The Last Empire (15 page)

For a beautiful heroine like Alma, sex is
de rigueur
, but though she fucks like a minx, the sexagenarian Updike has lost some of his old brio. Alma marries a nobody with a body; he never makes it in the business but makes a baby. Meanwhile, she grows more and more un-American. Proud to be a Hollywood liberal, she is prone to quarrel with her kid brother, Danny, now a CIA honcho. “Well, Danny darling, the movies have never pretended to be anything except entertainment. But what you’re doing pretends to be a great deal more.”

“It pretends to be history,” he said quickly. “It
is
history. Cast of billions. The future of the globe is at stake. I kid you not.” Nice touch, this last. Television slang of the 1950s.

Alma De Mott rises and falls and rises again. She is clearly based—research to one side—on Yvonne de Carlo’s performance as an up-down-up movie star of a certain age in Sondheim’s musical comedy
Follies
, whose signature song was “I’m Still Here.”

Time now to shift to Alma’s son, Clark, named for . . . you guessed it. In the family tradition, he is a born Shillington loser. He is, of course, conscious of being a celebrity as a star’s son. But the connection does him no particular good. He also has a stepfather called Rex. When he asks Alma why she married Rex, she “told him calmly, Because he is all cock.”

Clark is in rebellion against the Communism of his mother and her friends—pinks if not reds—and, worse, unabashed enemies of the United States in the long, long, war against the Satanic Ho Chi Minh. “Mom, too, wanted North Vietnam to win, which seemed strange to Clark, since America has been pretty good to her.” As irony, this might have been telling, but irony is an arrow that the Good Fiction Fairy withheld from the Updike quiver. Consequently, this
non sequitur
can only make perfect sense to a writer who believes that no matter how misguided, tyrannous, and barbarous the rulers of one’s own country have become, they
must
be obeyed; and if one has actually made money and achieved a nice place in the country that they have hijacked then one must be doubly obedient, grateful, too. Under Hitler, many good Germans, we are told, felt the same way.

There is nothing, sad to say, surprising in Updike’s ignorance of history and politics and of people unlike himself; in this, he is a standard American and so a typical citizen of what Vice-President Agnew once called the greatest nation in the country. But Updike has literary ambitions as well as most of the skills of a popular writer, except, finally, the essential one without which nothing can ever come together to any useful end as literature, empathy. He is forever stuck in a psychic Shillington-Ipswich-New York world where everything outside his familiar round is unreal. Because of this lack of imagination, he can’t really do much even with the characters that he does have some feeling for because they exist in social, not to mention historic, contexts that he lacks the sympathy—to use the simplest word—to make real.

Many of Updike’s descriptions of Hollywood—the place—are nicely observed. Plainly, he himself
looked
at the Three B’s—Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood—“the palm trees, the pink low houses, the Spanishness, the endlessness . . . the winding palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills, where there was no living person in sight but Japanese and Mexican gardeners wheeling dead palm fronds out from behind hedges of oleander and fuchsias.” “The wealth here was gentle wealth, humorous wealth even; these fortunes derived from art and illusion and personal beauty and not, as back home, from cruel old riverside mills manufacturing some ugly and stupid necessity like Trojans or bottlecaps.” The “humorous” is an inspired adjective, proving there is a lot to be said for firsthand observation. But then, alas, he must tell us about
how
films were made in the 1950s and what the makers were like, including Columbia’s Harry Cohn, a much-written-about
monster. Once inside the celluloid kitchen, Updike falls far, far behind the Bel-Air Brontës at their cuisine-art.

Alma is still here, as the song goes, while the son, Clark, works at a Colorado ski resort, owned by his great-uncle. Clark has gone through the usual schools and done the usual drugs and had the usual run-of-the-mill sex available to a movie star’s child. Now he must
find
himself—if there is a self to find—in a partially pristine Colorado rapidly being undone by ski resorts and the greenhouse effect.

Except for Alma, who knew from the beginning that she was unique in her beauty and sweet self-love, none of Updike’s protagonists has any idea of what to do with himself during the seventy years or so that he must mark time in this vale of tears before translation to sunbeam-hood in Jesus’ sky-condo. Happily, if tragically, true meaning comes to Clark in Colorado.

