John Updike, Your Writing Spoke to Me

I can almost hear writer John Updike telling an interviewer, as he did, "When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him."

I believe he accomplished his dream although I speak as a woman, not a man, and am only a bit younger than Updike. That second fact partly explains why his death scares me. But I am shaking also because of his uncanny ability to get under my skin, not every time, but often.

In my early twenties, I read Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, mainly because I hoped to be a writer and he was a young one getting a lot of attention. I wasn't in synch with his conscious decision to go against the prevailing literary wind by writing about an aged woman. Despite our nearness in age, I couldn't follow him into his imagined world.

Maybe because Updike's books continued getting attention, from time to time I continued to be curious. And of course there was that other Updike whose funny poems popped up in The New Yorker from time to time. One holiday time, I gave a book of them to my husband. For years the syllables of "Eskimos in Manitoba, barracuda off Aruba cock an ear when Roger Bobo starts to solo on the tuba" bounced around our house.

Next, Updike's x-ray vision began taking me inside the male mind. I can still see the format of his now classic story "At the A & P" as it appeared in The New Yorker even although by now I can't tell you the details of the story. Later, Updike worked his magic on me again as I read one of his Rabbit books. With the writer showing the way I could follow the writer into the seamy side of life. Wow, this was living, no matter how sordid.

I plodded though the many couplings in Updike's bestselling Couples while I was in my thirties; I just wasn't very interested in sin.

Many years later in both our lives, I became interested in the women he created. I believed in his character who became a movie star in whichever of his sixty books she appeared. I believed in the narrator of Updike's novel S who lived on a commune much like the Raj Neesh in my own sstate. And much more recently, reading Seek My Face, I could see how much Updike knew about the daily life of a woman living alone in her seventies. When he wrote that said old women were fussy, I began scrubbing my kitchen counter more carefully.

I'm merely one example of Updike's sixth sense for what people want to read.

He also had a passion for the writer's craft.

As he told an interviewer from The Paris Review "I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me."

Sources: personal knowledge supplemented by quotes from The New York Times obituary, January 28, 2009.