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Updike
Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.�
Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society� he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.
In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.�
Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society� he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.
With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published April 8, 2014
91 people are currently reading
1,369 people want to read
About the author
Adam Begley
13books24followersAdam Begley was for twelve years the books editor of The New York Observer. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement. He lives with his wife in Cambridgeshire, England.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
September 13, 2018
Rabbit Run was the first grown up book I read as a young adult that I could truly identify with. I remember thinking that Updike was a genius without knowing anything else about him. He wrote with teutonic precision, to borrow a phrase from Adam Begley the biographer, in capturing Harry's innermost thoughts. I went and devoured the rest of the Rabbit tetralogy. All the novels in the series felt genuine and authentic in spite of the criticisms around Harry's excessive testosterone and mysognistic instincts. The latter two books, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest each won Pulitzer prizes. I still consider this to be the best novel series that I have ever read. Perhaps it is because I grew up in a small town, like Updike, but I relate to Updike's writing in a way that I can't with say Philip Roth. So the Rabbit series was my introduction to Updike and I went on to read Centaur, Witches of Eastwick which I thought were good but I did not have the same emotional connection to the characters.
So I think to appreciate this biography, you will need to like Updike's writing. Begley does a superb job of capturing Updike the writer who was essentially Updike the person. All of Updyke's major works are discussed in the biography in chronological order and carefully interwoven with his life. It helps that Begley exhibits a careful command of vocabulary. It is always appropriate that a gifted writer would be the one to pen a biography about a legendary writer like Updike. The biography seems to capture the Updike that I remember from listening to interviews and reading some of his non-fiction articles. Since Updike was such a prodigious writer and gave so many interviews, his life story was as close to an open book as you'll find. I did like the literary circle discussion and some of the sniping that went on when Roth, Wolfe, Hitchens and Updike might comment on each other's works. Roth seemed to take the highest ground, Updike somewhere in the middle, Wolfe lower still and Hitchens at the bottom.
In a nutshell this biography is an excellent read especially if you are very fond of Updike the writer.
So I think to appreciate this biography, you will need to like Updike's writing. Begley does a superb job of capturing Updike the writer who was essentially Updike the person. All of Updyke's major works are discussed in the biography in chronological order and carefully interwoven with his life. It helps that Begley exhibits a careful command of vocabulary. It is always appropriate that a gifted writer would be the one to pen a biography about a legendary writer like Updike. The biography seems to capture the Updike that I remember from listening to interviews and reading some of his non-fiction articles. Since Updike was such a prodigious writer and gave so many interviews, his life story was as close to an open book as you'll find. I did like the literary circle discussion and some of the sniping that went on when Roth, Wolfe, Hitchens and Updike might comment on each other's works. Roth seemed to take the highest ground, Updike somewhere in the middle, Wolfe lower still and Hitchens at the bottom.
In a nutshell this biography is an excellent read especially if you are very fond of Updike the writer.
May 1, 2014
I thought and dreamt about this book for many years before it existed, or before it was even in the works. I almost never read Updike these days; in my twenties, however, he was second only to Nabokov (another writer I almost never read any more). I didn't just read the Rabbit novels or those old anthology stand-bys "Pigeon Feathers" and "A&P." I read it all—things like A Month of Sundays, say, or the poetry. I think I even took a stab at his play Buchanan Dying. He was about my parents' age, so his work was, among other things, a vicarious peering-into that generation's life. I kind of loved Updike—I loved that dorkily elegant insider/outsider almost like I'd love a father. And although Updike, autobiographical to a fault, gave us so much, I wanted to know more.
I knew this book would eventually get written by somebody, and think I mainly wanted two things out of it: I wanted to know how Updike wrote so well, and I wanted to know about all the sex. As Begley reveals, the good writing came from a fairly un-mysterious combination of early training from a writer-mother, a ferocious work ethic, and a certifiably high IQ. Yes, Updike was really, really smart. As for the mistresses, Begley protects most of their identities, but he does plunge us deep into the first big affair, which damn near killed Updike, and the second, which led to his second marriage and sealed Updike away in a Beverly Farms mansion, where he cultivated his franchise and circled the wagons amidst all the dull charges of misogyny and solipsism.
Updike's great quest was to become a famous writer, and the great drama of his adult life was his years-long escape from his marriage via an epic run of infidelity. Once he had accomplished these two things, his life was effectively over. By his early fifties he was already lamenting the loss of everything—his creative energy, his youth, the works. So anyway, I knew one day I'd hold such a book in my hands and now here it is. Now I know. And so, it's over.
I knew this book would eventually get written by somebody, and think I mainly wanted two things out of it: I wanted to know how Updike wrote so well, and I wanted to know about all the sex. As Begley reveals, the good writing came from a fairly un-mysterious combination of early training from a writer-mother, a ferocious work ethic, and a certifiably high IQ. Yes, Updike was really, really smart. As for the mistresses, Begley protects most of their identities, but he does plunge us deep into the first big affair, which damn near killed Updike, and the second, which led to his second marriage and sealed Updike away in a Beverly Farms mansion, where he cultivated his franchise and circled the wagons amidst all the dull charges of misogyny and solipsism.
Updike's great quest was to become a famous writer, and the great drama of his adult life was his years-long escape from his marriage via an epic run of infidelity. Once he had accomplished these two things, his life was effectively over. By his early fifties he was already lamenting the loss of everything—his creative energy, his youth, the works. So anyway, I knew one day I'd hold such a book in my hands and now here it is. Now I know. And so, it's over.
September 7, 2021
Borges once said of James Joyce that he was less a man of letters than an entire literature. If you want a sentence to sum up John Updike's career - a writer who published over fifty books and twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - you’d struggle to concoct a better one than that.
Updike was the only child of poor, Depression-era parents. The creator of juvenile basketball ace Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom doesn't sound like the type of kid you'd pick for the school team. Young Updike was gawky, shy, with a chronic stutter. Besides his psoriasis, Updike also suffered frequent stomach pains, hay fever, and his hair at times suddenly fell out in clumps. Home life was idyllic but secluded once Mother moved the family to a farm. If you overlook Mother's mood swings and total lack of talent for farming or producing publishable manuscripts, she was undeniably devoted to pushing her son towards his destiny. In an interview, she talked of receiving 'a premonition' that if she married Updike's father, 'the results would be amazing.�
The results were longer coming than you might think. Updike entered Harvard on a scholarship and remained a hard-working student, but felt out of his depth among the rich, privately-educated boys who formed most of the studentry. His repeated submissions to the New Yorker came back with depressing regularity. Applying for Archibald MacLeish's creative writing class, Updike was rejected twice. Homesickness struck him like dysentery.
Somehow, as if by magic, things suddenly began to go right. Updike met a girl, continued to produce and send out cartoons, poems and stories, and saw his humorous pieces published in a college periodical. A publisher, keen on those student pieces, asked him if he'd care to submit something to them for publication. A story drafted in the classroom finally snuck into the New Yorker’s pages. Updike netted not only an acceptance but, four months after publication, a job offer at the magazine.
Begley wisely focuses much attention on Updike's short stories - and not just for practical reasons. The New Yorker's 'whale sized' cheques financed Updike comfortably for the length of his writing life, ensuring he would never need publisher's advances. At their best, the stories are matchlessly sharp and poetic. They also form a running commentary on Updike's life: from dreamy, precocious teenager to happily married father, from not-so-happily-married father to serial adulterer and beyond.
Begley does a tactful job of tying his subject's characters to the people around him. Sometimes those ties were too close: one of the husbands who appeared in Couples, who also happened to be a lawyer, nearly sued him. Updike asked for some of his rawer stories to be 'banked' by the New Yorker for later - several years later. Marry Me, first written in the mid-1960s, was shelved for over a decade before it was printed. Although 'the vessel of circumstantial facts is all invented', Updike wrote, 'the liquid contained may, if spilled soon, scald somebody.�
Begley makes a dignified case for Marry Me’s merits and gives considerable space to Couples (which, we learn, earned over a million dollars and lifted Updike’s income from $50,000 to $410,000 in one year alone). As is only proper, ample space is given to the Rabbit novels, though very little on Rabbit At Rest - a mistake, for it is the crowning achievement of the whole sequence.
Canny readers will spot Rabbit's predecessors in Updike's work, notably in the poem 'Ex-Basketball Player'. Now, we know Updike's editor, Katharine White, actively discouraged him from writing about the kind of people the New Yorker looked down on. She also told a friend, somewhat acidly, that fiction wasn't Updike's best vein, and wondered if he was 'too versatile for his own good', which seems a strange thing to complain about. Far from being a New Yorker 'creation', Updike's greatest fiction was created in defiance of it.
Begley knows when to trust the small details and always has room for the illuminating anecdote or fact. Updike’s first New Yorker acceptance earned him $490, his second $612.50 and his third $826. This was at a time when his Father's annual salary amounted to $1,200.
We may have noticed that Rabbit at Rest ends in Florida, where Rabbit was unsuccessfully trying to escape to at the end of Rabbit, Run. Now we know the city where Rabbit dies was named after the hero from his Mother’s unpublished novel. Sometimes coincidence was a fine collaborator. Updike’s celebrated piece on the baseball player Ted Williams was written because Updike had called on a mistress who wasn't home.
Writers, I think, are a competitive, grumpy lot, not just John Updike. Begley doesn't indulge in hagiography but he is unduly harsh in places. Begley allows that Updike moved from New York to avoid narrowing his fiction. He then snaps his verbal ruler on his subject's knuckles, forgetting his previous claim when he says Updike moved solely to become ‘a big fish in a small pond.' Which is it?
I am not convinced by the case for Updike's poetry. Too little space is given to the last three decades of his life. I also wish someone intent on bolstering Updike's reputation had used more of his sentences. A mere handful from the short stories, however well unpacked, simply won't do. For whether describing an apple, a lover's flesh or a row of condoms at the drugstore counter, Updike makes you see things as if you've never seen them before. When people describe Updike as a poet moonlighting as a novelist they are paying him a sincere compliment, for his work celebrates the ordinary and gives ‘the mundane its beautiful due.�
There will be other lives of Updike but they will have to run fast to outpace this one.
Updike was the only child of poor, Depression-era parents. The creator of juvenile basketball ace Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom doesn't sound like the type of kid you'd pick for the school team. Young Updike was gawky, shy, with a chronic stutter. Besides his psoriasis, Updike also suffered frequent stomach pains, hay fever, and his hair at times suddenly fell out in clumps. Home life was idyllic but secluded once Mother moved the family to a farm. If you overlook Mother's mood swings and total lack of talent for farming or producing publishable manuscripts, she was undeniably devoted to pushing her son towards his destiny. In an interview, she talked of receiving 'a premonition' that if she married Updike's father, 'the results would be amazing.�
The results were longer coming than you might think. Updike entered Harvard on a scholarship and remained a hard-working student, but felt out of his depth among the rich, privately-educated boys who formed most of the studentry. His repeated submissions to the New Yorker came back with depressing regularity. Applying for Archibald MacLeish's creative writing class, Updike was rejected twice. Homesickness struck him like dysentery.
Somehow, as if by magic, things suddenly began to go right. Updike met a girl, continued to produce and send out cartoons, poems and stories, and saw his humorous pieces published in a college periodical. A publisher, keen on those student pieces, asked him if he'd care to submit something to them for publication. A story drafted in the classroom finally snuck into the New Yorker’s pages. Updike netted not only an acceptance but, four months after publication, a job offer at the magazine.
Begley wisely focuses much attention on Updike's short stories - and not just for practical reasons. The New Yorker's 'whale sized' cheques financed Updike comfortably for the length of his writing life, ensuring he would never need publisher's advances. At their best, the stories are matchlessly sharp and poetic. They also form a running commentary on Updike's life: from dreamy, precocious teenager to happily married father, from not-so-happily-married father to serial adulterer and beyond.
Begley does a tactful job of tying his subject's characters to the people around him. Sometimes those ties were too close: one of the husbands who appeared in Couples, who also happened to be a lawyer, nearly sued him. Updike asked for some of his rawer stories to be 'banked' by the New Yorker for later - several years later. Marry Me, first written in the mid-1960s, was shelved for over a decade before it was printed. Although 'the vessel of circumstantial facts is all invented', Updike wrote, 'the liquid contained may, if spilled soon, scald somebody.�
Begley makes a dignified case for Marry Me’s merits and gives considerable space to Couples (which, we learn, earned over a million dollars and lifted Updike’s income from $50,000 to $410,000 in one year alone). As is only proper, ample space is given to the Rabbit novels, though very little on Rabbit At Rest - a mistake, for it is the crowning achievement of the whole sequence.
Canny readers will spot Rabbit's predecessors in Updike's work, notably in the poem 'Ex-Basketball Player'. Now, we know Updike's editor, Katharine White, actively discouraged him from writing about the kind of people the New Yorker looked down on. She also told a friend, somewhat acidly, that fiction wasn't Updike's best vein, and wondered if he was 'too versatile for his own good', which seems a strange thing to complain about. Far from being a New Yorker 'creation', Updike's greatest fiction was created in defiance of it.
