Dear Tony,
There’s a passage in Gertrude and Claudius that I want to quote, on the general theme of women and their physical and sexual experiences. The passage comes at the moment when Queen Gertrude, alone in a room with Claudius, finally gives herself to him. Claudius lifts off her silk tunic and her linen chemise. She is naked.
But wait! I have to interject that, at this salacious turning point in Updike’s novel, Gertrude’s name is Geruthe, and Claudius’s is Fengon. And so:
Geruthe pressed her rosy ripeness into the abrasions of Fengon’s rough clothes. His riding shirt had leather shoulders to cushion mail. She inhaled the rain-drenched dead-animal smell. “Protect me,” she whispered, adhering tight against him as if for concealment, her lips seeking the gap in his bristling wet beard. Afterwards …
If there is anyone who could reliably tell us what it’s like to be an aroused and naked woman, adulterously embracing a rain-soaked bearded knight in armor, who, however, does not happen to be wearing his armor right now, but is wearing armor’s damp leathery smelly undergarments–if anyone could tell us, surely it would have to be John Updike. There are many pleasures to be had in reading his novels, and we have invoked some of the weightier ones, maybe to excess. But the main pleasure has got to be the simplest one of all. Reading a few pages of Updike is like running your hand through a box full of jewels. The most amazing things sparkle up at you, one after another–things seen from angles you’ve never imagined, or in a light you’ve never pictured.
Gertrude and Claudius’s great merit is the chance it gives Updike to go tearing through a medieval museum like a wide-eyed little boy, describing wonders on every side–costumes, customs, falcon gewgaws, trinkets from faraway Byzantium, memories of pre-Christian pagan rites, and splendidly exotic poisons that are impossible to identify once they have worked their usefully bloody effect. Updike does do his research, and Gertrude and Claudius isn’t the first instance of it, either. In the Beauty of the Lilies and Memories of the Ford Administration are filled to bursting with what seem to me genuine historical insights. The only serious problem with Gertrude and Claudius is–but before I say, let me turn to the point you raise about Shakespeare and Harold Bloom and the inventing of what it means to be human.
The idea that Shakespeare invented the modern idea of being human is not a new one. Victor Hugo wrote a book called William Shakespeare in which he made the same case, though Hugo spread the credit also to Aeschylus and Dante and several other people, the geniuses of literature and thought, whose achievements have lifted mankind out of muck of savagery. There’s something to that idea, I would think, even if, fresh from reading Updike, anyone might add that mankind and the muck are not so far apart as could be hoped. Shakespeare, as you point out, has always meant a great deal to us moderns because he seems to be looking backward and forward at once–back toward the Middle Ages, forward to our own times.
You are right to observe that Updike’s novel tries to evoke that same feeling of transition–of being caught halfway between medieval barbarism and modern skepticism. But this is what strikes me as silliest in Gertrude and Claudius. In the Danish court at Elsinore, Gertrude tries to explain to her husband what young Prince Hamlet has been studying, away at the university in Wittenberg:
There’s a ferment going on in cultivated circles to the south, various bits of ancient knowledge the Crusaders brought back, the Arabs and the Byzantine monks have been transcribing them for centuries but nobody read them, something about a new way of looking at the world scientifically, whatever that is, letting nature tell us about itself in little details. … Instead of taking everything on faith from the priests and the Bible, I mean.
To which the king replies:
You confirm my worst suspicions. My son is down there on the Elbe learning how to doubt–learning mockery and blasphemy when I’m trying to install piety and order into a scheming, rebellious conglomeration of Danes.
Those sentences sound ridiculous. They sound like someone’s term paper on the Renaissance. They devastate the mood. There are a lot of those passages, too, and they would sink Gertrude and Claudius if it weren’t for a steady supply of happy phrases like “scheming, rebellious conglomeration of Danes,” which, in their wry buoyancy, keep the novel afloat.
But, enough on Gertrude and Claudius. Tony, what you and I should try to figure out, on some future occasion (now that our electro-epistolary exchange has ended), is the answer to one remaining question. Namely: If you and I and so many people look on Updike with such warm enthusiasm, why do so many other perfectly reasonable people, book-lovers, look on him quite differently? Among the best-known writers of today, Updike seems to me the most controversial–the most thoroughly disliked, even despised, by some people. More than Roth, more than Bellow. Why is that? I don’t know the answer.
yours,
Paul
