1932-2009

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings

John Updike, “A Month of Sundays” (1975)

I knew it was going to happen soon. I could feel it in my bones. It was only appropriate that the man’s passing should arrive almost as a punctuation mark to the end of a lifestyle he studied, idealized, and mused over in more than 60 works of fiction, non-fiction, and essays and book reviews, the postwar, suburban boom of a new home with two cars in the garage, limitless financial credit, and “idealistic careers and early marriages.”

John Updike is dead at the age of 76.

In June of ‘06 I had the pleasure to see the old master at a live event produced by the Writers Guild, which I wrote about briefly for 8763 Wonderland:

Last evening I saw John Updike and Bruce Wagner – the latter is arguably my favorite L.A. novelist – in dialogue at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. The event was the release of Updike’s latest novel “Terrorist”, which is receiving mixed reviews but as far as I am concerned even the half-baked work of a master modernist such as Updike is far preferable over the next offering from Dan Brown or Lillian Jackson Braun.

The theater was filled to capacity and the audience was comprised almost exclusively of forty and fifty-somethings. Updike clearly does not resonate with the young’uns these days and I think the kind, affable, and self-effacing author was well aware of this fact as he lamented the death of the written word, looking back at his own youth that was always filled with literature.

“There were always books in one’s home back then,” he said, “and magazines – with words, not just pictures like today.”

To add insult to injury, one of the attendees asked Updike if he thought that “today’s literature is coming from the writing on TV, like the shows on HBO.”

Honest to God. There’s some schmuck running loose out there who thinks screenwriting is modern literature.

Only in L.A.

I hope.

My first impulse, of course, was to stalk across the packed theater and beat the man senseless with my walking stick.

But I left my walking stick in the car.

I’ll never make that mistake again. There’s always someone in need of a beating when a weapon is unavailable.

Updike is a constant in my personal reading cycle. I’m still three-quarters of the way through Rabbit at Rest, which is waiting impatiently on my bedside table. A nice hardback edition of In the Beauty of the Lillies is also on my bookshelf, tapping its unread pages and scowling at me.

More later but for now here’s one of Updike’s occassional ghost appearances in The Trace Stories. From Trace Goes Shopping:

One Saturday afternoon in an unusually warm November, Trace was engaged in any number of activities to avoid confronting his four looming magazine deadlines for the month. He surfed the net. He read a few chapters of a novel. He cleaned his desk and used a spray can of cleaning duster to eject the dead skin from his keyboard. He was in the exfoliation phase of his latest psoriasis flare-up, a phase when the patient’s skin begins to flake in finite amounts and fall off like so many snowflakes. The flakes fell in little clouds from his legs, his lower torso and, of course, his hands.

In the process of cleaning his desk he came across a study on psoriasis in literature written by a general practitioner in the Netherlands. The paper had been submitted to the Dutch College of General Practitioners.

“Psoriasis functions as a metaphor for the creative process,” Trace read. “Psoriasis is the result of the implosion of the artist and the literary works on psoriasis – John Updike’s “The Centaur” and “From The Journal of a Leper”, Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective” – all cultivate the idea that psoriasis is the Achilles heel of the introvert individualist, the artist who looks upon the world as a guardsman from the ivory tower of his psoriasis. His salvation is make-believe or an entirely private world: the imagined past of the world of art.”

Trace forgot he had a copy of that study. It was sandwiched between a phone book and two other ignored manila folders. He placed it in the file stacker to the left of his desk, resolving to read it again that evening, but as four o’clock was looming it was time for him to head to Flynn’s Market for his six-pack of beer, pack of smokes, juice for the morning, and whatever else caught his eye.

John Updike, 1932-2009