Begley knows when to trust the small details and always has room for the illuminating anecdote or fact. Updike’s first New Yorker acceptance earned him $490, his second $612.50 and his third $826. This was at a time when his Father's annual salary amounted to $1,200.
We may have noticed that Rabbit at Rest ends in Florida, where Rabbit was unsuccessfully trying to escape to at the end of Rabbit, Run. Now we know the city where Rabbit dies was named after the hero from his Mother’s unpublished novel. Sometimes coincidence was a fine collaborator. Updike’s celebrated piece on the baseball player Ted Williams was written because Updike had called on a mistress who wasn't home.
Writers, I think, are a competitive, grumpy lot, not just John Updike. Begley doesn't indulge in hagiography but he is unduly harsh in places. Begley allows that Updike moved from New York to avoid narrowing his fiction. He then snaps his verbal ruler on his subject's knuckles, forgetting his previous claim when he says Updike moved solely to become ‘a big fish in a small pond.' Which is it?
I am not convinced by the case for Updike's poetry. Too little space is given to the last three decades of his life. I also wish someone intent on bolstering Updike's reputation had used more of his sentences. A mere handful from the short stories, however well unpacked, simply won't do. For whether describing an apple, a lover's flesh or a row of condoms at the drugstore counter, Updike makes you see things as if you've never seen them before. When people describe Updike as a poet moonlighting as a novelist they are paying him a sincere compliment, for his work celebrates the ordinary and gives ‘the mundane its beautiful due.�
There will be other lives of Updike but they will have to run fast to outpace this one.
July 5, 2014
I've been a fan of John Updike's work for a long time. I read this first biography eager to learn more about where the fiction I admire came from. I was a little surprised to learn that it came from his own life. For the most part he recast his own personal experiences into his writings. From the early short stories to the first novel, Of the Farm, to the magnificence of The Centaur to Marry Me and even to the racy, notorious Couples, Updike was telling his own story. The famous characterizations of Henry Bech, Richard Maples, Peter Caldwell, and Piet Hanema were all portraits of the author himself while other characters in the novels were based on his family and friends more or less, particularly his wife Mary. Equally surprising to me was learning that Rabbit Angstrom of the well-regarded tetralogy bears little resemblance to Updike.
The way Updike recycled his own life and the lives of family and others around him determined the shape of Adam Begley's biography. Writing a critical biography was almost necessitated by that important trait of the fiction. I was pleased that the fiction received such detailed analysis. I also felt it appropriate that a man who put so much of himself into his stories and novels should have a biographer who relates his subject through that fiction. Almost every event of Updike's life has some fictional parallel. Whether a boy contemplating pigeons in a barn, the death of his mother, or adultery in Ipswich, Massachusetts, events of his life are inserted and interpreted in the work. Begley tells the biography in that way. For that reason it's all slightly non-linear, but it is fascinatingly full of descriptions and facts of how Updike lived, worked, and thought, including material sensational and tabloid-like as well as artistic and philosophical. It's almost seamless. In essence, the life is explored as how it relates to the writings. The happy result is that both life and the life's work receive comprehensive analysis. The happy result is thoroughly satisfying as a biography that's slightly eccentric but which is well organized and well written and runs like a well-oiled machine.
Adam Begley was an insider. He's the son of the novelist Louis Begley (Wartime Lies; About Schmidt). We're told the Begleys also lived in Ipswich, which became the bedroom community of Tarbox in the novel Couples, and that they were friends of the Updikes. The biographer gives the impression he has a deep understanding of Updike and even knows more than he can tell. But the only door to the man and writer he uses is the work. His knowledge of both is convincing, satisfying.
As neighbor, son of an Updike family friend, Begley knows all the players of the legendary Ipswich years. One charge against him is that he shows favoritism toward the 1st wife, Mary, friend of the Begleys, while painting an awkward portrait of Martha, the 2d wife. She's depicted as being a controlling influence on Updike, a gatekeeper who protected him from distractions which might affect the work and who also limited access, even from the children of his 1st family. Reviewers are aware of more than I can be, but it seems to me Martha's protective reactions are more normal than not, understandable given Updike's fame and the public demands on his time. As Begley himself explains, Mary began her life with him before he'd had even his first success, and she lived with him as he evolved. It makes a difference that when he married Martha he was already fully-formed as a prolific, prize-winning man of letters. Why is the question of Mary's and Martha's treatment so important? I suppose getting it wrong can be seen as a flaw of perception that might prompt arguments about other perceptions in the biography. Each reader has to come to his own satisfaction.
As for myself, I was riveted by this biography. I learned quite a bit about where the individual works came from and why they took the shape they have. I learned a lot about an author who's always interested me. The detail of the subject's life and thought provided goes very deep. From the philosophical underpinnings of a novel like Roger's Version to relating the family crisis caused by a cuckolded husband confronting John and Mary, it's all here. But this is just the first of the Updike icebergs to float by. There will be other biographies. In addition, Begley tells us Updike was a busy letter writer and that he corresponded with many close friends in the literary world, Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan among them. We can look forward to what's still to come. In the meantime we have Adam Begley's fine biography. I imagine Updike would've liked it.
The way Updike recycled his own life and the lives of family and others around him determined the shape of Adam Begley's biography. Writing a critical biography was almost necessitated by that important trait of the fiction. I was pleased that the fiction received such detailed analysis. I also felt it appropriate that a man who put so much of himself into his stories and novels should have a biographer who relates his subject through that fiction. Almost every event of Updike's life has some fictional parallel. Whether a boy contemplating pigeons in a barn, the death of his mother, or adultery in Ipswich, Massachusetts, events of his life are inserted and interpreted in the work. Begley tells the biography in that way. For that reason it's all slightly non-linear, but it is fascinatingly full of descriptions and facts of how Updike lived, worked, and thought, including material sensational and tabloid-like as well as artistic and philosophical. It's almost seamless. In essence, the life is explored as how it relates to the writings. The happy result is that both life and the life's work receive comprehensive analysis. The happy result is thoroughly satisfying as a biography that's slightly eccentric but which is well organized and well written and runs like a well-oiled machine.
Adam Begley was an insider. He's the son of the novelist Louis Begley (Wartime Lies; About Schmidt). We're told the Begleys also lived in Ipswich, which became the bedroom community of Tarbox in the novel Couples, and that they were friends of the Updikes. The biographer gives the impression he has a deep understanding of Updike and even knows more than he can tell. But the only door to the man and writer he uses is the work. His knowledge of both is convincing, satisfying.
As neighbor, son of an Updike family friend, Begley knows all the players of the legendary Ipswich years. One charge against him is that he shows favoritism toward the 1st wife, Mary, friend of the Begleys, while painting an awkward portrait of Martha, the 2d wife. She's depicted as being a controlling influence on Updike, a gatekeeper who protected him from distractions which might affect the work and who also limited access, even from the children of his 1st family. Reviewers are aware of more than I can be, but it seems to me Martha's protective reactions are more normal than not, understandable given Updike's fame and the public demands on his time. As Begley himself explains, Mary began her life with him before he'd had even his first success, and she lived with him as he evolved. It makes a difference that when he married Martha he was already fully-formed as a prolific, prize-winning man of letters. Why is the question of Mary's and Martha's treatment so important? I suppose getting it wrong can be seen as a flaw of perception that might prompt arguments about other perceptions in the biography. Each reader has to come to his own satisfaction.
As for myself, I was riveted by this biography. I learned quite a bit about where the individual works came from and why they took the shape they have. I learned a lot about an author who's always interested me. The detail of the subject's life and thought provided goes very deep. From the philosophical underpinnings of a novel like Roger's Version to relating the family crisis caused by a cuckolded husband confronting John and Mary, it's all here. But this is just the first of the Updike icebergs to float by. There will be other biographies. In addition, Begley tells us Updike was a busy letter writer and that he corresponded with many close friends in the literary world, Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan among them. We can look forward to what's still to come. In the meantime we have Adam Begley's fine biography. I imagine Updike would've liked it.
January 29, 2015
Let me say upfront: I’m not usually a fan of biographies. They always end badly. Especially in today’s morally unanchored world, the towering ambition of most lives worthy of a biography leaves a path of destruction on the way to temporal success: families destroyed, other careers shortened, lives poorly and feebly lived, if not outright crippled with disease.
Despite being one of my favorite authors on late 20th century American life, John Updike does not diverge greatly from the pattern. While rocketing to success for being the first to indulge in and divulge rampant adultery in suburban America with his lightly-fictionalized novel Couples (1968), Updike � to his credit, later regretting “In our attempt to be beautiful, we often break a lot of innocent bystanders� bones� (p.354) � left a path of destruction in his, and others�, children’s lives. It takes two to not only adulter, but to foster an environment in which it thrives, so Updike’s first wife Mary for years had affairs of her own. Yet, despite the murkiness of her transgressions, it can safely be assumed that Updike, not only as the man of the house but a powerhouse one, was most responsible.
Here was are, three paragraphs into the review, and not yet a word on the quality of Updike’s oeuvre, but biographies, and especially literary biographies, tend to do just that: focus us, in a sad Peeping Tom sort of way, on the particulars of an artist’s life rather than the supposed glories of his work. This is unavoidable, however, for we rightly suspect that the quality of a man’s character colors the quality of his work; particularly where the work is inscrutable or resistant to facile interpretation (as it must always be these post-modern times), a writer’s character becomes determinant, or controlling, a vital clue to the work’s trajectory and meaning.
Given all the challenges, new biographer Adam Begley has done an extraordinary job molding the life of one of America’s most famous recent authors, the first big bio since Updike’s death from lung cancer in 2009. He sets the tone early and well in his introduction. Snappily, Begley details Updike’s obvious charms, a prophetic first encounter with the great man from his crib (Begley’s father was a Harvard classmate of Updike’s), and ends the intro with a most winning, and agreeably humble, sentence: “It’s one of my fondest wishes that those books [the Library of America’s recently published two tomes of Updike collected stories] will mark the beginning of a surge in his posthumous reputation.� (Which this biography may ably contribute to.) We are immediately assured that such a big, important life is in the hands of a competent and sympathetic (not sycophantic) biographer.
Not only has he read all 29+ published novels, countless short stories, reviews, poems, and light verse, but a sizeable amount of the author’s correspondence, including with other authors (Joyce Carol Oates, in particular). No detail was too inconsequential for Begley to track down: he corrects Updike’s memory of past events in not-too-obtrusive footnotes (such as the source of his first wife’s French), and offers up the clarifying arcanity of New Yorker magazine payment particulars. He much more than ably weaves in quotations from diverse works without ever seeming pedantic. While, thankfully, avoiding psycho-babble, he brings insights into the potential motivations and drive of a literary titan hiding behind the vast facade of his public image � understandably so, as his “fiction� was almost always very thinly veiled autobiography. Peeking behind the veil, Begley does so with a light and competent touch, his literary judgments always well informed and argued, his psychological or moral ones a tad less so.
As the “it’s� of the Introduction quotation above, Begley writes with an informal style, a respectful and non-purple prose. Given Updike’s frequent lack of restraint when plumbing the depths of (his) sexual antics, Begley demonstrates an admirable remove, gliding swiftly over (the many) prurient details.
With frequent quotes, that tickle the palette like amuse-bouches, Begley builds a solid case for why the great man received so many awards (even if denied the coveted Nobel for Literature) and why we should care. Updike’s habitual self-deprecation is shown to be yet another lovely fruit of his generation. What I personally find most admirable is Updike’s startling and observant prose, coupled with his self-declared objective “to give the mundane its beautiful due.� He loved America and, unlike so many post-modernists, was unafraid to say so. Begley attributes this gestalt, and much else, to Updike’s only-son upbringing in the small town America of Shillington, Pennsylvania, an idyllic upbringing (rudely interrupted by his mother’s insisting on the young family’s retreat to the unimproved farmhouse of her own childhood), and that seems just right. His mother, a frustrated writer (though eventually with several published works and New Yorker articles to her name), was clearly a towering figure in his life, who not only breast-fed a massive belief in his importance and talent, but followed him diligently with a constant correspondence. (In today’s terminology, they were enmeshed.)
Yet � that familiar curse of the famous � Updike’s life ends badly. He ends the marriage to his first wife Mary (who comes off as a much more sympathetic person than Wife #2) after twenty-one years, and marries Martha, or Mistress #?, towards the end of his Ipswich romp. He demonstrates regret, even telling Mary at the divorce proceedings he would undo it all if he could, but in the end gets what he wants: a controlling wife who protects his privacy and writing time like a lioness her pups. Among those kept at a distance are his children, now doubly wronged. (As son David later commented: his father decided early on that his writing would “take precedence over his relations with real people.�) (p.410) His last three decades, accordingly, seem drained of color and warmth. (Begley, appropriately, titles his penultimate chapter “The Lonely Fort.�)
Begley’s judgement and task fail him in few areas. After prior allusions to the deleterious impact of Updike’s philandering on the children, he offers a justification for the serial adultery this way:
“Couples made him rich and famous � and, in a sense, notorious. But his notoriety � the winking acknowledgment of his dizzy ride on the merry-go-round of Ipswich adultery � is misleading. The novel was made possible not because he made a habit of bedding down with the wives of his friends but rather because he remained detached, because his “inner remove� freed him from the moral and social constraints most adulterers surrender to.� (p.294)
It is a curious supposition: that Updike’s art is validated by an inner remove (while wreaking havoc in the lives of others) which justifies his repeatedly going back to the same passion-well without, thank goodness, surrendering to the usual moral and social constraints. Wow! That sounds like a 007-like Licence to Bed.
