Memories of the Ford Administration Book

"We all dream of becoming a child again. The worst of us as well as the best. Perhaps the worst most of all!" THE WILD BUNCH.

"Billy Brown's soul lies a-moldering in the crib, but his body goes crawling on." EUGENE O'NEILL

The plot of FORD ADMINISTRATION is a typical Updike plot. Alf Clayton is a small-time history professor at a small-time college in New England in the mid-Seventies. He's cheating on his wife with another faculty wife, and at the same time he's trying to write a book about President James Buchanan, the last President before the Lincoln and the Civil War. Just as Buchanan was never able to figure out which side he was on, North or South, slavery or abolition, so Alf can't make up his mind between his warm, relaxed, slightly bohemian wife Norma ("The Queen of Disorder") and younger, sexier, more aristocratic Genevieve ("The Perfect Wife.")

There's something creepy about Updike. This is a human being who hates being alive, and fears the very condition of being human. What drives him is fear, and it's not just fear of a specific enemy, like women or blacks. It's fear of having to acknowledge that other human beings actually exist. I'm sure there's some psychologist like Erickson who could explain it in terms of developmental stages. A baby has no knowledge of anything outside of himself and the nipple. Everything else in the world is a threat, except the nipple. Updike thinks of that state as "innocence." And he keeps trying to recapture it. He feels enormous nostalgia for Buchanan's world because in that world a white man could live as if blacks and women didn't exist. What he loves about "history" is that it can be written in such a way that painful facts painlessly disappear. He misses the days when black lives didn't matter. Buchanan is his hero because in his mind Buchanan was a victim -- the real criminals are the abolitionists who insisted on making slavery a moral issue.

For John Updike, the real horror is that human beings have to choose between right and wrong. Wouldn't it be easier to stay a child forever, to be incapable of seeing, feeling, or thinking? That's how Updike defines innocence. Some would call it death. But that doesn't matter, because God is dead anyway, and there's no point in trying to understand history or your own mistakes, because history isn't real, nothing can be documented and nothing is real except your own body's infantile demands. But hey, it's the Ford years, and everyone's doing it. Whatever it happens to be.

You will not believe how lazy Updike is with his writing. Like, "here's a list of famous people who died in 1974. Here's a list of the top pop hits on the radio. Maybe we talked about these things at the party. Maybe we didn't. What difference does it make, anyway? God is Dead. Buchanan is dead. The Civil War was pointless. Why do those blacks keep making trouble?"

In spite of all the information dumping, facts are the real enemy in this book. There are no facts about what slavery was really like. Still, there are some funny passages, like the faculty part where Alf pretty much rips on everyone . . . in his head, of course. He doesn't like confrontations. And the scene where he's about to seduce a jaded woman his own age, and he claims that he was "disappointed" the Korean War ended before he got a chance to fight. ("But for these vile guns, he'd have been a soldier too!" SHAKESPEARE) Alf is clearly a coward, like Buchanan. But simple cowardice would be understandable. It's the creepy way he tries to put down other people, like hippies, and abolitionists, for having a moral life. He even talks about the nineteenth century woman who founded his college as being "militantly unmarried." It's not just sexism. Any form of integrity, unselfishness, or even basic self-control is unsettling to Alf.

What balances all the hatred, of course, is sentimentality. The best writing in the book is probably where Alf comes home late at night to check on the family home and the children he's abandoned. This passage could have been one of the stories in "Problems" written twenty years earlier. Problem is, this story goes on too long, and Alf keeps talking about how much he loves his little girl, Daphne, and how pure she is, and it gets really creepy after a while. You start to realize that his daughter's purity is valuable to him precisely because it gives him a license to debase and degrade other women. This is not new, of course. Studs Lonigan was doing this stuff in the Thirties. ("My sisters are as pure as yours," he says to his pal Arnold Sheehan, when they're visiting a whorehouse.) But where tough Chicago author James T. Farrell was exposing evil, Updike is covering it up. (Part of what slavery meant was that girls Daphne's age could be raped by southern slave owners while men like Buchanan did nothing.) Ultimately, the tender father-daughter theme is just another lie. Alf brags about what an adoring father he is, and how innocent his daughter is -- and then he talks about taking her to see THE GODFATHER PART II.

Huh?!?! That's an R Rated movie, full of brutal violence. Who takes a nine year old girl to see it? More than that, it's two and a half hours long. What nine year old girl would WANT to see it? Don't misunderstand me, that movie is a classic, much closer to great art than anything Updike ever wrote. The most interesting moment in the novel is when Alf says frankly that the movie is "terrifying." He's right. Great art, tragedy written for adults, is terrifying. In the GODFATHER PART II weak men who betray their families die horrible deaths. Men who can't control their sexual impulses are shamed and stripped of power. Evil catches up to the evil-doer no matter how wealthy he is, no matter how cunning he appears to be. John Updike spent his whole artistic life running away from those kind of truths, terrifying truths. Alf in this novel is just like Fredo, actually. ("Old Abe Lincoln would never come down here! But James Buchanan knows these places like the back of his hand!") Except unlike Fredo, Alf never pays for his sins, never learns anything, and never becomes human enough to arouse our sympathy.

Now I can't really recommend this book, because it sucks. But in a way I recommend it very highly. If you don't understand what the Me Too movement is all about, just read what our Alf says about his girl students. If you don't understand how Harvey Weinstein got away with so much for so many years, read how Alf and his buddies react to the idea of sexual harassment on campus. If you don't understand why Ta-Nehisi Coates writes with such fury and despair about how white people choose to remember American history, read the Buchanan sections.

Every ugly trend in America now is something John Updike fought to keep alive. He was wrong on every single issue and just as hateful as Donald Trump. Yet he wasn't some ignoramus reality TV star. He was a Harvard graduate and a venerated member of the literary elite.

That's worth remembering too!