John Updike died this week at the age of 76. I kept up with his regular book reviews in the New Yorker and his short stories as they appeared there or in other periodicals. Although I haven’t got around to reading his later novels – which seem appealing despite consistent critical thrashing – I always took notice when one appeared (there it is, right on time) and usually bought a beautiful Knopf hardcover copy off the remainder tables a year or two later. There’s no shortage of Updike novels for the future.
Updike was tirelessly curious, intelligent and affable. Very affable. He was a bit like the teacher’s pet who never stopped taking delight in the sensual qualities of everything, the infinite goodness in the world. In contrast to the raging Philip Roth, Updike was complacent, essentially frictionless, in his bourgeois surroundings – he said idiotic things like “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy” – and this colours much of the fiction. His unfailing ability to craft beautiful sentences in the Nabokovian mode was not always an asset. Actually, it was more like an addiction; he was prone to thrusting these metaphor-heavy sentences into the thoughts of the inarticulate. But most of the time he rose far above these failings.
I like Updike’s short stories best. The ones that come to mind right now are ‘The Lucid Eye in Silver Town,’ ‘Snowing in Greenwich Village,’ and ‘The Bulgarian Poetess,’ but there are numerous others. On the day of his death I picked up his wonderful “harvest”, The Early Stories (1953-1975), and read ‘You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You’ and ‘Museums and Women’ for the first time. I then revisited the 1978 story ‘Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author’ from Bech is Back (1981) in which Henry Bech, a glorious has-been of a Jewish-American writer, winds up on an island in the Caribbean autographing “twenty-eight thousand five hundred tip-in sheets of high-rag-content paper” for a tacky pigskin special edition of his old book Brother Pig. Writer’s block is taken to a new extreme as Bech’s meandering career is reduced to “negative perfection…He could not even write his own name.” Bech’s adventures are hilarious. As we know, Updike never suffered from writer’s block.
(As an aside, I heard the late Norman Mailer whizzed through thirty thousand tip-in sheets for the first edition of The Time of our Time while listening to Mozart. I have a pristine copy of that edition – it was cheaper than a new paperback – and Mailer’s signature is a thing of beauty: dead centre with each letter finely articulated. But maybe my tip-in sheet was in the first thousand.)
Updike, who loved books as physical objects as much as (or even more than) books as literature, conceived and executed a totally unique project at the beginning of his fifty years with Alfred A. Knopf: a uniformly-designed collected edition (Janson type, Perpetua headings). He was certainly finnicky about his books, and wrote in a 1997 essay: “A master set of the forty Knopf hardcovers sits in a polychrome row opposite my desk. They are stripped of their jackets and marked up with typos and second thoughts toward some ultimate perfected edition” (More Matter, p. 761). Here are some of those jacketless books in no particular order:
Can is it be true we shall soon pass a year without a new Updike book? Since 1958 there has (usually) been a yearly alternation of novels with other books (collections of short stories, essays, poetry, etc.). A short story collection, My Father’s Tears, is due out in June. In the last months of his life Updike spoke about a new novel-in-progress set in Ancient Rome. Whether he finished that book is not known, but we may possibly see it in 2010.
Updike was pedantic about collecting every last squib of his writing within hardcovers. So what of the smattering of essays and reviews that have appeared since his final bumper gathering Due Considerations (2007)? I would not be surprised if he left instructions. But if these pieces are too slight to constitute a book of their own, I’d suggest a fat anthology of his best non-fiction with the uncollected pieces in an appendix.
And sometime in the future we should expect The Late Stories, which will collect work written 1975-2009: the remaining pieces from Problems (1979), as well as the stories in Trust Me (1987), The Afterlife (1995), Licks of Love (2000) and My Father’s Tears, and whatever stories are still forthcoming. One new story has already appeared: the Winter 2009 issue of The American Scholar carries a piece called ‘Nessus At Noon’. It is an unusual and very short parable in dialogue form set in a dry-cleaning establishment. The mention of a deathbed is a little startling:
Who was it on his deathbed, asked by some officious person if he thought God would forgive him, responded, “Yes. Forgiveness is his métier“?
The dry-cleaner attributes the statement to Heinrich Heine.
Update: Various newspapers have published a rather depressing new poem by Updike called ‘Requiem’:
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.— JOHN UPDIKE
This poem is due to appear in a new collection called Endpoint in September. According to the LA Times, Updike submitted the collection to Knopf only a few weeks ago. There will also be an Everyman’s Library reissue of The Maples Stories (aka Too Far To Go) in August following My Father’s Tears. A glut of posthumous Updike!
[See The Centaurian website]
Posted by matthewasprey 
Posted by matthewasprey 
Posted by matthewasprey 
