413 - John Updike and the Funny Theologian

John Updike and the Funny Theologian

By John McTavish

"Updike doesn't preach. He tells realistic stories with symbolic and theological overtones that, in effect, invite us to enter the discussion ourselves. Here we are invited to consider the goodness of our relationship with God. God's partnership with us in the covenant of grace disclosed in Christ does not, as has been said, solve our many problems. Yet, within our bloodsoaked world, it does give us a place to stand. Only goodness lives. But it does live. God is God and may be trusted to fill our lives with radiance and the world with joy. "

AMERICAN novelist John Updike and European theologian Karl Barth seem, at first sight, an odd couple. Clergy tend to revere Barth (even if they don't read him much) and despise Updike (and don't read him much either). Lay people often haven't heard of either. Yet both have earned the highest accolades in their respective disciplines. Many literary critics today would agree with William Pritchard's judgment that John Updike is "putting together a body of work that in substantial intelligent creation will eventually be seen to be second to none in our time." ¹ And for years, Barth has been widely regarded as the most influential theologian of the twentieth century.

These two giants appear to be working quite different fields: Updike that of modern realistic fiction, Barth that of traditional biblical theology. Yet, Updike has been influenced by Barth, even confessing that Barth's theology "at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it [my life]." ² Barth, said Updike once, is "a funny theologian," adding wryly, "They're not all funny." ³

My own discovery of the connection here affected my life significantly. I had been introduced to Updike's work in college, thanks to the recommendation of an atheist friend who thought that the nihilistic atmosphere in Rabbit, Run might disabuse me of some of the

John McTavish is a minister in the United Church of Canada, serving as pastor of Trinity United Church in Huntsville, Ontario. He is the co-editor of Karl Barth: Preaching through the Christian Year (1978) and co-author of The Passions of John Wesley: A Play in Two Acts (1 985).

¹ William H. Pritchard, in The Hudson Review.

² Assorted Prose, (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. ix.

³ "The Dick Cavett Show: A Conversation with John Updike," December 1978, p. 10. (The transcript of this program was privately circulated with the permission of CBS.)

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noises I had been making about becoming a minister. The novel, alas, succeeded only in sending thrilling sensations of joy down my spine: Updike's patented mix of searing realism and uncommonly beautiful prose captivated me at once. Barth took longer to appreciate. Seminary professors directed me to his work which seemed, initially, fusty and old hat, the ruminations of a tired traditionalist rather than the bold forays of a wide-eyed visionary. Only after the faculty's theological artillery had done its work and forced me to concede that the half-baked religious humanism of my youth could stand a little seasoning, did the power and beauty of Barth's theology begin to impress itself upon me.

When I began my work in parish ministry, Updike symbolized the tantalizing world of the flesh, and Barth represented the transcendent world of the spirit. The two writers unfortunately also symbolized a dichotomy that was crystallizing inside me, causing me to fear that one day these two worlds of flesh and spirit might fly apart. Then I made my great discovery. In 1968, Updike's novel Couples appeared, and Time magazine ran a cover story on the author of the sexual shocker of the year. I now learned that during the very period when Updike was writing Rabbit, Run, the awareness of mortality pressed so keenly upon him that he felt "a constant sense of horror that beneath this skin of bright and exquisitely sculpted phenomena, death waits."

It was a full-dress religious crisis, lasting several months, and Updike says now that he got through it only by clinging to the stern, neo-orthodox theology of Switzerland's Karl Barth. ⁴

I read the words of Time again and blinked, amazed that a writer of Updike's sophistication would admit to having undergone a religious crisis, and even more amazed to find him responding so positively to Barth's rigorously Christological theology. The discovery not only amazed but comforted me. If the two writers who represented the split between flesh and spirit could themselves be compatible, the one even indebted to the other, clearly there was hope that my own little life could remain healthy and whole and free from the threat of psychic blow-up in the future. I wrote Updike, expressing delight in his positive relationship with my theological mentor and inquiring whether Barth, who had recently died, had likewise appreciated the work of my literary mentor. Updike, in reply, suggested that I look up his article on Barth in Assorted Prose and then added:

I began reading him ten years ago and even now have a copy of his commentary on Romans beside my bed, to read a few pages at a time. I wrote him a year before his death, to express how much his books had meant to me, and his secretary wrote back a charming letter saying that Mr. Barth was "astonished" that this was the case. I doubt that he had read me, though many of my books are in German. The world seems emptier, now that he is gone. ⁵

⁴ Time, April 26,1968, p. 74.

