I've been peering at obituaries and reminiscences, reading old stories and essays, listening to radio interviews recorded years ago, and cannot repress the thought that, while Updike's death is a great loss, those of us who care for literature can, perhaps for a week or two, take an interest in a higher than usual percentage of items in the daily cultural bombardment. Here follow some Updike bits that I've stumbled across in the past few days.
1. In John Updike, 1932-2009, I quoted from Elizabeth Hardwick's "Citizen Updike," one of the essays collected in Sight-Readings. Now I've re-read the whole thing and find it all first-rate. Of Tarbox, the name of the fictional town in which Couples is set, she writes: "Tar, an odorous viscous liquid, and box--well, guess."
2. It's a comfort to think that, for those of us who did not know him personally, access to Updike is no less than before. Being sustained by him, it's a further comfort to contemplate how much his reading seems to have sustained him. His love of books and learning is palpable on the written page. Sometimes it breaks out with a little yell. His introduction to Hugging the Shore concludes,
. . . I live again in a big white house with a view of saltwater. I keep looking out the window. The clean horizon beckons. All sorts of silvery shadows streak the surface of the sea. Sailboats dot it, some far out. It looks like literature. What a beautiful sight!
3. Speaking of his criticism, I'm gratified to notice how rarely it is excluded from the register of his diverse achievements. The collections--Picked-Up Pieces, Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, More Matter, Due Considerations--are doorstops, and the experience of reading them is like hanging out for hours with someone really smart. How fun is that? Stupidity surrounds us but there are avenues of escape.
4. Speaking of stupidity, check this out.
5. Updike's memoir Self-Consciousness contains a section, "On Not Being a Dove,"about the peace movement inspired by our country's adventure in Vietnam. His view seems to have been that, while a mistake, it was our mistake, and that once there stolid patriotism would have been more appropriate than the embarrassing antics of protestors obsessed with their own virtue. You can tell that Hardwick, for one, does not agree--the adjectives "tangled" and "dubious" creep into her discussion of this aspect of her subject's memoir. Anyway, Updike was a reliable Democratic voter, and I enjoyed this excerpt from one of his last interviews, wherein it is apparent which presidential candidate got his last vote:
It's very worrisome: I think if this country doesn't elect Obama, it will have blown an opportunity that will never come along again. I just think he's so much the superior candidate. Everything about him. But maybe I'm speaking like a teenage crush. Being the child of Depression Democrats, I've never had a great love for Republicans, although some of my best friends, etc., are Republicans. I've lived my adult life mostly under Republican administrations, mostly after LBJ — there was just Clinton and Carter. And this deification of Reagan, you mention Reagan, somehow the waves will part! I remember when people thought it was incredible that he'd be elected — as incredible as it is for Sarah Palin to become V.P., it was incredible for him to become president. He was charming, though, in a way. And he sort of convinced you — my mother once asked, how does he convince everyone that they're rich?
6. Here's a poem that will be published, posthumously now, in a volume called Endpoint and Other Poems:
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
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