John Updike's Secular Vision (Contra Christian Lorentzen)

Juan Gris, Breakfast (1914)

John Updike’s art essays are among the glories of modern literature. Of the many adjectives I’d choose to describe them – “sensuous,” “subtle,” “stylish,” “original,” “analytical,” “perceptive,” “inspired,” “addictive,” “delightful,” “detailed” – “religious” would not be among them. Yet this is the very word, the only word, that Christian Lorentzen uses to characterize Updike’s art pieces. Lorentzen, in his "All he does is write his novel" (London Review of Books, June 5, 2014), says Updike “never tired of writing about painting and sculpture in religious terms.” To my knowledge, of Updike’s roughly one hundred writings on art, only two discuss art in religious terms: his wonderful memory piece, “What MoMA Done Tole Me” (Just Looking, 1989), in which he reminisces about his youthful visits to the Museum of Modern Art, and "Invisible Cathedral" (The New Yorker, November 15, 2004; Due Considerations, 2007), an account of his 2004 visit to the new, expanded MoMA.

In “What MoMA Done Tole Me,” Updike says of the Museum of Modern Art, “I walked here often, up Fifth Avenue, to clear my head, to lift my spirits. For me the Museum of Modern Art was a temple, though my medium had become words.” Later in the piece, he says that the Museum “formed a soothing shelter from the streets outside” and that, “Within the museum, Brancusi’s statues were grouped in a corner room … and emanated an extraordinary peace and finality.” “These pet shapes,” he says, “had acquired, in the decades of the sculptor’s obsessed reworking of them, a sacred aura, which I imbibed as in a chapel, in that softly lit corner space from which one could only turn and retreat…. I was looking for a religion, as a way of hanging on to my old one, in those years, and was attracted to those artists who seemed to me as single-minded and selfless as saints.”

“What MoMA Done Tole Me” ’s most explicit expression of Updike’s religious feeling toward art occurs when he describes his encounter with Juan Gris’s Breakfast:

Breakfast, though a less sunny and matinal work than Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room, tasted more like breakfast: a stark but heartening outlay of brown coffee and thick white china, with a packet of mail and piece of newspaper at its edges. The yellowing scrap of jOURNal, which wittily includes the artist’s name in headline type, fascinated me: like the cracked green of Matisse’s Piano Lesson, the scrap was showing the chemical effects of time; it was aging away from the white of the tablecloth toward the grained brown of the table. On the table, the impudent yet somehow earnest use of commercial paper imitating wood-grain moved me, echoing here in this palace of high art the kitschy textures of my childhood exercises in artifice; and the perfect balance and clarity of this crayoned collage, together with the short life testified to by Gris’s dates on the frame (1887 – 1927), exuded the religious overtone I sought. A religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life, in an atmosphere of gaiety and diligence: this was what I found in the Museum of Modern Art, where others might have found completely different – darker and wilder – things.

What a gorgeous passage! The way Updike describes the scrap of newspaper (“aging away from the white of the tablecloth toward the grained brown of the table”) is very fine. It brings to mind Nicholson Baker’s comment about how much more Updike can do with a piece of reality than he can (U and I, 1991). Baker speaks for most of us on this point.

Updike’s moments of art religiosity seem to have been most intense when he visited MoMA. But by the time he wrote "Invisible Cathedral" (2007), his feeling appears to have waned. He says, “After seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and a cathedral may have sprouted too many chapels.”

To say, as Lorentzen says, that Updike “never tired of writing about painting and sculpture in religious terms” is a shade misleading. Only in “What MoMA Done Tole Me” and “Invisible Cathedral” did he do so expressly. Perhaps he sublimated his religious feeling towards art in his other pieces. That may account, in part, for their greatness. But Updike’s sensual apprehension of life (“Flesh is delicious,” he says, eyeing Lucas Cranach’s Eve) is also a key ingredient of his criticism – one that’s totally secular.  

June 23, 2014 Issue

Why read fiction? One reason, according to James Wood, in his "The Punished Land," in this week’s issue, is that “We enjoy watching the novelist play the game of truthtelling.” In so saying, Wood helps me understand why I prefer reading factual writing. I enjoy it because I know it isn’t a game; I can rely on it as a representation of real life. I like that phrase “real life.” Wood uses it in his great "On Not Going Home" (“But real life is a different matter”).

Some critics think that the representation of real life isn’t really art [e.g., Arlene Croce – she once criticized the costumes (“cowboy hats and splotched jeans”) in a ballet (American Ballet Theatre’s Rodeo) for being “too much like life”]. In order for it to be art (they say), there has to be distortion, heightening, dramatization, fabrication, transformation. In other words, in order to convert life to art, you have to fictionalize it. Wood holds this view. In “The Punished Land,” he compares Zachary Lazar’s nonfictional Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder with Lazar’s novel Sway, and says, “Sway is the stronger for Lazar’s confident but understated fictionalizing. The narrative doesn’t meekly copy the silhouettes of its research; it draws new, emboldened versions.”

