John Updike:'MY SUBJECT," re- marked the American novelist John Updike, who has died at the age of 76, "is the American Protestant small-town middle class".
In a society of extremes, where violence, verbal and otherwise, was a familiar cultural routine, Updike remained a believer in the possibilities of ordinary life.
“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.”
Undeniably white, heterosexual and a Protestant, during his lifetime Updike carried the burden of being a writer who was not black, not female, not gay, not Jewish – decidedly not multicultural.
He had a gift for being on the “wrong” side of issues about which there was a liberal consensus. Updike supported the American intervention in Vietnam, and doubted the wisdom of government support for the arts. He wrote with passionate grace about the love of women, but found even elegant depictions of homosexuality not to his taste.
He was born in Shillington, a small town in eastern Pennsylvania near the larger city of Reading.
Updike’s father Wesley found work as a poorly paid maths teacher, after periods of unemployment in the 1930s. A Republican, he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt and never switched back.
Wesley’s preference for the party that offered “the forgotten man” a break, a new deal, became the lifelong sentiment of his son. Updike’s mother, Linda Hoyer, worked as a saleswoman in a local store. She had a masters degree in English and wanted to be a writer. Her son John carried the burden of her ambition. The boyhood memory of the sound of her typing gave their house “a secret, questing life”. When asked in later years about her son’s great fame, she coolly remarked: “I’d rather it had been me.”
Updike’s family steadily voted Democratic. (Updike staunchly supported Obama in 2008, and described Sarah Palin as a “bird-brain”. He was quite perplexed to learn that both Obama and McCain included his books among their favourites.) He attended the local Lutheran church in Shillington, where his father was a deacon. In 1945, when John was 13, the Updikes bought the Hoyer family farm and moved to Plowville, Pennsylvania. John Updike, the most urbane of American writers, spent his adolescent years on an 83-acre farm.
A tall, shy, priggish, mamma's boy as a teenager, with a bold Roman nose, Updike found his greatest pleasure in drawing and writing. He was an accomplished cartoonist, wrote regularly for the Chatterbox, the Shillington high school paper, and won a scholarship to read English at Harvard.
There he joined the Lampoon, a venerable undergraduate club for dilettante bluebloods. He was a prolific contributor and then was elected president of the Harvard Lampoon, a magazine of satire and parody.
Updike was turned down twice by Archibald MacLeish for admission to the creative writing course at Harvard. In his junior year he married Mary Pennington, a fine arts major at Radcliffe College, and graduated summa cum laude (with the highest distinction) the following year.
Updike studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, where the couple's first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. He returned to America that year to join the staff of William Shawn's New Yorker. Katherine White, wife of fabled New Yorkerwriter EB White, offered Updike a staff job writing the "Talk of the Town" column. The magazine had been a major influence on Updike. At 12 he was given a subscription and he fell in love with its understated typography and cosmopolitan wit.
Shawn soon promoted him from a Talk reporter to a Talk writer at a salary of $120 a week. The Updikes rented a small fifth-floor apartment on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Wide of Manhattan. It was a time of thrilling literary discoveries. Updike first read Nabokov at Oxford; he encountered Joyce, Proust and Kierkegaard in New York.
The New Yorkerenhanced Updike's loving respect for facticity, the gravity of things. His loyalty was to the sense of what and how, of things which could be smelled and touched. He was frankly uninterested as a novelist in "opinions". The critic John Carey's comment that "intellectually" the first three of his Rabbit novels were a desert would have been accepted with no small pride by Updike.
He stayed 20 months at the New Yorker, but felt that the city itself was too distracting. He gave up the job and in 1957 moved his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Updike's debut novel, The Poorhouse Fair(1959), was a masterful observation of the inhabitants of the Diamond County Home for the Aged. With the publication of two collections of short stories, The Same Door(1959) and Pigeon Feathers(1962), Chekhovian studies of the awkward cadences and narrow horizons of eastern Pennsylvania, Updike's reputation for clever craftsmanship was confirmed. It was something of a poisoned chalice for a young writer. What might be forgiven or even admired in a Borges or a Nabokov was regarded with suspicion in a young American. With increasing asperity, reviewers and contemporaries like Norman Mailer wondered whether he was just an empty stylist.
Updike provided many different kinds of answers to that hurtful criticism. Rabbit, Run(1960) began a four-decade-long encounter with the ex-high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. The four novels ( Rabbit, Run, followed by Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest) appeared at decade-long intervals, and provide a precise, nuanced picture of the changing fortunes of a thoroughly ordinary man, and of a small Pennsylvania town, Brewer. The Rabbit novels provided Updike with a way to make sense of the waning American male, the American woman (his endless subject as a writer), infidelity (no less inexhaustible), and the American child.
The Rabbit novels were showered with awards and twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1982 he appeared for a second time on the cover of Time. “I like middles,” Updike remarked. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly runs.” Few novels have had a surer grasp on small-town life and its travails.
The Centaur(1963) was a bid for literary seriousness which worked; he won the National Book Award for Fiction. But as an act of homage to his father, the rich load of psychological interest in the relationship of a humble man and an intensely ambitious son was all but swallowed up by pretentious mythological parallels which swaddled the story.
The social excitements of the 1960s had an immense impact on the hard-working writer in his garret. There was a sexual revolution taking place in the lives of the young, upwardly mobile couples around them. When his fifth novel, Couples, was published in 1968, Updike hit the bestseller lists and stayed there.
Updike was not by temperament a Bad Boy like Philip Roth or Henry Miller, but he scorned "good taste" and wrote of women, their sex, skin, orifices, hair and scent with good humour and unabashed pleasure. Worried commentators who linked Coupleswith Roth's Portnoy's Complaintas examples of the degradation of American morality missed the point. Updike did not make a moral endorsement of the couples' infidelities, or even seek to judge them. He observed, and described, as Flaubert or Joyce had done, as a novelist should.
Updike produced an autobiography, Self-Consciousness, and four substantial novels in the 1980s, one of which, The Witches of Eastwick, Updike's take on the trend of 1980s feminism, was made into a successful movie. A volume of more than 800 pages collected Updike's Early Stories(1953-1975) to much acclaim in 2003. It received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004.
The quality of Updike's prose was an ever more supple and rewarding medium, freshly minted decade after decade. He described Piet Hanema in Couplesas "a man who was by profession a builder, in love with snug right-angled things". It was a fitting self-description. So productive, so good a writer; he was an adornment to American letters.
He is survived by his wife and the two sons and two daughters from his first marriage.
John Hoyer Updike: born March 18th, 1932; died January 27th, 2009