‘A Standard Of Beauty’

In October 2008, in one of the last interviews he gave, Updike said two things that stuck out. First, talking about his choice of profession, he mentioned that if he had not watched his mother trying to write short stories while he was growing up, that he thought it unlikely that he would have chosen the same profession. Then the conversation shifted to his father. "My father was a scared man," he told the interviewer. "And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.

"But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do."

He was as wryly, darkly Olympian about his father as he was about his characters. Not that he was cold, exactly, or unfeeling. It was the frightening clarity of his judgment that was so shocking and admirable. And then he spoke about his family, about children and then grandchildren: "I feel badly for people who for one reason or another haven't had a family life. Having children was something I wanted to do. It's a kind of creation that runs deeper maybe than even artistic creation. But at the same time I think I'm more the father of my books than of my children. My children are their own selves, whereas my books, however imagined or concocted, are something I've produced by myself. So therefore they must be, or speak for, me."

A man who speaks with that level of self-awareness gives his eulogists the day off.

© 2009