John Updike
publisher
Knopf
format
Hardcover
pages
304
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
MY FATHER’S TEARS by John Updike, was published posthumously and is the first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000. In this collection, Updike mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel. The American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination, all written by the most masterful of American authors.
About the Author
John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent his first years in nearby Shillington, a small town where his father was a high school science teacher. The area surrounding Reading has provided the setting for many of his stories, with the invented towns of Brewer and Olinger standing in for Reading and Shillington. An only child, Updike and his parents shared a house with his grandparents for much of his childhood. When he was 13, the family moved to his mother's birthplace, a stone farmhouse on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, eleven miles from Shillington, where he continued to attend school.
At home, he consumed popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries. His mother, herself an aspiring writer, encouraged him to write and draw. He excelled in school and served as President and co-valedictorian of his graduating class at Shillington High School. For the first three summers after high school, he worked as a copy boy at the Reading Eagle newspaper, eventually producing a number of feature stories for the paper. He received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University, where he majored in English. As an undergraduate, he wrote stories and drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, serving as the magazine's president in his senior year. Before graduating, he married fellow student Mary E. Pennington. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, and in that same year sold a poem and a short story to The New Yorker magazine.
Updike and his wife spent the following year in England, where Updike studied at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While they were in England, their first daughter was born and Updike met the American writers E. B. and Katharine White, editors at The New Yorker, who urged him to seek a job at the magazine. On returning from England, the Updikes settled in Manhattan, where John took a position as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He worked at the magazine for nearly two years, writing editorials, features and reviews, but after the birth of a son in 1957, he decided to move his growing family to the small town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. He continued to contribute to The New Yorker but resolved to support his family by writing full-time, without taking a salaried position. He maintained a lifelong relationship with The New Yorker, where many of his poems, reviews and short stories appeared, but he resided in Massachusetts for the rest of his life.
Updike's first book of poetry, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, was published by Harper and Brothers in 1958. When the publisher sought changes to the ending of his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, he moved to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The first novel was well-received, and with support from the Guggenheim Fellowship, Updike undertook a more ambitious novel, Rabbit, Run. The novel introduced one of Updike's most memorable characters, the small-town athlete, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Knopf feared that his frank description of Rabbit's sexual adventures could lead to prosecution for obscenity, and made a number of changes to the text. The book was published to widespread acclaim without legal repercussions. The original text was restored for the British edition a few years later, and subsequent American editions of the book have reflected the author's original intent. Updike's reputation as a leading author of his generation was established.
After the birth of a third child, Updike rented a one-room office above a restaurant in Ipswich, where he wrote for several hours every morning, six days a week, a schedule he adhered to throughout his career. In 1963, he received the National Book Award for his novel The Centaur, inspired by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following year, at age 32, he became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was invited by the State Department to tour eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1967, he joined the author Robert Penn Warren and other American writers in signing a letter urging Soviet writers to defend Jewish cultural institutions under attack by the Soviet government.
In 1968, Updike's novel Couples created a national sensation with its portrayal of the complicated relationships among a set of young married couples in the suburbs. It remained on the best-seller lists for over a year and prompted a Time magazine cover story featuring Updike. In Bech: A Book (1970), Updike introduced a new protagonist, the imaginary novelist Henry Bech, who, like Rabbit Angstrom, was destined to reappear in Updike's fiction for many years. Rabbit Angstrom reappeared in Rabbit Redux (1971).
In the 1970s, Updike continued to travel as a cultural ambassador of the United States, and in 1974 he joined authors John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur in calling on the Soviet government to cease its persecution of dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Updike separated from his wife Mary in 1974 and moved to Boston where he taught briefly at Boston University. Two years later, the Updikes were divorced, and in 1977 he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children in Georgetown, Massachusetts.
Rabbit is Rich, published in 1981, received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1983 Updike's other alter ego, Harry Bech, reappeared in Bech is Back, and Updike was featured in a second Time magazine cover story, "Going Great at 50." Among his novels of the 1980s and 1990s are a trilogy retelling The Scarlet Letter from the points of view of three different characters, and a prequel to Hamlet, entitled Gertrude and Claudius. In 1991 he received a second Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit at Rest. He was only the third American to win a second Pulitzer Prize in the fiction category.
In an autobiographical essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and religion as "the three great secret things" in human experience. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions. A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, the Jesuit magazine America awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a "distinguished Christian person of letters." He received the National Medal of Art from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from President George W. Bush. He was one of a very few Americans to receive both of these honors. The same year saw the publication of a comprehensive collection, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.
John Updike spent his last years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the same corner of New England where so much of his fiction is set. His last book was The Widows of Eastwick (2008), a sequel to his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. Updike succumbed to lung cancer the following year at the age of 76.
Beyond the book
BOOKS from Slate
The Examined, and Exhibited, Life
Updike was the consummate stylist with a blogger mentality.
By Brad Leithauser
Updated Monday, June 8, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET
With intimidating steadiness, right up until his death last January, John Updike went on doing what he'd done from the outset: He wrote and published, wrote and published. He wrested a first acceptance from The New Yorker in the summer he graduated from Harvard in 1954 and had released his first book, a collection of poetry, by 1958. Most subsequent years saw a new Updike volume and sometimes two. In the five months since he died, we've had two posthumous collections: Endpoint and Other Poems, issued in March, which served as a bookend to Midpoint and Other Poems (1969), and now My Father's Tears and Other Stories.
It has become almost a cliché to marvel over Updike's adherence to Henry James's dictum that the writer should be "one of the people on whom nothing is lost." For Updike, no meaningful experience went unrecorded and unpublished, ingeniously translated into fiction or verse. Over time, loyal readers began to feel a companionable connectedness not merely with his writing but with his much-photographed life. (He appeared on the cover of a number of his dust jackets.) You felt you knew his comings and goings, whether geographical or emotional, with a thoroughness usually reserved for your closest friends. This peculiar sense of familiarity surely goes a long way in explaining the extraordinary national outpouring of grief and admiration in the wake of his death.
