Reflections on John Updike (1932-2009)

The last time I spoke with John Updike-well, all right, the only time I spoke with John Updike-was in May 2008. He was in Washington, D.C., to deliver the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dr. Brian Lee was in charge of his schedule and kindly introduced me to Updike in a corridor as they were walking from one place to another. We spoke for about three minutes, which in and of itself does not make me an expert on the writing of John Updike. I have, however, over many years been an eager and appreciative reader of his work.

When I met him, Updike was just leaving an interview where he had been asked which of his novels he particularly liked. He had answered that The Centaur was perhaps his favorite as it was modeled on his father as a high school teacher and in which he had tried to capture the texture of high school life by moving classical Greek mythology into the narrative. He also mentioned an affection for Couples, which brought him fame and money, and The Coup set in Africa.

His answer allowed me to mention in our brief conversation that I was very much looking forward to the release of The Widows of Eastwick, already announced for the fall of 2008, because The Witches of Eastwick was my favorite novel of his. He smiled his kind and somewhat sly smile and said that literary critic Harold Bloom had liked The Witches best, but then it was the only novel of his that Bloom had liked.

Updike was thin, well-dressed, exuding an air of kindness and patience. He looked healthy for his seventy-six years. He did not bear himself as the lion of American letters, yet the volume and breadth of his work is remarkable and probably unrivaled by any great American literary figure in the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote novels, short stories, poems, art and literary criticism, and essays. His novels are set in many diverse locations from Brazil to Africa and Arizona, although most of them take place either in New England or the mid-Atlantic states. The forms of his novels are strikingly varied: in addition to rather straightforward narrative, we find magical realism in Brazil, an epistolary form in S., a multigenerational novel in In the Beauty of the Lilies, a novel set in a twenty-four-hour period in Seek My Face, elements of stream of consciousness in Couples, and novels with sequels, most famously with the Rabbit series, but also with Bech and with the women of Eastwick. He wrote a trilogy inspired by Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, exploring in modern settings the perspective of Hawthorne's three principal characters: the minister in A Month of Sundays, the husband in Roger's Version, and Hester in S. He even ventured into science fiction: Toward the End of Time.

Updike's writing shows a powerful interest in the details of human life. He wrote once of Vermeer's painting, "Young Woman Standing at a Virginal," as "very possibly the most beautiful painting in the world" and then reflected on its details, "silk dress, pearl necklace, velvet chair seat, red ribbons, marbled virginal sides, plaster wall, baseboard tiles, paintings within paintings, gleaming nubbled gold frame, alert and enigmatic face with greenish skin." He concluded: "This is the ordinary world re-created by a human hand and eye." Updike in his writing often does something very similar, showing remarkable interest in human life and the ordinary world by the detailed description he gives of so many things. In Couples, for example, he explores the feelings of women in playing field hockey, describes the material needed to build a hamster cage, and writes of complex issues in photosynthesis. Some critics may accuse him of "virtuosic fuss" from which Updike had exculpated Vermeer, but I think rather it reflects his enthusiasm for the variety of human endeavors and experiences.

Updike writes arrestingly beautiful sentences. Consider these examples, taken from Couples, ranging from minor to profound observations:

The salami he made lunch from was minced death.



Neusner comported himself with the confidence of the energetically second-rate.



For much of what they took to be morality proved to be merely the consciousness of the other couples watching them.



[T]here was little in her religious background-feebly Presbyterian; her father, though a generous pledger, had been rather too rich to go to church, like a man who would have embarrassed his servants by appearing at their party-to account for her inconvenient sense of evil.

Many critics have said that while Updike writes beautifully, he really has nothing to say. Such criticism mystifies me. I think it reflects that the critics are not interested in the things that Updike has to say. Indeed, they seem to feel that he has let them down by the things he has chosen to say.

Such criticism has often reminded me of an article I read more than thirty years ago in The New Yorker about Pella, Iowa. It was a charming and insightful piece about a small town seen through the eyes of a New Yorker. One element of the essay in particular has always stayed in my mind: the writer spent a Sunday in Pella and marveled that almost everyone was in church morning and evening. The writer did not attend church, but rather searched all over town to find someone to interview who was not in church. The decision not to attend church has stood as a symbol for me of the myopia of much of the intellectual establishment in America that assumes, since it is not interested in religion, it must have no real importance in the lives of people.

