Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
That was twenty years ago. Now I notice, in this text, amid the religious schemata, a less conscious pattern, announced by the sentence already quoted, about the strands of osier arching like separate serpents springing up and turning again into the knit of the wickerwork. The image forced itself upon me at the outset of the action; it returns on page 27, as Hook remembers himself as a child examining his bedcovers, “searching for the deeper-dyed thread that occasionally, in the old woven cloth, would arch above the others.” This microcosmic event is dramatically enlarged when, amid the schoolyard rumpus of the stoning, Hook, studying the interwoven clouds of the sky, has “his narrow field of vision crossed by a flow of arrowing stones, speeding through the air in swift flocks, and before he considered, he had the thought that here was something glorious. Battles of old had swayed beneath such a canopy of missiles.” The hurled stones arch; and so the entire incident itself arches up out of the fabric of the day, and then is turned again into the knit of the gossip that ends the day. Buddy carries the scandal into the crowd and composes a comic headline in the air; by page 180, amid the threads of several other rumored scandals, the event is anonymously made to yield a moral (“you sometimes need a man with a look of authority”) and allowed to fade from the common discourse.
The people who had come to the fair talked more slowly, tending toward affectionate gossip about the past they had in common as citizens of the town, and about roads and schools and old houses sold. Coarsened hands of still handsome women nervously tucked back stray strands of hair; young mothers pouted under the weight of sleeping babies.
Ipswich has displaced Shillington behind this evocation. The Massachusetts town where I wrote this novel, in the three summer months of our first year there, has begun to intrude upon the remembered town; young mothers and sleeping babies join my cast of characters.
Life goes on; stray strands are tucked back; the stoning has sprung up and been turned again into the knit. All is flux; nothing lastingly matters. Such pessimism came more naturally to the author of The Poorhouse Fair than his hopeful detection of a world-soul. For me, the most surprising—the most abruptly given—image occurs on the penultimate page; the stars are perceived as “not specks but needles of light suspended point downward in a black depth of stiff jelly.” Earlier, Hook, praying, had felt his mind as “a point within an infinitely thick blanket.” We are within, the young author feels, honestly claustrophobic—within a universe where the sun daily grows “orange, oblate, and distended”4 and then plunges to its death like some Titanic deity. For a while the furrow plowed by its plunge glows “the color of an unnatural element, transuranic, created atom by atom in the scientist’s laboratory, at inestimable expense,” but, as the sick-ward patients watch, clouds propelled by evening winds obscure the golden chasm. The poorhouse is fair, I wanted to say, against my suspicions that it is, our universe, a poor house for us.
The book was published early in 1959. Wright Morris and Mary McCarthy found kind words to say of it, and Mary Ellen Chase published in the Herald Tribune a review of extraordinary enthusiasm and warmth. Others found it precious, for all the “phenomenal composure” of the prose. Time, after what I took to be a panning, cited it among “The Year’s Best,” and I had the pleasure of seeing myself anointed, in their regal way, “Gifted Writer Updike.” The Poorhouse Fair arched back smoothly into the vast knit of past seasons’ books. It sold about eight thousand copies, and has been kept in print by the publisher’s generous policy in this regard. This is its sixth printing; the fifth was in 1966. A few lingering typographical mistakes have been cleared up, the historical clues have been adjusted as mentioned above, Gregg’s expression “a.h.” has been liberalized to “a.hole” (though I am pleased with my solution, for those days, to the problem of printed obscenities; better my abbreviations than non-words like “fug” or eye-catching dashes), and what appears to be the same boy at the fair has been given the same name throughout, Mark. Otherwise the text is unchanged; I could not write this novel now, and will respect the man who could. He wanted to lay down in these theorems and raptures the foundation for a tower of volumes, its title a slogan to prosper by. A few days ago I submitted the manuscript for my twentieth book. The future is now; it is as if, standing by that poorhouse wall, I threw myself down, into the pit of time, and, my neck unbroken, find myself here.
APOLOGIA PRO OPERE SUO, from the Afterword to Buchanan Dying (1974).
I wanted to write a novel in which the chief character was to have been a man who had a pair of spectacles with one lens that reduced as powerfully as oxy-gas-microscope and the other that magnified equally powerfully; in his interpretation, everything was very relative.
