The Last Empire (12 page)

On Twain’s first trip he did not lecture. On his second, accompanied by wife and daughter, he filled halls with a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which he eventually tired of and replaced with one on his early days in Nevada, based on
Roughing It
.

The liking for a country not one’s own (or for a celebrity not one’s own) is usually based on serious misunderstandings all around. Twain’s comedy was based on a Manichaean view of life. But neither audiences nor readers suspected the darkness that was at the core of his curious sensibility. As for Twain himself, in England he was very much the passionate pilgrim, to appropriate Henry James’s phrase (it can safely be said that the two writers could not abide each other). Each in his own way had found American society a bit on the thin side. But where James was after very big game indeed, psychologically, Twain simply preferred local color, while reveling in a sense of the past that often came rather too close to ye olde. “Spent all day yesterday driving about Warwickshire in an open barouche. We visited Kenilworth ruins, Warwick Castle (pronounce it Warrick) and the Shakespeare celebrities in and about Stratford-on-Avon (pronounce that ‘a’ just as you would in Kate).”
All in all, “I would rather live here if I could get the rest of you over.” As it turned out, by the end of his life he had lived 17 years abroad, much of the time in England.

But there are some marked oddities in these love letters to England. For one thing there are hardly any people in them, any English people, that is. Trollope had him to dinner at the Garrick, but he gives no description of this occasion even when writing to his bookish mother. He met Browning: no serious mention. He does ask the poet laureate to one of his lectures and, thoughtfully, sends along a ticket. Return post: “Dear Sir, I saw some of your countrymen last Sunday who spoke so highly of your Lectures that I longed to come and hear you; but whether I come or not I am equally beholden to you for your kindness. Yours with all thanks, A. Tennyson.” Not quite in the class of Disraeli, thanking an author for sending him a book “which I shall waste no time in reading.”

Where are the London hostesses of the day? Did they pursue him? He hated staying in other people’s houses so there are no descriptions of Bitter Homes and Gardens. For someone who had just finished a political satire,
The Gilded Age
(a “partnership” novel, he called it, with Charles Dudley Warner), he does not seem to have met any politicians other than the MP Douglas Straight, whose family was soon to be transatlantic. He does not mention what, if anything, he is reading. During his first London seasons he is simply absorbing color and drawing strength from the great crowds that come to hear him; first in Hanover Square and, later, around England.

These are very much the letters and thoughts of a businessman-actor-writer with a gift for comedy. He is, in short, a star on tour as well as a writer with an ever-alert eye for incidents to be used in such later books as
A Connecticut Yankee
and
The Prince and the Pauper
. Current productions by others (Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon
, Thomas Hardy’s
Under the Greenwood Tree
, and John Stuart Mill’s
Autobiography
) go unremarked.

So what then did British audiences actually see and hear? London
Daily News
: “Mr. Twain is a comparatively young man, small in form and feature, dark-haired and dark complexioned.” Actually, he was ginger-haired with a ruddy face. “He has a good deal of the nasal tone of some portion of the Americans.” London
Examiner
: “His dry manner, his admirable self-possession, and perfectly grave countenance formed a background that made the humorous portion of the lecture irresistible.” Often with no more than a carefully positioned pause, he would set up his joke, let the audience do the rest. “A smile never appears on his lips and he makes the most startling remarks as if he were uttering merest commonplace.”

But a predictably sour note was struck by the expatriate secretary to the American legation: “He [Twain] is a wiry man, with brown, crisp, wiry hair: a narrow forehead, Roman nose and sinister expression, and does not seem to know as much as would hurt him.” The secretary had once had literary longings.

Mark Twain’s Letters
covers two years in 691 pages, of which one is blank except for the ominous phrase “Editorial Apparatus.” To come? One trembles. This is hardly a labor of love for the common reader. There are footnotes upon footnotes. Nothing is not explained. Twain meets a gentleman who affects a Plantagenet connection. The irrelevant history of that broomish family is flung at the reader.

