by Begley, Adam
234 “No memory of any revision”: HS, 853.
235 “A door had opened, and shut”: SC, 98.
237 “we could turn what should be a happy adventure”: LGH to JU, October 25, 1962, Ursinus.
237 “people are incorrigibly themselves”: JU, The Maples Stories (New York: Everyman’s Pocket Classics, 2009), 11. (Hereafter cited as JU, The Maples Stories.)
237 “Richard and Joan Maple had become”: WMRR.
241 “mythanalysis of culture”: Denis de Rougemont, Love Declared (New York: Pantheon Press, 1963), 34.
241 The review, as Updike later remarked: CJU, 29.
241 “an etymology of the passions”: Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 18.
241 “form of love which refuses the immediate”: De Rougemont, Love Declared, 41
241 “Tristan loves the awareness”: De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 41–42.
241 “disguises a twin narcissism”: Ibid., 52.
241 a “longing for what sears us”: Ibid., 50.
241 de Rougemont “hangs on their necks”: “Books: Liebestod,” Time, September 2, 1940.
242 “selfish and altruistic threads”: AP, 225.
242 de Rougemont is “dreadfully right”: Ibid., 232.
242 “Only in being loved,” he writes: Ibid., 233.
243 they “hunkered down”: LL, 93.
243 a man in love “ceases to fear death”: AP, 222–23.
243 an “angst-besmogged period”: SC, 99.
243 “an ingenious psychosomatic mechanism”: Ibid.
244 “invulnerably detached” and “quite vulnerable”: LP, October 1, 1963, Houghton.
246 too “crowded,” as Updike himself put it: HS, 854.
249 the “clangor” of the last two paragraphs: Ibid., 855.
249 say “something good” for the “sad magic”: Ibid.
250 “I was talking to someone about John Updike”: Mary McCarthy, “The Art of Fiction No. 27,” The Paris Review (Winter–Spring 1962).
250 “delicate symmetry and balance”: Renata Adler, “Arcadia, Pa.,” The New Yorker, April 13, 1963, 185.
250 “brilliantly talented and versatile”: Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” The New York Times, February 4, 1963, 7.
251 “Updike finds his way more accurately”: “Prometheus Unsound,” Time, February 8, 1963, 86.
251 “the most significant young novelist in America”: Peter Buitenhuis, “Pennsylvania Pantheon,” The New York Times Book Review, April 7, 1963, 4.
251 feeling “wobbly,” he told Maxwell: JU to WM, May 4, 1964, Illinois.
251 his wife, unlike her fictional avatar, was “strongly on the scene”: JU to WM, September 1, 1964, Illinois.
251 “I was not privy to Marry Me,” she said: Author interview, WM, November 2, 2011.
252 “unease about the book’s lack of . . . sociology”: CJU, 134.
254 Updike’s “obsession with adultery”: Maureen Howard, “Jerry and Sally and Richard and Ruth,” The New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1976, 2.
254 Updike’s “one big situation”: Alfred Kazin, “Alfred Kazin on Fiction,” The New Republic, November 27, 1976, 23.
VI. Couples
256 “In fact . . . the literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft”: OJ, 117.
256 Her husband was at the dentist: DC, 114.
256 “We didn’t know what gesture to make”: CJU, 161.
257 “The fashion that fall was for deep décolletage”: Couples, 357.
257 “Take, eat. . . . This is his body, given for thee”: Ibid., 386.
257 “the dancing couples were gliding”: Ibid., 375.
257 “dense reality” through thick description: CJU, 146.
257 “It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday”: AP, 96.
257 “Our private lives had become the real concern”: CJU, 161.
258 “[W]hat concupiscent vanity it used to be”: SC, 78.
259 “complicating factors” might force him: JU to AAK, April 8, 1964, Ransom.
259 it “takes place in the future”: CJU, 37.
259 The Centaur after the centaur has died: Ibid., 27.
260 “a kind of chamber music”: JU to AAK, May 6, 1965, Ransom.
260 “It’s a book people mention to me”: CJU, 239.
260 “a little flight among imaginary moments”: LP, July 3, 1965, Houghton.
261 “underlying thematic transaction”: PP, 92–93.
261 “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed”: OF, 174.
