Book: Seek My Face
Author: John Updike
Price: Hamish Hamilton, ?16.99
John Updike studied art in London as a young man, and although he abandoned his artistic ambitions early on, he never gave up thinking about art. Reviewing exhibitions has been a constant and important part of his prolific output. And Updike, at his best, is capable of conjuring a density of sensual description, a fine-grained intimacy; a literary equivalent to Dutch interior painting.
Description, however, exists in tension with linear narration, and Updike is often criticised for his novels' meandering plotlessness. Unfazed by such criticisms, his sentences get longer and denser. Updike tosses it all in. He has said that description is an act of praise, but one often senses a metaphysical anguish behind his outpourings, an abhorrence of vacuums that is occasionally inspiring but just as often wearying.
As a novel, Seek My Face, which takes the life of Jackson Pollock and American postwar art as its subject, is a long way from Updike's best. He gives the impression of swishing the lives and thoughts of his characters around his palate like a wine taster, and the results are less than intoxicating. Nevertheless, Seek My Face does succeed on another level, as a sort of lightly fictionalised essay, whose intellectual themes are skilfully intertwined through the narrative. The project seems to have emerged from a review Updike wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1998 of the Pollock show then attracting huge crowds at the Museum of Modern Art. "America loves an emblematic life," began Updike, "and the Pollock show... is arranged to tell a tale of long struggle, high triumph and swift fall. The category of 'the heroic,' no longer applicable to political figures (mendacious bean-counters) and soldiers (dull tools of wicked warmongers) and athletes (at those salaries!), can still be applied to artists, especially abstract expressionists. They worked on a heroic scale, and made heroic breakthroughs into sublime simplifications-Rothko's hovering rectangles of colour, Kline's sweeping bars of black, De Kooning's infernos of flickering, flashing strokes and, above all, Pollock's epic drips."
This commentary provides a framework of sorts for Seek My Face, which takes the form of a present-day interview between the Pollock character's aged painter-wife, Hope (based on Lee Krasner), and a young woman from an online magazine who has come from New York to interview her. All the painters mentioned above, and a few more besides, are referred to in the course of the conversation, usually indicated by cursory and less than subtle name changes (Barnett Newman is "Bernie Nova"; Robert Motherwell is "Roger Merebien").
Updike writes about the remarkable breakthroughs made by the best of these artists. "Someone of your generation," Hope tells her interrogator, "probably can't believe how crucial, how important, how huge painting seemed then." Updike himself is anything but a minimalist, so the "sublime simplifications" of the abstract expressionists inevitably fill him with unease. "They all still spoke of painting in terms of self-exploration and an agonised authenticity that would revolutionise the world and whatnot," says Hope, "but the results were a little like company logos, everybody working on the scale of 19th-century academic art but each of them having come up with some eye-catching simplification."
The abstract expressionists' obsession with the "sublime" as an aesthetic category was the key, Updike implies, to their successes and failures. In trying to "ambush" the divine, they courted a kind of emptiness or nihilism. Immanuel Kant believed that the true sublime (which occurs when the imagination cracks, or fails, in the face of the too-huge, the too-powerful) obliterates the image, and artists like Newman and Rothko subscribed to similar notions. The "sublime gambit," one feels, is the real source of Updike's interest in Pollock. But he smells something rotten in the reductive strategies of abstract expressionism: a shunning of the unruliness and complexity of the material world, a denial of the simply beautiful or the sensual.
The notion of sublimity hinges on the Old Testament injunction against graven images, which has mired western art in confusion and occasional eruptions of iconoclasm for thousands of years. Likewise, the injunctions of Islam against pictorial "likenesses" led Muslim artists into an almost wholly abstract tradition. In the west, the modernist schools of abstraction, from Kandinsky and Malevich through to Pollock and Rothko, picked up where both the Islamic tradition and the iconoclasts left off; their work was a bid to reinvest western art with a sense of the divine which went beyond "mere" illusionism.
There have always been Christian arguments to counter too literal an interpretation of the second commandment, revolving around the New Testament's central story of the invisible God's incarnation as Christ. The fact that God took on human form cancelled out the injunction against representation and sanctioned a new, compassionate emphasis on the human body and face.
For his title, however, Updike has not felt the need to take refuge in New Testament-inspired revisionism. A practising Christian himself, he has drawn instead on an Old Testament quotation, from Psalms:
You speak in my heart and say, "seek my face."
Your face, Lord, will I seek
Indeed, the face is a crucial motif throughout the book. Sometimes it indicates immersion in the "fallen" material world ("...crowns and implants most of them; her smile is a lie"); other times, usually via the eyes, it points, in characteristic Updikean fashion, to something at once physical and transcendent ("our eyes achieve the radiance they do because on top of the film of water, which smooths out some of the cornea's microscopic irregularities, little sebaceous glands along the edge of the lids, literally thousands of them, secrete a coating of oil which smooths it out even further").
The face motif is deftly extended to Hope's relationship with Zack, whose "face which she had always thought beautiful... struck her now as a wall, an ungrateful blankness at which she had thrown her young life and wasted it." And it is even used to convey something telling about Hope's second husband, the sphinx-like, talented Guy Holloway (a rather unconvincing hybrid of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and goodness knows who else). Guy's face "was a face that presented little friction to the world" in contrast to Zack, who was "all friction-that's why he was stuck so much of the time."
All these observations are to be taken, if you will, at face value, but they also operate on a theological level. In his review of the Pollock retrospective, Updike concluded: "He is a heroic American, no doubt, in creating himself from scratch; what this inclusive show makes clear is how close he came to leaving just scratch behind." The comment chimes with something Hope says of her late husband, Zack, who "really had very little talent... just this terrible drive to be great."
Of course, it turned out that that drive-for a period, anyway-proved to be sufficient. Pollock really did produce something extraordinary and Updike, acknowledging this, seems beguiled. How does one account for it? What is the essence of sublime art? Hope's father used to believe it was just "howls for recognition." But the astonishing thing about Zack's work to her is that, "for all the violence of the details, the splattering, the gummy pooling, the overall effect has this, this quiet."
Updike seems acutely sensitive to the possibility that art, and even the world it tries to distil and sublimate, may finally amount to very little. Hope, although "afraid of finding nothing," clearly feels a need-like Updike himself-to continue her pursuit, to continue to "seek the face" of whatever it is she is seeking. While she was married to Zack, it seemed to her, "in my ignorance," that in his painting "there was too much groping and not enough finding." Now, more thoughtful and mature, she muses that "art has to fumble not to be decadent, it has to be just on the cusp of the possible, or we can't respond to it... It has to be about us, just a skin away from being nothing. Not nothing perhaps... but tumbling back into the radiance." That last phrase is itself a kind of groping, a beautiful figure of speech that may mean something or may, in fact, amount to nothing at all. Quintessential Updike.
