A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 79
Pennsylvania farmhouse after his mother
’
s
John
Updike
361
death. After cleaning out the house and readying it for sale, he believes he has “ reduced
the house to its essence ” and removed all traces of his family ’ s life there. Yet in sifting
through memorabilia and handling the artifacts of their past, he internalizes that
essence and rediscovers the vibrancy of his mother ’ s life and of the rural existence he
once yearned so passionately to escape. Other stories likewise involve returns to home-
towns, some of which give rise to memories with surprising freshness and immediacy,
while others produce unsettling effects. “ Conjunction ” relies symbolically on a tele-
scope to aid the protagonist in evoking memories of earlier conjunctions with his
wife, although he cannot keep his fi x on either the planetary conjunction he is observ-
ing or on his past.
Updike astutely depicts the pressures within ongoing relationships, adapting his
focus to the new landscape that age creates. A longer two - part story, “ George and
Vivian, ” chronicles the husband ’ s eventual admission that his third wife was “ no
comfort ” as they grate on each other during their European travels, while “ Farrell ’ s
Caddy ” treats the situation of discord in the twilight of a second marriage in a delight-
fully comic fashion via an astute caddy ’ s reading of the protagonist ’ s golf game. Other
protagonists in their sixties, such as Fogel of “ Short Easter, ” are bothered by the sense
that “ Everything seemed still in place, yet something was immensely missing ” (102)
– an insight brought home by the disorientation of an Easter holiday shortened by
daylight saving time. In the volume ’ s only fi rst - person narration, “ Falling Asleep Up
North, ” fatigue becomes an advantage of age, facilitating loss of the angst that for-
merly arose so keenly. Updike brings Joan and Richard Maple into the afterlife phase
in “ Grandparenting, ” the volume ’ s fi nal story. Both remarried, they amicably attend
the birth of their daughter ’ s fi rst child, although certain tensions endure beneath the
surface. As Richard holds his new grandchild, he concludes that “ Nobody belongs to
us, except in memory ” (136), typifying the refl ective and somewhat resigned insight
that his characters derive from their accumulated experience. Although the stories of
this phase are not as achingly lyrical or as highly experimental as some of Updike ’ s
earlier work, they nonetheless exhibit his continued craftsmanship, as well as his rare
ability to capture the latent signifi cance of the mundane and to use realistic detail in
evoking the pleasures and sorrows of memory.
To his previous collection of four children ’ s books – one for each of his children
– Updike added A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects in 1995, presumably with his
grandchildren in mind; his son David provided the photographs. He followed the
next year with the novel In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) and Golf Dreams (1996), a
gathering of his prose works on the sport that was a consistent avocation as well as a
topic of literary refl ection. His novel Toward the End of Time (1997) preceded the
publication of his twelfth short story collection, Bech at Bay: A Quasi Novel (1998) ,
whose subtitle signals the coherence among the volume ’ s fi ve longer stories. Updike
takes his traveling celebrity author from Kafka ’ s grave to the Nobel platform, with
meetings of literary intelligentsia, a courtroom appearance, and literary murder in
between. Once again, Updike takes aim in comic fashion at such serious issues as
governmental suppression of writers, the diminishment of American writing, the
362
Robert M. Luscher
wounds critics infl ict upon authors, and the dubious honors bestowed upon writers
by the media culture. As Updike lampoons the same critical establishment that has
received the Bech books more warmly than any other, he takes – as David Lodge states
– “ wicked delight in his own invention ” (9).
Despite allowing his character to serve as the mouthpiece of some pointed barbs
(even one aimed at himself), the view of Bech that Updike presents is characteristically
mixed. Continually self - deprecating, Bech nonetheless arouses reader sympathy as he
frets about mortality, sexual attractiveness and prowess, literary relevance, and his
paucity of worthwhile opinions. Bech ’ s roles in these stories range from darling of
dissident writers to president of an arts academy, defendant in a libel trial, avenger
of literary slights, and fi nally parent and Nobel Prize winner. Like the fi rst Bech
volume, this one begins with a sojourn in Eastern Europe and closes with Bech onstage
at an awards ceremony. In between, he manages to achieve some measure of power as
president of a literary society, as the forgiver of a Hollywood agent who has brought
a libel suit against him, and as a murderer of critics who have panned his work.