⁵ Private letter from John Updike, December 8, 1969.

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Sometime later, I wrote the novelist again, this time enclosing an article by Barth in which the theologian sketches his relationship with Kierkegaard. Updike replied:

I read Barth's address on Kierkegaard with the deepest interest; one of my theological heroes scrutinizing the other, and so diffidently scoring the essential defects, or limits, of him. Really, Barth's mind, so invariably earnest, always penetrates to some depth tonic for me; he makes me feel that rare thing, with authors, called love-one loves a man for thinking and writing so well. ⁶

Updike's love for Barth finds obvious expression in such full-blown Barthian characters as the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, the adulterous minister who serves as the protagonist and epistolarian of A Month of Sundays ("I became a Barthian, in reaction against my father's liberalism, a smiling fumbling shadow of German Pietism, of Hegel's and Schleiermacher's and Ritschl's polywebbed attempt to have it all ways ") ⁷ and Professor Roger Lambert, the cuckolded theologian who serves as the protagonist and narrator of Roger's Version ("I took down my old copy of [Barth's The Word of God and the Word of Man,] a paperbound Torchbook read almost to pieces, its binding glue dried out and its margins marked again and again by the pencil of a young man who thought that here, definitively and forever, he had found the path, the voice, the style, and the method to save within himself and to present to others the Christian faith..."). ⁸

While Barth's name looms large in Updike's later fiction, Barth's spirit looms larger still in three early novels written during the period when Updike's religious crisis was at its height and his discovery of Barth's theology at its freshest. Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963), and Of the Farm (1965) all take us straight to the heart of Barth's covenant theology of grace. Rabbit, Run (in which we see the rejection of God's covenant) and The Centaur (in which we see the acceptance of God's covenant) explore the vertical dimension of the covenant, and Of the Farm explores the horizontal dimension. I propose to draw out the Barthian motifs in these three early novels in the hope of illuminating the fascinating interplay between the novelist and the theologian and of stimulating greater interest in their work.

I

The motions of Grace, the hardness of heart; external circumstances.-- Pascal, Pensee 507

Pascal's epigram, which serves as Updike's epigraph for Rabbit Run, is fleshed out in this novel in the story of an ex-high school basketball star whose days of glory have been tarnished by the grinding of time.

⁶ Private letter from John Updike, July 29, 1970.

⁷ A Month of Sundays (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 24.

⁸ Roger's Version (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 40.

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Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is now in his mid-twenties and saddled with an unimaginative job and an even less imaginative wife who, pregnant for the second time, has recently taken to drinking and watching TV incessantly. Feeling trapped by this inglorious net of external circumstances, Rabbit bolts for freedom, displaying at once the rodentine characteristics of his nickname and the Pascalian "hardness of heart." While thoroughly animalistic in his ways, Rabbit is nevertheless bedeviled by spiritual urgencies. The motions of grace may have a hard time penetrating his heart, but they continue to strike his skin even as the rays of the sun strike the retina of the blind. These invisible, yet constantly pressing, spiritual motions constitute the novel's deepest theme. This theme is verbalized at one point during a spirited exchange between two clergymen: Fritz Kruppenbach, the Lutheran pastor representing Rabbit's side of the family, and the Reverend Jack Eccles, the Episcopalian priest representing Rabbit's wife's side. In both name and outlook, Kruppenbach recalls the early Karl Barth who stormed upon the theological scene in the 1920s with his thundering proclamation of the revelation of God breaking vertically from above in Jesus Christ. This utterly transcendent message, avers Barth in a seminal 1922 address, gives rise to the clergyman's enduring perplexity, for the clergyman is dealing with something far more than the potentially solvable problems of daily life:

Obviously the people have no real need of our observations upon morality and culture, or even of our disquisitions upon religion, worship, and the possible existence of other worlds. All these things belong, indeed, to their life and are bound up, whether they know it or not, with their life's one need. But these things are not that need. ⁹

The one great need that people have is the need for God. That, according to Barth again, is what-or rather who-people are hungering and thirsting for in and through all their material and emotional and sexual yearnings:

