Happy Birthday John Updike!
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Conclusion – Evolution of a Literary Lion
I set up shop rather innocently, naively, as a professional writer…I don’t really do much else but write. And I write every morning and the books, the manuscript pages, do pile up.
—From a 2006 interview with John Updike, (“Bartos Forum”)
Updike’s public persona and self-identity merge in the epigraph above, which makes it appropriate that he delivered it at a forum sponsored by the New York Public Library. The first part of the quote puts the reader (listener) in familiar Updike territory – that he embarked on his career seemingly by accident, as if he stumbled upon the idea one day walking home from the grocery store.
The second sentence accounts for Updike’s self-image of writer as professional craftsman, in his mind, not much different than anyone else who plies a trade and then realizes the results of the effort. This Updike takes the reader back to his early career, typing away in a dingy office above the Dolphin Restaurant in tiny Ipswich, Massachusetts. The final piece addresses Updike’s prodigious output by placing it in modest terms, which implies that through consistent, hard work, the pages materialize or mystically accumulate.
What one realizes when attempting to methodically unravel Updike is that finding out who he is at his core is impossible. There is too much intertwined, from his discussion of celebrity as a mask that eats at the face to the different roles he admits playing in an effort to cope with internal demons and public demands. While these layers confound the researcher attempting to get at the heart of an author, perhaps the inability to do so contains a large part of the magic of literary studies. We can infer, interrogate, analyze, and examine, but in the end, all roads must lead back to what the author has written.
Maybe the closest we can get to a writer is to simply identify them as “storyteller” and proceed as if the entire life is one of creating narratives. Updike would be the first to tell the enterprising scholar that writers are professional liars. In that case, can anything be known about them, but what they have written? While some scholars view fame as a negative aspect of popular culture, creating a public identity does not automatically determine that a celebrity is nefarious. Perhaps, if one believes Updike and Mailer, it is closer to erecting a brick wall around the perceived notion of inner-self as the fountain for authorial material that he must draw upon. In this case, then, inventing a public persona is a necessity, because without access to the inner source of experience or the well running dry, the writer is left without a narrative.
My dissertation explores two critical points in understanding John Updike’s recent career. First, I examine him from a perspective outside the heavily-studied Rabbit teratology. Focusing on Updike’s novel Terrorist, I attempt to counter the common misperception that he has little of to offer beyond the chronicling of middle-class, suburban America. Instead, this work digs for a deeper understanding of Updike as a writer.
Next, I consider Updike’s role as an artist, professional writer, and celebrity to draw out a sense of the writer’s life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using him as a case study enables the analysis to include his changing role as a literary writer who also had major bestsellers, as well as his standing as a celebrity and public intellectual. Rather than dismiss these cultural influences, I explore how they intersect with audiences, readers, and critics. For example, it seems naïve to believe that Updike’s role as a public figure did not play a part in how critics and scholars assess his work. A rising star among journalistic critics could gain a reputation for toughness by attacking an author with Updike’s prominence. Likewise, anyone looking into the publishing industry aspect of being an author (appearances, marketing, etc.) would be remiss in not assessing Updike’s role in building up his particular public persona. Piecing together his commentary regarding fame and celebrity creates a model of the public Updike that scholars can examine.
The central task of this dissertation is a close examination of Terrorist, including the themes Updike addressed and literary techniques he employed to promulgate those ideas. From this textual analysis, Updike’s vision of America and the world in the twenty first century emerges.
By reassessing Updike’s evolution as a writer, both in subject matter and literary technique, one realizes how his work reflects an increasing preoccupation with global issues, from American imperialism to terrorism. This study broadens the general conceptualization critics and scholars hold regarding Updike’s work by exploring the themes and literary techniques he used to portray the broader world.
Focusing on Updike the writer and his final standalone novel, this dissertation helps Updike scholars and critics address a central point that very well may define his historical reputation: Is there an Updike beyond the Rabbit novels and is there an Updike beyond suburban nostalgia? I argue that Terrorist reveals a great American writer at his full powers, as the world around him undergoes a watershed moment.
Updike too – looking like an antiquarian fuddy-duddy – fought this battle over the last decade of his life. As a professional writer, he criticized the potential demise of publishing at the hands of Google’s desire to create a digital version of every book ever written and e-book publishing, wondering where the writer-as-creator fit into the picture when a reader no longer needed to purchase the product. In other words, who pays for the content in a world where content is free?
