First published in The New Yorker, November 5, 1973.
I think that there's something about the notion of women as daughters that stirs a sense of adoration in men -- a fragile and glowing pride, especially in regards to a female's evolution from girl to woman. John Mayer wrote a song about it. So did Loudon Wainwright. The Beatles did, too. Granted, this whole daughter theory of mine is a suspicion more than anything else -- and for that matter, one that has been formulated from random bits of evidence. One such bit is Updike's "Daughter, Last Glimpses of."
More than anything, the story is a cautionary tale for fathers: the idea that your children won't be there forever and they will eventually look to other people -- other men -- in the process of constructing new identities, new families. The poignancy of "Daughter, Last Glimpses of" rests not the content of the daughter's actions, but rather, the story as a type of evidence of the father's gaze. It's evidence that reassures you that yes, your father was indeed watching.
Updike masterfully captures this paternal lens. Not only that, it's the kind of lens that I think every daughter would secretly approve of: a mixture of endearment, surprise, and mystification. The father figure who relays the story in first person, Geoffrey, is simultaneously impressed and puzzled by his daughter Joy. Between her impulsive desire to learn the jitterbug, her sewing, her investment in contributing to family affairs, and her fuss over raising chickens, the father exhibits a most beautiful and simple fascination.
The latter endeavor carried Joy away, she eventually leaves her family to live with the man who delivered the rooster, described as "the red-bearded harpsichord-maker." Once again, Updike grapples with notions of masculinity in the contentious relationship between the rooster (which is left behind after Joy leaves) and the man who delivered it. The reader feels Updike frown in this exchange, an unfair trade of a rooster for his daughter. While creature serves as an inadequate replacement for Joy, his role that of a painful signifier, a ghost that continues to thrive even in Joy's absence. While life goes on for Joy's family (and the rooster), the father expresses a distinct discontent with the construct of time: the speed at which Joy fled and the life that has ensued in the aftermath of her departure. Perhaps this sentiment is best captured in the final contemplative line, "...the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn as remarkable as all the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses."
The callus metaphor points to the greater moral of the story that I illuminated at the beginning of this piece. A callus desensitizes us to feeling life fully. And continuing in the Updike's theme of male identity, we tend to associate calluses with men: a biologically-produced armor that fails to protect us against another type of pain.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Early Writings
Since I belong to a generation that has their high school papers archived on computers, I was able to extract my essay on John Updike from my 11th Grade AP English class in May 2004. This final research paper concerned selecting an author and examining the relationship between their biography and body of literature.
So here's where it all started. And forgive that it reads like a high school paper, complete with the obligatory quote to kick off the essay.
“There are places I’ll remember/All my life, though some have changed…/All these places had their moments/With lovers and friends, I still can recall.” Musician John Lennon penned these lyrics for his song, “In My Life,” while taking an afternoon bus ride in his hometown of Liverpool, as he reflected upon the significant people and places of his youth. As demonstrated through Lennon’s inspiration for the song, lyricists, as well as authors, draw upon real-life experiences to fashion their characters, settings, and plots. Throughout the past fifty years as one of America’s most famous contemporary authors, John Updike continues to captivate readers through his biographically inspired writing. Updike’s personal experiences directly influence him to develop the main themes of middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships in his novels and short stories.
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Until age thirteen, he led a typical, small-town American life in Shillington, Pennsylvania with his mother, Linda Grace Updike, his father, Wesley Russell Updike, and Linda’s parents. Linda pursued writing and art in her free time, and Wesley worked as a science teacher at Shillington High School, which sat in the family’s backyard.
In 1945, the family abruptly moved eleven miles away to an 80-acre farm in Plowville, Pennsylvania. Updike graduated from Shillington High School in 1950 as co-valedictorian and president of his senior class with a tuition scholarship to Harvard. In 1952, he married Mary E. Pennington, a Fine-Arts major from Radcliffe. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, he won a Knox Fellowship, and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While in England, he sold his first short story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” to the New Yorker, and upon his return to the United States, the magazine hired him.
For the next two years, Updike worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and lived in New York City, where he and Mary started a family. In 1957, he moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he continued to write for the magazine. In his new home, Updike began his career as an author with his first two major novels, Rabbit Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Updike has continued to write novels, short stories, and poetry until present day. His illustrious career has earned him multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and the status of being one of America’s greatest authors for his literary voice and universal themes.
Throughout the majority of Updike’s writing, the theme of middle class suburbia continually resurfaces. He reflects American culture through small town settings and the lives of the townspeople, as crafted from his own life experiences. Updike’s early work consists of many short stories and novels referred to as “The Olinger Stories.” Updike based the typical American town of “Olinger” on his hometown of Shillington. Additionally, the neighboring city of Reading appears as “Alton,” and the town of Plowville as “Firetown." “The Olinger Stories” capture the lifestyle of middle class suburbia, and achieve Updike’s ultimate goal in his writing: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” Updike’s short story, “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” (1964), pays homage the values upheld by middle class Americans from an “Olinger” town.
