John Updike and the A&P of the mind *

Last week I found myself again on the same route from Southern NH to Wingaersheek Beach travelled on by my family for more than fifty years. Originally the route we traced followed the Merrimack River between my mother’s childhood home in Sandown NH to our beach house in Gloucester. The route as it passes through Essex and Ipswich is pastoral, full of old New England architecture and plenty of antique shops. With many of the large estates still intact one can imagine that it will never change. In those days it was my mother who drove accompanied by my grandmother. I was often on the floor of the car playing with my cars not considered unusual in the Fifties before seat belts. My younger sister was typically suffering from carsickness as we debated whether to pull over or hope that the nausea would pass and my older sister would be gloating over her ice cream cone that she was still savoring long after I had gobbled down mine.  Now the back and forth which starts from our house in Durham NH to the beach home that we have since inherited has become routine.  It was the requisite visits as we monitored my mother’s aging and then the long process of preparing the house for Summer rental.   As memories are embedded in the scenery I relate a few of them to my daughter who rolls her eyes and reminds me that these recollections are oft repeated. I came up with what I hoped was a fresh memory of seeing John Updike crossing the street in Ipswich. My daughter Eve acknowledged that she had never heard that story before. Not much of a story, just a flash of recognition as the author tried to negotiate the five-corner intersection of downtown Ipswich.

The memory instigated by our slow traversal of the center of Ipswich was suddenly interrupted by the telltale crunch of being rear-ended. I looked behind me and caught the gestures of the driver who acknowledged the incident. We signaled to each other to turn into the next side street to appraise the damage. The accident took place in front of the fire station. Before long several of the firemen walked over to see what was going on, presumably to make sure there were no gasoline leaks. They lingered awhile but one of them remained. While I was looking for a pen to take down driver license #s and insurance information, he took out his cell phone and in the most efficient modern way photographed everything, the damage to the car, my license and insurance card. My daughter, equally at ease with the powers of the cell phone did the same of his documentation. I thanked him for his consideration and attention to the accident. He introduced himself as the father of the young man who just plowed into me. Someone in the back seat of a passing car haled us and asked if we needed any help. The fireman chuckled that it was the local tower looking for an opportunity to make a buck. The accident had thrust me into the middle of a small community of Ipswich “locals”.

As we awaited the arrival of the Police to document the accident, I thought I would pick up where I left off before the accident and ask them if they had known their famous Ipswich resident John Updike. Yes! they knew of him and saw him around town. The fireman asked me if I knew that the Rite Aid down the street had once been the A&P, that was the local of one his best known short stories. I recalled having read it, vaguely remembering that the narrator was a store clerk.

Since the recent death of Philip Roth, there has been a lot of chatter about Updike: Their friendship and their falling out. Who was the greater author? Both had their territory: Roth, the chronicler of New Jersey and in particular the Jewish immigrant’s move  from the city to the suburbs and the middle class. Updike’s territory was Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and in particular that of the Protestant America. Today, Updike is typified as a narcissistic white male by David Foster Wallace, who would have not survived unscathed the #metoo era. Roth in his later years was somewhat reclusive but socialized on the  phone with with the guardian of the Western Canon Harold Bloom.

Once home, I decided to read the short story “A&P”. Online there were a few copies most transcribed with misspellings. A neat version was a PDF from the Littleton NH library. The setting was undoubtedly Ipswich and the Rite Aid down the street had the emblematic A&P cupola on it. It was about the right size for an A&P .The company  went out of business before the era of the megastores.

It was a good read.  The first time around I found the conformity/non-conformity take a little stale. The corporate versus sexual dichotomy may have been part of the early percolation of the sexual revolution and carried more psychic impact when the work was first published. A split that was less pronounced in the story but indelibly there was that the girls were upper class and Sammy, the nineteen old towny, was aware of it in the way they moved and talked and in the choice of hors d’oeuvres that they were picking up for their parent’s cocktail party. Just the nonchalance of the girls walking into a supermarket in their bathing suits implies that they didn’t feel compelled to follow the priggish rules of the middle class.  These girls probably lived in those beautiful estates that are protected by conservation easements that make the ride through Essex and Ipswich so scenic. I once wrote a blog about the insider/outsider phenomenon experienced by the Armenians.  As a member of youth sailing at the Annisquam Yacht Club, coming from the then decidedly middle class Wingaersheek Beach I experienced first hand the self-assuredness of the well-to-do descendants of the Mayflower in contrast to my adolescent insecurity. They lived in the large shingle style estates that probably had been in their families since the 19thc. Clearly Updike was impressed by their demeanor that radiated self confidence. In the end the narrator tries to insert himself into the story by making an attempt to resolve all the moral quandaries he has set up within the writing. He quits his job in protest of the boss’s embarrassing the girls for walking in to his store half-naked. Sammy may have hoped they would have noticed but like the rich in "The Great Gatsby" they move on unaware of the effect they have had on others.

