A Mighty Oak Falls

I met John Updike once, for the same 20-second interval that hundreds of others met the man that day: by waiting excitedly in a line, then reverently approaching a table where he sat, pen in hand, beside a stack of newly published books. This was at a college in St. Paul around 1992. The book he was promoting and touring for was the collected Rabbit novels. I wasn’t much interested in that; a student, I didn’t have $25 or $30 to spring for the hefty tome. Besides, I already owned some of the Rabbit series individually, and those that I didn’t own, I was in the habit of borrowing from my dad’s old pocket paperbacks, copious intrusive marks and all.

One such Rabbit book, and the one I took to the reading to be signed, was a first edition, first printing hardcover of Rabbit is Rich. This Pulitzer-winning title had been plucked (rescued, I liked to think) from the shelves of Stub & Herb’s, a bar and burger joint near the U of M campus, where part of the décor construed to identify it as a collegiate hangout were shelves filled with secondhand castoffs, including the ubiquitous Reader’s Digest condensed books. How Rich got in there we’ll never know. It had no dust jacket, and the cloth cover was a dull brown, so I suppose it blended in with the near-worthless relics. When a girlfriend who waitressed there spotted it, she gifted it to me, knowing my affinity and devotion to its prolific author.

The humble thing, considerably thinner than the volume on offer, I handed to Updike when my turn at the signing table arrived. I didn’t expect him to be surprised or delighted; I figured he’d been handed stranger things to sign. But I did secretly hope, as many must, that he would take notice of me. He received it with curiosity, and inquired in a manner, just as I’d hoped, that allowed me to relate my story of its acquisition. I told him how I’d gotten it from a girlfriend who worked at a restaurant, where it had been found on the shelves, and how she’d presented it to me. This made sense to him; he wasn’t offended that his work had been dealt some neglect. He asked what name to inscribe, and did his signing. “And the girlfriend?” he asked, handing the book back to me.

“We broke up,” I said.

“And this is all that’s left,” he commented slyly, a twist to the toothy mouth that he spoke often of being embarrassed by. He was absolutely right. The book was all that was left.

“Yes,” I said, and thanked him, pleased to have engaged him briefly (as if I’d done him a favor!)—a small recompense for the plenteous engagement he’d given me, given all of us in that room, that one lecture hall of one college, on one tour, back in 1992. 

This morning, the day after his passing, I feel I’ve had a longer conversation with him, after watching this interview conducted by Chip McGrath in October 2008. Though I wasn’t there and asked no questions, Updike’s warmth and openness are what one would hope to receive in a conversation with any admired man. Given short and unordinary questions, he expounds onto broader generalities. He’s humble about his accomplishments and honest about his doubts, failings, and uncertainties, which he seems to mention knowing that the impression his many admirers may have is that it all comes with masterful ease. He seems always to see with an uncommon scope, his perceptive mechanism fluidly zooming in and out of the past, in and out of himself, moving between the broad view of intellectualization and the sharp hone of his feeling. He admits to being having been hurt by criticism, and feeling “repentant” if he’d “trespassed” on women, on feminism, in his work. The Christian vocabulary was integrated in his person; he did not have to research these feelings as he says he researched Medieval witchcraft, for the Witches sequel, to learn of “pins and feathers” coming from peoples’ mouths.

Also integrated into his way of seeing is metaphor. Notice how his answer to the first question of the interview creates one, no warm-up needed: he says writing a sequel is hooking one car onto another, by which we immediately envision a train.

Notice how his eyes lock on the distance to his upper left, where on this stage he must see lights pointed right at him. It’s as if his imagination resides there, or he’s accessing something heavenly. When he adds his interviewer’s name in address, his eyes move down and to the right: the opposite, the earthly realm, the realm of man. Then, thinking again, composing intricate reflections live and on the spot with ease, his eyes return ceiling-ward.

Does anyone else speak as he does, in conversation? Ian McEwan, in reflection of his death called Updike’s personal manner “courtly.” It would seem that, I suppose, to an Englishman. But if all Updike’s thoughts and elocutions are formal, they are not affected. He knows when to put something simply; and often puts things very humorously, if sublty so. Most often, though, he sees many complexities and has the tools to include them in his speech. We know from his writings and interviews that these inclusions are homages to the complex splendor of creation and existence. It is a writer’s duty to attend to them. In this court, he was king.

