Updike

He was, in the view of magazine editors, the perfect New Yorker writer--a fount of elegant prose in every form over the Harold Ross and William Shawn postwar decades, a WASP outpost in the American mind being overrun by exotic Mailers, Bellows, Malamuds, Baldwins, Capotes and Kerouacs.

Those of us who came from an immigrant world read him in an effort to understand the rooted life that surrounded our metropolitan isolation. In his novels and short stories, we lived through the social and sexual arrangements of communities to which we did not belong (images of suburban wives opening their adulterous arms and welcoming neighbors' husbands to a post-Pill paradise).

What moved me most was to learn later that, behind that suave writerly voice, was a man literally uncomfortable in his own skin, suffering from psoriasis that made him feel like a leper, a subject which he of course wrote about beautifully, as he did with everything.

When John Updike died yesterday, he left behind more than fifty novels, short story collections, poetry, essays and reviews--a bookshelf of lovely language--by someone who, in his own way, was as much an outsider as the rest of us trying to connect with the life we all shared.

A Reluctant, Respectful VP

By dominating media coverage, Sarah Palin is giving Joe Biden a pass to do what he does best, talk straight to voters without the glare of bright lights and pushy reporters.

In the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza reports on conversations with Barack Obama in which Biden hesitated about being on the ticket, weighing the job against remaining as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or becoming Secretary of State. No Palinesque "you betcha" instant answer to running for VP.

"If you’re asking me to help you get elected," Biden says he told Obama, "I can do that other ways, but I don’t want to be a Vice-President who is not part of the major decisions you make."

In the campaign now, Biden is helping most by providing a contrast to his strident, superficial counterpart, as he did in their debate, and rallying working-class voters in key states without making headlines or gaffes.

Looking ahead, Biden sees himself as helping Obama reach across party lines to help heal the divisions of the Bush-Cheney years.

“The reason I’ve been relatively successful," he told Lizza, "is that I have never questioned the motive of other senators, and that’s instinctively Barack. Barack doesn’t start off, ‘Well, you disagree, you must be a, you know, an S.O.B. or you must not care about the poor or you’re sexist or you’re racist or you’re a whatever.’ He doesn’t think that way.”

If and when they are sworn in next January, Obama and Biden will be able to put that respectful approach to good use.

Good for the Soul and the Heel

Public confession makes a half-century leap from John Edwards' mea-not-so-culpa to a sudden exercise in self-revelation by Charles Van Doren, who was caught in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s.

But perhaps the most telling truth about public soul-searching comes, not from Edwards on Nightline or Van Doren in the New Yorker, but in a New York Times blog by the scholar Stanley Fish about "autobiographical writing that tells and hides all at the same time."

In a sympathetic rumination, Professor Fish points out that Van Doren, now 80, proffers the title, "All the Answers": "But there are no answers, at least to the questions most readers would want to ask: Why did you do it? What was going on in your mind? What about the moral issues? The moment of decision...seems not to have occurred, or to have occurred off-stage when no one, even the person most concerned, was watching."

It is likely that even now Van Doren doesn't know, but Fish credits him with an honest attempt at self-discovery: "He does not cast himself as a victim, or as a reformed villain or a misunderstood hero, three narratives that are quite popular in these days of compulsive self-discovery."

(A confession of my own: Several years after the scandal, as my magazine was preparing a piece on the aftermath, there was a letter from Van Doren's wife asking me to be "kind and gracious" and not publish it. But I did, and my refusal has troubled me ever since.)

When Robert Redford was working on the movie, "Quiz Show," he offered Van Doren $100,000 to be a consultant as "a guarantee of its truthfulness." Once again Van Doren was tempted to cash in, but his wife put her foot down firmly. "Don't be a fool," she told him, and he tore up the contract.

It is a long way from Van Doren to John Edwards, not only in time but character. Both may have been undone by vanity but there was and is no cunning and calculation in the man who succumbed in that earlier scandal.

Van Doren had the grace to retreat into silence (until now), but Edwards' lies and evasions have created a continuing public melodrama, and his wife, as sympathetic a figure as she has been, may be complicit in his use of confession for concealment rather than redemption. Maybe he too should wait fifty years before going public again about his inner turmoil.