However incongruous it seems, the Updikean extract I posted yesterday is from an essay, "On Not Being a Dove," about the author's halting, sheepish support for the Vietnam War at a time (late 1960s) when peers such as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer, not to mention Updike's wife, were militantly opposed. You might wonder what Vietnam has to do with neighborhood ski trips and back-seat shenanigans on the beery ride home, and the answer seems to be a principle well known to criminal attorneys: the prosecutor wants jurors who are "successful," because they think "the system" works, thereby accounting for their own success. These people believe cops and, in a different context, congressmen, generals, and presidents. By the time Updike, born in 1932, was in his mid-30s he had attained a lifestyle that he describes in the essay as "genteel Bohemian." If anything, this is probably an understatement, for by 1968 he had published five novels, four collections of short stories, two books of poems, and an essay collection, all well received. Success came early and fast and he seems to have had the syndrome that prosecutors look for. He certainly could afford ski trips. "I had not voted," he writes, "for Abbie Hoffman or Father Daniel Berrigan or Reverend William Sloane Coffin or Jonathan Schell or Lillian Hellman or Joan Baez or Jane Fonda or Jerry Rubin or Dr Spock or Eugene McCarthy." I detect in the catalogue at least a trace of authorial disdain. The riff concludes, "I had voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson, and thus had earned my American right not to make a political decision for another four years."
Many more than four years later, Rabbit Angstrom has Jewish golfing partners in Florida and keeps quiet while on tee boxes and greens they run down Reagan. Rabbit, of course, had voted for him. Updike himself never went so far--in one of his last interviews, in October of 2008 (he died of cancer three months later), he enthusiastically endorsed Obama over McCain--but there is in Rabbit's resentful, cantankerous character the shadowy imprint of his creator.
The mention of Jonathan Schell, who at the time would have been Updike's colleague at The New Yorker, will be of interest to longtime subscribers. In those days, the Talk of the Town pieces, including political commentary, were unsigned and meant to speak with the magazine's institutional voice. Updike was the principal author of many unsigned "notes and comments" until his reluctance to criticize the war caused him to withdraw in favor of "more leftish voices"--one of which was certainly Schell's, whose Village of Ben Suc was a devastating illustration of how the US "destroyed villages in order to save them." Schell would go on to write The Fate of the Earth.
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