John Updike ~ A man for all seasons.....

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.

Poetry by Barbara Helfgott Hyett

The Inlet

Here again, the rough-cut jetty, the ridge
worn flat by men trolling bass and bluefish
and boys with plastic buckets full of porgies.
The hooks are taut in their mouths.
I comb the crevices for mussels, find
a baby flounder, stiff and gray, a shell.
Right side down a huge crab bakes on a rock.

Behind me, vacant, boarded up, the tenements
where I was born. Beige bricks, three or four stories
crammed with families, fathers who delivered milk
or sold potato chips from tall tin cans -
I scooped them into brown bags, watched the oil seep through.

In summer, mothers gave up unemployment
to work in tourist places hawking beach chairs,
vegematics, tickets to Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Mothers didn't swim. They sent us to stay
at the lifeguard stand with a quarter for lunch.
We'd swim past the jetty to the rotted pilings, then back
to the shallows and the puckered seaweed. I'd open my eyes
underwater, watch the silversides skimming my cheek.
When my towel underneath the boardwalk was all in shadow
and the sand had turned quartz cold, I went home.

At Zwiebacks, after dinner, I'd read comic books
or else I'd buy one used. Later, at Altman Field
the boys from Philly who stayed at the guest house
would start to shoot some baskets.
Sometimes I'd just sit on the bleachers
licking salt from the back of my hand.
Everything was like that then: crisp, expectable,
a silent movie, the ocean and the hoop disappearing
gradually from the end of the playground
until I couldn't see the ball anymore.

In my bed, I'd watch the sway of the clotheslines
on the rooftop outside my window and listen
to the men playing pinochle at the dining-room table,
the stogie smoke gray and small-winged down the hall.
The women swept the floors, laid roach traps,
ate chocolate at the mahjongg game downstairs.
They'd laugh, and clack the bone faced tiles,
a sound of summer when summer wasn't time
but place, ordinary as the low cry of a loon
diving at night, the voice of a beach block,
its muggy rhythm, the click of the tide
just before it turns.

Barbara Helfgott Hyett

Robert Frost

The Road not Taken

a poem

by

Robert Frost

The Road not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The Road not TakenRobert Frost

Robert Frost

Mending Wall a poem by Robert Frost

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.

The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side.

It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines,
I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?
Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'
I could say '.Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Bio ~ Louisa May Alcott

Concise Biography and Picture
Louisa May Alcott

Nationality - American
Lifespan - 1832 - 1888
Family - Father was Amos Bronson Alcott a schoolmasterEducation - Tutored at homeCareer - Poet, novelist, and editorFirst Published in 1852

Famous PoemsLouisa May Alcott
A Song from the Suds a poem by Louisa May AlcottThe Lay of the Golden Goose a poem by Louisa May AlcottOur Little Ghost a poem by Louisa May AlcottThe Rock and the Bubble poem Louisa May Alcott

Famous Quote by Louisa May Alcott

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott

Recommended site for Famous Quotes / Quotations


Louisa May Alcott, who is often referred to as one of the great writers of children's literature, was famous for her homely books about life in America in the 19th Century. Her most celebrated novels featured the March family starting with Little Women which was published in 1868 and followed by Little Men, Good Wives and Jo's Boys.