“ Bech in Czech ” contrasts Bech ’ s jaded defi nition of the writer as one who is “ to
amuse himself, to indulge himself, to get his books into print with as little editorial
smudging as he can, to slide through his society with minimal friction ” ( Bech at Bay
12) with the Czech dissidents ’ craft and commitment in printing and circulating their
underground books. Bech ’ s journey leads to a further deepening of his Jewish identity
on a visit to Kafka ’ s grave, an existential panic, and an understanding that a more
serious conception of the writer ’ s role than he holds is the route to the literary immor-
tality he desires. Duped by his literary rival into becoming president of an elite guild
of writers and artists that resembles the Academy of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters, Bech unwittingly ends up presiding over its dissolution in “ Bech Pre-
sides, ” in which Updike satirizes the Manhattan intelligentsia. In “ Bech Noir, ” the
darkest and the most humorous of the volume ’ s stories, Updike – who early in his
career dubbed reviewers as “ pigs at a pastry cart ” (Bech 3) – portrays the power of
words in causing harm and backlash. Vexed by negative reviews whose sting has
endured, the 74 - year - old Bech becomes a serial literary avenger, ultimately enlisting
his mistress in a variety of schemes to do away with hostile critics. In “ Bech and the
Bounty of Sweden, ” Bech wins the Nobel Prize that had eluded his creator, but his
fabled writer ’ s block recurs as he attempts to pen his acceptance speech, and he ulti-
mately gives the award podium over to his infant daughter. Only months after this
volume ’ s publication, a new Bech story, “ His Oeuvre, ” appeared in the New Yorker ;
it was later collected with the stories from Updike ’ s three Bech short story sequences
in The Complete Henry Bech (2001).
Updike ’ s importance as writer and critic of short fi ction was recognized in another
fashion with the assignment to co - edit The Best American Short Stories of the Century
(1999) , for which he and Katrina Kenison selected fi fty - fi ve stories from the past
eighty - fi ve volumes of the Best American Short Stories series; his story, �
�� Gesturing ” was
chosen as the 1980 entry by Kenison. In his introduction, Updike expresses concern
about the health of the genre, noting that “ in my lifetime the importance of short
John
Updike
363
fi ction as a news bearing medium – bringing Americans news of how they live, and
why – has diminished ” (xxii). His fi fth gathering of assorted prose, More Matter ,
appeared the same year. After Gertrude and Claudius (2000), a novel, Updike published
Licks of Love (2000) , his thirteenth collection of short fi ction, which gathers twelve
stories with the novella “ Rabbit Remembered, ” a coda to the Rabbit tetralogy that
perhaps overshadows the short fi ction. Both the novella and the stories revisit old
territory: “ Rabbit Remembered ” brings the Angstrom saga into the 1990s and to the
cusp of the millennium through the story of Rabbit ’ s illegitimate daughter, while
the stories, for the most part, revive earlier characters and situations or focus on past
eras. One notable exception is the title story, which chronicles the picaresque sexual
adventures of a banjo player sent to the Soviet Union by the State Department as a
cultural emissary.
Nostalgia, however, is the dominant mood as the stories ’ protagonists retrace the
contours of past affairs, earlier married bliss, or their youth. In “ The Women Who
Got Away, ” for instance, the remarried narrator ’ s attempt to spark an affair with an
old acquaintance during a visit to the town in which his previous adulteries occurred
generates memories of those past amours; however, he discovers that his present efforts
may be in vain when he spots the object of his conquest holding hands with another
woman whose sexual attentions he had once failed to attain. The aforementioned Bech
story, “ His Oeuvre, ” fi ts well in this collection, as the appearance of Bech ’ s former
mistresses at his readings comes to overshadow his literary achievements as his true
masterpieces. Many of the other stories recall lost love and missed opportunities,
although the past appears in retrospect to be a time when pain and loss were more
easily overcome. Still, memory may prove unreliable, as the story “ How Was It,
Really? ” suggests: as the protagonist reviews the “ broad middle stretch ” of his life,
he feels like “ an astronomer … working with blurs ” (147) and is ultimately unable
to formulate a defi nitive answer to the title question – although Updike ’ s previous
short fi ction clearly provides an accurate depiction of that era.
Yet not all the collection ’ s stories look back at the erotic conquests and defeats
that the sexual innuendo of its title suggests. “ Lunch Hour ” involves the return of
recurrent character David Kern – fi rst introduced in “ Pigeon Feathers ” – for his high
school reunion; although Olinger High has long since been razed, he is able to get
in touch with his memories through the presence of the woman who as a young girl
had helped him shed his outcast status and become part of the main social clique. In
“ The Cats, ” the narrator ’ s inheritance of eighty acres of family property in Pennsyl-
vania, along with over forty cats that his late mother had cared for, brings him home
to step into the remnants of his old life. A companion story that revisits material
covered in The Centaur , “ My Father on the Verge of Disgrace, ” casts back into the
narrator ’ s small - town Pennsylvania youth, recalling his father ’ s precarious struggles
to support the family and ultimately affi rming his powers of endurance. Overall, the
stories in Licks of Love serve as a window into the past from a diminished present,
indulging in a forgiving retrospective glance that stands in marked contrast to the
millennial turbulence depicted in the Rabbit novella.
