John Updike, R.I.P.

The novelist John Updike was memorialized this week at the Episcopal church he attended in Massachusetts. A few days before, I read this post from Rod Dreher, a blogger I usually like, reacting to Updike's death. Dreher, a rare mainstream journalist who is also a culturally conservative Christian, starts off by saying he's never read the novelist and probably never will. Why not?  Because he objects to Updike's focus on sexuality. Not long ago, Dreher said he doesn't read poetry, and I am irritated that this intelligent man is playing into the stereotype of the dim-witted religious right. But there is indeed something off about Updike's sexual focus, fixed as it is upon adultery. It's quite clear that his adulteries were the most important thing in his life, or at least in his art, far more so than his relationships with his children. Updike also moved left over the years, after declining early in his career to join liberal protests against the Vietnam War. He would up worrying publicly about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and supporting Democratic presidential candidates. So I can see where Dreher is coming from.

But the truth is I've always loved Updike, and found his fiction irresistible. Last May 26, The New Yorker published a story of his called "The Full Glass," with an aging protagonist looking back over his life, and focusing on one adulterous relationship. He was an insurance salesman when they were lovers, then moves away and adopts a blue-collar trade, finishing floors. He hears she is dead of ovarian cancer, and: "I rejoiced, to a degree. Her death removed a confusing presence from the world, an index to its unfulfilled potential. There. You see why I am not given to introspection. Scratch the surface, and ugliness pops up." The title of the story refers to glasses of water. This is how it ends, with the now old narrator before his bathroom mirror: "My life-prolonging pills cupped in my left hand, I lift the glass, its water sweetened by its brief wait on the marble sink-top. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned." To a believer, the visible world is the glory of God. To a Roman Catholic like me, the world beyond this one is not a black and white matter of salvation or damnation, because of the prospect of Purgatory, where I hope Updike and most us are bound.

Comments

[Brian]

You don't agree with Updike's politics but you were able to judge his artistic work on its own merits. To me, this is the mark of an enlightened person. (Sorry if I choked a little while typing that :-)

By contrast, this Dreher fellow blasts Updike even though he admits he's never even read the man! The worst kind of ignorance is the willful kind.

[Bob Conner]

TypePad
Hey Brian: I guess in defense of Dreher, we bloggers are liable to spout off the occasional silly thing on the spur of the moment. My post bothered me a little because of the lack of an Albany connection, but it has since occurred to me that Updike's Dutch-WASP ethnic heritage is the same as the founders of the city.