Meekly copy the silhouettes of its research – is that what Wood thinks all factual writing does? Or is the application of his remark confined to Lazar’s nonfiction work? A writer’s research may disclose the outline (the silhouette) of the piece he or she eventually writes. But it may not. Talking about the composition of his classic The Pine Barrens (1967), John McPhee, in his "Structure" (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013), says,

I had done all the research I was going to do—had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store. I had read all the books I was going to read, and scientific papers, and a doctoral dissertation. I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it. The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn’t write even one. If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. I had never tried to put so many different components—characters, description, dialogue, narrative, set pieces, humor, history, science, and so forth—into a single package.

Making that single package involves more than just “meekly copying the silhouettes of its research.” It involves, at the very least, selecting and shaping. “Art is selecting and shaping,” Wood says, in his How Fiction Works (2008). It’s time he acknowledged that’s how factual writing works, too. 

On August Sander: Dyer v. Lane

August Sander, Pastry Cook (1928)

I want to compare Geoff Dyer’s recent "Categorical Imperative" (Bookforum, Apr/May 2014) with Anthony Lane’s "Faces in the Crowd" (The New Yorker, February 10, 2003). Both are reviews of August Sander’s photography. But their perspectives differ from each other. Dyer looks at the faces of Sander’s portraits and finds they “look as extinct as mammals.” He says, “People just don’t look like this anymore.” Lane looks at them and says the experience is “like entering into a novel.” Dyer sees the pictures as fossils. He says the faces are “stuck like fossils in the geology of time.” Lane animates the photos. Here, for example, is his vivid description of “Pastry Cook” (1928):

Round as a bun, topped with a head like a shining cherry, the master of his craft stands firm and square on the tiles of his kitchen, one hand clasping the inch-thick handle of a spoon or whisk, the other curled around the handle of a large mixing bowl, whose curves are a perfect match for the swell of his paunch. There is not an ounce of mockery in the mixture, and the pastry-maker himself would consider the portrait fair, perhaps ennobling, yet the picture is lightly, irrefutably spiced with a pinch of the comic. In that balancing of the aesthetic scales, Sander has no equal.

That noticing of the way the mixing bowl’s curves match the swell of the pastry cook’s paunch is brilliant!

Like Lane, Dyer feels “the all-consuming psychological pull” of Sander’s portraits, “their immense and draining gravity.” But unlike him, instead of being drawn into the photos, he “craves escape” from them - “escape from the density of faces and clothes – of people.” 

I admire Dyer for the honesty of his response. But of the two approaches, I prefer Lane’s. Sander’s pictures are dense with details. Lane helps me see them. 

Eagle Feather

This morning, cycling from Brackley Beach to Covehead Harbour, in Prince Edward Island National Park, I found an eagle feather in the grass on the edge of the trail. My wife spotted it, and I went back and picked it up. It’s a wing feather, dark gray, with a tiny patch of white at the base. I treasure it. It brings to mind the scene in Ian Frazier’s great On the Rez (2000), in which Le War Lance, one of my favorite characters in all of literature, gives Frazier an eagle feather:

He was wearing a gray felt cowboy hat with a tall, uncreased crown and an eagle feather hanging from the back on a buckskin thong. He took off the hat and untied the eagle feather and handed it to me. He said it was a present for my son, then only a month or two old. We shook hands, and I wished him luck. He said as soon as he had gotten himself some Chinese food he would catch the next bus home. On the subway back to Brooklyn, three people asked me about the eagle feather. A black man in an Indian-style choker necklace made of pipe beads asked if I would be interested in selling it. I smiled and said no.

James Wood's "On Not Going Home"

Photo of James Wood by David Levenson

One of the most absorbing essays I’ve read recently is James Wood’s "On Not Going Home" (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014). It has some irritating aspects (e.g., Wood’s characterization of his mother as “Scottish petty-bourgeois,” and his reference to “those dastardly school events always held in gymnasiums”); nevertheless, it resonates with me. I relish the autobiographical component in which Wood connects his personal experience of expatriation with his deep appreciation of, among other works, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. At first glance, this connection appears tenuous. Wood’s voluntary 1995 departure for the United States, where he’s lived for the last eighteen years, hardly compares to the traumatic dislocation that The Emigrants’ four tragic German wanderers experience. Wood acknowledges the incongruity. He says,

So whatever this state I’m talking about is, this ‘not going home,’ it is not tragic; there’s probably something ridiculous in these privileged laments – oh sing ’dem Harvard blues, white boy! But I am trying to describe some kind of loss, some kind of falling away. (The gain is obvious enough and thus less interesting to analyze.)

The description that Wood settles on is “secular homelessness.” I confess that I find this term hard to grasp. Wood mentions that its coinage was inspired by George Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness.” It’s an interesting phrase, but as a description of the mild, privileged, voluntary homelessness experienced by expatriates like Wood, it seems hazy, its meaning even more elusive than the “tangle of feelings” Wood is trying to get at.

But “secular homelessness” aside, my take-away from “On Not Going Home” is, firstly, Wood’s inspired description of the sound of the American train horn (“a crumple of notes, blown out on an easy, loitering wail”), and, secondly, his brilliant, epiphanic conclusion:

What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, “afterwardness,” which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

Postscript: James Wood’s “On Not Going Home” (retitled “Secular Homelessness”) is included in his The Nearest Thing to Life (2015), which I review here.