Like so much literature the story is about the nature of writing itself: the artist as observer, always looking from the outside in. Updike keeps trying to pin down the meaning of the sensory experiences; what do they mean in terms of larger societal constructs:  corporate/sexual or rich and poor. So much of the writing is just raw data: e.g. the movements of the actors through the store being like a pinball game and the detailed description of the cloth and color of the girl’s bathing suits. He has created a world for himself held up by incisive description and cultural insights but in the last lines of the story it forbodes a life time that is described as going to be hard. Could it be because he will always be on the outside looking in, never fully owning or identifying with the setting in which his description takes place. For the corporation the world is a site for the display of its brands. The artist, is a competitor in this realm but his power only comes from the fertility and staying power of his imagination not his bank account. However, we can say Updike has had the last word: his A&P of the mind* still exists whereas the original is long gone.

*a play on Henry Miller's comment about Coney Island as a state of mind that was used as a title of  Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind"

Thinking back on more than twenty years of art criticism by Jed Perl on the occasion of the publication of his most recent collection of essays by the Eakins Press Foundation

 Phil Press, fellow Boston artist and founder of Cambridge Adult Ed's Studio School, first introduced me to Jed Perl and his writing in the early 90’s. They had met as young painters at Skowhegan in the early 70’s and remained in contact during the intervening years. Occasionally, Phil would invite Jed to Cambridge to lecture to his students on some topic related to the New York art scene. I would always make a point of attending these talks, as his insights into the vacuity and hype of whatever scene was current, were an inspiration to persevere in my solitary struggle to make paint and painting a vital language of self-expression.

We are all three products of the figurative revival of the late sixties and early 70’s that gave credence to the language of painting from observation, a method that had been brutally sidelined by Abstraction, Conceptualism, Minimalism and Pop Art. Phil had studied at the Studio School in New York City, which was a stopping off place for many painters who wanted to work in a representational visual language, when it was hard to find such instruction elsewhere in the academic world. Phil went on to get his MFA at Queens where Louis Finkelstein, a luminary of the figurative movement taught . Phil seems to think that Jed studied painting for a while at Brooklyn College, where Philip Pearlstein and Gabriel Laderman were instructors. Laderman was known as much for his polemics on behalf of figuration as for his painting. I studied at Yale, whose identity as a center of the avant-garde was tempered by the arrival of Bill Bailey, who succeeded in bringing in as visitng artists many of the above-mentioned artists of the figurative movement.

To understand Perl’s philosophical stance, that he has steadfastly held for more than twenty years, it is necessary to see his thinking as formed in the context of that figurative revival. For a moment and in retrospect a very brief moment there was the hope of an alternative direction for art, or at least that figuration could continue on a track parallel to the avant-garde. I have written elsewhere that figuration wanted to revive the particular experience of being in the here and now, in contradistinction to an art object totally Greenbergian: on the one hand with its obsession with absolute forms, and mediatized on the other with its need to place the individual in an absolute socially defined identity. I recall vividly wandering the museums and galleries of New York and Boston and feeling a deep sense of alienation from the minimalsim, the conceptual sculpture, the media based Warhols, all issuing from an extreme rational analysis of modern life. A language that jumped out of the physical space that our bodies moved in replaced the magic of  art that could make real and tactile the present. There was never the smell of grass, the wind in your face nor the vibrancy of the seasons. The paintings of Gretna Campbell or Stanley Lewis that Perl admired were  literally a breathe of fresh air. The human existential reality of being in the world had found a place to stand. For one brief moment the grey clouds of rationalism opened up to a vivid blue sky where the senses of the body pulsated.

