John Updike was a novelist who wrote about business men and people who lived in small New England towns. He was not exotic at all. He has left this reminiscence of his politics when he was the rare author and artist to remain a patriot in the 1960s. A couple of anecdotes:
A response to a BBC questionnaire on Vietnam in 1966. It got him into trouble.
Like most Americans I am uncomfortable about our military adventure in South Vietnam; but in honesty I wonder how much of the discomfort has to do with its high cost, in lives and money, and how much with its moral legitimacy. I do not believe that the Vietcong and Ho Chi Minh have a moral edge over us, nor do I believe that great powers can always avoid using their power. I am for our intervention if it does some good—specifically, if it enables the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political future. It is absurd to suggest that a village in the grip of guerrillas has freely chosen, or that we owe it to history to bow before a wave of the future engineered by terrorists. The crying need is for genuine elections whereby the South Vietnamese can express their will. If their will is for Communism, we should pick up our chips and leave. Until such a will is expressed, and as long as no willingness to negotiate is shown by the other side, I do not see that we can abdicate our burdensome position in South Vietnam.
On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1964.
And yet I came away from that month, and the two subsequent weeks in the Eastern-bloc countries Bulgaria, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia, with a hardened antipathy to Communism. The difference between our empires was not, as many were beginning to say, and were to say louder and louder during the impending Vietnam years, six of one and a half-dozen of the other. It was more like eleven of one and one of the other. Ours was the distinctly better mousetrap.
He was there during the 1964 election. I must confess that I also voted for Johnson, but for different reasons.
in 1964 I went to considerable trouble to vote inside the Soviet Union, casting at the American embassy in Moscow my absentee ballot for Lyndon Johnson and against that warmonger Barry Goldwater; my peaceloving Russian hosts were as relieved as I at the Johnson landslide. One source of my sense of grievance against the peace movement when it came was that I hadn’t voted for any of its figures—not 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 Doctor Spock or Eugene McCarthy. I had voted for Lyndon Johnson, and thus had earned my American right not to make a political decision for another four years. If he and his advisers (transferred intact, most of them, from Kennedy’s Camelot) had somehow got us into this mess, they would somehow get us out, and it was a citizen’s plain duty to hold his breath and hope for the best, not parade around full of pious unction and crocodile tears and power hunger and supercilious rage.
On the peace movement and its contempt for Lyndon Johnson. I believe this comment is pertinent on the contempt, and hatred, for Bush by the political left today.
The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.
On the occasion of a visit of Soviet artists and writers to America.
Arthur Miller, no reactionary, said it best when, a few years later, he and I and some other Americans riding the cultural-exchange bandwagon had entertained, in New York or Connecticut, several visiting Soviet colleagues. The encounter was handsomely catered, the dialogue was loud and lively, the will toward friendship was earnest and in its way intoxicating, but upon our ebullient guests’ departure Miller looked at me and said sighingly, “Jesus, don’t they make you glad you’re an American?”
And so, he is gone. He never considered himself anything but a liberal Democrat but that brand has changed beyond recognition. The piece above was written in 1989 and I wonder what his thoughts would be today on Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party.
Tags: John Updike, literature.
So now Updike is going to be remembered because his politics stand in sharp contrast to Pelosi? 🙂 For a raving liberal like me, I could care less about how he compares to contemporary Dems. His words are what count. Everything else secondary. RIP.
peace
Wonderful quotes. Updike grasped the big picture of things. When I argue with leftists, I get the sensation that we’re in a modern American trial court, boiling things down to one bit of minutiae, and if the leftist can win on that one point, the judge awards a victory: “Did the US commit any atrocities in Vietnam/Iraq/East St. Louis? Aha! The whole enterprise is moot, we must pay treble punitive damages and be shamed for all eternity.” We then walk out of court the same “privileged members of a privileged nation.” Updike understood that there is a larger historical current flowing about us.
James, he was an unusual writer for the time. For example, he supported Lyndon Johnson, who got the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 in spite of Robert Byrd’s filibuster, while most of his fellow artists attacked Johnson. Updike wrote about people who went to work everyday and tried to raise kids and pay their mortgages. His contemporaries were Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller. Their work was quite different. I think it is worthwhile to quote him about contemporary controversies and what he thought at the time.
🙂 Looks like you care more about his politics than his work. Cool. I’ll pay attention to his work and not how he compares politically to Mailer or Miller.
peace
PS:
Did you forget that Miller said this line:
“Jesus, don’t they make you glad you’re an American?”
I not only didn’t I forget, I included it in the post. Updike has been criticized for his rather weak heroes, unable to resist sexual temptation, for example. I suspect he was describing his neighbors. Mailer went off the deep end in the last few decades of his life, especially with his detour into promoting criminals. The Miller quote is interesting because it shows how even a political leftist could see how great it was to be an American. I don’t know that someone of similar sentiments would feel the same way today, although this is a better country now than it was then.
Doctor Mike,
🙂
“I don’t know that someone of similar sentiments would feel the same way today, although this is a better country now than it was then.:
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. I can name many a liberal/lefty who feel the same way.
peace
“I am for our intervention if it does some good—specifically, if it enables the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political future.”
That turns out to have been an awfully big “if” and, in retrospect, doesn’t seem to be a blanket endorsement given the outcome.
James, it is your opinion that this country, which has elected a black president and is 44 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, is worse than 1964 ? That statement was after the law passed but before it had taken much effect.
Mike, I didn’t say he was right, just that he was not a reflex leftist in the 60s. I consider that an accomplishment.
Mike,
“James, it is your opinion that this country, which has elected a black president and is 44 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, is worse than 1964 ?”
🙂 Is this a serious question? Are you honestly asking me this type of question?
peace
PS: Maybe there is some confusion here. When I said I disagreed with you, I disagreeing with your idea that a liberal would not say the same things Miller did.
James, I’ve seen a bunch of them, some very close to the president, who have said otherwise.
:Mike,
🙂 Who? The First Lady? Did she say this in her “I hate whitey” speech?
peace
James, I was thinking of her comment that she was proud of her country for the first time. Wouldn’t you agree that that comment is not consistent with the Arthur Miller quote ?
Michael.
I suggest you google Stanley Crouch and look at his response to the whole “proud for the first time” drama.
James, I did Google him and found nothing about Michelle’s comment.
Here you go:
http://www.sacbee.com/debate/v-print/story/1029634.html
To be fair Crouch also has an essay from the start of the 08 campaign when he says Obama isn’t “black like him.” A sort of loopy thing to say but this is the same guy who punches a book critic AND takes on rappers for their lyrics about crime. Mmmmmm. Slight contradiction, but that is why I read Crouch. He’s always messy.