PEARL K. BELL
67
nations play their customarily emphatic role in his new novel,
Memories of
the Ford Administration,
Updike's familiar obsession with sex is
all
but
overwhelmed this time around by an elaborate excursion into American
history, both distant and near.
Gerald Ford enters the picture, to begin with, because Alfred
Clayton, the narrator of the novel, has been asked to set down his
memories of 1974-76 for an historical journal, and he is more than
happy to oblige because his mind keeps racing back nostalgically to the
mid-seventies, a time, before AIDS, when "Everything was out of the
closet, every taboo broken.... [The] paradise of the flesh was at hand.
What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under Kennedy
had become, under Ford, almost compulsory." 0 happy days!
Alf, never AI, is a horny professor of history at Wayward, a female
junior college in southern New England. Living in a grubby bachelor
pad during the Ford heyday, AIf has left his wife in order to devote
himself wholeheartedly - or whole-bodily - to his Perfect Mistress,
Genevieve, the wife of a deconstructionist professor of English at
Wayward, whose ravings about texts and anti-texts Updike skewers with
parodic glee. But guilt on several counts - about his three young chil–
dren, the assorted bedmates he can't keep his hands off, and his perma–
nently unfinished magnum opus, a biography of the fifteenth American
president, James Buchanan - has steadily poisoned the exhilaration of
AIrs freedom.
At this point Updike mixes fact and fiction. Buchanan has been a
longtime Updike passion and the subject of his only play,
Buchanan
Dying.
Like the novelist, Buchanan was a native of Pennsylvania. He was
Lincoln's immediate predecessor, and he has been called - unfairly, ac–
cording to Updike - the dullest of American presidents. In the novel
Buchanan shares the stage, in parallel and contrast, with another fa–
mously dull president, Gerald Ford, whose brief time in the White
House is given a surprisingly positive assessment, mainly because, as
Updike sees it, Ford held the country together, after the rupturing scan–
dals of Watergate, by pardoning Nixon. Though he makes no attempt
to deny the dullness of both presidents, Updike admiringly portrays
Buchanan as a figure of incorruptible integrity who tried, but failed, to
prevent the outbreak of civil war.
In this tricky juggling of past history and present sex, Updike alter–
nates between Airs memoir (whose star is his incorrigible penis) and the
chapters of his aborted Buchanan biography, portraying his long-ma–
ligned hero as "the only bachelor President, the most elderly up to
Eisenhower, the last President to wear a stock, and the last of the
doughface accommodators, before the North-South war swept accom-
