John Updike: There was style, and more
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic
Can a great literary figure write too beautifully?
Consider two related questions. Can a superb concert pianist hit the notes too accurately? Can a supreme realist painter capture a scene too exactly, too photographically?
To the layperson, the answer to all three questions would seem to be no. Even many professional musicians and painters would chime in with the public on the last two matters.
The death this week of John Updike, however, reminds us that things play out differently in literature. Too much beautiful writing, at times combined with too little plot, often brings opprobrium upon its creator. Recall that sainted immortal, Marcel Proust, renowned and loved worldwide for the music of his sentences, the lingering perfume of his style.
"I may perhaps be dead from the neck up," French editor Marc Humblot wrote in his 1912 rejection letter to Proust, turning down the first part of what would become Remembrance of Things Past, "but rack my brains as I may, I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep."
In the appreciations and obituaries of Updike over the last few days, one hears a similar plaint asserted, repeated, cited, acknowledged or gainsaid.
To be sure, sheer celebration of his uncannily adroit prose erupted as soon as the bad news got out. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe exulted that "few writers have staged such elegant lexical ballets on the page."
Fellow Pulitzer-anointed critic Henry Allen, in the Washington Post, confessed that despite his own aim to become the greatest living American prose stylist, he learned, when reading Rabbit, Run at age 19, that Updike could not be bested, that the older man was "a dragon who would be unslayable."
"Instead," Allen continued, "he stalked me for 35 years, breathing the cool, ego-crushing fire of a style that didn't just evoke reality but also seemed to violate one of our most ancient taboos, the one against the making of graven images - a style that created eerie holograms with 100 percent correspondence to the material world."
Yet those two voices could not drown out that long-established grumble: Yes, an astonishingly gorgeous writer, that Updike, but to what point?
As noted by the Los Angeles Times in its obituary, the distinguished critic and scholar Harold Bloom complained years ago that while Updike could craft a "beautifully economical narrative," he lacked depth, leaving him "a minor novelist with a major style."
Such caveats abounded early in Updike's career. Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a 1981 Village Voice essay, commented on the "great divide between Updike's exquisite command of prose and . . . the apparent no-good vulgar nothing he expended it on." Critic Norman Podhoretz, in Commentary, deemed Updike's style "overly lyrical, bloated like a child who has eaten too much candy." Gore Vidal attacked his beetle-browed contemporary for being "fixed in facility." Alfred Kazin, one of the era's major critics, caviled that Updike "can brilliantly describe the adult world without conveying its depth and risks," a remark that stung Updike sufficiently for him to note it in his memoir.
Who could be surprised, then, that such reservations arose again, and needed to be reported, in the farewells of the week?
Cultural critic Todd Gitlin, posting about Updike on the blog Talking Points Memo, declared, "It felt to me then , and still does, that Updike's fine instruments did not enable him to take the measure of enormity the way Faulkner, and Ellison, and Bellow, and Mailer, and Roth at their best could do, and in that way he remained an outsider to the huge awful stories."
The rebuke arises partly because, in modern culture, we expect writers and film directors to take the spot philosophers and theologians occupied centuries ago. Too intellectually lazy to access our actual philosophers and theologians, we dictate that our writers be overt moralists, political theorists, social critics, even journalists. If they can write pretty, too, that's fine, but pretty without substance? No thanks.
The mistake about Updike from the beginning was to imagine that there's an "either-or" in literature as inevitable as the one delineated in morals by Updike's much-admired Kierkegaard.
Because Updike chose to imply his beliefs through stories, descriptions and nuances rather than isms, suspicious fellow intellectuals ruled that no thinker operated behind the curtain. Because he evoked writerly envy more than any of his contemporaries except Saul Bellow - sentence-by-sentence combat between the two would have amounted to a Super Bowl of fiction - many peers resorted to slicing him where they could.
And yet, as younger novelist Jeffrey Eugenides marvelously observed on the New Yorker's Updike memorial page this week, "When a writer dies, a vote comes in." Judging by the burgeoning citations on artsandlettersdaily.com, full of tributes from writers and critics around the world, it's a landslide for "John Updike, Master," not "John Updike, Master Stylist."
Truth be told, Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, some valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work in words or rococo flourishes across pages.
Referring once to what his Pennsylvania boyhood bestowed on him, he wrote, "A kind of respect for middle class, ordinary life, a belief that there was something worth saying about it, that there was struggle and morals to be gained, that there was beauty in it."
Similarly, reflecting elsewhere on his career, Updike explained that "Three Great Sacred Things" had ruled his life and work: religion, sex and art.
He didn't mention style.
He was right not to.
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