What a dear and rewarding companion John Updike has been. As a teenager, I must have come across a story of two of his in the New Yorker, but my first substantial encounter came in the summer of 1966, when
The Centaur was assigned as reading for incoming Harvard and Radcliffe freshmen. Odd, to begin with a book that was more programatic, with its correspondences to classical mythology, and more awkardly autobiographical than Updike's other work. I moved on to
Couples when it appeared in 1968, again perhaps an unfortunate introduction, Updike stretching awkwardly in the direction of the best-seller list. But however imperfect,these encounters were captivating enough. From then on, I read the novels and story collections as they appeared. I backfilled, too, seeking out the early work.
Updike's books played a substantial role in my daily life. The first gift I gave my future wife, then a new acquaintance, was a collection of the Maples stories. I felt more identified with other (urban, Jewish) writers, Saul Bellow, and to a lesser degree Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. But Updike provided a model of what an author was altogether, a man who could write outside his natural genre, say, in the self-deprecating Jewish comic vein (the Bech books) or in magical realism (Brazil) - although again, these were flawed works - a man who could meld observation and imagination seamlessly.
The great glory is in in the Rabbit books. I loved even the weakest of the four (or five), Rabbit Redux. And I was one of the few young men who could say honestly that he subscribed to Playboy for the fiction, when Rabbit is Rich was appearing there, along with Mailer's Ancient Evenings. The third and fourth Rabbit volumes, the ones accorded Pulitzers, captured the times better than any journalism. Arguably as substantial an achievement was the stream of short stories. As an aspiring writer, I read them repeatedly, making mental notes and despairing - the metaphors! Impossible to match. For some reason, an early and rarely collected story, "The Alligators," has stuck with me, a quick sketch of a schoolboy who will not get the girl. That and the title Museums & Women. When I first read it, as one who had spent years torn between ogling art and its viewers, I gaped in awe at the juxtaposition - at a stranger's having captured my love and shame so succinctly; others have commented on the physical, concrete poetry in the two words.
So much in my own novel draws on Updike, however awkwardly, as in, say, the descriptions of domestic interiors. I have liked to think, and here perhaps daydream is the better verb, that he read that book - I sent it along and had a mutual friend bring it to his attention - and even that it played a role, however small, in Updike's decision to write a novel that is largely sympathetic to a home-grown terrorist.
And then there is the matter of living with Updike. I associate him with so much beach reading, the books that observe our Presidential history, the Hawthorne pastiches, the fiction that explores and resists scientific theory, the novels grounded in sex and flirtation and the charming weakness of men, and as always the early, uncomfortably religious stories. The harsher critics may be right, that Updike skirted true literary greatness, but that assessment misses his impact as a life's companion, for me certainly, as a brilliant commentator from outside my natural circle, a natural, a phenomenon of nature who shared our space and time. That Updike never won the Nobel Prize signals the Europeans' misunderstanding of American culture but, more, their misunderstanding of the broad functions of literature.
I woke this morning resolved to write this personal note without reading the obits, but over coffee, I weakened and relented. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, always a favorite, outdoes himself in the Times - a classic of the genre. It ends with this charaterization, by Updike, of his ambitions: "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."
