Giving him his due

Claire Lowdon on why we should still read John Updike

CLAIRE LOWDON

In the opening scene of Rabbit, Run (1960), John Updike’s second published novel, the twenty-six-year-old Harry Angstrom – aka Rabbit – joins some children playing basketball around a telephone pole. One of the boys is very good.

He’s a natural. The way he moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell. The way he waits before he moves. With luck he’ll become in time a crack athlete in the high school; Rabbit knows the way. You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them. They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county; in basketball in his junior year he set a B-league scoring record that in his senior year he broke with a record that was not broken until four years later.

Are the kids reading John Updike now? Or is he, like his most famous creation, “just one more piece of the sky of adults”? For “adults”, in 2019, read Dead White Males – or, as David Foster Wallace put it in one of the most (mis)quoted reviews of Updike ever, Great Male Narcissists. Wallace was writing in 1997, when Mailer, Roth and Updike, his central trio of GMNs, were “in their senescence”. Surprisingly, Saul Bellow didn’t make the cut. Bellow’s heavily autobiographical fiction surely meets Wallace’s criteria for the GMNs: “radical self-absorption, and … uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters”.

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In 2019 we have lots of things to say about autobiography and self-absorption, but string them together and you get some very snarly knicker elastic indeed. Is self-absorbed fiction always narcissistic, or only if it’s written by a straight white male? What if it’s autofiction? Does that make it ok? What are the alternatives? If a writer ventures outside their own socio-cultural sphere, is that praiseworthy empathy or problematic cultural appropriation? Is Karl Ove Knausgaard more self- absorbed than Rachel Cusk? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Bellow’s current status may give us a clue to Updike’s imminent fate. Less than fifteen years after his death, the Nobel laureate is not only little read but frequently reviled as an exemplar of toxic, entitled masculinity. Reactions to the second volume of Zachary Leader’s anxiously judicious biography focused on Bellow’s own deathbed question, Was I a man or a jerk? Often, the conclusion was that, thanks to the five wives, the affairs, and that bit in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, he was emphatically a jerk.

Updike’s final wife count stood at a modest two, though he surely rivalled Bellow on the affairs front. And it is not hard to imagine that he and Roth will be next in the dock. Literature’s cold cases have been relatively unsensational – no Saviles or Weinsteins unearthed as yet. But plenty of people (Bellow, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, etc) have been tried and found guilty of failing to live the unblemished lives we increasingly require from our writers and role models.

Updike, then Roth, then … Martin Amis? Ian McEwan? (McEwan, I suspect, will be hard to frame, though a review of Machines Like Me did finger him as a perp of the ultimate middle-class writerly crime – mentioning wine too often.) The tide is undeniably on its way out, sucking at the shins of Jonathans Franzen and Safran Foer, authors who didn’t get the memo, and persist in writing big, confident novels full of sex and thinly veiled autobiography. Updike hasn’t gone the way of Bellow quite yet, but Wallace’s essay of 1997 clapped a tag around his ankle that’s proven hard to shake. “Just a penis with a thesaurus”: the unforgettable soundbite is often wrongly attributed to Wallace himself. In fact the piece is much cleverer than that. Wallace provides a damning series of “actual-trust me-quotations” from anonymous female sources, while declaring himself “one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans”. His review mingles valid criticism of the novel in question (Updike’s Toward the End of Time, 1997) with baser critical practices. At its climax, he provides “hard statistical evidence” in the form of a page tally. Sample: “Total number of pages about Mexico’s repossession of the American Southwest: 0.1; Total number of pages about Ben Turnbull’s penis and his various feelings about it: 7.5”. And this is the review’s sanctimonious New Sincerity judgement on the protagonist: “Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole”.

The implication of the “statistical evidence” is that the book should have contained more about Mexico’s repossession of the American Southwest and less about penises. This breaches the first of Updike’s own elegant rules for reviewing, as stated in the introduction to his prose collection Picked-Up Pieces (1975): “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt”. But 2019 wants to know why we should play by Updike’s rules. Increasingly, fiction is judged on content over style. Updike chooses to write about an asshole with a penis: if you don’t want to read a book about assholes with penises, then Updike has written a bad book.

