Understanding Contemporary American Literature

Frederic Svoboda

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611178630
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A close look at the extraordinary literary achievements of a popular and prolific American author

The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood.

A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation—not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding John Updike

John Updike (1932–2009) was one of the most prolific, wide-ranging, and respected of twentieth-century American novelists, winner of every award available to an American writer, including the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the O. Henry Prize (twice), the National Book Critics Circle Award (three times), the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, to name only a few. Only the Nobel Prize for Literature eluded him. During his working life, he published at the rate of more than one book per year, more than sixty in all, including twenty-six novels and novellas and more than a dozen collections of short fiction. He was equally distinguished as a reviewer of literature and the fine arts, cultural critic, and poet. His career included a long-term association with two continuing American cultural treasures, the New Yorker (where much of his short fiction appeared) and the New York Review of Books (where he was a reviewer).

Early biography provides important keys to understanding his works and concerns. Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in rural West Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley Russell Updike, worked as a high school math teacher at Shillington High School (and later served as the model for the teacher protagonist in his son’s early novel The Centaur); his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, was a clerk in a local department store but also a serious, though not entirely successful, writer who did eventually publish short fiction in the New Yorker. West Reading became the fictional setting of Brewer and nearby Shillington the fictional Olinger in John Updike’s later works, and these places helped to form his subject matter.

“My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules,” Updike told Life magazine reporter Jane Howard in 1966, suggesting something not only of his subject matter but also of the approach that informs his best work: the appreciation and understanding of ambiguity that made him such a perceptive writer.

Updike early hoped to become a cartoonist, and when he went to Harvard on scholarship as an English major, he worked on its noted campus humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. The Lampoon had been a considerable part of the appeal of Harvard to him. He served as its editor during his senior year and was prolific in producing prose and cartoons for the magazine. (He had followed a similar model during his high school career.)

Before graduating he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe College student of the fine arts. (At the time Harvard was not formally coeducational, but Radcliffe served as its associated women’s school.) This first marriage provided the Updikes with four children—and the basis for his bittersweet and tender Maples stories, generally considered to be among his finest achievements in chronicling the state of American matrimony in the midcentury, which was an important continuing concern for Updike.

Graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, Updike won a fellowship for graduate work at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and studied in England until mid-1955. Connections made there with humorist James Thurber, Irish novelist Joyce Cary, and essayist E. B. White and his wife, Katherine White (fiction editor of the New Yorker), led him to New York City later that year and work on the New Yorker, particularly its famous “Talk of the Town” feature. His association with the magazine endured: it had a right of first refusal on his works and published hundreds of his stories, essays, and reviews over the course of his life.

There is a certain irony here in that the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, famously had proclaimed that “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady from Dubuque”—the magazine for sophisticates, not the ordinary American. However, in his Paris Review interview of 1967, Updike suggested a seemingly conflicting goal: “Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s [book store], are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

Here as elsewhere it is clear that Updike was aware of his literary forebears but also intent on setting his own course. Throughout his career he navigated successfully between sophisticated and mass audience appeal. The “countryish teenaged boy” of the quotation recalls Updike’s personal roots as well, particularly the sandstone farmhouse to which his parents had moved in 1945 when he was thirteen, dislocating him from comfortable town life (Begley 32), a setting that figures memorably in a number of his short stories.

By 1957 the Updikes already had a son and a daughter, but Updike chose to leave his secure New Yorker position and move to Ipswich, Massachusetts (near the Atlantic coast on Ipswich Bay, about thirty miles north-northeast of Boston), and make his living as a freelance professional author. Then as now, Ipswich was both a Boston bedroom community for commuters and a summer resort. It served as model for the fictional Tarbox of the scandalous and hugely popular Couples (1968), set during the end of the Kennedy administration, and more or less for the fictional Eastwick, Connecticut, in the seriocomic The Witches of Eastwick (1984), set in 1968–69, which partly reflects Updike’s reactions to the rise of women’s consciousness at that time.

By 1958 Updike had published his first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, poems of considerable charm that, like his subsequent poetry, do not evince the same seriousness, and have not attracted the same level of interest, as his fiction. (In all these poems, however, one can see the author seriously at play with language, a continuing strength of Updike, who was a noted stylist.)