Another key to understanding Jed Perl can be found in his admiration for the great critics and artists of early modernism. Confronted, with now several generations of American artists that see art as  providing a wonderful playground for experimentation with lifestyles, Jed, whose understanding of the tradition of Western Art allows him to talk intelligently about Chardin, Poussin and Vuillard sets up camp in the tradition of the art critics and shapers of early Modernism, such as Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro, Lincoln Kirstein, (all of whom are dedicated individual essays in the “Magicians and Charlatans”). When the Bourgeois world of the 19th c fell apart under the weight of science, there was in part a dancing on the grave of the past by the new guard but there was also the awareness that something had been lost as well as gained.The representational language that had held the real in its thrall for over 500 years had broken open, and that deconstruction liberated incredible energy. Perl sees that energy in Picasso’s semantizing of Cezanne in the “Les Demoiselles ‘d’Avignon” or in his appreciation of Edmund Wilson’s understanding of Stravinsky’s musical energy. These were makers and shapers (the title of his essay on Lincoln Kirstein) who would pick up the pieces like Eliot and Pound and make new realities. They knew and cherished the pieces of the past and ruefully accepted that the Europe they loved had suffered a catastrophe and like Humpty Dumpty no one could put the pieces back together again.  There still was the will to recreate a whole in the face of the wholesale destruction of the first World War. In the laissez-faire aesthetics of the contemporary art scene (the title of the introductory essay in this new collection of his essays) that is hell bent on chopping up bourgeois reality into smaller and smaller pieces, Perl sees no love of history. And when the past is referenced by contemporary figurative artist like Currin it is distorted to appear to be as ironic and cynical as their own work. It is brought down to their level.

I still have several photocopies of Perl’s essay from the October, 1992 issue of “The New Republic”, entitled ”The Art Nobody Knows” . It spells out the way in which the art scene, in its ever anxious need to promote the “new”, makes it impossible for those artists, who see art as a coherent language, deserving a lifetime of study, from having the air, space and money to pursue that goal. I would hand the article out to my painting students at the Art Institute of Boston in order to give them some perspective on where the tenets of my classroom came from and hopefully encouraging them to avoid being sucked into the latest fad at Yale and New York. The essay referenced the English artists Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as paragons of figuration. From a pedagogical point of view, they were valuable as stopping off points on the road from figuration to abstraction, which was the essential goal of my teaching experience. Unfortunately, few of my students, despite intelligence and talent, heeded Perl’s message. Their talent got them to Yale and to New York, but the human all to human need to belong to a status quo got the better of them, and they imprinted on whatever was then the current scene.

Many of the issues in the essays in “Magicians and Charlatans”, culled from his writing of the last decade, are already present in the essay I have from 1992:  The Whitney Biennials, commercialism, the art industry, the importance of the slow making of art over time, the need for patterns and form and the way the structure and culture of the New York scene make this slow growth impossible. His interests represent the effort of someone ,who cares not only about New York artists, but always tries to put his finger on the pulse of a larger meaning or zeitgeist in which they all participate. I recall a more recent essay that appeared in the “The New Republic” on the Cindy Sherman retrospective at t MOMA, that was sent to me by Mark Gottsegen, the author of the “Painters Handbook.” This one pulled out all the verbal weaponry and pearls of wisdom that he is capable of. It was a full-fledged frontal assault on Sherman, deconstructor of female myths mythologized in a major retrospective. After the smoke had cleared she still remained intact. Cindy as Perl points out is an industry supported by dealers, curators and collectors. When you unleash an assault on her you are only one person fighting an army.

The worlds of Rome and Bernini are so well fathomed as to appear as fresh and new as the early 20thc in New York, that he exquisitely depicts through essays on the writing of Meyer Schapiro, Edmund Wilson and Lincoln Kirstein. The contemporary scene of Oursler, Viola, Gober and Currin leave him for the most part without a label. Except for Gober they are dismissed as lacking the seriousness that he would like to see in their work but he does not dismiss them out of hand. He gives them their day, tries to understand why they have achieved their notoriety. Why this refusal to give them and others such as Yuskavage, Heilmann and Peytona a positive value? Those artists, who were reviewed in the earlier part of our new millennium are probably past their shelf life and for all I know aren’t even taken seriously today by even the hipster critics. I have to agree with Perl there is something missing. But what?

To shed some light on this, it is interesting to try to sift out Perl’s politics. I am sure he often gets backed into a corner where someone says: if you are so conservative in your tastes in art you must be right wing in your politics. He never hesitates to say he is for Obama or that Reagan destroyed the economy by cutting taxes, which in turn inflated the art market of the 80’s. In art he is an elitist but in politics he is an egalitarian. This distinction is current in some circles of New York Intelligentsia and was said of William A Henry 3rd’s book “In Defense of Elitism” in the early 90’s, that he bemoaned the weakening of the hierarchy of excellence over popular culture but was still egalitarian in his politics.  Maybe this is why Perl uses the economic expression laissez –faire culture (the title of the introductory essay of this collection) to point blame to the conflation of commerce and art culture, as seen in his attack on the multi-millionaire Eli Broad’s museum in LA, where the endower and the endowed see no separation of interest. The collector who purchases Jeff Koons gilded pop items then builds a museum/supermarket to promote his purchases.  Castelli is depicted as no more than a crass opportunist. The guilty parties are the capitalists, that need something to sell the public and choose art that pretends to challenge the commercial enterprise they are involved in.  I beg to differ: I think a different reading of history would point to egalitarianism as the cause of the vacuity in the art of today as much as unfettered capitalism.

