Rabbit RIP
Posted on January 28th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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John Updike died yesterday. There’s no shortage of fawning obits, but as it happens I was reading Florence King’s Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye yesterday, which includes this timely debunking inspired by her attempt to write about Updike for Lear’s magazine:
When Samuel Johnson was asked to comment on the plot of Cymbeline, he refused, saying, “It is impossible to criticize unresisting imbecility.”
I am at brain-death’s door. I can’t finish any of Updike’s books. I keep putting one down and going on to another, thinking it’ll be better, but it never is. His last one, Roger’s Version, is about a divinity professor and a computer expert who team up to prove the existence of God. Part of it is written in computerese and part in medieval Latin. The lit. crit. crowd called it “a novel of ideas.” How can they tell?
For the past month I’ve been hoping that Lear’s would self-destruct so I wouldn’t have to read John Updike. Last week while deep-frying softshell crabs I got the oil too hot and the pan ignited. It was a Freudian slip — I was trying to burn the house down so I wouldn’t have to read John Updike.
I’d rather be a human mine sweeper in the Strait of Hormuz than read John Updike. I’d rather run away and join the ladies auxiliary of the French Foreign Legion than read John Updike. Tell the Lear’s lady I’m dead — it’s more or less true.
There’s much more, so track down a copy of Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye.
Thr first time I took the Foreign Service oral exam, back in 1971, I failed partially because I, the product of a classical education, did not know who John Updike was. I was told afterwards that if I had been reading Time magazine, which was then de rigueur for any Diplomat aspirant, I would have known that he was the “thinking man’s choice for a reputable novelist who writes a lot about sex.”
Other than that, Mrs. Onassis, how did you like Dallas?
[Lucky nobody told her about Philip Roth - after Graham Chapman, from the Monty Python Restaurant sketch.]
That last paragraph sent me back to Mencken’s deathless passage on the speeches of Warren Harding:
“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
Ah, I can certainly sympathize. Reading _A Month of Sundays_ for my first year English class was torture, and no other novels of Updike’s remedied the aftertaste of that first foray.
Fortunately, my utter antipathy towards his prose is offset by a strong love of his poetry, scandalously unremarked upon and often brilliant.
RIP, Mr. Updike.
If I had any doubt that writers for this site have only the most tenuous connection to reality, this badmouthing of one of the most brilliant American writers confirms it. I suggest that , for starters, people pick up a copy of “Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories,” read it, and then come back here and apologize.
I found his reviews and commentary quite good, such as “Self Consciousness” and “Hugging the Shore.” I did like the few novels of his I read. “Toward the End of Time” was a hoot.
If I had any doubt that writers for this site have only the most tenuous connection to reality, this badmouthing of one of the most brilliant American writers confirms it.
If your jibe had more than a tenuous connection to proper english, I would find it, well, I would at least find its meaning. How, pray tell, does badmouthing a “brilliant” author confirm one’s doubt in the delusional nature of the speaker?
Count me as another who much admires Updike’s poems and wishes they were better known. Like Dorothy Parker and Phyllis McGinley, Updike had a great aptitude for witty rhymes, syncopated rhythms, and elegant enjambments: “Just turned nineteen, a nicely molded lad, / I said goodbye to Sis and Mother; Dad / Drove me to Wisconsin … “ I would far rather read this sort of thing than contemplations of Rabbit Angstrom’s navel, and can’t understand why Updike didn’t feel similarly.
Updike missed his true calling-biographer of obscure 19th century presidents. His works on Ten Cent Jimmy Buchanan-”Buchanan Dying” and the Buchanan part of “Memories of the Ford Administration”-were excellent. The rest of his work? Not as good.
Dennis, fair enough. But I suspect you got my meaning anyway.
Dan,
Speaking of Florence King, I’m in the middle of her ‘Southern Ladies and Gentlemen’ right now and it is a riot. I imagine you’ve probably read it, but, if not, it’s well worth a look. Her ‘tory anarchist’ sympathies haven’t shown yet (in this one), but I’m hoping they will before the book comes to a close.
Cheers,
Araglin
John Updike has certainly affected the world with his conventional wisdom — I see little quotes of his everywhere