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Updike's Fictional Faith

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Updike's Fictional Faith Updike's Fictional Faith Kathleen Verduin One summer afternoon about fifteen years ago, I repaired to the backyard with a glass of iced tea and a new book: John Updike's A Month of Sundays, then just out in paperback. I was still in the first chapter, I think, when a colleague noticed me from the sidewalk, strolled over for conversation, and affably asked to see what I was reading. "Oh," he said. "Updike. Isn't he the one that's a Christian?" I remember fighting down a surge of irritation. "The one that's a Christian" hardly seemed the way to characterize one of America's leading writers, and the remark epitomized a mentality I knew all too well, the kind that granted (or more often withheld) approval solely on the basis of the Christian label. As Louis Lotz quite sensibly points out in a recent issue of The Church Herald, art is not necessarily good because it's "Christian": it's good because it's good. 1 In fairness, though, my colleague's innocent question was perhaps not so misplaced after all . Since Updike began writing in the late 1950s he has frankly and repeatedly presented himself as a Christian believer: the late novelist John Gardner once went so far as to complain that Updike's books sometimes read too much like sermons. 2 Sensing a champion for their own position, religious critics have flocked to Updike's support, crediting him with an orthodox (and therefore corrective) vision of, as Alice and Kenneth Hamilton beamed in an early analysis, "earth set under heaven. "3 His novels, their graphic sexual passages notwithstanding, enjoy regular reviews in periodicals like the Christian Century, and critical studies on him are as likely to appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as in literary publications. 4 I have heard Updike quoted in the perorations to college chapel homilies, and I myself have used his short stories (apparently with some success) in an adult Sunday School class. The One That's a Christian. One of us. Yet this supposed orthodoxy, it lately seems to me, is exactly what begs for scrutiny in Updike's writings, even apart from the current imperatives of deconstruction; not everyone that says Lord, Lord, and so on, and as an insightful if skeptical friend once advised me, "Listen carefully to what people say about themselves, and then suspect the opposite." In an essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels, Updike himself has written, "the work itself invites us to search out the involuntary creed professed by his recurrent themes and artistic reflexes" (Hugging the Shore, 75), and the directive seems justifiably applicable to Updike's work as well. Fiction, he has proposed, "is nothing less than the 17 subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet" (Odd Jobs, 86), and his literary and critical works over the last three decades and more may indeed be read as a sustained and remarkably candid introspection, one that documents a spiritual journey even as it records the changing manners of American society. 5 The trouble is, I think, that Updike's "recurrent themes and artistic reflexes" may sometimes spell out a disturbing subtext at odds with, even subverting, his Christian profession. Since the beginning of his career, Updike has invoked the religious subculture of his childhood, which, he has acknowledged, "nourish[ed] a seed in me I never knew was planted." How did the patently vapid and drearily businesslike teachings to which I was lightly exposed succeed in branding me with a Cross? And a brand so specifically Lutheran, so distinctly Nordic; an obdurate insistence that at the core of the core there is a right-angled clash to which, of all verbal combinations we can invent, the Apostles' Creed offers the most adequate correspondence and response. (Assorted Prose, 181) Like their creator, all his protagonists are in some way religious, even if only vestigially (readers of this journal may be especially interested in Piet Hanema, the central character of Couples, who hails from a Dutch Reformed community near Grand Rapids); two of them- Tom Marshfield in A Month of Sundays and Roger Lambert in Roger's Version-are ministers. Among the most complicated germinations of the religious "seed" is his 1963 novel The Centaur, a tender memoir whose "main motive force," Updike confessed in an interview, was "some wish to make a record of my father. For fifteen years I'd watched a normal good-doing Protestant man suffering in a kind of comic but real way. I think it left me rather angry" (Picked-Up Pieces, 500). In this novel Wesley Updike appears in his real-life role as a high school science teacher, George Caldwell, but metamorphoses in alternate chapters into the mythological centaur Chiron, also a teacher of youth. Updike thus celebrates the mythic dimension of family history he has cited elsewhere (Pigeon Feathers, 58). Yet more deeply engrained than the mythological is another