Philosophy Now Forum

January 28th, 2009: John Updike has died at seventy-six.
In the last decade or two, his work had increasingly grappled with issues of aging and death, so perhaps his actual death should come as no surprise. But somehow it does—as it may have to him, if a passage from one of his early stories, “Pigeon Feathers,” is any guide:

The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground. “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

“Prolific” is a term often used to describe Updike. The man spewed forth words at an almost alarming clip, churning out approximately one book of fiction or short stories a year throughout his long literary life, not to mention a simultaneous outpouring of book reviews and other essays. It would be surprising if all of them were very good, and of course they’re not. But an astonishing number are.

Updike’s fictional oeuvre wasn’t really my cup of coffee. The trials and adulterous liaisons of hard-drinking suburban men of the 1950s and 1960s, or the similar doings of former basketball stars in small-town Pennsylvania, aren’t my favored reading topics. But even though I’m not much of a novel-reader in general, I managed to voluntarily get through quite a sampler of Updike’s fictional output, mostly because of his amazing ability to write.

In this he reminds me of another (and less prolific) literary stylist of very different background and subject matter: Vladimir Nabokov. But where Updike celebrates the ordinary and accessible, Nabokov delves into the arcane and mysteriously complex. Where Updike is somewhat warm (although at times repellent), Nabokov is very cold (and at times repellent). But both are almost unsurpassed in their ability to string words together beautifully in what are often very long sentences that nevertheless retain their clarity of meaning.

These are virtuoso performances, meant to inspire awe. And they do. Updike also writes from a stance of awe (even religious awe; he was a very religious man) at the entire physical world and especially its amazing human denizens. And although he is often accused of being a misogynist because of the way he draws many of his female characters, I have always perceived a sort of grudging respect (and perhaps even awe) for women’s emotional depth and tenaciousness behind his portraits of a sex that always fascinated him.

My favorite works of Updike are his short stories and his personal essays. I happen to like the short story genre in general better than the novel, and in Updike’s case the shorter form focuses his mind and pen (or typewriter, or computer). Many of his short stories are far more openly biographical than his more wide-ranging novels; and this suits me, as well. I have always found truth stranger—and far more fascinating—than fiction, even if it is a shaped and slightly altered, more literary, truth.

You may laugh at the word “truth” in the context of fiction writing. But my sense of Updike is that in his writing he was almost ruthless with himself. The heroes fashioned in his image are often flawed men, bent on their own pleasure even at the expense of others, as they struggle with their competing desire to be decent and with their need to reconcile themselves with God. Nothing is simple; even Updike’s serially philandering husbands often experience a poignant and bitter regret when interacting with the divorced wives they left behind—and the regret is not only for the havoc they wreaked on the ex-spouse or the children, but that which they unwittingly inflicted on themselves.

One of my favorite Updike short stories is called “Guilt Gems.” It describes three incidents in the middle-aged male protagonist’s life that have left him with a terrible residue of guilt. These episodes are not what you might think; there is no sex involved, for instance. If I recall correctly (and forgive me if this in in error, because I am doing this from memory) they consist of the following: the narrator banishing the beloved family cat to the basement because he is allergic to it, and seeing the resultant stricken and angry look on his son’s face; the narrator allowing his elderly mother to drive home alone from the airport; and the narrator tagging out his daughter in a neighborhood baseball game.

The subject matter may sound trite, but in Updike’s hands it is not. Both in the descriptive and in the psychological sense, the writing is lusciously beautiful, as Updike’s writing nearly always is.

But perhaps my favorite Updike work is his “memoir,” entitled Self-Consciousness. Eschewing the conventional narrative trajectory of most autobiographies (as does Nabokov’s somewhat similar work, Speak, Memory), it deals with just a few aspects of Updike’s life.

Typically, two of them (his stuttering, his psoriasis) are previously hidden personal flaws that Updike chooses to expose and explore. If that sounds disgusting or vaguely Oprah-ish, Updike manages to avoid that trap. But best of all, the book contains the tour-de-force essay “On Being a Self Forever.” The subject is nothing less than individual human existence.

Now that Updike’s life is over, we will have no more yearly offerings from that singular voice. But the celebration of the ordinary by this extraordinary writer lives on.