261 One goes so far as to cite Eliot’s dictum: Pritchard, Updike, 104.
262 an attempt “to show an aging mother”: MM, 11.
263 “Maybe in Russia,” he wrote, “I’ll learn to think big”: JU to WM, October 20, 1964, NYPL.
263 “He was so good about it,” said Luers: Author interview, William Luers, November 5, 2011.
263 felt obliged “to be a good guest of the Soviet state”: SC, 139.
263 “wearing abroad,” as he put it, “my country’s colors”: Ibid., 137.
263 “There I was everything I’m not here”: CJU, 15.
264 “the artistic indecency of writing about a writer”: CB, 5.
264 “a vehicle,” as he put it, “for impressions”: PP, 486.
264 “I am transported around here like a brittle curio”: CB, 147.
264 “It is a matter of earnest regret for me”: Ibid., 55.
264 “It is a great sadness for me”: Блага Димитрова, Събрани творби, Тom 2, Лирика и Поеми, Тих-Ивел, София [Blaga Dimitrova, Collected Works, Vol. 2, Lyrical Poems and Poems (Sofia: Tih-Ivel, 2003), 209].
265 “almost the dark side of the moon”: MM, 768.
265 “this fortyish young man, Henry Bech”: CB, 40.
266 “No sensitive artist in America”: MM, 853.
266 Updike was an “unusually gifted young man”: Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 261–62. (Hereafter cited as Bailey, Cheever.)
267 “Sometimes I like the thought of [Updike]”: Ibid., 347.
267 “John Cheever was a golden name to me”: OJ, 115–16.
267 “Aspiring, we assume that those already in possession”: Ibid., 117.
267 the diminutive Cheever was “Big John”: Bailey, Cheever, 348.
267 “a bright scuttle of somehow suburban characters”: PP, 23.
267 “a kind of Russian beauty”: OJ, 116.
268 “hogged the lecture platform”: Bailey, Cheever, 349.
268 continual “back-biting”: Benjamin Cheever, ed., The Letters of John Cheever (London: Vintage, 1992), 246.
268 “I think his magnanimity specious”: Ibid., 245.
268 “Our troubles began at the Embassy”: Ibid., 248.
268 “[T]he literary scene,” he wrote by way of explanation: OJ, 117.
269 “I feel in this company”: JU, ed., A Century of Arts and Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 183.
270 The anecdote, which Updike served up in an essay: PP, 24.
270 “As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion”: AP, 182.
271 “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them”: Ibid., 183.
271 “the end of review the END of meditating”: Ibid., 248.
272 “He does not have an interesting mind”: John Aldridge, “Cultivating Corn Out of Season,” Book Week, November 21, 1965, 5.
272 “To me he seems a writer who has very little to say”: Norman Podhoretz, “A Dissent on Updike,” Show, April 1963.
272 “a minor novelist with a major style”: Harold Bloom, ed., John Updike (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 7. (Hereafter cited as Bloom, John Updike.)
272 a “vacuity” at the heart of his stories: Dorothy Rabinowitz, “Current Books in Short Compass,” World, October 24, 1972, 52.
273 Updike “describes to no purpose”:
Gore Vidal, “Rabbit’s Own Burrow,” Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1996, 5.
273 “I guess I’ve recovered from your review”: JU to John Aldridge, September 18, 1973, John W. Aldridge Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
275 “I distrusted orthodoxies,” he wrote in his memoirs: SC, 142.
275 “Like most Americans I am uncomfortable”: Ibid., 112–13.
276 “apologetic” is how he describes his letter: Ibid., 116.
276 a “strange underdog rage about the whole sorry thing”: Ibid., 148.
277 “I wanted to keep quiet, but could not”: Ibid., 126.
277 “My face would become hot, my voice high and tense”: Ibid., 124.
277 a “central trauma” in John’s childhood: Ibid., 127.
277 “[T]he possibility exists”: Ibid., 134.
277 “I was, perhaps, the most Vietnam-minded person”: Ibid., 124.
277 Vietnam “made it impossible to ignore politics”: Ibid., 129.
278 “In my mind I was beset, defending an underdog”: Ibid., 126–27.
278 “I found him lively, funny, and mischievous”: Fax, Philip Roth to author, December 1, 2011.
279 “distinctive brands of irony”: Ibid.