A final area where Begley’s analysis likely falls short is with Updike’s “spirituality� (today’s non-terrifying euphemism for “Christianity�). One of the main reasons, at least for me, that Updike stood out from a post-World War II cohort of mega-stars who felt compelled to let it all hang out, was his professed belief. Begley, for good reason, treats the subject charily, for it represents the most glaring paradox of Updike’s life, that he remained a believing man while his actions confessed something else. Many Updike stories treat the spiritual crises of the protagonist’s. Begley writes that one such protagonist’s “religious doubts are eventually resolved to his own satisfaction (if not the reader’s � the boy deduces from the beauty of nature evidence of a caring deity.)� (p.40) Clearly Begley is skeptical of such deity-proofs. And while Begley makes many yeomen attempts at explaining Updike’s beliefs through those of his characters, I couldn’t shake the impression that the biographer was usually, while competently, speaking a foreign language. By adopting a non-judgmental tone about Updike’s philandering (“It seems clear that the time and place were also ripe for an unbuttoned pursuit of happiness.� �...they went too far, frolicked too freely. But I suspect that, at the time, they merely thought they were making the most of happy circumstances.�) (p.184), Begley seems to condone that the end, great art, justifies the means.
Alas, we only get cold gruel about Updike’s many spiritual crises. When a golf buddy quotes Updike as admitting that he’d “changed houses, church denominations, and wives,� (p.191), the reader has to wait thirty-two pages to learn more about the change in churches, after dozens of pages detailing the house and wife swapping. Given Begley’s declared desire to encourage more readers to return to Updike’s extensive works, perhaps it was better he tread lightly on issues of faith and belief, as they could well have condemned Updike as a towering hypocrite.
One of the biography’s few descriptive scenes of Updike’s faith (other than rosters of church committees and service) is how, as the father of an unbroken home, he would go from one child’s room to the next, together reciting the Lord Prayer’s before bed. It is heartbreaking that only after the long, thirty-two year distancing from his children during his second marriage, that the scene is repeated, if inverted, with Updike, on his death bed at the hospice, repeating the Lord’s Prayer with two of his adult children and his Episcopalian minister. (p.483)
Yet in the end analysis, Begley is largely persuasive: Updike’s paradise lost was his Shillington childhood. He concludes the opus of Updike’s biography with a curious echo of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud:
“Up until the final weeks of his life, when he was too sick to write, he was always that little boy on the floor of the Shillington dining room, bending his attention to the paper, riding that thin pencil line into a glorious future, fulfilling the towering ambition of his grandest dreams. ‘I’ve remained,� he once said, ‘all too true to my youthful self.’� (p.486)
But even there, doubts creep in. Was the towering ambition his own or his mother’s? Did his early resentment of his mother impact his treatment of women? If he was all too true to his youthful self, did he ever grow up in a meaningful, even spiritual way? As Begley earlier admits, Updike “seemed incapable of changing how he behaved,� (p.350) and was “incorrigible.� (p.352) Not a kind judgement of any adult, for it implies the spiritual crises were never resolved favorably.
I, for one, am encouraged to return to Updike’s work, as an acutely and lovingly observed dissertation on the not-so mundane of American life. Yet, like one of his latter-day critics who, as I do, would characterize many of his passages as high-brow porn, I will delicately skip the pulpy parts.
(My grandparents and the Updikes were neighbors for many years, so I got to meet the man several times and exchange a few postcards. Adam Begley is an old friend from college days, to whom I wish a continuing and growing success � and more.)
Despite being one of my favorite authors on late 20th century American life, John Updike does not diverge greatly from the pattern. While rocketing to success for being the first to indulge in and divulge rampant adultery in suburban America with his lightly-fictionalized novel Couples (1968), Updike � to his credit, later regretting “In our attempt to be beautiful, we often break a lot of innocent bystanders� bones� (p.354) � left a path of destruction in his, and others�, children’s lives. It takes two to not only adulter, but to foster an environment in which it thrives, so Updike’s first wife Mary for years had affairs of her own. Yet, despite the murkiness of her transgressions, it can safely be assumed that Updike, not only as the man of the house but a powerhouse one, was most responsible.
Here was are, three paragraphs into the review, and not yet a word on the quality of Updike’s oeuvre, but biographies, and especially literary biographies, tend to do just that: focus us, in a sad Peeping Tom sort of way, on the particulars of an artist’s life rather than the supposed glories of his work. This is unavoidable, however, for we rightly suspect that the quality of a man’s character colors the quality of his work; particularly where the work is inscrutable or resistant to facile interpretation (as it must always be these post-modern times), a writer’s character becomes determinant, or controlling, a vital clue to the work’s trajectory and meaning.
Given all the challenges, new biographer Adam Begley has done an extraordinary job molding the life of one of America’s most famous recent authors, the first big bio since Updike’s death from lung cancer in 2009. He sets the tone early and well in his introduction. Snappily, Begley details Updike’s obvious charms, a prophetic first encounter with the great man from his crib (Begley’s father was a Harvard classmate of Updike’s), and ends the intro with a most winning, and agreeably humble, sentence: “It’s one of my fondest wishes that those books [the Library of America’s recently published two tomes of Updike collected stories] will mark the beginning of a surge in his posthumous reputation.� (Which this biography may ably contribute to.) We are immediately assured that such a big, important life is in the hands of a competent and sympathetic (not sycophantic) biographer.
Not only has he read all 29+ published novels, countless short stories, reviews, poems, and light verse, but a sizeable amount of the author’s correspondence, including with other authors (Joyce Carol Oates, in particular). No detail was too inconsequential for Begley to track down: he corrects Updike’s memory of past events in not-too-obtrusive footnotes (such as the source of his first wife’s French), and offers up the clarifying arcanity of New Yorker magazine payment particulars. He much more than ably weaves in quotations from diverse works without ever seeming pedantic. While, thankfully, avoiding psycho-babble, he brings insights into the potential motivations and drive of a literary titan hiding behind the vast facade of his public image � understandably so, as his “fiction� was almost always very thinly veiled autobiography. Peeking behind the veil, Begley does so with a light and competent touch, his literary judgments always well informed and argued, his psychological or moral ones a tad less so.
As the “it’s� of the Introduction quotation above, Begley writes with an informal style, a respectful and non-purple prose. Given Updike’s frequent lack of restraint when plumbing the depths of (his) sexual antics, Begley demonstrates an admirable remove, gliding swiftly over (the many) prurient details.
With frequent quotes, that tickle the palette like amuse-bouches, Begley builds a solid case for why the great man received so many awards (even if denied the coveted Nobel for Literature) and why we should care. Updike’s habitual self-deprecation is shown to be yet another lovely fruit of his generation. What I personally find most admirable is Updike’s startling and observant prose, coupled with his self-declared objective “to give the mundane its beautiful due.� He loved America and, unlike so many post-modernists, was unafraid to say so. Begley attributes this gestalt, and much else, to Updike’s only-son upbringing in the small town America of Shillington, Pennsylvania, an idyllic upbringing (rudely interrupted by his mother’s insisting on the young family’s retreat to the unimproved farmhouse of her own childhood), and that seems just right. His mother, a frustrated writer (though eventually with several published works and New Yorker articles to her name), was clearly a towering figure in his life, who not only breast-fed a massive belief in his importance and talent, but followed him diligently with a constant correspondence. (In today’s terminology, they were enmeshed.)
Yet � that familiar curse of the famous � Updike’s life ends badly. He ends the marriage to his first wife Mary (who comes off as a much more sympathetic person than Wife #2) after twenty-one years, and marries Martha, or Mistress #?, towards the end of his Ipswich romp. He demonstrates regret, even telling Mary at the divorce proceedings he would undo it all if he could, but in the end gets what he wants: a controlling wife who protects his privacy and writing time like a lioness her pups. Among those kept at a distance are his children, now doubly wronged. (As son David later commented: his father decided early on that his writing would “take precedence over his relations with real people.�) (p.410) His last three decades, accordingly, seem drained of color and warmth. (Begley, appropriately, titles his penultimate chapter “The Lonely Fort.�)
Begley’s judgement and task fail him in few areas. After prior allusions to the deleterious impact of Updike’s philandering on the children, he offers a justification for the serial adultery this way:
“Couples made him rich and famous � and, in a sense, notorious. But his notoriety � the winking acknowledgment of his dizzy ride on the merry-go-round of Ipswich adultery � is misleading. The novel was made possible not because he made a habit of bedding down with the wives of his friends but rather because he remained detached, because his “inner remove� freed him from the moral and social constraints most adulterers surrender to.� (p.294)
It is a curious supposition: that Updike’s art is validated by an inner remove (while wreaking havoc in the lives of others) which justifies his repeatedly going back to the same passion-well without, thank goodness, surrendering to the usual moral and social constraints. Wow! That sounds like a 007-like Licence to Bed.
A final area where Begley’s analysis likely falls short is with Updike’s “spirituality� (today’s non-terrifying euphemism for “Christianity�). One of the main reasons, at least for me, that Updike stood out from a post-World War II cohort of mega-stars who felt compelled to let it all hang out, was his professed belief. Begley, for good reason, treats the subject charily, for it represents the most glaring paradox of Updike’s life, that he remained a believing man while his actions confessed something else. Many Updike stories treat the spiritual crises of the protagonist’s. Begley writes that one such protagonist’s “religious doubts are eventually resolved to his own satisfaction (if not the reader’s � the boy deduces from the beauty of nature evidence of a caring deity.)� (p.40) Clearly Begley is skeptical of such deity-proofs. And while Begley makes many yeomen attempts at explaining Updike’s beliefs through those of his characters, I couldn’t shake the impression that the biographer was usually, while competently, speaking a foreign language. By adopting a non-judgmental tone about Updike’s philandering (“It seems clear that the time and place were also ripe for an unbuttoned pursuit of happiness.� �...they went too far, frolicked too freely. But I suspect that, at the time, they merely thought they were making the most of happy circumstances.�) (p.184), Begley seems to condone that the end, great art, justifies the means.
Alas, we only get cold gruel about Updike’s many spiritual crises. When a golf buddy quotes Updike as admitting that he’d “changed houses, church denominations, and wives,� (p.191), the reader has to wait thirty-two pages to learn more about the change in churches, after dozens of pages detailing the house and wife swapping. Given Begley’s declared desire to encourage more readers to return to Updike’s extensive works, perhaps it was better he tread lightly on issues of faith and belief, as they could well have condemned Updike as a towering hypocrite.
One of the biography’s few descriptive scenes of Updike’s faith (other than rosters of church committees and service) is how, as the father of an unbroken home, he would go from one child’s room to the next, together reciting the Lord Prayer’s before bed. It is heartbreaking that only after the long, thirty-two year distancing from his children during his second marriage, that the scene is repeated, if inverted, with Updike, on his death bed at the hospice, repeating the Lord’s Prayer with two of his adult children and his Episcopalian minister. (p.483)
Yet in the end analysis, Begley is largely persuasive: Updike’s paradise lost was his Shillington childhood. He concludes the opus of Updike’s biography with a curious echo of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud:
“Up until the final weeks of his life, when he was too sick to write, he was always that little boy on the floor of the Shillington dining room, bending his attention to the paper, riding that thin pencil line into a glorious future, fulfilling the towering ambition of his grandest dreams. ‘I’ve remained,� he once said, ‘all too true to my youthful self.’� (p.486)
But even there, doubts creep in. Was the towering ambition his own or his mother’s? Did his early resentment of his mother impact his treatment of women? If he was all too true to his youthful self, did he ever grow up in a meaningful, even spiritual way? As Begley earlier admits, Updike “seemed incapable of changing how he behaved,� (p.350) and was “incorrigible.� (p.352) Not a kind judgement of any adult, for it implies the spiritual crises were never resolved favorably.
I, for one, am encouraged to return to Updike’s work, as an acutely and lovingly observed dissertation on the not-so mundane of American life. Yet, like one of his latter-day critics who, as I do, would characterize many of his passages as high-brow porn, I will delicately skip the pulpy parts.
(My grandparents and the Updikes were neighbors for many years, so I got to meet the man several times and exchange a few postcards. Adam Begley is an old friend from college days, to whom I wish a continuing and growing success � and more.)
January 30, 2014
'You have to give it magic'
And magic is just the descriptor for this immensely informed and intelligent biography of John Updike by the gifted author Adam Begley. It goes so far beyond where biographies usually tread, giving us insights into a great American author as a man, an original thinker, and as one of the finest novelists of the last century. A quick glance at the facts form Wikipedia, `John Updike (18 March 1932 - 27 January 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.' Impressive to recap the facts, but what Adam Begley has accomplished in this brilliant biography is placing flesh on these skeleton-like facts and offers up the enigmatic Updike better than any writer has accomplished.
