The Barthian Updike
I was introduced to John Updike by one of my fellow-seminarians at the North American College in Rome in the early 1960s, mostly as the author of short stories in The New Yorker. I was hooked and began to read everything that he published. The six months after I was ordained, when we had more freedom in Rome, I had the habit, on the afternoon we had off, of walking over to the Piazza di Spagna, buying the latest issue of The New Yorker, and spending the next two or three hours drinking tea after tea at Babington’s Tea Room reading Updike et al., before heading back, supercharged with caffeine, along the Tiber to the College. I became hooked on Updike and devoured anything he wrote; the hope that he might have a short story or a poem or a review in The New Yorker by itself justified a subscription.
When Rabbit, Run came out, I bought a copy and brought it to lectures at the Gregorian University, where, one day, I was told by one of my classmates that this was perhaps not the sort of book I should be reading while our professor went on in Latin about the theology of the spiritual life.
I appreciated it that Updike had religious, and specifically Christian, interests and, it seemed, commitments–that has not been at all common among great modern figures in U.S. literature. I loved “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” and have quoted it occasionally in homilies. (N.T. Wright quotes it in his recent mammoth book on the resurrection of Jesus.)
There is a scene in Rabbit, Run, in which a young Protestant minister named Eccles (a tad obvious, the name, but also rhymes with “feckless”), who is practicing his well-meaning ministry toward Rabbit, Harry Angstrom, including by means of games of golf, goes to visit the much older Lutheran minister in the town, the Angstroms being members of Pastor Kruppenbach’s church, Rabbit’s wife a member of Eccles’s church. Perhaps, Eccles ventures, the two ministers should cooperate in trying to help the couple save their fraying marriage? He can barely get the words out when Kruppenbach explodes (“even in his undershirt, he somehow wore vestments”):
“Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary; this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.” …
“I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people. I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minister of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf. What do you think now it looks like to God, one childish husband leaving one childish wife? Do you ever think any more what God sees? Or have you grown beyond that? …
“It seems to you our role is to be cops, cops without handcuffs, without guns, without anything but our good human nature. Isn’t it right? … Well, I say that’s a Devil’s idea. I say, let the cops be cops and look after their laws that have nothing to do with us.” …
“If Gott wants to end misery He’ll declare the Kingdom now.” …
“How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from: faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket. In running back and forth you run from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful, so when the call comes you can go out and tell them, ‘Yes, he is dead, but you will see him again in Heaven. Yes, you suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christ’s pain.’ When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot–he clenches his hairy fists–‘with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It’s all in the Book–a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”
Although, if I remember correctly, Kruppenbach disappears from the novel at this point, I’ve always felt that he represented Updike’s own view of what Christianity has to offer. Kruppenbach is pure Karl Barth. In his first collection Assorted Prose Updike included a review of Barth’s book on Anselm’s proof for the existence of God, a review written, he explained in the preface to the collection, “in acknowledgment of a debt, for Barth’s theology, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life).” This review is followed immediately by a single paragraph devoted to Paul Tillich’s Morality and Beyond; the review’s last sentence reads: “Terms like ‘grace’ and ‘Will of God’ walk through these pages as bloodless ghosts, transparent against the milky background of ‘beyond’ and ‘being’ that Tillich, God forbid, would confuse with the Christian faith.”
But two things led me to become disillusioned with Updike. The first was the preface he wrote when he gathered his short stories about the Maples into a single volume entitled Too Far To Go. I can’t find my copy at the moment, but at some point in the preface he says, in explanation, of the erosion of the marriage he has chronicled in these wonderful short stories: “Well, nothing lasts forever”. I thought when I read it that this was the sort of thing that the Rev. Eccles might say.
The other was the unpleasant sensation left in me by Updike’s autobiographical work Self-Consciousness, particularly his unrepentant, almost casual, description of his infidelities in his first marriage. It struck me that by writing and publishing this, he was renewing the pain he had caused. And I really haven’t read much of his ever since. Still, when I heard yesterday of his death, I felt real sorrow, as at the death of an old friend with whom one had once been close, with whom one had in the meantime lost touch.
My impression is that Updike, even in the texts quoted above, is not so much a committed Barthian as one who is aware of the values of faith in a problematic mode — that is, he can empathize with Tillich, with Barth, or even sound like N T Wright, but that his fundamental attitude is a kind of agnostic sympathy — there is at least a touch of a kind of Goethean perspectivism and suspension of judgment. Or say, Updike is a camera filming in intimate detail the life of faith or of moral striving just as he films the varieties of eros — in the “beyond good and evil” mode characteristic of the novel from Defoe and Balzac down.