“The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” directly reflects Updike’s views regarding New York City and its inhabitants through the eyes of thirteen year-old Jay August. The boy describes his first visit to New York City, accompanied by his father. They journey into the city from their small Pennsylvania town to purchase a Vermeer book, and to meet Uncle Quin, an affluent businessman who lives in a hotel. Jay’s father claims, “I (Jay) and his brother (Uncle Quin) were the smartest people he had ever met…he felt that now was the time for us to meet.” After arriving late at the hotel, Uncle Quin proceeds to take Jay and his father on a tour of the city. Throughout the journey, Uncle Quin continually ignores Jay’s desire to search for a Vermeer book, while he conveniently plans their tour around various places to handle his business affairs. At the conclusion of the visit, Jay summarizes his disgust for the city in the last line of the story: “Years passed before I needed to go to New York again.” Updike shares these same sentiments with his young narrator.
For two years, Updike lived in New York City while working at the New Yorker. During this time, he determined that the city was “an unnutritious and interfering world …of agents and would-be’s and with it non-participants.” Living in New York brought Updike to believe that “only stupid people take an interest in money,” as reflected in the character of Uncle Quin – a man whose life is determined by dollars. Also, Updike developed a strong distaste for city itself, where “survival of the fittest is the only law.” Thus, Updike moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which he refers to as “the crucial flight of my life, the flight from Manhattan.” The move enabled Updike to return to his familiar middle class suburban roots, which he longed for in the city, as evident in the scene at the Pickernut Club in “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.”
While Uncle Quin proceeds with his business transactions, Jay orders ice cream. The waiter states that vanilla and chocolate are the only flavors available. Jay describes, “I could scarcely believe it, when the cheap drugstore at home had fifteen flavors.” Minutes before, the waiter inquires if Jay and his father live in New York City, and the father responds, “I live in a hick town in Pennsylvania you never heard of.” As demonstrated through this scene, Updike subtly conveys that “a hick town” may offer a more flavorful life than one spends in the bustling city. Fifty years after writing the short story, Updike’s opinion of New York City remains unchanged. In a 2003 interview, he stated, “I'm glad I spent those two years in New York. I like writing about it. I like being in Manhattan mentally, but I didn't much like being there physically.” Also in reflection of his life in the city, Updike wrote, “The city feels full of other writers and of cultural hassle, and the word game overrun with agents and wisenheimers. I feared the city.”
Updike’s deep desire to escape New York City – a place where he felt trapped by the environment and its inhabitants – appears in his other novels and short stories through the theme of male angst. Male angst encompasses the fervent male desire to achieve satisfaction through power and freedom in marital and familial relationships, the workplace, sexual means, and religion. Many of Updike’s most highly acclaimed pieces, including the short story, “A&P,” and The Rabbit Tetralogy, focus on the restless, dissatisfied male protagonist, and the struggles encountered in attempting to attain an elusive state of fulfillment.
“A&P” tells the story of three teenage girls who enter an A&P store in Massachusetts “in nothing but bathing suits.” A nineteen year-old cashier, Sammy, along with the other cashiers and shoppers, watch the girls as they wander throughout the store. When the trio enters Sammy’s check-out line, the manager approaches them, and requests that they return to the store when they are properly dressed. After the confrontation, Sammy decides to quit, as he feels that the manager treated the girls unjustly. The manager warns Sammy that his parents will be disappointed in him, but Sammy still chooses to walk out the door. Like Sammy, Updike gained a reputation early in his career for abandoning authority to blaze new trails.
Updike drew upon his own nature and the work of J.D. Salinger to write “A&P,” in respect to the theme of male angst. Since his teen years, Updike developed a liking for watching his surroundings and the actions of people, particularly women, as reflected in the detailed characters in the story. In an interview, he stated, “The male eye is attuned to the hunt, and the girl-watching is part of the general hunting way of relating to the world.” Like Updike’s own observations, Sammy possesses a keen awareness of the girls and their presence in the store, described as “a pinball machine…I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of.” The first person voice of Sammy builds the tension he feels while lustfully watching the girls. Vivid descriptions also enable the reader to sense the heady atmosphere of the store.
