John Updike…Hound dog?
Posted on February 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
I went to this pretentious literary party not long ago, basically as a favor for a friend, who more or less blew me off within minutes after we arrived. So instead I was talking with a New Yorker writer, which always intimidates the heck out of me, especially when it’s one that I admire, which this was. And we were talking about how boring literary biographies are, and how the act of writing was really pretty boring, at least if you’re not doing it but reading about it, and how when English writers write biographies of literary types they focus on hot deviant sex, like with Graham Greene, and Americans are much more uptight about unmasking their literary heroes in this fashion.
Of course, this may be changing.
On Wowowow.com, author Roger Warner argues that John Updike messed around…a lot!
The ex-neighbor counted the [Updike] lovers he knew about on his fingers: The clipper-ship heiress who worked at the library. The majestic lady who taught children’s choir. The mother of the guy who sat in the pew next to Kim at [Updike’s] memorial service. “And my own first wife,” he said with a rueful laugh. “But then we were all fucking everybody else back then, in the Couples era. And so was I. Bad behavior. Very bad behavior. Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it over again, if I had a chance.”
The majestic lady who taught children’s choir?
3 Responses
2/11/2024 11:15 am
I’m going to go short on John Updike. (I know, who am I ? who cares? but still….) This post makes me realize what it is I don’t like about him. Sure, very talented writer — in the sense of, very able at putting sentence after sentence and building up to something affecting. Granted. The Rabbit books are great — no question that they belong in the American literary canon. But what I don’t like about Updike — and you start to feel it after, say, you’ve finished the second Rabbit book and are contemplating two more — is how suburban, which is to say proverbial, if not boring, is the scope of his vision. Fair disclosure: I haven’t read anything beyond the two Rabbit books and the stuff he contributed to the New Yorker (book reviews, essays, etc.), so obviously this isn’t really about his standing as a writer. But his literary themes and what appears to be his personal life are inescabably merged in my mind, and it kind of turns my stomach. Apparently, in the wild 60s and 70s, when “everybody was sleeping with everybody”, our Great Author — who lived in god-knows-where Connecticut or something — bedded a “clipper-ship heiress who worked at the library”. There — there it is, what turns my stomach. The shooting-apples-in-a-barrel quality to how a noted author, who shunned the glamourous life of the big city writer, picks the low hanging fruit in his safe, and safely affluent, little town. And yet, it’s not the hispanic waitress or the drugged out daughter of his handyman or the local “bad girl” now gone to seed he beds — not, in other words, the sort of girls his Rabbit went after — but a “clipper ship heiress”! What in the world IS a clipper ship heiress and how could one possibly locate one? These thoughts just lead me to my final resting place on Updike: liked a few of his books, admired his writing, wouldn’t want to have been caught dead at a dinner party with him.
2/11/2024 1:16 pm
I once had a dentist was always asking me whether I’d read the latest Updike (and frequently I had). When Updike’s novel “S” came out, I couldn’t help thinking that the dentist to whom the rather breathy female narrator writes must have been the same one who was repairing my teeth. Though this phenomenon is called “reader identification,” I didn’t actually like the way Updike handled that narrator.
But, more seriously, how much does it matter whether the realities of Updike’s life overlap with the fictions he wrote?
2/16/2009 7:17 pm
Updike was a purveyor of over-rated highbrow dicklit.