Understanding John Updike , livre ebook

UNDERSTANDING JOHN UPDIKE
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
JOHN UPDIKE
Frederic J. Svoboda

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-862-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-863-0 (ebook)
Front cover photograph Ulf Anderson
http://ulfanderson.photoshelter.com
In honor of Suzanne Henning Uphaus. Among the first
I cannot greatly care what critics say of my work; if it is good, it will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink, having in the meantime provided me with a living, the opportunities of leisure, and a craftsman s intimate satisfactions.
John Updike, Conversations
By his [Byron s] words he still lives . John Updike, On Literary Biography
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Preface
Chapter 1 Understanding John Updike
Chapter 2 The Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy: Updike s Masterpiece and Template for Understanding His Works
Chapter 3 The Maples Stories, Olinger Stories, and Other Short Fiction
Chapter 4 Couples (1968)
Chapter 5 The Shadow of Nathaniel Hawthorne and New England Puritanism: The Eastwick and Scarlet Letter novels
Chapter 6 Guide to Major Works: The Henry Bech Novellas
Chapter 7 A Brief Summing Up
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
PREFACE
John Updike died in January 2009, and with the end of his life came the opportunity to look back over a completed career and to sort out what was essential in his work from what garnered peripheral comments from critics and the public. A revaluation is appropriate, and the format of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series allows scope for this undertaking as well as providing a forum that will reach both beginning students of the author as well as those who have long appreciated Updike s unique vision of American life.
One of the burdens-or perquisites-of authorial success is celebrity. It is a burden that Updike carried with considerable grace, aided by a modest, unassuming personality. As possible parallels, the public reputations of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway come to mind, one reputation fostering and the other detracting from appreciation of the real merits of these two seminal American novelists. Neither is quite a model for considering Updike, nor is the celebrity of his contemporary Norman Mailer, a force of nature and culture whose fiction did not always measure up to the outsized claims of his personality but who shaped the conversation of his time via his audaciously personal nonfiction; his role in founding the Village Voice , a newspaper of importance in the life of the nation; his celebrity life; and the larger-than-life gestures he made in the service of celebrity and his personal demons.
Probably Philip Roth (almost precisely Updike s contemporary, born one year later) is Updike s chief rival in appealing to a wide audience-both literate and popular-while garnering critical acclaim and simultaneously serving as a major figure in American culture and its criticism from just after the mid-twentieth century onward. Like Updike, Roth is an author whose body of work is likely to endure. These two authors are hardly identical in background or point of view, but they maintained a relationship as friends at a distance (Roth s phrase) for much of their professional lives. Claudia Roth Pierpont characterized their contrasting gifts as like those of the modernist painters Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse: Roth would have to be Picasso-the energy, the slashing power-and Updike would be Matisse: the color, the sensuality . Updike was the painter in words Roth the master of voices . But they are united in having spent a lifetime possessed by America (303).
What Updike has left readers will endure beyond his obvious importance in his own time. He has his own author society and journal, the John Updike Review , which debuted in 2011 under the direction of James Schiff. The John Updike Society, led by James Plath, has sponsored several conferences and even has supported the purchase and ongoing restoration to its original condition of Updike s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Adam Begley s magisterial biography of Updike appeared in 2014, preceded a year earlier by Jack De Bellis s John Updike s Early Years and Bob Batchelor s John Updike: A Critical Biography .
A difficulty of dealing with an author so prolific and multitalented as Updike is simply fitting discussion of him into a work of reasonable length. Thus, for the purposes of this study, it has been best to be selective. After a brief overview of his career, this work focuses primarily on Updike s book-length fiction, delving particularly into works that typify his interests and strengths: the four novels and one novella featuring Rabbit Angstrom, his excellent short fiction, the bestseller Couples , the five novels indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne s The Scarlet Letter , and the satirical Henry Bech collections. His excellent short fiction is also considered. These related works demonstrate continuing strands in his fiction. Each major division in this study should stand alone for readers dipping into Updike s oeuvre. Additionally several sections suggest how Updike s works fit into specific elements forming the context of his time.
The reader should find herein not just an analysis but also an evocation of the pleasure of reading Updike. He was not only a significant author but also one who provided immense entertainment to readers of his time. Early in this project, I went to lunch with two married friends, Bob Uphaus and Lois Rosen, retired English professors, and let them know what I was working on. (Bob s late first wife, Suzanne, was an early scholar of Updike, and this book is dedicated in memory of her achievement.) Oh, Updike! Lois said. You must be having a wonderful time. Their positive reactions were immediate and spontaneous-and provided a clear sense of how so many people experienced Updike s work throughout his career. Both are skilled and sophisticated readers, yet also fans.
An author who can produce such reactions is certainly worth our attention.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding John Updike
John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most prolific, wide-ranging, and respected of twentieth-century American novelists, winner of every award available to an American writer, including the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the O. Henry Prize (twice), the National Book Critics Circle Award (three times), the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, to name only a few. Only the Nobel Prize for Literature eluded him. During his working life, he published at the rate of more than one book per year, more than sixty in all, including twenty-six novels and novellas and more than a dozen collections of short fiction. He was equally distinguished as a reviewer of literature and the fine arts, cultural critic, and poet. His career included a long-term association with two continuing American cultural treasures, the New Yorker (where much of his short fiction appeared) and the New York Review of Books (where he was a reviewer).
Early biography provides important keys to understanding his works and concerns. Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in rural West Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley Russell Updike, worked as a high school math teacher at Shillington High School (and later served as the model for the teacher protagonist in his son s early novel The Centaur ); his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, was a clerk in a local department store but also a serious, though not entirely successful, writer who did eventually publish short fiction in the New Yorker . West Reading became the fictional setting