364
Robert M. Luscher
Updike ’ s most recent work includes Americana (2001), a volume of poems, and
the novels Seek My Face (2002) and Villages (2004). The fi rst volume of his collected
fi ction The Early Stories: 1953 – 1975 , for which Updike received the PEN/Faulkner
Award, appeared in 2003. It gathers all but four from a total of 107 stories com-
posed in the fi rst twenty - three years of his career, with the stories divided into eight
titled sections that compose a shadow autobiography and paradigmatic slice of
twentieth -
century American life. The fi rst section reprints the whole of
Olinger
Stories , which has long been out of print, signaling perhaps that the other sections
of The Early Stories might be read in the same fashion as mini - short story sequences,
savoring each story as an autonomous unit while at the same time attuned to the
unity and coherence among them – and ever conscious of the discontinuities which
ultimately keep them apart. One possible model that Updike might have had in
mind is William Faulkner
’
s
Collected Stories
, in which Faulkner divides his short
fi ction into six geographically titled sections that set up similar resonance among
them. Updike thus creates a chronological arc of a composite American life, with
the fi rst four sections – “ Olinger Stories, ” “ Out in the World, ” “ Married Life, ” and
“ Family Life ” – tracing, as the dust jacket notes, “ a common American trajectory ”
from youth to family life, and the fi fth, “ The Two Iseults, ” charting the disruption
of the latter. The sixth and seventh sections – “ Tarbox Tales ” and “ Far Out ” – veer
somewhat from a strictly linear movement, although the affairs in the former section
depict deepened disruptions, while the stories in the latter, the blurb continues,
reside
“
on the edge of domestic space.
”
The collection concludes with assorted
“ unmarried and unmoored ” protagonists in “ The Single Life, ” bringing Updike ’ s
characters to the threshold of forging new attachments and facing mortality in the
face of eroding certitudes.
Updike
’
s efforts to bring Americans their
“
news
”
in short fi ction continued
unabated. As the recent gathering of less than half of Updike
’
s published short
fi ction reveals, his protagonists have generally aged along with their creator, provid-
ing a lasting chronicle of modern American social history. The Early Stories contains
many of his most daring formal and technical experiments with the form, as well
as a number of other exceptional stories – beyond “ A & P ” – that are deserving of
inclusion in anthologies. When subsequent volumes of his collected stories bring
together work from the past three decades, it will be evident that Updike was a
master of the short story form, and that his talents are perhaps best suited to it. As
his list of uncollected short fi ction grows, other collections are likely, further aug-
menting his centrality in refi ning and forwarding the renaissance of the short story
in the twentieth century. The qualities singled out by William Abrahams in his
&nbs
p; 1976 citation for Updike ’ s Special O. Henry Award for Continuing Achievement
are still relevant:
“
the majority of short
-
story writers continue to conduct their
explorations within the visible confi nes of the tradition itself. Few have done so as
consistently, or with such rewarding results as John Updike.
…
His unfl agging
mastery is at once an example and a consolation for addicts of the short story,
readers and writers alike ” (Abrahams 13).
John
Updike
365
References and Further Reading
Abrahams , William , ed. Prize Stories 1976: The O.
Samuels , Charles Thomas . John Updike . Minneapo-
Henry Awards . Garden City, NY : Doubleday ,
lis : University of Minnesota Press , 1969 .
1976 .
Schiff , James A. John Updike Revisited . New York :
Baker , Nicholson . U & I: A True Story . New York :
Twayne , 1998 .
Random House , 1991 .
Searles , George J. The Fiction of Philip Roth and John
Bech , Henry [ John Updike ]. “ Henry Bech Redux . ”
Updike . Carbondale : Southern Illinois Univer-
New York Times Book Review
(November 14,
sity Press , 1985 .
1971 ): 3.
Tallent , Elizabeth . Married Men and Magic Tricks:
Bloom , Harold , ed. John Updike: Bloom ’ s Major
John Updike
’
s Erotic Heroes . Berkeley : Creative
Short Story Writers . New York : Chelsea House ,
Arts , 1981 .
2000 .
Taylor , Larry E. Pastoral and Anti - Pastoral in John
— — — . John Updike: Modern Critical Views . New
Updike ’ s Fiction . Carbondale : Southern Illinois
York : Chelsea House , 1987 .
University Press , 1971 .
Burchard , Rachel C. John Updike: Yea Sayings .
Thorburn , David , and Howard Eiland , eds. John
Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press ,
Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays . Boston :
1971 .
G. K. Hall , 1979 .
DeBellis , Jack . John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967 –
Uphaus , Suzanne Henning . John Updike . New
1993 . Westport, CT : Greenwood Press , 1994 .
York : Ungar , 1980 .
Detweiler , Robert . John Updike