SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: MEMOIRS
John Updike
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
257 pp. $18.95
In his typically modest and apparently casual fashion, John Updike has written a book of memoirs with a purpose. He wishes to demonstrate that the self of his title, the great modern obsession and chief subject of our literature, is neither an adequate guide in life nor an adequate subject in literature. Whether or not we are willing to admit it, we require something outside our selves to get through life. We demonstrate our need for this something in the myriad ways we seek to transcend "the grimly finite facts of our individual human case." For Updike, "be it adoration of Elvis Presley or hatred of nuclear weapons, be it a fetishism of politics or popular culture," each of us demonstrates need that deserves the name of religion.
The design of Self-consciousness is not readily apparent inasmuch as it consists of six "personal essays," as Updike calls them in the foreword, some of which were published over the years in the New Yorker. (The book is correctly subtitled "Memoirs," indicating that it is a miscellany.) The first essay, "At War With My Skin," clinically details Updike's lifelong struggle with psoriasis--a constant embarrassment of flaking, blotched skin that until recent medical advances could be kept under control only by virtual year-round baking in the sun. Updike somewhat fancifully credits his skin condition--along with the lifelong stutter described in the following chapter, "Getting the Words Out"--with having nudged him into the solitary existence that made him a writer.
Self-consciousness could well have been subtitled "a somatic history," as it goes on to lay out Updike's experiences not only with stuttering, but also with bad teeth from childhood on, with asthma as an adult, and even with an inherited tendency to choke at odd moments. Another essay consists of a thickly researched family genealogy in the form of a letter to Updike's grandsons, John Anoff Cobblah and Michael Kwame Ntiri Cobblah, to whom the book is dedicated. The evident purpose in rehearsing the facts about past and present Updikes--both those from the author's native Shillington, Pennsylvania, and those born elsewhere--is to emphasize the degree to which the individual consciousness is a product of family inheritance. Still, what Updike calls "our debt of honor to our ancestors and our debt of shelter to our descendants" need not necessarily have taken the form of a published chapter that can hardly be of interest to anyone outside his family circle.
Not a dove
On the other hand, in "On Not Being a Dove," a chapter that has been brilliantly excerpted in Commentary magazine, Updike is able to bring his life and career to a focus by dilating on another kind of discomfort--the embarrassment he experienced over his qualified support of American intervention in Vietnam. In 1966 he provided a statement for a volume called Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, in which he defended the United States for its attempt to ensure free elections for the Vietnamese. For this measured defense he had to answer to the universally anti-Vietnam War intellectuals and right-thinking people of Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived his married-life-with-children, and Cape Cod, where he vacationed. Updike could not bring himself
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