Chris Simmons penned a short “Meditation” for the Hickory Daily Record that considers Updike’s thoughts about the Resurrection:
Risen Christ. 1510. Andrea Previtali. Rhode Island School of Design Museum
“At 28, the novelist John Updike cut to the bottom line of the Resurrection. Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of it surely led him to write ‘Make no mistake, if he rose at all, it was as his body; If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.’
“Updike realized that the Resurrection’s scandal, that a human could rise from the dead, must be true or the faith should be abandoned. He would have none of making it metaphor or redefining it to become less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had defeated it himself. At 76, as he approached its threshold, Updike asked his wife, “Are you ready for the leap?”
“It’s easy for the reality of the scandal to lose its punch in our gospel-saturated, yet post-Christian culture, especially in western North Carolina where many of us watched Billy Graham relentlessly invoke the Crucifixion during crusades from just about everywhere. We should sternly resist our own casualness with it in an age when many wrongly treat it as folklore. The Crucifixion was exactly the opposite. The Romans opposed Christianity so strongly partly because early Christians, much like Updike, were so focused on reality itself.”
“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 an article titled “John Updike: Suspicious of Santa, but fond of Christ” written for America Magazine, writer James T. Keane played to the season and began his feature with a quote from John Updike:
“A man of no plausible address, with no apparent source for his considerable wealth, comes down the chimney after midnight while decent, law-abiding citizens are snug in their beds—is this not, at the least, cause for alarm?”
Keane continued, “This is the week to ask: What exactly is Santa Claus up to? John Updike wrote the above about the suspicious fat man who breaks into our homes for his brilliant comic piece, ‘The Twelve Terrors of Christmas,’ first published in The New Yorker at Christmastime in 1992 and later released as a little book illustrated by Edward Gorey. The tone of it is classic Updike—dryly reported detail that provokes a laugh and an insight into the weirder aspects of accepted cultural tenets.”
On a more serious note, Keane recalled that when Updike died in 2009, this magazine’s obituary was written by its former editor in chief, George W. Hunt, S.J., “who had written on Updike himself and also been a longtime friend. (George got away with a title that probably would not have made it past the censors in previous ecclesiastical ages: John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art.)”
America Magazine gave Updike its Campion Award in 1998, and Updike’s acceptance remarks later appeared in the magazine under the title “A Disconcerting Thing,” which, Keane wrote, “is a beautiful piece of prose writing, up there with Updike’s most well-known non-fiction works. Unlike Edmund Campion, S.J., who had given his life for his Catholic faith, Updike noted, most Americans didn’t have to face such stark realities. ‘It is all too easy a thing to be a Christian in America, where God’s name is on our coinage, pious pronouncements are routinely expected from elected officials, and churchgoing, though far from unanimous, enjoys a popularity astounding to Europeans,’ he commented. ‘As good Americans we are taught to tolerate our neighbors’ convictions, however bizarre they secretly strike us, and we extend, it may be, something of this easy toleration to ourselves and our own views.”
Here’s a fascinating bit of trivia: John Updike—reviewed and interviewed at least as much and probably more than any other writer—first appeared in The New York Times not in connection with his writing, but rather his parenting.
Way back on March 2, 1958,Dorothy Barclay compiled an article on “The Magic World of Words” that appeared in The Times.
“Not long before his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published, Updike—already an acclaimed short-story writer—was featured in a parenting article, ‘The Magic World of Words,’ which discussed the best ways to spark a child’s love for language. Updike, the father of toddlers, told the paper in 1958, ‘When children are picking up words with rapidity, between 2 and 3, say, tell them the true word for something even if it is fairly abstruse and long. A long correct word is exciting for a child. Makes them laugh; my daughter never says “rhinoceros” without laughing.’”
John Updike famously hated giving interviews, but when his Ipswich dentist had his drill in his mouth and asked, “My son would like to interview you for his school paper. Would that be okay?” it’s tough to say no. Impossible, even.
What do you consider your major work up to this time? That is a very difficult question. Of the four novels I have written, each was the best I could do at the time. If I had to pick one it would probably be The Centaur. Of my short stories, my next book, Olinger which will come out next year, is my best.
I have read some of your books and have noticed a lack of endings. Do you have a special reason for using this style? I do not believe in artificial endings. A conventional ending doesn’t fit real life. (But) all of my books are written towards an ending I have in mind. I don’t just chop the end off when I get tired.
Do you find you often unknowingly use actual persons and occurrences in your writing? No. If I do it, I do it knowingly. In general, I try not to translate real things into fiction. But I find it almost unavoidable to refrain from mixing fact with fiction.
