John Updike has written a new novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies,[1] which illustrates Pascal’s assertion that “reason’s final step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” The novel’s religious element should be emphasized, because otherwise it would seem that Updike has strayed off into Gore Vidal territory with this lengthy saga covering four generations of an American family linked by their feelings for that pre-eminent twentieth-century American obsession, the movies.

Updike has already described his own pragmatic, Pascalian road to belief in the final chapter of his autobiographical book Self-Consciousness.

Of my own case, looked at coldly, it might be said that, having been given a Protestant, Lutheran, rather antinomian Christianity as part of my sociological make-up, I was too timid to discard it. My era was too ideologically feeble to wrest it from me, and Christianity gave me something to write about, and a semblance of a backbone, and a place to go on Sunday mornings, when the post offices were closed.

He looks at his situation less coldly, however, during the course of that chapter and presents an intelligent reflection on the universal will to believe, giving as one amusing example an argument that occurred when Picasso chastised Matisse for designing and decorating a chapel; both men had claimed to be non-believers. Matisse defended himself: “Yes, I do pray; and you pray too, and you know it all too well: when everything goes badly, we throw ourselves into prayer. … And you do it; you too. It’s no good saying no.”

Updike’s religious faith is more formal than that; in fact, it is something he has spent a lot of time thinking about. Protestantism is his creed of choice not because he believes its doctrines to be truer or the way of life it enjoins more perfect, but because it happens to be the manifestation of the religious impulse that is specific to his own country and century. Even as an adolescent, he writes, “I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really —not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him.” (This is a state of affairs not peculiar to America in the 1940s: in an age of almost universal “faith,” the sixteenth century, Martin Luther complained that “genuine Christians are none too common. I wish I could see two together in a place.”)

In the Beauty of the Lilies is superficially concerned with the cinema, but here the cinema is less important in itself than as a symbol of the quest for transcendence and perfection: as the century progresses the movies become significant to the lives of the Wilmot family in a way that organized religion has ceased to be, but their journey away from an inner life dominated by the church toward one ruled by a jumble of celluloid images turns out to be a circular one which takes them back to a genuine idea of God. “The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’” as Updike wrote in Self-Consciousness, “something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the outer rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side.” It also, in the end, survives Copernicus, Darwin, and Hollywood.

Updike’s narrative begins in 1910, at the moment that the Reverend Clarence Wilmot of Paterson, New Jersey, loses the last vestige of his religious faith. Clarence is a scholarly and rather passive man who has gone into the Church not from sincere zeal but because his father had planned it so; his malleable soul and gentlemanly manners have stood him in good stead with the governing elders of Paterson’s Fourth Presbyterian Church.

Shaken by challenges posed in books like Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll and What Is Darwinism? by Charles Hodge, and in the writings of Nietzsche and Marx, Clarence concludes that “the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be.” A pragmatic person, like one of the ministers of Updike’s own Pennsylvania youth, would not have considered ruining himself and his family over a matter of conscience. But Clarence finds himself unable to go through the motions, and begs leave to quit the ministry. The church administrators and elders don’t really see what the problem is: Clarence is well-respected in the parish; why can’t he just stay on and continue to perform his duties, while keeping his doubts to himself? Clarence’s wife, Stella, agrees, especially since she and their three children are threatened with the loss of home and livelihood. “Stop this tedious mooning about faith!” she scolds, and when Clarence explains the theological arguments that have tormented him she replies that “reason isn’t everything. There are things beyond it.” Had she read Pascal she might have added, “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”

Once Clarence rejects his vocation he discovers that Paterson has no more use for him. His world does not tolerate doubt, much less failure: “The immigrant hordes had brought to America German radicalism and Italian anarchism and Semitic materialism; this was no time for native-born Protestants to grow lax and abandon the sublime values and articles of faith that had induced God to shower down upon them the blessings due a chosen people.” Clarence is reduced to selling encyclopedias door-to-door for a pitifully meager commission; during his rapid plunge down the social ladder he notices a number of people formerly numbered among the untouchables— Irish and Italians in particular—passing him in the course of their own upward trajectory. Stella is reduced to cleaning houses (though she draws the line at working for any of her husband’s former parishioners) and the children must scramble for an education and a place in life.

Clarence’s only path of escape is into the nickelodeon, where he becomes one of the earliest worshipers at the shrine of the moving image. “Ever since his revelation three years ago of God’s non-existence, he had carried around with him a crusty, stunned feeling—a clinging sense of lostness… . The moving pictures’ flutter of agitation and gesticulated emotion from women of a luminous and ideal pallor licked at his fevered brain soothingly.” The cinema slips in to fill the gap left by God’s departure.

