It’s not like I found enough to love in Black Butler that I chose to write a novel set in the universe during NaNoWriMo. This past year, I read the whole manga up to the most recent volume available in English and watched the anime, including the non-canonical second season. (I have thoughts for another time there.) I admire the way Yana Toboso constructs the events of the manga so that everything ends on a cliffhanger, but not in a way that feels contrived and irritating. There’s an aura of the old pulp style about the manga’s structure in most chapters that I really enjoy.
Lovesick: Junji Ito
I’ve ready a lot of Ito since quarantine, when the spirals of Uzumaki drew me in during the biggest shutdown in 2020. Lovesick is a collection of shorter works, the title story of which is a deeply upsetting meditation on lost love, fortunes, and fate. I also enjoyed Ito’s Cat Diary, which gives audiences an opportunity to see his usually terrifying art style in a more humorous context.
Red, White, and Royal Blue: Casey McQuistion
This rom-com is probably the lightest thing on the list, but definitely one that I had the most fun about. Queer romance being something in vogue at the moment, I was slightly worried that it would fall into tropelandia or simply be the exact same formula as a hetero Harlequin, but with gays. I was happy to have my fears wiped away by the story of an English prince and the son of the President of the United States. Witty, sexy, profane–what else could you want from a fun read?
Suspiria
I rewatched Dario Argento’s Suspiria for the first time since college this summer and I had forgotten just how deeply implanted elements of this movie were. Even if I had not been able to remember which film they belonged to, seeing Argento’s camera move down a hallway and land on a particular window frame or element of decoration brought it flooding back with a nauseating reminder of what was to come. Garish and astonishing,
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon
I think that this might be the best biography I’ve read in a long time. Cornell’s life might seem very quiet by comparison to other grand artists of the period, but I found the little details–the counting of his days and obsessions–to be the most rewarding part of the book. Cornell has been a pet fascination of mine for a few years, particularly in relation to concepts of hauntology and nostalgia. I gave a few artist friends copies of the book for the holidays.
This text was originally read at the 2021 John Updike Society Conference in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Although this piece is about memoirs, I want to open with a quote from Midpoint. This quote comes from the preamble, to the second section of the title poem, which is made up of pointillist reproductions of family photographs. The poet’s eye turns to these photographs, magnified and turned into the patterned spheres of newsprint, and delivers a remark that serves, perhaps, as guidance:
Distance improves vision. Lost time sifts through these immutable old screens.
Perhaps now more than ever, readers have come to look for the autobiographical underpinnings of a text. Autofiction is in vogue again, and with it the question of a writer’s responsibilities—to the past, family and friends, to memory and invention; to readers. Most writers—if not all—take from life to a greater or lesser extent, just as most texts are at some level in conversation with other texts. Themes, if not events, can constitute a writer’s identity—the well-spring of material.
For a writer such as Updike, the phrase “autofiction” or “autobiographical” writer seems a somewhat uneasy fit. Reading two of Updike’s contributions to the memoir genre—“The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” and the later essay-memoir collection Self-Consciousness (1989)—allows an appreciative reader of the fiction to observe the way a skilled stylist can produce visions and revisions of an event, an emotion, and experience, as if viewing life with a cubist eye. Just as we add or subtract details from our past as we speak to a new colleague or stranger across a café table, a writer can begin from their base elements of lived experience (thoughts, emotions, senses, the popular culture radiating through their time) to shape elements into new images.
There is a hesitancy when the autobiographical percentage in an author’s work is brought up. One does not want to suggest a sense of taking transcription from life. The nature of the work can also change the extent to which we assume autobiography is at play—we do not ask Thomas Harris how close he is to Hannibal Lecter. That Updike returns so frequently to chronical the domestic life—especially the evolution of marriage—invites these questions. Nicholson Baker, in his study U & I, speculates on the awareness of this autobiographical interpretation: “Updike knows that people are going to assume that the fictional wife of an Updike-like male character corresponds closely with Updike’s own real-life wife—after all, Updike himself angered Nabokov by suggesting Ada was Vera” (Baker 115). In the introduction to Self-Consciousness, Updike gives the clear indication that he is both aware of reader’s interest in the construction of work and self, and of the sense that the memoir is not the final word on anything.