J.D. Salinger mastered this style in his novel, The Catcher in the Rye through the tormented character of sixteen year-old Holden Caulfield. Updike worked alongside Salinger at the New Yorker, who was one of the best writers at the magazine during the mid-1950s. “A&P” and The Catcher in the Rye share multiple similarities in regards to the theme of male angst, including the similar ages of Sammy and Holden, the boys’ tendency to disregard authority figures, the boys’ rash actions which spur their entry to adulthood, and the overwhelming influence of the boys’ raging hormones, which overtakes their logic. Sammy describes his sudden feeling of bewilderment and insecurity as he walks out of the store, as he states, “my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” Updike felt similar to Sammy when he left his staff job at the New Yorker. He described, “It took a little imagination to leave and quit the staff job at The New Yorker. I went to a party, and it was full of these people I revered…they struck me as very sad; I'm not sure why…I came home from that party and I said to my wife, 'Let's get out of here.” Sammy exists as only one of many characters that Updike created to express the feeling of displacement.
However, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom remains the chief representative of Updike’s theme of male angst. The Rabbit Tetralogy details Rabbit’s disturbing lifetime as he continually searches for his purpose in life, after his illustrious high school career as a small town basketball star. Updike published one book each decade, beginning in 1960 with Rabbit, Run. In this first novel, Rabbit suddenly quits his job as a MagiPeel Peeler demonstrator, and abandons his alcoholic pregnant wife, his infant son, and his dysfunctional family to have an affair in a nearby town. Despite this situation, Rabbit’s journey reveals that he longs for spiritual fulfillment, as he befriends a minister. Eventually, the minister persuades Rabbit to come to his wife’s bedside when she gives birth to their daughter. Rabbit’s return from his two-month sojourn forces him to face reality, which quickly grows more depressing when his wife accidentally drowns their baby. The novel concludes with Rabbit blindly running down the street, attempting to once again abandon his troubles. Updike faced many of the same issues as Rabbit, such as spiritual emptiness and solitude, but he never reached the same level of extreme disillusionment.
While working at the New Yorker, Updike felt spiritually unrest in the bustle of city. Updike reflects this religious crisis through Rabbit, as demonstrated in the scene when the minister shakes Harry’s hand at their initial meeting. Harry “feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation.” Like Harry, Updike felt intimidated by the presence of religion, which led Updike to examine the works of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierdegaard and the German Christian theologian, Karl Berth. Updike sought to determine the purpose of existence through religious study, and by continually pondering the topic in his writing. In Rabbit Run, Updike portrays a gas attendant as a symbolic religious figure that Rabbit meets during his flight. The attendant says, “The only way to get somewhere is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.” Such a statement verifies Updike’s realized religious views on finding the purpose of one’s life, which Rabbit certainly lacks. Updike once wrote, "My books are all meant to be moral debates with the reader in which the fundamental concern is to get the reader to ask the question, ‘What is goodness?’” Ultimately, Updike attempts to answer this question through his own writing, which reflects his internal religious debates and revelations.
In addition to pondering religion in Rabbit, Run, Updike also expresses feelings of loneliness and lack of direction, which he experienced during his youth. At age thirteen, his family unexpectedly moved to Plowville. This event caused Updike to begin his teenage years feeling isolated and displaced on the large farm. Similarly, Rabbit commenced adulthood with these same sentiments, as “he senses he is in a trap,” even within his own home. Rabbit’s solitude mainly occurs due to lack of stable relationships. He possesses no sense of belonging among family and friends, which leaves him feeling unloved and misunderstood.
As demonstrated by the marital and familial relationships in Rabbit, Run, Updike establishes the importance of the relationships between his characters. Updike’s experiences as a son, a father, a husband, and a lover, along to his keen observation skills, enable Updike to realistically develop the perspectives and interactions of his characters. “Flight,” an “Olinger Story” published in 1962, exhibit Updike’s capability to draw upon his own relationships and masterfully weave them into a story.
Seventeen year-old Allen narrates the story, which entails how he finally breaks free of his mother’s ambitions for him to “fly.” Since Allen’s childhood, Lillian continually states her goal for him to pursue scholarly greatness to ensure that he achieves a greater status than that of a typical middle class American. Lillian expresses great dissatisfaction in her family’s social standing, as she works in a department store, and her husband teaches math at Olinger High School. Also, Lillian takes care of her father, who lives with the family. During Allen’s senior year, he goes on a field trip with the Debate Team, and falls in love with “a plump small junior named Molly Bingaman” from his school. Upon returning home, Lillian discovers the budding relationship, and sees Molly as an unworthy distraction for her son. Even her husband attempts to persuade Lillian otherwise, but she refuses to allow Molly to stand in the way of Allen’s future. At the conclusion of the story, the relationship between Allen and Molly dies due to Lillian’s strong influence over her son. Updike depicts the relationships in “Flight” almost exactly as they existed in his real home during his teenage years.
After moving to the Plowville farm, Updike vividly recalls the increased tension within his family. Updike’s parents, Linda and Wesley, frequently argued over his future, in addition to Linda’s frustration at her husband’s lack of interest in living on the new farm. Linda felt heavily burdened and suffocated by sharing the house with her parents, in addition to caring for them as their health declined. Each of these relationships bears remarkable resemblance to those described by Updike in “Flight.”