Updike, nothing if not up-to-date, re-creates the celebrated slaughter at Waco, Texas, where the charismatic David Koresh and many of his worshipers were wiped out in their compound by federal agents. In Updike’s fiction, a similar messiah and his worshipers withdraw to Colorado in order to live in Christian fellowship until the final trump, due any day now. An attractive girl leads Clark to the Lower Branch Temple and to Jesse, a Vietnam veteran who is now a “high-ranch messiah.” As a novelist, Updike often relies on the wearisome trick of someone asking a new character to tell us about himself. Within the rustic temple, skeptical Clark and primitive Scripture-soaked Jesse tell us about themselves. Clark: “Yeah, well. What was I going to say? Something. I don’t want to bore you.” Jesse: “You will never find Jesse bored. Never, by a recital of the truth. Weary, yes, and sore-laden with the sorrows of mankind, but never bored.” A good thing, too, considering the level
of the dialogue. Jesse fulminates with biblical quotes from the likes of Ezekiel, while Clark wimps on and on about the emptiness of gilded life in the Three B’s.

The actual events at Waco revealed, terribly, what a paranoid federal apparatus, forever alert to any infraction of its stern prohibitions, was capable of when challenged head-on by nonconformists. How, I wondered, will Updike, a born reactionary, deal with the state’s conception of itself as ultimate arbiter of everything, no matter how absurd? Even “the good child” must be appalled by the slaughter of Jesse and his fellow believers by a mindless authority.

Since we shall witness all this through Clark’s eyes, Updike has made him even more passive than his usual protagonists. Too much acid in the Vipers Lounge? Clark does have a scene with Uncle Danny, who explains the real world to him in terms that the editorial page of
The Wall Street Journal
might think twice about publishing. Danny: “Vietnam was a hard call. . . . But somebody always has to fight.” (In the case of Vietnam, somebody proved to be poor white and black males.) “You and I walk down the street safe, if we do, because a cop around the corner has a gun. The kids today say the state is organized violence and they’re right. But it matters who’s doing the organizing . . . Joe Stalin . . . or our bumbling American pols. I’ll take the pols every time.” Thus, straw villain undoes straw hero; neither, of course, relevant to the issue, but Updike—Danny (true empathy may have been achieved at last) is now in full swing: “The
kids today . . . grow long hair . . . smoke pot and shit on poor Tricky Dicky” only because of “the willingness of somebody else to do their fighting for them. What you can’t protect gets taken away. . . .” Hobbesian world out there. Danny does admit that we got nothing out of Vietnam, not even “thanks”—one wonders from whom he thinks gratitude ought to come. But, no matter. Danny hates Communism. Hates Ho Chi Minh. Hates those “Hollywood fatcats and bleeding hearts” who oppose the many wars. Even so, “I try to be dispassionate about it. But I love this crazy, wasteful, self-hating country in spite of myself.” It would seem that Updike–Danny has not got the point. The people of the country don’t hate the country, only what has been done to it by those who profit from hot and cold wars and, in the process, bring to civilian governance a murderous military mentality, witness Waco.

How does Clark take all this? “To Clark, Uncle Danny seemed a treasure, a man from space who was somehow his own. . . .” Clark has not known many employees of the CIA, for whom this sort of bombast is the order of the day. That order flows not only through the pages of
The Wall Street Journal
but throughout most of the press, where Hume’s Opinion is shaped by the disinformation of a hundred wealthy tax-exempt American foundations such as Olin, Smith-Richardson, Bradley, Scaife and Pew, not to mention all the Christian coalitions grinding out a worldview of Us against Them, the Us an ever-smaller group of propertied Americans and the Them the rest of the world.