Clarence and Stella’s youngest son, Teddy, is passive, like his father, but lacks his father’s probing intelligence. Growing up in Basingstoke, Delaware, to which the family has repaired after Clarence’s death—an apple-pie American town with a marked resemblance to Updike’s own Shillington, Pennsylvania—young Teddy drifts aimlessly until his enterprising aunt finds him a niche as the town mailman. Teddy’s only obviously positive quality is his hatred of organized religion, a flame kept alight as a gesture of filial love, but he is strong enough to snatch happiness when it is offered. It comes in the person of Emily, a pretty but shy and lame young woman. This retiring couple surprisingly gives birth to a dynamo: Esther, or Essie, born in the early days of the Depression.

Updike always writes best when he writes about himself, and his worst bloopers occur when he strays among people who are exotic to him. In the Beauty of the Lilies is no exception. The remoter past seems to elude the author; the dialogue is unnatural, the narrative too detached, as though Updike were placing himself in 1910 or 1920 more as an intellectual exercise than because of a genuine creative impulse. Accordingly, Essie, who closely resembles Updike himself with her loving parents, her happy small-town Depression childhood, her ambition and her precocious talent, is the most vivid character in the novel and its central intelligence.

The beautiful little Essie has a tendency to smugness, as perhaps did the preternaturally gifted little John Updike—“she couldn’t blame the other children for being jealous of her and calling her ‘stuck-up.’ She wasn’t stuck-up, she just was perfect and so glad of it”—but Essie’s confidence and sense of election, her easy relationship with a God she neither questions nor examines too closely, make her a rather attractive character. Unlike her sterner Calvinist forebears, she is perfectly comfortable with her body and accepts sex both as a source of pleasure and as a weapon for the manipulation of men. “God understood. He made us, after all.”

Essie eventually becomes the midcentury substitute for the deity, a screen goddess whose image is worshiped throughout the country. Ruthlessly ambitious, she makes her way in a very short time from second runner-up in the Miss Delaware Peach Competition to being a major star of the Natalie Wood variety, and weathers the difficult transition into her thirties by going platinum blonde and landing leading roles in movies like Cream Cheese and Caviar opposite Paul Newman.

Essie retains her easygoing religion: one of the funniest moments in the book occurs when, as a young starlet, she holds her own in negotiations with “King” Cohn, and after much crude sexual repartee is only genuinely shocked when he asks her whether she is a Christian Scientist. “I’m a Presbyterian,” she answers quickly, to which Cohn responds, “I bet you are, baby. Well, whatever helps you through the tough spots.”

But Esther takes her God for granted; she fails to let anyone else in on her special relationship with Him, and keeps her son Clark, the product of one of her three ill-considered marriages, on the sidelines. Clark grows up an emotionally neglected Hollywood kid, unable to escape his mother’s powerful orbit. In his search for his own place in the world he comes into fateful contact with a David Koresh–style cult leader, Jesse Smith. Smith brushes off Clark’s anecdotes about his famous mother and reels in his fish with a canny lie: “I am the only person you will meet who is not interested in your mother. I am interested in you.” Smith’s religious community goes the way of Koresh’s, but in a moment of genuine grace—grace from his own God, suddenly revealed to him—Clark redeems his miserable life by saving others. Thus ends the family story, with the rationalist scruples that killed the great-grandfather’s faith being subsumed in a spontaneous, emotional adherence to the spirit rather than the letter of belief.

In the Beauty of the Lilies has far too many faults to be considered one of Updike’s better novels. It feels too planned, too structured; it contains little of the complex, subjective, poetically-charged writing that marks Updike’s best work. Both Clarence and Teddy fall flat as characters, possibly because they are so remote from Updike himself. Even Essie is not entirely successful, because Updike fails to be very convincing in the voice of a young girl. (But then, how many male writers have succeeded at that? I can’t think of one.)

Imperfect as fiction, In the Beauty of the Lilies is nevertheless of interest as the attempt of a considerable writer to give shape to America’s ever-fascinating spiritual struggles. Apostasy and fanaticism continue to be as much a part of our world as they were in Clarence Wilmot’s day, or even during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our culture has come to terms with neither God nor His absence.

Notes
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1. In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike; Knopf, 512 pages, $25.95. Go back to the text.