Updike

What’s left? one asks, looking at the cover photo of a coy-confident Updike on the beach, with the beautiful young arrayed behind him. What’s possibly left to tell of a life that has been so insistently mined for fictional ore? The wives, the friends, the mistresses, the children have all appeared often and often without disguise. Updike himself has come out lightly camouflaged as Richard Maple, ironised as the writer Henry Bech (whose greatest fear in life is that his creator will tire of him), and cast with a touch of Caliban and Hyde, or EveryAmerican as Rabbit Angstrom, “hero” of the finest and most penetrating fictional cycle of the post-Second World War era from arguably the most prolific major writer in the American canon: only his friend Joyce Carol Oates outproduces him, but with her it really is more like typing than writing.

Updike has claims on greatness if only for Rabbit Redux. The second novel of four about Angstrom is a bleakly comic view of America in the Vietnam, Chappaquiddick, Black Power, moonshot period, America at its most dissentious and most romantically confident. It’s a book into which Updike poured all his cross-grained ambivalence about his country and its culture.

And yet, behind all the autobiographical and à clef fiction, there was, after all, such a person as John Updike. And a contrary fellow he was: defiantly pro-American when it was virtually de rigueur to be anti, fearing those beautiful young as much as celebrating them, preferring the old colonial frontier to the New Frontier, oddly prudish, or at best philosophical about the sex he wrote about in such detail. Adam Begley gives us the solitary, obsessively loved child with an undimmably sunny disposition. His mother nursed her own literary career, even breaking into the pages of the New Yorker, where her son, after abandoning his dreams of becoming a cartoonist, became the “New Yorker writer” in excelsis, the maker of “well-made” stories and crisp social commentary. Updike’s own greatest fear was that his Creator would get bored and stop producing things to look at and make metaphors from before he, Updike, had a chance to note them down. Years before I met him officially, I spotted him on a London street, his head going this way and that like an alert bird. Half way down Kensington High Street, he stopped dead and read with utter concentration the writing on a manhole cover. I stopped to see what was so fascinating about a foundry name, and promptly lost him in the crowd, ever afterwards wondering if there was somewhere an Updike story or poem in which the borough’s sanitary crest played a role.

He started out as a poet and remains readable if infuriating in that role. The fiction emerged out of occasional pieces for the New Yorker and managed, more than is usually credited, to create fictional worlds which had little to do with Updike’s own situation. The Poorhouse Fair is a dystopian fantasy. The Coup was based on a trip to Africa. And so on. But the more familiar Updike is the one who in Couples stood his Ipswich, Massachusetts, neighbours and their criss-crossed lives in front of a flat newsreel backdrop (the USS Thresher accident; the Kennedys’ lost baby; Dallas) and blurred the line between history and fiction.

Updike might have chosen any of the Christian denominations, but cleaved to a form of Calvinism which insists that God does not reach down to us, we must reach out to him. For Updike this effortful yearning could be expressed in a thousand unlikely ways: in a perfectly struck five-iron approach (no one else has captured the “eerie religious latency” of golf); in a slam-dunk (basketball was Rabbit’s erstwhile sport); in speed and distance (Begley wisely covers much of Updike’s globetrotting in a single chapter); and, above all, in sex, most conspicuously the blasphemous elevation of oral sex as a form of Communion. It’s this that has made him notorious, rather than the sex per se. The eye of God is always present in the books, whether as the English penny that makes the eye of the golden weathercock in Couples, or the drowsily wandering eye that seems to overlook A Month of Sundays, perhaps his most overlooked novel.

Begley relates it all with affectionate reproval. Updike acquired early what an American critic once characterised as the “energy of new success” and never looked back. Begley is right: this “frictionless” success has been held against him; we like our writers miserable. “If he was, as he later claimed, angry, he tamped it down. He wasn’t despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn’t alienated or conflicted or drunk: he quarrelled with no one. In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers.” This is spot on, but so, too, is an anecdote that comes from the years after Updike, a New Yorker writer but not a New Yorker, had moved out to the country. His children were sent one day to his office with a message. The sound of typing stopped instantly when they knocked on his door. A kind, affable, interested, sincerely engaged father gave them his time and answered their query. Before the door was closed behind them, the typing had begun again. That was Updike.

BRIAN MORTON