America at 250: Christopher Jackson on John Updike

Christopher Jackson

I found out on Ceefax. That is the detail I always return to when I think of the day John Updike died, the 27th of January 2009, because it says something about the world he was leaving as much as it does about the man himself. Teletext, white block capitals scrolling against blue, no notification pushed to a pocket, no instant scroll of grief arriving from a hundred directions at once. It was a pre-internet sensibility, a Britain that was pre-Twitter and pre-Trump, an era that still had the texture of the old world about it though it was nine years into the new one. Updike had lived to see Barack Obama become president, an event he would surely have rendered, had he been given another decade, with the same patient noticing he gave to a Pennsylvania basketball game or a New England kitchen table.

A mentor, in the case of a writer you never met, has nothing to do with correspondence, or classroom, or coffee. It is a transmission that happens through sentences alone, and it happened to me the way it must happen to many thousands of readers who never had the luck of knowing the man himself. Updike gave me three things, roughly in this order. A sense of what it might be to have a style. A sense of how to build a corpus – it was Sir Martin Amis who always said Updike possessed a ‘Victorian amplitude’. He also bequeathed to me a sense of range: poems, prose, fiction, a play, criticism – it all tumbled out of him.

The style came first, and it came through the eye as much as the ear: it’s interesting to note that Updike was first a cartoonist. Consider the opening page of Rabbit, Run. Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole in an alley, and their shouts, Updike writes, seem to catapult up into “the moist March air blue above the wires.” Six words for a whole season and a whole afternoon. That was the trick I never recovered from: ordinary noticing pushed just far enough that the physical world tilts slightly under it. It is what people mean when they praise Updike’s eye for faces, though it was never faces alone. Late in his life he said that his aim as a writer had always been to give the mundane its beautiful due, and if you have read enough of him you know that this is not a boast so much as a job description.

He could turn the same instrument on the whole of the visible world, not only its people. In one poem ‘Thunderstorm in Vermont’ the sound of thunder is rendered as a piano falling down stairs. In one account of his own history he wrote that the universe was perfectly transparent, that we exist as flaws in ancient glass. That is a theological sentence wearing a scientist’s coat, or perhaps the reverse, and it is the kind of line that made me permanently suspicious of writers who keep their metaphysics separate from their prose style, as though the two were not the same muscle doing the same work.

Then there was the amount, which is easier to state than to absorb. Updike published more than fifty books: novels, story collections, poetry, criticism, a memoir, even a study of golf. The Associated Press obituary called him prolific, even compulsive. One writer, remembering him just after his death, put it more plainly still, noting that Updike quietly turned up to the desk six days a week, for fifty plus years, producing fifty plus books in the process. That is not a burst of inspiration sustained by will. It is a nine to five, dressed up in genius. It taught me, long before I could have said so, that showing up is itself a form of talent, perhaps the only form that can be relied upon.

And then there was the range, which is the part of him I think about most now. Poetry: some of it wonderfully comic, some of it cringeworthy. The Rabbit novels and all the rest of the fiction. Criticism that ran to thousands of pages. And, improbably, a single play, Buchanan Dying, his attempt to dramatise the last hours of James Buchanan, Pennsylvania’s only president and by most accounts its worst. Updike called it, in a phrase that manages to be modest and immodest in the same breath, “a kind of novel, conceived in the form of a play.” Almost nobody liked it, then or since. Critics found it airless, over-researched, more interested in nineteenth century syntax than in drama, and that verdict is broadly fair, and it does not matter in the least. What matters is that a writer already famous for Rabbit and the Maples stories and a shelf of verse felt compelled to try the stage at all, to see whether the instrument that had done so much elsewhere could be made to do this too. That is not dilettantism. In fact, it’s closer to hunger.

And then, at the last, the short stories, which are the truest register of everything else he did. The Maples sequence, tracking a single marriage from its first snowbound evening in Greenwich Village through its slow unwinding two decades later, has outlasted, in critical esteem if not always in sales, most of the doorstop novels that made his name. Reviewing his collected stories some years after his death, one critic thought it likely that in time Updike’s reputation would come to rest chiefly on this shorter work, on stories that were, at their best, masterclasses in what the form can achieve.

What actually endures, out of sixty-odd books, is difficult to say, and I am not sure I trust my own answer. Rabbit, certainly, all four volumes of him, a whole American life run from youth to the golf course to the grave. Henry Bech, the comic Jewish novelist Updike invented as a kind of loving joke against himself. Roger’s Version, a Barthian divinity professor set against a computer scientist trying to prove God’s existence by number theory, a novel critics almost universally praised though they could never quite agree on what they were praising. The stories, obviously. Perhaps the criticism too, which nobody reads as literature though it plainly is one. And the poems, which he treated as a kind of workshop for the prose and which have outlasted a good deal of writing that took itself more seriously at the time.

It is easy to forget, given how much space the novelist took up, that Updike was also one of the great critics of the century, and that he left behind, almost as an aside, a set of rules for reviewing that any working critic could still use without shame. Try to understand what a book is attempting, he wrote, and do not blame the author for not achieving what he did not attempt. Quote enough of the prose that a reader can form his own taste rather than take yours secondhand. And, in a sixth and looser rule he added almost as an afterthought, never try to put a writer “in his place,” turning him into a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. That last one alone would improve most of the literary journalism written since.

Not everyone agreed that any of this amounted to greatness, and a mentor you cannot argue with is not worth having. Martin Amis called him, in a phrase that has outlived most of the books it was aimed at, a “psychotic Santa of volubility,” a man who seemed to emerge from one or another of his studies each morning with a fresh sackful of reviews, forewords, playlets and poems. It is a joke with real teeth in it, admiration and impatience in the same breath. Norman Mailer went further still on purely literary grounds, dismissing him, according to one obituary, as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing, though the same Mailer, reviewing Rabbit, Run on its first appearance, had found in it a pain not unworthy of Hardy, and a universe hanging over the characters like a great sullen hopeless sky. Gore Vidal was harsher and more consistent than either. In a notorious essay for the Times Literary Supplement he said plainly that he had never taken Updike seriously as a writer, and attacked what he took to be a settled blandness in him, an acceptance of authority in any form. I am not sure any of them is wholly right. I am fairly sure that a writer who provokes three such different and such capable enemies is not a small one.

Almost to my own surprise, I stopped reading him some years ago. Some mentors give you everything they have in a single sustained transmission, and then the transmission ends, not because the source has run dry but because you have taken delivery of what you needed, and to keep returning to it would be dependency rather than use. I moved on to other writers. But a style, once it has entered you, does not unpick. Certain sentences, read closely enough, become part of the apparatus with which you read everything afterwards, including your own drafts, and Updike’s sentences did that to me before I had any real say in the matter.

He died on the 27th of January, and the following day the New York Times ran a poem of his, written not long before, addressed to his own death with a calm so exact it read less like an elegy than a final dispatch. His last poems, written characteristically in the nursing home, were collected as Endpoint and contained some lovely things: I still have the copy of the New Yorker where they first appeared. That, I think, is the last lesson, arriving after all the others. A style, sustained long enough and honestly enough, can carry you all the way to the end of the sentence, and perhaps a little way past it.