Rabbit at Rest -- Art as Life Itself

For years I’ve had a copy of Updike’s Rabbit at Rest sitting on the small bookshelf of our boat, where we have spent a part of the summer for each of the last eighteen years.  Each stay grows a little shorter as we age.  Perhaps that is because the boat seems to get smaller but the truth is it’s just more difficult. Boating demands strength and agility and a touch of fearlessness, all of which we had in abundance when we first started to boat on the Long Island Sound almost forty years ago, visiting most ports from Norwalk, CT to Nantucket, with yearly stopovers at Block Island.  Our stays now are mostly at the home port dock, but fortunately we are far out into the Norwalk River so it’s almost like being at a quiet mooring, with just more creature comforts when needed, like air conditioning. But occasionally we go out to the Norwalk Islands where we still have a mooring, especially on a fine day like this, leaving our home port…

I’m not sure why I kept this duplicate copy of what I consider to be Updike’s finest novel, Rabbit at Rest, on the boat, but now I know, having picked it up again.  I’m steeped in nostalgia. When I first read it I felt I was looking into my future.  Now I'm looking into my past. No one is a better social historian than Updike, the novelist. I miss him so much.

Simply put, Updike peers into the abyss of death in this novel.  It hangs heavily in some way on every page and having gone through some of the same experiences with angioplasties and more, I closely identify.  He’s now a snowbird in this novel, 6 months in Florida and 6 months in his familiar Pennsylvania environs. Rabbit (Harry Angstrom) has let himself go, however.  His little exercise is golfing but even that goes by the wayside.  On the other hand he is addicted to fast food, salt, you name the poison.   “Harry remorsefully feels the bulk, 230 pounds the kindest scales say, that has enwrapped him at the age of 55 like a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one. His doctor down here keeps telling him to cut out the beer and munchies and each night…he vows to but in the sunshine of the next day he’s hungry again, for anything salty and easy to chew.  What did his old basketball couch…tell him toward the end of his life, about how when you get old you eat and eat and it’s never the right food?  Sometimes Rabbit’s spirit feels as if it might faint from lugging all this body around.”

This last sentence really gets to the heart of the novel.  It makes me wonder whether Updike was unconsciously elaborating on the great Delmore Schwartz poem, The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me, especially the lines:

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,  

That heavy bear who sleeps with me,  

Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,  

A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,  

Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope  

Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.  

—The strutting show-off is terrified,  

Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,  

Trembles to think that his quivering meat  

Must finally wince to nothing at all.

With that as the essential theme, nothing escapes the granular examination of Updike the social historian, the sterility of Florida life, the inherent difficulty of the father – son relationship (poor Nelson becomes hooked on drugs, always having to live in the larger than life shadow of his father, and leads the family into financial crisis), the political back drop of the time – Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the cupidity of corporate America, driving real industry overseas and becoming a nation of financial engineering.  In fact, so much of the novel stands up to today’s world and one can see the foreshadowing of the Age of Trump.  There is even a swipe at Trump on the front page of Rabbit’s local Florida paper of the late 80s, a picture of Trump with the headline (Male call: the year’s hottest). One would have to wonder what Updiike would have written with the last few years as political fodder.

Rabbit maintains a little garden at his house in Pennsylvania, but he’s also planted the seeds of what his family has become, his wife Janice yearning for a life of her own as a real estate broker, his son Nelson running their car dealership into the ground with debts to finance his cocaine habit, his daughter in law, Pru, hanging onto a loveless marriage, his two grandchildren looking to their grandpa for love and guidance, and Rabbit like a deer caught in the headlights.  “Family life with children, is something out of his past, that he has not been sorry to leave behind; it was for him like a bush in some neglected corner of the back yard that gets overgrown, a lilac bush or privet some bindweed has invade from underneath with leaves so similar and tendrils so tightly entwining it gives the gardener a headache in the sun to try to separate bad growth from good.  Anyway he basically had but the one child, Nelson, one lousy child.”