Updike the lover of words found an easy mark in the Internet, blasting it for turning books into “something impalpable and instantaneous.” As one who cares about culture, he worried:
The Web is conjured like the genie of legend wit a few strokes of the fingers, opening, with a phrase or two, a labyrinth littered with trash and pitted with chat rooms, wherein communication is antiseptically cleansed of all the germs and awkwardness of even the most mannerly transaction with another flesh-and-blood human being” (Due Considerations 73)
You see, Updike willingly took the highly-publicized flack from journalists and the technology intelligentsia because he believed in the power of books.
Obviously, Updike had a chit in the game, as it were. His livelihood depended on selling books and magazines. Yet, we as proponents of the written word have no less stake in its propagation. As such, do we furrow our brows at the latest Dan Brown thriller selling 1 million copies on its release day or the publishing empire of J.K. Rowling, now one of the richest women in the world?
My goal is to advocate for literature and settle for reading. As a teacher, that means exploring (great) written words (and worlds) for the lessons they dispense and to continue interrogating authors and texts to reveal what might be learned. As a writer, this effort entails writing books, essays, and articles that engender critical thinking on the part of readers, asking them to create new ideas from the material as it interweaves with their own knowledge, lives, and experiences. Part of this task is to explore the work of writers like Updike in hopes that the scrutiny will appeal to future readers and, just maybe, instigate them reading either more of his work or researching themes, eras, and topics themselves.
Updike’s death in January 2009 resulted in renewed interest in his work. Knopf published a posthumous collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories that received widespread critical appreciation. His passing caused others to reexamine the several books published in the last year of his life, including the nonfiction anthology Due Considerations and novel The Widows of Eastwick. Even his final posthumous poetry collection, Endpoint and Other Poems, gained wider readership and more mainstream reviews than his earlier poetry books. In this regard, Updike carries on the popular culture tradition of a celebrity or artist gaining broader appeal after death. That he left behind enough work to sustain this initial push was most likely a mix of Updike’s realization that he faced death, thus producing more at the end, and Knopf’s desire to meet the uptick in demand for his work.
Most interesting for those hoping to keep Updike’s legacy alive, a core group of scholars (spearheaded by James Plath, Marshall Boswell, Lawrence Broer, Jack De Bellis, and James Schiff) launched The John Updike Society on May 24, 2009. The society plans to publish The John Updike Review, with Schiff as editor. Included in its mission statement is the goal of “awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike’s literary works” (“History/Mission”). While one wonders why it took so long for such a group to organize, the society’s advent signals a positive for Updike’s enduring legacy. As of mid-September 2009, The John Updike Society membership nears 100 and its founders are planning its first national meeting in Pennsylvania scheduled for October 2010.
Of course, the nation changed dramatically over Updike’s long career. In contrast to other artists, writers, actors, and musicians who could not adapt across the span, however, Updike remained one of the nation’s foremost writers. It is in the guise of America’s storyteller that Updike excels. And, one must admit, Updike’s own story is part of that effort.
At the end of the day, I argue, readers can still learn much from his work, even as today’s Internet-based society seems like it could pass him by. Although it is difficult to quantify the notion that books simply do not matter as much as they used to, one can find evidence supporting this idea by looking at the drop in book sales, particularly in “literary” fiction, or by talking about reading habits with young people.
Perhaps more troubling, when considering Updike’s long-term reputation, is that the focus among scholars and critics is onto other topics and new impulses, such as multiculturalism, gender studies, the “other,” and those privileged and unprivileged by literature. It is this negative, rather narrow view of Updike that raises the hackles of those, such as David Foster Wallace and others, who denounce him and his contemporaries as “phallocrats” or relics of a male-dominated canon. For them, Updike exists primarily as a stand-in for Rabbit, an American “everyman” easy to pick apart for his shortcomings.
While the stakes in Updike’s historical reputation are only really important among a relatively small group of literary scholars, one can imagine Updike falling into the second tier of American writers, mimicking, for instance, the status of a Sinclair Lewis or William Dean Howells. However, he could be elevated in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald to stand among the nation’s greats.
This dissertation advocates a broader examination of Updike, encompassing his complete catalog. I argue that those who invest the effort will find the author offers a forceful critique of the United States, particularly evident in Terrorist. As a result, the reader will confront racism, the role of individuals in a consumer-based society, faith, commitment, authority, and the pitfalls of popular culture. This is Updike full steam ahead.
Yes: matters. Matters.
Photo courtesy of flickr: emme-dk/Katrine Thielke
