by Begley, Adam
Accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in November 1998, Updike spoke to a crowd of over eight hundred at the Marriott Marquis hotel in midtown Manhattan. (Martha was in the audience with two of her sons and a “glamorous” daughter-in-law; none of the Updike children was invited.) In the speech, delivered with his habitual teasing charm, he noted that medals for lifetime achievement are engraved on the reverse side with a subliminal message: “the time has come to retire.” A new award piled onto his towering stack of honors only reminded him of that other, magnificent prize he hadn’t won. The Nobel was the uncontested peak of his profession, and every October he fell short. Though he bottled up his disappointment, he found it hard to disagree with the pundits who wondered whether the antic Dario Fo was truly more deserving than he. As William Maxwell put it forty years earlier, if Updike didn’t get the prize, it would be “the Swedes’ fault, not his.”
Crowning Bech with laurels, killing off Bech’s critics, having one of them tell Bech that his work was destined for the dustbin—these gags cut in various directions, but all are related to Updike’s anxiety about his own fame, present and posthumous. He whined to an interviewer that his books were no longer stocked in airport bookstores: “There’s no Updike at all. I’m a vanished man, a nonentity as far as mass readership goes.” Another symptom of his anxiety: he revived a long-simmering literary feud. Several weeks before the ceremony at the Marriott Marquis, nagged by the thought of prizes unbestowed and readers who got away, he dashed off a review for The New Yorker of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full (1998).* This was Wolfe’s second novel, his long-awaited follow-up to the huge commercial success of The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)—which Updike claimed he couldn’t read: “The blatancy of the icy-hearted satire repelled me.” His resentment of the new novel was apparent from the first paragraph: “The book weighs in as a 742-page bruiser. . . . A book to muscle aside all the others on the ‘New Releases’ table. A book that defies you not to buy it.” This chipper tone gives way to more sober assessment; despite Wolfe’s vigor and his laudable ambition, “A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest, aspirant form.” The rub was Wolfe’s failure to be “exquisite”; “Such failure would not seem to be major,” Updike writes, “but in the long run it is.” A vulgar book—“cheesy,” Updike called it in private—is an ephemeral book, and what mattered to Updike was the long run. He was confident that Wolfe’s mass audience would eventually dwindle to nothing, but this conviction wasn’t enough to neutralize his envy. His exasperation boiled over in a letter to Oates: “Wolfe not only demands to make his millions but wants respect, too.”
Norman Mailer barreled in, lamenting at length Wolfe’s “final inability to be great.” A Man in Full, he judged, was merely a “Mega-bestseller”: “At the highest level, it’s a failure.” With Updike, he argued that no matter how popular, Wolfe’s novels were not literature.* Wolfe hit back, calling Updike and Mailer “two old piles of bones.” Whereupon John Irving joined the fray: on any page of a Wolfe novel, Irving claimed, he could find a sentence that would make him “gag.” Wolfe’s rejoinder made it clear to anyone still in doubt that these high-profile literary figures were embroiled in a playground scuffle: “Larry, Curly, and Moe,” he said. “Updike, Mailer, and Irving. My three stooges.”
In the midst of the name-calling, Wolfe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters—despite Updike’s staunch opposition. Although he was in New York on the day of the May ceremonial when Wolfe was “apotheosized,” Updike decided it was a spectacle he could miss.* Yet he did nothing to extend the quarrel. He felt queasy about scrapping with a writer who worked so hard at his fiction; he knew that jealousy and ill will had played a part in his review of A Man in Full.
The antagonism between Wolfe and Updike was decades old; it had taken root in 1965, when Wolfe was a young reporter and published his notorious two-part parody (or “counter-parody”) profile of William Shawn and The New Yorker, “Tiny Mummies!” Making cruel fun of the man who ran the magazine Updike thought of as his home was bad enough; worse were the swipes at New Yorker short stories in general (“the laughingstock of the New York literary community for years”) and Updike’s in particular: “more and more tabescent.” Wolfe brandished the same adjective nearly twenty-five years later in his manifesto “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature.” Designed as a cure for tabescence, the manifesto was meant to galvanize literary novelists and get them writing robust social realism. Wolfe urged them to “do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms”—the beast being “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours.”
Wolfe’s “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and Updike’s “The Importance of Fiction,” an essay he wrote for Esquire in 1985, contain between them the meat of the quarrel (as opposed to the playground insults), which is essentially a disagreement about the aim of literature. Updike argued for the importance of individual sensibility: “Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has ever invented.” He specifically denied that fiction should be read for information of the kind a journalist uncovers. “Unlike journalism . . . fiction does not give us facts snug in their accredited truth,” he wrote. The meaning of fiction emerges from a collaborative process—“we make fiction true, as we read it”—and the collaboration occurs between two solitary souls, one “sitting in a quiet room coding make-believe,” the other elsewhere at a later date, trying to decipher it. A pair of rhetorical questions rounds out the essay and leaves no doubt as to the author’s allegiance:
What is important, if not the human individual? And where can individuality be better confronted, appraised, and enjoyed than in fiction’s shapely lies?