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Satire Suffers Setback

No, we don’t look to Disney/Pixar for biting social commentary, but it is a welcome addition to the otherwise simply romantic and irritatingly dialogue-less first half of Wall-E when the titular hero travels to Axiom, the space resort to which the universe’s known homo sapiens population (us) absconds, in the year 2100 or so, after ravaging Earth. Axiom is a floating utopia of leisure made possible by the ironic advance of technology. Here people recline in hovercraft chairs, suck from soda straws, and move along conveyors from one simulated “activity” to the next. All are obese, muscleless (later, when tipped from their chairs, none is strong enough to right himself—each lies helpless like a beetle on its back), obnoxious and impatient. The environment is sterile, almost militaristic. LCDs pump in ads, lights, sounds—hollow stimuli. On Axiom, there is no struggle, no human will, no love or hate, only constant satiation, constant reward. (But for what?) It’s a future that, though fantastical, is a logical outcome if the desires of the American consumer, as depicted by advertisers today, were to be fulfilled to the essential, diabolic extreme: nothing but passivity, stasis, and consumption, yet no guilt about global destruction, as the globe is already destroyed.

Axiom is unmistakably satirical.

Pixar’s two main contributions to the animated genre, as I understand it, are the advancement of CGI images to near-lifelike qualities of light, shadow, and perspective; and the savvy inclusion of adult elements to keep the chaperones, renters, and buyers interested. Wall-E’s love, Eve, is whisked away to Axiom just in time to make good on the second of these. The extraterrestrial spa/domicile reclaims the attention of viewers tiring of the predictable and rather one-dimensional mechanical courtship underway. This
only adds to the potency of Axiom as a satirical element. When we see humans for the first time, we’re captivated by what they’re up to; their escapades get us thinking. Viewers as young as ten, I would venture, can see there’s something vile about the human condition there. This easy
apparentness, this translucence, is a necessity for satire’s success.

Well, that success has been dealt a strange blow. Dish Network is currently running an ad, on CNN among other channels, for its upcoming broadcast premiere of Wall-E, in which a quintessential
nuclear family—tall, slim, handsome, brunette white male, his slightly shorter blond wife, and their two bright, tidy progeny—wear red and white unitards identical to those worn by people on Axiom, and partake in the same acts of axiomatic leisure. These are live-action, “real” people in the commercial, not Pixar animations. They are not corpulent, but rather fit, healthy and happy-seeming. They are (pretending to be) on Axiom. They receive massages in a stadium-sized room and smile at each other. They gather around a table, socializing, now superimposed over actual Axiom footage from the film Wall-E: its massive interiors of gleaming smoothness, unalarming colors, and edgeless corners that cannot bruise flaccid flesh. The family members’ easy demeanors describe a visit to an entertainment complex where one takes a welcome respite from hectic modern life, a return to which is made after a few hours, having not adjusted expectations so far as to make reacclimation to the emotional gravity of family conflict, suffering, and strife uncomfortable. In their excited visages we read the question, “Isn’t it wonderful to be here?” Though perversely, “here” is Axiom, a monument to sloth and gluttony. Then the family gathers before a TV, and orders up the film Wall-E from Dish Network.

And in this gesture they retreat from their role as visitors to Axiom. Now they are just humans here on Earth, where we still have TVs and satellites, doing what you should do: ordering the film that conceived and contains images of Axiom. Why? Because it’s the next best thing to being there! That is the earnest message of the Dish Network ad: that Axiom is a futuristic playground your kids will recognize and want to revisit.

But the contrary is precisely the point made in Wall-Eabout this orbiting oasis: it is not heaven but hell. The captain realizes this, and wages a battle with the onboard computer for control of the ship. Total inertia, it becomes obvious to him, is not bliss but a miserable paralysis.

The ad certainly confuses the message of Axiom, and may even degrade the film, even if only my memory of it, in which a poignant notion is dramatized entertainingly. Perhaps my hope that children seeing the film would remember this depiction of an imagined human outcome and do their best to prevent it happening in their lifetime was naïve. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d expected too much from a dramatic work. But assuming that some branch of the studio signed off on this Dish Network spot, one has to wonder, Why make satire if its pungency is going to be blithely negated to market itself? Perhaps that is naïve too. Perhaps right now cereal boxes are being filled with little plastic hoverchairs.

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