As Begley writes, `John Updike wrote about himself copiously. That's arguable and modestly neutral, but too vague. John Updike wrote about himself reflexively...."imitation is praise," he wrote. "Description expresses love.' He also wrote about himself lucidly.' And this is the style of writing that fills this lengthy but always enthralling book. Begley has done his research, interviewing as many people close to Updike (whether family or colleagues) and thus is able to present as true an image of the Updike we all have read. Begley spends time at the end of the book with the feeling we are at bedside as Updike dies of lung cancer. He includes some of Updike's final poetry:
My wife of thirty years is on the phone
I get a busy signal, and I know
she's in her grief and needs to organize
consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;
her body is the only locus where
my desolation bumps against its end.
This is the compleat Updike and there is far more in this illuminating biography that the life of a gifted writer: there is a lot of us in there, too.
Grady Harp
And magic is just the descriptor for this immensely informed and intelligent biography of John Updike by the gifted author Adam Begley. It goes so far beyond where biographies usually tread, giving us insights into a great American author as a man, an original thinker, and as one of the finest novelists of the last century. A quick glance at the facts form Wikipedia, `John Updike (18 March 1932 - 27 January 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.' Impressive to recap the facts, but what Adam Begley has accomplished in this brilliant biography is placing flesh on these skeleton-like facts and offers up the enigmatic Updike better than any writer has accomplished.
As Begley writes, `John Updike wrote about himself copiously. That's arguable and modestly neutral, but too vague. John Updike wrote about himself reflexively...."imitation is praise," he wrote. "Description expresses love.' He also wrote about himself lucidly.' And this is the style of writing that fills this lengthy but always enthralling book. Begley has done his research, interviewing as many people close to Updike (whether family or colleagues) and thus is able to present as true an image of the Updike we all have read. Begley spends time at the end of the book with the feeling we are at bedside as Updike dies of lung cancer. He includes some of Updike's final poetry:
My wife of thirty years is on the phone
I get a busy signal, and I know
she's in her grief and needs to organize
consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;
her body is the only locus where
my desolation bumps against its end.
This is the compleat Updike and there is far more in this illuminating biography that the life of a gifted writer: there is a lot of us in there, too.
Grady Harp
July 12, 2014
It would be easy to underestimate Begley's Updike, only because Begley makes it look so easy. The approach he has taken--to read Updike's fiction as a thinly veiled chronicle of his real life (in other words, the Maples stories are Updike's story)--seems so natural and fertile that one might think it obvious, even easy. But that would be to miss the creative genius it takes to land on this approach. It would also miss the stunning mastery of Updike's oeuvre that Begley displays--again, effortlessly. Mercifully, Begley does not try to mimic Updike's ornamented prose.
For someone of my generation, this glimpse into upscale suburbia in the 1960s is almost unfathomable--the culture of infidelity in Updike's Ipswich is incomprehensible. But then again, I come from the generation that paid for these shenanigans. (It struck me that this dynamic of irresponsible parents, seen from the perspective of the children hurt by it, is well captured in the much more recent film, The Way Way Back.)
Still, I gobbled up Begley's biography as my vacation read. "Humanizing" the eminent Updike certainly does not make him more loveable, but Begley succeeds in making him a "character."
After finishing the biography, I returned to Updike's essay, "On Literary Biography," in Due Considerations, one of his many omnibus collections (of which Hugging the Shore remains my favorite). This essay, like his memoir Self-Consciousness, is something of a pre-emptive strike against any would-be biographer. But embedded it in is an interesting tidbit. Updike describes reading a recent biography of William Shakespeare. The question so often brought to Shakespeare now is not "How did he do it?" but "Did he do it?" Updike's comment is its own little bit of autobiography:
"Unlike certain devotees of the nobility, I have never had any problem with the idea that a child of the middling provincial gentry (Shakespeare's mother was an Arden, a family of prosperous farmers) might enter the theatrical profession and spin a literary universe out of his dramatic flair, opportune learning, and country-bred street-smarts."
Well, of course not--since that also turns out to be Updike's story. But did he just equate himself with Shakespeare? Begley doesn't fall for that.
For someone of my generation, this glimpse into upscale suburbia in the 1960s is almost unfathomable--the culture of infidelity in Updike's Ipswich is incomprehensible. But then again, I come from the generation that paid for these shenanigans. (It struck me that this dynamic of irresponsible parents, seen from the perspective of the children hurt by it, is well captured in the much more recent film, The Way Way Back.)
Still, I gobbled up Begley's biography as my vacation read. "Humanizing" the eminent Updike certainly does not make him more loveable, but Begley succeeds in making him a "character."
After finishing the biography, I returned to Updike's essay, "On Literary Biography," in Due Considerations, one of his many omnibus collections (of which Hugging the Shore remains my favorite). This essay, like his memoir Self-Consciousness, is something of a pre-emptive strike against any would-be biographer. But embedded it in is an interesting tidbit. Updike describes reading a recent biography of William Shakespeare. The question so often brought to Shakespeare now is not "How did he do it?" but "Did he do it?" Updike's comment is its own little bit of autobiography:
"Unlike certain devotees of the nobility, I have never had any problem with the idea that a child of the middling provincial gentry (Shakespeare's mother was an Arden, a family of prosperous farmers) might enter the theatrical profession and spin a literary universe out of his dramatic flair, opportune learning, and country-bred street-smarts."
Well, of course not--since that also turns out to be Updike's story. But did he just equate himself with Shakespeare? Begley doesn't fall for that.
February 23, 2014
“More than fifty years after his first New Yorker check, he was still happily amazed that he could make a living this way, that his boyhood plan to ride ‘a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts� had succeeded quite so brilliantly.�
Pennsylvania-born John Updike was a man who found no greater joy in life than in the sheer act of writing.
Adam Begley’s comprehensive and sympathetic study of Updike’s life makes that abundantly clear. In a comment to friends about literary prizes, Updike said, “Being a writer at all is the prize.�
Begley has amassed a wonderful array of documentation on Updike’s journey as a man and writer, a journey that leaves the world a legacy of stories and poetry to enjoy.
Early influenced by his ambitious mother, who predicted her son was “going to fly,� Updike did transcend his small-town roots, though he never completely abandoned them or the values of his conservative upbringing. In fact, his blatantly autobiographical writing style thrives on nostalgia. Even in the period when he was recording fictionalized versions of his marital infidelities, his characters are haunted by guilt imposed by the religious faith he never abandoned.
Begley traces his journey from the boy dreaming of being a cartoonist to Harvard, on to the early success at the New Yorker and then the flight away from the city with the decision to become a freelance writer and novelist.
In addition to the many interviews with people close to Updike, Begley’s detailed look at the books, stories and poetry provides a penetrating look at what made the man tick and what will make his work endure.
Pennsylvania-born John Updike was a man who found no greater joy in life than in the sheer act of writing.
Adam Begley’s comprehensive and sympathetic study of Updike’s life makes that abundantly clear. In a comment to friends about literary prizes, Updike said, “Being a writer at all is the prize.�
Begley has amassed a wonderful array of documentation on Updike’s journey as a man and writer, a journey that leaves the world a legacy of stories and poetry to enjoy.
Early influenced by his ambitious mother, who predicted her son was “going to fly,� Updike did transcend his small-town roots, though he never completely abandoned them or the values of his conservative upbringing. In fact, his blatantly autobiographical writing style thrives on nostalgia. Even in the period when he was recording fictionalized versions of his marital infidelities, his characters are haunted by guilt imposed by the religious faith he never abandoned.
Begley traces his journey from the boy dreaming of being a cartoonist to Harvard, on to the early success at the New Yorker and then the flight away from the city with the decision to become a freelance writer and novelist.
In addition to the many interviews with people close to Updike, Begley’s detailed look at the books, stories and poetry provides a penetrating look at what made the man tick and what will make his work endure.
May 12, 2014
Fascinating reading for this Updike fan.
Bears revisiting often.
Notes
31..why was i so comfortably situated?
43..life had given my father a beating.
44..avenging the slights and abasements visited upon his father
78..monotonously triumphant career
167..effortlessly industrious
224..religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
240..The courtly love conceit is ingenious but limiting, the characters diminished rather than enhanced by their role in a medieval tragedy (Tristan and Iseult) reconfigured as contemporary farce.
335..Redux is U's most powerful work
407..BBC doc "What makes Rabbit run?"
447..Perfection Wasted
nitpick: small fonted asterisks makes them hard to find
Bears revisiting often.
Notes
31..why was i so comfortably situated?
43..life had given my father a beating.
44..avenging the slights and abasements visited upon his father
78..monotonously triumphant career
167..effortlessly industrious
224..religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
240..The courtly love conceit is ingenious but limiting, the characters diminished rather than enhanced by their role in a medieval tragedy (Tristan and Iseult) reconfigured as contemporary farce.
335..Redux is U's most powerful work
407..BBC doc "What makes Rabbit run?"
447..Perfection Wasted
nitpick: small fonted asterisks makes them hard to find
March 5, 2021
The first comprehensive biography of John Updike, published just 5 years after his death, this is almost a great biography. Begley gives a very close reading to Updike's novels and short stories, connecting the dots between the writer's life and work (Updike was always believed to be a highly autobiographical fiction writer, and Begley confirms that. There should no further debate necessary).
The book suffers from the fact it just feels too fresh. Also, while he had the cooperation of the first Mrs. Updike, he did not have the same relationship with the second, Updike's widow, and the executor of the literary estate. She may need to rejoin her husband before we get the book that ultimately surfaces.
Harold Bloom accused Updike of being a "minor writer with a major style". David Foster Wallace called him a "penis with a thesaurus". Both are good one-liners, but it remains to be seen how Updike's work and reputation will fare in the future. Much has changed in American literature and society since 2009.
The book suffers from the fact it just feels too fresh. Also, while he had the cooperation of the first Mrs. Updike, he did not have the same relationship with the second, Updike's widow, and the executor of the literary estate. She may need to rejoin her husband before we get the book that ultimately surfaces.
Harold Bloom accused Updike of being a "minor writer with a major style". David Foster Wallace called him a "penis with a thesaurus". Both are good one-liners, but it remains to be seen how Updike's work and reputation will fare in the future. Much has changed in American literature and society since 2009.
November 25, 2017
A very interesting literary biography. I had not realized that Updike put so much of his own life experiences into his stories and novels. However, that should not be surprising, given his expressed desire to, in his own words, "give the mundane its beautiful due." Updike published more than 60 books in his half-century career: novels, short stories, poems, book reviews, other prose pieces. He love the feel of typewriter keys (as opposed to the PC), and the tactile pleasure of a book. And he never owned a cell phone!
Now I want to reread the entire Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy!
Now I want to reread the entire Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy!
February 1, 2017
John Updike is my favorite writer, so how could I not love such a well-done biography of him?
July 3, 2014
I am an avid Updike fan. He captures America and the lifestyle of middle America, emerging from post WWII austerity, from the 1950's to the early 21st Century, mostly through fictionalised lives of ordinary Americans, mostly middle class, embracing the post-pill freedoms, Vietnam, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter and touching on the Civil Rights and other 1960's turbulence, though he does not go deeply into any issue.
Mostly though, his fiction is isolated from the greater American political stage with the characters immersed in their own lives and limited surroundings, whether that be Shillington or Ipswich. His world revolved around Pennsylvania and was a small-town boy and man at heary, though he did travel internationally and extensively, rarely turning down an appearance or promotional tour if these broadened his horizons.
Apart from his womanising, he is a difficult, some would say boring biographical subject. He was geeky both in appearance and action, had a stutter and psiorisis. He was not an alcoholic and avoided controversy. He was a dedicated slave to his work in short-story, poetry and novel formats, driven by a fear of poverty and failure. He courted and enjoyed attention and was sensitive, even having established himself in latter years as a distinguished American writer of the late 20th Century with Mailer, Roth and Irving. Yet his prodigious output was bound to lend fuel to a negative Updike review � Adam Begley has written an 'exemplary biography', and has obviously worked hard at his accomplishment, but, getting to know the real Updike was difficult.
Sometimes critics who took a personal, and often vindictive, dislike to him. But, surely this goes with any high-profile public person. I feel that this is not the definitive biobraphy, but, is a big chunk of the Updike biographical jigsaw and gives a good insight into what drove him to be a writer and the three women who dominated and sustained his life, his mother Linda, who had a premonition and knew she was nurturing a writer or artist of note in her only child, and his two wives, the equally permissive, Mary, whose critique and support he heavily relied on, and the over-protective gatekeeper of access to Updike, much to the chagrin and anger of his children, his second wife Martha. He never had an agent, but, Martha was as near he ever came to having one. What the reader mostly garners is how he constantly drew on his own life and experience for much of his fiction, and this creates an urge to revisit books already read and read books not read.
There is also an urge to explore his poetry, especially "Endpoint", a collection assembled when he knew that he was dying. The author is hindered by Martha, his second wife, and her refusal to co-operate, and in ways he subtly berates her e.g. by the perceived restrictions she placed on access by Updike's children and other students, journalists and outsiders. However, for all it's faults, this is a worthwhile read giving an insight into a man who stands with the giants of late 20th Century American Literature. I enjoyed the read and will explore new and re-explore Updike's work, having been armed with biographical insight that , so heavily, influenced his output on the page.
