His passing is very sad. He was a fountain of literary energy, writing novels, stories, poems, essays. He once said that he dreamed his ideal reader would be a lonely and alienated young person in a small town who happens on one of his books and suddenly becomes connected to a whole larger world.
Although I have not dipped into his fiction (my loss, I am sure), I have a friend who also mourns his loss, as he was one of her favourite authors. I have enjoyed the great wit and wisdom he brought to his essays and reviews. His compassion and love for literature shines in his non-fiction work, as I am sure it does in his fiction. It is a real loss for American letters. Although I am no longer in my old job, the one advantage of working in a library situation was that everyone loved books, so they would mourn the passing of a great writer the same as you. I felt some of the same emotion too, with the passing of Pinter in Dec. 2008 – a writer I know well. Also felt saddened when we loss Patrick McGoohan earlier this year, so no problem in bringing up those we admire in a thread. Thank you for honouring him.
Other recent losses (as long as we’re here) Hats off for the actor Ricardo Montalban and artisit Andrew Wyeth who both passed away recently.
I’m a big Updike fan – he’s the author I read most these days when I’m not watching films. I read all four of the Rabbit books this summer and what an experience that turned out to be for me. Very illuminating about my own life experience and also the years that I lived through even though I’m young enough to be Rabbit’s son (in fact, would be just a bit younger than Nelson if Nelson were a real person.) It also helped me understand my dad’s world even though he and Rabbit have many personality differences. I just discovered the other day, reading tributes, that Rabbit, Run (first book in the series) was made into a film starring James Caan back in 1970. Anyone seen it? I don’t expect it would be great but it would be interesting to see how it was adapted. But really, Updike’s use of the language and the psychological insight he reveails are the key to his books, not so much the events that happen in them, so I’m not sure how ideal his texts are for cinematic treatment. It would take a talented director to make the transfer successfully.
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike
He’s left us and now the room is all trompe d’oeuil.
And while we’re here mourning great American writers, I’d like to express my deep sadness at the loss of David Foster Wallace (September 2008). That man could write sentences so long twisted raw and psychologically complex he made Proust look like a grade school amateur with a coloring crayon.
Yeah, I love Wallace too, though I’ve never gotten around to his fiction. His essays are excceptional and from what I’ve read about him and seen in his interviews, he seems like he was a really good guy, humble and generous to other people.
They just made Brief Interviews With Hideous Men into a film… forever one of my favorite books until someone else has the testicular fortitude to expose the male psyche with such utter contempt. I am dreading the film. They’ve changed the plot (there wasn’t a “plot”, so they imposed one) and reduced the concept… aiii
But yeah, check out his fiction. Infinite Jest is a bit of a Finnegans Wake job, though… you have to be prepared to drown in it to get to the bottom of his ocean.
‘Brief Interviews’ sounds interesting. I think I’d start with that before Infinite Jest, which strikes me as the kind of Pynchonesque challenge best reserved for a time when I don’t have quite so many distracting thoughts buzzing through my head. I plan on getting around to that and my remaining Pynchon novels at some point in the future but I’ve never even contemplated trying to tackle Finnegan’s Wake. If you read and understood that book, then you sir, have more testicular fortitude than I. My hat’s off to you, if you got something out of Finnegan’s Wake, It appear to me to be written in Klingon. I think I’ll just have to wait for the movie.
It took 2 years. I read Robert Graves The White Goddess alongside it. I was going to give up and shelve it but the fact that everyone says it’s impossible to understand pushed me to chew into it. And after about a month of taking little bites out of it while commuting on the tube, it clicked. It’s full of beauty, pain, jokes, and its own logic, a car crash of language that you have to re-suture in your own mind. And it helps if you are prepared to follow up on myths, Irish history and alchemical/hermetic allusions as you go. I don’t think there’s such a thing as an interpretation. It’s what you make of it.
A movie of it would be incredible.
I was joking about a movie as I think of it as being the epitome of the term ‘unfilmable’ but then I guess anything is possible with the right visionary. It’s really cool that you got so much out of it and some great minds that I admire, Joseph Campbell, Harold Bloom among them, are huge fans of the book so it may indeed be a masterpiece but to me it seems like a lexical mindfuck that is way above my pay grade. Maybe later, when I’m older.. wiser… thetan level 7… man, just reading an excerpt of it makes me want to shut off my brain, watch Harold and Kumar and take a nap.
TM & JL: Finnegans Wake, The White Goddess (which I have never gotten around to finishing – good on you TM), and Pound’s Cantos are all books to stimulate the mind, but you need patience and, for FW and Cantos, a good crib. Well done, TM, for bringing these up. My daughter, who took linguistics and has studied several languages (Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and several modern languages), loves reading Finnegans Wake aloud, and it tends to make more sense when done so. I only do a few pages at a time. Cantos is a great read, too, but beware of all the strange politics and beliefs hovering around Pound – if that bothers you, stay away.
