Let us now talk of famous phallocrats
A friend posted that 1997 David Foster Wallace piece on Updike on Facebook, and what a gem it is.
[N]o U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.
That is what eventually put me off Updike – the fact that he was always writing about himself. And the fact that he didn’t seem to realize that women existed, except as things for having sex with.
His friends, especially his women friends, did not like Updike, at all.
[I]t’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason-mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:
“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”
“Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”
“Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny.”
These are actual-trust me-quotations, and I’ve heard even worse ones, and they’re all usually accompanied by the sort of facial expression where you can tell there’s not going to be any profit in arguing or talking about the esthetic pleasure of Mr. Updike’s prose. None of the other famous phallocrats of his generation – not Mailer, not Frederick Exley or Charles Bukowski or even the Samuel Delany of Hogg – excites such violent dislike.
I wonder if that’s because you’d think he would know better. He seemed thoughtful and non-macho, so shouldn’t that kind of writer be able to avoid the commonplace blindness about women? I think that’s how I felt about it, at least. Mailer, meh, what do you expect, but Updike? But misogyny is way more pervasive than that. It took me a long time to understand how pervasive (and I still probably don’t fully understand it).
Updike, for example, has for years been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy (see for example Rabbit Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech, Rev. Tom Marshfield, Roger’s Version ‘s “Uncle Nunc”) and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author himself. They always live in either Pennsylvania or New England, are unhappily married/divorced, are roughly Mr. Updike’s age. Always either the narrator or the point-of-view character, they all have the author’s astounding perceptual gifts; they all think and speak in the same effortlessly lush, synesthetic way Mr. Updike does. They are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying … and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody – and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women.
Those characters palled in the end.
Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid-he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike-he makes it plain that he views the narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.
That’s always the first place to look.
H/t Cam
I’ve waited a long time to read such a take-down of Updike. Missed it in 1997 but am glad to see it now. It might, however, be said that this chronicler of the 1960-1970s has been surpassed by the willfully blind, self-aggrandized, narcissists inhabiting the political world in 2016.
I was thinking that as I read. Narcissism has made such a comeback…
Out of a sense of literary duty, I slogged my way through the first couple of Rabbit books, some Saul Bellow and a couple of Phillip Roth books. I always thought that there was something wrong with me that I failed to appreciate those “geniuses”. I identified with none of it and didn’t even think the prose itself was all that great.
It’s very freeing to realize something I’m sure most people figured out long before I did: that it’s ok to dislike a supposed “great work of literature.” Since then, I’ve tossed aside quite a few Great Novels without a second of regret.
I would say the thing I now hope never is said of me is that my friends didn’t like me.
For a hilarious takedown of Updike, you can’t beat Florence King’s epistolary, um, “review,” in her Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye. She takes a few swipes at litcrit too. Is funny.
Brayton quotes the whole thing here:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2011/10/20/florence-king-on-john-updike/
From the above: “Updike’s style is an exquisite blend of MeIville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.”
Florence King is wonderful! I once, about 30 years ago, waded crotch-high through quite a bit of Updike’s ‘Couples’ before giving up, and I think I sampled a short story or two. I have read nothing of his since. The most memorable thing about him is not his writing but that in photos and drawings of him, he does rather resemble a rabbit. Florence King’s epistles have just led me to Gore Vidal’s splendid take-down, ‘Rabbit’s Own Burrow’, from the TLS, but readily found if Googled.
And even worse is the amount of oblivious misogyny, people who think of themselves as enlightened, maybe even feminist, but when they start writing women, they can’t resist the easy story – the woman who just has to spend all her time at a mirror, the girl who “teases” the man and causes him to molest her, the false rape accusation. Every one of these has come up in the past year in my playwriting group, and no one but me seems to recognize them – though, since we are sort of gagged on saying that we don’t like a play, and only supposed to comment constructively on the form and construction of the play, it may be that others have also recognized that but are silenced, like I am, from saying anything about that.
I understand the rationale behind that rule – no personal vendettas, and if you just don’t like the play, don’t say anything that isn’t helpful – but in the end, the oblivious plays get put on, and become just one more part of our national conversation.
After one of them was read, I sat there fuming as two middle-aged men talked at length about how important it was, because we need to have a conversation about this topic – the conversation being, apparently, why we are allowing women to call it sexual harassment when men reach inside their shirts and help themselves to a feel after the girl has flirted with them but not been willing to do more. I wrote a short monologue to “answer” one of the plays, and it got a great response. The group as a whole is not misogynistic, just oblivious. They think of themselves as feminists, and probably do support women’s rights, but if they are not able to recognize anti-woman tropes when they see them, nothing changes.
Yeah, but I hope the anti-racist white men don’t write about black people the way the feminist men write about women.
Re Florence King–if you haven’t yet read Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady you’re in for a treat. I’ve probably read it a dozen times, and still laugh out loud on almost every page.
I was relieved back around 2000 when I first started coming across take downs of these guys. I had though t must be some limitation of mine that I just didn’t find them very interesting despite being assured that they were geniuses, had written The Great American Novel & etc.
I make a bit of an exception for Mailer, because he occasionally took an interest in and wrote about things other than himself or thinly veiled fictional versions of himself. Also, he seemed a bit more ready to admit that his hang-ups about women and sex were just hang-ups about women and sex, not some deep philosophical angst.
Loved the Florence King piece and have ordered Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. from the library. It was reprinted by Verso in 2006.
I never rated Updike’s novels but do enjoy his criticism.
I don’t think anyone comes to life in the novels, male or female, except the narrator.