This entry in Kierkegaard’s Journals (December 10, 1837) excited me nearly twenty years ago; I, too, “wanted to write a novel in which the chief character” etc. To this fallow inspiration (I did try a few dozen pages, the journal of a wicked man, a high-school principal) time added the idea of a novel with a stationary hero, a man in bed dying. Learning that Samuel Beckett, Hermann Broch, and Carlos Fuentes had already written such books dampened but not quite extinguished this ambition, which was vaguely intermixed with a youthful vision of a tetralogy, of which the first novel would be set in the future, the second in the present, the third in the remembered past, and the fourth in the historical past. The first three materialized obediently enough (The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, and The Centaur), but the fourth hung unachieved, attracting to itself, over the years, the lint and interstellar matter of fragmentary inspirations. The discovery that Buchanan had mismatched eyes fitted the Kierkegaard, and the fact that he was Dying worked in with an overall alphabetical scheme of writing in my lifetime twenty-six novels, each to be dominated by one letter of the alphabet—the “B” in Rabbit, Run and the “C” in The Centaur need scarcely be emphasized. But, while I waited for the “D” to pull together (the first sentence would go, During the night, the old man had a strange dream), many other books presented themselves to be mustered through the presses, and the tetralogy remained open on one side to the wind and bad weather.
James Buchanan had to be the historical figure. Who was he? In my Pennsylvania childhood, I knew him to be the only President our great and ancient state had produced; but where were the monuments, the Buchanan Avenues, the extollatory juvenile volumes with titles like Jimmie Buchanan, Keystone Son in the White House, or “Old Buck,” the Hair-Splitter Who Preceded the Rail-Splitter? Lincoln and Washington were drummed into us but Buchanan went unmentioned. When, in 1968, as an act of penance for a commercially successful novel set in New England, I began my research, I discovered, of course, that Buchanan’s Administration had ended under a cloud of disgrace that after a century still glowered. The Covode Investigation, the Floyd scandals, General Scott’s published charges, a campaign of press vilification led by Forney, Greeley, and Bennett, the Lincoln Administration’s self-serving innuendoes,5 a congressional vendetta that stooped to abolishment of the franking privilege of ex-Presidents and to Thaddeus Stevens’s claim that Buchanan had defrauded the government of eight thousand dollars for White House furnishings—all did their work. Not Buchanan’s tediously dispassionate self-defense, nor the grand and tragic fatalism which informs Lincoln’s second inaugural—giving the war the cast of divine foreordination, of an inexorable justice whereby “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”—could dissipate the impression of bad performance and worse faith on Buchanan’s part. Even modern historians, a century remote from the wounds of the Civil War, sometimes jeer vindictively at “Poor, foolish Buchanan!” who “prayed and twittered and did nothing.”6
And yet my grandfather John Hoyer, born in Berks County in 1863, spoke of Lincoln as of someone who had personally swindled him, and to his death at the age of ninety voted the straight Democratic ticket. I felt a mystery here. My father, born Republican, became a Roosevelt Democrat in the Depression; this was understandable, the Depression was in my
Even older than my grandfather was Uncle John Spotts, his sister Hannah’s husband. Uncle John, shorter than five feet, with a hook nose and large-lidded eyes in deep sockets, spoke with an antique voice, an old-fashioned superpalatal wheeze that merged with the dark, somehow tropical greenery outside his house and the smells of fresh-baked pie dough and unused plush parlor chairs inside. Though his hand bunched into blue knobs as it gripped the curve of his cane, he was dapper, in starched pinstripe shirt and broad suspenders, and his inner knit, I felt as a child, was as clean and tight as the wickerwork of his porch chairs. Nearly a hundred Pennsylvania summers lived in him, hazy farm summers where only the springhouse was cool. His kindly, eerie wheeze of a voice, sighing “Johnny,” with a caressing tone of lament, arose from a green world where men would not breathe again, a Pennsylvania dying about us, though its buildings like bones remained. I wanted to dive into that lost green, and set a novel there.