I first read John Updike’s Vietnam War essay “On Not Being a Dove” in 1989. That’s when his memoir Self-Consciousness, the book in which it was included, was first published.

At the time the essay seemed to me to be a curiosity, a slight work of little import. After all, so many years had passed since the turmoil of the 60s and early 70s, with their fevered and nearly endless arguments about the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War. Updike was a reluctant hawk—or, rather, a non-dove—back then, and he explained why in the essay. But it had no particular resonance for me then, so many years after the fact.

My, the times they have a-changed. On reading the essay now, newly republished in Commentary, I find sentence after sentence to be not only extraordinarily insightful about what was going on back then, but remarkably relevant to what this country has just been through regarding Iraq. Not only that, but Updike’s description of his discomfiture in attempting to explain his more conservative stance on Vietnam to his liberal literati friends contains echoes of my own experiences with political discussions in the last few years.

In looking back from the vantage point of 1989, Updike quotes a letter he wrote in 1967 response to a NY Times book review:

Anyone not a rigorous pacifist must at least consider the argument that this war, evil as it is, is the lesser of available evils, intended to forestall worse wars. I am not sure that this is true, but I assume that this is the reasoning of those who prosecute it, rather than the maintenance of business prosperity or the President’s crazed stubbornness. I feel in the dove arguments as presented to me too much aesthetic distaste for the President…

Updike is writing about the dislike for Johnson. I cannot help but notice that the dislike for another, more recent, Texan president is also at least partly aesthetic in nature. Here is Updike in 1989:

The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world.

There is more; much more. Updike considered himself a liberal Democrat. But his basic intelligence and drive to be honest, both with himself and others, compelled him towards quite different conclusions than most of the people with whom he hobnobbed. And to speak up about it:

I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would. Those who would not, let them move North. But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that? And so on.
I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.

Updike’s fame was gained primarily as a writer of fiction; he was neither a politician, historian, nor statesman. In his essay, he asserts that writers’ views on the subject of the Vietnam War have no special authority. That is true. But his depth of thought, and the clarity with which it is expressed, creates its own authority:

My thoughts ran as follows. Peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle… It was all very well for civilized little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft evaders, but the United States had nobody to hide behind. Credibility must be maintained. Power is a dirty business, but who ever said it wasn’t?…

The Vietnam war—or any war—is “wrong,” but in the sense that existence itself is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer; and though the Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects, and the antiabortionists by picketing hospitals, and peace activists by lying down in front of ammunition trains, there is really no hiding what every meal we eat juicily demonstrates. Peace is not something we are entitled to but an illusory respite we earn. On both the personal and national level, islands of truce created by balances of terror and potential violence are the best we can hope for.

Updike loved this country and the comfortable and pleasant life he had carved out for himself within it. He never sought to become a pariah within the literary establishment; he wrote that “it pained and embarrassed me to be out of step with my magazine and literary colleagues.” But he could not embrace a position which he believed to be wrong—even if it was wildly unpopular—merely for the sake of convenience.

So, what did Updike think about the Iraq War? After all, he only died a few days ago; he was alive and kicking for most of it. After a quick Googling I was unable to find anything he wrote on the subject, but I think that this is very revealing. It’s a report by a blogger on a talk Updike gave back in 2006, in which he was asked his opinion of the war in Iraq. The questioner made a specific reference to Updike’s earlier views on Vietnam (the interviewer was Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker):

Goldberg points out that John Updike had been one of the few literary figures of the 1960’s to express support for the Vietnam War, and asks him to talk about George Bush and the war in Iraq. Updike accepts the comparison and acknowledges that, as in the 1960’s, his current feelings are mixed: the war is going badly, but the Bush administration faced hard choices and deserves some sympathy for the frustrating position it’s in.

Updike is clearly a principled moderate, and it’s brave of him to insist on ignoring the popular delineations between red-state and blue-state dogmatism…

Yes, indeed. Not that it got him much praise, then or now. Last night, for example, as I was watching a Charlie Rose tribute to John Updike that featured a panel composed of Updike’s editor Judith Jones, former New Yorker editor David Remnick, and New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, the latter casually mentioned, amidst the praise and reminiscence, that “of course, Updike was on the wrong side about the Vietnam War.”

Of course. Anyone who’s anyone knows that.