In the next year, Updike published both his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, and his first collection of short stories, The Same Door, with Alfred A. Knopf, which firm would remain his American publishers for the rest of his career. A Solomon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship supported work on what became the novel Rabbit, Run, his first breakout hit.

The Rabbit tetralogy is often considered as Updike’s greatest achievement: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—plus a fifth work, the novella Rabbit Remembered (2001), concerned with the family members left behind by the death of the books’ protagonist. This saga of the life of an ordinary young man from small-town Pennsylvania traces the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy through Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who achieves his own high point quite early in life—as a high school basketball star. From that point onward, Rabbit finds marriage, fatherhood, love affairs, work, and even monetary success as proprietor of a Toyota dealership not quite to be what he is longing for. His perpetual searching makes Rabbit fully human and engaging despite his many flaws; in his longings and worries, he re-creates the American state of mind over the mid to late twentieth century.

As in much of Updike, the Rabbit books brilliantly render the physical surfaces of American life, but they also reveal the currents beneath those surfaces. Rabbit is l’homme moyen sensual, perhaps, in the sense meant by Justice John M. Woolsey of the U.S. District Court of New York in his famous 1933 opinion, later affirmed by the Supreme Court, lifting the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses and laying the groundwork for Updike’s eventual exploration of previously proscribed areas of human experience. Rabbit is an ordinary sensual man, not well educated, yet still with considerable insight into his own life in small-town America, which is exquisitely rendered both in the novels’ present time and in Rabbit’s memories of the lost America of his childhood. A part of Updike’s genius lies in his ability to write within the limitations of perception of such a character yet to let his greater authorial perception plausibly shine through. He is always a master of point of view. As one example, in the final novel, Rabbit at Rest, the loss of a huge copper beech tree that once shaded the old house that Rabbit shares with his wife and mother-in-law becomes as eloquently evocative to Rabbit as the remembered sacrifices of World War II, and Updike makes readers consider how much even a very ordinary man may perceive.

By the early 1960s, Updike’s career was well launched. Stories had appeared multiple times in The Best American Short Stories volumes (“A Gift from the City” in 1959; the much-anthologized meditation on mortality “Pigeon Feathers” in 1962) and in the O Henry Prize Stories (“The Doctor’s Wife” in 1962). His novel The Poorhouse Fair won the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1960, and The Centaur (1963) won the National Book Award in that same year. Additional collections of stories (Pigeon Feathers, 1962) and poetry (Telephone Poles and Other Poems, 1963) also appeared. From this point on, a complete listing even of his book publications becomes more a matter for a bibliography than for this brief biographical and critical essay, and so a selective approach was taken.

Further, in 1964 Updike was elected as one of the 250 members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was one of the youngest ever chosen by this group, founded in 1904 and including over the years such luminaries as Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, John Singer Sergeant, Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Sandberg, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Mark Rothko, and Charles Dana Gibson. (Updike’s nearer contemporaries in the institute included Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Mary McCarthy.) In 1976 he was elected to the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters, then a more selective subgroup of the National Institute. Among earlier members the critic, editor and novelist William Dean Howells would probably come closest to modeling Updike’s importance as a widely influential, even beloved cultural arbiter.

Also in 1964 Updike traveled to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a cultural ambassador under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State, gaining experiences later adapted into some of the highly satirical Henry Bech stories and novellas, about a hack Jewish novelist striving to rise in the literary world. These works also incorporate some of Updike’s other experiences as a member of the nation’s official cultural elite and let him comment rather directly on the profession of authorship. Updike also made a foray into writing for children in the early to mid-1960s, with The Magic Flute (1962), Bottom’s Dream (1965), and A Child’s Calendar (1965).

Through the rest of the 1960s, Updike published several novels, his first collection of essays (Assorted Prose, 1965), another collection of verse, and three more stories in the O. Henry Prize Stories (“The Music School” in 1966; “Marching through Boston” in 1967, the latter reflecting the author’s participation in a Boston civil rights march; and “Your Lover Just Called” in 1968). The latter two are Maples stories; all three treat problems of marital relationships in affluent postwar America.

His 1968 novel Couples was a huge commercial success, staying on the best-seller lists for a year, earning a substantial movie advance payment, and leading to Updike’s first appearance on the cover of the influential weekly newsmagazine Time, his portrait accompanied by the headline “The Adulterous Society.” This book is sometimes down-rated for its treatment of adultery and wife-swapping among ten suburban couples but in fact is a work of considerable insight as well as technical achievement in narration, keeping its many characters in play throughout.

