"In the Beauty of the Lilies"

By John Updike

Alfred A. Knopf

491 pp.; $25.95

John Updike's book of memoirs, "Self-Consciousness," one of his least-read books according to a personal, informal poll, contains this statement:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea--this odd and uplifting line from among the many odd lines of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," seemed to me, as I set out, to summarize what I had to say about America, to offer itself as a title of a continental magnum opus of which all my books, no matter how many, would be mere installments, mere starts at the hymning of this great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea.

Updike's seventeenth novel and forty-sixth book, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," seems a summation of that opus. It is the only generational novel Updike has published, spanning four generations of a specific family over a space of 80 years. (The novel is divided into quartets, each allotted to a specific person in each generation.) It is not as though Updike hasn't written about the effects of one generation on another, as he has done ably in "The Poorhouse Fair," "The Centaur," "Of the Farm," "Roger's Version," the Rabbit quartet, and other novels. But those books usually span a number of days, or a season or cycle of seasons at the most, and the generational influences, though felt, are never worked out in increasing complexity down through decades to some sort of resolution that falls near our nonfictional present. So Updike's new novel represents, in form and intent, the dramatic exception to his entire oeuvre.

In the spring of 1910, during D. W. Griffith's filming of "The Call to Arms" in the sweltering heat of Paterson, New Jersey, the 17-year-old star, Mary Pickford, faints dead away, and just at that moment, as Updike relates it, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot, standing in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him." Wilmot has been reading "Some Mistakes of Moses," by Robert Ingersoll, a prominent atheist of the time, in order to refute Ingersoll's arguments for a parishioner, but "Wilmot's thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that Ingersoll was quite right: the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be."

Rationality triumphs, one might say, and reconceives God in its image, finding him lacking. Hewing closely to the arguments of early twentieth-century higher critics, Updike spends the better part of 18 pages detailing the "evaporation" of Wilmot's faith. The assertions of the cheerful apologists of Wilmot's era are reduced in his mind to "sad pap"--"Paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth." And having lost his faith, how can Wilmot continue to minister to his congregation?

Clarence's wife, Stella, a flummoxed optimist chiefly distinguished by her alert eyes and abundance of hair, is confident her husband's loss of faith is only temporary, and for a while she fills the pulpit for him. Whether this could occur in a church of 1911 overseen by an elder the likes of the formidable Dearholt, whose flashing oval glasses and bald pate remind Clarence of the pugnacious Ingersoll, is a matter of conjecture. In Updike's novel it happens; Stella preaches but is no balm to Clarence, who remains adamantine in his unbelief.

To demit the ministry, he must meet with the smooth-talking moderator of his presbytery, Dreaver, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, who suspects Clarence's troubles stem from attending Princeton and tries to dissuade him with maxims such as "Unfaith is a cohort of faith, as Satan is a cohort of God." And: "the staunch liberal tradition has nothing to fear from the future; no development can upset it. Remember the Epistle to the Hebrews, how Paul begins?--'God, who in sundry times and divers manners spake in time past.' Divers manners, and that includes Darwin and Marx, when the evidence bears out what they say."

One should not overlook the wicked humor in this, nor the state to which portions of the church had declined at that point; Updike has been diligent in his research. Dreaver's rationalism was the supreme ailment of that church, not because rationalism is a deficit but because it posited itself as the only avenue to truth, sovereign over even the testimony of Christ. Rot in the visible church starts at the top, as many have noted, and Updike chronicles not only the rot but the rise of the new religion America chose to adopt: the message from Hollywood.

Clarence, reduced to selling encyclopedias of an inferior sort, begins to frequent the movie houses and nickelodeons then springing up in Paterson:

This was a church with its mysteries looming brilliantly, undeniably above the expectant rows. The projectionist slowed or speeded up the reel like a conductor regulating a symphony's tempo, and the piano player in the corner, huddled beneath his sallow lamp like a monk at his candlelit prayers, sought to inscribe the silent images with thunders and tinklings that channelled the unified emotions of the audience into surging indignation, distress, suspense, and a relief that verged upon the comic in the violence of its discharge.

Clarence succumbs to tuberculosis, and the violence of discharge of relief in the family at his death, or at Clarence's release from his faith, is passed on to his youngest son, Theodore (named after "the virile President"). After Clarence's death, Teddy moves with his mother, Stella, into the house of well-to-do relatives in small-town Delaware.

Teddy, whose character devolves from the plodding stoicism of his boyhood to passive ennui, watches his older sister, Esther, enter the escapades of flapper life in the twenties, while his even older brother, Jared, who serves in World War I and returns wounded and cynical, becomes a rent collector for a small-time gangster in New York City. Though Teddy is the brightest of Stella and Clarence's children, nothing seems to engage him. Eventually he marries a young woman with a crippled leg, a Methodist, Emily, the daughter of an ex-farmer (his wife is a mulatto) who runs a local greenhouse. Teddy declines to attend church with his wife and becomes a postman, delivering good news and bad.