When they come to us for help they do not really want to learn more about living: They want to learn more about what is on the farther edge of living-God. ¹⁰

Yet, it is precisely God that the clergy have so much trouble speaking about, either on account of embarrassed softness (as in the case of Eccles) or clumsy hardness (as in the case of Kruppenbach). The word "God" of course can easily be uttered, but the truth for which this word is an expression can only be communicated by the One who breaks vertically from above in God's own self-revealing power. The novel, illustrating Barth's analysis, shows Rabbit being pursued by a friendly hound of heaven in the person of Reverend Eccles. The

⁹ Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (Harper and Row: New York, 1957), p. 188. The address was originally delivered in Germany in 1922.

¹⁰ Ibid., P. 189.

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affable clergyman arranges for a game of golf with Rabbit and, once on the green, tries to understand what makes Rabbit run:

"Harry," he asks, sweetly, yet boldly, "why have you left her? You're obviously deeply involved with her."
"I told ya. There is this thing that wasn't there."
"What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?"
"Well if you're not sure it exists don't ask me. It's right up your alley. If you don't know nobody does." ¹¹

Eccles, his very name recalling the worldly wisdom of Ecclesiastes, doesn't know, he can't know, this "thing" that Rabbit is talking about. Such knowledge requires wisdom from on high, and so, appropriately, Eccles seeks out Kruppenbach, who stands there on Mt. Judge armed with Karl Barth's searing, transcendent gospel. The meeting between the two clergymen begins with Eccles offering Kruppenbach a balanced, insightful, but naturally all too this-worldly account of why Rabbit has fled his wife and forsaken his adult responsibilities:

"Do you think," Kruppenbach at last interrupts, "do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people's lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don't agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don't think that. I don't think that's your job." ¹²

Eccles doesn't want to hear Kruppenbach tell him what his job consists of, any more than the worldly ecclesiastics of the roaring twenties wanted Barth to tell them about the real task of the ministry. But Kruppenbach/Karl Barth tells anyway:

"If Gott wants to end misery He'll declare the Kingdom now. How big do you think your little friends look among the billions that God sees? In Bombay now they die in the streets every minute. You say role. I say you don't know what your role is or you'd be home locked in prayer. There is your role: to make yourself an exemplar of faith. There is where comfort comes from; faith, not what little finagling a body can do here and there, stirring the bucket.... In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful.... When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us. Anything else we can do and say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It's all in the Book-a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I'm serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil's work." ¹³

Kruppenbach's words seem almost a parody of Barth, and indeed, there are parodic elements here, rich with humor. Yet Kruppenbach/ Karl Barth/John Updike is ". , . serious. Make no mistake." However

¹¹ Rabbit, Run (Now York: Knopf, 1960), p. 133.

¹² Ibid., p. 169.

¹³ Ibid., p. 170.

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outrageously insensitive and theologically one-sided Kruppenbach may be, he is pinpointing the secret need underlying all other human needs. He is touching the ultimate desire that makes Rabbit run. Here is Barth himself expressing the matter without the entertaining parody:

The people do not need us to help them with the appurtances of their daily life. They look after those things without advice from us and with more wisdom than we usually credit them with. But they are aware that their daily life and all the questions which are factors in it are affected by a great What? Why? Whence? Whither? which stands like a minus sign before the whole parenthesis and changes to a new question all the questions inside-even those which may have already been answered. They have no answer for this question of questions, but are naive enough to assume that others may have. So they thrust us into our anomalous profession and put us into their pulpits and professorial chairs, that we may tell them about God and give them the answer to their ultimate question... It is evident that [the people] do not need us to help them live, but seem to need us to help them die: for their whole life is lived in the shadow of death. ¹⁴

Considered thematically as a whole, Rabbit, Run seeks to understand what makes Rabbit run, run from his wife and child, run into the arms of a prostitute, run back and forth between the two women, run until the poor bunny hardly knows where he is running, let alone why. What makes Rabbit run? Death, says Updike/Barth. That is the fundamental concern for thinking animals. And God, and God alone, can satisfy this grave concern. As another unsettled character conceded centuries ago: "Thou has made us for thyself, Lord: and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee." ¹⁵ What both the Eccleses of the church and the worldly-wise beyond the church's walls can't understand is that, in the end, faced with the end, neither worldly wisdom nor worldly pleasure, nothing worldly at all in fact, can still our restless hearts. Only God's covenant of grace fulfilled in Jesus Christ and made real by the motions of the Spirit, can still the storm that rages within. So long as that storm is not stilled, our hearts will remain restless and, like Rabbit, only with mounting despair and increasingly tragic consequences, we will go on running.