For other professional reviewer's viewpoint:
A study that fails to do justice to a great writer: Updike
Updike review � Adam Begley has written an 'exemplary biography'
Mostly though, his fiction is isolated from the greater American political stage with the characters immersed in their own lives and limited surroundings, whether that be Shillington or Ipswich. His world revolved around Pennsylvania and was a small-town boy and man at heary, though he did travel internationally and extensively, rarely turning down an appearance or promotional tour if these broadened his horizons.
Apart from his womanising, he is a difficult, some would say boring biographical subject. He was geeky both in appearance and action, had a stutter and psiorisis. He was not an alcoholic and avoided controversy. He was a dedicated slave to his work in short-story, poetry and novel formats, driven by a fear of poverty and failure. He courted and enjoyed attention and was sensitive, even having established himself in latter years as a distinguished American writer of the late 20th Century with Mailer, Roth and Irving. Yet his prodigious output was bound to lend fuel to a negative Updike review � Adam Begley has written an 'exemplary biography', and has obviously worked hard at his accomplishment, but, getting to know the real Updike was difficult.
Sometimes critics who took a personal, and often vindictive, dislike to him. But, surely this goes with any high-profile public person. I feel that this is not the definitive biobraphy, but, is a big chunk of the Updike biographical jigsaw and gives a good insight into what drove him to be a writer and the three women who dominated and sustained his life, his mother Linda, who had a premonition and knew she was nurturing a writer or artist of note in her only child, and his two wives, the equally permissive, Mary, whose critique and support he heavily relied on, and the over-protective gatekeeper of access to Updike, much to the chagrin and anger of his children, his second wife Martha. He never had an agent, but, Martha was as near he ever came to having one. What the reader mostly garners is how he constantly drew on his own life and experience for much of his fiction, and this creates an urge to revisit books already read and read books not read.
There is also an urge to explore his poetry, especially "Endpoint", a collection assembled when he knew that he was dying. The author is hindered by Martha, his second wife, and her refusal to co-operate, and in ways he subtly berates her e.g. by the perceived restrictions she placed on access by Updike's children and other students, journalists and outsiders. However, for all it's faults, this is a worthwhile read giving an insight into a man who stands with the giants of late 20th Century American Literature. I enjoyed the read and will explore new and re-explore Updike's work, having been armed with biographical insight that , so heavily, influenced his output on the page.
For other professional reviewer's viewpoint:
A study that fails to do justice to a great writer: Updike
Updike review � Adam Begley has written an 'exemplary biography'
November 25, 2014
A detailed, seemingly comprehensive 500 page biography that reads almost like a novel. Begley shows how Updike repeatedly and mercilessly, yet lovingly, mined the relationships and experiences of a lifetime in his fiction, essays, and poetry. Many exquisite quotes from Updike’s works like the following:
Updike’s stated goal in his writing: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.�
“I read slower than I write.�
“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started.�
“We forget most of our past but embody all of it.�
“Happiness is best seen out of the corner of the eye.�
“Between now and the grave lies a long slide of forestallment, a slew of dutiful, dutifully paid-for maintenance routines in which dermatological makeshift joins periodontal work and prostate examinations on the crowded appointment calendar of dwindling days.�
Updike’s boyhood plan was to ride “a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts.� And he succeeded.
Updike’s stated goal in his writing: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.�
“I read slower than I write.�
“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started.�
“We forget most of our past but embody all of it.�
“Happiness is best seen out of the corner of the eye.�
“Between now and the grave lies a long slide of forestallment, a slew of dutiful, dutifully paid-for maintenance routines in which dermatological makeshift joins periodontal work and prostate examinations on the crowded appointment calendar of dwindling days.�
Updike’s boyhood plan was to ride “a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts.� And he succeeded.
April 11, 2014
I Review Adam Begley’s “Updike,� a Biography.
By the time "Rabbit" hit the bookstores Updike was ‘falling in love, away from marriage.� After Rabbit, Run, sexual elements became stronger in his fiction, and if the Brewer of “Rabbit� was really Reading, Ipswich was really Tarbox, despite Updike’s denials � especially his denials after Couples appeared in 1968. Updike wasn’t the first in his Ipswich crowd to commit adultery, and possibly not the first in his marriage, according to Begley. Mary liked to flirt at parties, and she took a lover in the early �60s. “With one or two exceptions there was no actual wife-swapping,� no key parties or orgies, but Updike admits in his memoirs he was a “stag of sorts.�
Go to my blog:
and then to the Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row.
Joe
--Joe
November 5, 2015
Unusually, I read the biography without having read any of his work. That may have made it more difficult to get into the book at first, but it is very well written and researched, interweaving the events of his life with summaries of the plots of his novels, which more often than not closely reflected his life. The book focuses on the 50s,60s and 70s to the relative neglect of the following three decades, which are given light coverage in the final two or three chapters. This may have been because he led a more isolated and less eventful life after his second marriage and also because many seemed to feel that the quality of his work tapered off later in his life.
March 26, 2016
This was a well researched, somewhat comprehensive biography of John Updike, but it was a little dull. This may be a function of Updike's life: his most interesting activity was writing. I love about him his appreciation for the mundane and how he turned it into art. Begley failed to understand the centrality of faith in Updike's writing and, presumably, life. He also spent too much time on individual short stories to the neglect of the novels, and he skimmed over the later novels and some of the earlier ones too. I was however happy to see him give Updike sone due as a poet. Martha Updike must have been very mean to Begley because she sure comes off as awful.
September 23, 2018
A big book that I planned to skim and read the parts of his life and about the books and stories that I was most interested in learning more about - but ended up reading it in the more traditional linear fashion. I was able to get the audiobook about halfway through the print copy and I finished it in that format which was a good idea.
Updike is probably my favorite contemporary writer, so I found all the small details interesting.
Updike is probably my favorite contemporary writer, so I found all the small details interesting.
May 25, 2014
I gave this book five stars because I worshipped John Updike and his work, and any biography that could bring me closer to him was bound to be great. I think Begley felt the same way. Although criticism and critical viewpoints were included in this joint biography and literary discussion, Begley seems to go out of his way to meet them and defend Updike. For me that was just fine.
June 26, 2014
Reading Adam Begley’s book on John Updike confirms my beliefs that biography matters and that first biographies of major writers invariably leave more to be explored. Begley shows that while it may have seemed effortless for Updike to write sixty-odd books, this production took a lot of effort. Updike was more disciplined than almost all of his contemporaries, except for the likes of Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates. And like these two, he suffered at the hands of undiscerning critics, who think a major novel cannot be produced in less than five years. But as some writers know, the more you write, the more the words accumulate, eventually having an incremental impact that can sustain an author like Updike over a lifetime. Producing many books results in some being better than others, a truth that seems inevitable. Rather than a reason for us to deplore a prolific artist, a sizeable body of work affords an opportunity to admire a dedicated craftsman unafraid of failure. Begley writes as an Updike partisan, noting the writer’s faults to be sure, but never breaking party ranks. He also gives Updike’s critics—John Aldridge and David Foster Wallace, for example—their due. Begley is a good literary advocate, although he sometimes seems blinded, seeking only the biography in the fiction. His verdicts are not surprising. The Rabbit novels are Updike’s best fiction, along with, of course, his many short stories. Updike’s light verse and poetry are less important but deserve more attention than they have received. He is given high marks as a book reviewer with a remarkable range, including art commentary—although Begley treats Updike like an amateur art historian who skillfully conveys his impressions but is not to be taken too seriously.
But Begley cannot show what the creative struggle meant to Updike when he was not writing, or when he was writing about not writing. Begley was denied access to much of Updike’s personal correspondence because Updike’s second wife, Martha, who controls the literary estate, would not cooperate with him. From my own research I can tell you that she thought Begley got off to an unseemly fast start too soon after her husband died. Whether Begley made a strategic error in not cultivating the widow, concluded that he would never secure her permission no matter how much he pandered, or did not wish to become ensorcelled by her is hard to say. Trying to appease a literary estate is usually a losing proposition—as Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes’s not-quite-authorized biographer, can tell you after having been excommunicated by the widow Hughes. Biographers have to find their own voices, and this Begley has done by producing a double-column biography, aligning what was happening in his subject’s life with what Updike was writing at the time. Begley has done a diligent job interviewing Updike’s friends and lovers and, most importantly, Updike’s first wife, Mary. The result, for the first part of the biography, is splendid, since Mary is frank not only about Updike’s virtues and faults, but also about her own. She verifies, in so far as any work of fiction can, the truth of the Maples stories, for example, and describes the kind of loving, if sometimes disengaged, father Updike was to his four children. Mary was there to watch Updike grow as a writer during his Harvard years and his time abroad in London, when he still had some hope of becoming a first-class illustrator. And she was on hand to deal with his sexual antics during the era that made his novel Couples a four-million-copy bestseller.
In The New Yorker, Louis Menand commends Begley for being more scrupulous than most biographers in revealing few details about Updike’s dalliances. But of course Menand is wrong. Readers of biography need to have the names and dates of a subject’s lovers. Who were they, and what were they like, and how did the Updike they knew square with the fellow who wrote the stories, novels, essays, and poems? Was the private Updike noticeably different from the public one, from the one who wrote letters and interacted with his children? Why literary critics like Menand want to live in willful ignorance of such information is mystifying—I suppose it messes up their fastidious desire to deal only with the fiction. Why such writers bother to review biography is a bigger question. Their ambition seems to be to cut biography and the biographer down to size, or in this case to extol a biographer who has done only half his job—although Begley should not be handled too harshly. He spoke with many of Updike’s lovers with the understanding that he would not out them, perhaps the only way to get them to talk at all. But to suppose the biographer is doing anything more than making a virtue of necessity is to evince ignorance about biography, which is, alas, all too common among otherwise intelligent critics.
Begley’s biography breaks apart in 1977, when Updike divorces Mary and marries Martha. The biographer, like an apostle obliged to rewrite scripture, has to rely on Updike’s children, who clearly resented his second wife commandeering their father’s genius, restricting access to the great man, and, in general, secluding him in the conventional life of a renowned author. But he continued to do fatherly things, while admirably letting his children go their own way even when he had misgivings. He was not merely a churchgoer, but an active participant in the life of his church. He had golfing buddies. Like most Americans, he did not take that much of an interest in politics and rarely made it the subject of his work. He was, however, a diffident supporter of the war in Vietnam, a stance that put him out of step with many of his contemporaries, such as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. In some ways, Updike did not feel qualified to pontificate on politics, the national sport. His demurral has been taken by some as evasive, but if he really hadn’t given that much thought to politics, should he just join the dissenters? Perhaps what really upset his contemporaries on the left was his qualified respect for authority and unwillingness to stand on his own self-righteousness. Begley does not pursue this line of thought, but it has always seemed to me that Updike was refreshingly different from the herd of independent minds who opposed the war—even if he was wrong about it.
Begley exhibits some momentum during the first half of the book, buoyed by his knowledge of his subject’s ways and means. This information is one reason he suggests that Martha did what her husband could not. He did not abandon his four children, but he had reached a point where he wanted to remove himself (somewhat) from them. To his children—all mostly grown by then—Updike’s departure may have seemed unfeeling. But to him, as a parent, was this such a poor choice? From Martha, Begley could have learned more, but as he revealed in an interview with The Awl, he never met Martha.
Begley does not reflect much about how Updike’s status as an only child might have affected his own parenting. Did having four children fill a need? Did his interaction with his writer mother—who did so much to encourage him, but who was also sometimes domineering—contribute to the aloofness he displayed when dealing with his own children? The patterns are there to be read in different ways, and perhaps Begley thought it better not to force interpretations. Or perhaps Begley did not have the kind of evidence that would permit more extensive interpretation. A second Updike biographer with access to the personal correspondence that Begley did not see may fill out and enrich this part of the story.
Like a good biographer, Begley dispels many of the shibboleths that saddle Updike. Although he wrote for The New Yorker all of his professional life, Updike was not, in key respects, a New Yorker writer. He only lived in the city for about two years and rarely made it the subject of his fiction. In fact, he did not like New York much, preferring to live in New England and to write about it when his home ground in Pennsylvania did not preoccupy him. A world traveler, Updike also set his fiction in Africa and South America, and created his own version of the literary life in his stories about Henry Bech. Although Updike received some excellent editing at The New Yorker, he hardly took his cue from the staff there, for example, ignoring Katherine White’s advice to steer clear of a novel about an ex-basketball player. Had he been in thrall to her, there would be no Rabbit novels.
