In an author’s aside from La Rouge et le noir, Stendhal preemptively chides his reader: “Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral!” More than once accused of carrying around such immoral mirrors in his pack, John Updike would often cite the passage in his own defense. He claimed to write with a precise, innocent realism that portrayed the full range of human experience.
John Updike: The Collected Stories: A Library of America Boxed Set
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1949 pages
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Most of all, Updike relished the mirror’s arbitrary details. He once summed up a strain of American painting that depicted, in a phrase lifted from Jonathan Edwards, “the clarity of things.” The clarity of things certainly inspires Updike’s own painterly flair for embellished description. Yet it is not merely the blameless exactitude of Stendhal’s mirror that distinguishes Updike’s realism: he carries his mirror down the road. It moves. Motion characterizes Updike’s prose as much as mimicry.
First, his sentences seem to flow unhindered. They are often described as elegant or effortless, in part because of how smoothly they appear to roll from word to word in a faultless tumble of consistent pacing. Their rhythms convey the motion of an eye’s roving gaze or a hand skimming across surfaces. In one of Updike’s best early stories, “The Happiest I’ve Been,” the young John Nordholm careens down the Pennsylvania turnpike only to discover a landscape so abundant with meaning it brooks no punctuating period: “There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility—you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element—and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state—as if you had made your life.” The sentence spreads itself out with sharpened em dashes gleaming, ready to slice through its own airy element.
Second, Updike’s characters themselves are on the move, perpetually leaving or struggling to return. The eponymous story of his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears, combines the leaving with the returning. It begins as the narrator leaves home for a woman, describing the tears his father shed at that parting, and ends as he rushes back, now with his second wife, while his father lies dying in the hospital. All the running around, the lust and the leaving, is tethered to the single still point of his childhood home, for “I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.”
Leaving and then returning to Pennsylvania is a consistent theme in Updike’s work. He thought of his novel Rabbit, Run as an ethical response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, juxtaposing the responsibilities of one’s home state against the liberation of leaving. Updike’s love of things in motion takes on a peculiarly spiritual quality in the novel. Its epigraph comes from Pascal: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.” One of the various ways the novel explores the “motions of Grace” is in the graceful movements of Rabbit’s all too corporeal body.
Famously, the novel opens with the ex-basketball star stopping by a playground and joining in a pickup game with schoolchildren. However pathetic a figure this adult trying to relive his past might be, Updike delights in describing Rabbit’s play: “He’s a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell.” This may be part of a blatant bid for Updike’s readers to say the same about his writing, but it is also an attempt to render as seamlessly as possible the beauty of an athlete’s instinctual graces.
Updike thought of adding the subtitle “A Movie” to Rabbit, Run, his first of four prize-garnering novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The prose assumes an overtly cinematic quality in its present-tense narration and quick perspectival shifts. Mirroring the moving picture with language is just what Updike is trying to achieve—cutting from one frame to the next, rearranging what is in the frame and where, zooming in and out, restlessly gathering the action into a three-dimensional panorama of domestic despair.
In that opening playground scene and throughout the novel, Updike simulates the movie camera’s capacity to move through space with lenses switching focus. If we are to compare Rabbit, Run to On the Road, as Updike invites us to, their different ethical registers evoke the different visual effects of the camera’s movement: whereas Kerouac’s visual descriptions pan with confident appraisal across whole landscapes, Updike’s arc with gentle affection around the objects they describe. They strive to create with words something like a visual caress.
John Nordholm offers an example of that caressing lens when he and his friends play a game of circular Ping-Pong. He concludes a catalogue of images from the game with one last flourish, when an “earring of Ann’s flew off and the two connected rhinestones skidded to lie near the wall, among the Schumans’ power mower and badminton poles and empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles. All these images were immediately lost in the whirl of our running.” John Nordholm may have lost the images, but John Updike stored them away. That “twice punctured by triangles” is the classic Updikean touch—the apparently capricious detail that continues the movement of the two sliding rhinestones with two punctured triangles and evenly completes the whirl of the sentence.
