John Updike: Words, Words

John Updike: Words, Words

The craggy coast of Massachusetts harbors John Updike and symbolizes both his physiognomy and his fiction. He and his characters seem all edges and angles of stone, defying easy grasp.

When Updike writes with studied seriousness, as he does in A Month of Sundays, the reader should expect satire. In his seventh novel, one of his best, he thoroughly satirizes wordy, modern Protestant theology through his brilliant twist of a stock plot—adulterous minister copulating his way through his congregation. (Chaucer, too, used such a plot and protagonist.)

Newsweek’s reviewer called A Month of Sundays Updike’s “most overtly Christian novel.” And it is, though the lusty language may offend or sidetrack some readers. But then that doesn’t bother Updike. He revels in puzzling readers.

The novel answers questions from other novels. Why is the minister in Rabbit Run ineffective and self-serving when he tries to convince Harry Angstrom to return to his wife? And in Couples, why does the only person who regularly attends church, Piet Hanema, also regularly pursue wife after wife in his Massachusetts coastal town? Somehow the theology of our century—a theology that’s been simplified and popularized—has twisted the biblical concept of natural fecundity to mean promiscuity. The words are the same, but meanings have changed.

Tom Marshfield, Updike’s latest protagonist, has been sent by his bishop for a month of rest at an omega-shaped rest home. To work out his problems Marshfield must keep a diary while there. The minister is skeptical about the healing power of such an exercise: “I suffer from nothing less virulent than the human condition, and so would preach it,” he tells us. Of course, the ironic thing is that the human condition is terminal, both spiritually and physically—and Updike knows it.

Updike plunges the reader into a myriad of quasi-psychological jargon and methodology. The rules of the rest home, set by bishops and church boards, reflect this: “No serious discussions, doctrinal or intrapersonal. No reading except escapist.… The Bible above all is banned. No religion, no visitors, no letters in or out.” All traditional, perhaps orthodox, sources of help for emotional and spiritual healing, banned. But the bar opens at noon.

Marshfield is outwardly preoccupied with sex, but the real source of his trouble lies beneath that. He is obsessed with words, as though language were the thing itself rather than a representation or image of reality. Puns, Latin phrases, and religious-sounding sentences recur in Marshfield’s diary. The fact that Updike uses the vehicle of a diary points to the conclusion that the theme is the idolatry of words.

The nearly defrocked minister exists in an era and in the atmosphere of wordy analysis. His whole life as minister has been word-oriented (had it been Word-oriented his problems would have been fewer). In his church Marshfield “plump[ed] for the word as against pretty liturgy,” though “words” would have been the more accurate word. Although he complains of writing for hours each day, he soon admits that the task is more enjoyable than he had anticipated. Just as Marshfield finds it difficult to wean himself from sex, so it is with words. We learn this in his obsession to preach—not so that others may hear and learn, since he has no congregation, but because he must say (or write, in this case) the words:

Today is Sunday. Though they try to hide this from us, I can count; I came here on a Monday flight, and this is my sixth morning. I must preach. But without a Bible, without a copious and insipid encyclopedia of sermon aids and Aramaic etymologies … [Knopf, 1975, p. 41].

The things he misses are word-helps. He preaches on the words, “Neither do I condemn thee.” The sermon is not only a masterful exercise in word-twisting but a fine example of what modern so-called biblical criticism can do if challenged. He champions adultery, and twists Jesus into supporting that position.

In each of the sermons he writes, he plays the same game of words pitted against reason. And that is Marshfield’s whole approach to Christianity, influenced, he says, by Barth. “No man,” he explains, “unless it was Jesus, believes. We can only profess to believe.” All that is real, then, is the words. There is nothing behind them. Only words give something or someone existence. Ms. Prynne, the manager of the rest home, whom Marshfield tries to seduce, holds no reality for him until she writes in his diary: “You spoke. You exist.” But later he writes:

Nothing. Not a word. You read me only on dull Sundays. You are repelled by my advances. You have ceased to exist. I have wasted an hour running my poor lab rat of a mind through the mazes of these alternatives, and poking though the old pages looking for words from you I might have missed. Nothing. Not a word [p. 219].

Ironically, what Marshfield craves is not sex but language. When Ms. Prynne finally succumbs to him, no words are spoken: “You seemed lost in thought, only your hand speaking to me.…” After all those words, he remains a stranger, both to himself and to others.

Updike writes of the idolatry of words and how we misuse them. We, like Marshfield, sometimes expect too much of words. Or perhaps we refuse to allow them their proper function. They should lead, not bind, and are the means to an end, not the end itself. A Month of Sundays with biting wit effectively shows us our confusion.

CHERYL FORBES

No More Than Roast Beef

Jubilee, Volume One, Number One, is a sixty-eight-page oversized adult Christian comic book. It immediately raises several questions in the mind of a perspicacious reviewer. Why is Cheryl Forbes so cruelly caricatured on page nine? Why aren’t any of my cartoons included? Why does this thing cost $2.95 plus postage?

Most of the cartoons are professional in their execution. Some are overtly Christian. A few are unsatisfactorily obvious. Others are just puzzling. Basil Wolverton’s six pages of caricatured freaks are hardly a part of the “visual feast” promised on the contents page, nor do they seem to serve an edifying purpose.

The styles range from nineteenth century Art Nouveau to last month’s Mad. Some of the best selections are reprints of old work. Heinrich Kley’s masterful pen drawings from the early 1900s are both gratifying in their technical accomplishment and grotesque in their editorial content.

All in all it’s a strange volume that will probably appeal mostly to the twenty to thirty age bracket. The price seems somewhat high, but then it’s no more than you’d pay for a roast beef sandwich at a good restaurant. And what’s three bucks between friends. Besides, editor Craig Yoe assures us it took lots of hours and bucks to put this thing together. Why would he lie to us, total strangers?

So go ahead and send your $2.95 plus 30 cents postage to Jubilee, 174 Portage Drive, Akron, Ohio 44303. It’ll give the fellows encouragement and help them do better next time.

JOHN V. LAWING, JR.

John V. Lawing, Jr. is features editor at the “National Courier,” Plainfield, New Jersey.

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