Clark would now be ripe for neo-conhood, but for the fact that he was never a con or anything at all until he drifted into Jesse’s orbit, already set on a collision course with the U.S. government, which allows no group the pleasure of defiance even in the name of the One in whose Image we were fashioned. Jesse has been stockpiling weapons for “The Day of Reckoning.” Lovingly, Updike lists the arsenal. Clark suddenly realizes that here, at last, is the perfect orgasm, something well worth dying for. “The gun was surprising: provocative like a woman, both lighter and heavier than he would have thought.” The ultimate love story of a boy and his gun, “ready to become a magic wand.” Disappointingly, at the end, Updike is too patriotic or too timid to allow federal law-enforcement officers to destroy the temple along with the men, women, and children that Jesse has attracted to him. Colorado State Troopers do Caesar’s work, unlike Waco, where Caesar himself did the deed.

At the end, Clark turns on Jesse and betrays him. In order to save the children from the Conflagration, Clark “shot the false prophet twice.” Although Clark himself perishes, he dies a hero, who saved as many lives as he could from the false prophet whom he had, for no coherent reason, briefly served. Finally, world television validates Clark’s life and end. Who could ask for anything more?

Stendhal’s view that politics in a work of art is like a pistol shot at a concert is true, but what is one to do in the case of a political work that deals almost exclusively with true patriot versus nonpatriot who dares criticize the common patria? I quoted at length from Updike’s
Self-Consciousness
in order to establish what human material this inhuman novel is based on. I have also tried to exercise empathy, tried to feel, as President Clinton likes to say, the author’s pain. Actually, to find reactionary writing similar to Updike’s, one must turn back to John Dos Passos’s
Midcentury
, or to John Steinbeck’s
The Winter of Our Discontent
. But Updike, unlike his predecessor Johns, has taken to heart every far-out far-right piety currently being fed us.

Also, despite what Updike must have thought of as a great leap up the social ladder from Shillington obscurity to “Eliotic” Harvard and then on to a glossy magazine, he has now, Antaeus-like, started to touch base with that immutable Dutch-German earth on which his ladder stood. Recent American wars and defeats have so demoralized our good child that he has now come to hate that Enlightenment which was all that, as a polity, we ever had. He is symptomatic, then, of a falling back, of a loss of nerve; indeed, a loss of honor. He invokes phantom political majorities, righteous masses. Time to turn to Herzen on the subject: “The masses are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are offended by those who stand alone . . . they want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.”

Updike’s work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up. In this most delicate of times, Updike has “builded” his own small, crude altar in order to propitiate—or to invoke?—“the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”

The Times Literary Supplement

26 April 1996

* 
A N
OTE ON
T
HE
C
ITY AND THE
P
ILLAR
AND
T
HOMAS
M
ANN

Much has been made—not least by the Saint himself—of how Augustine stole and ate some pears from a Milanese orchard. Presumably, he never again trafficked in, much less ate, stolen goods, and once this youthful crime (“a rum business,” snarled the unsympathetic American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) was behind him, he was sainthood-bound. The fact is that all of us have stolen pears; the mystery is why so few of us rate halos. I suspect that in certain notorious lives there is sometimes an abrupt moment of choice. Shall I marry or burn? Shut the door on a life longed for while opening another, deliberately, onto trouble and pain because . . . The “because” is the true story seldom told.

Currently, two biographers are at work on my sacred story, and the fact that they are trying to make sense of my life has made me curious about how and why I have done—and not done—so many things. As a result, I have begun writing what I have said that I’d never write, a memoir (“I am not my own subject,” I used to say with icy superiority). Now I am reeling haphazardly through my own youth, which is when practically everything of interest happened to me, rather more soon than late, since I was force-fed, as it were, by military service in the Second World War.

My father once told me, after reviewing his unpleasant period in public office, that whenever it came time for him to make a crucial decision, he invariably made the wrong one. I told him that he must turn Churchill and write his own life, demonstrating what famous victories he had set in motion at Gallipoli or in the “dragon’s soft underbelly” of the Third Reich. But my father was neither a writer nor a politician; he was also brought up to tell the truth. I, on the other hand, was brought up by a politician grandfather in Washington, D.C., and I wanted very much to be a politician, too. Unfortunately, nature had designed me to be a writer. I had no choice in the matter. Pears were to be my diet, stolen or homegrown. There was never a time when I did not make sentences in order to make those things that I had experienced cohere and become “real.”