Through another poster on this site, I have just discovered Wallace and my friend posted to me an online interview he did on Charlie Rose – incredible! He also talks about David Lynch and The Unforgiven on this interivew. I look forward to trying Infinite Jest, which I am reserving at my library. I love many of the post-modernist writers that Wallace was influenced by, like Barth, Barthelme, Coover, but have yet to develope a taste for Pynchon. Wallace mentions these, too, in the same interview.
I am going really off topic here, but one of my favourite things to note are those spooky moments of synchronicity. The Wallace video email arrived the same day I was watching Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) by L. Malle. I found out that Wallace committed suicide last year that day and the movie is about a suicide. Great film by the way and a Criterion. Forgive me for really going off topic! Thanks for your patience.
I think this is the only thread where you can legitimately wander off topic without fear of reprisal.
yeah, Wallace suffered enormously from depression, and in the end it’s rumored that it was the pharmaceuticals, and the constant changing of drugs to control his downspirals that precipitated his suicide. In that sense he’s down with the best— Woolf, Plath, the other Wolfe, and so on, all the manics and the depressives who write like demons… Le Feu Follet fascinates me because the original book by Pierre Eugène Drieu La Rochelle (himself a depressed suicidal fascist) is based on the life of surrealist/Dada poet Jacques Rigaut who killed himself in an apparent act of pure nihilism… circles within circles… and then the film is just bleak and perfect and beautiful as hell, and I can’t help but think that Louis Malle must have ridden his own personal elevator to the gallows at some point, but got out before the 13th floor and thought better of it. And Eric Satie was no stranger to rejection, heartbreak, poverty, and deep melancholy. The whole thing’s a spiral to a point of purity, right down to the silence screaming at the end as the credits roll.
re: Pound… The anti-semitism in the Cantos -—-
“the allegiance of Jews to a patriarchal God represents for Pound a “cult of the will” gone wrong, while at the same time Jews also, he implies, love in the “wrong” way: perversely or too intensely. By thus representing in Pound’s mind a parody of everything that he himself wanted, Jews came to play a scapegoat function in his thinking, as they did for fascism in general. If we could only purge the world of “Jewishness,” Hitler proclaimed, then we would have workers happy in their factories and bosses safe in their offices. So too, I think, the idea of a world purged of Jews meant for Pound a world in which true mastery and rightful authority (his own, for example) would be recognized by all men, and in which a loyal band of artist/comrades (Gaudier and Hulme returned from the dead, Eliot escaped from the clutches of the church) would together create that ideal community for which he never stopped longing—a world, in short, wherein authority and community would come together at last, in a joyous marriage." (Burton Hatlen/Marianne Korn, Ezra Pound and History)
I find it hard to read his work. He couldn’t think past the expectations of his class and education. I don’t admire writers/filmmakers/artists who can’t recognize and circumvent their own ideological failings, or at bare minimum acknowledge them.
TM: I read Pound because of his role in promoting modernism in literature and poetry. I find his poetry exciting, dense, challenging, as he works on many levels. That was why he and Joyce corresponded, but they never really hit it off, because neither was a good reader of the other’s work. Pound is an extreme case of a man who was basically a prisoner of his own warped ideology – social credit economics, anit-semitism, pro-Fasicism, etc., but I put all that behind me to explore his rich verbal world. He revolutionized poetry and was a huge influence on Eliot, W.C Wiliams, Charles Olson, etc.
It was no accident he spent much of his later life in a sanatorium (though some biographers suspect this was done more to avoid prosecution for war crimes as he worked as a propagandist for Mussolini’s government during the war, of course). He did try to expiate his past sins in parts of his poetry – try the Pisan Cantos at some point to see what I mean. The man was wracked by demons, and may have been one in his own life, but poets (like certain filmmakers) are not easy people to live with or assimilate. We have a whole couple of recent threads on filmmakers who have clouded pasts, such as Riefenstahl and Kazan, where the issue of politics is discussed. I fully appreciate anyone, however, who for whatever reason, cannot support the work of an artist, based on their politcal or personal choices. I judge my politicians by their political choices, but not my artists – it’s just the way I am.
No, I hear you. I’ll check out the Pisan Cantos. In fact, I’ll give Pound a re-read, just for the sake of open-mindedness (reccomendations?). I was a lot younger when I read his poetry, and like most people, there’s a tendency not to update earlier impressions and condemnations with the wisdom of a few years. As it goes, I knew very little about his later life, the sanatorium episodes and the war crime accusations—- this deserves more investigation.
While we’re here, on the subject of controversial and maligned artistic figures: Pasolini. I recently had a massive change of heart about him when I finally came to understand Salo. This is in part because of a film I finished this month, the first rough cuts of which have met with some serious antipathy, and I’ve had to defend my decisions to make it. But anyhow… Pasolini suddenly looks largely misunderstood to me, and I’ve had to revise this earlier opinion I had of him as a blatant misogynist hiding behind a tract of politico-linguistic bull.
