Updike

by Begley, Adam

  404 “a pale white castle in a fairy tale”: LP, September 10, 1981, Houghton.

  404 “As we drove up the lane,” Oates wrote: JCO to JU, October 9, 1982, Syracuse.

  404 “Now that I think of it[,] wasn’t 675 Hale the house”: MA to JU, August 10, 1982, Houghton.

  404 “We ate at a table that was much too large”: E-mail, Austin Briggs to author, March 6, 2011.

  405 “My own house, up a wooded hill”: OJ, 61.

  405 “middling, hidden, troubled America”: SC, 103.

  405 the Gold Coast, “a bucolic enclave”: HG, 457.

  405 summer places built by “quiet Boston money”: OJ, 50.

  406 “I envy John the metaphorical resources of Infinity at his left hand”: JCO to JU, October 9, 1982, Syracuse.

  407 Rabbit’s life was less “defended” than his own: HG, 448.

  408 “What is clearest in the documentary”: John Corry, “A Documentary of John Updike,” The New York Times, July 13, 1983.

  408 “I feel in most respects that I am a pretty average person”: WMRR.

  409 “That was when you really got the impression”: Author interview, Michael Updike, August 18, 2012.

  409 “It felt like we’re his mistress”: Ibid.

  410 “His life seemed destined never to be wholly his own”: A, 64.

  410 a “chasteningly grand” silhouette: WE, 10.

  411 “engagingly half-mad with a storyteller’s exuberance”: Bloom, John Updike, 2.

  411 “semi-depressed and semi-fashionable”: WE, 2.

  411 “I once moved to a venerable secluded town”: OJ, 855.

  411 “Bald November reigned outside”: WE, 156.

  412 “[T]he world poured through her”: Ibid., 78.

  412 “[S]unlight pressed on Alexandra’s face”: Ibid., 291.

  412 Updike “had a very good spy in the female camp”: Diane Johnson, “Warlock,” The New York Review of Books, June 14, 1984, 3.

  412 “loves Alexandra better even than Rabbit”: Bloom, John Updike, 2.

  412 “I’ve been criticized for making the women”: Quoted in Margaret Atwood, “Wondering What It’s Like to Be a Woman,” The New York Times Book Review, May 13, 1984, 1.

  412 “gorgeous and doing evil”: WE, 343.

  412 conflating “sinister old myths” with the “modern female experiences”: OJ, 855.

  413 “a male author notoriously unsympathetic to women”: Nina Byam, “Review of The Witches of Eastwick and Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer,” The Iowa Review (Fall 1984): 165.

  413 “The decade past has taught her more than it has taught him”: RRich, 138.

  414 “the sexual seethe that underlies many a small town”: CJU, 267.

  417 “ruminative ekphrasis”—poetic description of an artwork: Arthur Danto, “What MOMA Done Tole Him,” The New York Times Book Review, October 15, 1989, 12.

  418 “I feel confident in saying that the disadvantages of New York life”: OJ, 53.

  418 a depressive divinity school professor with a “sullen temper”: RV, 9.

  418 To achieve the “informational abundance”: OJ, 869.

  419 Having decided after Witches to “attempt a city novel”: Ibid., 856.

  419 a “crassly swank” rotating restaurant atop a skyscraper: RV, 309.

  420 “urine and damp cement and rubber-based paint”: Ibid., 59.

  420 “beyond the project, deeper into that section of the city”: Ibid., 221.

  420 “an African mask, her lips and jaw majestically protruding”: Ibid., 223.

  420 “princess of a race that travels from cradle to grave”: Ibid., 226.

  420 “killing an unborn child to try to save a born one”: Ibid., 221.

  420 “an essay about kinds of belief,” Updike labeled it: CJU, 254.

  420 staying overnight in the hospital “under observation”: RV, 269.

  420 “When I was spent and my niece released”: Ibid., 280–81.

  421 Crews accused Roger (and Updike) of “class-based misanthropy”: Frederick Crews, “Mr. Updike’s Planet,” The New York Review of Books, December 4, 1986, 12.

  422 Crews locates “a certain bleakness at the center” of Updike’s mind: Ibid., 14.

  422 his “sense of futility and of doom and of darkness”: Mervyn Rothstein, “The Origin of the Universe, Time and John Updike,” The New York Times, November 21, 1985.

  422 “the natural state of the sentient adult”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1993), 84.