What will today’s reader make of the contents of the Library of America’s reissue of Updike’s first four novels, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965)? By today’s standards, there are certainly things to object to, and in the interests of full disclosure I’m going to list some of the most incriminating moments here. Think of me as a very honest estate agent, pointing out the cracks and damp patches so that you know exactly what it is you’re getting into. Because Updike’s apartment in the many-windowed House of Fiction is a beautiful place, and it would be a great shame if people stopped hanging out there altogether.

When we reread Rabbit, Run today, with almost 2020 vision, the novel’s assumptions about men and women leap out at us. Rabbit is relieved when he discovers his date Ruth is a few months younger than him: “you can’t be master, quite, of a woman who’s older”. When Ruth goes to the bathroom after sex, having not used contraception, at Rabbit’s insistence, he is disgusted: “There’s that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men’s dirt – insulting, really”. Rabbit’s more general assessment of women is that “you keep bumping against them, because they want different things; they’re a different race. The good ones develop give”.

In the National Book Award-winning The Centaur, Updike’s mythologically infused portrait of a father–son relationship in small-town Pennsylvania, the section that will give modern readers the most trouble is the framing device. The novel is partially narrated by the son as he looks back on his childhood and recounts his memories to his girlfriend, who is black. “Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs”.

In Of the Farm, a counterpart to The Centaur in that it focuses on a mother–son relationship, it is the gender politics, again, that feel outdated. The narrator Joey looks at his mother and his second wife Peggy: “I noted with pride that both women were tall, sizeable. It seemed a sign of some wealth that I could afford to snub them”. Peggy has his number, telling him, “Oh, I think you do like [the farm]. You like it the same way you like me. It’s something big you can show off”. But Joey remains unrepentant: “I was touched by this humble conception of herself, so disillusioned and so nearly true”.

There are plenty of things I could say in “defence” of these awkward moments. First, they are all thought or spoken by Updike’s characters, not by him. (Counter-objection: Updike is closely aligned with his own protagonists. “As Updike regularly told interviewers”, notes Adam Begley in his biography of 2014, “Harry Angstrom is a portrait of the author in straitened circumstances”. Wallace goes too far, however, when he claims that Updike’s protagonists are “basically all the same guy”, equating Rabbit Angstrom with Richard Maple.)

Second, Updike himself balances the male gaze with powerful moments of insight into the female perspective. After church in Of the Farm, Joey tells the local minister that his sermon was excellent – a sermon that opines that “Woman … was put on earth to help Man do his work”. In the car home, his mother delivers her laconic verdict: “It seems to me that whenever a man begins to talk that way, he’s trying to excuse himself from some woman’s pain”. In Rabbit, Run, there are the two Joycean, grammar-lite soliloquies. One for Rabbit’s wife Janet, one for his mistress Ruth, both impressively accurate on the psychological qualia of sex for straight women. (Counter-objection: the vast majority of Updike’s writing is still focalized for male characters. When my all-female book group read the author’s “Maples” stories, as collected in Your Lover Just Called (1980), the main criticism was the “one-sidedness” of the approach – the fact that none of the stories was told from Joan Maple’s point of view.)

I could go on – or, indeed, start to counter those counter-objections. But this piece is already date-stamped enough. In the third episode of the charming podcast “Medieval History for Pleasure and Profit”, Alice Rio and Alice Taylor give a surprising response to a listener’s question, “how badly did it smell, really?” They point out how relative smell is – how a medieval person travelling forward in time to today would be overwhelmed by the stench of petrol fumes, which we mostly don’t notice. The things we smell in Updike’s work, or Bellow’s, are as indicative of our own time as of theirs. And times change very quickly. Readers in their early thirties might consider themselves woke millennials – but how many of them, in their schooldays, used the word “gay” as a general pejorative? Leader’s biography of Bellow relates how his final novel, Ravelstein (2000), a roman-à-clef, landed Bellow in trouble for implying that Allan Bloom (the real-life model for Ravelstein) was homosexual and died of AIDS. From the vantage point of a scant two decades, the squeamishness of this critical response already looks quaint. Who knows – in another two decades, 2019’s heated discussions about race and gender may look equally quaint. The atrocities we’re unconsciously committing in our novels today are probably something to do with the environment. All those casual plane journeys in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy! The takeaway coffee cups in Knausgaard!