TM: Do what YOU think is right, which always should be the artist’s creed. Pasolini is an artist who is difficult, like Pound, or Warhol, (or yourself), to get a handle on and decide how to approach. I need to see and study more of Pasolini’s work myself, especially Salo, as I have yet to see it. In terms of your own work, the artist is ALWAYS right, because they are doing things from their own perspective, in the moment. Basically, that is the only thing that counts. We come here, to this forum, to rehash and state our own perspective on an artistic moment, ie. film, that has been someone else’s (the director’s/auteur’s) important moment. All art is creation, criticism and commentary is just re-creation.
Now, to get back to the thread topic, I would like to share with everyone a poem sent to me by a person I just met on site, in response to something I sent him. It is by John Updike – in apologies to Jay for hi-jacking his topic:
“A Rescue” by John Updike
I wrote some words today that will see print.
Maybe they will last “forever”—
that is, more than ten years, in that
someone will read them, their ink making
a light scratch on his mind, or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction
upon a yellow bird—a goldfinch?—
that had flown into our potting shed
and could not get out,
battering its wings unintelligently
upon the dusty panes of the never-opened windows.
Without much reflection, for once, I stepped
to where its panicked heart
was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy soft hands
pinned it against a pane,
held cupped this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door released it,
like a self-flung ball,
to all that lovely perishing outdoors.
Bob, ‘Hijack’ away. I’m enjoying this discussion. Great poem. I really enjoyed that Charlie Rose interview with Wallace as well. His passing is sadder than Updike’s being he was relatively young and deprived of a full life. What a fascinating intellect he was.
Jay: After seeing the interview with Wallace and hearing about him from people on this site, I can’t wait to read Infinite Jest. Thanks for the comments, as I was feeling a bit guilty before.
Meander, meander… this thread is a lot more interesting than a static topic, and it’s more likely to lead somewhere eventually, rather than jam in a bottleneck of competitive opinion, simply by its lack of defined goal. So for now, to re-hijack the thread and weave it back to these themes of depression, society, writing, controversy, politics, and America, here’s some food for thought: an hors d’œuvre, an entree and a desert….
1) an extract from Wallace’s short story, The Depressed Person
2) a previously unpublished interview with Updike on The Great Depression (from New York magazine), and finally
3) some criticism of Updike by Wallace.
Wallace
“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its context — its shape and texture, as it were — by recounting circumstances related to its etiology. The depressed person’s parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played, as in when the depressed person had required orthodonture and each parent had claimed — not without some cause, the depressed person always inserted, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement — that the other should pay for it. Both parents were well-off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person a willingness, if push came to shove, to bite the bullet and pay, explaining that it was a matter not of money or dentition but of “principle.” And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle’s legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of “principle,” though unfortunately not a “principle” that took into account their daughter’s feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected — here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment — to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in."
from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999)
Updike
“I was born in ‘32, when the Depression was at its worst. It’s frightening: From one Depression to the next. Years ago I saw a psychiatrist for a couple of years, and when I’d done a couple sessions describing myself, he said, ‘Oh, it certainly smacks of the Depression.’ I’ll tell you what was nice about being born in 1932: There were a lot of only children. Because people were pulling in there, they were scared. My mother wanted to have another child, I believe, but my father was out of work. He was thrown out of work and my father simultaneously lost his investments. They weren’t enormous, but they were enough to sustain him and his wife in the nice small-town house where I grew up. The men combined forces, my father did get a job and scrape through, but it was a scraping-through, even relative to the other people in the town. A schoolteacher makes less than a full-fashion knitter, which is what a lot of the men did. But you’ve seen movies about that era, and there was a certain coziness, and a dollar went a long way, and people were kind of kind to each other. It was considered correct form to give a dollar to bums when they came to the back door, and when they did, we did. But … it was a very stable world for a child. Children don’t like change, they don’t like changing grades, or I didn’t, [they don’t] love changing houses, but the Depression froze small towns. And then the war came along, and froze them additionally. So by ‘45, it was a world that hadn’t really changed in fifteen years. Now, you get used to nothing looking the same and nothing being there that was there. It’s a different world entirely.
“But the economic terror was very real. My father was a minister’s son and a responsible man who was out of work and had no idea how to get work. And he never forgot that. Never stopped voting Democratic, too. My secret hope is that if it is a [new] depression, everyone will start voting Democratic again!”