  423 his good temper balanced against a recurring sense of being “smothered and confined, misunderstood and put-upon”: SC, 256.

  423 “Happiness,” he writes in Self-Consciousness, “is best seen out of the corner of the eye”: Ibid., 254.

  423 “Can happiness,” he asks, “be simply a matter of orange juice?”: Ibid., 255.

  423 his sense of well-being is complicated by his “inner remove”: Ibid., 256.

  423 “is a vast conspiracy to make you happy”: ES, 413.

  424 “He that gains his life shall lose it”: SC, 257.

  424 the tone was sometimes “kind of acid”: CJU, 188.

  424 God was the “guarantor” of his existence, “a protector and a reference point”: WMRR.

  424 he woke up in the night feeling “fearful and adrift”: MM, 40–41.

  424 he was wearing, he tells us, his “churchgoing clothes”: SC, 254.

  425 “I have stayed out,” as he put it, “of the business end of St. John’s”: CJU, 255.

  425 “I saw this as being a woman’s novel by a man”: Mervyn Rothstein, “In ‘S.,’ Updike Tries the Woman’s Viewpoint,” The New York Times, March 2, 1988.

  426 “A sort of blessing seemed to arise from the anonymous public”: OJ, 761.

  426 “this massive datum that happens to be mine”: SC, xi.

  427 he conceded that he was peddling a kind of “cagey candor”: HG, 472.

  427 “These memoirs feel shabby,” he wrote: SC, 231.

  427 “A writer’s self-consciousness,” he tells us, “is really a mode of interestedness”: Ibid., 24.

  427 “leaning doggedly away from the pull of his leather pouch”: Ibid., 37.

  427 “here we see Updike nude, without a stitch of irony or art”: Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché (New York: Talk Miramax Book, 2001), 376.

  428 “a parading,” as he put it, “of my wounds”: DC, 11.

  428 he adopts a self-mocking tone: “I have preened, I have lived”: SC, 78.

  428 “a basically glancing, flirtatious acquaintanceship”: Ibid., 154.

  428 “I had propelled my body through the tenderest parts”: Ibid., 40.

  428 musing on his “troubled epidermis”: Ibid., 72.

  428 “What was my creativity, my relentless need to produce”: Ibid., 75.

  428 he describes the “obdurate barrier” in his throat: Ibid., 79.

  428 the “paralysis of stuttering stems from the dead center”: Ibid., 87.

  428 the “ingenious psychosomatic mechanism”: Ibid., 99.

  428 “I tried to break out of my marriage”: Ibid., 98.

  429 “I gave my teeth to the war effort”: Ibid., 163.

  429 “holes where once there was electricity and matter”: Ibid., 248.

  429 “Between now and the grave lies a long slide”: Ibid., 78.

  429 “You carry your own hide to market”: Ibid., 211.

  429 “Truth,” he writes, “is anecdotes, narrative”: Ibid., 234.

  430 she wanted to go home and “take what comes”: JU to WM, November 8, 1989, Illinois.

  432 “I was an orphan, full of the triumphant, arid bliss of being on my own”: OJ, 869.

  433 Updike, in a “frenzy of efficiency,” did the same in the late fall of 1989: Ibid., 867.

  433 she made “gallant stabs in both directions”: JU to WM, November 8, 1989, Illinois.

  434 Her “unignorable” decline during the year he spent writing it: OJ, 872.


  434 medical details he “shamelessly” fed into his terrifyingly vivid descriptions: HG, 458.

  434 “that singeing sensation he gets”: RRest, 91.

  434 “Deciding to wind up the series”: JU, “Why Rabbit Had to Go.”

  434 “You might say it’s a depressed book”: Ibid.

  435 “working at the full height of his powers”: Michiko Kakutani, “Just 30 Years Later, Updike Has a Quartet,” The New York Times, September 25, 1990, C13.

  435 “one of the very few modern novels in English”: Jonathan Raban, “Rabbit’s Last Run,” The Washington Post, September 30, 1990.

  435 a friendly, unbuttoned congregation, a “human melt”: RRest, 371.

  435 “to the mild, middling truth of average American life”: OJ, 183.

  435 “always . . . trying to fashion a piece of literature”: Ibid., 189.

  436 “It is, after all, the triumph of American life”: Ibid.

  436 “Harry’s eyes burn”: RRest, 371.