The protagonist of Couples, a Dutch American contractor born in western Michigan, Piet Hannema, is a more thoughtful and appealing Rabbit in some ways, though also a sensual man, but his last name further suggests anima, soul, and the deeper spiritual implications of midcentury affluence and success. Like Updike, Piet is a seeker after religious faith (and unlike Updike ultimately a failed one), but in any case he is a protagonist facing head-on midcentury America’s dilemma: attempting to reconcile affluent success with the fading of the religious values that once held the nation together—and with the loss of American innocence. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is the major historical event at the center of the book’s chronology, one among a number of such events that place the book clearly in its place and time. Couples is a major novel and a part of Updike’s continuing legacy.

In 1970 appeared Bech: A Book, a humorous hybrid of novella and short story collection that satirizes both the authorial struggle to succeed and then maintain a reputation and the careers of several of the Jewish American novelists who were the Protestant Updike’s contemporaries. Updike returned to his alter ego Henry Bech in subsequent volumes in 1982 and 1998, with the satire becoming broader and perhaps more farfetched. Critical reaction to these books was mixed. They somewhat recall what British novelist Graham Greene had called “entertainments,” books intended to be less serious and more overtly entertaining than that novelist’s full-fledged works, but they do have serious points to make.

Rabbit Redux, which appeared in 1971 to considerable acclaim, reflects the events of the later sixties as Couples reflects the decade’s earlier years. In the next year appeared Seventy Poems and the very distinguished Museums and Women and Other Stories. In 1973 Updike again was serving as a cultural ambassador—this time to nations in Africa—on a Fulbright Foundation–sponsored tour. This took him to Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia and energized and provided background for later novels, including The Coup (1978), Terrorist (2006), and perhaps even indirectly Brazil (1994), which also drew on a brief trip to that country.

In 1974 Updike published a play, Buchanan Dying, following in the unsuccessful steps of previous American novelists who attempted to make a move into the lucrative theater market, including Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Updike in his preface seemed to intimate that this very long work might not be much performed (“Were this play ever to be produced,” he wrote), but it was several times in abridged form, first at Lancaster’s Franklin and Marshall College two years after publication, with the fact that President James Buchanan was born nearby perhaps contributing to local interest in the play. This work also suggests another continuing Updike interest, the public personality seen in the context of his own time, to which he returned most notably in Memories of the Ford Administration (1993), in which a historian tells his own life’s tale while simultaneously comparing thirty-eighth president Gerald Ford to James Buchanan, the fifteenth. Buchanan was the president immediately preceding Abraham Lincoln and is widely regarded as one of the worst, having done nothing to stem the South’s movement toward secession, which flowered in the months between Lincoln’s election and inauguration. During his administration Ford was similarly viewed by many, though since his reputation has risen, largely for his role in asserting the decency of the American presidency in the aftermath of the 1974 resignation of Richard M. Nixon. With Updike, subject matter seems seldom lost: throughout his career he returned to and reworked previous concerns adeptly and almost always to good effect. In the same year the author separated from his first wife, and the next year appeared another O. Henry Prize story, “Nakedness.”

The novel A Month of Sundays also appeared in 1975, beginning a thematic concern with Puritan America and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterful re-creation of it, particularly in his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. Updike’s A Month of Sundays was a reenvisioning of the adulterous minister character of The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale, and has generally been seen as forming a trilogy along with Roger’s Version (1986), which deals with a modern-day version of Roger Chillingworth, Dimmesdale’s nemesis, and S. (1988), a comic novel from the point of view of a decidedly modern version of Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale’s lover. However, the seriocomic The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and its late-career sequel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), are recognizably in the same line of inquiry into traditional American values and their limits (as we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Understanding John Updike
• Chapter 2: The Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy: Updike’s Masterpiece and Template for Understanding His Works
• Chapter 3: The Maples Stories, Olinger Stories, and Other Short Fiction
• Chapter 4: Couples (1968)
• Chapter 5: The Shadow of Nathaniel Hawthorne and New England Puritanism: The Eastwick and Scarlet Letter novels
• Chapter 6: Guide to Major Works: The Henry Bech Novellas
• Chapter 7: A Brief Summing Up
• Bibliography
• Index