The veins had been tapped, of course—the load mined—in over thirty years’ worth of prose and poetry; and where an especially striking marked parallel in my other work seemed to me, I have quoted it, as a footnote. But merciful forgetfulness has no doubt hidden many other echoes from me, as well as erode the raw material of autobiography into shapes scarcely less imaginary, though less final, than these of fiction. (xi)
Here is an accounting then, but it might not quite add up perfectly. Updike, like many authors, was a chronic reviser (the Library of America edition of his Collected Later Stories refers to the incorporation of “posthumous corrections found in Updike’s personal copies of his books.”) The world is worked and reworked—from his childhood, his family history, his thoughts and feelings and desires. The footnotes of Self-Consciousness serve as moments where the author opens the door. At the same time, those moments are being curated by the author. The development of the self, the development of consciousness, is, in its way, the intersection of place and time—the creation of a self, a “writerly writer” that was summed in the New Yorker style Updike had cultivated since his own youth; a style, after reading him, many others also wished to attain. “What I have written here strains to be true but nevertheless is not true enough. Truth is anecdotes, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian” (234). The trickiness of memory and self-creation is made clear when Updike mentions a moment from his parents’ lives together:
I remember waiting with her [Updike’s mother] by a window for my father to return from weeks on the road. It is in the Shillington living room. My hands are on the radiator ridges, I can see my father striding through the hedge toward the grape arbor, I feel my mother’s excitement beside me mingle with mine. But she says this cannot be; he had lost his job before I was born. (155)
I love this moment from Self-Consciousness because it shows not only the fickleness of memory but also the way that an author can create a scene, moving through details so real that he may believe it a true piece of his past, though it is a chronological impossibility.
Since I first picked up a copy of Self-Consciousness, when I was already reading Updike (and too young to understand half of what I was getting into), I was entranced by the specificity of the subtitle: memoirs—an autumn word, suggesting the foxed and discolored edges of a photograph. It is a nostalgic form for a work focalized through nostalgia. Suzanne Henning Uphaus writes that
Certainly, Updike misses the ideal past, a time when the writer could depend upon a “common store of assumptions,” when the paper he wrote on was far from blank. […] Updike’s nostalgia for such a past is a constant theme in his fiction. We see it at first, strongly presented, by the older people in the earlier novels […] In Couples, however, the older generation has disappeared; Piet’s parents are dead, as is the past they represent. It remains for him only to recognize and accept this fact. (Uphaus, 132-133)
As a writer, I have often thought that childhood memories are most interesting because in childhood we lack so much contextual information for what is happening around us, as if we had tuned in to some unfamiliar soap opera on an afternoon home sick from work—we vaguely recognize the characters, we can fill-in the details of the story, but we cannot know firsthand what we did not witness. The connections of location and memory in Self-Consciousness suggests the author was piecing together and processing his experiences through the distance that improves vision written about in Midpoint. Opening with “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, Updike travels the old neighborhood and the old past, while his family watches Being There. The streetlights are harsher than he remembers. Things changed radically from Updike’s childhood—something he had already been bracing himself for since at least the 1960s when he wrote that “It has taken me the shock of many returnings, more and more widely spaced now, to learn what seems simple enough, that change is the order of things” (165). Memories pour forth and are arranged in neat order, forming a walking tour of what is lost and what remains. Earlier, the sense of self and grounding was placed in more explicit terms in “The Dogwood Tree,” with the determination that can only come from childhood certainties:
My geography went like this: in the center of the world lay our neighborhood of Shillington. Around it there was greater Shillington, and around that Berks County. Around Berks County there was the State of Pennsylvania, the best, the least eccentric state in the Union. Around Pennsylvania, there was the United States […] There was only one possible nation: mine. (163)
The youthful sense of the center of the world existing as far as the legs of a boy can carry him recurs in Updike over and over, from his experience with a reporter discussed in the opening of Adam Begley’s biography (later fictionalized in one of Updike’s stories) to the protagonist of his late short story “Kinderszenen”—the first Updike short story I ever sought out in its original magazine publication, in Harper’s. The young Toby moves through his neighborhood, so similar to the one described by Updike in both memoirs, now able to cut and collage the scenes of the past into some new fiction. Indeed, the passage that comes to me most clearly is the alley-space by the chicken house, used as an outdoor bathroom, appearing again across a forty-year distance.
