Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike
Is there a living writer whose achievements are so much taken for granted as John Updike’s? History is fertilized with unknown masters; but what about recognized masters who are under-appreciated? What happens to such fruit? How can any literary award’s committee sit down to discuss the world’s best – Lessing, Pamuk, Pinter – without someone muttering a single spondee — “Updike” — to quickly settle the matter?
There’s a terrible imbalance here: On its “Also by John Updike” page, Due Considerations lists 21 novels, 15 short story collections, eight collections of essays and criticism, seven books of poems, five children’s books, a play and a memoir; and Due Considerations itself contains no less than 146 articles of considerable stylistic, metaphorical, critical and intellectual weight. One’s reminded of Alexandre Dumas, a factory of a writer, a brand name, but Updike has chosen every word himself, written it all, while averaging an astonishing five beautiful sentences out of every six, with an equally impressive batting average of perfect words (whereas most popular writers these days hit no more than one sentence out of ten; and some no more than one per book).
Now compare this profound and prolific oeuvre, compare Updike’s scintillating talent, his steadfast devotion to testing “the limits of what I know and what I feel,” his implacable “homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness” and most amazingly, the fact that he’s still among us, still writing, still knocking sentence after sentence out of the park, compare this unrivalled writer to all the recognition he’s received so far — including Two Pulitzer prizes, the National Medal of Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, even a reference to Updike on the Simpsons – and you begin to understand exactly how much merit is lacking. It’s just not enough. Can it ever be enough?
In his review of William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life, Updike inadvertently stumbles upon a possible explanation: “It all came down to one book,” he writes of Proust’s A la Recherche due Temps Perdue. “No wonder it had to be vast. Posterity tends to give novelists a longer ride on one or two big books than on a raft of smaller ones.” And there’s the rub for someone like Updike. Perhaps he’s written too much.
The bigger problem, of course, is us. We’re easily distracted. We’re quick to watch the caped daredevil parachute off a skyscraper while neglecting the urbane-looking chap who always, for some reason, floats beside us, inexplicably, an inch above the ground. Updike makes a daily habit of his American genius; it follows readers around, especially men: to poker games, movie theatres, baseball diamonds and YMCA swimming pools and the everyday wooing of dollars and cars. “Small wonder,” he wrote in a short story inspired by his love for a ‘55 four-door Waterfall Blue Ford sedan, “the [American] landscape is sacrificed to these dreaming vehicles of our ideal and onrushing manhood.”Onrushing manhood. The suburban bedroom. The desperate housewife’s predecessor – desperate husbands. Sex has bedevilled Updike throughout his life. Like few other American writers, he’s proven to be endlessly fascinated by America’s (and therefore his own) fascination with sexual liberty, forever comparing one decade’s behaviour with another’s, as a museum curator might compare different schools of art (The inclusion in Due Considerations of his frivolous essay “Ten Epochal Moments in the American Libido” is a case in point).
This obsession of Updike’s, I speculate, may cause readers to dismiss an Updike novel as passé while ignoring the deeper beauty of its craftsmanship; and perhaps the sex-obsession itself is an Americanism many Americans, at least the more international-minded, are outgrowing these days. He seems to recognize the broader truth in old age, noting somewhere in Due Considerations – can’t find the exact quote – that sex in the late, pre-liberated 1940s had its own special codes and secret charms, and these were just as thrilling to the libidos of onrushing manhood as any activity in less prudish times to come.
Updike’s lush style of writing is deceptively well-trimmed, impeccably-dressed. He’s as prudent and delicate with his details with he is dismissive of dogma. Notice his recollections of childhood summers: “I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, and I liked the way I looked in the mirror, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.” Now notice the “perhaps” in the sentence that follows these details: “We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves.”
And we love such observations, perhaps, not just for the mirrors they present us, or even for the clarity of their reflection, but for the fact they’re conjured by a 73-year-old master of his art with the ability to astound us all the more – by travelling still farther through memory and time – the older he gets.
