John Updike.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)

John Updike (1932-2009) once said that his first publication and nearly sixty-year-long relationship with this magazine was the great professional event of his life--no, he called it the ecstatic event of his professional life--and he never tired (for younger writers, it was inspiring to see how he never tired) of seeing his prose in Caslon type, his name for all those decades appended to, or, later, preambling, a story or a review in these pages. It was part of the great good luck of this magazine that he needed, or indulged, us, and that his appetites and ambitions matched the dreams of the editors--which is only to say that several generations of editors tossed a bit less fitfully at 3 A.M., knowing that, if a book on some knotty modern subject had been sent out to Massachusetts, two weeks later there was sure to be, rebounding back, nine or ten pages of perfectly tuned prose--typo-free, full of cunning synopsis, serene judgment, big news (a generation got educated on Borges and Nabokov alongside him), bite without tooth marks, and always at the end a permanent turn of phrase or a metaphor, not a witticism merely but a benediction, a blessing, an insight that lifted it far above mere reviewing and into a form of witty personal poetry.

And, as those same generations of editors learned, the near-perfect thing was usually prefaced by a letter gaily outlining its supposed inadequacies, and all the reasons the editors might wisely prefer not to run it at all--a form of modesty that, given not just the quality but the heat and shimmer of what was enclosed, passed the edge of modesty to touch the edge of superstition: it was, one realized, Updike's way of staying young, an outsider, pressing his face against a window, still the long-faced brilliant boy on a remote Pennsylvania farm turning the pages of a New York magazine and quietly deciding to be a cartoonist and a humorist and a parodist, while the loving and ambitious mother fretted and the weak but honest father listened to the radio (a family triangle that he inserted, again and again, into all our imaginations). He was still a kid from Shillington dreaming of being a New York wit, and feeling lucky that he had been allowed in at all.

Those reviews alone would have been enough to make a major career, each one not laying down the law for the writer but bringing news to the reader. (What editor would not cry out in delight at finding a piece that made the simple and sage distinction that purposes are not points, that, where the purpose of "King Lear" was to purge the soul with pity and terror, its point was that old men should not retire prematurely.) And then one remembered that the prose was just the ivy on the drystone wall of his short stories, which provided a lyric, etched picture of a half century's domestic manners and longings. And then one remembered that the wall of stories was just a pleasant border surrounding the lawn and mansion of his twenty-three novels, which had cumulatively taken on the full weight of American social history, doing the classic job of the nineteenth-century novel as though no one had ever said you couldn't any longer, tracking our experience from the parched Truman era to gray-and-white Eisenhower and beyond to smiling Reagan and shaky Carter and even sexy Ford. (And then one recalled that the author might have traded in two or three of those novels for another volume or two of poetry, which was, of all his work, his special pet.) Thinking about the scale of that achievement, one turned back to the ivy, and hoped someday to climb at least that high.

John Updike was a fine colleague, a beaming platform presence, a valued contributor, a welcome visitor to the office, a genial supporter of younger writers--just a freelance writer living in Massachusetts, as he puckishly described himself. And, the hard part for his colleagues and friends to square, he was also one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing. As well as any writer ever has, he fulfilled Virginia Woolf's dictum that the writer's job is to get himself or herself expressed without impediments--to do so as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did, without hate or pause or protest or obvious special pleading or the thousand other ills that the embattled writer is heir to. Woolf meant not that the writer's job was to write a lot, or to register the self with a splash, but to get his or her real experience down: all the private pains and pictures, the look on a loving parent's face when humiliated in a school corridor, or the way girls smell in football season--to get it down and fix it there for good. Updike, to use a phrase he liked, got it all in, from snow in Greenwich Village on a fifties street to the weather in the American world.

If he gave so much to the magazine, he took something from it, too. He took, and kept, a tone. Updike the humorist is probably the least known or recognizable Updike of them all, but something of the White-cum-Thurber sound of the New Yorker that he joined--that bemused, ironically smiling but resolutely well-wishing, anti-malicious comic tone--lingered in his work till the very end. In the last year of his life, he wrote to an admirer that "humor is my default mode," and that he still dreamed of being the new Benchley, the next Perelman. He flourished in his early years here, writing Talk pieces and casuals (his parody of Harry Truman as the Adam of "Paradise Lost" is one small masterpiece among many), and the material of comedy remained implicit in almost every sentence he wrote: the dancing recognition of the likeness of the unlike, the will to treat the organic mechanically--his sexual congresses are blissful but funny, never "transcendent," because they are so entirely acts of organic machinery, wise souls made into copulating clockwork. The common sense that regularly inflected his judgments of big writers and dubious ideas had its origins in a humorous tradition, too; in his criticism he caught the notes of Wolcott Gibbs and Brendan Gill as much as those of Edmund Wilson.

And the comic current ran deeper even than that. Despite the lyrical surface of his prose, Updike was a realist, as comedians must be, and never even marginally a romantic. He was genuinely unseduced by all the myths of American romanticism: gorgeous Daisys and vast sinister Western landscapes are equally absent from his books. His girls and women are real, with scratchy pubic hair, and his American landscape of car dealerships and fast-food retreats held no place for doomed, exciting, existential gunmen. He was, for all those perfect shining sentences, a realist; the sentences sing, but they don't ennoble.

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