In praise of John Updike (1932-2009).

Webb, Stephen H.

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When we praise someone in their presence, there is always the suspicion that we are trying to win their favor or influence their reception by others. This is especially true when we try to honor those who are already copiously acclaimed. Fortunately, in situations where only the highest praise will do, there are rituals that relieve us of the hazard of making a spectacle of ourselves. Nobody minds, for example, if you bow low before a king or queen; decorum demands nothing less. You are likewise excused for a mawkish wedding toast, especially if you have had a couple of drinks beforehand. In some social situations, the unwritten rules of small talk practically require you to defend the superiority of the local athletic team or your favorite sports star. If you are a literary critic, however, praising a writer to the hilt will strike many readers as an abandonment of your vocation, if not your senses. Going beyond appreciation tempered by criticism will make you sound perilously sentimental.

Why is encomium for writers such a disrespected art form? Why is it so awkward to praise the words that best honor the shared substance of our lives? There might be many reasons why we hesitate to acknowledge the beautiful in linguistic form. Maybe our polemical and polarized culture has hardened us to the suppleness of handcrafted sentences, or maybe, from a less elevated vantage, too many of us who write about writing are frustrated writers ourselves, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the wedge that great writing cleaves between the pleasant and the perfect. Writers or not, the fact that the core of much secondary education in America consists of English classes cannot fail to shape even the most erudite literary interpretation. Schools drill into us from a young age the idea that a clever interpretation of a writer's limitations is the most minimal index of sophistication. In any case, our days are so saturated in words that, thanks to the web, words count less than ever before. The writers of the world post their messages because they are aggrieved or are grieving, not because they want to say something in just the right words. Writers who write beautifully can never be given the last word.

All of this is just to say that offering John Updike the praise he deserved while he was still alive was rhetorically challenging. He was such a good writer that anything shy of shooting over the mark sounded petty when coming from academics or envious when coming from fellow writers. Praise from academic quarters was especially stingy, which made following Updike's career as a professor a mark of both distinction and eccentricity. Updike had doubters rather than critics, disbelievers who, like disbelievers of every kind of miracle, refused to investigate what they were certain could not be true.

His death has brought his admirers out of the closet and has given hyperbolic assessments their due. It has also forced his most devoted followers to relinquish their exclusive hold on him, as if now a collective sigh must be uttered over his name. Updike was our happy Proust, infinitely observant but not self-indulgently tortured, at home with the bourgeoisie rather than ambivalent about the aristocracy, perhaps because he was in love more with things than the memory of things. Now that we cannot look forward to the steady flow of his new work, we are left to pay the homage to him that he paid to our world.

Yet even in death Updike continues to deliver, at least in The New Yorker, which is understandably reluctant to let its union with him be parted. It was jolting to read his review of a biography of his friend John Cheever just as I was settling into the thought that he would write no more. Perhaps this was Updike's way of mocking as premature any attempt to foreclose on his productivity. At one point in the article, Updike voices his annoyance of the biographer's observation that Cheever is unfashionable in the college classroom. "Cheever's characters are adult, full of adult darkness, corruption, and confusion." Updike compares Cheever favorably to Fitzgerald's romanticism and Hemingway's stoicism. Noting that Cheever was a regular communicant at Episcopal morning Mass, he writes, "His errant protagonists move, in their fragile suburban simulacra of paradise, from one island of momentary happiness to the imperiled next." We should be grateful, he concludes, of the "glimmers of grace and well-being" Cheever gives us, rather than dwelling on Cheever's daily struggles ("Basically Decent" 75). One cannot help but suspect that Updike was thinking about his own legacy as well.

Updike fans often have their favorite memory of when they first realized how good he was. My wife and I spent the summer of 1991 travelling in India, soon after the publication of Rabbit at Rest. We arrived in New Delhi at night to a scene that looked like a bad movie version of the fall of Saigon, chose someone at random to drive us to our hotel, and used his back to shield the prying hands of beggars. He piloted his auto rickshaw through a highway flooded with exotic machines and laboring beasts. At our hotel we gingerly stepped over the men who were sleeping in the hallway leading to our room. We did not realize how cool the room was until, after a night swatting off cockroaches, we opened the door to what felt like an oven that had been on bake for the whole day. I soon discovered just how short a distance connects the appetite to the sense of smell. Yes, I lost my stomach in the heat and stench. While wandering the city, we happily stumbled into an English language bookstore that even more happily had Rabbit at Rest for sale. My copy still has the sticker, "FBS, Famous Book Store, 25, Janpath, N. Delhi."