The centerpiece of the novel, however, is Teddy's daughter Esther or Essie--or Alma DeMott, as she christens herself with the help of an agent--destined to become an American icon, a Hollywood star. With her the unbuttoning of the book really begins. In "Self-Consciousness" Updike claims it surprised him to have his writing style called "luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is exactly what it wasn't--other-indulgent, rather." He says his models were Proust and Henry Green--masters of "styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap themselves around the things, the tints and voices and perfumes, of the apprehended real."

For the first part of the book Updike's style wraps the objects and hues and smells and sounds of life as tightly as the silk woven in Paterson mills, as though this membranous net will haul home reality itself. Then a joyful unpacking begins with the appearance of Essie: "She looked at the four corners of the ceiling again, in the reverse direction, holding Mr. Bear so his glass eyes with the loose black disk (like a little tiddlywink) in each could look parallel with her. He was a Teddy Bear but her Daddy was called Teddy and so she called her toy Mr. Bear."

Essie is obsessive and religious, according to her own definition of religion, as in her visual "crossing" of rooms and her self-centered prayers, and is a sexual adventuress by the time she is in high school. She becomes even more obsessively involved with movies than her grandfather and decides she has to step forward from life onto that magnifying, glittering screen. She goes first to New York, where her cousin Patrick (Jared's son), an aspiring painter, lives in reasonable splendor in his parents' city apartment. She hopes to impress her cousin by dropping the towel she's wrapped in after her first shower in the apartment, but Patrick, alas, is gay.

He proves to be a good contact and mentor, however, introducing her not only to the agent who will make her and her career, but to art movies at the Modern--"it was like entering the silence before she had been born, when Alma had no gray hair and her grandfather Wilmot walked the earth." She was "shaken and stretched above all by the Italians and neorealismo" and also impressed by the Russians--

the glowing robed giants of Eisenstein, stalking one another through castle corridors like chambers of a vast crazed mind. For the first time in a scene of charging Teutonic Knights, faceless in their tin-can helmets, she saw the Christian cross, flapping on their banners, used as a symbol of evil. These many films new to her unsealed an abyss that Essie had not looked at since she was seven and, sitting between her parents, had watched Lost Horizon; in that pretty young face suddenly crumbling with age had loomed an abysmal cruelty of horizonless time and space from which Hollywood and her house on Locust Street and her customarily answered prayers had sheltered her. But to remain loyal to her prayers it was necessary to face this harsh illumination and grow, though it hurt, and often the date on whose arm she walked out through the lobby did not, from his crass comments, seem to have absorbed anything, to have any idea of what a troubling revelation he had witnessed.

It is the dimensional descent into Essie's existence that propels her portion of the book with such power. She becomes a star in her own right, a weird cross between Lana Turner and Bette Midler, and her scenes and affairs with other actual named stars, along with her marriages, take on the exactitude and tabloid cast of a Hollywood memoir. For Hollywood is where Alma is bound, and Hollywood is where she reigns; but to divulge the details of her rise would be to presume upon Updike's careful construction of life gone haywire in the wilderness and the bounty of modern America, as represented by Hollywood and its many "locations."

Indeed, to reveal the intricacies of plot or the details of a fictional character's inner life is a bit like telling a family member about the contents of their gift (which you've sneakily unwrapped) from a distant relative. The worst affront is to reveal crassly what a writer has worked for hundreds of pages to unpack, a book's carefully constructed resolution: the end. This should be left to each reader to take in his or her own way, in one's own good time.

That decorum must be balanced against the reviewer's duty to suggest the architecture of a book, its shape and thrust. "In the Beauty of the Lilies" begins with a flavor of historical documentation (reminiscent of the Buchanan sections in "Memories of the Ford Administration"), then picks up plot and pace in a graphic unreeling down to the present. Another generation, more confused than Essie-Alma's, closes out the book in an inferno many will relate to Waco.

Alma's son, Clark, the focus of this last section, ends up with even more names and nicknames than she bears, as if the further the family moves from Clarence's unmooring in the faith the more their identities multiply and blur, taking on the fragmentary tags we presently find attached to e-mail. Clark is driven from Hollywood by his mother's tongue, in part, when she bluntly tells him why she married a hippie musician for whom Clark develops a dogged affection--largely because of the way the man would dive so far for a misthrown frisbee his airborne momentum would carry him in a walloping splash into the backyard pool, a kind of baptism that Clark reexperiences, at least visually, as he works at his Uncle Jared's Colorado mine turned ski slope.

