In a tribute to British author Henry Green (1905-73) titled “A reintroduction to the poet of modern fiction,” Danny Heitman begins with an observation and a quote from John Updike:

“Green’s books haven’t remained reliably in print, evidence of his limited popular appeal. But those who like Green’s novels really like them, and his following, though small, has been distinguished. John Updike, not prone to jacket-blurb hyperbole, celebrated Green’s novels with almost religious zeal.

“‘For Green, to me, is so good a writer, such a revealer of what English prose fiction can do . . . that I can launch myself upon this piece of homage and introduction only by falling into some sort of imitation of that liberatingly ingenuous voice, that voice so full of other voices, its own interpolations amid the matchless dialogue twisted and tremulous with a precision that kept the softness of groping, of sensation, of living.”

Amazon link to Loving

An “Alternative Media” site recently ran an opinion piece masquerading as news (“The Coming White Flight in Europe”) that quotes a big chunk of John Updike’s satirical 1978 novel, The Coup.

“Since the future of the world will be heavily influenced by the huge number of Sahelians headed our way, here’s the opening of John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup, in which he describes a fictionalized Sahelian country much like Niger. Keep in mind, however, that the population of Niger in 1978 was 5.7 million. Today it is 21.5 million. In another 39 years, the span of time since Updike’s novel, it is expected to grow to 81.4 million. The Coup begins with the Col. Gadaffi-like Col. Ellellou writing his memoirs in a Nabokovian-Updikean prose style:

“‘My country of Kush, landlocked between the mongrelized, neo-capitalist puppet states of Zanj and Sahel, is small for Africa, though larger than any two nations of Europe. Its northern half is Saharan; in the south, forming the one boundary not drawn by a Frenchman’s ruler, a single river flows, the Grionde, making possible a meagre settled agriculture. Peanuts constitute the principal export crop: the doughty legumes are shelled by the ton and crushed by village women in immemorial mortars or else by antiquated presses manufactured in Lyons; then the barrelled oil is caravanned by camelback and treacherous truck to Dakar, where it is shipped to Marseilles to become the basis of heavily perfumed and erotically contoured soaps designed not for my naturally fragrant and affectionate countrymen but for the antiseptic lavatories of America — America, that fountainhead of obscenity and glut. Our peanut oil travels westward the same distance as eastward our ancestors plodded, their neck-shackles chafing down to the jugular, in the care of Arab traders, to find from the flesh-markets of Zanzibar eventual lodging in the harems and palace guards of Persia and Chinese Turkestan. Thus Kush spreads its transparent wings across the world. The ocean of desert between the northern border and the Mediterranean littoral once knew a trickling traffic in salt for gold, weight for weight; now this void is disturbed only by Swedish playboys fleeing cold boredom in Volvos that soon forfeit their seven coats of paint to the rasp of sand and the roar of their engines to the omnivorous howl of the harmattan. They are skeletons before their batteries die. Would that Allah had so disposed of all infidel intruders!’

“‘To the south, beyond the Grionde, there is forest, nakedness, animals, fever, chaos. It bears no looking into. Whenever a Kushite ventures into this region, he is stricken with mal à l’estomac.’

“‘Kush is a land of delicate, delectable emptiness, …’

“‘In area Kush measures 126,912,180 hectares. The population density comes to .03 per hectare. In the vast north it is virtually immeasurable. The distant glimpsed figure blends with the land as the blue hawk blends with the sky. There are twenty-two miles of railroad and one hundred seven of paved highway. Our national airline, Air Kush, consists of two Boeing 727′s, stunning as they glitter above the also glittering tin shacks by the airfield. … The natives extract ingenious benefits from the baobab tree, weaving mats from its fibrous heart, ropes from its inner bark, brewing porridge and glue and a diaphoretic for dysentery from the pulp of its fruit, turning the elongated shells into water scoops, sucking the acidic and refreshing seeds, and even boiling the leaves, in desperate times, into a kind of spinach. When are times not desperate? Goats eat the little baobab trees, so there are only old giants. The herds of livestock maintained by the tribes of pastoral nomads have been dreadfully depleted by the drought. The last elephant north of the Grionde gave up its life and its ivory in 1959, with a bellow that still reverberates. “The toubabs took the big ears with them,” is the popular saying. Both Sahel and Zanj possess quantities of bauxite, manganese, and other exploitable minerals, but aside from a streak of sulphur high in the Bulub Mountains the only known mineral deposit in Kush is the laterite that renders great tracts of earth unarable, (I am copying these facts from an old Statesman’s Year-Book, freely, here where I sit in sight of the sea, so some of them may be obsolete.) In the north there were once cities of salt populated by slaves, who bred and worshipped and died amid the incessant cruel glisten; these mining settlements, supervised by the blue-clad Tuareg, are mere memories now.’

