her first royalty check on an entire cart full of flowers. At her house in Maine, which she called “The Only House,” she had an outdoor boudoir with a table and nightstand and a mirror nailed to a tree, along with an outside well that held butter and eggs, and wine bottles kept cold in a stream; one could easily imagine a little fur family living in The Only House, but it was just her friends, associates, editors, and lovers passing through. She was once chastised by a hotel owner in Paris because she had brought giant orange trees and live birds into her room. The orange trees might have been okay, but the live birds were a little de trop.

It also seems that she could be annoying in the way only an
energetic seven-year-old could be: a friend asks her the time, and she says, “What time would you like it to be?” She had a group called the Bird Brain Society, in which the members could declare any day Christmas and the rest would come over and celebrate it. She was, in other words, one of those people whose magnetism owes something to the fact that the line between play and life is never entirely clear to them.

Virginia Woolf captures this quality in her description of Lewis Carroll: “For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.” Lewis Carroll, a stuttering lifelong bachelor who preferred playing games with children for hours to adult company, was not alone in this respect. Maurice Sendak’s unhappy childhood always seemed bitterly, creatively alive in him, though he had a very happy long-term relationship with a psychiatrist, Eugene. “I refuse to lie to children,” Sendak once said. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.” And like Margaret Wise Brown, Kay Thompson, the author of the Eloise books, an actress, a film star, and a nightclub singer, apparently led a racy, interesting, unsettled life, and said to those inquiring about who the little girl was based on: “Eloise is me! All me.”

For Margaret Wise Brown, underneath all of this whimsicality or childlike behavior there was, of course, some isolation and turmoil. Her relationship with her lesbian lover, Michael Strange, whom she privately, and perhaps not surprisingly, called Rabbit, was rocky and tormented. Michael once took an illustrator aside and said, “Why don’t you marry Margaret and take her off my hands?” Margaret never had children of her own, and her affairs were often unstable. The playful, ebullient social presence obscured periods of despair and loneliness.

But anyway, just something to think about as you are reading “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon.…” The great soothing anthem of millions of American childhoods was conjured by someone restless, unsettled. Maybe it makes sense that the great dream or poem of domestic peace should come from someone for whom that peace is charged, elusive.

Margaret Wise Brown died tragically early at forty-two, though it should be noted that she died playfully. She was in France, hospitalized for appendicitis (“I’ve really enjoyed this odd French Hospital,” she wrote to a friend), and after the routine operation she seemed to be recovering uneventfully. One morning she kicked her leg can-can style to show a nurse how well she was, and an embolism killed her instantly.

At the time Margaret was about to be married to her much younger fiancé, “Pebbles” Rockefeller. She was touring France, and he was sailing to meet her on his boat. It’s possible that she was just then on the verge of growing up or settling down or becoming more ordinary. Though one half imagines Pebbles Rockefeller sailing somewhere, and Margaret saying, “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me, I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.”

One day an editor asked me to write about the enormous popularity of the television show
Mad Men
. I was entirely willing to do so, except for one small obstacle, which is that I had never watched a single episode. I spent several days watching so much of the show that I almost felt like I should write my article in front of a manual typewriter in a pencil skirt.

I could see why people were transfixed by the pouring of cocktails in the office, by the lighting of cigarettes with silver lighters, by the extramarital carousing of advertising executives in hats. The phenomenal success of the show seemed to rely at least in part on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times. In some larger cultural way, we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, of the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink.

The show derives its particular electricity from the differences, from the moments that contrast sharply with the way we
live now. As one watches the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women sipping cocktails, the seven-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, one can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are; but is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon? The fascination is not unmixed. If the characters in
Mad Men
are smoldering against the famous repression of the fifties, it may be that we smolder a little against the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times.

Which is to say that these days, the careful anthropologist observes brief furtive forays into the world of excess in highly functional and orderly people. I notice more than one mother sneaking out of a party for a secret cigarette in my garden; I hear another talk about how she has two or three glasses of wine every night, how she might be an alcoholic, and yet another describe a Facebook flirtation with someone from her past. One hears the faint murmur of these guilty pleasures, these tiny rebellions, these harmless, momentary flares of intensity or escape, and yet, in the end these vices are so minor and controlled. The large-scale messiness of
Mad Men
is not for these modest rebels, the free fall into chaos, into a stranger’s warm and enticing bed; it frightens and enthralls them. What they want, in other words, is to watch four seasons of it through the safe, skewed mirror of the television set.

In my casual investigation into those lost years, I have lunch with Jerry Della Femina, whose 1970 cult classic memoir,
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor
, is widely considered the inspiration for
Mad Men
. I notice that when he
talks about those days in the advertising business he uses the word “fun,” which stands out to me suddenly as exotic and old-fashioned. Who has fun in the office anymore? Maybe we are disappearing into Facebook or email or foreign newspapers or shopping, but we are not expecting the flagrant flirtation or cocktail party atmosphere of Sterling Cooper; we are not expecting what Jerry Della Femina means by “fun.”

These days, people of Don Draper’s age and situation pour energy into beautiful vacations, or cook lemon ricotta capellinis and salmon crème fraiche risottos from organic free-range ingredients for a dinner party. But are they hanging out with the same boozy fluidity, are there wild bursts of bad behavior, are they expecting each day to live up to the ineffable standard of “fun”? Perhaps part of what is so appealing, so fascinating about
Mad Men
is the flight from bourgeois ordinariness, the struggle against it, in all of its poetic and mundane forms.

At one point, Don Draper says to his bohemian mistress, who has no children, no husband, no obligations, “I can’t decide if you have everything or nothing,” and that would be the crucial question. The show seems to be managing, just barely, an existential crisis over ordinary life; it dovetails with the loopy charismatic exegesis of
The Lonely Crowd
. It asks what David Riesman called “the well heeled organization man,” will you die of constraint, of boredom, of domestic propriety, or will you break out, will you run off? Don Draper, who suffers so attractively, quotes Frank O’Hara, “Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again.” And one wonders if perhaps there is an audience of successful, healthy couples in the new mode, sitting in their bedrooms with flat-screen TVs waiting for just that same thing.

Today’s moderately restless or mildly discontented couples tend to go to couples therapy and “work” on their relationships instead of drinking so much they don’t know where they are, or slipping into a back room with a man they meet in a bar. But can we be sure our own preferred forms of malaise and alienation are better or more fruitful than theirs? Are we happier than Don and Betty Draper, or are we just doing yoga or Pilates or getting overly involved in our children’s homework or “working” on our relationships?