If we lift our muzzles from the scent trail of sexism in Updike’s early work and look around, we find ourselves standing firmly in the past. This for me was one of two great surprises on recently reading Updike’s debut, The Poorhouse Fair. The novel was published in 1959, when Updike was twenty-six. Like Toward the End of Time, it’s actually set about twenty years in the future. By the time Updike wrote the introduction to the 1977 Knopf reissue of the novel, included in the Appendix of the new Library of America edition, most of the novel’s “predictions” had already been invalidated. For the modern reader, it’s about as futuristic as Adam Bede is historical, ie not at all. The “futuristic” elements barely register, apart from as odd inaccuracies – one character notes how “of the three presidents assassinated, all were Republican”.

What you notice instead is how long ago it all seems. We think of Updike as a fairly modern, fairly suburban novelist, a frequenter of golf clubs and diners. But John Hook, the key protagonist of The Poorhouse Fair, is ninety-four, with memories stretching back to the nineteenth century. Updike was born in 1932, and his maternal grandparents shared the family home. It sounds obvious but it’s still worth stating: Updike was well acquainted with the generation born around the time of the American Civil War.

The second astounding thing about The Poorhouse Fair is what an unusual debut it is. In fact, Updike had started with something much more conventional, the unpublished novel “Home”: in Begley’s paraphrase, “the Olinger chronicles presented as a continuous narrative stretching from his mother’s teenage years to his own”. When “Home” was rejected by publishers, Updike set to work on something defiantly different. Set in a poorhouse – an old people’s home in today’s money – The Poorhouse Fair was intended by Updike as “a deliberate anti-Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Its vision of the future is not an imminent dystopia, but just more of the same. “As in our mundane reality, it is others that die, while an attenuated silly sort of life bubbles decadently on.” Thus The Poorhouse Fair is both a surprisingly modest starting point and an extremely ambitious one: a twenty-six-year-old imagining himself into the mind of a ninety-four-year-old! Updike also inhabits the consciousnesses of various other residents, as well as Conner, the young, harried prefect, Ted, the even younger delivery boy, and several visitors to the poorhouse’s annual fair.

Read as a debut it is deeply impressive, and it’s exciting to watch Updike honing the lyrical descriptive gifts that characterize and enrich his later work. (“The boys kept edging one behind the other, like a deck of two cards shuffling itself.”) But you wouldn’t press The Poorhouse Fair on anyone, or rush to reread it. The major problems are overstuffed sentences and a formal shapelessness, a lack of focus, which Updike attempts to justify in the 1977 introduction. There, he quotes a sentence from the novel’s opening page. “In the cool wash of early sun the individual strands of osier compounding the chairs stood out sharply; arched like separate serpents springing up and turning again into the knit of the wickerwork.” This, he tells us, is the novel’s pattern and import: “Life goes on; stray strands are tucked back … All is flux; nothing lastingly matters”. The great French braid of the generations, from the Civil War through Rabbit’s 1959 to 2019. (2019: one year shy of Updike’s dystopia in Toward the End of Time, which has not yet quite come about, because true to Updike’s earlier prediction, an attenuated silly sort of life has just bubbled decadently on.)

Throughout his work, Updike is fascinated by time, hyper-conscious of that generational flux. “In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinions and even into those of our grandfathers.” This observation from The Poorhouse Fair is echoed in the lovely short story “Plumbing” (1971), which concludes with the plumber trying to persuade the narrator to replace a section of furred-up pipe. “Replace it now, you’ll never have to worry with it again. It’ll outlast your time here.” In the final paragraph, the narrator watches the plumber and muses:

My time, his time. His eyes open wide in the unspeaking presences of corrosion and flow. We push out through the bulkhead; a blinding piece of sky slides into place above us, fitted with temporary, timeless clouds. All around us, we are outlasted.