“‘But even memory thins in this land, which suggests, on the map, an angular skull whose cranium is the empty desert. Along the lower irregular line of the jaw, carved by the wandering brown river, there was a king, the Lord of Wanjiji, whose physical body was a facet of God so radiant that a curtain of gold flakes protected the eyes of those entertained in audience from his glory; and this king, restored to the throne as a constitutional monarch in the wake of the loi-cadre of 1956 and compelled to abdicate after the revolution of 1968, has been all but forgotten. Conquerors and governments pass before the people as dim rumors, as entertainment in a hospital ward. Truly, mercy is interwoven with misery in the world wherever we glance.’

“‘Among the natural resources of Kush perhaps should be listed our diseases-an ample treasury which includes, besides famine and its edema and kwashiorkor, malaria, typhus, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, leprosy, bilharziasis, onchocerciasis, measles, and yaws. As these are combatted by the genius of science, human life itself becomes a disease of the overworked, eroded earth. The average life expectancy in Kush is thirty-seven years, the per capita gross national product $79, the literacy rate 6%.’

“‘The official currency is the lu. The flag is a plain green field. The form of government is a constitutional monarchy with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed. An eleven-man Supreme Counseil Revolutionnaire et Militaire pour l’Emergence serves as the executive arm of the government and also functions as its legislature. The pure and final socialism envisioned by Marx, the theocratic populism of Islam’s periodic reform movements: these transcendent models guide the council in all decisions. SCRME’S chairman, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Minister of National Defense, and President of Kush was (is, the Statesman’s Year-Book has it) Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou–that is to say, myself.'”

Caleb and Linda Pirtle are writers, and in a recent blogpost they quoted advice from “John Updike: A giant of American literature” that begins with the title: “John Updike: Five pages a day every day of your life.”

Writers write. It can be that simple.

“John Updike, he of the bushy eyebrows and hawkish nose, had a distinct style of prose that was described as baroque, exquisite, and prolifically poetic. He did win a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, a pair of National Book Awards, and the Pen/Faulkner Award. And such novels as Couples and Witches of Eastwick, not to mention his quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels, have a definite place on the top shelf of American literature.

“His name is widely known.

“His work is widely praised.

“Yet, John Updike, the man, was very private. Not a recluse, perhaps, but, it’s said, he cultivated his embowered solitude and would rather sit amidst isolation in his home on the Massachusetts shore and write.

“No one wrote more.

“He left an unending trail of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, most of which appeared rather regularly in The New Yorker. In addition, he published almost one book a year for more than a half century.”

Read the advice that Updike gave writers, which Caleb Pirtle passes along.

Mark Reason has been writing a blog “in search of” his late father John—”for 30 years the rugby correspondent of the Daily and then Sunday Telegraph. John began his tours of New Zealand in the ’60s and wrote two books chronicling the tours—and he came across a book that reminded him of his father.

That book was My Father’s Tears, by John Updike.

“I last saw my father a week before his death. He was sitting quietly in a chair looking out on the back garden in Twickenham. There was snow on the ground. He smiled at me, peaceful and, I now realise, happy to go. He wasn’t going to hang around. My dad’s smile was saying goodbye to me,” Reason writes.

“I am not sure I ever saw my father cry. The other day in the glorious Hamilton second hand bookshop I saw a copy of John Updike’s My Father’s Tears. Of course, I bought it, there seem to be a lot of Johns in this story.

“Updike’s father was seeing him off at the train station on the way to college. ‘It shocked me—threw me off track as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears.’

It was the only time Updike saw his father cry. A few, years later, with Updike trying to fly back from Europe in time to be with his seriously ill father, the news arrived that his dad had died. Updike’s wife put her arms around him and told him to cry.

“‘I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.’

“I find it the other way around. I can’t ever remember seeing my father cry, not even when my little brother died. I am sure he must have done, but not in front of the children. In some ways Victoria was still my father’s ruling monarch. And so I cry quite a lot. My father left me plenty of his tears.”

Read the whole blog entry.