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The human bind. John Updike is acclaimed as a chronicler of the contemporary, a thoroughly modern, relaxed and witty fellow who writes wonderfully about sex. Yet he is also a Christian and a patriot. Religion does more than colour his prose; it shapes it
Published 19 January 2004
The Early Stories
John UpdikeHamish Hamilton, 838pp, £25
ISBN 0241142644
Not too impressed by the new El Greco exhibition at the Metropolitan, John Updike wondered in the New York Review of Books whether his lack of enthusiasm for such delirious deformities sprang from a "stubborn, hard-shell Protestantism". The paintings had "the slickness of any art that doesn't subject itself to a constant reality check", and only in a couple did we feel "the pinch of the human bind". His review provides a neat self-definition. The human bind is what Updike writes about; few authors have held more stubbornly to reality; and if religion is omnipresent beneath the surface it is because his Protestantism is where it pinches.
Note those minimising terms "pinch" and "bind". The quotidian contains no Sophoclean tragedies or dilemmas, and in Updike's America nothing much happens. These stories, written mostly for the New Yorker, are short in many senses: short on drama, twists, suspense, short in fact on much of what we conventionally think of as storytelling skills. Some are more like tableaux than narratives, yet that is to be expected; for a writer who in a foreword describes his aim as "to give the mundane its beautiful due", too much literary artifice would fall foul of the reality principle. I baulked a little at that "beautiful"; in the mouth of a lesser writer it would be smarmy, a Nick Hornby-ish celebration of banality as the ideal. Not in Updike. The dignity of his characters and of their small-town doings is not something conferred by the author: it is a given.
One of the surprises of discovering or rereading these stories is the persistence of the spiritual motif. The further we move from an era of belief into one of agnosticism tempered with genteel nihilism, the more extraordinary it seems that an acclaimed chronicler of the contemporary, a thoroughly modern, relaxed and witty fellow who writes wonderfully about sex, should be a Christian and a patriot. Yet those to whom the Updike persona seems anomalous need their own reality check: this is America, where 60 per cent of people - corporate crooks, welfare cheats, adulterers and divorcees of all classes included - go to church.
Religion does more than colour Updike's prose; it shapes it. The delicacy of the self-analysis is a refinement of the introspective Puritan tradition, as is the sex, now out in the open as well as in the head, which doubles the pleasure. In pretty much every story the hero is thinking about how he can get someone into bed, often his wife. Marriage is licensed randiness, and when adultery intrudes the offenders are not remorse-ridden: they are just intricately upset, suffering deliciously small stabs of conscience before and after succumbing. America frequently seems to us a culture of excess, yet the most persuasive thing in Updike is his avoidance of extremes.
Given what we know of the author, which thanks to his memoir Self-Consciousness is a good bit, it is unsurprising that the conjugal tensions have a confessional timbre; like one of his many alter egos here, Updike is a writer "intoxicated by the wine of self-exegesis". As in Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, ex-wives haunt his stories, though they enjoy more benign fictional treatment than Roth's Claire Bloom, or Bellow's Vela, the Romanian ogress in Ravelstein, retrospectively invested with a prickly moustache.
"Lifeguard", more meditation than story, is the most overt attempt to reconcile faith with sensual enjoyment of the world, and typically, it is lightly done. The narrator is a student of divinity who, enthroned on his beach above the sunbathers and swimmers, sees no contradiction between his studies and a hearty appreciation of female flesh: "Lust stuns me like the sun. You are offended that a divinity student lusts? What prigs the unchurched are. Are not our assaults on the supernatural lascivious, a kind of indecency?" Politically, too, Updike eschews modish guilts. In "Marching through Boston", one of the few pieces that deal with public issues, one character avers: "All mass movements are unreal." The older stories refer to black characters as Negroes, and Updike's foreword explains why he resisted an impulse to substitute a more up-to-date locution: "Fiction is entitled to the language of its time . . . Black, which is inaccurate, may some day be suspect in its turn."
One way to approach Updike's work is to think how little the word "relationships" applies to it, though clearly that is what it is mostly about. This is tricky territory, and one hesitates to glamorise the recent as much as the distant past. Yet compared to today, the duplicities and disloyalties he describes seem more considered, in a sense more natural than the sexual and emotional bean-counting and bartering of affection by individuals that "relationships" has now come to suggest. Writing here between the 1950s and 1970s, perhaps Updike was recording an intermediate stage in the process when a residue of community still existed, socially and between the sexes: a feeling that men and women were in this together even when their dreams and desires tugged them apart.
Of the easeful sophistication of Updike's style, what is there to say, except that its main elements were there from the beginning? So was the former art student's painterliness: "The sun, probing the shredding sky, sent low through the woods and windowpanes a diluted filigree, finer than colour, that spread across her and up the swarthy oak headboard a rhomboidal web." Watching the more tentative early stories fill out you understand how the richer textures of the great Rabbit saga came about. Is this a faultless writer, you sometimes wonder? Clearly not, though his failings are more than usually the result of his virtues.
There is such a thing as the prolixity of genius and Updike has it, as much in his lengthier word-paintings as in his pheno- menal, Puritanical productiveness. Nabokov kept his classifying prowess for his butterflies' genitalia; Updike crowds it on to the page, where his prose sometimes struggles to bear the weight of his own descriptive powers. It is a mistake to allow him into a museum (the story "Museums and Women", though brilliant, is too contrived). Let him loose on the past - natural history especially - and you are in for trouble, as in "During the Jurassic": "Like him she was an ornithischian, but much smaller - compsognathus." For a Protestant, a principle is something to contest, and in a selection of stories rightly headed "Far Out" Updike fails his own reality test. The tendency has recently recurred in less impressive works, such as the archaising Gertrude and Claudius or the extravagant Seek My Face, in which a female artist is imagined to have been successively married to Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and (yes) Andy Warhol.
Omnivorous over-exuberance is also evident when he catalogues the artefacts of daily existence - the brands, the ads, the TV shows - or hymns the hamburger or the motel. Mostly it is superbly done, surpassing the original, lifting reality above itself, illuminating America like a great artist colouring a mundane print. Yet the effect can be fatiguing because so little is spared his compulsive colouring-in. Updike's virtuosity, inexhaustible, can exhaust the reader.
Then there are the moments where his amiably adulterated religion thins into religiosity. When he extols the wonder of the world a little too insistently, the effect can be of a sermon by a startlingly literate priest with a secret inclination to animism. "Pigeon Feathers", where the bird's throat is described as "executed in a controlled rapture with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him", is an example.
Where, at nearly 72, does his reputation stand? Doubtless he is not at his peak, but it is too soon to say he has passed it, and as an American his standing is likely to be affected by non-literary factors. Updike is suspected of Old World preciousness in the US, and distrusted by Europe's americanophobes for being soft on the Great Satan. My own suspicion is that what both sets of critics really resent is his failure to conform to their agendas, too cramping and conventional to accommodate the full expanse of his talent.
George Walden's latest book is Who's a Dandy? (Gibson Square)
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