So much has been written about Updike and sex that it is refreshing to see Begley return often to Updike’s treatment of religion and religious feeling—its place in his life, in his work, and in the lives of others. He was a man of faith who always had his doubts. His freethinking stance is a manifestation of a man who was marvelously open to experience, to registering the quotidian, and to intimations of immortality in the ordinary. A case in point is “Pigeon Feathers.� Begley suggests the story is about Updike’s “adolescent crisis of faith”—although to put it in purely autobiographical terms unnecessarily delimits the reach of this masterpiece. Begley almost too dutifully builds up his biographical perimeter. Thirteen-year-old David Kern is Updike’s stand-in. Together with a mother and father who also resemble Updike’s parents, David is boxed up in a farmhouse in Firetown, a fictionalization of Plowville, the natal home Linda Updike insisted on moving back to despite her son’s and husband’s resistance. They did not want to be removed from Shillington, Updike’s beloved hometown, which becomes Olinger in his fiction. While it is good to know that Updike’s parents were the starting point for the story, Begley does not seem to notice that the characters Updike creates seem harsher and less nuanced than Linda and Wesley Updike. Begley paraphrases the story’s exquisite opening, and as a result much is lost in the translation. Here are the first three sentences:
When they moved to Firetown, things were upset, displaced, rearranged. A red cane-back sofa that had been the chief piece in the living room at Olinger was here banished, too big for the narrow country parlor, to the barn, and shrouded under a tarpaulin. Never again would David lie on its length all afternoon eating raisins and reading mystery novels and science fiction and P. G. Wodehouse.
Updike has often been accused of writing precious prose, of emitting perfect sentences that do not amount to much more than an expression of elegant style. But as an analysis of Updike at his best shows, such dismissiveness is nonsense. This beautifully measured beginning is about more than David and Updike. It is about deracination and its disturbing consequences for the human psyche.
The material world, in this case, is solidly observed in a succession of objects that help the boy own his existence. When those objects are disarranged, David feels as banished as the sofa and is dead to this new world. He might as well be living under a shroud. He is disoriented as he looks at his books, “stacked, all out of order.� But rather than discourse on his character’s feelings, Updike shows us David’s world. We can see it for ourselves, instead of being told about it. The eclectic, casual, and comfortable world of David’s adolescence has been disrupted, as Begley says, but “Pigeon Feathers� is also about a rage for regularity that helps us situate ourselves in the reality we have built. So David’s sets about “to find a new place� by arranging his books. In its quiet, unassuming way, the story’s opening paragraph is reminiscent of the moving scene in The Sound and the Fury when Benjy wails because Luster is going the wrong way around Jefferson’s square, quieting only when Luster turns the wagon around so that to Benjy everything appears “each in its ordered place.�
David’s mother cruelly demands that he shoot the pigeons his grandmother says are fouling the furniture in the barn. A reluctant David, goaded by his father who, in effect, calls his son soft, shoots a whole mess of the birds, feeling like a “creator,� clever at seeing and shooting “these little smudges and flickers.� To this theological conceit, Updike adds a warrior mentality that looks upon the carnage as dead enemies, “falling with good, final weight.� Dead, the birds are to be admired as beautifully engineered specimens: “And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.� Begley rightly concludes that David’s “religious doubts are eventually resolved to his own satisfaction (if not the reader’s—the boy deduces from the beauty of nature evidence of a caring deity).� The god who “lavished such craft upon these worthless birds� could not refuse to “let David live forever.�
The notes to the Library of America’s new Updike: Early Collected Stories provide the author’s own 1996 gloss on this story he wrote in 1960 as a reconstruction of his “adolescent trauma of religious doubt mixed with the trauma of being moved from a small town to an isolated, unimproved farm.� Even a single word like “unimproved� takes us deeper into the story, into David’s and our own increasingly atavistic feelings. But Updike doesn’t leave off where Begley’s biography begins. Instead, Updike makes the theological/philosophical thrust of the story paramount: “The notion that killing other creatures relieves the fear of death owes something to Hemingway. At the age of sixty-two, I can scarcely improve on the vision and affirmation of the last paragraph.� And, it must be said, any biographer or critic would be hard put to improve on Updike’s characterization of his work.
Begley’s book has only so much room to discuss individual works—his discussion of “Pigeon Feathers� is accorded two substantial paragraphs—and perhaps to say much more is to defeat narrative in favor of analysis. But for Updike’s best work, more of a buildup might have been preferable to cataloguing both his achievements and his failures. Even so, Begley has done the good work of a first biography destined to be superseded—not by jettisoning his adumbrations about Updike the man and his work, but by building upon them.
But Begley cannot show what the creative struggle meant to Updike when he was not writing, or when he was writing about not writing. Begley was denied access to much of Updike’s personal correspondence because Updike’s second wife, Martha, who controls the literary estate, would not cooperate with him. From my own research I can tell you that she thought Begley got off to an unseemly fast start too soon after her husband died. Whether Begley made a strategic error in not cultivating the widow, concluded that he would never secure her permission no matter how much he pandered, or did not wish to become ensorcelled by her is hard to say. Trying to appease a literary estate is usually a losing proposition—as Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes’s not-quite-authorized biographer, can tell you after having been excommunicated by the widow Hughes. Biographers have to find their own voices, and this Begley has done by producing a double-column biography, aligning what was happening in his subject’s life with what Updike was writing at the time. Begley has done a diligent job interviewing Updike’s friends and lovers and, most importantly, Updike’s first wife, Mary. The result, for the first part of the biography, is splendid, since Mary is frank not only about Updike’s virtues and faults, but also about her own. She verifies, in so far as any work of fiction can, the truth of the Maples stories, for example, and describes the kind of loving, if sometimes disengaged, father Updike was to his four children. Mary was there to watch Updike grow as a writer during his Harvard years and his time abroad in London, when he still had some hope of becoming a first-class illustrator. And she was on hand to deal with his sexual antics during the era that made his novel Couples a four-million-copy bestseller.
In The New Yorker, Louis Menand commends Begley for being more scrupulous than most biographers in revealing few details about Updike’s dalliances. But of course Menand is wrong. Readers of biography need to have the names and dates of a subject’s lovers. Who were they, and what were they like, and how did the Updike they knew square with the fellow who wrote the stories, novels, essays, and poems? Was the private Updike noticeably different from the public one, from the one who wrote letters and interacted with his children? Why literary critics like Menand want to live in willful ignorance of such information is mystifying—I suppose it messes up their fastidious desire to deal only with the fiction. Why such writers bother to review biography is a bigger question. Their ambition seems to be to cut biography and the biographer down to size, or in this case to extol a biographer who has done only half his job—although Begley should not be handled too harshly. He spoke with many of Updike’s lovers with the understanding that he would not out them, perhaps the only way to get them to talk at all. But to suppose the biographer is doing anything more than making a virtue of necessity is to evince ignorance about biography, which is, alas, all too common among otherwise intelligent critics.
Begley’s biography breaks apart in 1977, when Updike divorces Mary and marries Martha. The biographer, like an apostle obliged to rewrite scripture, has to rely on Updike’s children, who clearly resented his second wife commandeering their father’s genius, restricting access to the great man, and, in general, secluding him in the conventional life of a renowned author. But he continued to do fatherly things, while admirably letting his children go their own way even when he had misgivings. He was not merely a churchgoer, but an active participant in the life of his church. He had golfing buddies. Like most Americans, he did not take that much of an interest in politics and rarely made it the subject of his work. He was, however, a diffident supporter of the war in Vietnam, a stance that put him out of step with many of his contemporaries, such as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. In some ways, Updike did not feel qualified to pontificate on politics, the national sport. His demurral has been taken by some as evasive, but if he really hadn’t given that much thought to politics, should he just join the dissenters? Perhaps what really upset his contemporaries on the left was his qualified respect for authority and unwillingness to stand on his own self-righteousness. Begley does not pursue this line of thought, but it has always seemed to me that Updike was refreshingly different from the herd of independent minds who opposed the war—even if he was wrong about it.
Begley exhibits some momentum during the first half of the book, buoyed by his knowledge of his subject’s ways and means. This information is one reason he suggests that Martha did what her husband could not. He did not abandon his four children, but he had reached a point where he wanted to remove himself (somewhat) from them. To his children—all mostly grown by then—Updike’s departure may have seemed unfeeling. But to him, as a parent, was this such a poor choice? From Martha, Begley could have learned more, but as he revealed in an interview with The Awl, he never met Martha.
Begley does not reflect much about how Updike’s status as an only child might have affected his own parenting. Did having four children fill a need? Did his interaction with his writer mother—who did so much to encourage him, but who was also sometimes domineering—contribute to the aloofness he displayed when dealing with his own children? The patterns are there to be read in different ways, and perhaps Begley thought it better not to force interpretations. Or perhaps Begley did not have the kind of evidence that would permit more extensive interpretation. A second Updike biographer with access to the personal correspondence that Begley did not see may fill out and enrich this part of the story.
Like a good biographer, Begley dispels many of the shibboleths that saddle Updike. Although he wrote for The New Yorker all of his professional life, Updike was not, in key respects, a New Yorker writer. He only lived in the city for about two years and rarely made it the subject of his fiction. In fact, he did not like New York much, preferring to live in New England and to write about it when his home ground in Pennsylvania did not preoccupy him. A world traveler, Updike also set his fiction in Africa and South America, and created his own version of the literary life in his stories about Henry Bech. Although Updike received some excellent editing at The New Yorker, he hardly took his cue from the staff there, for example, ignoring Katherine White’s advice to steer clear of a novel about an ex-basketball player. Had he been in thrall to her, there would be no Rabbit novels.
So much has been written about Updike and sex that it is refreshing to see Begley return often to Updike’s treatment of religion and religious feeling—its place in his life, in his work, and in the lives of others. He was a man of faith who always had his doubts. His freethinking stance is a manifestation of a man who was marvelously open to experience, to registering the quotidian, and to intimations of immortality in the ordinary. A case in point is “Pigeon Feathers.� Begley suggests the story is about Updike’s “adolescent crisis of faith”—although to put it in purely autobiographical terms unnecessarily delimits the reach of this masterpiece. Begley almost too dutifully builds up his biographical perimeter. Thirteen-year-old David Kern is Updike’s stand-in. Together with a mother and father who also resemble Updike’s parents, David is boxed up in a farmhouse in Firetown, a fictionalization of Plowville, the natal home Linda Updike insisted on moving back to despite her son’s and husband’s resistance. They did not want to be removed from Shillington, Updike’s beloved hometown, which becomes Olinger in his fiction. While it is good to know that Updike’s parents were the starting point for the story, Begley does not seem to notice that the characters Updike creates seem harsher and less nuanced than Linda and Wesley Updike. Begley paraphrases the story’s exquisite opening, and as a result much is lost in the translation. Here are the first three sentences:
When they moved to Firetown, things were upset, displaced, rearranged. A red cane-back sofa that had been the chief piece in the living room at Olinger was here banished, too big for the narrow country parlor, to the barn, and shrouded under a tarpaulin. Never again would David lie on its length all afternoon eating raisins and reading mystery novels and science fiction and P. G. Wodehouse.
Updike has often been accused of writing precious prose, of emitting perfect sentences that do not amount to much more than an expression of elegant style. But as an analysis of Updike at his best shows, such dismissiveness is nonsense. This beautifully measured beginning is about more than David and Updike. It is about deracination and its disturbing consequences for the human psyche.
The material world, in this case, is solidly observed in a succession of objects that help the boy own his existence. When those objects are disarranged, David feels as banished as the sofa and is dead to this new world. He might as well be living under a shroud. He is disoriented as he looks at his books, “stacked, all out of order.� But rather than discourse on his character’s feelings, Updike shows us David’s world. We can see it for ourselves, instead of being told about it. The eclectic, casual, and comfortable world of David’s adolescence has been disrupted, as Begley says, but “Pigeon Feathers� is also about a rage for regularity that helps us situate ourselves in the reality we have built. So David’s sets about “to find a new place� by arranging his books. In its quiet, unassuming way, the story’s opening paragraph is reminiscent of the moving scene in The Sound and the Fury when Benjy wails because Luster is going the wrong way around Jefferson’s square, quieting only when Luster turns the wagon around so that to Benjy everything appears “each in its ordered place.�
David’s mother cruelly demands that he shoot the pigeons his grandmother says are fouling the furniture in the barn. A reluctant David, goaded by his father who, in effect, calls his son soft, shoots a whole mess of the birds, feeling like a “creator,� clever at seeing and shooting “these little smudges and flickers.� To this theological conceit, Updike adds a warrior mentality that looks upon the carnage as dead enemies, “falling with good, final weight.� Dead, the birds are to be admired as beautifully engineered specimens: “And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.� Begley rightly concludes that David’s “religious doubts are eventually resolved to his own satisfaction (if not the reader’s—the boy deduces from the beauty of nature evidence of a caring deity).� The god who “lavished such craft upon these worthless birds� could not refuse to “let David live forever.�
The notes to the Library of America’s new Updike: Early Collected Stories provide the author’s own 1996 gloss on this story he wrote in 1960 as a reconstruction of his “adolescent trauma of religious doubt mixed with the trauma of being moved from a small town to an isolated, unimproved farm.� Even a single word like “unimproved� takes us deeper into the story, into David’s and our own increasingly atavistic feelings. But Updike doesn’t leave off where Begley’s biography begins. Instead, Updike makes the theological/philosophical thrust of the story paramount: “The notion that killing other creatures relieves the fear of death owes something to Hemingway. At the age of sixty-two, I can scarcely improve on the vision and affirmation of the last paragraph.� And, it must be said, any biographer or critic would be hard put to improve on Updike’s characterization of his work.