279 “Have I not stayed away from the Amish”: Roth to JU, August 24, 1978, Houghton.
279 the “twin peaks” of Updike’s achievement: Fax, Philip Roth to author, December 1, 2011.
279 Roth had become “an exhausting author to be with”: MM, 298.
279 “A good woman wronged”: JU to MA, November 10, 1996.
280 “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife”: MM, 9.
280 “cruelly obtuse—and I knew he wasn’t obtuse”: Fax, Roth to author, December 1, 2011.
280 Roth categorically denied: Fax, Roth to author, December 2, 2011.
280 they never spoke again: Fax, Roth to author, December 1, 2011.
281 The living Americans he weighed up: CJU, 17.
281 “a 17th century house with enough rooms”: Ibid., 12.
282 He took, he admitted, “snobbish pride”: PP, 31.
282 “I wear them until they get quite big”: LP, December 6, 1959, Houghton.
282 “By my mid-thirties,” he wrote in his memoirs: SC, 122.
282 “parasitic relationship with Steuben Glass”: CJU, 12.
282 He estimated, for example, that in 1967: Td.
284 the “little fantasy” featuring young Wendell Morrison: JU to ND, October 4, 1968, Michigan.
285 “oddly good-looking, with an arresting hook nose”: CJU, 12.
285 “I seem to remember, on one endless drive”: SC, 123.
286 “At moments of suburban relaxation”: Ibid., 123–24.
286 Jane Howard noted how “enmeshed” Updike was: CJU, 13.
286 in Ipswich he felt “enlisted in actual life”: SC, 253.
286 he claimed still to feel, in his “innermost self”: MM, 806.
286 “inner remove” apparent in the backward tilt of the head: SC, 256.
287 “the patriotic grace to cancel”: JU to JCO, January 22, 1985.
287 “the dancing couples were gliding”: Couples, 375.
287 “monstrous” self-absorption: CJU, 161.
287 “Shh. You’ll wake the children”: Couples, 9.
288 “Daddy, wake up! Jackie Kenneny’s baby died”: Ibid., 256.
288 “a young man almost of her generation”: Ibid., 356.
288 “Her lips were pursed around the stem of a lollypop”: Ibid., 435.
289 “All these goings on would be purely lyrical”: “View from the Catacombs,” 67.
290 “God’s own lightning”: Couples, 536.
290 The burning of the church is a “great event”: Ibid., 535.
290 “Television brought them the outer world”: Ibid., 259.
291 “Not since Korea had Piet cared about news”: Ibid.
291 “the meaningless world beyond the ring of couples”: Ibid., 282.
291 “a nice blend of Noel Coward and Krafft-Ebing”: Wilfred Sheed, “Play in Tarbox,” The New York Times Book Review, April 7, 1968, 33.
291 “I wrote the book in a spirit, mostly, of love and fun”: JU to JCO, January 12, 1976, Syracuse.
291 “smothered in pubic hair”: “View from the Catacombs,” 75.
292 Tarbox was “blatantly recognizable as Ipswich”: JJ, August 7, 1967, Ransom.
292 “libel and invasion of privacy”: AAK to JU, August 10, 1967, Ransom.
292 “indeed I know of no abortions at all”: JU to AAK, August 12, 1967, Ransom.
292 its “grim” portrait of a “fretful,” squinting author: CP, 70.
293 “I disavow any essential connection”: CJU, 27.
293 “The Tarboxians are not real people”: JU, “Letter to the Editor,” Ipswich Chronicle, April 25, 1968.
293 the possibility that it would create a “furor”: JU to WM, October 7, 1967, Illinois.
294 “cerebral raunch,” the tag applied to Updike’s oeuvre: Dwight Garner, “Sex, Drugs and E Chords While Seeking Remission,” The New York Times, December 22, 2011, C1.
294 how “wearying” she found the “sexual redundancies”: Diana Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1968, 131. (Hereafter cited as Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders.”)
294 dismissed her review as “a banshee cry of indignation”: CJU, 25.
294 “I can think of no other novel, even in these years of our sexual freedom”: Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders,” 130.
294 Trilling’s acid kicker: “But to what purpose?”: Ibid.
294 “artistic creation is at best a sublimation”: HG, 469.
294 “Art is his pastime, but love is his work”: Ibid.
