There’s been talk among Updike scholars that there isn’t enough critical attention paid to the poems, short stories, and minor novels, and that there’s perhaps too much of an emphasis on autobiographical criticism. For them, David Crowe’s 352-page study, Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories, should provide a welcome change.
Crowe, a full professor at Augustana College and a graduate of Luther College, includes Updike’s oft-quoted excerpt from Midpoint—“Praise Kierkegaard, who splintered Hegel’s creed / Upon the rock of Existential need; / Praise Barth, who told ho saving faith can flow from Terror’s oscillating Yes and No . . . . ”—but concentrates his study on the Danish philosopher and theologian.
At first reading, it seemed slow going in the first chapter, which is really a compressed summary of all that Crowe covers in the rest of the book, peppered with language like “as we will later see.” But a rereading of it yields a number of to-the-point summary statements that frame Updike in numerous ways that haven’t hitherto been proposed. Chapter 1 may pose a similar first-read obstacle if one breezes past the concepts and assumptions and conclusions that can feel too general, without enough quotation to anchor them. But again, a rereading of the text proves fruitful. After that the intro and first chapter, though, Cosmic Defiance becomes practically indispensable.
Crowe treats the Maples stories as a whole in his first three chapters, including a useful timeline of the Maples’ relationship. Chapters 2 and 3—“The Neighbor-Love Problem for the Rather Antinomian Believer” and “Kierkegaard’s Marital Ideality and Updike’s Reality”—also offer discussions that center on broad thematic concepts but with more detail. And with Chapter 4: “Identity transformation and the Maples Marriage,” Crowe really hits his stride, integrating basic discussions of Kierkegaard’s philosophies with specific discussions of Updike’s stories that make you see those stories differently.
“In Kierkegaardian terms,” Crowe writes, “Richard typically acts out his commitment to the aesthetic, behaving as badly or charmingly as he wishes while he seeks out adventures of sexual and social gaming (rotations), while Joan typically acts out the ethical, keeping her good manners intact and engaging in parental or civic concerns. Richard in his way and Joan in hers are thus fending off full consciousness of their existential situations. Neither has faced up to mortality or made the leap into eternal relations with God. Occupying these two differing spheres,” he writes, referring to Kierkegaard’s three spheres of existence (the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious), “does not necessarily indict a deep incompatibility. On the contrary, the two can make each other a special project, in a social rather than existential sense—Richard helping Joan to broaden her freedoms and realm of pleasures, Joan helping Richard to behave more properly.” Crowe offers thought-provoking discussions such as this as the rest of his monograph unfolds, with each chapter focusing on a group of related stories:
Chapter 5—Oh But They Were Close: “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” “Wife-Wooing”
Chapter 6—Fathoms Deep in the Wrong: “Giving Blood,” “Twin Beds in Rome,” “Marching Through Boston”
Chapter 7—The Etiquette of Adultery: “The Taste of Metal,” “Your Lover Just Called,” “Waiting Up,” “Eros Rampant”
Chapter 8—Frightened People Discussing: “Plumbing,” “The Red-Herring Theory,” “Sublimating,” “Nakedness”
Chapter 9—Consecrated Unhappiness: “Separating,” “Gesturing,” “Divorcing: A Fragment”
Chapter 10—Reality is Sacred: “Here Come the Maples,” “Grandparenting”
Because Crowe tackles more than a single story in every chapter, we never lose sight of the bigger picture—the arc of their collective narrative and what that narrative represents. For the most part, Crowe stays clear of the fact that Richard was based on John and Joan was based on Mary Pennington Updike, and that the Maples stories are as autobiographical as Updike’s fiction gets. That he stays focused on the religious and philosophical elements is a strength, as readers familiar with Updike’s work and the Adam Begley biography will be fully aware of the autobiographical underpinnings.
In Chapter 6, Crowe posits that “Updike updates Kierkegaard, making his views on Christian marriage more relevant to contemporary practices in America than to 19th century Danish ones. Updike also comes very close in these stories to violating his stated artistic ethic of withholding judgment of his characters. He invites us to judge Richard harshly for indulging in shockingly selfish and hurtful tirades against his wife and caustic comments about his children.” As Crowe concludes, “In these stories Updike attends closely to Richard’s and Joan’s complex states of mind as they contemplate love.”
“The Maples stories teach us what it feels like to spend decades yearning for faith, yet to fear that faith so much—or the freedom it confers, or the God who offers it, or the offended reactions of others—that it seems better to live a life of determined distraction, to submit instead to personal compulsions, habits, and convoluted projects. The stories also teach us what it feels like to love, both selfishly and selflessly. In their intricate, diachronic way, the Maples stories hold out hope for the leap of faith, for blessed identity transformation, and for the freedom to perform genuine works of love,” Crowe writes.
In the end, though readers may need to backtrack to those early broad discussions of “Updike’s Kierkegaard,” Crowe offers a fascinating study of the stories that may well become the most taught of Updike’s. And Cosmic Defiance is a welcome addition to the dialogue on Updike and religion that began with the Hamiltons, then continued in earnest with George Hunt’s John Updike and the three great secret things: Sex, Religion, and Art, James Yerkes’ edited anthology on John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, and Marshall Boswell’s John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. When Crowe gets into textual analysis, he presents readers with one of the fullest and most provocative discussions of the Maples stories to date.
—James Plath