For Wolfe, conversely, the aim is to expose the “status structure of society.” Not quite an afterthought, the individual matters only because of his “intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him.” The inner life of a creature who stands on just two feet hardly figures in Wolfe’s scheme; it’s the billion-footed specimen he’s after.
What’s odd about this difference of opinion is that Updike, from Couples onward, and especially in the last three Rabbit novels, proved more than willing to “wrestle the beast.” The novelist credited with uncovering the “adulterous society,” who turned himself into an expert on the workings of a Toyota dealership, should have been Wolfe’s hero, not his nemesis.
FOR DIVERGENT REASONS, both Wolfe and Updike cited a remark Philip Roth made back in the comparatively sedate year of 1961 about American reality “outdoing” the novelist’s imagination. As if to prove him right, America in September 2001 turned frightening and bizarre in ways fiction, no matter how hog-stompingly baroque, could never match. On the morning of September 11, Updike and his wife woke up in Brooklyn Heights, where they were staying in the tenth-floor apartment of Martha’s son Jason. Martha’s four-year-old granddaughter and the babysitter called from the library and pointed across the East River to Lower Manhattan, less than a mile away, where one of the Twin Towers was unaccountably on fire: “smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface.” A building blocked the view of the second plane’s screaming approach, so they were further mystified when the other tower burst into flames; the gorgeous day, the flames, the smoke—it all seemed unreal, a high-tech TV drama.
John and Martha went up to the roof of the apartment building and there witnessed the collapse of the first tower. He preserved his impressions in a Talk piece for the September 24 issue of The New Yorker:
[I]t fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air. We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; w
e clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling. Amid the glittering impassivity of the many buildings across the East River, an empty spot had appeared, as if by electronic command, beneath the sky that, but for the sulfurous cloud streaming south toward the ocean, was pure blue, rendered uncannily pristine by the absence of jet trails. A swiftly expanding burst of smoke and dust hid the rest of lower Manhattan; we saw the collapse of the second tower only on television, where the footage of hell-bent airplane, exploding jet fuel, and imploding tower was played and replayed, much rehearsed moments from a nightmare ballet.
The accuracy of the observation would have pleased the reporter in Wolfe, less so Updike’s deliberate insistence on his own sensibility, on the act of perception rather than the phenomena perceived. The piece begins: “Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.” His eyewitness account delivers both an indelible portrait of what he saw and also a lesson in how to resist the smallness of reflexive solipsism. He ends with an implicit promise: resiliency and optimism will secure a bright future for a larger entity—the city.
The next morning, I went back to the open vantage from which we had watched the tower so dreadfully slip from sight. The fresh sun shone on the eastward facades, a few boats tentatively moved in the river, the ruins were still sending out smoke, but New York looked glorious.
A gesture of solidarity in the face of bewildering violence and loss, the piece should be read with the opening sentence in mind. Updike is urging us to keep looking, to keep fighting.
The combination of terrorists and airplanes had been vivid to him for at least a decade, when he used the Lockerbie bombing as a leitmotif in Rabbit at Rest. A little more than a year before 9/11 he added Islam to the mix in a poem called “Icarus”:
O.K., you are sitting in an airplane and
the person in the seat next to you is a sweaty, swarthy
gentleman of Middle Eastern origin
whose carry-on luggage consists of a bulky black brief-
case he stashes in compliance with airline regulations,
underneath the seat ahead.
He keeps looking at his watch and closing his eyes in
prayer . . .
Playing with prejudice, and what we would today call racial profiling, Updike makes us complicit in his fear and his guilt. Our “praying neighbor” is of course revealed as a harmless passenger, and we are released from small-minded suspicion. As a parting gift, Updike bestows on us a gorgeous image of a plane aloft: “this scrape against the numbed sky.”
In “Varieties of Religious Experience,” a short story he wrote about a year after the events of September 2001, and Terrorist, the novel he began two years later, he reversed the strategy of “Icarus”: instead of racial profiling, we get an intimate and, in the case of Terrorist, sympathetic portrait of a would-be suicide bomber, an honest attempt to understand sincere hatred for American life in the twenty-first century. In the story, Updike gives us a chilling moment with Mohamed Atta in a roadside strip joint in Florida, lets us feel the pressure of the deed just days from execution: “Within him his great secret felt an eggshell thickness from bursting forth.” The germ of the novel was the mental image of a tunnel exploding and water crashing in—Updike scaring himself with a claustrophobe’s hell. The Lincoln Tunnel during rush hour became the bomber’s target. The bomber, at first, was going to be a young Christian, a seminarian convinced that he was surrounded by devils trying to rob him of his faith. Updike eventually settled on a similarly embattled protagonist, but one who had converted to Islam: a New Jersey high school student, half Egyptian, half Irish American, under the sway of a sinister Yemeni imam. Eighteen-year-old Ahmad is a distant cousin of another Updike extremist, Ellelloû, the rabid anti-American narrator of The Coup. Both characters offered Updike the opportunity to cast a jaundiced eye on American materialism, to give Muslim rage a voice.
