The Stories of Updike by John Updike

First published:The Same Door, 1959; Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, 1962; Olinger Stories: A Selection, 1964; The Music School, 1966; Bech: A Book, 1970; Museums and Women and Other Stories, 1972; Too Far to Go: The Naples Stories, 1979; Problems and Other Stories, 1979

Critical Evaluation

John Updike is a prodigiously talented writer; he is a poet, parodist, critic, novelist, and short-story writer who achieved distinction and a very considerable reputation in the first half of the 1960’s. His career is remarkable, indeed virtually unique among the serious writers of his generation. Perhaps equally remarkable—for there are limits to the most finely tuned imagination, and even though people tend to forget it they must inevitably judge others by their own experience—he gives evidence of enough self-transcendence to be aware of the surprising good fortune which has attended all his efforts. From the first, he has been a character in that rare thing: a genuine, American, real-life success story. It is the kind of thing that has not happened and does not happen to most serious American writers. One need only recall the story Robert Frost used to tell groups of eager young student writers, how a relative had offered him a living for a year, without worry or burden, to determine if he really were a poet. “Give me twenty,” was Frost’s reply to the astounded relative; it took twenty years of hard and lonely labor before Frost was able to convince a publisher to publish his poems. Equally familiar and typical is the example of William Faulkner, who wrote professionally for twenty-five years before anyone began to give him or his work any attention or to consider his work worthy of prizes and awards. Contemporary literary history would indicate that Faulkner’s career and Frost’s are typical, except, perhaps, for the happy endings.

Not only did Updike become a “writer” without prolonged struggle or delay, but, with the single exception of his first book of poems, The Carpentered Hen, he has remained with one publisher, and almost all of his work has been published in one magazine, The New Yorker. Both of these facts are extremely unusual for the times. Most serious writers, and especially the younger ones, move from publisher to publisher, not willingly perhaps, but compelled to by the complexities of the modern publishing business, which simply cannot allow a writer to grow and develop, acquiring an audience as he goes along, over any considerable period of time without demonstrable “success.”

In a sense, Updike has been patronized by two strong and distinguished literary powers and, thus, given an opportunity to develop his talent under apparently almost ideal circumstances, saved from the simple, mundane, and frequently discouraging conditions which plague almost all other writers. Moreover, his critical reception has been uniformly good. Surely he is one of the most encouraged writers of his time. It remains to be noted that he has made every effort to justify this extraordinary interest. He is obviously a prodigious worker. He has not wasted time, nor has he failed to make the most of his advantages. There is no doubt that he is a hard-working, highly gifted, and imaginative writer.

There are built-in dangers and disadvantages to this kind of success story. Talent, to be recognized easily and early, must inevitably be based upon precedent, upon a set of existing and accepted standards. For any establishment to offer rewards at the outset, the work of the neophyte must be acceptable to and, indeed, be complimentary to the establishment. Looking back in time, readers should have no cause to wonder why, for example, Lizette Reese was for so long considered a much better poet than Robert Frost, why Glenway Wescott was recognized as a literary artist while William Faulkner was not. In this era of intense self-consciousness, of continual agonizing reappraisal, it is highly unlikely that a decently educated and successful young writer would not be haunted by the specters of a recent literary past, troubled by the vague prospect that history may well be repeating itself in his case. The thought might well be inhibiting. Then there are the inhibitions that can so easily come from writing for particular patrons and an already existing audience. If these patrons are essentially conservative in literary matters, one would be disinclined to offend, to bite the hand that feeds. The mechanics of human rationalization are such that, in order to continue to create at all, a writer would have to believe in his patrons. To question would be crippling. To rebel might be disastrous.

It is, therefore, a tribute to the skill of Updike to report that in spite of all these factors and in spite of the fact that he has shown little interest in pioneering and innovation in any form, his work has continued to grow in stature and, so far, without the least sign of self-doubt or diminishing integrity.