II

Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth. -- Karl Barth

Barth's anthropological statement, taken from the theologian's exposition of the Apostles' Creed in Dogmatics in Outline, serves as the theme-announcing epigraph for The Centaur. We are creatures of the

¹⁴ Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 187.

¹⁵ The most recent, and presumably final, installment of the Rabbit saga, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Knopf, 1990) shows Rabbit finding in the end, for all his restlessness, the rest concerning which Augustine speaks.

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earth, dust through and through, and yet, by virtue of the miracle of Grace, we are also citizens of heaven. George Caldwell, the novel's protagonist, dramatizes the centaur-like creature who thus lives on the boundary between heaven and earth. A high school science teacher by profession, and no spiritual athlete or cloistered religious by temperament, George's utterly earthly heart is nevertheless open to the motions of Grace. In company with his son one night, car trouble having stranded them in an out-of-town hotel, George gets into bed:

...after his body stopped rustling the sheets, there was a pause, and he said, "Don't worry about your old man, Peter. In God we trust. " ¹⁶

The joking vein conceals a serious affirmation of faith. Caldwell's trust in God may not dissolve the problems of earthly existence; indeed, George remains as harried and anxiety-ridden as Rabbit ever was. But there is this vast, incalculable difference: His earthly life is lived in the light of the watchful, caring eye of heaven. George realizes that God is his trustworthy partner in life. Earthly griefs and torments may break upon him, and do, but they cannot destroy this man who lives in the knowledge of God's indestructible covenant of Grace.

Throughout the novel, by way of testing this thesis, a number of things, everything in fact from the threat of cancer to the peril of small-town gossip, conspire to do George in. The school secretary, for example, goes after Caldwell after he inadvertently spies her in the arms of Olinger High's lecherous principal, Zimmerman. The secretary immediately questions the principal about Caldwell's trustworthiness. Zimmerman attempts to reassure her:

"The matter of trust has never come up between us."
"But now?"
"I trust him." ¹⁷

In terms of the natural story line, the secretary is asking the principal of Olinger High to dismiss one of his most popular teachers. At the mythological level, she is asking Zeus to kick the wise and gentle centaur off Mount Olympus. Theologically, she is asking the God of Israel and Father of Jesus Christ to tear up the covenant of grace. The request is bound to founder upon the rocks of reality:

"You overestimate my omnipotence. The man has been teaching for fifteen years. He has friends. He has tenure."
"But he really is incompetent, isn't he?"
"Is he? Competence is not so easy to define. He stays in the room with them, which is the most important thing. Furthermore, he's faithful to me. He's faithful."
"Why are you sticking up for him? He could destroy us both now."
"Come, come, my little bird. Human beings are harder to destroy than that." ¹⁸

¹⁶ The Centaur (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 168.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 216.

¹⁸ Ibid.

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Updike doesn't preach. He tells realistic stories with symbolic and theological overtones that, in effect, invite us to enter the discussion ourselves. Here we are invited to consider the goodness of our relationship with God. God's partnership with us in the covenant of grace disclosed in Christ does not, as has been said, solve our many problems. Yet, within our blood-soaked world, it does give us a place to stand. "Only goodness lives. But it does live." God is God and may be trusted to fill our lives with radiance and the world with joy. Toward the end of the novel, Caldwell remembers walking on some church errand with his clergyman father down a dangerous street in Passaic. It was a Saturday and...

...the men from the sulphur works were getting drunk. From within the double doors of a saloon there welled a poisonous laughter that seemed to distill all the cruelty and blasphemy in the world, and he wondered how such a noise could have a place under the sky of his father's God....

Then Caldwell remembers...

...his father turning and listening in his backwards collar to the laughter from the saloon and then smiling down to his son, "All joy belongs to the Lord."