However, the most important and biographical relationship in story exists between Allen and his mother. The opening scene describes mother and son standing atop a hill that overlooks Olinger. Allen’s mother says, “There we all are, and there we’ll be forever. Except you, Allen. You’re going to fly.” During Updike’s teenage years, his teachers and parents recognized him as a gifted young man. Linda saw John’s talents as a way for her to vicariously reach her goals of having her art and writing published. She convinced John that he was destined to achieve greatness, in the exact same way Lillian instilled this same belief in Allen. Linda also introduced John to the New Yorker, and as a young teenager, he set his goal of working at the magazine. “Flight” may be one of Updike’s most biographical stories, as it accurately illustrates the personal relationships of his youth.
Though Updike’s life experiences directly influence him to develop his most prominent themes of middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships, these life experiences hold another significance in his occupation. The very themes which Updike chooses to develop in his short stories and novels served as the most important influences that led him to pursue a career as a writer in the first place. Updike’s upbringing in the middle class town of Shillington and the relationship with his mother – similar to the mother and son relationship in “Flight” – drove him to pursue excellence, in hopes of reaching his goal to work at the New Yorker. The goal blossomed and came to fruition as a result of Updike’s deep desire to achieve satisfaction through freedom and power, much like Sammy in “A&P” and Harry in The Rabbit Tetraology. Despite his success over the past five decades, Updike remains humble, unlike Uncle Quin in “The Lucid Eye of Silver Town.” Clearly, Updike’s life experiences that relate to middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships hold a special place in his life, as he has devoted the past fifty years to crafting stories and novels based on these themes. He would certainly agree with John Lennon’s lyrics, “I know I'll never lose affection/For people and things that went before/I know I'll often stop and think about them.”
Begley, Adam. “Jolly Geezer John Updike is Back.” Anchorage Press Nov. 6 – Nov. 12 2003. 10 May 2004 <http://www.anchoragepress.com/newarchives/feature1vol12ed45.html>.
Excerpts. Grace Cathedral. 10 May 2004.
Heffron, Joe. “Part 5: Early Stories.” Knot Magazine May 2004. 10 May 2004 <
Updike, John. “A&P.” The Writer’s Presence. 4th ed. Ed. Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 888 – 894.
---. The Early Stories. New York: Knopf, 2003.
---. “Flight.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Ed. George McMichael, Frederick Crews, J.C. Levenson, Leo Marx, David E. Smith. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1998.
---. “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.” Adventures in American Literature. 1st ed. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Austin: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996.
---. Rabbit, Run. 1960. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996.
“Updike, John.” Literary Encyclopedia. 10 May 2004.
So here's where it all started. And forgive that it reads like a high school paper, complete with the obligatory quote to kick off the essay.
In His Life: Updike’s Biographically-Influenced Themes
“There are places I’ll remember/All my life, though some have changed…/All these places had their moments/With lovers and friends, I still can recall.” Musician John Lennon penned these lyrics for his song, “In My Life,” while taking an afternoon bus ride in his hometown of Liverpool, as he reflected upon the significant people and places of his youth. As demonstrated through Lennon’s inspiration for the song, lyricists, as well as authors, draw upon real-life experiences to fashion their characters, settings, and plots. Throughout the past fifty years as one of America’s most famous contemporary authors, John Updike continues to captivate readers through his biographically inspired writing. Updike’s personal experiences directly influence him to develop the main themes of middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships in his novels and short stories.
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Until age thirteen, he led a typical, small-town American life in Shillington, Pennsylvania with his mother, Linda Grace Updike, his father, Wesley Russell Updike, and Linda’s parents. Linda pursued writing and art in her free time, and Wesley worked as a science teacher at Shillington High School, which sat in the family’s backyard.
In 1945, the family abruptly moved eleven miles away to an 80-acre farm in Plowville, Pennsylvania. Updike graduated from Shillington High School in 1950 as co-valedictorian and president of his senior class with a tuition scholarship to Harvard. In 1952, he married Mary E. Pennington, a Fine-Arts major from Radcliffe. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, he won a Knox Fellowship, and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While in England, he sold his first short story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” to the New Yorker, and upon his return to the United States, the magazine hired him.
For the next two years, Updike worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and lived in New York City, where he and Mary started a family. In 1957, he moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he continued to write for the magazine. In his new home, Updike began his career as an author with his first two major novels, Rabbit Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Updike has continued to write novels, short stories, and poetry until present day. His illustrious career has earned him multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and the status of being one of America’s greatest authors for his literary voice and universal themes.
