John Updike (1932-2009) once said that his first publication and nearly sixty-year-long relationship with this magazine was the great professional event of his life—no, he called it the ecstatic event of his professional life—and he never tired (for younger writers, it was inspiring to see how he never tired) of seeing his prose in Caslon type, his name for all those decades appended to, or, later, preambling, a story or a review in these pages. It was part of the great good luck of this magazine that he needed, or indulged, us, and that his appetites and ambitions matched the dreams of the editors—which is only to say that several generations of editors tossed a bit less fitfully at 3 A.M., knowing that, if a book on some knotty modern subject had been sent out to Massachusetts, two weeks later there was sure to be, rebounding back, nine or ten pages of perfectly tuned prose—typo-free, full of cunning synopsis, serene judgment, big news (a generation got educated on Borges and Nabokov alongside him), bite without tooth marks, and always at the end a permanent turn of phrase or a metaphor, not a witticism merely but a benediction, a blessing, an insight that lifted it far above mere reviewing and into a form of witty personal poetry.
And, as those same generations of editors learned, the near-perfect thing was usually prefaced by a letter gaily outlining its supposed inadequacies, and all the reasons the editors might wisely prefer not to run it at all—a form of modesty that, given not just the quality but the heat and shimmer of what was enclosed, passed the edge of modesty to touch the edge of superstition: it was, one realized, Updike’s way of staying young, an outsider, pressing his face against a window, still the long-faced brilliant boy on a remote Pennsylvania farm turning the pages of a New York magazine and quietly deciding to be a cartoonist and a humorist and a parodist, while the loving and ambitious mother fretted and the weak but honest father listened to the radio (a family triangle that he inserted, again and again, into all our imaginations). He was still a kid from Shillington dreaming of being a New York wit, and feeling lucky that he had been allowed in at all.
Those reviews alone would have been enough to make a major career, each one not laying down the law for the writer but bringing news to the reader. (What editor would not cry out in delight at finding a piece that made the simple and sage distinction that purposes are not points, that, where the purpose of “King Lear” was to purge the soul with pity and terror, its point was that old men should not retire prematurely.) And then one remembered that the prose was just the ivy on the drystone wall of his short stories, which provided a lyric, etched picture of a half century’s domestic manners and longings. And then one remembered that the wall of stories was just a pleasant border surrounding the lawn and mansion of his twenty-three novels, which had cumulatively taken on the full weight of American social history, doing the classic job of the nineteenth-century novel as though no one had ever said you couldn’t any longer, tracking our experience from the parched Truman era to gray-and-white Eisenhower and beyond to smiling Reagan and shaky Carter and even sexy Ford. (And then one recalled that the author might have traded in two or three of those novels for another volume or two of poetry, which was, of all his work, his special pet.) Thinking about the scale of that achievement, one turned back to the ivy, and hoped someday to climb at least that high.
John Updike was a fine colleague, a beaming platform presence, a valued contributor, a welcome visitor to the office, a genial supporter of younger writers—just a freelance writer living in Massachusetts, as he puckishly described himself. And, the hard part for his colleagues and friends to square, he was also one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing. As well as any writer ever has, he fulfilled Virginia Woolf’s dictum that the writer’s job is to get himself or herself expressed without impediments—to do so as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did, without hate or pause or protest or obvious special pleading or the thousand other ills that the embattled writer is heir to. Woolf meant not that the writer’s job was to write a lot, or to register the self with a splash, but to get his or her real experience down: all the private pains and pictures, the look on a loving parent’s face when humiliated in a school corridor, or the way girls smell in football season—to get it down and fix it there for good. Updike, to use a phrase he liked, got it all in, from snow in Greenwich Village on a fifties street to the weather in the American world.
If he gave so much to the magazine, he took something from it, too. He took, and kept, a tone. Updike the humorist is probably the least known or recognizable Updike of them all, but something of the White-cum-Thurber sound of the New Yorker that he joined—that bemused, ironically smiling but resolutely well-wishing, anti-malicious comic tone—lingered in his work till the very end. In the last year of his life, he wrote to an admirer that “humor is my default mode,” and that he still dreamed of being the new Benchley, the next Perelman. He flourished in his early years here, writing Talk pieces and casuals (his parody of Harry Truman as the Adam of “Paradise Lost” is one small masterpiece among many), and the material of comedy remained implicit in almost every sentence he wrote: the dancing recognition of the likeness of the unlike, the will to treat the organic mechanically—his sexual congresses are blissful but funny, never “transcendent,” because they are so entirely acts of organic machinery, wise souls made into copulating clockwork. The common sense that regularly inflected his judgments of big writers and dubious ideas had its origins in a humorous tradition, too; in his criticism he caught the notes of Wolcott Gibbs and Brendan Gill as much as those of Edmund Wilson.