But that is not the only thing that is entwined, being strangled; it’s his heart and the American soul. “As the candy settles in his stomach a sense of doom regrows its claws around his heart”  “With [his golf partners], he’s a big Swede, they call him Angstrom, a comical pet gentile, a big pale uncircumcised hunk of the American dream.”   And when he finally has a heart attack on a Gulf of Mexico beach, “he lay helpless and jellyfishlike under a sky of red, of being in the hands of others, of being the blind, pained, focal point of a world of concern and expertise, at some depth was a coming back home, after a life of ill-advised journeying.  Sinking, he perceived the world around him as gaseous and rising, the grave and affectionate faces of paramedics and doctors and nurses released by his emergency like a cloud of holiday balloons.”

He has an angioplasty when he should have had a bypass, but he doesn’t want anything done in Florida instead returning to his home soil of Pennsylvania.  “Harry always forgets, what is so hard to picture in flat Florida, the speckled busyness, the antic jammed architecture, the distant blue hilliness forcing in the foreground the gabled houses to climb and cling on the high sides of streets, the spiky retaining walls and sharp slopes….”  But home there are problems, family problems, money problems, leading to marital discord, and Rabbit on the run again, but to where, to Florida, bringing his compromised heart, and his focus more and more on death. “It has always…interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves…”

And yet, on the lonely drive down I95, one that I’ve done scores of times myself, Updike’s penchant for social commentary and his ear for dialogue dominates.  Nearing the Florida border Rabbit turns to a man one empty stool away from the counter of a rest stop restaurant, asking:

“’About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?’  He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to pass.

‘Four’ the man answers with a smile. ‘I just came from there. Where you headin’ for in Florida?’

‘Way the other end.  Deleon.  My wife and I have a condo there, I’m driving down alone, she’ll be following later.’

The man keeps smiling, smiling and chewing. ‘I know Deleon.  Nice old town.’

Rabbit has never noticed much that is old about it.  ‘From our balcony we used to have a look at the sea but they built it up.’

‘Lot of building on the Gulf side now, the Atlantic side pretty well full. Began my day in Sarasota.’

‘Really? That’s a long way to come.’

‘That’s why I’m makin’ such a pig of myself.  Hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar since five o’clock this morning.  After a while you got to stop, you begin to see things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘The stretch I just came over, lot of patchy ground fog, it gets to you.  Just coffee gets to your stomach.’  This man has a truly nice way of smiling and chewing and talking all at once.  His mouth is wide but lipless, like a Muppet’s  He has set his truck driver’s cap, with a bill and a mesh panel in the back, beside his plate; his good head of gray hair, slightly wavy like a rich man’s is permanently dented by the edge of the cap.

‘You driving one of those big trucks? I don’t know how you guys do it. How far you goin’?’

All the salad on the plate has vanished and the smile has broadened, ‘Boston.’

‘Boston! All the way?’ Rabbit has never been to Boston,  to him it is the end of the world, tucked up in under Maine.  People living that far north are as fantastic to him as Eskimos.’

 

There is more to the dialogue than that but it exhibits Updike’s keen ear for ordinary talk.  I could have had the same conversation as that (although Boston is not fantastic to me in the same way).

Arriving in Florida, without his wife, who is really not following him, he is alone, with his failing heart and his dimming dreams, the heavy bear that goes with him, dragging him down, down.  Rabbit at Rest.  Brilliant, one of the best novels of the late 20^th century along with Roth’s American Pastoral.

Not having Updike’s decade by decade commentary of the Rabbit series feels like the same galactic void from his sentence:  “The stark plummy stars press down and the depth of the galactic void for an instant makes you feel suspended upside down.” My world is upside down without him.

“We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving ties.” –

 

Three for the Road

Some ostensibly very different works of fiction are discussed  here, Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, John Updike’s The Maples, and The Portable Library of Jack Kerouac.  But they are tied together in some ways, particularly as I read them somewhat concurrently over the last month or two -- mostly during our trips to Alaska and Seattle -- and each in its own way has struck a chord in me.

After reading McEwan’s Saturday which I thoroughly enjoyed, everything taking place in one day (Saturday, naturally), I read his Solar -- a good story but not in the same league as Saturday.   I had never read Atonement, his highly praised and ultimately filmed novel, something I must get to doing.  I was looking for something a little lighter from McEwan for our recent trip to Alaska and Seattle, and I stumbled upon his Sweet Tooth, a mystery and a love story, and written from a woman’s first person point of view.  Much in the novel is about writing itself, a novel within a novel with detailed outlines for some short stories as well, all fitting together like a literary jig saw puzzle.