Reading about Harry Angstrom's defiant descent into the vulgarities of American popular culture was my primary source of sustenance that first week in India. Updike hurtled Rabbit toward death, but I carried his book like it was my passport and my return airline ticket both. It was somehow comforting to see that America, through Updike's eyes, was every bit as extravagant in its own way as India. All I could hold down was plain white rice, but Updike's gustatory elaborations made up for my restricted diet. I relished every word Updike fed Rabbit, from his incessant snacking to his rebellion against hospital food. "The Corn Chips as he walks along the pavement begin to accumulate in his gut into a knotted muchness, a little ball of acid, and yet he cannot resist putting just one more into his mouth, to feel its warped salty edges, its virgin crunchiness, on his tongue, between his teeth, among these salivating membranes" (Rabbit at Rest 328). The meticulously diagrammed drudgery of Rabbit's ingestion distracted me from my lack of hunger, and by the time Rabbit died, I was cured.

Updike's own death released a slew of critics from their panegyric scruples, but many still took the opportunity to grouse about the lack of energy of his late novels, as if an aging race horse loses beauty with a statelier, slower gait. What irritated me most, however, were the passing references to Updike's interest in theology as if it were one of his hobbies, like pursuing other men's wives or sunning his skin on the beach. That is one reason why I was so interested in the poems he was said to be working on right up to the time of his death. I was hoping for a last word about the way all of his words tried to proclaim the Word, or at least an assurance that he was a believer right to the end. Updike owed me nothing along these lines, of course, and it is surely a sign of my deficiency in professional critical credentials that I was so eager to read his final poems as an indication of the state of his soul. Too many Christians, doubting common grace, strain to find evidence of a faith conviction in their favorite artists, as if beauty on its own does not point to God. Yet there I was, writing his editor, Judith Jones, to request the proof pages of his final book, Endpoint, before its publication, so that I could mine it for evidence that Updike had not apostatized. (1)

I was not disappointed. Indeed, the last two poems in the collection are as confessional as anything Updike has written about religion. On a first reading, "Creeper" appears to be a compact allegorical meditation on nature's collusion in our quest for the afterlife. Updike describes how the "feeblest tug brings down" a Virginia creeper, which falls with "stoic delicacy." "To live is good," Updike imagines the Creeper ruminating, "but not to live ... is good also, all photosynthesis abandoned." Yet the next spring the woody vine will climb again "up that same smooth-barked oak." Our insistence on more life, the poem seems to be saying, is rooted in the mindless upward surge of nature. On a closer reading, however, I began to think that Updike had slyly paired his desire for everlasting life with an equally honest confession about his aspiration for lasting literary fame. He knew that people thought he wrote too much, comparing him to a force of nature. Were his words the vine, hungrily covering the papery oak? Perhaps he was admitting that the milieu of his deepest religious impulse was the search for poetic immortality, rather than nature's fecundity.

In the books of moralists, the desire for earthly fame and eternal salvation are contrasting, if not altogether opposed, but Updike always treated his vocation as a gift and literature as a way of giving thanks. Not without ambiguity, he typically twinned the experiences of beauty and grace, so that his office of writing was also a habit of prayer. He wanted to put all of his experiences into the best possible words, which sometimes made it seem as if he thought this was the best of all possible worlds. What he really wanted was a literary legacy that would stand on its own even as it pointed to his creator. Only by saying yes to God can desire be saved from self-indulgence and genius turned divine, not diabolical.

All desire, properly expressed, moves us to God. This Updike says, in all of its ambiguity, in "Fine Point," the last poem in Endpoint. Written on December 22, 2008, about a month before he died, it begins with the lines, "Why go to Sunday school, though surlily, and not believe a bit of what was taught?" and proceeds to answer this more-than-rhetorical question. After reflecting on his own ecclesial existence--an un-surly tongue reposing in "papyrus pleas," the "timbrel creed of praise" giving substance to the sacraments, the blood of which "tinges lips"--Updike quotes the first part of Psalm 23:6: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life." He adds, modestly or not, only the words, "my life, forever," which end the poem and, I guess, his oeuvre. With those words he draws attention to a body of work that says everything he was given to say.

WORKS CITED

Updike, John. "Basically Decent: A Biography of John Cheerer." The New Yorker 9 March 2009: 75.

--. Endpoint and Other Poems New York: Knopf, 2009.

--. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Penguin, 1990.

NOTE

(1) I am grateful to Judith Jones for granting permission to quote from the uncorrected proof pages of Endpoint and Other Poems.