Patricia Abbott’s Feb. 9, 2022 blog entry featured John Updike’s “Wife-Wooing” as the topic. Abbott wrote, “These are some of my favorite stories. You watch a marriage fall apart over the course of the collection. ‘Giving Blood’ is my favorite.
“Favorite line. ‘Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl.’ How I wish he had used ‘innocent’ instead of ‘ignorant’.”
The post sparked a lively exchange of comments, among them:
“In one of the later Maple stories, the wife wants to have sex with her husband and he says, ‘It’s too far to go.’ That line shocked me when I read it. John Updike was one of the best book critics of his era. Political correctness now relegates Updike to the trash heap,” a person named George wrote.
Rick responded, “It’s all the amateur ‘critics’ on social media who should be reviled and put on the trash heap. I liked Rabbit Run, Of the Farm and The Witches of Eastwick. I haven’t read any short stories by him.”
“Consider also this view of death by the atheist John Updike, from his novel, Pigeon Feathers:”
Wait. The atheist John Updike?
James Yerkes’ 1999 book delves into Updike’s complicated view of religion
It’s easy enough for non-literary folks to confuse a short story collection with a novel, but confusing a writer almost universally hailed as a Christian writer with an atheist? Let’s be clear here. Though dictionaries define “atheism” as simply “disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods,” it must necessarily involve something more extreme—a rejection of God or the existence of God, perhaps, or else all of Christendom are atheists. For who hasn’t had at least one moment of fearful doubt, the frightening kind of “What if there is no God?” thought that threw deep thinkers like the existentialists into the throes of despair? Didn’t Christ also experience a moment of despair and lack of faith while dying on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Below is the passage that Dr. Cook was introducing:
“Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you were drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt in your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, an unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.”
This was 14-year-old David Kern during his moment-on-the-cross despair. Later in the story, however, David experienced an epiphany and a return to faith . . . and to hope.
The John Updike Society has so many members who are ministers precisely because Updike—a Lutheran who married a minister’s daughter—is a Christian writer who writes honestly about what it really means to be a Christian and to wrestle with doubts. Even the admission of doubt is an act of faith, for doubt is uncertainty, not disbelief. As many Updike scholars have observed and even Wikipedia noted, “Updike’s novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader….”
“Updike’s faith is Christian,” Bernard A. Schopen wrote some 16 years after Pigeon Feathers was published in book form, “but it is one to which many of the assumptions about the Christian perspective do not apply—especially those which link Christian faith with an absolute and divinely ordered morality.” In Updike’s fictional world, faith is not absolute, nor is it constant. It is perpetual, but broken (balanced?) by doubts that occupy his heroes as they hope for grace.
As Updike wrote in the November 29, 1999 New Yorker, “Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. At the end of the millennium, and of a century that has the Holocaust at its center, the reasons for doubt in God’s existence are so easily come by….” Wavering faith is the rule in Updike’s fictional world, not the exception. But wavering faith and atheism are not the same.
“In 1996, John Updike released his 17th novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, a story about a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, who loses his faith, leaves the ministry and becomes an encyclopedia salesman. In a strange case of art imitating life, Updike was narrating my story. I was a Baptist minister who had slowly been losing my faith. That same year, I left the ministry and embarked on a second career in technology sales.
“While Updike captured my painful but liberating movement from Christianity to agnosticism, he failed to narrate the stigma and stereotypes associated with being an agnostic or atheist,” Ramsey wrote.
“Last year, I wrote a book in which I discuss my journey from minister to agnostic and critique popular religious notions like ‘everything happens for a reason.’ I have friends who have reviewed my book online, some of whom masked their names to avoid being outed by their association with a controversial topic and agnostic writer,” Ramsey said.
Jacobs replied, “John Updike’s Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs are the bookends of my Updike Shelf (about which, another time). Here was someone who didn’t have to review or consider his contemporaries or predecessors, and yet industriously, prolifically did. What generosity.”
When Young weighed in with “Martin Amis’s collection The War Against Cliché. His flow is insane,” Jacobs said, “Wait, I meant to say that! Well, Amis has written about Updike and Updike about Martin’s father, Kingsley, so maybe this is a male literary turducken . . . .”
Shortly before The John Updike Society convened in Reading, Pa. for their 6th Biennial Conference, Jonathan Clarke published a piece in City Journal titled “John Updike and the Politics of Literary Reputation.” In it, he assesses the current problem: Updike’s fall from literary grace during a time of “cancel culture” and the #metoo movement.
“His is a striking case study in the politics of literary reputation in a time of generational upheaval,” Clarke writes. “Updike has not been a victim of cancel culture. He merely represents the ancien regime.”
Clarke suggests that “Updike’s self-effacing public manner now looks like a tactical error in the long game of literary reputation. Philip Roth and Toni Morrison never tired of singing the song of themselves—and why not, in the end, when the world is so crowded and busy? It’s not that Updike was modest about his talent; it’s simply that he embodied the cultural style we associate with American Protestantism. The vanquishing of that once-dominant mode has contributed to a growing incomprehension of Updike’s work.”