Begley’s book has only so much room to discuss individual works—his discussion of “Pigeon Feathers� is accorded two substantial paragraphs—and perhaps to say much more is to defeat narrative in favor of analysis. But for Updike’s best work, more of a buildup might have been preferable to cataloguing both his achievements and his failures. Even so, Begley has done the good work of a first biography destined to be superseded—not by jettisoning his adumbrations about Updike the man and his work, but by building upon them.
October 21, 2017
Aside from a recent biography of Charles Dickens, I rarely read biographies of writers. Their books are what I'm interested in, not so much the lives that produced them. John Updike, though, is an exception as many of his novels and stories are thinly disguised autobiography so his books and life overlap and shed light one another. Further whetting my interst is that Updike was a chronicler, especially in his Rabbit Angstrom quartet of novels, of 20th century American middle-class society, a group that includes me.
Updike has often been accused of being a superb stylist but writing about nothing of any importance, and worse, of being a sexist who was inordinately fond of his sexual descriptions. Begley disagrees and considers Updike one of our great novelists of the 20th century. He poses the question of what is important in fiction. Updike would argue that fiction is supremely suited for examining individual sensibility, and that includes memory, emotion, conscience, all the intangibles of our consciousness. A writer like Tom Wolfe would dismiss this idea and urge novelists to concentrate more on the structure of society, its injustices and distortions, and as he puts it, to wrestle the "beast".
It's true that Updike's earlier novels and short stories concentrated more on the inner lives of individuals, but beginning with the mid-career Rabbit novels he moved outward and his later work includes plenty of societal "wrestling." A contemporary of Updike with whom he is often compared is Philip Roth whose roots are in an urban Jewish background while Updike's are in a rural Protestant Pennsylvania. From different perspectives, both look at both the individual who is inseparable from the society he inhabits.
Begley writes, "Theology and adultery are twinned subjects in both Updike's work and his life." Much of this biography traces both of those subjects - the hedonism of sexual pleasure comes with its moral and ethical costs. They involve the disruption of stable families, the guilt that comes with marital betrayals, the impact on entangled children. All of this, of course, reflects a shift of values and attitudes toward marriage that began in mid 20th century America. Much of this unrest is dominant in Updike's stories about the fictional Maples family.
Another aspect of Updike's "theological" concerns was a constant preoccupation with death in the lives of his characters. What hope is there for so many of these fallen and flawed people that Updike describes? There seems to be a Calvinistic tendency that some kind of salvation is not ruled out, and in secular terms, it means a description and validation of their lives in fiction, lives we recognize, at least in part, as our own.
What Begley finds is that they closely parallel Updike's own life, and reveal that the one thing Updike valued above all else was his writing. He had phenomenal powers of observation and could detach one part of himself from the turmoil he was involved into write about it, turn it into fiction, even as he was living it.
Updike was a prolific writer, composing twenty-four novels, nearly twenty short story collections, childrens' stories, extensive poetry, and huge collections of his non-fiction pieces, many of them book reviews, mostly written for THE NEW YORKER . As he wrote in one of his earlier pieces, he wanted to find “a method of riding a thin pencil line out of Shillington", a small town in Pennsylvania. He rode his pen from his modest beginnings into fame and possible immortality (a relative term, for writers, of course - who knows how long they will be remembered?) . Seventy-seven years of experiences that ended with his death in 2009.
Updike has often been accused of being a superb stylist but writing about nothing of any importance, and worse, of being a sexist who was inordinately fond of his sexual descriptions. Begley disagrees and considers Updike one of our great novelists of the 20th century. He poses the question of what is important in fiction. Updike would argue that fiction is supremely suited for examining individual sensibility, and that includes memory, emotion, conscience, all the intangibles of our consciousness. A writer like Tom Wolfe would dismiss this idea and urge novelists to concentrate more on the structure of society, its injustices and distortions, and as he puts it, to wrestle the "beast".
It's true that Updike's earlier novels and short stories concentrated more on the inner lives of individuals, but beginning with the mid-career Rabbit novels he moved outward and his later work includes plenty of societal "wrestling." A contemporary of Updike with whom he is often compared is Philip Roth whose roots are in an urban Jewish background while Updike's are in a rural Protestant Pennsylvania. From different perspectives, both look at both the individual who is inseparable from the society he inhabits.
Begley writes, "Theology and adultery are twinned subjects in both Updike's work and his life." Much of this biography traces both of those subjects - the hedonism of sexual pleasure comes with its moral and ethical costs. They involve the disruption of stable families, the guilt that comes with marital betrayals, the impact on entangled children. All of this, of course, reflects a shift of values and attitudes toward marriage that began in mid 20th century America. Much of this unrest is dominant in Updike's stories about the fictional Maples family.
Another aspect of Updike's "theological" concerns was a constant preoccupation with death in the lives of his characters. What hope is there for so many of these fallen and flawed people that Updike describes? There seems to be a Calvinistic tendency that some kind of salvation is not ruled out, and in secular terms, it means a description and validation of their lives in fiction, lives we recognize, at least in part, as our own.
What Begley finds is that they closely parallel Updike's own life, and reveal that the one thing Updike valued above all else was his writing. He had phenomenal powers of observation and could detach one part of himself from the turmoil he was involved into write about it, turn it into fiction, even as he was living it.
Updike was a prolific writer, composing twenty-four novels, nearly twenty short story collections, childrens' stories, extensive poetry, and huge collections of his non-fiction pieces, many of them book reviews, mostly written for THE NEW YORKER . As he wrote in one of his earlier pieces, he wanted to find “a method of riding a thin pencil line out of Shillington", a small town in Pennsylvania. He rode his pen from his modest beginnings into fame and possible immortality (a relative term, for writers, of course - who knows how long they will be remembered?) . Seventy-seven years of experiences that ended with his death in 2009.
June 4, 2018
Mr. Begley's biography about John Updike focuses on how Updike's fictional stories were ill-disguised reflections of the author's life and thoughts. There are no examples of great heroics in the famous author's life. If anything, beyond his breathtaking achievements in the literary world, it's somewhat mundane beyond Mr. Updike's wandering libido. Mr. Begley, therefore, focuses on the artistic merits and ingredients behind many of Updike's works. The biography is less an emphasis on writing a chronological history as it is a quasi-psychoanalytical measure of the man and how he evolved. It is not the typical approach I've experienced when reading biographies about other writers such as John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Harper Lee, E.B. White, Mark Twain etc.
Without question Mr. Updike was a talented writer, highly intelligent, hard worker, and yearned for literary fame. It all came with breathtaking ease compared to most other writers. The most notable nonliterary aspect of his life was his numerous affairs. However, Mr. Begley avoids any salacious material but does examine the major effects of two of the women with whom he had extramarital affairs. All his other illicit trysts and the women's names are intentionally left out to protect their anonymity. Kudos to Mr. Begley for his noble discretion by avoiding Kitty Kelley-like muck. Beyond analyzing how Updike's works mimicked the guy's life, Mr. Begley also addresses the famous author's relationship with his parents, especially the mother Linda; his small town upbringing; his four years at Harvard and quick recognition as an bona-fide author soon after graduation; his employment at the New Yorker; going out on his own in his mid-twenties; his social circle in Ipswich, Massachusetts which gave him oodles of material revolving around infidelity; his relationship with various authors including John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates; and how immense wealth as well as fame changed his world.
Mr. Begley has done a wonderful job with the book but it is difficult for me to see anyone without a keen interest in John Updike's work being interested in reading this thing. Unlike Norman Mailer's life which was riddled with outrageous egomaniacal antics, Mr. Updike was pretty drab stuff. It's his art that really stood out. The only two minor things I found frustrating about 'Updike' was the paperback's snobby, unnecessary, deckle edge which made it difficult to turn pages and asterisks so small that my 57-year-old eyes had a hell of a time noticing them. Trying to find the tiny bugger to see how it applied to the footnote on the bottom of the page was like trying to find friggin' Waldo. It may be the first time the ordinary asterisk has caused me to swear under my breath countless times.
Without question Mr. Updike was a talented writer, highly intelligent, hard worker, and yearned for literary fame. It all came with breathtaking ease compared to most other writers. The most notable nonliterary aspect of his life was his numerous affairs. However, Mr. Begley avoids any salacious material but does examine the major effects of two of the women with whom he had extramarital affairs. All his other illicit trysts and the women's names are intentionally left out to protect their anonymity. Kudos to Mr. Begley for his noble discretion by avoiding Kitty Kelley-like muck. Beyond analyzing how Updike's works mimicked the guy's life, Mr. Begley also addresses the famous author's relationship with his parents, especially the mother Linda; his small town upbringing; his four years at Harvard and quick recognition as an bona-fide author soon after graduation; his employment at the New Yorker; going out on his own in his mid-twenties; his social circle in Ipswich, Massachusetts which gave him oodles of material revolving around infidelity; his relationship with various authors including John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates; and how immense wealth as well as fame changed his world.
Mr. Begley has done a wonderful job with the book but it is difficult for me to see anyone without a keen interest in John Updike's work being interested in reading this thing. Unlike Norman Mailer's life which was riddled with outrageous egomaniacal antics, Mr. Updike was pretty drab stuff. It's his art that really stood out. The only two minor things I found frustrating about 'Updike' was the paperback's snobby, unnecessary, deckle edge which made it difficult to turn pages and asterisks so small that my 57-year-old eyes had a hell of a time noticing them. Trying to find the tiny bugger to see how it applied to the footnote on the bottom of the page was like trying to find friggin' Waldo. It may be the first time the ordinary asterisk has caused me to swear under my breath countless times.
May 10, 2023
This was another foray into audio biographies of celebrated authors, and it took a while to get through, clocking in at 20+ hours at 1.5X speed. I was also laid up for a couple weeks from surgery and pain meds and I primarily listen to audiobooks while driving to and from work.
I have wanted to explore Updike's writing for a while now. He's one of four authors to have received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, and his were both for his Rabbit series. Last year, I attempted to read the first book of the Rabbit series, Rabbit Run and while I was liking the writing, I struggled to stay with it and I'm not sure why (my feeling it was the wrong book at the wrong time).
Despite all my years working in bookstores, I was surprised to learn just how prolific John Updike was in his lifetime, not only writing novels, but short stories (he basically shaped the short story format for the New Yorker magazine). He also wrote poetry, book reviews, and essays.
What I didn't like about this biography was an inconsistent timeline with the various chapters and sections within chapters. Rather than progressing through his life by chronicling his various novels and stories written at those times, the author chose to jump forward or leap backward in time to further explain something in Updike's style, or how events and people in his life became subject matter for him (and no one was safe, not even his own children).
I will definitely dive into the Rabbit series in the near future, not that I have a better understanding of the author himself. This is why I choose author bios for my audio reads.
I have wanted to explore Updike's writing for a while now. He's one of four authors to have received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, and his were both for his Rabbit series. Last year, I attempted to read the first book of the Rabbit series, Rabbit Run and while I was liking the writing, I struggled to stay with it and I'm not sure why (my feeling it was the wrong book at the wrong time).
Despite all my years working in bookstores, I was surprised to learn just how prolific John Updike was in his lifetime, not only writing novels, but short stories (he basically shaped the short story format for the New Yorker magazine). He also wrote poetry, book reviews, and essays.
What I didn't like about this biography was an inconsistent timeline with the various chapters and sections within chapters. Rather than progressing through his life by chronicling his various novels and stories written at those times, the author chose to jump forward or leap backward in time to further explain something in Updike's style, or how events and people in his life became subject matter for him (and no one was safe, not even his own children).
I will definitely dive into the Rabbit series in the near future, not that I have a better understanding of the author himself. This is why I choose author bios for my audio reads.
May 15, 2014
If you like the prose of John Updike, you’ll enjoy this biography. I suppose my job is to answer the question for non-believers: why should I read this? The answer is simple: Adam Begley’s fine portrait helps us see the combination of family forces and innate personality traits that produced one of the finest writers of the 20th Century. "Updike" is entertaining and deliciously detailed. And, most of all, reading Updike gives us the chance to watch an artist develop and get to work.
Quite literally, work.
John Updike made a commitment as a young teenager and never altered his course. The youthful glint in his eye never faded. He wrote a poem about four weeks before his death. With a main character who is intellectually playful and a biographer who so copiously examined the connection between Updike’s life and the many ways he fictionalized that life in the written word, there’s a powerful or interesting idea on each page of this beautifully written book, either from Updike himself or Begley teasing something out.
Perhaps the single most important ingredient in the formative stages of Updike’s career was a mother determined to imprint an only son with ambition and expectations as a writer. But "Updike" makes it clear that the writer took his mother’s ambition (“enough for two,� Begley writes) and applied himself like a voracious, insatiable student.
Begley’s close readings of Updike’s short stories and novels (and poetry) provide terrific insights into the life of the man himself. (If nothing else—you’ll get some excellent suggestions for a few dynamite short stories to read; I had overlooked “Farrell’s Caddie,� among many others.) Updike, after all, digested his life for the sake of his art. He may or may not have written with a “callous disregard for his family and other, collateral victims,� but he observed and wrote and then he observed and he wrote some more.
"Updike" spends a fair amount of time on Updike’s youth in the Pennsylvania towns of Plowville and Shillington and it details young John’s interesting and complicated relationship between his mother and father.