It is by his short stories that Updike is best known, and it should be observed that chunks and sections of the novels have been originally published in somewhat different form as short stories. In this practical sense, Updike’s fiction is the short story. The Same Door is a book of sixteen well-wrought stories, for the most part conventionally correct according to the familiar formula of The New Yorker, observing the taboos of that magazine, careful, restrained, controlled, and unemphatic in the smooth organization of subject, theme, and structure. Though they are not “autobiographical,” they derive almost exclusively from the author’s pragmatic rather than imagined experience, and they modestly do not aspire to extend beyond these self-imposed limitations. There are stories set in Olinger, which he acknowledges in the foreword to Olinger Stories to be an only lightly disguised reflection of his hometown, Shillington. There are school stories, stories of the pains and pleasures of adolescence, stories set in Oxford, and stories involving young married couples in New York. With the exception of the final story in the book, “The Happiest I’ve Been,” each of these stories is almost a textbook example of The New Yorker story, the expanded anecdote, the significant sketch, told in a straightforward and uncomplicated manner, following the accepted convention of the dramatic presentation with a reasonable unity of time and place. Usually Updike employs a third-person narrator for whom, as a result of the things which happen, there is likely to be an ever so slight rearrangement of the structure of his sensibility. They are fixed in time, at once precisely and evocatively, by the convention of reference to things—the books, fads and fashions, brand names, and popular songs of a particular moment in time. Nevertheless, the essential mood of all the stories, in fact explicitly stated, is memory, unabashed nostalgia, of shards dug up, cleaned and polished, then elegantly displayed against the ruins of time. Time, mutability, the natural process of change and decay are the principal forces against which the human protagonists must wrestle. It is unfair to point out that this drama is a slight one, like the small child who cries against a rainy day, for it has a long and honored tradition, and great writers have made much of it. It is fair, however, to remark that such a theme allows for only small action and diminutive moral drama. Morality, good and evil, appears only insofar as it relates to the overriding concern of the single perceptive self in time. The moral world is, then, greatly simplified. What is bad is likely to be vulgarity, stupidity, ugliness, results of imposed conditions rather than active choices.

There is wit and some humor as well in this first book, but basically all of the stories are extremely serious, exemplary of high seriousness and earnestness applied to simple and commonplace experiences of life, at best succeeding in giving a glimpse of the extraordinary mystery at the heart of things, though always in danger, teetering close to the sheer edge of solemnity and the incorrigibly sentimental. It is this seriousness which has impressed Updike’s enthusiastic critics most uniformly.

None of these items, however, would be enough to lift Updike to official stardom in the established literary firmament. There are a number of qualities that make The Same Door a good deal more significant than several other and roughly similar collections by young writers. His style and verbal felicity are vitally important to the overall effect. Updike is a poet and a good one. A poet’s love of language and the exact shadings and connotations of the right word emerges in sentence after sentence. He displays, as well, a poet’s ear, an aptness of dialogue, a breathtaking sense of the intricate rhythms of prose. Moreover, he demonstrates a superb visual sense, not surprising since he has studied art professionally, an ability to compose a scene or to evoke a person, place, or thing memorably with a few carefully sketched details. The final effect of all these virtues is a haunting quality of evocation, which fits his theme and mood with admirable decorum and, overwhelming all else, leaves a lapidary ambience, a feeling of great richness and beauty, a luminous purity brimming with an inner light.

The Same Door, however, is not the whole story by any means. Pigeon Feathers represents a new and expanded use of his talent. It is another example of the atypical quality of Updike’s literary career. Many modern writers began with experiment and innovation and moved gradually toward the use of a developed style to explore other interests. Typically, Pigeon Feathers would be a first collection of stories, though, realistically, it would have been extremely difficult to publish as such. It is important that with The Same Door, Updike passed all the academic tests. He had “become a ’writer.’” With his chevron of achievement, he has been able to carry patron and audience with him into more adventurous directions in both form and subject matter. Again his basic theme, stated in a functional epigraph from Kafka, is memory, but now there is a difference. There are the apparently conventional stories, including the title story, which lead off the book, but even they are slightly off center when compared to the earlier stories. There are frankly, more explicitly autobiographical stories, and the first-person narration, used only sparingly in The Same Door, is here used freely and easily and often. Most significantly, there are varieties and exercises in the form and structure of the short story, which, while hardly new, are very new for Updike and quite new for The New Yorker. He has an epistolary story in “Dear Alexandros.” He employs the method of dramatic monologue in “A & P,” “Archangel,” and “Lifeguard.” There is a mild story of social consciousness in “The Doctor’s Wife.” There are, perhaps most successfully, a group of personal reminiscences which are transmuted into a form of fiction as in “The Crow in the Woods” and the almost essaylike concluding stories—“The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, Fanning Island,” and the second, “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car.” To make these work as stories requires all of his natural and acquired skill and, as well, requires of the reader a more than casual interest, not only in the perceptions of the author but also in his life. In fairness to the many fine contemporary story writers, it must be pointed out that his experiments are not radical and are, in large part, derivative. Yet they represent in many cases the first successful popularization of methods and techniques that have in the past been the exclusive domain of the little magazines. Other writers of the short story owe John Updike their gratitude even though he came late to the task; and even if his artistry has been overpraised by his admirers and often praised for the wrong reasons, there is no denying that Updike is a skilled and serious short-story writer.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.

Greiner, Donald. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984.

Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993.

Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Newman, Judie. John Updike. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Uphaus, Suzanne Henning. John Updike. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.