Among American writers of his generation, Updike was unusual in his comprehensive effort to get the entirety of his life into his fiction. He certainly stands apart from Truman Capote, or Norman Mailer, or Philip Roth, or Joyce Carol Oates, or Anne Tyler—all of whose birthdates lie within 10 years of his. Yet a strange thing happened during his last decade: A different generation caught up with him. Updike seems less unusual when set beside a newer and typically much younger group of American writers: bloggers. Among them, too, we often witness an impulse to throw the whole of one's life onto the page—or the computer screen.
This shift may be less a result of changing sensibilities than a simple change in technologies. Updike was privileged—deservedly so. There weren't many writers of his generation granted what was essentially carte blanche to fill row after row of New Yorker columns, or page after page of Knopf books, with whatever pleased them. Many bloggers, on the other hand, have no editorial team they must win over before their work materializes. What was once a rare privilege is now a common right.
A story like "Morocco," which opens My Father's Tears, has some kinship with the sort of vacation blogs you'll find on the Internet. The story—one of the book's weakest—feels reportorial and autobiographical, an attempt to salvage, by way of entertainment, an exotic family vacation beset by minor difficulties and disappointments (chilly weather, currency problems, mazelike streets).
Still, the difference between an Updike and a would-be Updike is of course immense and immediately felt. You experience it at the most basic, sentence-by-sentence level. Updike was the master of an effortless elaborateness that allowed him to express great subtlety—of nuance, of thought—without losing an impression of lucidity. He is one of those rare writers whom you never want to read without a pencil in hand, ever alert to the prickling possibility, even where a story or novel or poem seems to be flagging, that you will soon meet some verbal aptness that calls out to be noted now and pondered later.
There's an early example near the end of "The Happiest I've Been," which concluded his first collection of stories, The Same Door (1959). The narrator and his high school friend have begun a long dawn drive across snowy Pennsylvania, and the friend lights a cigarette: "A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh." The sentence is nothing more than an elaboration of the story's title, but with the heavy, rasping rhyme of "scratch" and "match," the somewhat grandiose "diminution," and the way in which this suddenly magical drive promises to come bumping back down to earth with the approaching lights and clangor of Pittsburgh, Updike effects a stunning conjunction of the lyrical and quotidian. He was 26 when this story was first published.
And for another half-century he went on producing sentences as fine and fertile as this one. I felt a similar thrill, reading My Father's Tears, when I came upon this:
He gasped for breath, doggy-paddling back to the dock, and from this lower perspective saw the trees all around as the sides of a golden well, an encirclement holding him at the center of the circumscribed sky.
And this:
Except for her bust, abruptly outthrust in the eight grade, her physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness.
And these two, from my favorite of the new stories, "The Walk with Elizanne":
Her face displayed, along with that demure quick smile he could now remember—a smile that darted in and out—a good sense of herself, an established social identity momentarily set aside, for this occasion, like a man's jacket folded into an airplane's overhead bin.
And:
Then he kissed her again, entering that warm still point around which the universe wheeled, its load of stars not yet visible, the sky still blue above the streetlights.
"The Walk With Elizanne" reintroduces David Kern—a Pennsylvania native and stand-in for the author—whose initial appearance dates back to The Same Door. We met him as a teenager; now, he's returned to Pennsylvania for his 50th high-school reunion, an event that naturally tilts his teenage years again into the foreground. (When the narrator of the title story, "My Father's Tears," remarks, "I have never really left Pennsylvania," he might be speaking for either Kern or Updike.)
In a dark book—My Father's Tears is probably the bleakest of any of Updike's story collections; for all the gorgeous prose, death and the disabling indignities that are its forerunners are ubiquitous—"The Walk With Elizanne" strikes a welcome counter-note. It scintillates with Updike's conviction, borne out in a lifetime of devotion to the writing desk, that the amassing of sharp-eyed observation can be salvational.
At his reunion, David encounters someone he doesn't instantly recognize, a classmate named Elizanne, who, at the close of the evening, offers an unexpected and touching confession: "You were very important to me. You were the first boy who ever walked me home and—and kissed me." In the aftermath of the reunion, David undertakes a peculiar charge, which—as so often in Updike's fiction—requires a painstaking ransacking of memory. Shaped in equal parts by the "distorting lens of old age" and the riddled abiogenesis of art, David begins to reconstruct his fateful and yet nearly forgotten walk with Elizanne.
Kern's pilgrimage is ultimately directed toward a kiss—a teenage girl's first kiss—but before arriving there he must reconstruct street after street of his largely vanished hometown:
David's walk with Elizanne must have taken him from the high school or its grounds along the Pike through the blocks of semi-detached houses, which above their porches held picture windows where seasonal decorations—orange-paper pumpkins and black-paper hats for Halloween, Christmas tinsel, Easter baskets—announced the residents' fealty to the Christian calendar. The trees along the streets changed from horse chestnuts in the old section where he lived to dense lines of Norway maples.
A reader can, in the midst of all this lovingly recreated specificity, almost lose sight of the notion that David's is ultimately a two-pronged spiritual quest. Memory must first be made to yield, but then the language of its surrender must be given a careful burnish worthy of this rediscovered world. You get the feeling, by the story's close, that David's restoration is richer than the distant, dwindled events that inspired it. Updike—a marvelous critic—was especially delighted by, and illuminating in his analysis of, art's paradoxes. And here's a prime example of an ancient and ever-new miracle: the copy that turns out to be brighter and sharper-edged than the original.
Brad Leithauser is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University