Throughout the majority of Updike’s writing, the theme of middle class suburbia continually resurfaces. He reflects American culture through small town settings and the lives of the townspeople, as crafted from his own life experiences. Updike’s early work consists of many short stories and novels referred to as “The Olinger Stories.” Updike based the typical American town of “Olinger” on his hometown of Shillington. Additionally, the neighboring city of Reading appears as “Alton,” and the town of Plowville as “Firetown." “The Olinger Stories” capture the lifestyle of middle class suburbia, and achieve Updike’s ultimate goal in his writing: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” Updike’s short story, “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” (1964), pays homage the values upheld by middle class Americans from an “Olinger” town.
“The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” directly reflects Updike’s views regarding New York City and its inhabitants through the eyes of thirteen year-old Jay August. The boy describes his first visit to New York City, accompanied by his father. They journey into the city from their small Pennsylvania town to purchase a Vermeer book, and to meet Uncle Quin, an affluent businessman who lives in a hotel. Jay’s father claims, “I (Jay) and his brother (Uncle Quin) were the smartest people he had ever met…he felt that now was the time for us to meet.” After arriving late at the hotel, Uncle Quin proceeds to take Jay and his father on a tour of the city. Throughout the journey, Uncle Quin continually ignores Jay’s desire to search for a Vermeer book, while he conveniently plans their tour around various places to handle his business affairs. At the conclusion of the visit, Jay summarizes his disgust for the city in the last line of the story: “Years passed before I needed to go to New York again.” Updike shares these same sentiments with his young narrator.
For two years, Updike lived in New York City while working at the New Yorker. During this time, he determined that the city was “an unnutritious and interfering world …of agents and would-be’s and with it non-participants.” Living in New York brought Updike to believe that “only stupid people take an interest in money,” as reflected in the character of Uncle Quin – a man whose life is determined by dollars. Also, Updike developed a strong distaste for city itself, where “survival of the fittest is the only law.” Thus, Updike moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which he refers to as “the crucial flight of my life, the flight from Manhattan.” The move enabled Updike to return to his familiar middle class suburban roots, which he longed for in the city, as evident in the scene at the Pickernut Club in “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.”
While Uncle Quin proceeds with his business transactions, Jay orders ice cream. The waiter states that vanilla and chocolate are the only flavors available. Jay describes, “I could scarcely believe it, when the cheap drugstore at home had fifteen flavors.” Minutes before, the waiter inquires if Jay and his father live in New York City, and the father responds, “I live in a hick town in Pennsylvania you never heard of.” As demonstrated through this scene, Updike subtly conveys that “a hick town” may offer a more flavorful life than one spends in the bustling city. Fifty years after writing the short story, Updike’s opinion of New York City remains unchanged. In a 2003 interview, he stated, “I'm glad I spent those two years in New York. I like writing about it. I like being in Manhattan mentally, but I didn't much like being there physically.” Also in reflection of his life in the city, Updike wrote, “The city feels full of other writers and of cultural hassle, and the word game overrun with agents and wisenheimers. I feared the city.”
Updike’s deep desire to escape New York City – a place where he felt trapped by the environment and its inhabitants – appears in his other novels and short stories through the theme of male angst. Male angst encompasses the fervent male desire to achieve satisfaction through power and freedom in marital and familial relationships, the workplace, sexual means, and religion. Many of Updike’s most highly acclaimed pieces, including the short story, “A&P,” and The Rabbit Tetralogy, focus on the restless, dissatisfied male protagonist, and the struggles encountered in attempting to attain an elusive state of fulfillment.
“A&P” tells the story of three teenage girls who enter an A&P store in Massachusetts “in nothing but bathing suits.” A nineteen year-old cashier, Sammy, along with the other cashiers and shoppers, watch the girls as they wander throughout the store. When the trio enters Sammy’s check-out line, the manager approaches them, and requests that they return to the store when they are properly dressed. After the confrontation, Sammy decides to quit, as he feels that the manager treated the girls unjustly. The manager warns Sammy that his parents will be disappointed in him, but Sammy still chooses to walk out the door. Like Sammy, Updike gained a reputation early in his career for abandoning authority to blaze new trails.
Updike drew upon his own nature and the work of J.D. Salinger to write “A&P,” in respect to the theme of male angst. Since his teen years, Updike developed a liking for watching his surroundings and the actions of people, particularly women, as reflected in the detailed characters in the story. In an interview, he stated, “The male eye is attuned to the hunt, and the girl-watching is part of the general hunting way of relating to the world.” Like Updike’s own observations, Sammy possesses a keen awareness of the girls and their presence in the store, described as “a pinball machine…I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of.” The first person voice of Sammy builds the tension he feels while lustfully watching the girls. Vivid descriptions also enable the reader to sense the heady atmosphere of the store.
