John Updike, 1932-2009

[falconridge]

A great American artist has died. John Updike, novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and unsurpassed chronicler of distinctively American middle-class attitutes, practices, principles, routines, and rituals over the past half-century, succumbed to lung cancer yesterday in a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.

My initial reaction to the news was as much of anger and outrage as of grief. All my reading life, which began circa 1961, there'd always been Updike and his industriously wrought, sturdily scaffolded, sedulously smoothed creations: funny, lyrical, bittersweet tales of suburb-bred working stiffs, low-aiming philanderers, and fallen-away parsons borne inexorably upon the current of their appetites--but toward what? Many of Updike's characters--such as Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Bech, Tom Marshfield (the lecherous, golf-loving minister of A Month of Sundays) strive vainly to find the love, security, and higher purpose promised in the bloom of callow youth--but remain dissolute has-beens at a loss to understand exactly what went wrong and too distracted by the exigencies of their otherwise unremarkable lives to determine any new destinations, or the will and compass to propel themselves toward them.

With Updike's death, the dynamism and almost organic expansion of his oeuvre (which grew by more than a book a year; my last count of published titles puts it at 60-some) has been crudely and cruelly delimited by what still strikes me as an absurd and arbitrary, albeit inevitable, circumscription of finitude. Damn! Ave atque vale, Master Updike.

[Lefty]

falkenridge, you have written a very nice tribute.
I regarded him as a very fine writer.

[falconridge]

The Amish


The Amish are a surly sect.
They paint their bulging barns with hex
Designs, pronounce a dialect
Of Deutsch, inbreed, and wink at sex.

They have no use for buttons, tea,
Life insurance, cigarettes,
Churches, liquor, Sea & Ski,
Public power, or regrets.

Believing motors undivine,
They bob behind a buggied horse
From Paradise to Brandywine,
From Bird-in-Hand to Intercourse.

They think the Devil drives a car
And wish Jehovah would revoke
The licensed fools who travel far
To gaze upon these simple folk.






--John Updike, June 28, 1966; from Midpoint and Other Poems (Knopf, 1969)

[bigmack]

John Updike: A Life in Letters (http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/arts/1194811622313/index.html#1231546423876)

[falconridge]

Thanks, Lefty and 'mack.

Viewing on The New York Times web site the many photographs capturing Updike's image in various stages of the author's life reminded me of another of his poems, "Exposure," written in 1962. Though Updike or his editors consigned these lines to the "Light Verse" section of his Collected Poems, 1953-1993 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), the poem is ever so much more than a trifle. Herewith ...


Exposure


Please do not tell me there is no voodoo,
For, if so, how then do you
Explain that a photograph of a head
Always tells if the person is living or dead?

Always. I have never known it to fail.
There is something misted in the eyes, something pale,
If not in the lips, then in the hair--
It is hard to put your finger on, but there.

A kind of third dimension settles in:
A blur, a kiss of otherness, a milky film.
If, while you hold a snapshot of Aunt Flo,
Her real heart stops, you will know.

[toetoe]

Falconridge,

I tol' you 'n' tol' you --- iterum iterumque --- don't EVER circumscribe finitude. Geez, ev'ry high school drop-in knows that.

All sobriety aside, my narrow experience with Updike's work tells me that The Centaur is some of the greatest stuff in my personal lexicon. I put his prose right up there with that of Thomas Berger --- high praise from Toetoe, indeed. :ThmbUp: .

[toetoe]

Hosted by Big Rosie, the highbrow lawnmower's take on literature,
Word Updike ?, debuts tomorrow on LOGO ... or is it MSLGBT ?

Quick Spark plug:

Mr. Updike once wrote of Muriel Spark that "[she] is one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine."

As sweet as that assessment is, and as appealing the notion of a fiction machine, I am obsessed with the possibly superfluous comma. Fellow pacekeepers, what say YOU ?

[falconridge]

Hosted by Big Rosie, the highbrow lawnmower's take on literature,
Word Updike ?, debuts tomorrow on LOGO ... or is it MSLGBT ?

Quick Spark plug:

Mr. Updike once wrote of Muriel Spark that "[she] is one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine."

As sweet as that assessment is, and as appealing the notion of a fiction machine, I am obsessed with the possibly superfluous comma. Fellow pacekeepers, what say YOU ?My verdict is stet, just as it would be had JU jettisoned two commas--the one after "altering" along with the one after "feeding"--but not one without the other. I'm amenable, though, to his enclosing the clause "as well as feeding" in commas, on the grounds that that punctuation cues the reader to the sentence's prosody--i.e., its rhythmic and intonational qualities.

While we're on about commas, let me say that I've noticed a disquieting tendency lately to omit the necessary second comma in appositional phrases: e.g., "Clay, the bardic heavyweight braggart made good on his promise to dispatch Cleveland Williams by the fourth round." There should, of course, be a comma after "braggart." I've seen such slovenliness even in, horribile dictu!, The New York Times. O tempora, o mores!

--Mara Ingram, Grammarian

[toetoe]

The Comma Delimited Files,torn from today's headlines, and starring "Diacritical" Mark Wahlberg.

I was referring to the plethora of commas in the previous sentence, Sir Ridge. :blush: .

[toetoe]

Uh, same sentence; just earlier on. :blush: .