Adrienne LaFrance contemplates “The Human Fear of Total Knowledge; Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy” and quotes John Updike in the process.

“Libraries tend to occupy a sacred space in modern culture,” she writes in her June 3, 2016 Atlantic article. “People adore them. (Perhaps even more than that, people love the idea of them….)”

“In The Book of Sand, Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of an unexpected visit from a Bible salesman, who has in his collection a most unusual object. ‘It can’t be, but it is,’ the salesman says. ‘The number of pages is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none is the last.’ The strange book is so engrossing as to be sinister,” LaFrance writes, adding that in Borges’ The Library of Babel “‘each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters.’ The appearance of order is an illusion….”

“I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum,’ John Updike wrote in an essay about Borges in 1965. ‘Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life.’

“Borges was not just interested in literary artifice, as Updike points out, but fundamentally concerned with the nature of reality, a preoccupation that often led him to interrogate the scope and organization of human knowledge.”

The Buffalo News “Reporters’ Notebook” for March 17, 2016, posted by Olaf Fub,  quoted John Updike:

“A thought for this drizzly week from novelist John Updike, born on this date in 1932, ‘Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.'”

Updike bibliographer sent an email saying the quote, which is from “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” should read, “Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth”; but we expect to hear shortly from Updike’s biographer as well, since Updike was not born on March 17, but rather on the 18th.”

Writing for The Telegraph, Martin Chilton considers the legacy of John Cheever and cites Updike in the process:

“As his contemporary John Updike put it: ‘John Cheever was often labelled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.”

“John Cheever: ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’

The article was posted on October 15, 2015.

Anne Tyler, whose novel A Spool of Blue Thread made the Man Booker 2015 shortlist, referred to Updike in remarks that appeared in The Guardian. She says that “with each new scene I have an uncomfortable sense of making it up, of ordering them about willy-nilly. Oh, what a silly, artificial business novel-writing is, I’ll think. Who am I kidding, here? And I glance at the John Updike poem that I keep above my desk, ‘Marching Through a Novel’ where he likens his characters to meek foot soldiers blindly following his orders. Poor dears. I pity them.

“But gradually, new layers develop. I did plan for Denny to marry but I didn’t know exactly whom he married, and once I see her, I smile. I’m intrigued by Stem’s wife Nora: she’s as mysterious to me as she is to the rest of the family, and I perk up whenever she enters a scene.

“Then I find out that the mother of the family used to have one of those bad-boy boyfriends when she was in her teens. Why, I had no idea! I have to go back to an earlier section to drop in a couple of references to him. (Or, as John Updike put it, to ‘develop a motive backwards to suit the deed that’s done.’) This is why I love rewriting: each new draft reflects more of those extra layers that I hadn’t foreseen at the start.

“Man Booker 2015 shortlist: the stories behind the novels”

On October 1, 2015, Literary Hub published “The Life and Times of Alfred A. Knopf” by Chip McGrath, excerpted from a special edition history on the occasion of the company’s 100th anniversary. Since, as McGrath points out, Updike was “the last great acquisition of the Alfred era,” he is well represented.

John Updike once compared Alfred A. Knopf to “a cross between a Viennese emperor and a Barbary pirate,” McGrath writes.

“[Knopf’s] correspondence was hearty and businesslike and seldom ventured to make editorial suggestions. (A good example is the letter he wrote to Updike in 1967 after reading Couples. He called the novel a ‘lollapalooza,’ and then shrewdly suggested that at his own expense Updike hire a lawyer in case any of Updike’s friends or neighbors thought they recognized themselves in the book. Updike, incidentally, was the last great acquisition of the Alfred era, and despite their age difference, the two men hit it off immediately, not only because Knopf happily picked up Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair—after Harper dithered over it for months, suggesting first one revision, then another—but out of a shared love of typography.)”

“I love books physically,” Knopf wrote in his 1917 catalog, and “in 1965, when Knopf celebrated its 50th anniversary and was widely recognized for its distinguished record, it was Alfred who got most of the praise. The Typophiles, an organization that encouraged the appreciation of fine typography and bookmaking, published a two-volume Festschrift in his honor, with tributes from writers like John Hersey, Paul Horgan, John Crowe Ransom, and Updike.

Photo:  Carl van Vechten.

They say it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, and the often decorous John Updike probably wouldn’t have had anything negative to say about the recent death of E.L. Doctorow. But Updike is no longer among us and Bruce Weber, writing for The New York Times, quoted Updike’s comparatively nasty assessment of Doctorow’s historical novels in the obituary “E.L. Doctorow Dies at 84; Literary Time Traveler Stirred Past Into Fiction”:

“Perhaps the most telling review came from John Updike, who was prominent among a noisy minority of critics who generally found Mr. Doctorow’s tinkering with history misleading if not an outright violation of the tenets of narrative literature. Updike held Ragtime in especial disdain.

“’It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game,’ he wrote in The New Yorker, going on to dismiss several other Doctorow books before granting their author a reprieve.

“’His splendid new novel, The March, pretty well cures my Doctorow problem,’ Updike wrote, adding, ‘The novel shares with Ragtime a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up close, and finally receding over the horizon.

“’Reading historical fiction,’ Updike went on, ‘we often itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get to the facts without the fiction. But The March stimulates little such itch; it offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide. Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.'”