J.D. Salinger mastered this style in his novel, The Catcher in the Rye through the tormented character of sixteen year-old Holden Caulfield. Updike worked alongside Salinger at the New Yorker, who was one of the best writers at the magazine during the mid-1950s. “A&P” and The Catcher in the Rye share multiple similarities in regards to the theme of male angst, including the similar ages of Sammy and Holden, the boys’ tendency to disregard authority figures, the boys’ rash actions which spur their entry to adulthood, and the overwhelming influence of the boys’ raging hormones, which overtakes their logic. Sammy describes his sudden feeling of bewilderment and insecurity as he walks out of the store, as he states, “my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” Updike felt similar to Sammy when he left his staff job at the New Yorker. He described, “It took a little imagination to leave and quit the staff job at The New Yorker. I went to a party, and it was full of these people I revered…they struck me as very sad; I'm not sure why…I came home from that party and I said to my wife, 'Let's get out of here.” Sammy exists as only one of many characters that Updike created to express the feeling of displacement.
However, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom remains the chief representative of Updike’s theme of male angst. The Rabbit Tetralogy details Rabbit’s disturbing lifetime as he continually searches for his purpose in life, after his illustrious high school career as a small town basketball star. Updike published one book each decade, beginning in 1960 with Rabbit, Run. In this first novel, Rabbit suddenly quits his job as a MagiPeel Peeler demonstrator, and abandons his alcoholic pregnant wife, his infant son, and his dysfunctional family to have an affair in a nearby town. Despite this situation, Rabbit’s journey reveals that he longs for spiritual fulfillment, as he befriends a minister. Eventually, the minister persuades Rabbit to come to his wife’s bedside when she gives birth to their daughter. Rabbit’s return from his two-month sojourn forces him to face reality, which quickly grows more depressing when his wife accidentally drowns their baby. The novel concludes with Rabbit blindly running down the street, attempting to once again abandon his troubles. Updike faced many of the same issues as Rabbit, such as spiritual emptiness and solitude, but he never reached the same level of extreme disillusionment.
While working at the New Yorker, Updike felt spiritually unrest in the bustle of city. Updike reflects this religious crisis through Rabbit, as demonstrated in the scene when the minister shakes Harry’s hand at their initial meeting. Harry “feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation.” Like Harry, Updike felt intimidated by the presence of religion, which led Updike to examine the works of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierdegaard and the German Christian theologian, Karl Berth. Updike sought to determine the purpose of existence through religious study, and by continually pondering the topic in his writing. In Rabbit Run, Updike portrays a gas attendant as a symbolic religious figure that Rabbit meets during his flight. The attendant says, “The only way to get somewhere is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.” Such a statement verifies Updike’s realized religious views on finding the purpose of one’s life, which Rabbit certainly lacks. Updike once wrote, "My books are all meant to be moral debates with the reader in which the fundamental concern is to get the reader to ask the question, ‘What is goodness?’” Ultimately, Updike attempts to answer this question through his own writing, which reflects his internal religious debates and revelations.
In addition to pondering religion in Rabbit, Run, Updike also expresses feelings of loneliness and lack of direction, which he experienced during his youth. At age thirteen, his family unexpectedly moved to Plowville. This event caused Updike to begin his teenage years feeling isolated and displaced on the large farm. Similarly, Rabbit commenced adulthood with these same sentiments, as “he senses he is in a trap,” even within his own home. Rabbit’s solitude mainly occurs due to lack of stable relationships. He possesses no sense of belonging among family and friends, which leaves him feeling unloved and misunderstood.
As demonstrated by the marital and familial relationships in Rabbit, Run, Updike establishes the importance of the relationships between his characters. Updike’s experiences as a son, a father, a husband, and a lover, along to his keen observation skills, enable Updike to realistically develop the perspectives and interactions of his characters. “Flight,” an “Olinger Story” published in 1962, exhibit Updike’s capability to draw upon his own relationships and masterfully weave them into a story.
Seventeen year-old Allen narrates the story, which entails how he finally breaks free of his mother’s ambitions for him to “fly.” Since Allen’s childhood, Lillian continually states her goal for him to pursue scholarly greatness to ensure that he achieves a greater status than that of a typical middle class American. Lillian expresses great dissatisfaction in her family’s social standing, as she works in a department store, and her husband teaches math at Olinger High School. Also, Lillian takes care of her father, who lives with the family. During Allen’s senior year, he goes on a field trip with the Debate Team, and falls in love with “a plump small junior named Molly Bingaman” from his school. Upon returning home, Lillian discovers the budding relationship, and sees Molly as an unworthy distraction for her son. Even her husband attempts to persuade Lillian otherwise, but she refuses to allow Molly to stand in the way of Allen’s future. At the conclusion of the story, the relationship between Allen and Molly dies due to Lillian’s strong influence over her son. Updike depicts the relationships in “Flight” almost exactly as they existed in his real home during his teenage years.
