The writings of John Updike convey his cultivated attention to detail, common sense, and an uncommon seriousness and honesty of purpose. The author died this week on Tuesday January 27th, and these thoughts are dedicated to his memory.
In 1989, Updike published Self-Consciousness, a series of autobiographical essays. Updike recounts that he had heard, "...perhaps in jest, of someone wanting to write my biography -- to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me! " -- and that he was repulsed, and at the same time motivated to write his own account, to:
...record what seems to me important about my own life, and try to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in the world...with a scientific dispassion and curiosity.
Great writers often can tell us something of self-awareness, self-judgment, and the experience of personality. Commenting on the title concept, Updike remarked, "A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward."
Self-Consciousness begins with Updike describing himself wandering the streets of the town in which he grew up: Shillington, PA. He is alone, in the rain, a victim of nostalgia and a forced layover, after his luggage had been lost at the local airport.
I had propelled my body through the tenderest parts of a town that was also somewhat my body. Yet my pleasure was innocent and my hope was primitive. I had expected to be told who I was, and why, and had not been entirely disappointed.
His essays concern remembrances of his mother, his father (a local school teacher), and recollections of where buildings were (the library, post-office, his home), storefronts and the men and women who owned or worked in those stores: the man who cooked hot dogs for the children in his small restaurant, the police chief and crossing guards, and Henry's Variety Store:
I was a devotee of packaging, and bought for the four grown-ups of my family...a little squarish silver-papered book of Life Savers, ten flavors packaged in two thick pages of cylinders labeled Butter Rum, Wild Cherry, Wint-O-Green ... a book you could suck and eat! A fat book for all to share, like the Bible. In Henry's Variety Store life's full promise and extent were indicated: a single omnipresent manufacturer-God seemed to be showing us a fraction of His face, His plenty, and leading us with our little purchases up the spiral staircase of years.
Updike also examines how his own motives were formed within his family and neighborhood.
Life breeds punchers and counterpunchers, venturers like my father and ambushers like me: the venturer risks rebuff and defeat; the ambusher risks... fading away to nothing while his moment never arrives...I had a certain determined defiance. I would not teach, I would not farm, I would not (deep down) conform. I would "show" them. I would avenge all the slights and abasements visited upon my father -- the miserly salary, the subtle tyranny of his overloads at the high school, the disrespect of his students, the laugher in the movie house at the name of Updike.
His thoughts sometimes touched on his self-management; he understood that any form of such self-direction involves trade-offs...
...as my own life's careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefulness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.
Regarding personality more generally, Updike tells us, it grows, not free, but is rather connected to the trellis of our social lives: the town we grew up in, the schools we attend, the jobs and homelife we experience, even the dentist we visit.
As our self-consciousness develops we learn to appreciate those small details of the surroundings that support us, and, as we climb to our destinations, to take a moment here and there to appreciate the awe that can be found even in the details of our existence.
None of us goes on reading or writing forever, but during our time, as Updike suggested:
The self's responsibility...is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let's say, the walk back from the mailbox.
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Notes: Updike, J. (1989). Self-Consciousness. New York: Fawcett Crest/Ballentine. "A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned," Page 23; "...perhaps in jest, of someone wanting to write my biography-to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!" p. xv; "I had propelled my body through the tenderest parts of a town" Page 40; "I was a devotee of packaging" Pages 9-10; "Life breeds punchers and counterpunchers" Page 32; "Even toward myself, as my own life's careful manager and promoter," Page 270; "The self's responsibility, then, is to achieve rapport..." Page 271
Correction: The initial version of this post listed the date-of-publication of Self-Consciousness as 1985 in the text; the correct date is 1989.
(c) Copyright 2009 John D. Mayer
