Closet explorer
Bel Mooney
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism John Updike (Andre Deutsch £21)
A good review is, amongst other things, ra-a little anthology,' he says, and the thought is at once symptomatic of Updike's approach to the job, and tempting as a model. John Updike is that rare creature, a critic who approaches what he reads in the High Victorian manner, believing that his first job is to praise its 'beauties'. His desire to enjoy, and a need to explain with seriousness, not malice, if he does not, in- form every word. He will offer extensive quotation in the palpable conviction that the book under review matters more than any clever wordspinning on his own behalf; and yet the wordspinning is there graceful, sometimes funny, always alert, and begging for quotation itself.
Let, for the sake of space, just one or two examples suffice. Updike is excellent on Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, seeing as much beneath the surface as there is to see, yet never lapsing into the slick and mindless cliches so common in British reviewing of the 'wickedly funny', 'blackly witty' and `sparklingly black' variety. In a few sentences he has both subjects: 'Murdoch and Spark — how weary they must be of being bracketed and reviewed together! Yet they constitute a class by themselves both so intelligent and fluent, so quizzical and knowing, both such resourceful mixes of feminine clairvoyance and masculine generalship, both such makers. The 1*.° of them together reappropriate for thohr generation Shakespeare's legacy of dal.' comedy, of deceptions and enchantmens' of shuddering contrivance, of deep Peri sonal forces held trembling in the skein ° social truces'. Turning from that to Margaret Drabble' one might expect patronage. Were a revicy'er of this novelist to be headlined in tlie Observer (say), `Drabbling in the MO' "„ should be alerted for conventional bitch Yet though Updike is not without criticism of Drabble's attitude to form, he through to the novelist's particular and mirable strengths: 'Deeper than its sea' tered, diffident surface as a novel of Ma//,; ners, The Realms of Gold celebrates human as a department of the natnrawe Here, as elsewhere in this collection, ot sense Updike's approval of one who is ilhe afraid to tread with deliberation uP°r1tp1 moral ground that is essential to the 11°„7;5 despite its potholes and treacher°'
stretches of mud. has
It is odd that the word Irreverent' become so fashionable as a term of pra'is Yet, used in the true sense, reverence all what John Updike feels for his 'craft all sullen art', and for those who dare to pray,,v tice it as he does — setting sail for the etTlrerly tiness of the open sea, instead of ITT at hugging the shore. He knows what 'is, he stake, and quotes a little note to himself
found amongst his papers: 'An artist mediates between the world and minds; a critic merely between minds. An artist must even at the price of uncouthness and alien- ation from the contemporary cultural scene Maintain allegiance to the world, and a fer- vent relation with it.'
Though the range is enormous (Celine, Melville, Vonnegut, Jarry, Brecht, Barthes, Grass, to name but a tiny fraction), the tone Is constant — what he describes as 'ap- preciation and exposition'. There is, you sense, an unwavering purpose beneath it all: to search out the good news and make it Public. 'Fervent' ... Updike sees the con- nection himself: 'I find myself, in these Pieces, circling back to man's religious nature and the real loss to man and art alike
when that nature has nowhere to plug itself into.'
Discussing Melville, he drops another
clue: .. no novelist, even though he ex- plore no further than the closets and back stairs of his own home, can be without some news he wishes to bring'. Accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, he told his audience that every novelist must write from 'the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it'. The creator of Bech and Rabbit tells nothing but good news — old- fashioned, liberal and humanist — about the forms of creation. Hugging the Shore will be an invaluable sampler for anyone who shares that faith, or wishes to explore it.
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