  436 “tired and stiff and full of crud”: Ibid., 166.

  436 As he would say, “Enough”: Ibid., 512.

  436 the neatness of “a squared-off tetralogy, a boxed life”: HG, 457.

  436 “So many themes convene in Rabbit at Rest”: Ibid., 459.

  437 Brewer kids playing basketball: “Legs, shouts”: RRun, 3.

  437 These black kids have “that unhurried look”: RRest, 487.

  437 “as alone on the court as the sun in the sky”: Ibid., 506–7.

  437 At forty-five he was “over the hill”: CP, 147.

  438 “I wanted to cap my series and make it a tetralogy”: OJ, 872.

  438 “a specimen American male’s evolution into grandpaternity”: Ibid.

  438 “Harry tries to imagine the world seen through her clear green eyes”: RRest, 55.

  438 Nelson cries in anguish, “Don’t die, Dad, don’t!”: Ibid., 512.

  438 “Whatever it is, it has found him, and is working him over”: Ibid., 136.

  439 “I think he was emotionally shy with us”: Author interview, David Updike, January 18, 2013.

  439 his father “just didn’t have room for grandchildren”: Author interview, Michael Updike, August 18, 2012.

  440 “With his wonderful new tool of ease how can a writer say No?”: OJ, xviii.

  442 the many months of “sexual disarray”: MM, 822.

  442 “I’ve been carrying Buchanan around with me for years”: CJU, 230.

  442 “There is a civilized heroism to indecision”: MFA, 13.

  442 for the next fifteen years and counting, “fairly content”: Ibid., 365.

  442 Alf tells us, “Real life is in essence anti-climactic”: Ibid., 357.

  442 “the Queen of Disorder”: artistic, vague, maternal: Ibid., 10.

  443 “the Perfect Wife”: peremptory, efficient, snobbish: Ibid., 24.

  443 “my Tempest, my valedictory visit to all my themes”: MM, 822.

  443 “like many a mother in the biography of a successful man”: MFA, 26.

  443 “Is it not the biological cruelty of mothers”: Ibid., 29.

  444 “What would have happened to me if William Shawn”: HG, 466.

  445 “shamanistic mystique” associated with the cult of Mr. Shawn: MM, ix.

  445 The sober, dignified pages he was used to were suddenly “sharply angled”: Ibid., xxi.

  446 the days before “Tina’s barbarians” sacked and pillaged: JU to MA, March 5, 1994.

  446 “There is a bliss in making sets of things”: MM, xxiii.

  446 “I have a little Bech book in the works”: JU to JCO, December 30, 1997, Syracuse.

  446 “My poems are my oeuvre’s beloved waifs”: CP, xxiv.

  447 “Well,” he asked, “why would you collect your poems”: Televised interview with Charlie Rose, October 6, 1997.

  448 “John Updike is a far better poet”: X. J. Kennedy, “John Updike Collected Poems,” The New Criterion (April 1993): 62.

  448 “entertainment quotient” in Updike’s verse: Thomas M. Disch, “Having an Oeuvre,” Poetry (February 1994): 288.

  448 He was unwilling to deprive himself entirely of his “secret bliss”: JU to JCO, March 3, 1994, Syracuse.

  449 “Nevertheless, the living must live, a writer must write”: MM, xxiii.

  449 dragging behind him “like an ever-heavier tail”: SC, 86.

  450 “That he takes up so much of my time”: MM, 757.

  451 a process he thought of as the “packaging of flux”: CP, xxiii.

  452 “you reach an age when every sentence you write”: DC, 651.

  452 “You have to give it magic”: Rothstein, “The Origin of the Universe, Time and John Updike.”

  453 she was raised as Essie Wilmot in a “sweet small town”: BL, 333.

  453 secure in “her power, her irresistible fire”: Ibid., 286.

  453 recognizes in her costar an “inhuman efficiency”: Ibid., 353.

  454 “spouting blood . . . the hole spurting like a water bubbler”: Ibid., 483.

  454 “metallobioforms,” a plague of deadly inorganic pests: TET, 110–11.

  454 a mysterious “halo of iridescence”: Ibid., 151.

  454 “quantum leaps of plot and personality”: MM, 833.

  454 Oates, reviewing the novel in The New Yorker, described Ben as “morbidly narcissistic”: Joyce Carol Oates, “Future Tense,” The New Yorker, December 8, 1997, 117.