It was half a joke but the boy took it to heart. All joy belongs to the Lord. Wherever in the faith and confusion and misery, a soul felt joy, there the Lord came and claimed it as his own; into barrooms and brothels and classrooms and alleys slippery with spittle, no matter how dark and scabbed and remote, in China or Africa or Brazil, wherever a moment of joy was felt, there the Lord stole and added to His enduring domain.... ¹⁹

Toward the end of his career, Karl Barth spoke of "the happy science" of evangelical theology, making it clear that, thanks to the covenant of grace, the first and last and decisive word about human life is this same irrepressible word of joy:

...what God wills for us is a helpful, healing and uplifting work, and what God does with us brings peace and joy. Because of this, God is really the God of the euangelion, the Evangel, the Word that is good for man because it is gracious. With its efforts, evangelical theology responds to this gracious Yes.... It is concerned... with Immanuel, God with us! Having this God for its object, it can be nothing else but the most thankful and happy science! ²⁰

III

Consequently, when in all honesty, I've recognized that man is a being in whom existence precedes essence, that he is a free being who, in various circumstances, can want only his freedom, I have at the same time recognized that I can want only the freedom of others. -- Sartre

The famous words of the French existentialist, which supply the epigraph for Of the Farm, signal Updike's intention to turn the

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 296.

²⁰Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Anchor Books: New York, 1964), pp. 9-11.

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spotlight from our vertical relationship with God to the horizontal relationship with our neighbor. Only Updike doesn't develop the theme of freedom in fellowship along Sartre's philosophical lines; he retains the Barthian flavor in his thought, dramaticizing in this novel the theological ethics that Karl Barth elaborated in his mature Church Dogmatics. ²¹

"In God we trust," George Caldwell said. Can God be trusted to know not only the secret of the liberating truth about our relationship with God but also the freedom-giving truth in our relationships with one another? Updike, like Barth, would appear to think so. Indeed, Updike once attempted to popularize Barth's understanding of the pivotal relationship between men and women in an essay that was eventually rejected by The New Yorker. Of the Farm was subsequently written, so Updike himself tells us, as a way of publicizing this essay's contents. ²² Updike's original essay, suitably transmuted and condensed, appears in the novel in the form of a sermon heard by Joey Robinson on the morning of the third day of Joey's weekend visit to the family farm. To this homecoming visit Joey has brought along his newly acquired second wife Peggy, his stepson Richard and, not least, his unresolved guilt and pain from shattered relationships in the past. Returning to his roots, Joey hopes to set these relationships right again.

The core of the problem involves Joey's relationship with his wife. The male-female relationship, coming to its crowning intensification in the husband-wife relationship, is, for Barth as well as Joey Robinson, the crux-the great opportunity but also the great challenge to the out-working of the horizontal dimension of the covenant. It is this relationship that Updike's fictional minister attempts to illumine in his Barthian-inspired sermon. The minister takes for his text the classical biblical passage calling us to live together in community and not in isolation: "And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make an help meet for him " ²³ Exalted vision! Yet the moment steps are taken to realize it, the sexual problematic rears its head: "And the Lord God caused a deep steep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man." ²⁴

Showing his Barthian colors, the minister doesn't flinch from trying to understand whatever theological light the Bible is here throwing on

²¹Barth, Church Dogmatics: A Selection (Harper and Row: New York, 1962). Updike appears to have had especially in mind the section "Man and Woman" (pp. 194-229), which includes selected passages from Barth's discussion of the relationship between Man and Woman under the rubric "Freedom in Fellowship" (Church Dogmatics, Volume 3, Part 4, pp. 116-240).

²² I am indebted here to the Catholic critic George Hunt, whose sleuthing work, reported in his book John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1980), unearths the literary pre-history of Of the Farm (p. 83).

²³ Of the Farm (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 149.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 151.

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sexual politics. The differences between the sexes in this story are not, accordingly, suppressed:

[Eve] was taken out of Adam. She was made after Adam. And she was made while Adam slept. What do these assertions tell us about men and women today? First, is not Woman's problem that she was taken out of Man, and is therefore a subspecies, less than equal to Man, a part of the whole?

