Updike`s voyeurism
Forty years before John Updike died I read him. I was scandalised, horrified and enraged. Living in a rustic cocoon, my life revolved around singing birds; Mahjong playing housewives; chattering children; bursting blossoms and shady green trees.
Our husbands worked at the adjacent factory in Jhelum that made cigarettes and for evening entertainment walked around the manicured compound taking in the heavenly air. It was the age of innocence.
One balmy winter afternoon a package arrived cycled in by the local newspaper hawker. Once a month we got a bundle of bestsellers from a book club whose subscription was our pride and joy. A hard backed with a bright red cover jacket caught my eye. Scrawled across in yellow was Couples.
I didn`t know John Updike. I didn`t know the plot of his book. My reading list as a kid was Enid Blyton girlie mysteries. Later while growing up I graduated to Georgette Heyer`s regency bucks and Barbara Cartland`s golden gondolas. For real steamy stuff ...the sizzling kind, the gaggle of girls like me shared the True Romance magazines where teens got pregnant and didn`t know what to do next.
Good, I mumbled, as I turned the heavy book to read the synopsis of Couples at the back. It was about, yes you got it, couples who were friends. Ten minutes into the book, my nerves jangled and my hormones caused a crater in the pit of my stomach. I felt like throwing up. “You`re a pervert,” I shut the book and shouted at John Updike`s grinning photo. “How dare you corrupt my mind?” I was shaking with revulsion. “Your pornographic details disgust me.”
I never forgave John Updike for ruining that afternoon. But I have a confession to make Despite my cursing him continually I couldn`t put the book down. Once finished, I swore to myself I`d never read another Updike as long as I lived. And I`m happy to report that I have stuck to my vow. Of course, over time one read about him getting two Pulitzer Prizes; of course one read about his four Rabbit series; and hundreds and hundreds of gems of literature that he continued to churn out from his study in the boondocks of Boston which was his home for 50 years. John Updike was an icon. But I stayed clear of him still nursing my petty little grudge.
On this January 27, news arrived John Updike was dead at age 76.
My Jhelum-days-remembrance of the man returned. I had to read everything said and written about him. America mourned its literary giant. He deserved the Nobel Prize. Today, it`s hard to keep up with the daily outpourings still flooding the web. I just finished watching his live interview with The New York Times and can`t believe that this charm-filled, well- mannered, good-natured and well-groomed gentleman had lung cancer and would be gone in 30 days! In all his recent interviews, John Updike never spoke of death but life. And yet a month later the man who wrote Couples and found instant fame is no more.
My morbid curiosity needed a closure. I had to read about Updike`s funeral which he had planned before dying. Here`s one description “The organist struck the opening chord, and the service began. The pace was brisk, the hymns familiar. No eulogy. It could have been anybody`s funeral.”
Now back to his fiction Why was it so sexually explicit? Why did he write about divorce, infidelity and Lotharios and end up with a Pulitzer Prize? “Adultery,” John Updike once told Time, “has become a kind of imaginative quest for successful hedonism that would enable man to enjoy an otherwise meaningless life.” Okay, but where did Updike - whose rule of thumb was to write 3 pages daily for 50 years - get his material for his salacious stories?
“John Updike will be remembered not so much for his books — we couldn`t read them as fast as he could write them — as for his social effect,” said a former neighbour after his funeral. “He was an undercover man — a spy, as he sometimes called himself. A world-class writer and a sexual adventurer who chose to camouflage himself among bland bourgeois suburban WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), perhaps because it was so easy to get away with. His breakthrough book, Couples about marriage and infidelity, was published decades ago but there are still people talking about who did what to whom. It took me years to figure out, but Updike lived a double life. He was two different people The extraordinary intellect, and the guy who hid it with a kind of false modesty. The reality was he took everything that happened around him and put it into his fiction — with changes — but not always with enough changes to make people around here comfortable. I introduced him to my mother. Sometime later a short story appeared that was closely modeled on her. It was accurate, but very cruel. I didn`t speak to him for a couple of years.”
To be fair, Updike couldn`t have produced over half a century of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism by secretly studying his neighbours` wives or their mothers! Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, the magazine that carried John Updike`s works for 60 years, calls the late author “One of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing.” He fulfilled Virginia Woolf`s dictum that “the writer`s job is to get himself or herself expressed without impediments—to do so as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did, without hate or pause or protest or obvious special pleading... not that the writer`s job was to write a lot, or to register the self with a splash, but to get his or her real experience down all the private pains and pictures—to get it down and fix it there for good. Updike, to use a phrase he liked, got it all in.”
Updike has left us with the wisdom of the ages - the weight we carry with us as we age; Thwarted dreams; Physical desire pitched against physical decay; The cul-de-sac stasis of life in the suburban middle class. “John Updike chronicled these things and more in his decades of writing, and in this story he lets us in on the one release we all have time,” is my favourite tribute to the man now gone forever.