John Updike

Shortly before the first of these personal essays was composed (but several years after the soft spring night in Shillington that it describes) I was told, perhaps in jest, of someone wanting to write my biography -- to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me! The idea seemed so repulsive that I was stimulated to put down, always with some natural hesitation and distaste, these elements of an autobiography. From the Forward to Self-Consciousness, 1989

6 Selections from this Leonardo of American Letters

Bech in Rumania (excerpt) The writer owned a car, and he drove them, with the gentleness of a pedal boat, through a maze of alleys overhung by cornices suggestive of cake frosting, of waves breaking, of seashells, lion paws, unicorn horns, and cumulus clouds. They parked across the street from a blue sign, and went into a green doorway, and down a yellow set of stairs. Music approached them from one direction and a coat-check girl in net tights from the other. It was to Bech as if he were dreaming of an American nightclub, giving it the strange spaciousness of dreams. From Bech: A Book, 1965

Better than Nature (excerpt) Ryder's modest successes -- he had patrons from early on, and toward the end he was pursued by commissions -- are entangled with the something guileless, rare, and captivating about his personality; in an art world of debonair cosmopolitans like John La Farge and Abbott Thayer, his dedication to art, despite so little apparent talent for it, savored of heroism and sanctity. His heedless techniques, his trite and wispy poems (collected in the Homer-Goodrich volume and quoted by Broun), the dim melodrama of his fairy-tale tableaux, and his decay, after 1900, into grubby eccentricity and counterproductive obsessiveness all conspire to suggest that Ryder was a bit of a simpleton. Americans, with their basically millennial expectations, admire holy fools, especially in the arts, and the full-blown Ryder, combining Whitman's beard with Emily Dickinson's reclusiveness, is our holy fool of painting. Puritanism continues to shape our collective aesthetic sensibility if not our personal behavior; it values sincerity and prefers to a suspect facility like John Singer Sargent's a definite awkwardness, an evident wrestle with difficulty, like Ryder's. In its world-hating heart, Puritanism admires, as ultimate proof of sincerity, self-destruction, whether it comes as the plastic slide of Ryder's gumbo or Pollock's drunken car crash. On such disdainful negations are lofty reputations built. On Albert Pinkham Ryder from Still Looking, Essays on American Art, 2005

Dog's Death She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car. Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!" We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction. The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver. As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin And her heart was learning to lie down forever. Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed. We found her twisted limp but still alive. In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears. Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her, Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared. Back home, we found that in the night her frame, Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog. First encountered in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, 2002

Flight (excerpt) At the age of seventeen, in the fall of my senior year, I went with three girls to debate at a high school over a hundred miles away. They were, all three, bright girls, A students; they were disfigured by A's as if by acne. Yet even so it excited me to be mounting a train with them early on a Friday morning, at an hour when our schoolmates miles away were slumping into the seats of their first class. Sunshine spread broad bars of dust down the length of the half-empty car, and through the windows Pennsylvania unravelled in a long brown scroll scribbled with industry. Black pipes raced beside the tracks for miles. At rhythmic intervals one of them looped upward, like the Greek letter omega. "Why does it do that?" I asked. "Is it sick?" "Condensation?" Judith Potteiger suggested in her shy, transparent voice. She loved science. "No," I said. "It's in pain. It's writhing! It's going to grab the train! Look out!" I ducked, honestly a little scared. All the girls laughed. Judith and Catherine Miller were in my class, and expected me to be amusing; the third girl, a plump small junior named Molly Bingaman, had not known what to expect. It was her fresh audience I was playing to. From Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, 1959

Roger's Version, ii (excerpt) In contrast with the sour quarrelsome atmosphere and deteriorating ceiling of our kitchen, how happy the Kreigmans appeared in their dining alocve, their multicolored lamp just barely illuminating the shadowy walls, which they, like most academic families, have strewn with clumps of eclectic objects -- African masks and drums, Carpathian shepherds' horns, Ethiopian crosses, Soviet balalaikas -- displayed as evidence of foreign travel, like the mounted heads of kudus or leopards for another social class, in another time and empire. From Roger's Version, 1986

A Sandstone Farmhouse (excerpt) Five years after the September when they had moved, Joey went to college. Essentially, he never returned. He married in his senior year, and after graduation moved to New York City. Another of his mother's visions, along with that of the farm as paradise, was of him as a poet; he fulfilled this heroic task as best he could, by going to work for an ad agency and devoting himself to the search for the arresting phrase and image, on the edge of the indecent, that incites people to buy -- that gives them permission, from the mythic world of fabricated symbols, to spend. The business was like poetry in that you needed only a few lucky hits, and he had his share, and couldn't complain. He never again had to get on a bus with a shovel. From The Afterlife and Other Stories, 1995

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