It takes place during the paranoid cold war 1970s when a young Cambridge graduate, a mathematician by training but a compulsive inveterate reader by avocation, Serena Frome, joins the M15, the British intelligence agency.  Ultimately she moves up the ranks and is given a “soft” assignment, nothing too dangerous, of following young British writers, ones that M15 might think would benefit by clandestine financial support, in the hope that their writings might have some use in the macro setting of the cold war.  So, the beautiful Frome is assigned to bestow a grant to a young writer, Tom Haley.  How was she to know that they would fall in love, his never realizing her association with M15 (thinking she represents a nonprofit group that bestows literary endowments)?  Where there is such a secret there are the underpinnings for tension throughout the novel and McEwan capitalizes on every twist and turn.  To say any more is to give away an ingenious ending to the novel, where everything finally coalesces.

But how real life enters and is transformed by fiction is at the heart of the novel.  As an example, Serena and Tom discuss probability theory (as a reminder, Serena is a trained mathematician).  Tom doesn’t get it.  But ultimately it enters one of the short stories he is writing   He gives it to Serena to read.  She fails to see how it coalesced in the creative process until she tries to go asleep and in that state finally realizes how Tom did get it:  As I lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, I thought I was beginning to grasp something about invention. As a reader, a speed-reader, I took it for granted, it was a process I never troubled myself with. You pulled a book from the shelf and there was an invented, peopled world, as obvious as the one you lived in…. I thought I had the measure of the artifice, or I almost had it. Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of the parts…. At one level it was obvious enough how many separate parts were tipped in and deployed.  The mystery was in how they were blended into something cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious.  As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.  Just a wonderful description of the creative process, how life is reflected and filtered by a writer’s story.

This is a page turner, somewhat of a classic spy story, besides being a primer on writing itself.  Ian McEwan is becoming one of the more interesting writers of the 21^st century.

But I return, now, to a different kind of 20^th century story (actually stories), having had the pleasure of concurrently reading Updike’s The Maples Stories. Although these were published during his lifetime, they have been posthumously issued as an “Everyman's Library Pocket Classic” in hardcover, a volume to treasure.  I had read most of these before, but to read the eighteen stories that span from 1956’s “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” to “Grandparenting” published in his favorite venue The New Yorker in 1994 is to view the life of the great literary man himself.  It took Adam Begley’s brilliant literary biography, Updike, to see that “the Maples” were in fact Updike and his first wife Mary.  The closest Updike had delved into autobiography was his work Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, published in 1989 but that is greatly about his growing up in Shillington, PA. 

The Maples chronicles the jealousies, infidelities, the love and the hurt, and the intimacies and the breakdown of his marriage.  Consider the aching beauty of his writing, so finely crafted in this description of when Richard Maple picks up his wife Joan in his car to finally go to court for their no fault divorce:  She got into the car, bringing with her shoes and the moist smell of dawn. She had always been an early riser, and he a late one. 'Thanks for doing this,' she said, of the ride, adding, 'I guess.' ‘My pleasure,' Richard said. As they drove to court, discussing their cars and their children, he marveled at how light Joan had become; she sat on the side of his vision as light as a feather, her voice tickling his ear, her familiar intonations  and emphases thoroughly musical and half unheard, like the patterns of a concerto that sets us to daydreaming.  He no longer blamed her: that was the reason for the lightness. All those years, he had blamed her for everything - for the traffic jam in Central Square, for the blasts of noise on the mail boat, for the difference in the levels of their beds. No longer: he had set her adrift from omnipotence. He had set her free, free from fault. She was to him as Gretel to Hansel, a kindred creature moving beside him down a path while birds behind them ate the bread crumbs.

