On page 10 of Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Knopf),
John Updike makes it clear that he’s reluctant to be “a subject of
extended biographical treatment,” wherein “some callow inquisitor
interprets his life.” At age 75, the elegantly reserved Pennsylvania
Dutchman says that “a fiction writer’s life is his treasure, his ore,
his savings account, his jungle gym.”
He avoids the
biographical treatment trap by bringing us essays and criticism in one
mighty tome. As a tour guide through 700-plus pages, he’s clearly in
charge of journeys to China (where people seem so “happy”), with a stop
in glorious Florence, Italy, to taste Pontormo’s “electric, fruity
colors.”
Humble observations about the pennies of his
childhood are as sharply penned as his terrific essay (“The Future of
Faith”), expertly interwoven with a hilarious slog through the Venice
Biennale, where he’s stunned by pavilions rife with photos taken by a
chimpanzee and abstractions painted by trained elephants. Only the
dullest reader will fail to see the impossibility of separating Homo sapiens from the milling herd.
Whether
you agree with this stance or not, there’s charm in imagining all
living things as part of a herd thundering forth in search of who knows
what. Updike’s novels, essays and reviews (particularly his reviews in The New Yorker) have
been part of my life for many years, possibly because our experiences
are similar: a taste of sexy suburbia-fueled dry martinis, a peculiar
fascination with cinema and the world of “art” and, as we grow ever
older, a wondering about what it means to be ensnared in a specific
American fabric, once so seamlessly velvety with an upwardly mobile
middle-class, but now stretched and tattered and barely recognizable to
aging eyes.
The author’s broad-ranging efforts remind me of
sitting in a church pew (or a movie theater), waiting for answers to
pour forth; however, as time narrows, the act of questioning matters
far more than the answers. “As to the movies,” Updike observes, “who of
my generation did not seek his inmost self within the glittering,
surging world-picture that cinema presented
to its rapt receivers in the semi-dark? What was worthwhile and true
was somehow coded there, coded in Gary Cooper’s pale-eyed deadpan and
Esther Williams’ underwater smile.” For serious students of writing,
and the arts in general, the book includes depictions by Goya and
Thurber, among others.
The author’s remembrance is set down in
sturdy Dutch type on creamy paper, encased in a cover featuring him
clad in an impeccable suit, with a flash of white cuff to match his
hardearned thatch of white hair. Tilted slightly upward, his gaze, like
his prose, both questions and duly considers the unanswerable.
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
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The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
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