At some moments of research I touched something live. In the great round reading room of the British Museum, with its aquarium whispering, they brought me a book about Henry Clay published in 1864; its pages had never been cut, I had to slice them with the edge of a credit card. Startled British faces looked around at the tearing sound. I wanted to explain, I was innocent, more than innocent; I was the prince whose kiss this book had been awaiting, asleep, for over a century. Then, at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a few floors above the muggy hullaballoo of Philadelphia, I held in my hands the very sheets of paper—eight of them, legal-length—upon which Jeremiah Black, his gorgeous flowing hand intact after a sleepless night and a hectic month, had written out his objections and emendations to Buchanan’s proposed reply to the South Carolina “Commissioners.” For a moment—December 30, 1860—American history had flowed through these sheets, these arabesques and furious hatchings of ink. A tide had turned that morning. The South’s long hold on Washington had been broken; the possibility of a negotiated, peaceful secession had passed. The Union’s course had been set, here, in my hands. And again, one winter, unable to make the novel move, unable to strike the music—the chords of detail given momentum by significance—that, as Henry James had warned, can only be elicited from “the palpable present intimate that throbs responsive,”9 I impulsively, desperately flew south from Boston, hoping that the sight of Wheatland, in Lancaster, might break the block. The flight to Newark was delayed; I missed the connecting flight and had to drive a rented car through New Jersey, to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Winter held the woods and wide fields in suspense. I passed the Morgantown exit that so many times had taken me home and drove into Lancaster as dusk was falling. Buchanan’s dusty road to Marietta is now a residential street. It rises out of the old downtown, where the courtly street names and colonial brick houses persist amid a modern clutter of commerce and reconstruction; and then Marietta Avenue slightly falls, and on the left, back safe on its great lawn, stands Wheatland. Of orangish brick, the mansion, with its narrow windowless sides and rather sprightly, Frenchified façade, feels intimate—or felt so that day, when snow hushed its grounds, and I was the only visitor. The driveway had been plowed, but the paths were unshovelled. No caretaker moved to intercept me. Solitary as a burglar, as a lover, I waded to the windows and looked in. Through wavery panes rapidly darkening, I glimpsed planes of wallpaper, an oval mirror topped by an eagle, balusters of the stairway in whose newel post is sealed the rolled-up mortgage papers and at whose head rests (I knew) the porcelain bowl given Buchanan by the Mikado of Japan, the largest piece of porcelain in the world, mistakenly sold out of the White House by Mary Lincoln and many years later recovered for Buchanan’s estate. Creeping along the wall, I peered, as into Henry James’s “garden,” into the windows of the library where the old Functionary had spun his web of letters and received job-seekers, power-brokers, cronies, and neighbors. The leather settee, the glass-fronted bookcases, the framed posters and flags, even the basket of pretzels the Lancaster Historical Society has set up on the center table—I could make out all these, but coming closer had put me further away. The furniture of his life remained sealed upon its mystery. The house was closed for the season. I could not get in.
Nor could I get into his life and make my novel there. The plan was to have him dying and in delirium or dream reliving. His days, the correct dates running along in the margin like the ticking of a clock, would flow unchronologically one out of another, revealing the “veins” of his psychology, of his fate. There were even four chapter titles, alliterative as I like them: “Love,” “Law,” “Duty,” “Death.” But researched details failed to act like remembered ones, they had no palpable medium of the half-remembered in which to swim; my imagination was frozen by the theoretical discoverability of everything. An actual man, Buchanan, had done this and this, exactly so, once; and no other way. There was no air. Atoms of the known lit up an abyss of the unknowable. In the end, a play seemed possible. Let the designers of sets and costumes solve the surfaces. Let theatrical unreality equal historical unreality. Let the actors themselves be the “veins.” Let speech, which is all impalpable that remains to us of the dead, be all. Some scenes, like that of the Colemans’ party, I took from the aborted novel; other scenes, like Buchanan’s walk with Jackson and the Cabinet struggles, had only to be synthesized from existing accounts. The pages did at last accumulate. In the course of their accumulation, I broke my leg, turned forty, buried my father. So be it. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. Here is Buchanan, I am rid of him, and this book, a mosaic with more tesserae than matrix, constitutes, I trust, my final volume of homage to my native state, whose mild misty doughy middleness, between immoderate norths and souths, remains for me, being my first taste of life, the authentic taste.
REPLY to an essay by the historian Paul Boyer, in a collection of twenty such essays-and-replies called Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront the American Past—and Each Other (2001).
Paul Boyer’s lively, friendly appraisal of my novel Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) does not mention what I considered the pivotal intersection of Alf Clayton’s Buchanan saga with his real, as remembered, life: his swooning into the arms of a student’s mother, Mrs. Arthrop, upon hearing that her name, like that of Buchanan’s lifelong love object, was Ann. “Oh. Ah. ‘Ann,’ I repeated. Th
Nor does Professor Boyer identify by name my previous work on Buchanan, the long play Buchanan Dying, published in 1974 and performed in cut versions in 1976, twice—in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and in San Diego, California. Though my publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., made a handsome volume of it—perhaps the handsomest, in design and typesetting, of any of my books—I remained unsatisfied with this packaging of the Buchanan matter, and tried again nearly twenty years later. The reasons for my dissatisfaction were, basically, the unwieldiness of an actual life, especially a long political one lived in the public eye from 1814 to 1868, and the embarrassments, forcefully described by Henry James in a memorable letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, of writing what he called “ ‘historic’ fiction”—“The real thing,” he warned, “is almost impossible to do and in its essence the whole effect is as nought.” The novel, I think, delivers better than the play what I have to say about Buchanan, because it wears its aesthetic discomfort, as it were, on its sleeve, in the person of the discomfited, all-confessing narrator, a teacher of history.