  455 the postapocalyptic, “post-law-and-order” environment: TET, 271.

  455 “I am safe,” he says, “in my nest of local conditions”: Ibid., 329.

  455 autobiography is “one of the dullest genres”: MM, 834.

  456 “Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence”: TET, 8.

  456 “In her guilt at secretly wishing me dead”: Ibid., 240.

  456 Gloria, in his estimation, is a “soigné vulture”: Ibid., 271.

  456 her rich widow’s reward: “well-heeled freedom”: Ibid., 142.

  456 immersed in “suburban polygamy”: Ibid., 136.

  456 “Well, it’s your call, but you already told us, the Readers”: Notes found on TET manuscript, Houghton.

  457 “Among the rivals besetting an aging writer”: HG, 5.

  XI. The Lonely Fort

  458 “particularly sour, ugly and haphazardly constructed”: Michiko Kakutani, “On Sex, Death and the Self: An Old Man’s Sour Grapes,” The New York Times, September 30, 1997, E1.

  458 “It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst”: David Foster Wallace, “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?” The New York Observer, October 13, 1997.

  458 He’d learned to shrug off the “irrepressible Michiko”: JU to MA, November 16, 2004.

  458 since he had seen her “blow her top” so often, it was hard to take her seriously: JU to ND, November 21, 2002, Michigan.

  458 “As memento mori and its obverse, carpe diem”: Margaret Atwood, “Memento Mori—But First, Carpe Diem,” The New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1997.

  459 “Old artists are entitled to caricature themselves”: JL, 82.

  459 “idly constructed . . . and astonishingly misogynistic”: James Wood, “A Prick in Time,” The Guardian, January 29, 1998.

  459 sexual obsessions “have recurred and overlapped thickly enough”: James Wood, “Gossip in Gilt,” London Review of Books, April 19, 2001.

  460 “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn”: Ibid.

  460 “plush attention to detail” amounted to “a nostalgia for the present”: James Wood, “The Beast in the American Ice Cream Parlour,” The Guardian, October 25, 1990.

  460 “If Updike’s earlier work was consumed with wife-swapping”: Wood, “Gossip in Gilt.”

  460 “Updike is not, I think, a great writer”: James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Belief and Literature (New York: Random House, 1999), 193.

  460 “Woo
ds [sic] is a great annoyance,” Updike wrote: JU to John McTavish, June 13, 2008.

  462 a subliminal message: “the time has come to retire”: MM, 856.

  462 if Updike didn’t get the prize, it would be “the Swedes’ fault, not his”: WM, “Confidential Report on Candidate,” 1959 Guggenheim Fellowship competition.

  462 “There’s no Updike at all. I’m a vanished man, a nonentity”: David Streitfeld, “Updike at Bay,” The Washington Post, December 16, 1998.

  462 “a very hasty job”: JU to Ann Goldstein, October 22, 1998.

  462 “The blatancy of the icy-hearted satire repelled me”: MM, 323.

  462 “The book weighs in as a 742-page bruiser”: Ibid., 320.

  462 “A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment”: Ibid., 324.

  463 “cheesy,” Updike called it in private: JU to JCO, December 15, 1998, Syracuse.

  463 “Wolfe not only demands to make his millions but wants respect, too”: Ibid.

  463 Wolfe’s “final inability to be great”: Norman Mailer, “A Man Half Full,” The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998.

  463 Wolfe hit back, calling Updike and Mailer “two old piles of bones”: Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 152–53.

  463 when Wolfe was “apotheosized”: JU to JCO, May 31, 1999, Syracuse.

  463 “a minor novelist with a major style”: Bloom, John Updike, 7.

  464 two-part parody (or “counter-parody”): Wolfe, Hooking Up, 252.

  464 “the laughingstock of the New York literary community”: Ibid., 279.

  464 Updike’s in particular: “more and more tabescent”: Ibid., 278.

  464 “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment”: Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1989, 55.

  464 Wolfe urged them to “do what journalists do”: Ibid.

  464 “Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument”: OJ, 86.

  464 “Unlike journalism . . . fiction does not give us facts”: Ibid., 87.

  465 the aim is to expose the “status structure of society”: Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” 52.

  465 “intimate and inextricable relation to the society”: Ibid., 50.

  465 American reality “outdoing” the novelist’s imagination: Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary (March 1961): 224.