In remembering the dogwood tree I remember the faintly speckled asbestos shingles of the chicken house at the bottom of our yard, fronting on the alley. We had a barn as well […] and between the chicken house and the barn there was a narrow space where my grandfather, with his sly country ways, would urinate. I, a child, did also, passing through this narrow, hidden-feeling passage to the school grounds beyond our property; the fibrous tan-gray of the shingles would leap up dark, silky and almost black, when wetted. (152)
Consider looking at this scene again through “Kinderszenen”:
The field is two minutes’ walk away […], from the lower end of the yard, through the narrow space between the chicken house and the empty garage. Mother complains that this space smells of urine, and blames the men of the house, including Toby. It makes her just wild to think about it. “What’s the point of having indoor toilets?” she asks, getting red in the face. Still, Toby keeps doing it. Just being in this space between two walls, the chicken house’s asbestos shingles and the old garage’s wooden clapboards with the red paint flicking off, makes him need to go wee-wee. (864)
Though pictures do not appear in Self-Consciousness and the photograph that illustrated “The Dogwood Tree” as it first appeared in Five Boyhoods is absent from Assorted Prose, the photographs of the author taken by his mother serve as footholds for his memories. In “The Dogwood Tree,” the author had looked at himself as a child, looking out into the future, and found himself troubled that he had not yet turned out into the man the child had wanted to become.
I go back now, to Pennsylvania, and on one of the walls of the house in which my parents now live there hangs a photograph of myself as a boy. I am smiling, and staring with clear eyes at something in the corner of the room. I stand before that photograph, and am disappointed to receive no flicker, not the shadow of a flicker, of approval or gratitude. The boy continues to smile at the corner of the room, beyond me. That boy is not a ghost to me, he is real to me; it is I who am a ghost to him. Like some phantom conjured by this child from a glue bottle, I have executed his commands; acquired pencils, paper, and an office. Now I wait apprehensively for his next command, or at least a nod of appreciation, and he smiles through me[..]. (185)
From childhood through adulthood, the successful author is photographed again and again. “Without those accumulating photographs my past would have vanished year after year. Instead, it accumulated, loose in a set of shoeboxes, in no order, and because of its randomness ever fresh, ever stunning.” (12) The portrait of the author that I most admire is the author photograph by Elena Seibert, in which the author’s face peeks out from his hands, allowing the shy smile and the sense of a child who knows something that the reader does not know. If you will pardon my temporary adoption of Nicholson Baker’s “memory criticism” approach, I cannot help but recall—against historical chronology of “Kinderszenen,” and the moment in which the protagonist, Toby, reflects on how he came to know the secret knowledge of differences between himself and girls. “How had she seen him peeking? Had his spying eye gleamed in the crack?” (855). I, probably among many readers, had the experience of finding the secret knowledge of the adult world—and, perhaps, an explanation for why each of my grandparent’s divorced—in Updike’s work. There is then a kinship between the author and reader, of us both children peeking in the dark, peeking through the crack, and sharing some unspoken knowledge—dare I call it Higher Gossip?
Looking out towards the future caused great anxiety in Updike, as the child grew into a man, into a parent, into a grandparent. In Self-Consciousness, Updike recalls “squatting in our cellar making my daughter a dollhouse under the close sky of the cobwebby ceiling, and the hammer going numb in my hand as I saw not only my life but hers, so recently begun, as a futile misadventure, a leap out of the dark and back” (97). A decade or so later, perhaps this dollhouse memory would burrow itself down and out once more, as an existential needle-drop in his glimpse into the (now past) future, Toward the End of Time.
Our eldest, Mildred, had an eighth birthday coming in May, and I wanted to build her a dollhouse. It wasn’t to be a very elaborate one […] but whenever I went down to the cellar to work on the dollhouse[..] a clammy sense of futility would ooze out from the rough old eighteenth-century foundation stones and try to drown me. […] I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die, would die an old lady in whose mind I had become a dim patriarchal myth[…] (81-82).
Even in youth, there was a connection between the future, particularly the self-less future after the author was no more: “The dread of death comes upon me in futuristic space movies, and when, in early adolescence, I would read science-fiction, I dreaded those future aeons when I would not be present—an endless succession of days I would mist, wit their own news and songs, and styles of machine” (243-244).
“The Dogwood Tree” seems conspicuously absent from the flaneurs’ journey that opens Self-Consciousness. Updike expressed uneasiness with “The Dogwood Tree” even when it was gathered in Assorted Prose. “Though there are some tenderly tuned passages, my reminiscence in general, I fear, has the under-cooked quality of prose written to order, under insufficient personal pressure” (viii-ix). There might also be the sense that the changes he had witnessed were in fact only the preamble to greater change. And yet, the dogwood tree that inspires the title becomes in some ways a metaphor for Updike’s life and later his career on the whole—“each year with increasing volume and brilliance” (151).
Perhaps these letters gathered together in my remarks find only so much to hold them together against the “increasing volume and brilliance” of a life’s work. Though a professor once told me never to end a presentation with another writer’s words, I will come back to the beginning and end with a quote from Midpoint, one that sums the writer’s craft:
The Library Never Closes 