After moving to the Plowville farm, Updike vividly recalls the increased tension within his family. Updike’s parents, Linda and Wesley, frequently argued over his future, in addition to Linda’s frustration at her husband’s lack of interest in living on the new farm. Linda felt heavily burdened and suffocated by sharing the house with her parents, in addition to caring for them as their health declined. Each of these relationships bears remarkable resemblance to those described by Updike in “Flight.”
However, the most important and biographical relationship in story exists between Allen and his mother. The opening scene describes mother and son standing atop a hill that overlooks Olinger. Allen’s mother says, “There we all are, and there we’ll be forever. Except you, Allen. You’re going to fly.” During Updike’s teenage years, his teachers and parents recognized him as a gifted young man. Linda saw John’s talents as a way for her to vicariously reach her goals of having her art and writing published. She convinced John that he was destined to achieve greatness, in the exact same way Lillian instilled this same belief in Allen. Linda also introduced John to the New Yorker, and as a young teenager, he set his goal of working at the magazine. “Flight” may be one of Updike’s most biographical stories, as it accurately illustrates the personal relationships of his youth.
Though Updike’s life experiences directly influence him to develop his most prominent themes of middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships, these life experiences hold another significance in his occupation. The very themes which Updike chooses to develop in his short stories and novels served as the most important influences that led him to pursue a career as a writer in the first place. Updike’s upbringing in the middle class town of Shillington and the relationship with his mother – similar to the mother and son relationship in “Flight” – drove him to pursue excellence, in hopes of reaching his goal to work at the New Yorker. The goal blossomed and came to fruition as a result of Updike’s deep desire to achieve satisfaction through freedom and power, much like Sammy in “A&P” and Harry in The Rabbit Tetraology. Despite his success over the past five decades, Updike remains humble, unlike Uncle Quin in “The Lucid Eye of Silver Town.” Clearly, Updike’s life experiences that relate to middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships hold a special place in his life, as he has devoted the past fifty years to crafting stories and novels based on these themes. He would certainly agree with John Lennon’s lyrics, “I know I'll never lose affection/For people and things that went before/I know I'll often stop and think about them.”
Begley, Adam. “Jolly Geezer John Updike is Back.” Anchorage Press Nov. 6 – Nov. 12 2003. 10 May 2004 <http://www.anchoragepress.com/newarchives/feature1vol12ed45.html>.
Excerpts. Grace Cathedral. 10 May 2004.
Heffron, Joe. “Part 5: Early Stories.” Knot Magazine May 2004. 10 May 2004 <
Updike, John. “A&P.” The Writer’s Presence. 4th ed. Ed. Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 888 – 894.
---. The Early Stories. New York: Knopf, 2003.
---. “Flight.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Ed. George McMichael, Frederick Crews, J.C. Levenson, Leo Marx, David E. Smith. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1998.
---. “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.” Adventures in American Literature. 1st ed. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Austin: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996.
---. Rabbit, Run. 1960. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996.
“Updike, John.” Literary Encyclopedia. 10 May 2004.
Monday, October 6, 2008
"Still of Some Use"
First published in The New Yorker, October 6, 1980. Later published in Trust Me, 1987.
While I do not necessarily believe in destiny, I am a believer in serendipity. Since I thought up the idea for this blog about a week ago, I knew that the first story I would review is "Still of Some Use." Today is the first time that I've had the time and focus to write an entry about it -- and wouldn't you know, it's the 18th anniversary of its publication. Of all 365 days in the year and of all the stories that I could have possibly chosen, what are the chances?
Deteriorating relationships and divorce are common subject matter for Updike. After all, he married at 21 years of age and divorced the same woman 22 years later. To me, that always seemed like an awfully long time to remain married to someone that you would ultimately divorce. While I am the most underqualified person to be probing in this subject matter, consider that Updike also happens to write prolifically about affairs. You don't even have to read that many of his stories to wonder if having affairs was some sort of coping mechanism for an unfulfilling marriage. Maybe he just became sloppy after 22 years and he got caught. I do wonder, I really do.
While a divorce triggers the events of "Still of Some Use," it's not the substance of the story. Rather, it's about the weight of time, the relics and ruins that we must manage at the end of an era. The protagonist, a divorced man named Foster, is recruited to help clean out the attic in his family's old house. The central objects of focus are the board games:
When Foster helped his ex-wife clean out the attic of the house where they had once lived and which she was now selling, they came across dozens of forgotten, broken games. Parcheesi, Monopoly, Lotto; games aping the strategies of the stock market, of crime detection, of real-estate speculation, of international diplomacy and war; games with spinners, dice, lettered tiles, cardboard spacemen, and plastic battleships; games bought in five-and-tens and department stores feverish and musical with Christmas expectations; games enjoyed on the afternoon of a birthday and for a few afternoons thereafter and then allowed, shy of one or two pieces, to drift into closets and toward the attic.
