Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

IN "On Not Being a Dove," the best of the six autobiographical essays in Self-Consciousness, John Updike explains his discontent with the superficial pacifism of anti-Vietnam protestors: "To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough ftom the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given."

Nixon called those people "who must make their arrangements in the world as given" the "silent majority." That phrase was one of his most effective political tools. A large portion of the American people recognized themselves in those words and responded powerfully to having been so well understood. Their support buoyed up his Administration through just the sort of twilight struggle a democracy is not supposed to be able to sustain. Long after it had become clear the war could not be won, they backed the government in the enervating task of shedding just enough more blood to win an acceptable peace. It was almost worth it. But for Watergate, Nixon might have held the North Vietnamese to the deal.

The silent majority were not witless enthusiasts for the war. They were, I always thought, people who prided themselves on not thinking they were any smarter than they were, or than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon was on not being "wiseguys," which is just what the peace movement seemed to be full of. They were realists in Jacques Maritain's sense of the word: people who do not believe that it is impossible to find the truth, but have learned that it is quite difficult, and prize humility, and piety, accordingly.

Self-Consciousness is largely about being an elegant, fashionable, adequately modernist, Harvard-educated author, a peer of the literary establishment, and still a member of the silent majority.

"Who elected you?" say children in a schoolyard when one of their number seems a little too willing to explain how things should be done. Updike feets much the same way about the protestors: "One source of my sense of grievance 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 Dr. Spock, or Eugene McCarthy. I had voted for Lyndon Johnson, and thus had carned my American right not to make a political decision for another four years." This last line sounds a little cynical and self-deprecating and thereby very Updike. But there is conviction behind the cynicism. Good citizens, like good Christians, practice acceptance, not only because humility is good but because it clears our vision.

If [Johnson] and his advisors . . . 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 spouting pious unction and crocodile tears. Vietnam seemed to me a tight place we had got into and must close our eyes to squeeze through . . .

The Vietnam War or any war was "wrong" but in the sense that existence is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer. . . . Peace is not something we are entitied to, but an illusory respite we earn. . . . A dark Augustinian idea lurked within my tangled position: a plea that Vietnam . . . could not be disowned by a favored enlightened few hiding behind college deferments, fleeing to chaste coot countries, snootily pouring pig blood into draft files, writing deeply offended "Notes and Comments," and otherwise pretending that . . . bloody hands didn't go with having hands at all. A plea in short for tbe doctrine of Original Sin and its obscure consolations.

Updike's fierce humility (mixed in, of course, with at least as much ambition and deceit as one generally finds in performers) makes him here as always a likable writer. He blends a lifetime of words with his cherished place in the silent majority by hanging on to his observer status with both hands. For Updike, life is very largely what happens to us: what we see, rather than what we do. This is a true thought, and its petulant denial is part of what made the peaceniks so unattractive. But this observer's passion can be taken too far.

It often has been taken too far in Updike's novels, and it is consistently destructive here. With one irredeemable exception, every essay has moving, epiphanic moments, but none of the six can be called a complete success. The book on the whole is tedious, mundane, cliche-ridden, self-obsessed, and overwritten. One hesitates to say such things about Updike; they have been said so many times before. He has-so he believably says-taken the criticisms to heart, but-as he also says here-he just cannot see what the crities mean. What do they mean, I write beautifully but have nothing to say? he laments. I have "the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say." He means really that he has all of middling America to describe. Unfortunately, he also has a very imperfect sense of which are the interesting bits and an exaggerated view of how much help we need from him to see them.

The Vietnam essay is the best, in part because it is the only one premised on the author's taking an action: in this case, writing a mild endorsement of the war for an anthology of fashionable opinion on the subject. Even so, it soon veers off into obsessive self-analysis: Was my wife right that I liked Johnson because he was a schoolteacher like my father? Are my friends right that I am callous about the sufferings of others because I have never suffered myself? Not all this is off the point; the essay is about the psyche of the silent majority, not its geostrategic vision. But a great deal of it is too long, too lovingly described, and too disingenuous.

Updike's constant self-conscious selfdeprecation, his way of rendering every observation a bit more diffident by displaying the array of his possible motives for making it, is repeated so often that it seems tricky or cowardly rather than insightful or self-revealing. Finally it is farcical, as when he ends the Vietnam essay with a fairly solemn 11-page description of his lifelong problems with bad teeth and frightening dentists, by way of refuting the charge that he has not known suffering.

In addition to the 11 pages on teeth he devotes an entire essay of 36 pages to his psoriasis and another only slightly shorter to his stuttering, but there are only scattered, veiled paragraphs on his divorce, which he it seems initiated and which to this day, one guesses, he thinks wrong. It seems quite reasonable, even admirable, not to write about one's divorce, but it seems unreasonable to expect readers to be more interested in one's skin.

In every essay there are long descriptive passages, beautifully written but intolerable to read, not because they are too long but because it is impossible to find a principle of selection, of artifice. There are penetrating insights to accompany the descriptions, but there are also trivialities and cliches that would not be forgiven in a college literary magazine. One gets the feeling that he just cannot hold them in, as if he were no more than an observer of his writing as well as of his life. Three pages from the end of the book, he asks parenthetically, "Can happiness simply be a matter of orange juice?" Earlier, in a passing comment about the women's movement arising with but outliving the peace movement, he announces, "Fists uplifted, women enter history. The clitoral at last rebels against the phallic"-an observation that for banality and wrongheadedness rivals any dumb pronouncement of the peaceniks. At the very least a writer who regards himself as a chronicler of Eros among the moderns might pause long enough to recall that the clitoris is not the opposite equivalent of the phallus-except in the Playboy philosophy, wherein the phallus is equivalent to the glans. Women have entered history only to have John Updike trivialize their erotic power because he can't slow down his typing.

In the stuttering essay, called "Getting the Words Out," he writes of taking "a lifetime to sort out, particularize, and extol with the proper dark beauty" his middling America. In the same essay he dreams of using a line ftom "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" ("In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea") as "the title of a magnum opus of which all my books, no matter how many, would be mere installments, mere starts at the hymning of this great rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea."

This terrifying suggestion of an endless Updike novel is more than accidentally related to his theme of a nation cut off ftom Christ or any similarly authoritative truth. Once again he has a real point. The great American novel has generally been imagined as big, because writers tend to think of America as a phenomenon to be chronicled rather than an essence to be uncovered. This is almost a truism, but not nearly a truth, Updike, a Christian, should know better. But in the present work, as so often in his novels, it is impossible to find the essences beneath all the words.

Through most of his career, Updike's steady job was to write pieces for William Shawn's New Yorker. He had, he tells us, the greatest respect for both the magazine and Mr. Shawn, whom he regarded as a better editor than Harold Ross. They were made for each other. The interminable length of New Yorker journalism, the endless layering of details, the worldfamous, obsessive fact-checking department staffed with its radical empiricists, the languid voice of "Talk of the Town," in which diffidence paraded as elegance and exquisiteness substituted for economy, the fiction in which no stone was left unturned but none of the people ever moved, all made the magazine the perfect home for a writer who was so dedicated to playing the unobtrusive observer that he could never shut up.