Category Archives: First Person Singular

UK journal considers Updike’s posthumous reputation

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In “Cast Aside: John Updike’s posthumous reputation,” The Skinny: Independent Cultural Journalism, a teaser reads,

“As John Updike biographer Adam Begley appears at Manchester Literature Festival this month[Tuesday, Oct. 14, 6 p.m.], we consider the posthumous reputation of one of America’s best-known writers. It’s arguably never been at a lower ebb, but should this be so?”

Never mind that it’s debatable Updike’s reputation has ebbed, because he’s always had  admirers and detractors.

For a springboard, writer Jim Troeltsch uses Updike himself.

“John Updike, speaking in 2005, four years before his death: ‘Reputations do subside, is one of the conclusions I’ve drawn. Your life as a famous writer, like your life as a human being, is limited, and now that we all live so long, a lot of us live to see ourselves become faded reputations. I don’t know if that’s true of me or not—I try not to think about it too much.’ The subtext’s pretty transparent; even then Updike knew his reputation, at least as a novelist, was waning.”

Never mind that Troeltsch may have been reading too much into Updike’s statement. What follows is a discussion that begins with often-cited dismissals by James Wood, Harold Bloom, and Gore Vidal and a subsequent dismissal of the charges that Updike is a misogynist without much else to say.

“To label Updike a misogynistic narcissist and leave it at [that] is surely to miss the point. Was Proust a longwinded snob? Joyce a drunken lech? Céline a crazed anti-Semite? Yes; but do such things really matter when it comes to judging their work on its own terms (even when such odious traits are shared by their characters)?

“The novel’s a container of consciousness—the author’s. And when the consciousness, as in Updike’s case, is so great as to allow us to apprehend the world anew, to actually augment our reality—to really do this; to make us see the tea-soaked sugar cube in the shaded sandstone farmhouse—then perhaps we should put the faults to one side and say: yes, maybe this really is enough.”

More debate on Updike’s stature

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It’s funny how one appraisal leads to another, or a conversation . . . or a debate.

William Deresiewicz’s essay-review of Updike for The New Republic has already inspired a favorable response from National Review, that other side of the aisle publication. That’s encouraging, because these days Updike appears to be one of the few subjects that a liberal or conservative can agree upon.

Now Peter J. Leithart (First Things) weighs in with “Painter of Surfaces,” posted online on September 10, 2014, which oddly enough has nothing much to do with Updike’s painterly style.

“No one has to defend Updike’s skill as a writer,” Leithart writes, “and he was surely a success, as Deresiewicz’s rapid-fire summary indicates. . . . Updike’s reputation suffers more because he was, in Deresiewicz’s words, ‘an unembarrassed, unreconstructed middle-American. . . . Updike’s life and work are testaments to the idea that mid-American values, beliefs, and sensibilities are adequate to address and interpret modern experience.’ That cannot be forgiven.

“Nor can Updike’s theological conviction. . . . But he, like the non-judgmental God of his novels, stays on the surface. Updike will be remembered as a chronicler of his times, but Deresiewicz doesn’t convince me that his novels have the depth to be of enduring importance.”

National Review is Looking at Updike, Again

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“It’s not cool to like the writing of John Updike,” National Review‘s Michael Potemra declares in “Looking at Updike, Again.” “But it’s the right thing to do.”

Wasn’t that what actor Wilford Brimley told us about eating oatmeal?

Potemra explains that the “anti-feminist rap against Updike deserves, in our current cultural plight, a little more attention. The locus classicus of this opinion was the famous phrase of David Foster Wallace, who quoted a female friend’s gibe that Updike was ‘a penis with a thesaurus.’ Now, David Foster Wallace has basically been canonized as a secular saint, and to be dismissed by him in this fashion amounts to having the phrase NOT. COOL. branded on your forehead.”

Potemra was apparently inspired to reconsider Updike after reading a New Republic book review of Adam Begley’s Updike by William Deresiewicz, whom he quotes:

“Updike—and Mailer, and Roth, and the other men (and women) of their generation—were situated at a complicated juncture in the history of sexuality. They came of age before the revolution, but not so long before that they couldn’t try to join it. Sexual freedom descended on them not as a birthright, but as a miracle. Of course they went a little wild. When the Pill came out in 1960, the oldest member of the baby boom was fourteen. Updike was 28. If he spent a lot of time thinking about sex, it’s not a big surprise. Updike, like his contemporaries, was also too early for feminism. That may not be conducive to the most progressive attitudes . . . but it also means that Updike stood between the old and new Victorianisms.”

Potemra adds, “Deresiewicz is pointing to something important: Updike, as a man of his generation, did not view ideologizing about men and women to be his basic calling in life. It was sufficient for him to watch men and women, to notice, and to record his observations in some of the best prose ever produced by an American writer.”

A.O. Scott writes on the Death of Adulthood

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Film critic A.O. Scott dips one toe in familiar waters and the other in American literature to discuss what he perceives as “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” which was published on September 11, 2014.

Both Philip Roth and John Updike are mentioned—Roth, more so than Updike.

“While [Leslie] Fiedler was sitting at his desk in Missoula, Mont., writing his monomaniacal tome [on Love and Death in the American Novel], a youthful rebellion was asserting itself in every corner of the culture. The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom—a new crop of semi-antiheroes in flight from convention, propriety, authority and what Huck would call the whole ‘sivilized’ world.