American scholarship is now a sort of huge make-work program for the conventionally educated. In a case like this, scholar squirrels gather up every scrap of writing they can find and stuff these bits into volume after volume, with metastasizing footnotes. The arrangements that Mr. and Mrs. Clemens made to have their laundry and dry-cleaning done by mail (no, I won’t explain how that worked) is a joy for those of us who revel in dry-cleaning, but what of the unkempt many who sit in darkness? No matter. We are dealing here with ruthless collectors. To them, one “fact” is equal to any other. I accept this thoroughness. But is it necessary to note every phrase—indeed every letter of the alphabet that Twain and his various correspondents saw fit to cross out? Like this. No.

The Sunday Times

11 May 1997

* 
R
ABBIT’S
O
WN
B
URROW

A decade ago, thanks to the success of America’s chain bookstores with their outlets in a thousand glittering malls, most “serious” fiction was replaced by mass-baked sugary dough—I mean books—whose huge physical presence in the shops is known, aptly to the trade, as “dumps”: outward and visible sign of Gresham’s Law at dogged work. In spite of this, the fact that John Updike’s latest novel,
In the Beauty of the Lilies
, briefly made it to the bottom of the
New York Times
best-seller list is remarkable. As it is a rare week when any “serious” novel is listed, one is usually so grateful that there are still those who want to read an even halfway good novelist, one ought never to discourage those readers whom he attracts. Also, what is the point of attacking writers in a period where—save for prize-mad pockets of old London—they are of so little consequence?

In observance of this law of a dying species, I have hardly mentioned, much less reviewed, Updike in the past, and he has observed the same continence with regard to me. But, lately, as I turn the pages of
The New Yorker
, where his poems, short stories, and book reviews have been appearing for so many years, I note an occasional dig at me. Apparently, I do not sufficiently love the good, the nice America, is the burden of his
épingles
. In sere and yellow leaf, Updike is now in superpatriot mood and on the attack. For instance, apropos the movie star Lana Turner (whom, to his credit, he appreciates): “Fifty years ago we were still a nation of builders and dreamers, now whittlers and belittlers set the cultural tone.” O vile Whittlers! O unGodly Belittlers! Of whom, apparently, I am one.

Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer, I now find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we have the money, the credentials, and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that passes all understanding. Finally, according to the mainline American press, Updike has now got it all together, and no less an authority than
The New Yorker
’s George Steiner (so different from Europe’s one) assures us that Updike now stands alongside Hawthorne and Nabokov, when, surely, he means John P. Marquand and John O’Hara.

Prior to immersion in next year’s Pulitzer Prize novel, I read Updike’s memoir,
Self-Consciousness
(1989), written in the writer’s fifty-seventh year. Self-consciousness is a good theme, if meant ironically. After all, save to self, we are, none of us, worth much fussing about, run-of-the-mill poor, bare forked animals—or was it radishes?—that we are. Anyway, I hoped that he would make some self-mocking play on his own self-consciousness as opposed to Socrates’ examined life. Hope quickly extinguished. There is no examination of the self, as opposed to an unremitting self-consciousness that tells us why he was—is—different—but not too much different—from others and what made him the way he is—always
is
, as he doesn’t much change in his own story, a small-town Philoctetes whose wound turns out to be an unpretty skin condition called psoriasis. “Yet what was my creativity, my relentless need to produce but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing
overproduction?”

John Updike’s father was of Dutch-American stock; his mother German. He was born in 1932, in modest circumstances at Shillington, Pennsylvania. The mother was a would-be writer, constantly typing away and sending out stories that returned to her like so many boomerangs. The son would soon outdo the mother,
his
stories returning home in the pages of
The New Yorker
.

The Shillington that he describes is a sunny place, despite the Depression of the 1930s and some labor strikes; more than once, Updike edgily refers to the election by the nearby city of Reading of a
socialist
mayor. Happily, for his school of Biedermeier novels, the world outside himself seems never to have caught his proper interest until the dread 1960s, when “bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth . . . were selling this nation out.” But that was long after he was a “plain child, ungainly youth. Lacking brothers and sisters, [he] was shy and clumsy in the give and take . . . of human exchange.” Of contemporaries who did not care for school, “I could not understand how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign.” But then he is always true to his “docile good child nature.”