Of course, questioning Updike’s status as a writer of stature is nothing new. Those who have followed the critical response to Updike’s work will think immediately of John Aldridge’s early claim that Updike might be a great stylist but that he “has nothing to say.”
In 2014, The New Republic took up the issue again in a debate between English comedian, novelist, and TV personality David Baddiel and literary critic-biographer Jeffrey Meyers: “John Updike: Tedious Suburbanite, Literary Great.” Prompting the debate was the release of the Adam Begley biography, Updike.
Baddiel argues on the “for” side. He begins, “Let’s begin by making one thing clear. John Updike was the greatest writer in English of the last century. Unquestionably, he was the best short story writer; I would argue the best novelist, certainly of the postwar years; one of the very best essayists and in the top 20 poets.” On the negative side, Meyers calls Updike’s New Yorker contributions “made-to-order” and dismisses the magazine entirely as a group of editors and contributors who engaged in “mutual admiration” and “quarrelled over a semicolon but encouraged facile content and ironed out all traces of distinctive style.” Meyers concludes, “Updike, cherishing every scrap of his personal life and striving for mythical significance in his daily doings, fell back on the trivial and tedious details of his small-town childhood.” Ironically, in his biography of Hemingway, Meyers doesn’t take that author to task for mining his own adolescence to create a series of stories set in Michigan, or later stories and novels that also reflect Hemingway’s lived experiences. So maybe it all comes down to a long-debated aesthetic question: what is a suitable subject for art?
In recent years, males who have taken advantage of women have been toppled amid cries of “toxic masculinity,” and Confederate statues and monuments have been removed because of “cancel culture.” But in his Spectator essay “Read Ray Bradbury before he’s canceled,” associate editor Ron Liddle questions whether the backlash against writers for alleged sexism or racism isn’t somewhat like pushes from the other side of the political arena to ban books from school libraries. His essay raises other questions: Should writing about a fictional man who abuses women or spouts racist things be treated the same as a flesh-and-blood man who abuses women or says racist things? Can a male write about a misbehaving male protagonist? Should a writer be held accountable for a character’s behavior? When it comes to art, is censorship ever justifiable? If so, when, and under what circumstances? And what about inconsistencies? Why are older novels that feature sexist male protagonists not held in the same contempt as those from a more recent past? Is “cancel culture” driven by personal crusades?
Although Liddle focuses on Bradbury, Updike also factors into the discussion. “Frankly, it’s a wonder we are allowed to read [Bradbury] at all. But that’s where Fahrenheit 451 got it right. After reading Bradbury I moved on to Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike — especially Updike, another small-town writer. These people seemed to me giants of literature and yet I suspect you will have to search high and low to find them on a university syllabus, so comprehensively have their reputations been trashed for political reasons.
“Updike, an almost lifelong registered Democrat, is loathed for his supposed misogyny and racism,” Liddle writes. “I read an academic article recently supposedly in support of Updike: it said he should be read because we needed to know what a vile bastard he really was. Saul Bellow is canceled because he became a bit gamy about the neighborhood gangs in Chicago, and also for Henderson the Rain King and Mr Sammler’s Planet, which are considered terribly racist. And Philip Roth? Hell, even his biographer has been canceled. Maybe we ought to memorize a book or two from each of these wonderful writers, in order to keep the memories alive. I’ll take Updike’s Couples, if that’s OK — I already know most of it by heart. It’s late now. There’s a wind whipping up and the distant sound of thunder carrying the whiff of autumn. I am no longer 15 years old. But I might still hunker down between my sheets with Bradbury, comforted by the tales of the weird and ominous stuff going on just outside.”
Then she provided an answer: “Let’s judge the great male literary figures on merit, not by their sexual deeds.” But she did not come to that decision without a struggle.
“Never do I feel more trapped inside my gender than when I’m thinking about Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. But not for the reasons you might think,” Lowdon wrote.
“These novelists dominated the American literary scene for 50 years. Boldly, shamelessly, their work mined their lives and those of the people they knew. Over the past decade important biographies of all three have appeared, flooding those lives with the cold, hard light of non-fiction. The promiscuity and the adultery we already knew about. But the scale of it! Sometimes Bellow had four women on the go at once. Or how about Updike, who pleasured his mistress through her ski trousers in the back seat of the car his unwitting wife was driving? And Roth, whose later work seems so noble, so serious—why there he is, caught red-handed in Blake Bailey’s new biography, using prostitutes and sleeping with his students!”
Lowdon wrote that ironically “we perform a piece of sexist reduction when all we care about is what Roth [and Updike and the others] did in bed. And although, increasingly, it’s considered reactionary to say, ‘Hold on, things were a bit different back then,’ it’s true: they were. The way we think about sex and power has shifted radically in the past half-century.”