“Grandparenting” which takes place well after the Maples divorce is an act of atonement for Updike as it brings together the now divorced Maples one last time to participate in the birth of their first grandchild  It ends with the plaintive “Nobody belongs to us, except in memory,”  Indeed, Updike is for the ages.

a "beat" copy

And what could be more different from Updike than Jack Kerouac’s Portable Library which I managed to fit in here and there, making it mostly bedtime reading.  I read On the Road ages ago so that and his other writings in the Portable Library edition seemed new to me. Oh, man, this is the beat generation, a step before mine, but I remember it well as it played out in the late 50s and 60s.  Kerouac writes with a pulsating persistence, almost stream of consciousness, as if he just cannot fit enough life on a physical page.  It throbs with energy as he tries to absorb the “real” underbelly of America in every place imaginable, with the help of drugs, alcohol, sex, and, man, cool beat music.  It’s almost as if he did not live in the same world as an Updike who crafted his sentences like a sculpture.  No, Kerouac was more like a Jackson Pollack, frenzied by getting the colors of life just right (to him), writing in riffs like Charlie Parker (both mentioned by him in his writings). 

Here is just one breathless paragraph from his Jazz of the Beat Generation (1949) after hearing a rendition of “Close Your Eyes:”  Up steps Freddy on the bandstand and asks for a slow beat and looks sadly out the open door over people's heads and begins singing "Close Your Eyes." Things quiet down for a minute. Freddy's wearing a tattered suede jacket, a purple shirt with white buttons, cracked shoes and zoot pants without press; he didn't care. He looked like a pimp in Mecca, where there are no pimps; a barren woman's child, which is a dream; he looked like he was beat to his socks; he was down, and bent, and he played us some blues with his vocals. His big brown eyes were concerned with sadness, and the singing of songs slowly and with long thoughtful pauses. But in the second chorus he got excited and embraced the mike and jumped down from the bandstand and bent to it and to sing a note he had to touch his shoe tops and pull it all up to blow, and he blew so much he staggered from the effect, he only recovered himself in time for the next long slow note. "Mu-u-u-u-sic  pla-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay!" He leaned back with his face to the ceiling, mike held at his fly. He shook his shoulders, he gave the hip sneer, he swayed. Then he leaned in almost falling with his pained face against the mike. "Ma-a-a-ke it dream-y for dan-cing"-and he looked at the street out-side, Folsom, with his lips curled in scorn-"while we go ro-rnan-n-n-cing"-he staggered sideways-"Lo-o-o-ove's holi-da-a-a-ay"-he shook his head with disgust and weariness at the whole world-"Will make it seem"-what would it make it seem?-everybody waited, he mourned-"O-kay." The piano hit a chord. "So baby come on and just clo-o-o-o-se your pretty little ey-y-y-es" -his mouth quivered, offered; he looked at us, Dean and me, with an expression that seemed to say "Hey now, what's this thing we're all putting down in this sad brown world" -and then he came to the end of his song and for this there had to be elaborate preparations during which time you could send all the messages to Garcia around the world twelve times and what difference did it make to anybody because here we were dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself and the pathos of people in the Godawful streets, so he said and sang it, "Close-your-" and blew it way up to the ceiling with a big voice that came not from training but feeling and that much better, and blew it through to the stars and on up-"Ey-y-y-y-y-y-es" and in arpeggios of applause staggered off the platform ruefully, broodingly, nonsatisfied, artistic, arrogant. He sat in the corner with a bunch of boys and paid no attention to them. They gave him beers. He looked down and wept. He was the greatest.

Old home, still essentially the same

It was only after reading The Portable Jack Kerouac that I realized I have some ‘six degrees of separation’ with him.   Over a period of 12 years he lived within two miles of where I lived as a kid (92-18 107^th Street, Queens, NY), first at his parent’s house at 133-01 Cross Bay Blvd, Queens, NY and then for five years at 94-21 134th Street, his frequently hanging out at Smokey Oval Park on Atlantic Avenue, where I used to practice with the Richmond Hill HS baseball team. This park was later renamed the Phil Rizutto Park as Rizutto played at Richmond Hill High School, and was a classmate of my father’s. 