Updike’s aunt sent the family a subscription to The New Yorker in 1944, when John was 12, and the young writer, really, never looked back. He loved the magazine’s cartoons and for many years developed talent as an illustrator and cartoonist but adjusted course after a successful and inspiring run at Harvard University (full scholarship) and at Oxford University (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art). Along the way, he learned to love the Romantic poets and Shakespeare—and recognized his own talent for telling a story on the page. Young Updike wanted to stay in college forever.
From the outside, he made it look easy.
As Begley puts it: “This frictionless success has sometimes been held against him. His vast oeuvre materialized with suspiciously little visible effort. Where there’s no struggle, can there be real art? The Romantic notion of the tortured poet has left us with a mild prejudice against the idea of art produced in calm, rational, workmanlike manner (as he put it, “on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain�) but that’s precisely how Updike got his start. When he arrived at The New Yorker, he hadn’t yet written anything resembling a masterpiece (he sensibly aimed at the achievable goal of turning out stories and poems his favorite magazine would be likely to buy), but he was building for himself, plank by plank, a stable platform on which to perform more daring feats.�
New York didn’t last long. Neither did a job as staff writer for the The New Yorker—though his long relationship with the publication lasted all his life. It’s possible Marcel Proust is responsible for Updike setting loftier goals. “It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance,� Updike wrote on reading Proust. “I was dazzled by the witty similes � that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better� writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.�
John Updike managed his own career, consciously leaving New York City for Massachusetts and bearing down (hard) on the goal of becoming a successful novelist at the highest level. He managed everything, right down to his “aw shucks� public image.
Begley makes it clear that Updike had taken a fairly significant risk in leaving the well-cushioned life of a New Yorker staff writer. There were no guarantees. There were setbacks but all obstacles withered in the face of Updike’s flying pencil.
For material, Updike drew heavily on his Pennsylvania youth and on the interactions among his circle of friends. His life was complicated and layered and so were the lives of his characters. Over time, Updike would develop three principal leading men to live his life on the page—Richard Maple, Henry Bech and Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom, the star of the four novels and one final novella. Religion played a key role. So did golf. And so did sex. And sometimes ("A Month of Sundays"), all three.
"Couples" launched him to the level of public figure—a novel about the lives of well-off suburbanites in fictional Tarbox, Massachusetts who were busy balancing their religious upbringing with the new freedoms of the mid 1960’s. “Curiously muffled,� Begley writes, “the satiric element in 'Couples' lies buried under two layers: Updike’s exuberant prose, which wraps in baroque splendor whatever it touches, and the mass of sociological detail provided about Tarbox and its inhabitants.�
Begley’s deep dive into various novels is powerful—particularly the Rabbit tetralogy and the three novels inspired by "The Scarlet Letter"�"A Month of Sundays," "S.," and "Roger’s Version." Begley gives strong play to Updike’s short stories, poetry and literary criticism, too. So Updike is part biography and part literary analysis. Reading "Updike" will make you want to pluck a title off the shelf and start reading his works all over again, this time armed with more awareness and insights about the man behind the words.
In "Self-Conciousness," Updike said he approached the memoir fragments with “scientific dispassion and curiosity.� Begley accomplishes the same—and simultaneously makes a convincing case that Updike, while hardly perfect, belongs with the best.
Agreed.
(For an interview with Adam Begley, please visit my blog: )
Quite literally, work.
John Updike made a commitment as a young teenager and never altered his course. The youthful glint in his eye never faded. He wrote a poem about four weeks before his death. With a main character who is intellectually playful and a biographer who so copiously examined the connection between Updike’s life and the many ways he fictionalized that life in the written word, there’s a powerful or interesting idea on each page of this beautifully written book, either from Updike himself or Begley teasing something out.
Perhaps the single most important ingredient in the formative stages of Updike’s career was a mother determined to imprint an only son with ambition and expectations as a writer. But "Updike" makes it clear that the writer took his mother’s ambition (“enough for two,� Begley writes) and applied himself like a voracious, insatiable student.
Begley’s close readings of Updike’s short stories and novels (and poetry) provide terrific insights into the life of the man himself. (If nothing else—you’ll get some excellent suggestions for a few dynamite short stories to read; I had overlooked “Farrell’s Caddie,� among many others.) Updike, after all, digested his life for the sake of his art. He may or may not have written with a “callous disregard for his family and other, collateral victims,� but he observed and wrote and then he observed and he wrote some more.
"Updike" spends a fair amount of time on Updike’s youth in the Pennsylvania towns of Plowville and Shillington and it details young John’s interesting and complicated relationship between his mother and father.
Updike’s aunt sent the family a subscription to The New Yorker in 1944, when John was 12, and the young writer, really, never looked back. He loved the magazine’s cartoons and for many years developed talent as an illustrator and cartoonist but adjusted course after a successful and inspiring run at Harvard University (full scholarship) and at Oxford University (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art). Along the way, he learned to love the Romantic poets and Shakespeare—and recognized his own talent for telling a story on the page. Young Updike wanted to stay in college forever.
From the outside, he made it look easy.
As Begley puts it: “This frictionless success has sometimes been held against him. His vast oeuvre materialized with suspiciously little visible effort. Where there’s no struggle, can there be real art? The Romantic notion of the tortured poet has left us with a mild prejudice against the idea of art produced in calm, rational, workmanlike manner (as he put it, “on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain�) but that’s precisely how Updike got his start. When he arrived at The New Yorker, he hadn’t yet written anything resembling a masterpiece (he sensibly aimed at the achievable goal of turning out stories and poems his favorite magazine would be likely to buy), but he was building for himself, plank by plank, a stable platform on which to perform more daring feats.�
New York didn’t last long. Neither did a job as staff writer for the The New Yorker—though his long relationship with the publication lasted all his life. It’s possible Marcel Proust is responsible for Updike setting loftier goals. “It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance,� Updike wrote on reading Proust. “I was dazzled by the witty similes � that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better� writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.�
John Updike managed his own career, consciously leaving New York City for Massachusetts and bearing down (hard) on the goal of becoming a successful novelist at the highest level. He managed everything, right down to his “aw shucks� public image.
Begley makes it clear that Updike had taken a fairly significant risk in leaving the well-cushioned life of a New Yorker staff writer. There were no guarantees. There were setbacks but all obstacles withered in the face of Updike’s flying pencil.
For material, Updike drew heavily on his Pennsylvania youth and on the interactions among his circle of friends. His life was complicated and layered and so were the lives of his characters. Over time, Updike would develop three principal leading men to live his life on the page—Richard Maple, Henry Bech and Harry “Rabbit� Angstrom, the star of the four novels and one final novella. Religion played a key role. So did golf. And so did sex. And sometimes ("A Month of Sundays"), all three.
"Couples" launched him to the level of public figure—a novel about the lives of well-off suburbanites in fictional Tarbox, Massachusetts who were busy balancing their religious upbringing with the new freedoms of the mid 1960’s. “Curiously muffled,� Begley writes, “the satiric element in 'Couples' lies buried under two layers: Updike’s exuberant prose, which wraps in baroque splendor whatever it touches, and the mass of sociological detail provided about Tarbox and its inhabitants.�
Begley’s deep dive into various novels is powerful—particularly the Rabbit tetralogy and the three novels inspired by "The Scarlet Letter"�"A Month of Sundays," "S.," and "Roger’s Version." Begley gives strong play to Updike’s short stories, poetry and literary criticism, too. So Updike is part biography and part literary analysis. Reading "Updike" will make you want to pluck a title off the shelf and start reading his works all over again, this time armed with more awareness and insights about the man behind the words.
In "Self-Conciousness," Updike said he approached the memoir fragments with “scientific dispassion and curiosity.� Begley accomplishes the same—and simultaneously makes a convincing case that Updike, while hardly perfect, belongs with the best.
Agreed.
(For an interview with Adam Begley, please visit my blog: )
January 28, 2018
Having enjoyed the works of many great American writers (Yates, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald among them) it was a librarian, many years back, who asked if I had tried Updike novels. The conversation we had left me curious - she was of a mind that this would be one US author I would loathe. So, I picked up the first of the Rabbit novels to discover more. The 'charges' levelled at Updike's work always refer to misogynistic tendencies - I found I loved his way with words. His characters have a 'life' to them because they are frequently unlikeable and always flawed and that was true of both male and female characters throughout his works. In his own words Updike devoted the main body of his works to 'middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities'. He didn't spare his readers from the unpleasant side of middle America.
So, having devoured all the Rabbit series, the Bech books and others, I was pleased to receive Adam Begley's biography of Updike in my Christmas stocking !
Begley has taken a huge amount of information and worked it into a revealing and detailed journey through Updike's life. A complex man, also flawed (surprise surprise!) - the overall result is a much greater understanding of what made this gifted writer tick and how his own life experience is frequently interwoven in to his work.
If you are an Updike fan it is a 'must-read', if you sit in the anti-Updike camp - still a must read; it may explain a thing or two!
So, having devoured all the Rabbit series, the Bech books and others, I was pleased to receive Adam Begley's biography of Updike in my Christmas stocking !
Begley has taken a huge amount of information and worked it into a revealing and detailed journey through Updike's life. A complex man, also flawed (surprise surprise!) - the overall result is a much greater understanding of what made this gifted writer tick and how his own life experience is frequently interwoven in to his work.
If you are an Updike fan it is a 'must-read', if you sit in the anti-Updike camp - still a must read; it may explain a thing or two!
January 4, 2020
A solid biography and yet I finished it thinking it could have been better. Begley thanks Updike's first wife (Mary) and their children in his Acknowledgements but all of their input seems to have been on background - there are very, very few direct quotes from any of them. This is especially troubling in the case of Mary, who appears (fictionalized, of course) in so many of his stories and novels from the 1950s and 1960s. Begley repeatedly speculates (often, annoyingly, in the first person) about Mary's reaction to this story or that novel and I kept thinking, "Well, why don't you just ask her?" Very strange. Updike's second wife (Martha) and her children appear not to have cooperated at all which forces Begley to reconstruct their 30 year marriage from second and third hand sources, many of whom seem to have an axe to grind. However, Begley gives Updike's work itself a thorough examination without bogging down in the sort of heavy textual analysis that would be out of place in a general interest work. Overall there are more good things than bad about this book but I think the definitive Updike biography is still to be written.
August 2, 2017
I didn't care much for this book, but it's only half due to the author. In his defense, the life itself is not very interesting - no real struggles, no revelations, no depth; in short, Updike comes across as a person who elicits neither sympathy nor affection. The part that is the author's fault is that, while I find it interesting to learn a little something of how an author includes personal details and experiences in his or her works, this book maps nearly every event (without regard to its level of importance) in Updike's life to one of his works and describes each instance in excruciating detail - over time this becomes distracting and eventually tiring. I felt compelled to take long breaks from the book while reading it.
August 29, 2017
Remembering no Updike read in my youth, although there very well may have been some, Adam Begley's book left me wanting to read none. Updike starts off confusing and draggy, starts coasting at Harvard and flying in New York, only to hit a wall in Ipswich. John Updike comes across as a self-obsessed mama's boy, a favorite son always craving special attention from a woman in one adulterous affair after another; until he ends up with a second wife who is like both a dominating mommy and daddy, shielding him from most of the outside world, including his own children. Might one suggest he was nothing but a closet woman hater, not an insightful observer and writer of life.
(Note: I received a free ARC of this book from Amazon Vine.)
(Note: I received a free ARC of this book from Amazon Vine.)
June 27, 2021
More 3.5.
Begley doesn't always give clear dates for publication of books (a chronological list in the back before the index, something biographers of other writers have provided, would have been useful), spends too much time on individual stories, and has a liking for defending Updike against most criticism (except the type he levels himself), though he does, in fairness, admit a few remarks that are less than favourable. Still, the overall feeling is that Begley's a Booster. And who is he boosting? Not the greatest writer who ever wrote in the u.s., which makes the talk of the Nobel tiresome (as it is about most writers). The style is all right. The book captures probably all anyone would want to read about Updike and his family.
Begley doesn't always give clear dates for publication of books (a chronological list in the back before the index, something biographers of other writers have provided, would have been useful), spends too much time on individual stories, and has a liking for defending Updike against most criticism (except the type he levels himself), though he does, in fairness, admit a few remarks that are less than favourable. Still, the overall feeling is that Begley's a Booster. And who is he boosting? Not the greatest writer who ever wrote in the u.s., which makes the talk of the Nobel tiresome (as it is about most writers). The style is all right. The book captures probably all anyone would want to read about Updike and his family.
March 10, 2022
John Updike is perhaps the perfect subject for a literary biography because he was at once such a prolific writer and he is the American writer who most reliably turned his life into fiction. Adam Begley does a superb job of reading Updike's life through his fiction and showing us how writing fueled his life. Begley also provides excellent readings of his work accompanied by plenty of quotations that together make the case better than any argument that Updike is our most exquisite writer at the level of the sentence. Reading his sentences in this book only makes me want to read more, and not only his novels (the rest of the Rabbit trilogy, The Coup, Roger's Version) but also the late poems and more of his nonfiction.
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