I think what haunts Perl’s work is that the generation that came of age after the Abstract Expressionists, in particular, the boomers let themselves be defined by the media. It was a cultural narcissism in extremis, where the inner world becomes "colonized" by the outer world. But what if all these successions of styles and cultural moods only reflect a slow unraveling or winding down of the unmediated self. The Abstract Expressionists had found some latent strength in the systems of Jung and Freud to map out an inner landscape. There were drives to be defined that could push out against the world and psyches rooted in a collective consciousness that would surprise us about our true selves. These systems were a modern religion for those who were no longer capable or willing to embrace traditional religion.They created a map of an inner life that has  been replaced by several generations now that are medicated and mediated on all levels. If the inner and outer are the same, can we even talk about the self.The hipsters don't care.

”Postcards from Nowhere” points out that the art collectors and the artist are on the same page. This state of things could be seen as the result of the loss of a mandarin class, of an elite that could differentiate the good and the bad, but it must follow that this demise of an intellectual aristocracy will end in an egalitarianism that validates any and every attempt of the masses at self- expressions. I think the modern art scene is the result of "here comes everybody". The skill necessary for painting is abandoned for installation that appeals to the practical craft of the ordinary citizen as renovator of her own space. Painting was always based on the metaphysical power of the artist’s gaze to take their momentary observation and turn it into the eternal moment. Marxist critics felt that stability came from having money to buy the time to stop the visual clock and impose their vision on the world. Now that the metaphysical base has been undercut, there is no direct contact between man and nature, man and the cosmos that one finds in Cezanne and Van Gogh or the raw imposition of the Freudian id on form that you find in Picasso or Pollock. Warhol, our John Singer Sargent, best embodies this shift of private consciousness to a totally mediated self. Now the parts are reduced to miniscule grains that are too small to piece together. To quote Nietzsche:

“Are we not well on the way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small soft round, unending sand.” The ability to put things back together has long past? The reduction ad infinitum has become a reduction ad absurdum/. Perl is the chronicler of this never-ending train wreck.


I find it telling that the frontispiece of “Magicians and Charlatans” is dedicated to Leon (presumably Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of “The New Republic”) with a quote from Po Chu-i (a Tang poet):

To Leon:

"Till day broke we sat in the moon’s clear light
 Laughing and singing, and yet never grew tired.
 In Ch’ing-an, the place of profit and fame,
 Such moods as this, how many men know?"

If Po chu-i, who was exiled for having violated Confucian precepts in his role as an assistant to the Emperor, had been born during the Maoist cultural revolution, such private moods would have made him a candidate for a good rinse of brainwashing. What Perl could explore more thoroughly is that the Marxist notion of how the bourgeoisie suffers from “false consciousness” has so permeated our culture that, although we don’t send our artists off to a gulag for not toeing the party line, there is a shunning that is prevalent in academia for those who are not always current in their tastes. The real heroes for Perl are those artists that didn’t win the jackpot. Whether they rose to the stature of those artists like Matisse that they emulated is not the issue as Updike and Plagens insist it is in their reading of Perl. Artists such as Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, and Stanley Lewis embody and embodied a tradition of artists, who understood painting as being as subtle and structured as the language we speak. You can’t judge them badly for not rising to the same level as their predecessors. They thought it more valuable to codify the magic of the language of seeing and like the monks of Ireland in the Dark Ages, who preserved the wisdom of Greek and Latin culture in their codexes, to save it from the barbaric hordes.The invasions have already begun: to quote Perl:"For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince and now Cai-Guo qiang, having a retrospective at the Guggenheim is like being a Visigoth, who has been given the keys to Rome."

Perl’s essays are a lamentation for a paradise lost, for what little we have gained on this modern train to nowhere. Like the old man on the train who bemoans the fact that he missed his stop but won’t get off at the next stop to take the next train back, he understands the arrow of time points  forward. But maybe we have the wrong metaphor. Maybe we are just going around in circles.