Then, another association from my past: a close friend early in my high school years, Paul Ortloff, apparently began a relationship with Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, when he was attending Cooper Union for art.  For the first nine years of Jan’s life Kerouac had denied being her father but after a blood test he acknowledged the fact.  She only met her father two or three times.  As one might imagine, Jan, was psychologically damaged by this rejection which haunted her for her entire short life (died in her mid 40s) but as a teenager she fell head over heels in love with Paul.  I can understand why.  He was charismatic, bright, and as Jack Kerouac was to the Beat generation I suppose Paul was to psychedelic and tattoo art.  I wrote about him when I first started this blog, trying to capture some of my personal history (reading the entry today somewhat distresses me, because of the lost opportunities and its candor):  He was a rebel with a James Dean aura. In later life Paul became a psychedelic artist. His road to that distinction was paved when he first learned to carve simple tattoos into himself using India Ink, graduating to having professional tattoos injected all over his body. He and I would go off to a Coney Island tattoo parlor on the subway for those. For some reason, I hesitated doing the same (probably because I was very allergic to pain!). When I read John Irving's haunting and enigmatic “Until I Find You” I couldn’t help but think of Paul.

Paul on right; Me second from the left

Paul and I lost contact well before we graduated from high school, his going his way into psychedelic art, ultimately moving to Woodstock, NY, my going the so called straight and narrow.  Reading about him in James T. Jones’ Use My Name:Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families brought up a lot of memories, but his relationship with Kerouac’s daughter was unknown to me at the time.  Of course I cannot verify any of this other than Jones’ account.

Interesting where reading takes you. All three of these books brought me inward, a self examination at this stage of my life.  So in spite of their differences, to me there is commonality other than the fact I read them sort of concurrently and mostly during our trip to Alaska and Seattle.  Simply put, they spoke to me very personally, one about writing, one about the marriage and craft of the short story by a writer I deeply admire (and miss), and the other about a parallel universe, one of which I was aware, but only lived through tangentially.

Updike Revealed

I waited on Amazon’s virtual Internet line to buy one of the first copies shipped of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike.  Any reader of my blog knows he is my favorite author, I think the best of the late 20^th century, along with Philip Roth.  But unlike most of his contemporaries, he flourished in all venues, poetry, short story, novels, as well as being a brilliant man of letters.  As George Gershwin was to American music, Updike was to American Literature.

I wondered whether any biographer would be up to the task of capturing the breadth of his accomplishments.  The literary biography bar had already been set very high by the relatively recent biographies of other important late twenty century writers, Carol Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Blake Bailey’s Cheever,A Life, and also by Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty; The Life and Work of Richard Yates.

In fact, I thought Blake Bailey would emerge as the ideal biographer of John Updike (but he is now working on a biography of Philip Roth which will round out the pantheon of “my” authors). Adam Begley may have had an inside track.  His father, Louis Begley, another author I admire, knew Updike.  They were at Harvard together as undergraduates, although Begley went in a totally different career direction upon graduation, into the law, until he found himself writing novels towards the end of his career and now into retirement. For me, there is an uncanny connection between Louis Begley and John Updike as social commentators, capturing the times I’ve lived.  I explained my case here and here, so no sense going into further detail in this entry.

And so back to Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike, who I felt I “grew up with” and admired from afar, reading most of his incredible output with such admiration and wonder that one person could write so prodigiously and with such high literary quality.  Like Roy Hobbs, Updike was a “natural.”  He made poetry out of the quotidian.

Begley’s biography is superb, treating Updike with both reverence and objectivity.  In fact, my rose colored glasses of Updike were somewhat removed by the biography.  To my surprise, Updike was less than a perfect human being!  And he indeed lived the life he described in the novel so often associated with him, Couples.  I don’t make this observation as a moral criticism, but more as an abandonment of a certain naiveté I’ve had about Updike.  It doesn’t change my love of his work or my assessment of his importance to the world of American literature.  In fact, I think Begley’s biography will go a long way in assuring his place as one of the most important American writers, period.  

Begley well documents Updike’s four stages of life, his cloistered childhood in Shillington and Plowville, PA, his Harvard years where he acquired “a monumental erudition,” the period of his first marriage to Mary during which time they raised a family of four children in Ipswich, MA and he established himself as a writer of consequence, and his second marriage to Martha during which time he wrote from the perspective of an acknowledged senior statesman of American literature.

Although Updike finally left his home town of Shillington, PA, that town never left him or his fiction, nor did his later residence in Ipswich MA after he graduated from Harvard (and married in his Junior year, just as I did).  But before Ipswich, he worked at The New Yorker for a while and lived the life of a young NY writer.  The New Yorker and Updike were inseparable during his entire career. In fact there were generations of Updikes published in that venerable magazine, some of his mother’s short stories and stories by his son, David.  All three mined autobiography for their fiction and Updike felt a little “crowded” by his mother and then son appearing in the same pages (although their contributions were minimal compared to his).