“From there it is but a quick ride on the Pineapple Express to Apatow. The Updikean and Rothian heroes of the 1960s and 1970s chafed against the demands of marriage, career and bureaucratic conformity and played the games of seduction and abandonment, of adultery and divorce, for high existential stakes, only to return a generation later as the protagonists of bro comedies. We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from Catch-22 to The Hangover, from Goodbye, Columbus to The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.

Writer quotes Updike on L.E. Sissman

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In a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Mortality as Muse; L.E. Sissman deserves to be revived,” a Sightings columnist tells about a now-obscure ad man turned poet whose premature death from cancer elicited remarks from John Updike.

“So why read him now? John Updike put it well in his New Yorker obituary: ‘One said goodbye to Ed wondering each time if it would be the last time. It marks the quality of the man that this shadow became something pleasant: an extra resonance in the parting smile, a warmth in the handshake. He helped us all, in his work and in his courage, to bear our own mortality.’ He still does, as do Ms. Adams and Mr. Myers, whose willingness to write with equal honesty should inspire all of those who grapple with the common dilemma, whether its coming be imminent or merely prospective.”

Composer credits Updike for inspiration

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Screen Shot 2014-09-12 at 7.25.35 PMNaxos, “The World’s Leading Classical Music Group,” published an article last year that might have slipped everyone’s notice, but since lately the Updike detractors have been rattling the picket fence with their sticks, it seemed a good time to post “Kenneth Fuchs and JoAnn Falletta record fourth disc with the London Symphony Orchestra” (September 23, 2013). The recording includes Falling Man (based on a fragment from Don DeLillo’s post-9/11 novel), Movie House (“seven poems by John Updike for baritone voice and chamber ensemble”) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (inspired by four of William Blake’s poems).

Fuchs writes, “When I read John Updike’s new novel Rabbit Is Rich in 1982, I knew I had come upon a writer whose words would inspire me for a very long time. Updike’s observations about American life and the objects and desires of the American sensibility spoke directly to me. I fell under the spell of his poetry and found many poems that I thought would be right for musical setting. Movie House is a cycle of seven poems set for baritone voice and chamber ensemble (flute, oboe, clarinet, string trio, and harp) from Updike’s second volume of poetry, Telephone Poles, published in 1963. The poems include ‘Telephone Poles,’ ‘Maples in a Spruce Forest,’ ‘Seagulls,’ ‘The Short Days,’ ‘Movie House,’ ‘Modigliani’s Death Mask,’ and ‘Summer: West Side.’

“When performed together, the collection lasts about 31 minutes. I was attracted to these poems because of their optimistic evocations of life during the 1950s, the decade in which I was born. Read some fifty years later, the poems have a nostalgic quality that seems both ironic and poignant. I chose the title of the poem ‘Movie House’ as the title of the entire work. The first poem, ‘Telephone Poles,’ introduces the phrase ‘our eyes’ and the idea of observation, which runs throughout the cycle. The music accompanying that phrase (an ascending major second followed by an ascending major sixth) forms the musical motive from which the melodic and harmonic structure of the entire work evolves. Like the images on a movie screen, the musical setting of each poem is meant to provide the listener with an aural, visual, and emotional perspective from which to observe the world.”

Amazon is currently selling the CD for $11.47.

Guardian writer weighs in on Updike’s rubbish

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The Guardian Books Blog recently posted an item on “Raiding John Updike’s Rubbish—a trashy pursuit.”  As the headline implies, the writer thinks that “a reread of the Rabbit books might be a better way of sneaking a peak into the mind of their author, rather than rummaging around in what he threw out.”

“As for me, I didn’t spend long on Moran’s blog—it felt sleazy, to be looking through such intimate pieces of a man’s life—and Updike was a man who shared much with the world, through his fiction.

“There is one picture, though, which Moran found and which the Atlantic published, which gives me reason to pause, briefly, in this decision. It’s of Updike, on a basketball court, involved and lean, and it’s so completely reminiscent of the start of Rabbit, Run that I can’t stop gazing at it.”

Updike scores a 1 on this 200 Best American Novels list

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Writing for PBS, Victoria Fleischer on September 11 posted an article titled, “Have you read the 200 ‘best American novels’?”

She reported that a single individual “embarked on an experiment” and “committed to reading only American novels and decided to compile a list of the 100 best that were published between 1770 and 1985.”

The architect of this plan was, well, an architect from Massachusetts named David Handlin.

Not surprisingly, Updike’s Rabbit, Run made the list. But it does raise an eyebrow that it’s the ONLY Updike book included. The Pulitzer Prize winner Rabbit Is Rich didn’t make his list, nor did Updike’s own favorite book, the National Book Award-winning The Centaur.

Handlin’s picks have caused a stir, with Sandra Gilbert, a distinguished professor of English emerita at the University of California, questioning the criteria for “novel” and “American.” She wrote her own list in response, and one of the things she did was to remove Updike—though she was quoted in the PBS article as saying “I’m not at all inclined to demand deletions, but prefer instead to suggest additions that would make this mini-narrative of our literature (for a narrative it is) more representative of the culture we’ve inherited.”