John Crowley
IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton, R94)
THE novel, since its beginnings, has generated large numbers of subgenres. The varieties have lately seemed to proliferate wildly, like varieties of snack foods on supermarket shelves, and the bright if somewhat illusory array attracts not only readers but writers tempted to try something new, to see if they can turn out a campus farce, or an alternative- history novel, or a techno-thriller, or all three in one.
The kind that has now attracted John Updike’s restless talent is the one where the generations of a family experience all the currents and counter- currents of the century, which variously pass them by, destroy them, or carry them to fame and adventure, thence to disillusion and loss.
Among the usual components of this popular flavour are evocative lists of pop-culture icons, walk-ons by real historical characters, and family members who recapitulate the experiences of earlier members in changed circumstances. All are present in Updike’s version; so are Updike’s voice and his repertoire of gesture and feeling, as distinctively his as the genre he is working in is common property.
Two themes connect the generations of the Wilmot family as they successively appear before us: one is God, the other is the movies.
The story begins in 1910, in Paterson, New Jersey, as the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot all at once loses his faith. He becomes an encyclopaedia- salesman, and in the darkened nickelodeons of the city escapes his dilemma, finding there all that he will ever know of transcendence.
His decline in status has various effects on his family. His wife, Stella, will remake her husband as a sort of martyr. His son Jared’s natural cynicism will find fuel in his father’s foolish abnegation. His youngest son, Teddy, will never forgive God for not relenting and giving his father the slightest sign of his existence.
For Clarence and his crisis of faith, Updike employs an upholstered prose, cut from that heavy gabardine yardage that runs from, say, George Eliot to William Dean Howells. Only when Updike drops it, in Teddy’s section, do we realise gratefully that this orotundity will not be permanent.
The world picks up speed dangerously in the 1920s, and frightens Teddy into abnegations of his own. Teddy too goes to the movies, but they somewhat frighten him with their extremities of pain and urgency, even the comedies. To Teddy’s daughter, Essie, growing up in the 1940s, movies are not an escape; real life is the movies, and life itself the imitation.
For Essie, Updike adopts a swift style richer than anything that has come before, and his vivid evocations of the artificial life of the screen, appealing and vivid throughout, now come through Essie’s consciousness: “She [Ginger Rogers] wore dresses that were mountains of ruffles and big snakes of ostrich feathers that came up and covered her chin and no matter how fast he was making her move and twirl on the slippery ballroom floor her eyes stayed level and calm and warm like lamps inside her head.”
Essie will herself enter alive into that empyrean as a star. Single-minded and heroically self-regarding, she is also the only one of the Wilmots who genuinely and spontaneously believes in God: not in church or religion, but in God as the source of the universe’s love and beneficence just for her.
God catches up with Essie’s son, Clark, in the final part, and destroys him. Movies are the most real thing in Clark’s life too, but he no longer believes in them. He is ripe for colonisation: the leader of a fanatical religious commune, writes Updike, “stepped into him like a drifter taking over an empty shack”.
The outcome is clear early on, and it is to be wondered what exactly we are to make of the Waco-in- an-alternative-universe that ends the book abruptly.
The key to Updike’s intent may lie in the epigraph from which the otherwise puzzling title comes: “As he died to make men holy,” the Battle-Hymn of the Republic says, “let us die to make men free.” The God that Clarence Wilmot abandoned seizes upon his great-grandson, but Clark is given the chance to die in making at least a few women and children free.
The question remains: what, when we awaken both from the dream of Revelation and the revelations in the darkened theatre, do we awaken to?
John Crowley’s novels include Little, Big and rgypt