All the Wounded Gods

By Richard Lacayo Monday, Nov. 11, 2002
    • Anyone who interviews John Updike, 70, approaches him knowing that he would just as soon be sticking pins in his eyes as sitting across from your tape recorder. He has said as much in some interviews. So it doesn't help that his lovely and wise new novel, Seek My Face (Knopf; 276 pages), describes a long interview in which a journalist with a plain mind confronts a woman with more intricate workings. Hope, 78, is a famous American painter who is questioned by Kathryn, 27, a relentless art specialist who knows everything about postwar American artists except the deep sources of their power to throw thunderbolts. That she will never comprehend. "Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery," Hope thinks to herself, "the indeterminacy that gives art life." It's safe to say Updike has entertained that very thought.

    So what actually happens when Updike is sitting across from you? He turns out to be amiable and gallant, as sociable as you could ask the winner of every literary prize short of the Nobel to be. If this is all just a mellow charade, it's certainly one that he has mastered, just as in this brief novel of deep feeling, his 20th, he has mastered the voice of a woman struggling to convey the things that inspired her. "This is my most 'de-masculinized' work," he says. "The willingness to relive a life — I can only imagine two women doing it. A guy would get impatient and leave."


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    Hope is an artist who does not fully arrive at herself until she has buried her first two husbands, both of them artists more famous than she, who required a lot of care and feeding. Her first, Zack McCoy, is plainly modeled on Jackson Pollock. The wounded god of Abstract Expressionism, he moves from early struggles in New York City to vexed triumphs on the sunlit east end of Long Island. There McCoy/Pollock has his breakthrough to the drip paintings that bring him fame, which arrives at his door with its jaws open.

    "It's a wonderful story," Updike says. "That this terribly handicapped man handicapped by his alcoholism, limited in his intelligence, in his skillswent into the countryside, and this flood of light somehow entered his work." With darkness by its side, as Updike well understands. He takes art seriously. For more than 20 years he has been producing a good-size body of art criticism, reviews full of nuance and sharp eyesight. Once an aspiring cartoonist, he majored in English at Harvard but studied afterward at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. His first wife was a painter, and on their return to the U.S., he tried painting too, until he realized how hard it was to "lay out the colors, then keep the kids from putting their hands on the wet canvas."

    Seek My Face lets Updike imagine his way into the enigmas of that great moment in the 1950s when American art conquered the world. By way of Hope's memories, he lights upon Pollock's contemporaries — Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman — the anointed gladiators of the American avant-garde. The names are changed, but their vanities and treacheries and barroom intellectual brawls are pretty much as we know them. As for Hope, she resembles Pollock's actual wife, the steadfast Lee Krasner, though not in every detail, especially after McCoy's death, when she marries Guy Holloway, a composite of Pop artists from the '60s, who never quite comes to life.

    She also resembles Updike. Sometimes so does McCoy. Is it his own face that Updike is asking us to seek? Maybe McCoy is his wished-for self, diving into the volcano of instinct. But it's Hope who has his gift for rustling language. When she remembers the way her German-born art instructor spoke a "ponderous slow English, like concrete dripping in clumps inside a turning mixer," what you recall is that reading Updike has always provided the pleasures you hoped were in store when you went to the trouble of learning to read.

    Hope resembles Updike too in her yearning to reach for transcendent states by way of the things of this world — food, landscape, pigment and, of course, sex. What she loves first about McCoy is not his art but the lean arc of his body and the feral escarpments of his face, with its "lovely low-relief episodes of muscle." If this is a novel in which people think and talk, it's a frisky one all the same. "I'm not terribly up on the actual sex lives of these artists," Updike admits, "except that they were sexy and they suffered from a lot of spare time." And as he does with many things, he manages to make the most of that.