Yet under all this blandness and acceptance of authority in any form, there is a growing puzzlement. “Social position in America is not easy to be precise about,” he notes; then, warily, he tries to place his high-school teacher father: “My family sold asparagus and pansies for odd money, embarrassing me.” But unlike a Fitzgerald or an O’Hara (most Irish Catholic writers in America are born with perfect radar on how to make it all the way to the blue light at landing’s end—or pass out at the bar in the attempt), Updike seems to have missed whatever gentry there may have been in the neighborhood. All he knows is that his mother says that we are much “nicer” than a lot of other people, which is important if not very useful, as his father is a definite nonsuccess, and so Updike concludes that:

Life breeds punchers and counterpunchers, venturers like my father and ambushers like me: the venturer risks rebuff and defeat; the ambusher . . . risks fading away to nothing. . . . All those years in Shillington, I had waited to be admired, waited patiently . . . burrowing in New York magazines and English mystery novels for the secret passageway out, the path of avoidance and vindication. I hid a certain determined defiance. . . . I would “show” them, I would avenge all the slights and abasements visited upon my father—the miserly salary, the subtle tyranny of his overlords at the high school, the disrespect of his students, the laughter in the movie house at the name of Updike.

Not exactly Richard III. Rather the inner rebellion of a shy, ambitious, small creature—a rabbit?—preparing to abandon its nice safe burrow for a world elsewhere, for a place across the water in nearby sinful Manhattan.

Shillington was to remain central to Updike’s intense consciousness of self. In footnotes to his memoir, he solemnly quotes from his own work to show just how he has used the “real” life of his small town in fiction. Over and over again he writes of the Lutheran Grace Church, the elementary school, the post office, of youthful revels at Stephens’ Luncheonette. Not since Sinclair Lewis has a naturalistic writer been so merciless to his reader as Updike. Endlessly, he describes shops and their contents, newspaper advertisements, streets that go here, there and everywhere except into the—this—reader’s mind. Places and people seem to interest him only when reduced, as cooks say, to receipts not dishes. Certainly all the words he uses are there on the page, but what they stand for is not. Only he himself is recorded with careful attention, as he notes his aim of “impersonal egoism,” and “always with some natural hesitation and distaste” when it comes
to memoir-writing; yet he soldiers on, and we learn that only after the family moved from Shillington does he masturbate—and so a lifelong adhesion to heterosexuality begins, at least in the mind. With
jouissance
, he comes into his kingdom, love in hand.

As a fellow
New Yorker
writer, S. J. Perelman, puts it in a letter to Ogden Nash in 1965, “J. Updike . . . read extracts from three works of his to the assembled scholars, which I didn’t personally hear as I was overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed pages. But Cheever brought me tidings that all dealt with masturbation, a favorite theme of Updike’s.” Of course, Perelman was a bit of a grouch; and who could have foretold that in three years’ time this onanistic “youth” would write
Couples
, a celebration of marriage and its saucy twin, adultery, the only important subjects of middlebrow fiction, saving God Himself and His America? It should be noted that Christianity seems always to have been a fact for Updike, starting with the Grace Lutheran and other churches of Shillington; later, as an outward and visible sign of niceness and of belongingness, he remains a churchgoer when he moves up the social scale
to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he achieves that dream of perfect normality which is not only American and Christian but—when in the company of other upwardly mobile couples—ever so slightly bohemian.

Although Updike seems never to have had any major psychic or physical wound, he has endured all sorts of minor afflictions. In the chapter “At war with my skin,” he tells us in great detail of the skin condition that sun and later medicine would clear up; for a long time, however, he was martyr to it as well as a slave to his mirror, all the while fretting about what “normal” people would make of him. As it proved, they don’t seem to have paid much attention to an affliction that, finally, “had to do with self love, with finding myself acceptable . . . the price high but not impossibly so; I must pay for being me.” The price for preserving me certainly proved to be well worth it when, in 1955, he was rejected for military conscription, even though the empire was still bogged down in Korea and our forces were increased that year from 800,000 to three million—less Updike, who, although “it pains me to write these pages,” confesses that he was “far
from keen to devote two years to the national defense.” He was later to experience considerable anguish when, almost alone among serious writers, he would support the Vietnam War on the ground that who am I “to second-guess a president?” One suspects that he envies the clear-skinned lads who so reluctantly fought for the land
he
so deeply loves.