Updike: the trivial and the profound
[NOTE: I happened across this old post of mine from December of 2012, and I liked it enough to give it another go-round.]
I’ve long been a fan of John Updike’s short stories, although his novels—which are probably much more widely read—don’t do all that much for me. He was one of the most prolific writers of the last century, so there’s plenty of both genres from which to pick and choose.
Perhaps I like the short stories better because I prefer short stories to novels in general. I’m not sure why—some sort of reader ADD, perhaps But I think most novels allow the writer to be too self-indulgent, going on and on and often becoming a repetitious or meandering bore—whereas short stories require focus, focus, focus.
Well, I like tapas bars and tasting menus, too.
Right now I’m reading a collection of Updike stories entitled “The Maples Stories,” about a fictional couple called the Maples whom Updike followed for decades from early marriage through disillusionment and conflict to divorce. The Maples are surrogates for Updike and his first wife, who split in the 70s.
Updike’s world is not mine. I don’t live (and never have lived) among brittle, intelligent, hard-drinking suburban couples during the 50s, 60s, and 70s who compulsively engaged in multiple affairs with each other, both casual and non. Or at least, if I did, I was so out of the loop I never realized it.
But Updike’s Maples stories—of which I’d read two or three even before reading this book—have always grabbed me because they seem to express almost perfectly the sturm and drang, the bittersweet regret, and the strong centripetal force that even a failing and miserable marriage can exert on wretched and flawed spouses deciding whether to remain together or go their separate ways.
Updike is not only a master of poetically precise language and description (both of external and internal states), but he is a master of observation. Once an art student, he retained an eye for just about everything. He’s been criticized for focusing on the trivial, the slight, the non-heroic, but I think that misses the point—which is his love of almost everything on earth as a source of wonder.
To Updike, nothing is trivial. Or rather, the celestial is in the details. For, despite his emphasis on the physical minutiae of illicit sex (more often found in the novels than the stories), and the large and small failures and betrayals of the human race (including, quite prominently, those of Updike himself, through surrogates), Updike’s other great theme is religion, as well as the fleeting nature of a single human life.
It was a quiet story entitled “Plumbing” in the Maples book that prompted this essay of mine. The story is about moving from an old house to a new, but that doesn’t even begin to capture what Updike does with his description of the empty old house and the life the family had lived there, beginning with a plumber’s dissertation on the flaws in the pipes in the new home to which the family has moved. I suggest you read the whole thing, but this excerpt may serve to give you just a tiny idea of the splendors hidden there:
The old house, the house we left, a mile away, seems relieved to be rid of our furniture. The rooms where we lived, where we staged our meals and ceremonies and self-dramatizations and where some of us went from infancy to adolescence—rooms and stairways so imbued with our daily motions that their irregularities were bred into our bones and could be traversed in the dark—do not seem to mourn, as I’d imagined they would. The house exults in its sudden size, in the reach of its empty corners. Floorboards long muffled by carpets shine as if freshly varnished. Sun pours unobstructed through the curtainless windows. The house is young again. It, too, had a self, a life, which for a time was eclipsed by our lives; now, before its new owners come to burden it, it is free. Now long moonlight makes the floor creak. When, some mornings, I return, to retrieve a few final oddments—andirons, picture frames—the space of the house greets me with virginal impudence. Opening the front door is like opening the door to the cat who comes in with the morning milk, who mews in passing on his way to the beds still warm with our night’s sleep, his routine so tenuously attached to ours, by a single mew and a shared roof. Nature is tougher than ecologists admit. Our house forgot us in a day.
[NOTE: If you haven’t read Updike on Vietnam, please do.]
Never cared for Updike. His frequency is out of sync with mine.
Updike is full of passages that are a joy to read — not only lyrical and precise but, as your quotation shows, intelligent.
I’m afraid that what you delicately call his descriptions of the minutiae of sex seem to me more accurately described as a Masters-and-Johnson’s eye view, and they give me the creeps.
Neo, thanks for the outstanding links, including your past post.
I think the quote about the empty house is especially fine. Updike had a clear vision of reality, and the empty house shows his ability to express that vision exceptionally well.
The Left’s postmodern curricula in its various guises–whereby students no longer learn how to read with facility, and where students never come into contact with the world’s best literature–have stolen some of the great experiences in life from the majority of the children of at least two American generations. Even those who don’t care for Updike should at least have the real chance to discover that they don’t. (Nowadays, if you want a list of the best writing, look at the works that used to be required for a degree in Literature but no longer are. And I don’t mean for just English literature.) It’s heartbreaking.
And thank you for the link to Updike on Viet Nam. Two of my brothers fought in Viet Nam, 1967-1969, USMC. They fought during the Tet Offensive, and America won it. Updike’s ideas on it all are well worth reading, and understanding. I believe that a glance at the satellite image of North and South Korea at night, which can be found here in a particularly worthwhile link:
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/driveby/darkland_its_never_daylig.php
with the profound darkness of the North, is eloquent as a visual expression of the value of America’s fight and victory in the South in the Korean War. The Viet Nam War was an attempt to bring this sort of enlightenment to at least South Viet Nam. The Left brought its usual ideological darkness to the end of that war, including the ugly efforts of a man named John Kerry; moreover, now they are trying to bring that darkness to America, with Kerry’s machinations on the world stage, including the evil of the fraud of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
The past is prologue.
Totally agree with David at 7:47 PM.
Maybe it is natural to advanced age, but descriptions and depictions of coupling, no matter by how great a writer (and Updike is great), have become a discouraging turn-off.
What artistically seemed so awesome and “real” a few decades ago in a Bukovski or even in the comics of R. Crumb, now just seem like tmi, an artistic floperoo.
(Trite alert): In his short stories, De Maupassant amazingly conveyed the erotic (and a lot else) without getting into the details, and yes our culture used to be able to convey the erotic quite clearly and erotically without getting into the details (baby, it’s cold outside).
As a matter of principle I do not use the infantile “first initial-word” convention (e.g. “the n-word”), so please forgive me the following. The word “fuck” has long since become more than tedious, and I say this as a habitual user of the word, despite my better self. And I classify the use of the word artistically with the details of coupling.
But to get off the old geezer stuff,
Minta Marie at 8:43 PM has a great post from beginning to end. The Left’s postmodern curricula in its various guises–whereby students no longer learn how to read with facility, and where students never come into contact with the world’s best literature–have stolen some of the great experiences in life from the majority of the children of at least two American generations.
This identifies one of the highly successful triumphs of the Left, robbing folks of the opportunity to understand actual life better, to become more profound in their own thinking, judgment and understanding.
What neo has done with Frost and Updike (and much more) in her posts is to gracefully, naturally, point out how they were personally outside the Saturday morning cartoon fest our culture has become, primarily because the Left controls the culture and that is what best serves their ends.
As with Mamet, it gives one comfort in a hopeless age.
I am not an Updike fan, though my Lord, the man can write — his story “Pigeon Feathers” has passages in it that are enough to make other writers throw away their pens. In spite of the beautiful words, I somehow never believed in his characters. However, tonight I reread this post, remembering it dimly from the last time Neo posted it, and was stopped in my tracks by the line, “Our house forgot us in a day.” Last year we moved away from the farm where we’d spent more than two decades and raised our children into adulthood. There was something about the pictures we took of the empty rooms after the movers left, something I couldn’t put my finger on, something that’s been nagging at me ever since — and that was it. The house forgot us, after the lives we lived and made there, a 200-year-old house that had forgotten countless lives before ours. That’s what it was. And it took Updike to show me.