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Introduction

In addition to the relevant facts, winnowed from heaps of raw in-

formation, a biography ought to give a sense of what its subject was

like to shake hands with or stand next to or drink coffee with. Sohere, before we burrow into the life and work, is a little vignette

I hope will give a taste of John Updike, the flavor of the man as

he appeared to me in the late fall of 1993, when I trailed behind

him, playing Boswell for a day and a half. We were in Appleton,

Wisconsin, at Lawrence University, where Updikes younger son

had studied in the eighties. Updike had been invited to give the

convocation address, dine at the home of the university president,

and talk with students in a writing seminar. It was the sort of well-paid trip Updike made over and over again. He was on display as

Americas preeminent man of letters, showing off what he called his

public, marketable selfa wonderfully controlled and pleasing

performance that revealed, it seemed to me, a good deal about his

private, hidden self.

He had barely sat down (we were at a buffet supper at the

presidents house, plates balanced on knees, guests in armchairs or

perched on footstools) when a well-dressed woman sitting near himasked in a sweet midwestern voice, Mr. Updikedid you write the

wonderful story about the man who swims from pool to pool?

I wish I had, he answered at once, his voice honeyed like his in-

terlocutors; that was John Cheever, The Swimmer. He grinned,

and contained in that wolfish grinhis small mouth a sharp Vin

his long, narrow facewas a mixture of pure amusement, malice,

and forbearance. Perhaps now that John is dead I could lay claim

to some of his stories. The assembled company exhaled with a long,

relieved laugh. They were relaxing, surrendering to his charm.

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Encouraged, the same woman spoke up again, asking if Mr.

Updike, so famously prolific, was slowing down, thinking of retire-

ment. Again, the response was instant: Do you think I should? Atsixty- one? His tousled hair was nearly white, his eyebrows scruffy

like an old mans. A network of fine wrinkles surrounded his eyes

but the eyes themselves were bright and lively (he had a bona fide

twinkle in his eye, said Jane Smiley, maybe the only person Ive

ever known to really have such a thing). He was tall and lanky

but not remotely feeble or doddery. On the contrary, he exuded a

vigorous self-confidence, an almost palpable centeredness. His voice,

still sweet, had taken on a flirty, comically submissive edge, as if theadvice of this midwestern Cheever fan could hasten his retirement

and shape the end of an illustrious literary career. I havebeen tidy-

ing up, he offered, along with another friendly, wickedly acute grin.

That moment of teasing social agility sparked my suspicion

that the playfully mischievous, dazzlingly clever John Updike was

a potentially dangerous individual, and that a gamut of conflicting

emotions, not all of them kindly, were hidden behind the screen of

his public persona. I think it was the hint of danger, subliminallycommunicated to the clutch of listeners in the presidents blandly

elegant living room, that made his performance in the role of cele-

brated author so appealing. Yes, he was a professional writer being

professionally engaging, but he was also signalinghow? with that

clichd twinkle?that his good behavior, his forbearance, had its

limits.

At the time, Id read only a few dozen Updike stories and a

couple of the novels; when I finally read his memoirs, I found thisapposite passage about an earlier trip to a midwestern university:

I read and talked into the microphone and was gracious to

the local rich, the English faculty and the college president,

and the students with their clear skin and shining eyes and

inviting innocence, like a blank surface one wishes to scrib-

ble obscenities on.

Suspicion confirmed. Of course there was an undercurrent of ag-

gression in all that expertly deployed charm, a razor edge to his os-

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tensibly gentle wit. In one of the dazzling self-interviews with his

alter ego Henry Bech, he lamented his own eagerness to please and

ridiculed the whole notion that a writer should be nice: [A]s Nor-man Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long af-

terwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is

like thepfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our

brains delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization. A

nice, happy author? No, thanks. I found I liked him all the more.