With that in mind, let’s take the long view on Updike. The major problems in his early work do not include the male gaze. More troublesome are those overstuffed sentences, which appear throughout these novels, most persistently in The Poorhouse Fair. Even in the comparatively pared-back Of the Farm, we encounter this:

Downstairs, on the tawny kitchen floorboards scuffed and scored by dog claws, there lay, like a papery golden mat spread before the front door that gazed with its single large pane through the grape arbor toward the meadow, a rhomboid of sun mottled with the slightly shivering shadows of grape leaves.

It should be said, though, that this oubliette of a sentence is immediately followed by a beautifully formulated observation on a par with “temporary, timeless clouds”: “This patch of sun had been here, just this shape, twenty years ago, morning after morning”.

Clouds: in early Updike, if you see them coming, run for cover. He is capable, from the start, of hitting the bullseye with a word or two: the “heavy oblong” of a catfish in The Poorhouse Fair; a sinkful of “bloated” shirts in Rabbit, Run; a “mane of weeds” in the centre of a little-travelled road in The Centaur; a bat like “a speck of pain” in Of the Farm. But, clouds seem to provoke a particular descriptive pomposity in Updike. This example from Of the Farm is typical: “Shapelessly being burned away, the clouds had the persistence of a dull ache, and collectively seemed a ruined strategy, a confusedly ebbing life”.

Then there’s Updike’s great, oft-acknowledged debt to Joyce. Nothing wrong with learning – or borrowing – from a master, but in The Centaur his devotion gets him into trouble. In Ulysses, you have to go searching for the Homeric parallels, which are there to provoke the author’s invention, not to provide meaning. The Centaur takes another classical myth – the sacrifice of Chiron the Centaur for the sake of Prometheus. Chiron is represented by George Caldwell, Prometheus by his son Peter. Neatly, the gods in Updike’s refiguring are teachers, with Zimmerman (Zeus) in charge. But the mythological index at the back, listing over forty figures from Greek mythology with page numbers corresponding to their referents, feels overdone, too nerdy.

In the mythological sections of the novel, everything is coloured by the challenge Updike has set himself, which seems restrictive rather than generative, as in Joyce. This is a description of the “Zeus”, the school principal: “the unbalance of his face seemed that of a proud pregnant cloud tugged by a wind high in heaven”. There is something faintly naff here, like an over-themed party. The novel is leavened by “straight” sections – a description of a chaotic family breakfast in the Caldwells’ freezing farmhouse, Peter’s car rides around Olinger with his father – and it is here that the writing comes alive, and you understand better why The Centaur won a National Book Award. As a whole, it feels disjointed – a problem that Updike addressed in his acceptance speech for the award. “The shape of the book formally approximates, for me, the very mixed and somewhat antic experience it was trying to convey. The book as well as the hero is a centaur.” Too clever by half: I’ll take the realist half, and pass on the myth.

Rabbit, Run and Of the Farm are the most successful novels in this volume, and they both suffer from the same forgivable problem. Both achieve Updike’s noble stated intention – “to give the mundane its beautiful due”. In Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom runs out on his stifling marriage and stays away for two months, during which time he lives with Ruth, a sort of prostitute, does some gardening for a rich old lady called Mrs Smith, and plays golf with the Reverend Eccles, who’s trying to save his soul. In Of the Farm, thirty-something Joey takes his new, second wife and her eleven-year-old son to visit Joey’s widowed mother on the farm where he grew up. They stay for the weekend and Joey mows the meadow, while the two women negotiate their new relationship.

Into these modest narratives, Updike introduces moments of high drama that sit uneasily with all that masterly mundanity. The contrast is most pronounced in Rabbit, Run, where the tragic event at the end of the novel unbalances the whole – much as “done because we are too menny” does in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. In fact, in Rabbit, Run, Updike builds up to the drunken Janice’s accidental drowning of her baby with great care; but in the aftermath, the response is warped to serve the novel’s theme of the rabbit escaping the constricting hutch of his life. Rabbit, implausibly, takes all the blame on himself – until the funeral, where he blurts out that it was Janice who killed their daughter and runs away again. Of the Farm is much more continent, but there’s still a slight loss of nerve during some of the confrontations between the characters, which are heightened just out of the range of plausibility. It seems unlikely, for example, that Peggy would accuse her new mother-in-law of “throwing a sulk and worrying your son”.

