Fictions and Fantasies of Early-Twentieth-Century Manhood

At the outset of John Updike’s new novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, New Jersey in the early twentieth century, realizes that he no longer believes in God. Nearly eight decades (and five hundred pages) later, Clarence’s great grandson finds some measure of faith in a utopian commune run by religious madmen, only to lose his life in an apocalypse of fire and bullets. The novel’s religious context is underscored by the title, taken from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle-Hymn of the Republic”:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

Updike suggests that the purposeful God of mid-Victorian America subsequently stumbled through a wilderness of corporate chaos and Darwinian doubt, and was tripped up early in the twentieth century by thin strips of celluloid. The distant, misty glories of Heaven proved no match for the immediate, vivid glamor of Hollywood.

Although Updike’s ostensible theme is the triumph of movies as means of consolation, the chief malady afflicting modern man—the gendered noun is intentional—is manhood itself: Clarence’s crisis of faith is symptomatic of a loss of manly self-esteem. As a young man he had been invigorated by the “sap of hope,” eager to seize the pulpit and do battle with free-thinkers and atheistic scientists; but at age forty-four, Clarence has lost “his sap” (p. 20). Brooding alone in his study, he regards his doubt as “an effeminate yielding where virile strength was required” (p. 18), and he worries that the women in his household will take note of his “weakened, shamed condition” (p. 21). While conducting church services he loses his voice and cannot continue. His wife rises, concludes his sermon, and leads the church in singing the hymn. Clarence looks on “in a daze of ironic impotence” (p. 55) as his wife collects the offering. “Yours, O Lord, are the grandeur and power, majesty, splendor, and glory” (p. 56), she calls out with triumphant flourish. When Clarence later tells her of his intent to leave the ministry, she instantly perceives that he will fail in the competitive world beyond the manse. “You were a weak reed,” she lashes out, “but I thought I could make a man of you” (p. 65). Depleted of the “sap of hope” and beset by an “invalid mood” (p. 42), Clarence is predictably (and literally, it turns out) a flop in bed.

These are familiar themes for Updike. His Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy is our foremost chronicle of contemporary middle-class manhood, and Clarence in many ways resembles “everyman” Angstrom. Both characters bridle at the responsibilities of adult manhood and eventually bolt from them entirely. And much as Angstrom’s son, a sniveling, drug-abusing “loser,” is less manly than even his vaporous father, Clarence’s male descendants prove more deficient than he.

But Clarence Wilmot is no Harry Angstrom, and In the Beauty of the Lilies is not Rabbit set in period dress. In the Rabbit volumes, Updike constantly binds the reader to the present: Angstrom inhabits a familiar world of consumer products, news snippets, and popular songs and movies. Updike employs the present tense to push the story to the “edge of the future, without vantage for reflection or regret or a seeking of proportion” (p. xiii, 1995 ed., Rabbit Angstrom ). In the Beauty of the Lilies, on the other hand, provides Updike with a chance to reflect on the past—the relentless past tense may surprise his regular readers—and here Updike’s characteristically thick detail delineates the trajectory and...