In many ways, John Updike has been as misunderstood by many as Pella was in this essay. Updike began his days in a Pennsylvania small town, but was then welcomed into the bosom of the eastern establishment. He attended Harvard and then lived in Manhattan, writing for The New Yorker. Surely he had arrived. But then he left Manhattan for the sake of his writing and his family and moved to a small town outside of Boston. He wrote often-although by no means exclusively-about white, middle-class Protestants from outside the important cities of America. For years, he wrote one novel annually and produced many learned and interesting essays on literature, art, golf, and other subjects. Although once divorced, he never seemed to have trouble with alcohol, drugs, or writer's block. Strangely, many within the intellectual establishment seem to have been unable to forgive him for this effrontery.

In these reflections on Updike, I do not write as a critic but as a reader. While critics have their uses, I tend to agree with Kierkegaard: "An artist is someone who suffers and creates. A critic is the same except he neither suffers nor creates." Updike once referred to many of his critics as "harshly dismissive and blithely inaccurate." I have not read extensively in the writings of Updike's critics; but time and again in reading reviews of his new novels, I wondered if the reviewers had read the same book I had. This distance between my experience and the critics was perfectly captured in the comment my mother-in-law heard from some pundit on the radio who observed that he did not like Updike's novels, although the only one he had read was The Catcher in the Rye.

Another good example of the silliness written about Updike is the memorial that appeared in The National Review. There the author admitted that he had not read a great deal of Updike, but observed that Updike seemed to regard adultery as a sacrament. In the first place, Updike as a Protestant author does not have a sacramental view of reality; and in the second place, he does not write as if adultery were good or healthy. Consider the conversation between two famous adulterers in Updike's Couples, after the woman learns she is pregnant with her lover's child:

"It's all so silly, isn't it? Adultery. It's so much trouble."
He shrugged, reluctant to agree. "It's a way of giving yourself adventures. Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge."
She asked, "What do we know now, Piet?"
He felt her, in the use of his name, drawing near, making of this desperate meeting an occasion of their being together, a date. He hardened his voice: "We know God is not mocked."

Updike is not presenting adultery as a sacrament, but rather as part of the frantic search for meaning in a world that has lost God. He wrote, "About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior."

Not all Christians must or should read Updike, for there are offensive and problematic things in his writing. His explicit discussion of sex understandably offends many Christians, and he is not necessary reading for any. His writing on sex, however, is not titillating; and for those who are not offended, he offers remarkable insights into the complex and sinful ways humans live their lives.

One useful critic who has explored the writings of Updike is George Hunt, S. J. As early as 1980, Hunt wrote with sympathy and insight, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. These three secret things were Updike's own statement of his work, as he sought to give adequate place to elements of human experience neglected by other authors.

As Updike writes about sex, so he also writes about religion as a human experience. In many novels he contrasts the claims of science with those of faith. In Couples, for example, a scientist, who is an avowed atheist, comments on a complex chemical reaction: "If a clever theologian ever got hold of how complex it is, they'd make us all believe in God again." But at the same time that Updike believes the complexity of nature points to the existence of a creator, he also seems to believe that the indifference of nature points in the opposite direction. He gives voice to such fears in The Widows of Eastwick when Alexandra is visiting an ancient Egyptian tomb: "No escape, everything around her proclaimed. No escape, however energetically and luxuriously religions make a show of rescuing us from death. There is no magic, the world is solid, clear through, like the depths of limestone above her."

He summed up his ambivalence about the relation of nature and the supernatural, or of science and religion, in the last sentence of a one-page statement for National Public Radio for a series entitled "This I Believe":

We are part of nature, and natural necessity compels and in the end dissolves us; yet to renounce all and any supernature, any appeal or judgment beyond the claims of matter and private appetite, leaves in the dust too much of our humanity, as through the millennia it has manifested itself in art and altruism, idealism, and joie de vivre.

Updike was not a preacher, but he did think of himself as a Christian. He regularly attended church, affirmed the physical resurrection of Christ and read Karl Barth avidly. He believed that the function of creative writing was not to promote religion, but was "a mode of truth-telling, self-expression, and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness." He exposed in our human experiences both the reality and beauty of the image of God in us and the mess and misery of sin. He helped us understand what it is to be human in a fallen world.

Updike wrote: "A fiction writer's duty is to deliver reality as it has come to him-to describe the details, the conflicts, and puzzles of being a live human being." The reader's privilege has been to be moved by his elegant voice. I, for one, shall greatly miss the annual anticipation and satisfaction of his latest novel.