The story behind Updike’s nostalgia for his nondescript hometown of Shillington, Pennsylvania, and his equally fierce desire to leave it, is told with unfussy aplomb in Adam Begley’s new biography. Updike is no exhaustive scholarly study, but it provides a coherent account of a long and diffuse literary career in need of summation and, truth be told, a spirited retrieval. As a new generation of readers begins to reassess Updike’s achievement, Updike will likely be their guide to the man Begley warns us was, in spite of his notorious affability, “a potentially dangerous individual.”
The biography begins with an extensive portrait of Shillington and the young Updike’s self-effacing father and domineering, if fawning, mother. Linda Updike was an aspiring writer who would ask her son, as a ten-year-old, to edit her autobiographical stories about family dynamics and small-town life. As familiar as those subjects would become in his own fiction, the young Updike’s ambitions were first ignited when his aunt, then Edmund Wilson’s personal secretary at The New Republic, gave them a subscription to The New Yorker as a Christmas present when he was just 12 years old. The budding artist soon began regularly mailing the magazine his cartoon sketches and light verse. He eventually received an acceptance nearly a decade later, during his final year at Harvard. The charmed life of literary success that Updike led—nearly all his short fiction first appearing in The New Yorker, with Alfred A. Knopf publishing each new novel—was in fact built on ten years of rejections.
One of his stories, “Flight,” details the conflicted emotions both Linda and John experienced as she urged him to fly from their small town. Does Allen Dow want to flee? Will his mother actually let him go if he does? Allen longs for both the security of the familiar and the thrill of escape. This and several others of Updike’s short stories provide intimate glimpses into the psychological dramas of his personal life, and Begley is content to rely heavily on their exposition. Happily, he never succumbs to unwarranted speculation. In fact, inasmuch as he provides helpful glosses on Updike’s most clearly autobiographical writing, the best way to read Begley’s biography is in tandem with the Library of America’s recently published two-volume Collected Stories.
Though Updike’s Rabbit novels constitute his most ambitious accomplishment, he attains the height of his powers in the short stories. The genre’s limited frame fits his penchant for descriptive epiphanies of feeling. Taken together, their documentary content provides a remarkably close account of the moves that partitioned out his life. First from charmed Shillington to his exile on the Plowville farm, then from Harvard tenderfoot to a newly married New York sophisticate, and finally from his suburban fatherhood to his divorce and remarried retreat to stately Haven Hill in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.
Begley draws our attention to a critical turning point when Updike switched editors at The New Yorker. Katherine White (spouse of E. B. White) advised Updike early on to steer clear of small-town nostalgia and disillusioned ex-basketball players. In response to this criticism, he wrote “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the first of his Maples stories. Then, when William Maxwell began to edit Updike’s stories, he encouraged Updike to return to Shillington for his best material. If White played a role in launching the Maples, we have Maxwell—who became a lifelong friend—to thank for Rabbit Angstrom and the Olinger stories.[1]
In addition to the felicities of Updike’s long and fruitful relationship with The New Yorker, Begley offers snapshots of his literary friendships. Following the year of Philip Roth’s scandalously uproarious Portnoy’s Complaint, Updike published a book of poems about middle age, Midpoint. He had his publisher print a special copy to send to Roth—Poor Goy’s Complaint. We also hear John Cheever, whom Updike would help out of more than one drunken debacle, refusing to blurb Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair: “His eloquence seems to me to retard the movement of the book and to damage his control.” It would become a familiar refrain with Updike’s detractors.