Having left New York, as well as Shillington, he developed two alter egos to deal with “what might have been.”  He imagined a life of Harry Angstrom in his Rabbit tetrology….a high school basketball star in PA, but then what?  And in a number of short stories he imagined a life of Henry Bech, a writer from the “New York school of writing.”  The Maple short stories, on the other hand, closely chronicled his deteriorating first marriage even detailing his own children.  In fact if there was anything that stands out in Begley’s biography it is how Updike extracted fiction from his personal experiences; absolutely nothing escaped his omniscient eye. 

After his second marriage, Updike and Martha moved more inland, away from Ipswich, to Georgetown, MA (and years later to Haven Hill, a mansion in Beverly Farms MA, and although on the sea, still secluded).  He lived a more isolated life during his later years.  Begley notes that there he was “settled and safe – out of harm’s way – and free from the time – and energy-consuming entanglements of the riotously unmonogamous Ipswich lifestyle.  But he worried that he was putting too much distance between himself and the sources of his inspiration.”  Updike himself, after nine months into his second marriage said, “One of the problems of being a fiction writer is that of gathering experience.  The need for seclusion and respectability that goes with some success, both are very sheltering – they cut you off from painful experience.  We all want to avoid painful experience, and yet painful experience is your chief resource as a writer.”

Curiously enough, as Begley points out, as a young writer Updike made his mark without the anger and torment of so many of his contemporary writers.  “He wasn’t despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn’t alienated or conflicted or drunk; he quarreled with no one.  In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers.  Even his neuroses were tame.  Except for his psoriasis, his stutter, and his intermittent religious doubts, he faced no obstacle that hard work and natural talent couldn’t overcome.” Perhaps that is because Updike came from a cocoon of love and protection and adulation, his mother recognizing his genius (and he was a bone-fide one), fostering it and in a sense living out her own dream as a writer through her only child.  They had a close relationship throughout Updike’s life.  In fact, his mother was a published author, but her focus was always on her son

And indeed, Updike was a hard worker and devoted himself to writing most days of his life when he was not travelling, playing golf or sometimes poker, or philandering (although, gathering information from all those activities).

I think Begley gets to the heart of “what made Updike run” – especially during his Ipswich years, by putting his finger on what always puzzled me about Updike, his strong religious vein, usually disguised in his novels but prominent in works such as Roger’s Version. It seemed to be somewhat inconsistent with the life he led.  In Ipswich he joined the First Congregational Church (ironically the same religion in which I was brought up, but abandoned as an adult).  Religion to Updike was a constant fulcrum in his life, a hinge on which to swing between the fear of death, to his infidelities. Begley hones right in on the issue:

Surrounded by disbelief more or less politely concealed, he refused to play along -- "I decided ... I would believe." Though he disapproved of pragmatic faith, he was well aware of the utility of his own special brand of piety: "Religion enables us to ignore nothingness," he wrote, "and get on with the jobs of life." He explained the tenacity of his faith by pointing to the part played by fear: "The choice seemed to come down to: believe or be frightened and depressed all the time." On a good day, faith in God gave him confirmation that he mattered -- "that one's sense of oneself as being of infinite value is somewhere in the universe answered, that indeed one is of infinite value." Religion eased his existential terror, allowing him to do his work, and to engage in the various kinds of play that best amused him-among them the hazardous sport of falling for his friends' wives. He was caught in a vicious circle: he fell in love, and his adulterous passion made him feel alive, but also sparked a religious crisis that renewed his fear of death -- so he fell in love some more and read some more theology. Not surprisingly, his wife found that she couldn't tell when he exhibited signs of angst, whether he was suffering from religious doubt or romantic torment.

Furthermore, Updike recognized his exceptionalism as a writer and hoarded every document, doodling (he was an expert cartoonist and almost went into the profession of animation), every letter he received.  These, he knew, would be a treasure trove for future literary researchers after his death. Even by the time he was in college, Updike had a literary vision of his future, one he described to his mother in a letter: “We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popular, an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom…[one who could] produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic”  A mighty lofty vision for a young man who then carved that future for the rest of his writing life.