I think he understood Barth’s critique of liberalism but could also put himself in the shoes of the most versatile liberals — thinking again of the theological discussions in “Roger’s Version”, with its distinctly un-Wrightiian account of the Resurrection.
Interesting discussion of Updike’s theology here: http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2009/01/john-updike-1932-2009-glance-at-his.html
Here is a substantial piece from Theology Today: http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jan1992/v48-4-article3.htm
And here is The Christian Century: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n18_v112/ai_16997241
Andrew Sullivan links to a good bite of Updike, makes me realize–along with this post–how usual it once was to read good fiction:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/quote-for-th-29.html
“When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher’s shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don’t feel that now. I don’t feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it’s gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they’re less comfortable with the written word. They’re less comfortable with novels. They don’t have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It’s sad. It’s momentarily uphill, I would say.”
I would have thought that “Eccles” rhymed with “freckles” rather that with “feckless”. At least that was the fashion in Rhode Island, where we ate a dessert called an eccles cake. Perhaps C. Kaveny knows of that excellent confection.
Another obit worth noting–the demise of the print edition of the Washington Post Book World–and not unrelated perhaps to Updike’s lamentation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/books/29post.html?ref=books
Joe K,
Perhaps you are not distinquishing between art and philosophy or theology. Art depicts reality in particularly sharp ways while theology sets standards. A world of difference. If you carried your conclusion to its logical end you would stop saying your breviary with all its lies. Especially every saint having noble and pius parents.
Thanks to everyone for the useful observations and links. But as for Joe K’s main point, it leaves me troubled. It has been so long since I read Rabbit,Run that I can’t recall exactly how this episode works out or how Eccles is portrayed more specifically. Kruppenbach is certainly memorable here and I wouldn’t want for a second Updike to have never written him.
But if he is pure Barth then I want to say too bad for Barth. It is very easy to beat up on liberal Protestantism and some social worker God. But I can’t imagine going to Joe K for some help that I think he could provide for rescuing a friend’s marriage from disaster and hearing him say, “Tough, Peter. My job is go home and lock myself in prayer and after your friend’s marriage and family has all gone to shards, well, I’ll come out and announce the Resurrection.”
When someone says there is only Christ for us and all this decency is nothing but the Devil’s work, I wonder whether they are putting down the foundations for exactly the kind of disappointing conduct that Joe K discovered later in Updike.
This gets to a bigger question that nags me, and Joseph O’Leary’s comment points in that direction. Is a lot of this dramatic Barthianism a pose, a form of — or rationalization for — aestethicism?
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned James Wood’s essay (in The Broken Estate) on “John Updike’s Complacent God.” Wood argues that Updike cannot really imagine the loss of faith and the absence of God because his God is so conveniently and glamorously present in anything and everything that it doesn’t really matter much.
And one more question: Many writers who are soaked in and radiate a religious outlook have an impact on the religious communities from which they spring. J. F. Powers certainly did for a preconciliar Catholicism, as of course did Mauriac and Bernanos and Greene et al. Flannery O’Connor has had that kind of impact on Christian, especially Catholic, sensibility and thinking. Has Updike had any impact on the Protestant world that he sprung from and so often portrayed — apart from dissertations and exercises in literary criticism or boasting? Has Rabbit or Dale and Roger or Fr. Tom in A Month of Sundays or the characters in In the Beauty of the Lilies (I’ve not read all of these) in some way shaped, added depth to, or redirected mainline Protestantism, its clergy or its theologians or its intellectuals or its sermons? If not, is the reason something about Updike, something about mainline Protestantism, or something about both?
Peter: I didn’t mean to give the impression that I agree with the Rev. Kruppenbach, but only to say that I thought that Updike, at this point in his life, seemed to agree with him, and I later cited his comment on how much Barth had meant to him, and his dismissal of Tillich. I also would have a problem with the fierce Lutheran’s pastoral approach. If I were asked to choose between Eccles and Kruppenbach, I think I’d ask that the cards be reshuffled and redealt.
I haven’t read any of the literature on Updike and religion, but I would expect that it would show marked changes in his views over the course of fifty years. I was simply registering a comment, and a feeling provoked by his death.
Anyway, I’m glad I provoked you to return to the blog, and I would love to read responses to the very interesting questions you pose in the last half of your post.
An amusing line from Updike’s classic report of Ted Williams’ last game in Boston (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”):
“Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God’s five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists – typical Boston College levity.”
http://www.boston.com/sports/redsox/williams/july_7/updike_essay.shtml