Updike
By Adam Begley,
Harper, 576 pages, £25
This respectful and sympathetic biography of John Updike (1932-2009) arrives just at the time, about five years after his death, when Updike may be most in need of championing. An immediate posthumous decline in revered authors’ reputations, once they are no longer around to command reverence, is common. Updike’s later work, unlike that of his great contemporary Philip Roth, was not reputation-enhancing: novels such as “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000) and “Villages” (2004) fell short of his best and may even have cast retrospective shadows over his more feted achievements.
He never entirely shook off the charge that he was, in the critic Harold Bloom’s words, “a minor novelist with a major style”, that, in spite of the gorgeous particularity of his prose, he had, as another hostile critic alleged, “nothing to say”. Then there was his alleged misogyny.
Adam Begley may not disarm these critics. While he does a fine job of illuminating Updike’s work biographically, he misses conveying what made the author great: the rapturous vividness of Updike’s language, the capacious wonder of his vision and the shifting ironies of his narrative voice do not come across here.
Begley’s comments on a passage in “Wife-Wooing”, one of Updike’s stories about Joan and Richard Maple, exemplify his somewhat literal interpretations. Richard Maple narrates:
“In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly ... The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge.”
Begley thinks that this — so descriptive of Updike’s thoughts about his own wife, Mary — is “one of the cruellest paragraphs in Updike’s oeuvre”. It may be so. But Richard’s judgment is, we are meant to see, willed, partial and provisional; it does not dispel his real belief, that Joan is essentially beautiful. The elements in Updike’s writing for which biographical interpretations are insufficient lie beyond Begley’s scope.
However, “Updike” is not supposed to be a work of literary criticism. As biography, it is exemplary. Any Updike fan will find it rewarding, as indeed will anyone who has enjoyed his work and any reader with an interest in modern American letters.
Updike fans will have inferred already that a good deal of his fiction was closely autobiographical and will have absorbed much of his life story. He was brought up in Shillington, a small town in Pennsylvania, and at the age of 13 moved with his family to a farm in Plowville, some miles away in the country. He was dismayed at the move, instigated by his mother, and always recalled Shillington (“Olinger” in his stories and novels), from which thereafter he spent his teens in semi-exile, as an Edenic place of welcoming luncheonettes, treasure-crammed stores, and eccentric but kindly neighbours; “Never since leaving it have I enjoyed such thrilling idleness,” he wrote.
This resentment notwithstanding, Updike was close to his mother, later to become a published novelist and short-story writer herself. Linda Updike encouraged her only son’s artistic ambitions, and reinforced his longing to be more than a small-town boy. At first, he aimed to become an artist, and only once he was at Harvard — “The Christian Roommates” is the story that gives the fullest account of this period — realised that his true calling was as an author. Nevertheless, he spent a year on a Knox Fellowship studying at the Ruskin School (see “A Madman”), before settling in New York to fulfil a long-held ambition — achieved with startling ease — of joining the staff of the New Yorker (“Toward Evening”, “Snowing in Greenwich Village”).
Updike had married Mary Pennington while still at Harvard (she was a Radcliffe graduate). By the time the couple moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts (“Tarbox” in “Couples” and in various short stories), they had two children and were to have two more. Here was another Eden, albeit one from which, Updike’s fiction implies, God was absent or denied — at the end of “Couples”, Tarbox’s Congregational church is struck by lightning and burns to the ground. John, Mary and their Ipswich contemporaries enjoyed parties, dinners, word games, Sunday sporting get-togethers and intricate adulterous entanglements, all of them recorded, with various degrees of disguise, in Updike’s fiction.
As early as 1962, Mary visited her lawyer’s office to instigate divorce proceedings, before Updike called to summon her home (“Leaves”). Their marriage, continually compromised by adulteries on both sides, at last collapsed in 1974. In 1977, Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard. Martha, a notable absentee from Begley’s acknowledgements and clearly unpopular with the family members and friends who did assist him, was uncompromisingly protective. She and Updike settled in a grand mansion in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, and, while travelling a good deal, restricted their contacts with those — no matter who they were — who might have distracted the author from his work. Begley covers the last 30 years of Updike’s life in 90 pages of a 576-page book.
A typical single-sentence description of Updike is that he was a chronicler of adulteries in New England. But his most celebrated work is a kind of alternative autobiography, a portrait of a Pennsylvanian without a college education: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, star of four novels published between 1960 and 1990. Harry is a naive, venal, greedy participant and observer of his surroundings and era, portrayed in the novels with extraordinary imaginative generosity and insight.
What Updike had “to say” lies in the texture of his novels, in all he noticed and rendered, rather than in moral arguments. As for his misogyny: perhaps a male critic cannot answer this charge convincingly, but may point out that Updike has had many female fans, some of them — Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields — not unenlightened.
The appetite for life in his works reflected the man. He published some 70 books — novels, short stories, collections of poetry, collections of journalism. He read voraciously and widely. He took an intense interest in the design of his books. He never had an agent, so he had to negotiate his own contracts. He sat on church, town planning and other local committees. He played golf and poker regularly. He learnt to read music and joined a recorder group. He did DIY, assembling dolls’ houses and chicken coops, putting up bookshelves and storm windows. Somehow, amid this, he found the time to conduct love affairs. His relish for all these activities is apparent in his writing.
Updike, like many authors, dreaded becoming a biographical subject: the notion “repulsed” him, he wrote. No matter how much their work may be based on their lives, authors regard it as distinct, a product of their creativity; they do not want it muddled with, and reduced to, biographical facts, of which they would prefer to be the mediators. Updike, though, has been lucky. Begley has approached his task with the conscientiousness of an admirer of the man and of his work and, while not uncritical, has completed the book in the same spirit. But as for what he calls “a surge in [Updike’s] posthumous reputation”: it may fall to others to bring that about.
–Guardian News and Media Ltd