What literally drives Clark from Hollywood is the lowest common denominator of its industry--the one that more and more movies tend to swoop toward in the present--the hard-core porn film. After a messy viewing of one, he decides he has to get away from Los Angeles, out of reach of movies. Of course they're ubiquitous now, with VCRs, and it is perhaps this ubiquity that has led young people to view themselves as actors. Clark drifts with his grandfather's passivity from working for his uncle into a cult modeled somewhat on the one that went up in Waco, though Updike places his, amusingly, near the present nerve center of neocon Christianity, in Colorado. There is a fascination with firearms that Updike hasn't touched on since his early work.

I will add only that Clark seems less caught up in the cult than in the current of rootless role-searching his life has taken on, and that the one who holds him immobile by speaking with the provocative chatter of a Skeeter (from "Rabbit Redux") for our time could, as well, for destruction's sake, be declaiming on New Age theosophy as Vietnam arms. It is the fervency that counts. Near the novel's end Clark suffers a disbelief as great as his great-grandfather Clarence's. Clark's disbelief, however, turns out to be heroic and suggests a rekindling of faith in a generation nearly neutered by the gods of video and computer logic. Or if not faith, at least a hope that his generation will not be so easily taken in by the religion of glamorized violence that is projected from Hollywood over this roughly rectangular country all across the generally spherical globe where so many are severed by the breadth of the seas, if not from the birthplace of Christ, then from the revolutionary and rocklike nature of his teaching.

Then to zoom far back from all this for a moment. If the rational arguments Clarence encounters in his insectlike slide down the slick-walled sink of stable religion (as Updike pictures it) are taken as the palpable truth, that would be too bad. As surely as Hollywood movies, such arguments are the confections of men, devices exploited to this day for the attention they draw, as the publicity-seeking fellows of the Jesus Seminar, for instance, exploit them. They are harbingers of the final breakup of mere religion for religion's sake, as they were the end in Clarence's age of a faith that had become so etiolated and compromised it was no longer Christianity.

This is a portion of the truth that "In the Beauty of the Lilies" conveys, consciously at times, at other times in Updike's freewheeling giving over of himself to the characters of Essie and Clark. Updike, an ardent adherent of Karl Barth (again see "Self-Consciousness"), has been viewed in literary quarters as a latter-day Hawthorne, especially since "Roger's Version," an updated "Scarlet Letter," appeared. Like Hawthorne, Updike has chronicled the centrality of religion to American life, and the resilience of his supple and entwining prose has always suggested nothing less than redemptive freedom. Throughout his career he has rendered articulate proponents and exponents of faith, Christian faith in particular, and has set at center stage one of the largest bodies of redeemed humanity ever to appear in American fiction--most of it amazingly free of scorn--not only many modern Hesters but the Richards and Rogers and the Rabbits of the twentieth century.

The song by Julia Ward Howe that provides the title for Updike's new novel is emblematic in itself of the decline of Christianity. It was the battle song of the North during the Civil War, and it reduces Christ to a startling incarnation: "I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps; / They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps"--the fires of Union troops. Once the unique and divine nature of Christ is rendered null, as it was by descendants of the Puritans, the Unitarians who claimed Julia Ward Howe and Emerson (soon to peel yet further off) as adherents, he becomes an avenging troop trampling out bloody vintages. That was the beginning in America of the reprehensible sense, best conveyed by America's only contemporary bard, Bob Dylan, of having "God on our side."

When genuine faith is replaced by a religion of and for and by a government, doom lies in the dark ahead, no matter how many watchfires are built from the remnants of that faith. As soon as the higher critics of Germany detonated the Christianity of academicians and clerics, those at the top, and then of young seminarians, the way was paved for the religion of the Reich, and the orderly and urbane country of Germany that had produced more scholars and artists per capita over the previous century than any modern nation, perhaps, fell under mob rule and a dictator's shout.

When a government thwarts the free expression of Christian faith, hedging it with legalities and ridicule that would be unimaginable if carried out against another religion, its actions become so hypocritical that the simplest citizen sees through them like glass, and thinks, Hey, if Daddy can do that . . . And when a government offers a secular religion with itself as the head and then alters that religion out of pragmatism with each new election, drawing the curtain on yet another production of the American Dream, it drives its disenfranchised and dismayed citizens into improbable false religions, into cults, into the clan mentality of a modern militia--those Bravehearts of Montana.

That is the sobering moral of Updike's transcendent new novel, a consolidation of most of what he has felt and thought and experienced and written over his 60 years as a Christian in America. There were once giants in the earth, we hear, and Updike is attaining to that stature, or anyway is America's only writer of such manifold literary distinction he sometimes seems to have moved beyond even the Nobel.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE

July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 22

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