I’ve been revisiting the memoir Self-Consciousness by John Updike, which I first read when it was published in 1989. Updike is best known for his novels, but I consider them his weakest genre. I much prefer the short stories and the personal essays, the latter being the form this particular work takes.
Self-Consciousness is where I first encountered Updike’s reflections on the Vietnam War, entitled “On Not Being a Dove” (I wrote at length about the work here). After my political conversion, it meant even more to me than when I had first read it, because of Updike’s descriptions of his own discomfort at finding himself at odds with the liberal literati who were such a large part of his pleasant New England surroundings:
…Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk [LBJ] from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world…
I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would. Those who would not, let them move North. But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that? And so on.
I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.
That should give you a good idea of Updike’s pellucid, graceful, and pointed style. His novels are known for their sexual boldness, but in his essays we find a different sort of boldness: a searching honesty about himself and the world, or at least an attempt at such.
Besides the Vietnam essay, my favorite selection in the book is the last one, “On Being a Self Forever.” It’s not easy to describe exactly what this essay is about, because it is so wide-ranging: a summing up of the trajectory of Updike’s persona, a meditation on religion and the possibility of an afterlife, and a hymn to the unfailing beauty of the natural world, all written by one of the greatest stylists in the English language.
It is difficult to find an excerpt from the essay that gives an idea of its flavor; it is a true tour de force. But here’s one I happen to like, in which Updike tries to describe our relation to the automobile, and wonders if people of the future can possibly understand what it was like:
Will the future understand, for instance…how much of our lives was spent in automobiles, and how largely their little curved caves of painted metal, speeding through a landscape of imploring advertisements and commercial desolation, and the powerful instant responses of their knobs and pedals, and the fine points of their amenities and costliness, and their aura of controlled explosion were part of our coming of age, our mating, our fulfillment of obligations, our thrusts of creaming? An average American male became a man at the age of sixteen with his possession of a driver’s license, and every seventeen years thereafter he drove the distance to the moon. Not just the robust but the timid and the crippled and the myopic and the senile and the certifiably insane daily hurtled about on the highways only inches and a flick of the wrist removed from murderous collision. Every pair of hands resting on the steering wheel held the power of death; the wonder is not that accidents occurred but that most of us daily lived through that siege of rushing miles. We even felt, while speeding along a curious peace. But for a handful of sportsmen and Amish farmers, we had forgotten, in a few generations, the horse, and how ubiquitously horse power, horse manure, horseflesh, and horse suffering and the smell and whinny and clip-clop of them had covered the city streets, the same streets we then choked and blanketed with millions of big self-propelled scarabs.
I’m not sure why I chose that particular passage. Almost any would have done just as well—such as the following, in which Updike explains something about writing and fame, two things he knew a great deal about:
Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat.
Updike’s writing life was a long, productive, and mostly successful attempt to keep his own eyes from getting fat—to continue to observe his fellow humans and the universe itself as clearly and honestly and even lovingly as he could, and to write about them without an inflated sense of his own self-importance.