She continued, “Roth, Updike and Bellow are our fathers in the sense that we have inherited the world in which they lived and wrote. Perhaps we simply can’t bear to discover that these once-revered figures are less than perfect. An uncomfortable truth: a man who is capable of great insights into the human condition can desire in his dotage to f*** a much younger woman. Are we afraid of what these men have to tell us about sex—that it is full of inconvenient, transgressive, inappropriate feelings?”
Lowdon concluded, “The world is messy, full of unwanted erections and coercion and pornography. Good novelists try to capture that mess on paper. Which is in itself a moral act—to look clearly and unflinchingly at what is.”
This time of year John Updike’s poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” is often reprinted and just as often pondered.
The most recent to tackle the poem is the Maverick Philosopher, who is listed among The Times of London’s 100 Best Blogs.
Bill Vallicella (aka Maverick Philosopher) writes, “Given what we know from yesterday’s Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s sense, and not ethical in the Dane’s sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.
“Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn’t do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men’s wives. Am I being fair?”
In a Q&A with The Nerd Daily, Jennifer Dupee, author of the debut novel The Little French Bridal Shop, was asked, “Was there a moment in your writing career where you thought, ‘Okay, now I am officially a REAL writer?’ Can you tell us about that time in your life?”
Dupee responded, “I’m still not sure I feel like a REAL writer. It’s just something I’ve always done and will always continue to do. But I do have one small anecdote: My grandmother was friends with John Updike. When she died, we both spoke at her funeral. He came up to me afterward and praised my eulogy. In that moment, I felt a little like I’d arrived.”
In his May 21, 2020 article on “The Philip Roth Archive,”Jesse Tisch described “A fan’s obsessive rummage through the letters and papers of the writer who died two years ago today” that “reveals a playful, funny, brilliant man.” The letters also reveal a great deal about the complicated relationship Roth had with fellow literary giant John Updike.
“Their relationship is hard to categorize, not a friendship, exactly, nor merely an acquaintance,” Tisch wrote. “For all their similarities—two literary grandees of the same generation, both precocious, prolific, obsessed with male desire and waning potency—they were strikingly different. Religious and secular. Serene and intense. High style and vernacular. Whereas Updike poured out novels, Roth, a plebeian laborer, assembled them brick by brick. To say that writing was pleasure for Updike and torture for Roth is to overstate things only slightly.
“The Roth-Updike letters reveal a deeper, more complex relationship than I had known about. Despite their differences, Roth admired Updike extravagantly, both as a novelist and a critic. “There’s no other writer (which is to say no one at all) in America whose high opinion means more to me than yours,” Roth wrote Updike in 1988. Roth pored over Updike’s reviews of his books, taking them to heart even when he didn’t agree: ‘take a look at page 181 of The Anatomy Lesson,’ he urged Updike in 1984. ‘My answer to the last paragraph of your review.’
“Somehow, despite their mutual respect and occasional get-togethers, the friendship never deepened. Roth’s half of the correspondence is warm and funny (another difference: Roth was far funnier), his fondness tinged with envy. ‘Reading you when I’m at work discourages me terribly—that fucking fluency!’ Roth wrote Updike in 1978. That wasn’t the only source of envy. ‘He knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America,’ Roth told David Plante. ‘I don’t know anything about anything.’ Indeed, one picks up on a subtle antagonism to Roth’s joshing. ‘Poor Rabbit. Must he die just because you’re tired?’ he needled Updike in 1990. More than once, Roth bristled at Updike’s criticism. He couldn’t understand Jewish novels; he had no comprehension of Jewish history or the Jewish psyche. ‘We are in history up to our knees,’ he told an interviewer, dismissing Updike’s review of The Anatomy Lesson.
“To some degree, both men were guarded and self-protective. Updike’s shield was amiability; Roth’s was humor and flattery. Of the two, Roth seemed more eager to pursue a deeper friendship. Roth professed ‘affectionate sympathy and something even more than that’ to Updike in 1991, yet sensed a certain resistance, a studied aloofness, on Updike’s part. Any chance for friendship was ruined by Updike’s incisive criticism of Roth’s novels. Reviewing The Anatomy Lesson, Updike complained of ‘the grinding, whining paragraphs’ and suggested that ‘by the age of fifty a writer should have settled his old scores.’ That rankled. In 1993, Updike delivered several sharp blows to Roth’s ego in the process of criticizing Operation Shylock (final verdict: Roth was ‘an exhausting author to be with’). The final blow came in 1999, when Updike, writing in TheNew York Review of Books, endorsed Claire Bloom’s vindictive memoir of her relationship with Roth. That did it: Roth was furious; the men never spoke again. Late in life, his wounds somewhat healed, Roth would claim to regret their estrangement. ‘I think you are next after Gordimer,’ he wrote Updike in October 1991. Of course, neither would follow Gordimer, which proved another lasting connection between the men—America’s greatest nonwinners of the Nobel Prize.”
The fascinating article based on letters from the Philip Roth Archive covers a lot more ground than this. Here’s the link.