Begley’s writing itself is superb with the biography reading like a novel, integrating his observations, bolstering them from Updike’s own fiction.  Consider just this one passage: “…Mary’s knack of keeping her husband at a distance, her studiously unruffled passivity – leavened by dry humor, bolstered by tenacious dignity, and sealed with maturing beauty – helped to hold the marriage together.  Like many of his damaged fictional couples, they ‘hunkered down in embattled, recriminatory renewal of their vows, mixed with spells of humorous weariness.’”  Between his own elegant writing, and plentiful quotes, Begley has managed to create a verisimilitude approaching a virtual hologram of Updike’s life.

In reading this work, I accumulated six single spaced pages of notes and in reviewing them, realized it would be silly to go into detail on all.  I’d end up practically reprinting the essence of Begley’s extraordinary biography and as such I’ve omitted so many other issues that “made Updike run” and many of the controversies.  My heartfelt suggestion: read the biography! 

In some ways this was a difficult one for me to read. We all have a favorite writer, but I also thought of Updike as a distant friend, a one way relationship of course, but an intimate one.  His passing was a loss to me. We had so many commonalities as well, his being almost exactly ten years older than I, with a number of uncanny things in common (I don’t mean to compare myself to him in any way however).  We lived through the same eras.  What he wrote about I experienced.

Towards the end of his life, he gave a talk at the National Booksellers Association in 2006 entitled “The End of Authorship” – a defense of the printed word in which he felt threatened by Google’s attempt to digitize, well, everything.  He loved the texture of the book as I do.  As Begley recounts, “Updike saw [the universal digitized library] as ruin for writers dependent on royalties.  Defending not only the economic model that had sustained him but his fundamental conception of literature, which he understood to be a private, silent communication between two individuals, author and reader, he was arguing for ‘accountability and intimacy.’….His identity was forged in solitary communion with an open book.” 

His was a life of productivity and meaning, and now immortality, a writer who will be read for generations.  We would all like to be remembered.  It was his intention, even as a young man, to achieve exactly what he achieved (and he did it through assiduously hard work, not to mention having a pure genius for writing).  How many of us can say that?  My life in publishing was something I loved, but now that is gone, receding in my retirement years to the point I sometimes wonder whether it was a dream and what exactly did I accomplish?  Reading Begley’s acknowledgments I was heartened that he gave attribution to Jack De Bellis:  “Without the herculean efforts of Jack De Bellis, a tireless collector of Updike facts and Updike treasure, all Updike scholars would have to work twice as hard as they do.”  I cite this as at the end of my publishing career my company published his John Updike Encyclopedia. Before that we published his John Updike, 1967-1993: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Updike reviewed the chronology for the former and wrote an introduction for the latter.  So the circle closes for me.  Books matter, great literature captures life better than any compilation of digital photographs, and Updike’s works will be read and studied by generations and generations to follow.

When Updike died in early 2009, I wrote a piece which perhaps puts my feelings expressed above in context. A few months later, at the bottom of this entry I quoted his poem “Perfection Wasted,” quintessential Updike, displaying his playful, satiric side, as well as his endless ruminations about death.

He was a fine poet, a part of his work so often overlooked.  It is when he turned most inward.  So I conclude this entry by quoting his “Enemies of a House,” still another commonality as I’ve done battle with New England homes as he, and I’m fascinated by how he turns the poem describing the despoliation of an old house into the universality of the end of a life.

Enemies of a House

By John Updike

Dry rot intruding where the wood is wet;

       hot sun that shrinks roof shingles so they leak

and backs pane-putty into crumbs, the pet

       retriever at the frail screen door; the meek

small mice who find their way between the walls

      and gnaw improvements to their nests: mildew

in the cellar, at the attic window, squalls;

      loosening mortar, desiccated glue;

ice backup over eaves; wood gutters full

      of leaves each fall and catkins every spring;

                 salt air, whose soft persistent breath

turns iron red, brass brown, and copper dull;

      voracious ivy; frost heaves; splintering;

                 carpenter ants; adultery; drink; death

His was indeed a life well led as documented by Adam Begley in this inspired biography.