“It’s very worrisome: I think if this country doesn’t elect Obama, it will have blown an opportunity that will never come along again. I just think he’s so much the superior candidate. Everything about him. But maybe I’m speaking like a teenage crush. Being the child of Depression Democrats, I’ve never had a great love for Republicans, although some of my best friends, etc., are Republicans. I’ve lived my adult life mostly under Republican administrations, mostly after LBJ — there was just Clinton and Carter. And this deification of Reagan, you mention Reagan, somehow the waves will part! I remember when people thought it was incredible that he’d be elected — as incredible as it is for Sarah Palin to become V.P., it was incredible for him to become president. He was charming, though, in a way. And he sort of convinced you — my mother once asked, how does he convince everyone that they’re rich?
“I don’t know if we’re on the eve of a depression. It sort of showed us America at its best. The movies that came out of the Depression, they’re wonderful in a way. The rich are rich! And nobody blames them for it. Houses in Long Island, and flighty daughters, and limousines — figures of gentle fun. It’s funny to watch them, because they don’t have the anger you’d think it would have called forth. But America is a place where everyone could become rich.”
source—NY magazine
Wallace on Updike
Source—- Associated Press Obituary.
He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation’s confusion over the civil rights and women’s movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. His characters, complained one younger author — David Foster Wallace — had no passion but for themselves.
“The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self,” Wallace wrote in 1997. “Though usually family men, they never really love anybody — and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women.”
I think I’ll continue the trend and ask something completely off-topic: does anyone have the obituary Updike wrote for Nabokov? I’ve wanted to read it for some time, but have been unable to find it.
Tobias: Thank you for the selections you posted. Very interesting.
“The power of the imagination is not apt soon to find another champion of such vigor. . . . He takes with him the secret of an undiscourageable creativity, he leaves behind a resplendent oeuvre.” Updike on Nabokov
I’ll track it down.
Good luck, TM. I tried earlier and couldn’t find it on the internet. I’d like to read it though if you come across it. I believe it was in the New Yorker in early July of 1977 if that helps.
Exceptionally apt quotes TM, as always – do you have a file of these things somewhere? I love this thread!!! Nabakov is one of the few writers I have read almost everything by at one time or another. Interesting how he got into this conversation. Still never got around to reading Updike’s fiction, although I did try – what does that say? Could Wallace be right? But I have always admired Updike’s non-fictional voice – was it somehow more real?
Jay, I have a few contacts in publishing and know a few heads out there who storehouse this kind of writing… thanks for the heads up on date and publication, should make it easier to find. I’ll do my best.
Yeah, Bob, Nabokov is a hero. Lolita is one of the greatest novels ever written. I think it’s flawless, awesome, perfect in its tones of contempt and empathy. There’s a thread on the films somewhere but I haven’t read them.
Updike wrote a lot about Nabokov. “What startling beauty of phrase, twists of thought, depths of sorrow and burst of wit! … It was Nobokov’s gift to bring Paradise wherever he alighted…” and later he wrote “If ‘Transparent Things’ is a splintered hand-mirror, and ‘Ada’ cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset cumulus, ‘Look at the Harlequins!’ is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments as a magician’s sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness.”
More synchronicities, etc. —-Nabokov taught Martha Updike, Updike’s second wife, at Cornell University. Updike later said that Lolita gave him the inspiration/method/courage to bring explicit sexuality into his writing, and influenced Rabbit, Run. He also got inspiration for form out of Nabokov: from Pnin he got the idea of creating a short book of stories about an alter ego (Henry Bech).
So they are bonded on some fundamental levels, although Updike evolved into a completely unique entity.
Tobias: Thank you for looking. I have scoured the internet and been unable to find it, but the few excerpts I have read (like the ones you posted: lovely, and so apt) have really piqued my interest.
Shelley: John Updike wrote an obituary of Nabokov for the July 18, 1977 issue of The New Yorker in the “Notes and Comments” section. It is uncredited. Maybe this is the one you are looking for. I have the Complete New Yorker on disc and it is about a full page review. This might be the one you are after. Your local library may be able to get it for you.
That’s the one— “On Nabokov”, The New Yorker (18 July 1977). Updike is credited as author of it in A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology (José Ángel García Landa) 2007.
I’d like to read it too. Can you copy and paste it here?
Moderated
“I always dreamed of filming it myself, from a first-person POV.” NEH, that’s the source of my disappointment too. I really wanted to do The Depressed Person. Or the whole thing as a sequence of first person POV interviews. Raw as the emotions that wrote them.
…This gives me an idea. Narratives, talking heads in strange locations. Garage. Literature. Scripts, adaptations. A series of experimental filmed readings using text from the kind of authors in this thread.
I’d like to do some Beckett texts. Thoughts?
Moderated
Jay Leighty
This is a movie site but one of my favorite writers (I would argue the greatest living writer up until his passing) just died and I was surprised and slightly dismayed that not a single person from my job or circle of friends has ever read or knew anything about John Updike. Any fans of his work? Surely someone on this site has a couple of good things to say about this legendary writer.