Ahmad’s hometown, New Prospect, is based on Paterson, the setting for the first part of Lilies. Updike hired a chauffeured car and toured storefront mosques in the scruffier neighborhoods. For forty dollars an hour, he employed a Harvard graduate student to help him with transliteration of the Koran and details such as the traditional attire of Islamic clerics. He sent away for a home-study course for a New Jersey commercial driver’s license. He consulted army manuals on explosives, and did Web research on detonators. He tapped into his generous store of Shillington High School memories. And for the first and last time in his career, he tried to bring a thrillerlike plot to a suspenseful conclusion.
Although Terrorist made the bestseller list—and clung on for several weeks—the reviews were mixed at best; some, such as Christopher Hitchens’s blast in The Atlantic (where, ironically, “Varieties of Religious Experience” had recently been published), were openly insulting: “Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon”—that is, since 9/11. Opinion was divided about whether Ahmad was a credible character: some reviewers praised Updike for having stretched himself; others blamed him for overreaching.
Being told that he had no business imagining the interior life of a Muslim teenager was particularly galling after the relentless criticism he endured for revisiting old haunts in Villages: the word familiar had appeared in the headline of review after review. Even friendly critics felt that Villages suffered in comparison with earlier explorations of the same territory. The hero, Owen Mackenzie, emerges from an idyllic small-town boyhood that is essentially indistinguishable from Updike’s. Owen escapes his beloved Willow with a scholarship to MIT rather than Harvard; works at IBM rather than The New Yorker; and makes a modest fortune, after going freelance, writing software rather than literature. All this is revealed in retrospect. In the opening pages of the novel we find Owen comfortably retired in Haskells Crossing, married to his second wife, Julia, who might as well be Ben Turnbull’s nagging Gloria; husband and wife are rattling around in what might as well be Ben Turnbull’s big white house. The sense of déjà vu is also overwhelming in the account of Owen’s years with his first wife in Middle Falls, the second of the three villages that define his life, and the setting for his ecstatic participation in round after round of suburban adultery. The hanky-panky begins when the youngest of Owen’s four children is still an infant, and ends, abruptly, when Owen leaves wife number one for wife number two. It was the numbing recurrence of this old dance that annoyed so many reviewers.
He couldn’t help himself. The compulsion to circle back to any place where he felt some essence of his being was stored grew stronger as he grew older, and extended even to fictional locales—Eastwick, for instance, which he revisited in a sequel that again found little favor with the critics. One notable exception was Alison Lurie, writing in The New York Review of Books, who praised the return of Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, thirty years after their misadventures with Darryl, in terms that offered sweet vindication: “It is to Updike’s great credit, and a proof of his long-standing and ardent interest in women, that he is also interested in and deeply sympathetic to their experience of age.” In its loving, sharp-eyed look at the elderly, The Widows of Eastwick, his final novel, doubled back to his first, The Poorhouse Fair.
Most of the accolades that came his way during these last years, if not focused on Harry Angstrom, featured his short stories rather than his novels. When he published The Early Stories toward the end of 2003, he was showered with the kind of reverential critical attention he hadn’t met with since Rabbit at Rest a dozen years earlier. Gathering and arranging 103 of the stories written between 1954 and 1975 was a bittersweet experience; it was the kind of rigorous spring-cleaning he enjoyed and performed more and more frequently—Everyman’s Library, a Knopf imprint, published The Complete Henry Bech in 2001 and The Maples Stories in 2009—but it also made him feel as though he were closing up shop. Cynthia Ozick’s review can’t have helped; her acclaim, distinctly fun
ereal, began with a tombstone:
John Updike: the name is graven. It stands, by now, alongside Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, those older masters who lay claim to territory previously untrafficked, and who make of it common American ground. So enduringly stamped and ineradicably renowned is Updike that it was more tribute than gaucherie when, only the other day, someone (a demographer, as it happens, with wider views of the shiftings of lives) asked, “Is he still alive?”
As if worried that he might take offense, she offered to bury him alongside a crowd of illustrious figures:
As for the plenitude of stories and novels: think of Balzac, Dickens, George Sand, Trollope, Chekhov and all the 19th-century rest. It scarcely seemed likely that the distracted and impatient 20th could throw up such prodigious abundance.
To be ranked with indisputably great writers was of course music to his ears, as close to the exact melody as the pitch-perfect Ozick could manage. Equally pleasing was Jay Cantor’s more concise tribute: “These stories, I feel sure, will weather all times and tides.” Lorrie Moore came tantalizingly close to eclipsing the others, but her verdict had a sting in its tail: “It is quite possible that by dint of both quality and quantity,” she wrote, Updike “is American literature’s greatest short-story writer.” So far so good—but then she wondered aloud whether he wasn’t also “our greatest writer without a single great novel.”
After twenty years of seeing it given to other distinguished writers, Updike won the prestigious Rea Award for the Short Story in 2006. He told Oates, who’d been on the judges’ panel along with Richard Ford and Ann Beattie, how very dear his stories had been to him, both because they earned him his living and because they recorded, “in an oblique way,” his life. He added, “[I]t doesn’t do to think overmuch about prizes, does it? Being a writer at all is the prize.”