VII. Updike Abroad
295 “In the era of jet planes and electronic communication”: MM, 769.
296 “It was good to read about Bech on the boat”: JU to WM, September 27, 1968, Illinois.
296 a “deeper, less comfortable self”: OJ, 4.
297 the “basic and ancient” function of bringing news: MM, 768.
298 “the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson”: CB, 308.
298 Wordsworth prepared them for the “nodding” daffodils: JU to WM, April 14, 1969, Illinois.
298 “pigeons the color of exhaust fumes”: CB, 103.
298 “every shire,” Updike wrote, “has been the site of a poem”: PP, 62.
298 “there are recesses of England that exist only for the initiates”: Ibid., 59.
298 “parade in everything from yak hides to cellophane”: Ibid., 57.
298 “Here,” Updike wrote, “things are . . . cheap”: Ibid., 55.
298 “They entered a region where the shaggy heads”: CB, 111.
299 “turning a touch cosmopolitan”: LP, February 25, 1969, Houghton.
299 “full of unworkable antiques and devices”: JU to WM, September 27, 1968, Illinois.
299 The rent, moreover, was “princely”: CP, 364.
300 he brooded about the fact that he was now irrefutably “successful”: JU to WM, March 6 and 7, 1969, Illinois.
300 “[A]s a light verse writer I am through”: JU to HM, March 5, 1958, NYPL.
300 “I may have reached the age”: JU to RA, January 30, 1979, NYPL.
300 feeling “like each thing is produced on the verge of silence”: Hiller.
301 he left it out of The Early Stories: PP, 16.
302 Richard Nixon’s looks and his “vapid” campaign: JU to WM, November 8, 1968, Illinois.
302 “It had been years since we heard anybody”: Author interview, Anthony Lewis, January 17, 2012.
302 “having made him a photographer”: JU to WM, December 2, 1968, Illinois.
303 “the futile Buchanan project”: JU to JJ, December 18, 1969, Houghton.
304 he didn’t want to become “a huckster for myself”: JU to AD, April 8, 1968, Tulsa.
305 he declared them �
�masterful flirts”: PP, 61.
305 “I see why they call English women birds”: JU to WM, October 24, 1968, Illinois.
305 “an extremely pleasant and intelligent man”: E-mail, Diana Athill to author, October 3, 2011.
306 “Tony Lewis and his wife Linda sort of adopted us”: Author interview, MW, July 14, 2012.
306 “tremendous intellectual energy and fun”: Author interview, Eliza Lewis, January 19, 2012.
306 Steiner remembered the author being “delightful company”: Letter, George Steiner to author, January 14, 2012.
307 “I have felt like a balloon on too long a tether”: PP, 63.
307 a sentence lifted from a letter to Maxwell: JU to WM, June 4, 1969, NYPL.
307 “a meal for six,” he groused: JU to WM, April 14, 1969, Illinois.
308 “What frightens me really is not how much I dislike it”: WMRR.
308 The African lecture proved awkward: PP, 16.
308 “Henry Bech is bleary,” he added, “but in good voice”: JU to WM, undated, Illinois.
309 “slightly enlarged my sense of human possibilities”: CJU, 68.
310 A land of “delicate, delectable emptiness”: Coup, 4–6.
310 Kush “suggests . . . an angular skull”: Ibid., 6.
310 “dreaming behind his sunglasses”: Ibid., 298.
310 “mandarin explosions,” Updike called them: HG, 473.
311 “the low, somehow liquid horizon”: Coup, 21.
311 “the paramilitary foolery between the two superparanoids”: Ibid., 57.
311 “fountainhead of obscenity and glut”: Ibid., 3.
312 “Out-of-the-way places,” he noted: MM, 768.
312 a “fraught and sad . . . expedition”: MT, 115.
313 “As it hoveringly descended”: SC, 152.
314 “All Venezuela, except for the negligible middle class”: HS, 31.
314 “Los indios and los ricos rarely achieve contact”: Ibid., 34.
314 “Updike! Rabbit, Run! We love his works!”: Author interview, Luers, November 5, 2011.
315 “That was why, he supposed, you travelled”: CB, 308.
315 “For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe”: Ibid., 303.
315 “More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer”: Ibid., 326.
315 He worries that he will “cease to exist”: Ibid., 329.