And the comic current ran deeper even than that. Despite the lyrical surface of his prose, Updike was a realist, as comedians must be, and never even marginally a romantic. He was genuinely unseduced by all the myths of American romanticism: gorgeous Daisys and vast sinister Western landscapes are equally absent from his books. His girls and women are real, with scratchy pubic hair, and his American landscape of car dealerships and fast-food retreats held no place for doomed, exciting, existential gunmen. He was, for all those perfect shining sentences, a realist; the sentences sing, but they don’t ennoble.
Given how seamlessly he fit here, it’s a miracle that he ever got out; he could have stayed at the magazine, tried out all the chairs, and become a local god. But he did something braver. He fled New York for Ipswich, and then made a bolder journey into writing, absorbing the hardest and highest of the moderns—Proust and Nabokov first of all, but Borges and Henry Green and so many others—without abandoning the old sounds he loved, either. The first paragraph of his great story “Museums and Women,” from 1967, is a summation, almost a formula, of the compound, mature Updike style:
Nabokov haunts the long first sentence, but the second—“Both words hum”—is pure White, and the last, like the sum of them all, is entirely Updike, turning a sensation into a lighthearted sermon, a little parable. High modernism plus American humor equals this writer who encompassed them both.
A virtuoso, he was never content with virtuosity. He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisitist urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him. He was at once conjurer and chronicler, and it is this that makes the great Updike novels masterpieces properly so called: they get it all in and they get it all right. Describing the “Rabbit” books to a new reader, one is stunned to be reminded of their apparent inconsequence: the hero isn’t a great bootlegger who gets killed, or a boy on a raft with a runaway slave, or even a suicidal small-town gent or an exotic expatriate in Spain. He doesn’t do anything grand. He’s a high-school basketball star in a dying town; he runs a Toyota dealership; he has an affair or two with a woman; he stays married; he has a hopeless son. And yet Rabbit’s small acts hold not just truth but also glamour, a mystery and glow almost Proustian.
Two big things separated him from other writers of his time, and one joined him to it. His patriotism, which made him pro-war in the sixties, and his religious faith were both, though hardly alien to other writers, expressed in his work with a simplicity of feeling that connected him to his own lower-middle-class roots and to the common experience of the country. He could not very easily imagine himself living outside America, and his love of nation had an authentic plainness to it. (He wrote of Reagan that he was like God: you never knew what he knew, everything or nothing.) He could understand Reagan and Nixon, and their supporters, in a way that his more urban friends didn’t try to. His Christian faith, in turn, shaped by the theologian Karl Barth, was American in its mysterious optimism; who can forget his description of the Parable of the Talents, and how he could feel the damp earth of the boy who buried them? At the other end of his sensibility, the sexual explicitness that he pioneered in American fiction was additive, ameliorative—the one thing that had been left undescribed, a piece of the world’s experience previously unfixed. Compared with more obvious pioneers of sex writing, how blended his descriptions are into a larger world of memory: sex in Updike happens not in a stripped-down theatre of two but in a coliseum of many, part of the continuum of sensation in which we live.
Throughout all that varied work, one theme rose and was repeated over and over. Updike’s great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful. Unlike his European contemporaries, who saw the same space and the attempted filling as mere aridity and deprivation, Updike was close enough to, and fond enough of, the source of postwar material abundance to love it fully, and for itself. (And he knew enough of the decade of deprivation that preceded the big blossoming never to be jaded about plenty.) He viewed the material culture of American life with a benign, appreciative ironic eye. But he had no illusions, either, about its ability to cover the failure or wish away mortality. His 1996 novel “In the Beauty of the Lilies”—which may well emerge as the sort of late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation—makes this almost schematically apparent: the death of American religion is matched by the rise of American movies. It is no accident that the final heart attack of his hero and alter ego Harry Angstrom, Rabbit himself, is preceded by the sudden rush of knowledge that the department-store Christmases of his childhood and the wonderful pop music of his adolescence were both calculated commercial frauds.
Comedy was his default mode, though, and comedy is made of realism alloyed with love. A note of happiness rings through Updike’s prose, and draws us to it, makes us happy when we read it. It is not a fatuous happiness, or a happiness unaware of death (a preoccupation with death and dying was a steady feature of his work), but neither does it cede too much to mere mortality. One has a sense of someone who—as much as, though with more wit than, Andy Warhol—has spent a good deal of his life liking things. Women’s clothes, their hair, the hybridization of American accents; the way that the hyper-cold of the airline baggage compartment can be felt like a secret in the bag as you unpack—all these images and moments, recalled at random from his work, are not just reported but quietly rhapsodized, registered with love. It is his affections that rise, and that we recall.
One would want, therefore, to triangulate him, as he once did in an early and beautiful elegy for T. S. Eliot, somewhere among three other comic and ecstatic writers: that other bemused Protestant Charles Schulz, for a sense of the possibilities in a popular form and the love of the sure cartoonist’s touch; his fellow-Readingite Wallace Stevens, for the intimation of the numinous in the ordinary Sunday mornings of the mid-Atlantic states; and—why not?—the Shakespeare of the comedies and sonnets, for the ability to get himself expressed fully, unimpeded, and for the desire, even in the face of death, to set down, for readers still unborn, all the sweetness of our common life. ♦