Missing, and misunderstanding, John Updike
I was busy when John Updike died. Markets were in freefall, everyone in my industry was worried about their job, the days and nights blurred together into a melange of conference calls, spreadsheets, and client meetings. There was no time to process the loss of the man I knew as an essayist, a thoughtful art critic, and one of the giants of the New York Review of Books of that era.
One obstacle to understanding Updike is that wrote so much. His personal goal was to produce five pages a day, every day. Over fifty years this amounted to 20 novels, a dozen short story collections and poetry, plus the non-fiction essays.
The essays are wonderful. They run long and short, far and wide, and Updike cheerfully acknowledged their random character. In the introduction to More Matter, his fifth collection, his blames the times:
… And so it has come to pass that, in the 1990s, as I turned sixty and then reached sixty-two (senior discount at the movies!) and then passed retirement age, instead of devoting myself wholly to the elaboration of a few final theorems and dreams couched in the gauzy genres of make-believe, I have cranked out, in response to many a plausible request, the mass of more or less factual matter, of assorted prose, which Knopf has herewith heroically, indulgently printed and bound, my fifth such collection and— dare we hope?—my last.
But despite their weight and depth - More Matter alone runs 928 pages - they are not central to most people’s picture of Updike. I recently mentioned the essays to an old friend, a professional writer. He’d never looked into them, he said, but had enjoyed the novels. “Updike was a great stylist…” he offered, pausing thoughtfully before adding: “the best.”
Writing at the time of Updike’s death, Russian critic Aleksandr Genis noted how influential the Updike had been in the USSR in the 1960s. The authorities let books like The Centaur into the country because they could be read as critical of the the American system. But, said Genis,
We were drawn in not by the content of his works but exclusively by their form. "The Centaur" arrived on our shelves together with other idols of the 1960s generation -- "The Catcher In The Rye" by J.D. Salinger, "Billiards At Half Past Nine" by Heinrich Boll, "The Fall" by Albert Camus, "The Woman In The Dunes" by Kobo Abe. It's no accident that all these novels were translations. With their experimental poetics, it was not just artistic freedom that pierced the Iron Curtain, but ordinary freedom as well. The pathos of their content -- their criticism, on which the authorities were counting -- flew right past Soviet readers who were intoxicated by their formalistic innovations.
When they finally got access to the whole Updike canon, he says, they resisted the more complete picture. They liked the story they had:
Instead of seeing a lyrical realist who accurately and with melancholy described small-town America, Russians held on to the image of a daring innovator who transformed everyday life into myth, his father into a centaur, and literature into freedom.
I like the photograph above because the partial perspective highlights this hide-and-seek aspect of Updike. You might think you have gotten to know him after reading few thousand words, then discover some completely different and equally noteworthy aspect. I just know him imperfectly from the essays, these bright little works of non-fiction art, so clear and casual you could almost forget you’re dealing with a bloody genius..