Updike mourned: Martin Amis summed it up when he said it was a very cold day for literature when John Updike died of lung cancer on Tuesday, aged 76.
It was a passing that brought out tributes from the big guns of letters on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.
To fellow American giant Philip Roth, Updike was “our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer”. Updike was and always would be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne: “His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.” Fellow American Joyce Carol Oates, dwelling on the extraordinary luminosity of his style, also spoke of his wonderful, warm, sympathetic sense of humour, which people didn’t always notice: “I will miss him terribly, as we all will.”
To John Banville he was “ a superb prose stylist who was also a keen and very perceptive chronicler of his time”, while Ian McEwan hailed Updike as “the greatest novelist writing in English at the time of his death”.
Tributes poured in to the New Yorker where Updike had been a mainstay, starting with his poem Duet, With Muffled Brake Drums, which was published in 1954, right up to May 2008 when his last work of fiction for the magazine, The Full Glass, appeared. The subscription he was given to the magazine as a Christmas present by an aunt when he was 12 was obviously the start of a relationship of huge enrichment for him, for the magazine and, above all, for his readers. Apart from the wonderful fiction there was the huge body of literary criticism and reviews to which, as Eileen Battersby said in her tribute and analysis in Wednesday’s Irish Times, readers of international fiction should look.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, said they adored him. “No writer was more important to the soul of the New Yorker than John . . . He was, for so long, the spirit of the New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him.” Online postings to the New Yorker’s Book Bench section flowed freely as news spread. To Paul Theroux he was America’s great noticer: “He helped us see”.
Although T Coraghessan Boyle never met him, Updike was “one of the enduring heroes of my life”. Updike enchanted Boyle: “He led the way. I will miss him in the way I would miss one of the peaks outside the window here if some natural catastrophe were to take it down. There is an absence, surely, but there is the memory of what was once there – and, better yet, a full shelf of books to recollect and reread.” To George Saunders, Updike was “a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky”.
In the Guardian, Martin Amis, linking Updike to Joyce, said that in a novel such as Couples you could see that Updike set himself the task of bringing Joyce to the US. “Joyce himself said that certain things were too embarrassing to be written down in black and white. Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that. He took the novel on to another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom. It’s as if nothing human seemed closed to his eye.”
A cold day for literature alright when one of the biggest oaks in the forest is no more – but also the perfect day to go back to his work, or start reading him for the very first time.
Kelman comes to town
Scottish writer James Kelman comes to Dún Laoghaire next month. Kelman, who won the Booker prize in 1994 for How Late it Was, How Late, will give a reading hosted by Irish writer Sean O’Reilly, currently writer-in-residence with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT).
The event is on Thursday, February 26th at 7pm in IADT.