Why “loss of nerve”? Because Updike doesn’t need any of this; he can describe Nelson and Billy, two toddlers fighting over a toy, and hold his readers rapt. “Nelson’s face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, ‘Pilly have – Pilly – ’ But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief’s chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground.” The Reverend Eccles tells Billy to give it back. “Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate’s head.” (My italics).

Updike is also a poet of domestic mess, omnipresent in life yet so often absent in art. In the Wallace Collection there is a masterpiece by the Dutch artist Esaias Boursse, “Interior with Woman Cooking” – a quietly radical painting that makes mess its chief subject. You can’t see the woman’s face, or much of her baby, covered in its filthy blankets. Again and again, Updike provides the modern equivalent. From Rabbit, Run:

On the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous numbers and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas.

In David Foster Wallace’s page count, the category that racks up far and away the most hits – eighty-six – is “Total number of pages about flora around Turnbull’s home, plus fauna, weather and how his ocean view looks in different seasons”. Wallace clearly sees this as wasted space, but that depends – as it always does – on the quality of the writing. And one reason to read and reread Updike is that he is one of the great nature writers. In Of the Farm, there’s the unforgettable extended riff as Joey mows the meadow and compares the landscape to Peggy’s body. Or how about Rabbit at his gardening job?

Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets … the shaggy golden suds of bloomy forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden … He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions …

The implication here and elsewhere – that the “it” Rabbit is running towards throughout the novel may be nothing more or less than the procreative urge – suggests a possible influence in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The US ban on Lawrence’s novel (published by Knopf, as Updike was) was lifted in 1959; Updike wrote Rabbit, Run the same year, in just nine months, and made alterations to the novel’s most explicit scenes on the advice of Knopf’s legal experts.

The sex in Rabbit, Run and throughout Updike’s work is occasionally overdone but mostly very good and very brave – brave not because it’s explicit, but because the author is unafraid to broadcast the full spectrum of human response, which includes less noble, less palatable impulses. I can’t agree with Nicholson Baker in the otherwise wacky and wonderful U&I (1991) when he criticizes Updike for this description of the narrator’s wife at the end of the short story “Wife- wooing”: “Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage”. Baker thinks this is “inexcusably brutal”: “I couldn’t imagine Updike’s real, nonfictional wife reading that paragraph and not being made very unhappy”. But what Updike is noticing, brilliantly, is that people don’t look the same – or the same to us – all the time, and that our attraction to them ebbs and flows. Updike’s genius, his gift to us, was his commitment to setting such insights down, the courage to draw directly from life. The gaze in “Wife-wooing” is the dispassionate gaze of a true writer. Not a narcissist, not a phallocrat: someone equal to capturing the multifaceted truth.

As a woman, I’d rather be looked at by Updike than lectured at by Wallace. And as a reader, I’ll take any number of ill-judged mythological parallels and over-ambitious sentences for the generous quantities of “rich life-cake”, in Bellow’s phrase, that Updike serves up. To return, briefly, to basketball and Rabbit: “When he was hot he could see the separate threads wound into the strings looping the hoop”. That’s true of Updike, too. When he’s hot, you can see it all, as if you were right there in 1959 or 63 or 65 – when Updike was still just thirty-three. He wrote those four novels in just six years. Like Rabbit, he might only be B-league when you set him next to Joyce. But B-league is very rare. We don’t get many writers who can play at Updike’s level. It’s possible – easy, even – to make a case against anyone’s work. Updike’s “phallocracy”. Updike’s verbosity. The real question is how good are the good bits: in this case, more than good enough.

Perhaps you’re still unconvinced; perhaps you’re operating a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the Great Male Narcissists. Of course, you can take him or leave him. But if you walk away, you’ll be missing out. The same applies to Bellow. They might not be perfect representatives of the way we’d like to live now. But they’re part of where we’ve come from – and we’re lucky to have their virtuosic accounts of what it was like to live then.

From The Centaur:

I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn’t it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity?

John Updike has fixed innumerable seconds for us – and what could be more enduringly modern than that?

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