A Burden of Answered Prayers

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS by John Updike; Knopf; 257 pages; $18.95

BY PAUL GRAY

For more than 30 years, John Updike has borne, with considerable poise and good humor, a terrible burden. He is one of those people whose prayers were answered. Growing up a beloved only child in Shillington, a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania, he dreamed of becoming a writer, of seeing his work appear on the pages of The New Yorker. And -- presto! -- these things occurred and were then followed by unanticipated consequences: lots of money, critical recognition and fame. Worse fates have befallen people, and Updike adjusted as best he could: he cashed the checks, entertained intrusive interviewers and basked modestly in the limelight. But several years ago, his equanimity slipped when he heard that someone, somewhere, was planning to write his biography. "To take my life," he thought, "my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!" If anyone was going to tell Updike's story, the author decided, it ought to be Updike.

Self-Consciousness is neither a straightforward autobiography nor a decisive pre-emptive strike against future chronicles. There will surely be biographies of Updike someday, all of which, if they are any good, will draw heavily from this book of revelations. Updike's candor is not of the scandalous or titillating sort. Rather, the six essays assembled here piece together a fascinating self-portrait of an evolving sensibility, of a mind learning to love the world from which it feels, for several reasons, estranged.

The love came early, prompted by the sensations and surroundings of childhood. Visiting Shillington, Updike unexpectedly finds himself at loose ends for a couple of hours and wanders about through a soft spring drizzle, trying to recapture his past. He enters familiar ground: "The street, the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book." His first attempts to put this secret into words were, he gently suggests, sometimes misunderstood: "My own style seemed to me a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is exactly what it wasn't -- other-indulgent, rather."

The blights on his happy childhood seem small, but, Updike argues, they inexorably determined the life he would lead. As a boy, he developed psoriasis and a sporadic stammer; he could savor reality's entrancing parade but never feel comfortable joining it himself. The recurring rashes on his skin kept him apart, drove his attention inward: "You are forced to the mirror, again and again; psoriasis compels narcissism, if we can suppose a Narcissus who did not like what he saw." One of the hallmarks of his fiction became elaborate celebrations of the status quo. Updike thinks he knows why: "An overvaluation of the normal went with my ailment, a certain idealization of everyone who was not, as I felt myself to be, a monster."

Similarly, his stammer posed a problem: how to get the attention he craved without risking public humiliation. In retrospect, the solution seems obvious: "The papery self-magnification and immortality of printed reproduction -- a mode of self-assertion that leaves the cowardly perpetrator hidden and out of harm's way -- was central to my artistic impulse." Redemption beckoned: "To be in print was to be saved."

One of the many ironies weaving sinuously through this haunting memoir is the recognition that writing did not leave the author protected from the world after all. "Celebrity," he writes, "is a mask that eats into the face." Updike uneasily recalls his much publicized refusal, during the 1960s, to oppose U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a stance that left him odd man out among friends, fellow authors and members of his children's generation: "Authority to these young people was Amerika, a bloodstained bugaboo to be crushed at any cost. To me, authority was the Shillington High School faculty, my father and his kindly and friendly, rather wan and punctilious colleagues, with whose problems and perspective I had had every opportunity to empathize."

He wonders consistently about his own failings: "The critics who found me callow might be right: I had been lucky and, as the lucky will do, had become hard-hearted." But this book betrays no coldness, only the wry detachment of someone trying to tell the truth about himself while being simultaneously "aware of a possible cliff-high vantage from which my self-solicitous life was negligible."

That neglect may stem from indifferent fellow passengers on this planet or, more seriously, eternity. Updike does not want to conclude that his -- or anyone's -- existence means nothing in the long run. His belief in God, his Sunday church-going, his hope for some form of a hereafter are all discussed and underline how unconventional his fiction has been by contemporary standards.

$ His books are peopled by liberal sophisticates in comfortable, man-made environments. One of the pleasures of reading Updike has been his meticulous attention to the ways, particularly sexually, we live now. But these sleek surfaces reflect hidden depths. He writes, "It was and is still my fate to like the settings and the personalities that enlightenment creates without wanting, myself, to be thoroughly enlightened." Looking back on his career, he criticizes himself for having been too pliant and obedient, too willing to "go along" with the exigencies of reality. But in the process he displays his self, the stubborn core that countered and threw waves back against the current of his times.