Wednesday, January 28, 2009
John Updike
About twenty-five years ago, I think, I wrote John Updike's obituary for The Times. Nothing of it remains. I never met him, I always assumed I would. Now it's too late and Updike has become his work. He was once a pupil of Vladimir Nabokov. He later said of Nabokov, approximately, 'He writes prose the only way it should be written, ecstatically.' This is true of Nabokov, true of Updike and true of writing prose. Prose should be ecstasy because existence is. Surprisingly often.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
The first of his I read was A Month of Sundays, about the randy Reverend. I was about fifteen so it made quite an impression, obviously.
ReplyDeleteAnother era draws to a close.
I'm intrigued by the idea that a novelist like Updike can be a 'pupil' of Nabakov, or indeed, anyone. How does it work? Martin Amis always claims Saul Bellow as a mentor figure but I've never quite got that one either.
He literally was, Brit, at college.
ReplyDeleteIs that so? Interesting, but a bit of a let-down. After all, anyone could have been a literal pupil of Nabakov, at college.
ReplyDeleteIt is a loss. I interviewed Updike years ago and managed to irritate him by first saying I thought he was a direct descendant of America's Puritan writers (I meant Nathaniel Hawthorne, et al, but he thought I was saying he was a prude), and then I made my gaffe worse by saying I didn't like the Rabbit novels as I found them misogynistic in a middle-class-white-suburban male way. It wasn't a great interview, but I did always love his prose. His short stories were masterful and his essays and reviews very important to American literary life.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad, at least, that I could redress some of my insults in my review of his last novel, "The Widows of Eastwick," which I found a wonderful evocation of aging and womanhood. Updike was a great American writer.
Thought for the day:
ReplyDeleteThere is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
Updike, Villages, 2005
I came over assuming I'd receive concise insight on one of so many I've never read. Exactly so. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteHow does Updike compare to Bellow? Where is Amis in the pecking order? (I read Amis once, on Stalin. Assume nothing else.)
"I read Amis once, on Stalin."
ReplyDeleteHis fiction is much better.
I am a relative of Updike and shall be writing his definitive obituary this week. I know it is keenly awaited...
ReplyDeleteBellow called Nabokov a 'wicked wizard'. I prefer this.
ReplyDeletePs. I think Amis' *non*fiction is better. Suum cuique.
ReplyDeleteBut have you tried The Information!
I love/hate Amis's fiction, even while I'm reading it. It astounds, irritates and exhausts in equal measure.
ReplyDeleteBut I thought his strange autobiography Experience was the best thing he's written by a factor of a lot.
Here's Amis on Updike the literary journalist: [his] inestimable virtue: having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes.
ReplyDelete