A few unkind things were said about your last book, Of the Farm. What is your general opinion of critics? I don’t have a general opinion of critics. It all depends on the critic. Being a critic is a very difficult thing to do well. I think there’s a lot of propaganda going on about books. If a book cannot defend itself, then it cannot be defended.
Do you have any favorite authors or persons who have influenced your writing? Many, beginning with my parents and my wife. As for authors, I would have to say James Thurber, Henry Green, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway all influenced me.
Yesterday, on John Updike’s 89th birthday, Literary Hub published an article by Walker Caplan that noted how Updike, “with one notable exception, was an incredibly kind reviewer.” Those familiar with Updike’s work are probably wondering which one that might be: his review of Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, or Toni Morrison? Okay, so there’s more than one. The fact remains, Updike was an incredibly generous reviewer who first and foremost refused to criticize a writer for not writing the kind of book that the reader or reviewer might have preferred. Updike was so devoted to the idea of writers reviewing writers that he set forth his now-famous list of rules for reviewing books.
Caplan includes a handful of criticisms that range from an “it could be me” response—”The elder Trellis [from Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds] is kept immobilized in his bed by surreptitiously drug-induced sleep while his characters, including a number of American cowboys recruited from the novels of one William Tracy, run wild. At least, that’s what I think is happening.”—to the blunt: “Ray Finch, the hero of Norman Rush’s lengthy new novel, Mortals, finds many things annoying. . . . Iris and Ray have been married for seventeen years, and she gives signs of having the seventeen-year itch. This is less surprising to the reader than to Ray, who is perhaps the most annoying hero this reviewer has ever spent seven hundred pages with.”
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.
Pets weren’t allowed in the dorm when John Updike went to Harvard in the fall of 1950, but he took his dog anyway . . . that is, James Thurber’s drawing of a dog made especially for young Updike, whose first ambition was to become a cartoonist. Updike had written a fan letter to the famed cartoonist asking for a drawing to hang on his bare wall, and Thurber obliged.
Last week theInk Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events blog featured Updike’s Thurber cartoon, courtesy of Miranda Updike; this week, the blog adds a letter that Updike had written home to his parents and other “Plowvillians,” provided by Michael Updike.
In that letter dated September 29, 1952, young Updike writes, “This room is always cold and in shadow, for it faces the moon, whereas last year’s room faced the sun. I have the window open to admit the warmth. Coming in to our room is like entering a cave, dank, mossy, but without drawings (beyond Thurber’s) on the wall . . . .”
New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin posted an entry today on Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events titled “Updike’s Thurber.” In it, readers get a rare glimpse of the cartoon dog that Thurber drew especially for a young ‘tween fan named John Updike (courtesy of Miranda Updike).
“For those of us who treasure Thurber’s art, there is I would suggest, nothing more wonderful than a Thurber drawn dog. In Updike’s Introduction to Lee Lorenz’s The World of William Steig, he tells us that in 1944, when he was 12 years old, he wrote Thurber a fan letter. Thurber responded with the drawing you see at the top of this post”.
In musing about the relationship between Updike and Thurber, Maslin shared his “favorite Updike description of Thurber’s art: ‘…oddly tender…a personal art that captured in ingenous scrawls a modern man’s bitter experience and nervous excess.'”
BBC News recently ran a story by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani about Nigerian blogger Teslim Omipidan, whose passion for history and all things Nigerian has connected famed American writer John Updike to his country’s politics. Here is one of Omipidan’s stories:
In October 1961 a young American named Margery Michelmore caused a stir when, in the midst of Peace Corps training at the University of Ibadan in southwestern Nigeria, she decided to send a postcard to a friend back home. In it, she described the “squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions” of her new environment. “A Nigerian saw the postcard before it was mailed; distributed photocopies around the campus—sparking riots from the students who found the private message outrageous, and an international incident that eventually drew the involvement of then US President John F. Kennedy.”
Where does Updike come in?
“Back in 1961, acclaimed writer John Updike absolved Margery Michelmore of blame in the postcard incident. ‘Miss Machelmore did not sin in saying in a personal missive that she was startled, coming fresh from Foxboro, Massachusetts, to find the citizens of Ibadan cooking in the streets,’ he wrote in the 28 October issue of that year’s The New Yorker. ‘And the fellow student who picked up the dropped card and, instead of mailing it, handed it to the local mimeographer seems guilty of a failure of gallantry. One may or may not cook in the streets, but one does not read other people’s mail and then demonstrate because it is insufficiently flattering,'” Updike had written in “The Talk of the Town.”