Its possible, I suppose, that I was programmed to like him. My

father and he were classmates in college, both of them majoring in

English, and for a while after graduation, when my parents wereliving in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Updike and his first wife

had moved to Ipswich, less than an hour away, the two couples were

friendly. Fifty years later, when Updike died unexpectedly (very few

people knew that he was ill, let alone dying), my father sent me an

e-mail version of an anecdote Id heard before:

One day for some reason John came to see us alone, in the

early afternoon. We were in our living room, which wasflooded by the afternoon sun. You were in your Easy Chair,

a contraption in universal use then among advanced couples,

which allowed the pre-toddler to recline rather as though he

were in a barbers chair having his hair shampooed. One of

Johns less known talents was his skill as a juggler. He took

three oranges from a bowl on the coffee table and began to

juggle for you, and you began to laugh. Astonishing belly

laughter.

According to this family legend, Updike was the first person to

make me laugh. Part of me believed it, and believed it was a natural

consequence of this early imprint that I found him congenial when

I met him as an adult, the baby in the Easy Chair having grown up

to be a literary journalist. Whenever we spoke (which wasnt often

all told perhaps a dozen phone calls and two extended face-to-face

interviews), I was amazed and delighted by his gracious, professional

manner, and by the sly undercutting of his public, marketable self.

He wanted to let you know that he was perfectly aware of the falsity

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of the situation, and perfectly prepared to be amused by it, for the

moment. He wanted to let you know that his real self was elsewhere.

This wasnt just a targeted trick, like juggling for a baby, de-ployed for the benefit of an admiring journalist; old friends and col-

leagues noticed it, too. John could be funny and very friendly, said

his Harvard friend Michael Arlen, but you always felt that this was

just a parallel universe we were occupying for the momentthe real

universe was back at his desk. Roger Angell, Updikes New Yorker

fiction editor for more than thirty years, observed how, near the

end of each visit to the magazines offices, he somehow withdrew

a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turnedaway. Angell called it the fadeaway and thought it had to do with

being temporarily exiled from writing: the spacious writing part of

him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its en-

grossing daily stint back home. He was there but not therejust as

he was kind but subversive, and charming but dangerous.

Another confusion: Updike thought of himself, or wanted to

think of himself, as a pretty average person. So he said at age forty-

nine. But since childhood hed been assured that he was exceptional,brighter and more talented than the rest. And surely he was. A drum-

roll of honors, prizes, and awards accompanies the very long list of

his published bookssixty-odd in fifty-one years! The list and the

accolades confirm that he was indeed extraordinary. His most ob-

sessive fan, Nicholson Baker, whose U and Iis easily the strangest

homage he ever received, declared unreservedly that Updike was a

genius (but rightly conceded that the word has no useful meaning).

My ideas about this question are borrowed from Lionel Trilling,who wrote about George Orwell, He was not a genius, and this is

one of the remarkable things about him. Trilling thought Orwell

stood for the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with

nothing more than ones simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and

a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes

to do. Updike once declared that his epitaph should be Here lies a

small- town boy who tried to make the most out of what he had, who

made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.

Hard work, talent, undeceived intelligencethose three es-

sential ingredients require a binding agent, which is ambition. The

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small-town boy aimed high, with posteritys judgment never absent

from his thoughts. As a college student he dreamed of becoming a

universal artist, by which he meant someone both great and pop-ular, lodged in the heart of the American people not just today but

tomorrow. In the mid-sixties, he began to deposit his papers at the

Houghton Library, where Harvard University stores its rare books

and manuscripts, where scholars go to examine the literary remains

of giants such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry

James, and T. S. Eliot. For the next forty years Updike dutifully

boxed up and delivered to the library first drafts and false starts and

galley proofsthe refuse of my professionas well as personalcorrespondence. Today the Updike archive, a vast paper trail, possi-

bly the last of its kind, is irrefutable evidence of faithhis own and

othersin the enduring significance of his achievement.*

Predicting his eventual place in the pantheon of American lit-

erature is an amusing pastime, but no more useful than playing

pin-the-tail with the genius label. In September 2013, the Library

of America published two volumes of his collected stories; if that

proves to be the first installment of a uniform edition of his work,one of Updikes fondest wishes will have come true. Its one of my

fondest wishes that those books will mark the beginning of a surge

in his posthumous reputation.

* Nine months after Updikes death, Harvard bought the archive from his es-tate for three million dollars; until then the university had merely been storingthe material, hoping one day to own it.