John Updike died yesterday of lung cancer at age 76. Most memorials will concentrate on his prolific writing career, his prodigious gifts as a prose stylist, his contributions to the New Yorker, his conservatism (he was a churchgoer, a rare breed among the literati) and maybe the controversies over sexually explicit books like Couples and Brazil. A roll call of facts will follow: some sixty books published as novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and critic; two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of Arts.
Since those stunning facts and figures are available elsewhere, I thought I’d write a brief account of my own experience with Updike’s writing.
He once said in an interview that:
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.
The setting was Oregon, not Kansas, but the experience was much the same. I was a sophomore in high school when I pulled Updike’s The Centaur off one of my parents’ sagging basement bookshelves. The cover intrigued me, with its silhouetted centaur against a blue background, and the pages were yellowing and brittle, exuding the intoxicating scent of a used bookstore. The first sentence hooked me: “Caldwell turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow.”
The Centaur remains one of my personal favorite novels — a poignant and poetic account of young Updike’s fraught and fragile relationship with his father, a burdened teacher at a small Pennsylvania high school. Updike managed to make one man’s rather pitiable existence the stuff of rich drama and psychology, likening it to Greek tragedy. Caldwell — well-meaning, insecure, beleaguered and misunderstood — is one of Updike’s most convincing and touching characters. Peter, the author’s alter-ego in the novel, is a sophomore in high school who aspires to be an artist, inspired partially by his love for Vermeer. To me, Updike was very much like a Vermeer or a masterful Dutch miniaturist, one of those painters who could recreate with loving attention and accuracy every precious detail of an interior or a landscape. He was a poet of the prosaic, a writer so gifted he could make mowing the lawn an aesthetic experience (read On the Farm).
The macro- as well as microcosmic fascinated Updike. Religion played a very important role in Updike’s fiction, even if his ideas are less than orthodox. Quotes from Kierkegaard and Karl Barth served as epigraphs to a few of his novels, and books like A Month of Sundays and Roger’s Version deal seriously with the question of God’s existence, God’s will, and the moral degradation of modern society. One of his most recent books, Terrorist, attempted to describe how American culture, with its glittering, seductive surfaces, conspires against a person of deeply-felt faith. Updike’s characters are often preoccupied with death and the afterlife. Sin, especially sexual sin, and its consequent guilt and bad fruits, is a leitmotif of Updike’s. This obsession with sex and adultery can become tiresome (Villages, for example), and perhaps John Gardner was essentially correct when he wrote of Updike: “Updike’s message, again and again, is a twisted version of the message of his church, neo-orthodox Presbyterianism: Christ has saved us, nothing is wrong; so come to bed with me.”
I believe the authentic Updike is in The Centaur, because in it he extends his author’s sympathies to someone outside himself. It is an intimate, loving portrait of his father, and the sheer beauty of Updike’s prose enraptured me as a fifteen-year old. (To my detriment: I spent many embarrassing years trying to write in a pseudo-Updikean style. Not advised.) My gratitude to Updike for The Centaur, and for giving me the kind of reading experience that makes one a life-long lover of literature, is unbounded. Each of his books was an attempt “to give the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it. He accomplished his task with unflagging energy, and the literary landscape is more beautiful for it. Rest in peace, Mr. Updike.
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