Second, she was made after Adam. Think of God as a workman who learns as he goes. Man is the rougher and more ambitious artifact; Woman the finer and more efficient. ²⁵

These observations trigger, in the novel, polite laughter from the front pews-and that was twenty-five years ago. Today, of course, the minister's chauvinistically-worded remarks would elicit howls of outrage from people who are in no mood to joke about such matters. To be sure, the verbal clumsiness displayed by the minister is enough to make us all wince. Yet that clumsiness catches at something real. How hard it is for any of us to speak about these delicate yet crucial matters without sticking at least half a foot into the mouth! At this very moment, I am painfully aware of my own verbal clumsiness while trying to express what I think I hear Updike saying on the basis of what he thinks Barth is saying on the basis of what the theologian thinks God is saying to us all.

What is the new thing that is struggling to be said here? We live in a time when an abstract notion of equality threatens to flatten out the patterns, particularly the sexual patterns of God's good creation, leaving us with a bleak and soulless vision of sexual ambiguity. Granted, the sexual differences have been shamelessly exploited in the past, but, as the Catholics say, Abusus non tollit usum. Misuse does not negate right use. The differences between the sexes are not intrinsically bad but good. They indicate complementary needs, complementary strengths, complementary patterns that deepen and enrich our life together.

Updike's fictional minister, however clumsily, develops these themes after the fashion of Barth's penetrating discussion in his ethics of creation:

Karl Barth, the great theologian of our friendly rivals the Reformed Church, says of Woman: "Successfully or otherwise, she is in her whole existence an appeal to the kindness of Man." An appeal to the kindness of man. "For kindness," he goes on to say, "belongs originally to his particular responsibility as a man." ²⁶

Kindness and appeal to kindness: These are ethical concepts that need to be carefully distinguished from cultural categories. What is called for here is not a patriarchal culture in which the initiative of kind men becomes confused with culturally-conditioned expressions of

²⁵ Ibid., pp. 151-152.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 153.

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male dominance, and the appeal of women to the kindness of men mistaken for culturally-conditioned expressions of female subservience. Ethics, not culture, is at stake here.

Male initiative in kindness! According to Barth, this is the man's particular responsibility. And when the man rebels against his special calling and refuses to show kindness to the woman, he becomes weak however strong he may appear to be by way of compensatory psychological tactics. Barth notes that the weak man, compensating for his weakness by adopting tyrannical forms of behavior, may shrewdly attempt to conceal his tyrannical behavior under the guise of its opposite:

The tyrant need not be cruel or bad-tempered. There are quiet, gentle, amiable, easy-going tyrants who suit women only too well, and it is an open question in which form the male tyrant is worse and more dangerous. The distinctive characteristic of the tyrannical as opposed to the strong man is that he does not serve the order but makes the order serve himself. ²⁷

Female appeal to the kindness of man! This is the woman's special calling. And when she rebels and refuses to let her whole existence be an appeal to man's kindness, she becomes immature, however much she may compensate for her immaturity through aggressive, confrontational tactics. Again, Barth notes that the immature woman, compensating for her immaturity through aggressive behavior, may shrewdly cloak her aggressiveness under the guise of its opposite. For the woman is quite capable of playing on her side...

...the counterpart which the tyrant expects to see and which is necessary to the success of his own performance. She discovers in advance what is expected of her and fulfills it to the letter. She finds it convenient to make things as convenient as possible for him. She also finds it attractive-and the clever tyrant will Certainly support this view-to be his pliable kitten, his flattering mirror. In pleasing him, she thus pleases herself. And she, too, will play her part all the more craftily because it is only a part. ²⁸

These ethical moves and counter-moves, strategies and subterfuges, are objectified in the conversations and encounters that fuel Updike's quiet, yet powerful, psychological novel. Joey, to give but one example, recalls an incident with Peggy during an illicit weekend spent together before Joey left his first wife, Joan. He remembers Peggy saying:

"Don't come again. I'm getting worse at saying good-bye. I'm sorry, I'm no good at this. I wanted to be a nice simple mistress for you but I'm not big enough. I'm too possessive. Go, go back and be nice to Joan, I've messed us all up by falling in love." ²⁹

Peggy here craftily plays up to Joey's weakness through her compliance. She doesn't appeal to his kindness. There is no kindness

²⁷ Barth, Church Dogmatics: A Selection, pp. 224.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 225.

²⁹ Of the Farm, p. 87.