Sometime prior to Cheever’s slight, Updike had left his full-time position at The New Yorker and quit the city altogether, explaining in a letter to his mother that staying would seal his fate as an “elegant hack.” It was a worry Updike had held for some time. His freshman-year roommate, Christopher Lasch (“The Christian Roommates” gives a wonderful portrait of the two soon-to-be-famous writers, though its title does not refer to them), wrote home using the same noun to describe the gap between his roommate’s talent and ambition:
He writes poetry, stories, and draws cartoons and sends all of these to various magazines. He has even had a few things accepted. He is more industrious than I, but I think his stuff lacks perception and doesn’t go very deep. He is primarily a humorist. As he himself admits, he is probably a hack.
Updike, a “hack”? In retrospect, the young Lasch’s judgment—like Updike’s worry—seems ludicrous. And yet, perhaps his preternatural fluency was a curse as well as a gift. Once he moved to the small town of Ipswich, a far-flung suburb of Boston, he kept up an extraordinary level of production, writing 67 books between 1958 and 2009—more than a book a year. Once he remarked with nonchalance that he wrote faster than he read.
While living in Ipswich, Updike became known as the preeminent chronicler of an emerging “adulterous society.” He was writing with new levels of sexual candor about the moral maelstrom of a new era. Couples, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel about his set of Ipswich friends, showcases Updike’s ability to turn personal circumstances into the emblems of social change. Decades later, the novel is still disorienting in its lyrical celebration of the immorality it ostensibly sought to condemn.
Perhaps his eloquence had damaged his control. Perhaps it had become too habitual to turn the gaudy parade of life into an evanescent sparkle of words. Yet his final book of poems, Endpoint, describes his own deathbed in that same glossy style. Its joyful tone intimates the passionate, unwavering conviction he sought to adorn with words. Following the doctor’s decree that his death is certainly imminent, he closes the series of poems:
The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
Saying, Surely—magnificent that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.
Though the novels kept steadily appearing—including a triple tribute to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and S., as well as a magnum opus stretching across the entire 20th century with In the Beauty of the Lilies—Updike slowly slipped into the backseat of contemporary literature as the century came to its end and another began. Terrorist sold well, but was largely panned. A rising generation of novelists, led by David Foster Wallace, drew more inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinth-like plots than from Updike’s lyricism. Yet regardless of literary fashions, Updike stands alone in his ability to imbue the ordinary with a wonderful thrill. All those syntactical pirouettes embody a sensibility determined to praise.
Updike’s fidelity to both the beauty and moral mess of creation amounts to a carefully considered theology of sensation. While he is suspicious of asserting any secular ethic in his fiction, it resonates with gratitude for the gift of physical experience. Amiably coaxing us to pay attention, he celebrates reality’s textures and tastes, its obdurate plenitude. Updike may lack heavy-hitting ideas, as his critics have protested; he may traffic too often in stereotypes; but who else in all of American literature repeatedly returns us so vividly to the sensorium of everyday worship?
The peculiarities of embodiment transfixed him. As one of Updike’s more odious seducers (a character type he stole from Kierkegaard but put to brilliant use), the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, writes in A Month of Sundays, “Generalizations belong to the Devil; particulars to the Lord.” How could the Devil be in the details, as the saying goes, in a religion with an Incarnate God? To lavish a lily or a sparrow with rapt attention merely follows the Creator’s lead.
As wayward as his adulterous characters are, Updike’s descriptions cannot help but bear witness to the profundity of all human experience—however familiar. Both the faithful spouse’s and the tempting lover’s bodies are described ecstatically; the clutter of domestic drudgery and the freedom of the open road receive the same exultant hymns to material splendor. The radiant blessings Updike renders ubiquitous betray his adulterers’ actions as foolishly superfluous. Joy is a quality of attention, a gift of the Spirit; no change in circumstances can bestow it.
If Updike seems too reticent to judge what his mirror shows, keep looking. For the mirror keeps moving and its sheer accumulation of images is saying something. There is always some thing.
1. The Collected Stories are missing both the Maples stories, featuring a married couple unashamedly based on John and his first wife, Mary, and the Bech stories, starring Updike’s tongue-in-cheek Jewish alter ego. These stories will appear in a future volume from the loa.
Scott Dill is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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