Has John Updike ever said no? That question dogged my progress through this sixth volume of his essays and criticism, which collects another eight years' worth of occasional prose. There is, apparently, still no anniversary that Updike would willingly deny acknowledgment of, no obit he would pass up, no introduction he feels himself unqualified for (Daniel Fuchs' Hollywood Stories? Send them over. A new translation of The Mabinogion from 12th-century Welsh? Two thousand words by close of play).
By the time I got to the final section of the book, which begins at page 660 and is devoted to answers that Updike has lately given to those kinds of inquiries that it would be so forgivable to ignore — “A response to the question of why do I live in New England, posed in this case by a fledgling journal called The Improper Bostonian, in 1999” or “A response to a request from Weston M Hill, Harvard ‘94, who in 2002 was putting together ‘a celebration and history of Harvard Dorm Life'” and asked for “a story or poem (or even a photo) about [my] experience of living in Lowell House and/or in Hollis in the Yard” — but to which he provides leisurely paragraphs of considered anecdote, I came to the conclusion that yes, he probably has never said no.
This unflagging accommodation is unquestionably a virtue but not one that is necessarily to the fore when it comes to collected prose. Updike is no fabulist but there is something defiantly Borgesian about the reprinting here of his introduction to a bibliography of his own work, which in turn presumably will be referenced in a later edition of the bibliography. “My instinct for self-preservation is strong,” he writes, and he is not joking. His own archives “consist of shelves of my books, foreign and domestic, in my home, particularly two shelves that hold often-handled first editions of my 50-odd volumes marked up with corrections that have been made in later printings or that I hope will some day be made. Upstairs in a storage room, four cardboard boxes contain over 50 years of tearsheets from magazines, which contain many an oddment and all my unsigned contributions, mostly from 1955 to 1968 to the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section ... .” Some of which he grudgingly admits have escaped the attention of his bibliographers, but “something, after all, must be forgotten, or nothing can be remembered.”
All writers have an interest in posterity, accumulating words against mortality, but few have catalogued their afterlife quite so comprehensively as Updike. He calls book-reviewing and magazine commissions his “improvised sub-career”; it's what he does in time-outs from novels. He is often keen to remind you he is working to deadline, or to keep long-extinct wolves from the door; in a previous volume he noted that a principal reason for undertaking a particular contract was that it happened that “the payment for a monthly review roughly balanced a monthly alimony payment that was mine to make.” Due considerations, indeed.
The irritation and marvel in all of this is that even when Updike is going through the motions — a note on the opening of the Hayden Planetarium, or a review of “Stanley Crouch's ambitious first novel” — he is incapable of inelegance or anything less than subtle judgment. His autopilot is any other writer's Red Arrows. To say he is well-read would be like suggesting Tiger Woods has spent a fair amount of time on the driving range. Updike not only has the unnerving habit of rigorously revising hard-won opinions about books you've never opened, he has generally given careful attention to the entire oeuvre of authors you have never heard of. Thus “the Bogota-born, Brussels-reared, Mexico City-dwelling poet and prose writer Alvaro Mutis” in his seventh novella “has the supple heft of a new-born classic.”
Sometimes you have the sense that, in a spirit of devilment and awe, Updike's commissioning editors at the New Yorker have conspired to test the limits of his curiosity. They never come close. A 400,000-word biography of Kierkegaard, translated from the Danish, affords Updike delighted insights into the “poetry of Adam Oehlenschlager and the intellectuality of King Christian VIII,” though he regrets it lacks proper examination of the influence of the great Dane on “Kafka and Karl Barth and Unamuno.”
For all his extravagant intellectual expeditions, though, he is at his effortless best the closer he gets to home. There are fragments of memoir scattered though these pages. Updike anyway has a habit of locating himself before he addresses the subject at hand; in passing, he examines his fear of water, begun when his father inadvertently dropped him in a pool, an event submerged in the “wavery warps” of memory; he confesses a lifelong poker addiction, indulged every fortnight in the same card school of Massachusetts neighbors since 1957; and he tells his life story through the cars he has owned. Of his first marriage: “We went our separate ways, she to a boxy Volvo station wagon, for Swedish stability, and I to a lime-colored Mustang convertible, for American pizzazz.”
The pick of the pieces are the half-dozen essays on writers that Updike has revered. Updike himself has been the subject of hero-worship, most memorably in Nicholson Baker's U and I, but he is not above some adulatory recollections of his own. The four related essays on EB White and James Thurber in particular act as a kind of Portrait of the Artist. White (most famous as the author of Charlotte's Web) introduced Updike to the New Yorker; Thurber, the magazine's resident wit, was his boyhood idol; their collaborative satire Is Sex Necessary?, first published in 1929, asked the question that Updike has spent a career answering. Every writer is a frustrated something; Updike is a frustrated cartoonist (there is an irony in the fact that someone with his facility for paragraph and essay has always envied one-liners); Thurber could both write and draw, and Updike has never stopped coveting that gift.
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