"Still of Some Use" captures Updike's talent in appealing to our most fragile emotions. He knows that the mere thought of sorting through childhood games depresses people. And furthermore, Updike knows that no one wants to talk about it, even though it's a square that every middle class American lands on at some point during their life. We ache to even think that we were once so easily amused by these playthings. With age, our definition of "games" evolves into a disconcerting one. We realize that not all games are fun. Most games are solitary in a lonely sort of way. They become a way of life, a chore to be delegated, a task to be managed. Rules are no longer clear and even if you follow the "right" path, success is not necessarily guaranteed.
This is the heart of "Still of Some Use." The games are an obvious yet effective symbol for Foster, a useless and lifeless pawn amidst his ex-wife's new relationship and his adult sons. Readers forgive Updike for the glaring metaphor -- with our defenses already weakened and our mouths agape at the poignancy undercovered within us, we really can't argue with him that these games are representations of the dissolving man, the explosion of the nuclear family.
Despite the unsettling plot, Updike gives us what we want in the end when Foster's son requests that he accompanies him to the dump to dispose of the games and other garbage from the attic. One of Updike's peculiar charms is his endings. Sometimes, they seem entirely wrong, and other times, they are all too perfect. In "Still of Some Use," we meet the middle of the road. While we glow in the possibility that this ending could be our own, the skeptic in us feels cheated by the unlikely fantasy:
"O.K.," Foster said. "You win. I'll come along. I'll protect you."
It doesn't matter how old you are. Even if you don't want to admit it, you still want to win the game.
While I do not necessarily believe in destiny, I am a believer in serendipity. Since I thought up the idea for this blog about a week ago, I knew that the first story I would review is "Still of Some Use." Today is the first time that I've had the time and focus to write an entry about it -- and wouldn't you know, it's the 18th anniversary of its publication. Of all 365 days in the year and of all the stories that I could have possibly chosen, what are the chances?
Deteriorating relationships and divorce are common subject matter for Updike. After all, he married at 21 years of age and divorced the same woman 22 years later. To me, that always seemed like an awfully long time to remain married to someone that you would ultimately divorce. While I am the most underqualified person to be probing in this subject matter, consider that Updike also happens to write prolifically about affairs. You don't even have to read that many of his stories to wonder if having affairs was some sort of coping mechanism for an unfulfilling marriage. Maybe he just became sloppy after 22 years and he got caught. I do wonder, I really do.
While a divorce triggers the events of "Still of Some Use," it's not the substance of the story. Rather, it's about the weight of time, the relics and ruins that we must manage at the end of an era. The protagonist, a divorced man named Foster, is recruited to help clean out the attic in his family's old house. The central objects of focus are the board games:
When Foster helped his ex-wife clean out the attic of the house where they had once lived and which she was now selling, they came across dozens of forgotten, broken games. Parcheesi, Monopoly, Lotto; games aping the strategies of the stock market, of crime detection, of real-estate speculation, of international diplomacy and war; games with spinners, dice, lettered tiles, cardboard spacemen, and plastic battleships; games bought in five-and-tens and department stores feverish and musical with Christmas expectations; games enjoyed on the afternoon of a birthday and for a few afternoons thereafter and then allowed, shy of one or two pieces, to drift into closets and toward the attic.
"Still of Some Use" captures Updike's talent in appealing to our most fragile emotions. He knows that the mere thought of sorting through childhood games depresses people. And furthermore, Updike knows that no one wants to talk about it, even though it's a square that every middle class American lands on at some point during their life. We ache to even think that we were once so easily amused by these playthings. With age, our definition of "games" evolves into a disconcerting one. We realize that not all games are fun. Most games are solitary in a lonely sort of way. They become a way of life, a chore to be delegated, a task to be managed. Rules are no longer clear and even if you follow the "right" path, success is not necessarily guaranteed.
This is the heart of "Still of Some Use." The games are an obvious yet effective symbol for Foster, a useless and lifeless pawn amidst his ex-wife's new relationship and his adult sons. Readers forgive Updike for the glaring metaphor -- with our defenses already weakened and our mouths agape at the poignancy undercovered within us, we really can't argue with him that these games are representations of the dissolving man, the explosion of the nuclear family.
Despite the unsettling plot, Updike gives us what we want in the end when Foster's son requests that he accompanies him to the dump to dispose of the games and other garbage from the attic. One of Updike's peculiar charms is his endings. Sometimes, they seem entirely wrong, and other times, they are all too perfect. In "Still of Some Use," we meet the middle of the road. While we glow in the possibility that this ending could be our own, the skeptic in us feels cheated by the unlikely fantasy:
"O.K.," Foster said. "You win. I'll come along. I'll protect you."
It doesn't matter how old you are. Even if you don't want to admit it, you still want to win the game.
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