One hell of a lot of americans are basically phillistines.

Whatever one thinks of Updike, he was an authentic person of letters. He wrote to his own standards, not to the pulp-media market. He sometimes wrote freely (and tastefully) about human sexuality, but he was still an ascetic, while he was doing it.

I’ve often thought he might have been happy living some centuries earlier, as a sorta/kinda Benedictine monk…writing…(With a wry eye, and without excessive judging)…as long as his superiors in the monastery didn’t keep TOO tight a leash on him, or punish him for his laughing at the fleshly follies and humanity of his compatriots. :o)

“The Witches of Eastwick” was a good example of what I’m talking about. It was a bright, funny, novel. Much better than the movie. (which, despite Updike’s professed loathing for it, had IT’S moment, too. :o) The scene where Jack Nicholson as Satan is voodooed into the middle of the church service while Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer give him a good rousting, to me, was hilarious…:o) )

Wherever you are, good on you, John.

Can almost insert extraordinarily OT comment on Melbourne weather. Pushing 100 as of 11:30 AM.

His latest work always drew attention. From then the question was never ‘if’ you’d read it, but ‘when’ you’d buy – - and thereafter how much of it you’d get through before putting it up on the shelf with the rest of his [prominent, like a framed degree - his occupying the full sprawling range of “U”, unless someone mis-shelved The Name of the Rose].

The lure was usually an extract in the Times, or a lenthy reflection in NYROB or the New Yorker, or the Saturday literary second of the Chronicle or the Trib, and later in the local fishwrap, the last invariably some time after it joined the shelf. It’s always seemed the reviews of his works, the efforts to make sense of what he was on about, connected better – sometimes a little, other times a lot, and often to my dismay. What was wrong with me that I just never got it the way these reviewers did? Nonetheless, I was like Miami Steve in his movie mobster schtick on the Sopranos: whenever I thought I’d finished with his stuff, I’d be dragged back in.

So now I think the muted reaction has to do with this widespread feeling he never actually got to us – or us, society, the broad spectrum of post-WII life, to him – - and maybe the former because the feeling on the later pervaded his work. Sifting through some of his shorter stuff, and parts of his Rabbits and his Witches, reflecting on whatever I’ve retained in the way of memories of those, it seems to me he idled over glasses of water or barefoot through wooded areas with very much the same approach, and the same attention to detail, and the same ‘journalistic’ emotional detachment he applied to a partner’s neurosis or to some part of a lover’s body.

Right now I’m thinking the problem is that it appears he kept feeling drawn to the idea to that it was his job to describe the ‘truth’ in a feeling – and since it was always his feeling, therefore his ‘truth’ [and no one else’s], and moreover because in given circumstances to the same stimuli, far more than not his feelings didn’t come anywhere near my own.

But that’s it, isn’t it? He was always out of place, always off visiting his feelings like a second-hand tourist to his visible, audible, readable self, when it was in New York or New England or [rarely] elsewhere. The more socially communicable variation on that approach, it seems to me, lay with someone like Graham Greene, whose own journalistic detachment was set in exotic scenery, both in locales and plots, and in asserting firm, dismissive judgments as to what was going on in the heads of others [usually a muddle of confusion, or a riotous comedy of misconception] – in contrast with Updike’s, not I think religious, but certainly reverentially disciplined, and whatever was the cause or source, rigid, adherence to the notion that whatever in hell was going on in someone’s else’s mind – even in the same circumstances, even in relation to similar stimuli – was by definition a mystery, not just unknown but unknowable to him.

So, I think [maybe] there’s his ‘truth’, on the shelf, where it’s always been: Here’s what I was feeling when I, and you, and our fellow voyagers and seeming companions through life, were watching and listening and breathing and our hearts were all beating and our brains were all humming as this thing happened – or just to the two of us – or to each of us alone. And if you are unable to tell me what you were feeling, well: I guess you didn’t realize how important it is.

Well said.

something like this, maybe ???

I called his office and railed against supporting Harper … *sigh* … going to call Rae’s Office.

Like BSL, I loved Updike more for his essays and criticism, but then I’m C18, and we’re kind of prosaic. It was an important cultural shift, imho, when writers like Updike and Vidal and even Mailer (sorry: personal resentments) recalled us to the art that is in every kind of writing, not just poetry and fiction. There are Brits who did that as well, of course, and earlier, but you had one brilliant generation there of exceptional public voices.

BSRH @ 35, that is such a wonderful story. Did you resist saying anything to him? I never like to intrude on people I meet that way, but sometimes you just want to say something like “Thanks.”

Variety comes through…

http://www.variety.com/article…..8;nid=2563