Gerald Ford Redux

By Paul Gray

TITLE: MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION

AUTHOR: JOHN UPDIKE

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 371 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: An obsessive and amusing history professor answers a questionnaire.

A history professor named Alfred L. Clayton receives a request from the Northern New England Association of American Historians. Would he jot down his "memories and impressions" of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974-77) for possible inclusion in the association's triquarterly journal, Retrospect? Well, would he ever. In fact, Clayton is prodded into such an orgy of reminiscence that he produces a manuscript almost diabolically unsuited to academic publication. That, according to the clever premise of John Updike's 15th novel, is why Clayton's ramblings must occupy a book of their own.

Much of the initial fun of Memories of the Ford Administration stems from the disparity between what Clayton has been asked to do -- help furnish a scholarly archive of the Ford years, an activity in itself slightly risible -- and what he actually does, which is to tell the NNEAAH exactly what he was thinking, writing, feeling and doing during the roughly 2 1/2 years in question. And he lets his interrogators know, early on, that he wants to do it his own way: "((Retrospect editors: Don't chop up my paragraphs into mechanical 10-line lengths. I am taking your symposium seriously, and some thoughts will run long as rivers in thaw, and others will snap off like icicles. Let me do the snapping, please.))"

What Clayton chiefly remembers about the Ford Administration is that it corresponded almost exactly with 1) his abandonment of his wife Norma ("the Queen of Disorder") and their three children for an affair with Genevieve Mueller ("the Perfect Wife"), the spouse of a younger colleague of his at Wayward Junior College, an all-women institution in southern New Hampshire; and 2) his attempts amid this turmoil to complete his "historical/ psychological, lyrical/elegiacal" biography of James Buchanan, the 15th President of the U.S.

Why Buchanan, the pallid predecessor of Abraham Lincoln -- and the subject of Updike's novel-length play Buchanan Dying (1974)? "I love him," Clayton tells Genevieve. "He was scared of the world, Buchanan. He thought it was out to get him, and it was. He was right. He tried to keep peace." Clayton senses an affinity with the indecisive Buchanan because he too is trying to negotiate, without much success, between warring factions within himself: his passion for Genevieve and his guilt toward his discarded children. "I was a fervent supporter of marriage," he notes, "just not of my marriage, my present marriage."

Clayton argues that the "tide of endless wanting" that swamped him was a particularly salient characteristic of the Ford years: "The paradise of the flesh was at hand. What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under ! Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory." And he remembers all this activity as being comparatively worry-free: "Bodily fluids had no deadly viral dimension in the dear old Ford days; one dabbled and frolicked in them without trying to picture the microscopic galaxies within, the squadrons of spherical space ships knobby with keys for fatally unlocking our cell walls." This stands in contrast not only to the insecure present but also to the staid 19th century morality experienced by Buchanan, whose proper courtship of a Pennsylvania woman ended tragically, first with her breaking off the engagement and then with her sudden, mysterious death.

Yet Clayton wonders why all this freedom left him and everyone close to him so anxious, addled and unhappy: "The present is Paradise, yet our brain forbids our living in it long." Beneath the comic excessiveness of his meditations can be glimpsed some somber spiritual shadows: "Everything was out of the closet, every tabu broken, and still God kept His back turned, refusing to set limits."

The long passages that Clayton includes from his never completed book on Buchanan are often impressive and sometimes moving, written in an accurate pastiche of an older and more formal American prose. "All these 19th century people made sense," he tells Genevieve, "in a way we can't any more. They still had a language you could build with." But Clayton's demonstrated writing skill raises some questions. Why is he stuck in a professional dead end, at a backwater junior college? What accounts for his obsessively detailed response to a routine questionnaire?

Ultimately, Updike's attitude toward his garrulous narrator and hero remains unclear. On two occasions, Clayton makes gratuitously cruel comments to his wife. She does not seem stung by them, and he shows no remorse for what he said. He is good fun to be around, but it would be nice to know how far he can be trusted and believed.