narrative, where Caldwell functions less as Chiron than as Christ (chi rho), a Suffering Servant his son (named, yes, Peter) both worships and denies. "It does not seem to me contradictory," Updike wrote sometime later, "to posit a father who appears as both God and a victim of God. Such a paradox, after all, is fundamental to Christian theology" (Picked-Up Pieces, 116). This seems an unimpeachably Christian insight, and its expression in the context of an essay on Kierkegaard testifies to a degree of theological sophistication certainly unusual in modern novelists. In the years following his graduation from Harvard, Updike has told us, he immersed himself in then 18 current religious writers. "I read Chesterton, Unamuno, Maritain, C. S. Lewis, and Eliot, to name a few- for in the Fifties a number of professed Christians still commanded intellectual respectability, even glamour," he recently recalled, identifying "A Book That Changed Me" for a London magazine series as Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling in the Anchor paperback edition (Odd Jobs, 844). But in this formative period he was most attracted, as he has frequently stated, to the emerging neo-orthodoxy monumentally exemplified in Karl Barth. References to the Swiss theologian pepper Updike's writings: he named Barth as one of his personal saints in the poem "Die Neuen Heiligen" (Verse, 161), and his allegiance has never appreciably wavered. For Updike, Barth has stood for an unabashed supernaturalism: in Updike's words, Barth's God, "the real God, the God men do not invent, is totaliter aliter-Wholly Other. We cannot reach Him; only He can reach us" (Assorted Prose, 273-4). 6 In sorry contrast to what Updike commends as Barth's "heroic stubbornness" (Picked-Up Pieces, 126), theological modernism seems to him to have sold out. As Barth decried "the god to whom in our pride and despair we have erected the tower of Babel .. the great impersonal, mystical, philosophical or naive state, civilization, or religion" (quoted in Assorted Prose, 273), prominent liberal figures have consistently repelled Updike for their demythologizing and "bewildering duplicities. " In his review of Tillich's Morality and Beyond (which contains the phrase just quoted), Updike concluded, The net effect is one of ambiguity, even futility-as if the theologian were trying to revivify the Christian corpse with transfusions of Greek humanism, German metaphysics, and psychoanalytic theory. Terms like "grace" and "will of God" walk through these passages like bloodless ghosts, transparent against the milky background of "beyond" and "being" that Tillich, God forbid, would confuse with the Christian faith. (Assorted Prose, 283) From the perspective of Barthian orthodoxy, Updike has employed fiction to lament-and lampoon-contemporary religion, particularly in caricatures of well-intentioned but pitifully inadequate clergy. Sometimes these ministers are merely intellectually limited-like the Rev. Horace Pedrick, in Couples, whose "sermons, with contortions that now and then bent his body double, sought to transpose the dessicated forms of Christianity into financial terms" (21). Most often, however, they reflect the liberalist capitulation prototypical in Tillich. In A Month of Sundays Tom Marshfield, a self-described Barthian, despises his assistant's "custardly confection of Jungian-Reichian soma-mysticism swimming in a soupy caramel of Tillichic, Jasperian, Bultmannish blather, all served up in a dime-store dish of his gutless generation's giveaway Gemiitlichkeit" (13). An 19 - inventory of the correctly tolerant Grants Committee at the Divinity School of Roger's Version culminates in And Ed Snea (two syllables, Sne-a), a specialist in Bultmannism and holocaustics, is a short, slight, fair nominal Presbyterian who has become, by one of those tricks of fashion that animate academic communities, the Marrying Sam of Godless weddings; when the Czech emigre astrophysicist's daughter marries a Japanese Buddhist graduate student in semantics, it is Ed who tailors the rite to their exact shade of polite disbelief, silently rolling his eyes upward when a single spoken word of Heavenly appeal would be too much. (205) Further examples could be cited from literally all of Updike's novels. Mordantly apt, these parodies (if that in fact is what they are) complement Updike's statement that he intended his "Scarlet Letter" trilogy- A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version, and S., all of them inspired by Hawthorne's classic-to document "American religion and its decay since Puritan New England" (Odd Jobs , 859). 7 The nostalgia for a religious childhood, when "the call to supper ha[d] a piercingly sweet eschatological ring" (Pigeon Feathers, 247), pairs in Updike with a recurring theme of decline- in some ways central to his most recent novel Memories of the Ford Adminstration, which intersperses imagined scenes from the life of President James Buchanan with the vulgarities of social relations in the 1970s.
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