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to appeal to. Her moral protestations instead give Joey a good conscience and buck up his resolve cruelly to dispatch his wife and children. Joey remembers:

And when I first-prematurely--offered to leave Joan for her, she cried. Oh no! Your children! I could never make it up to you! ³⁰

How nice, we may think. A mistress with feelings! A homewrecker who cares! But it's all part of an elaborate game by which Peggy and Joey rationalize their moral failures. Joey is cruel (to Joan and his children, whom he is prepared to sacrifice for Peggy), and Peggy pretends to feel ever so guilty, thereby intensifying Joey's anguish, but also making him proud of such a woman who could feel so morally anguished, thus intensifying his resolve to sacrifice Joan for her. Joey is really nothing but a weak man, and Peggy an immature woman, and all the camouflaging that takes place in and through the psychological game-playing cannot alter the fact that the right relationship, the right order between men and women, has been contradicted with-literally and figuratively-heartbreaking results.

Only we should note that it is our hearts, and the hearts of our families, that break. The covenant partnership between man and woman remains inviolable. The partnership between the sexes is willed by God and sealed by Christ's blood. Far from breaking it, we can only break ourselves, and others, on it. As Updike's fictional minister concludes, in splendid Barthian fashion:

Kindness differs from righteousness as the grasses from the stars. Both are infinite. Without conscious confession of God, there can be no righteousness. But kindness needs no belief. It is implicit in the nature of Creation, in the very curves and amplitude of God's fashioning. ³¹

IV

While Barthian characters continue to walk through the pages of Updike's later fiction, the novelist has not seen fit to go on dramatizing Barthian themes with anything like the intensity he displayed in his early fiction. Updike, indeed, hardly even reads Barth now, rarely reads any of his theological mentors. His life, as he tells us in his recently published memoirs...

...is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No.³²

What Barth gave him, when Updike needed it, was a good intellectual defense for the Yes to life that Christianity proposes. "I'm very grateful to him," Updike acknowledged in a 1978 television interview with Dick Cavett:

³⁰ Ibid., p. 88.

³¹ Ibid., p. 154.

³² Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989) pp. 230-231.

425 - John Updike and the Funny Theologian

1 stopped reading Barth although I just did read a book about him, as a matter of fact. But there was a time in my late twenties, early thirties when I was very frightened. Frightened of being alive, and somehow Barth eased away the fear and enabled me to go on living. It's as simple and as complex as that. ³³

It was during this same interview that Updike talked about Barth's voice:

...the voice of the man aside from what he is saying... very comforting, kind of fatherly, gravelly, omniscient. Amused, even? He's a funny, a funny theologian. They're not all funny. ³⁴

And what, pray tell, did this funny theologian think of John Updike? Updike himself doubts that Barth ever read him, although, in one of Barth's posthumously published letters, there is a tantalizing reference in which the theologian requests a copy of Updike's review article of his book on Anselm. ³⁵ Unfortunately, we never learn what Barth made of the novelist's brilliant exposition and searching critique of Barth's small but pivotal study of St. Anselm's theological method. And that lone reference, as far as I can tell, is the only time the theologian ever mentioned John Updike.

We may surmise, however, that Barth, in heaven, has become well-acquainted with the works of this writer whom literary critics have repeatedly called "the Mozart of our technological era." And from our earthbound perspective, hints continue to surface indicating that Barth would find in Updike the same congenial spirit that Updike discovered in Barth. The book about Barth that Updike mentioned to Dick Cavett, for example, was almost certainly Eberhard Busch's biography, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts. Reviewing this book in The New Yorker, Updike noted that Barth read a goodly amount of fiction and had some definite things to say about the role of the contemporary novelist. Barth's own words, quoted by Updike in the review, would seem to augur a remarkable sympathy for Updike's own literary goals and achievement:

I expect the contemporary novelist to show me man as he always is in the man of today, my contemporary--and vice versa, to show me my contemporary in man as he always is... The novel should have no plans for educating me, but should leave me to reflect (or not) on the basis of the portrait with which I am presented. ³⁶

³³ "The Dick Cavett Show: A Conversation with John Updike," December 1978, p. 10.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Barth, Letters: 1961-1968 (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1981), p. 139. Barth's request for Updike's review of Fides quaerens intellectum was prompted by a remark in 1963 by the President of Princeton Theological Seminary, James McCord.

³⁶ Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism, (New York: Knopf, 1983) p. 831.