Dear John

A NEW biography of John Updike reminds us of the importance of finding beauty in the ordinary.

** FILE ** In this 20 May 2006 file photo, author John Updike takes part in a panel discussion at BookExpo America 2006 in W...

PERHAPS it is impossible to write a biography of John Updike that does not seem a little dim in the light of its subject. That, at least, was the thought that recurred while reading Adam Begley’s diligent and necessarily expansive life of the author.

This is no slur on Begley, who is smart, thoughtful and obviously steeped in Updike’s voluminous body of work. He advertises a deep admiration for his subject without succumbing to the kind of literary worship Updike can ­inspire — a fanboy intensity typified by Nicholson Baker’s 1991 love letter U&I.

Nor does his life soft-pedal the human frailties or insoluble personal contradictions that Updike exhibited. The years of exuberant adultery, the political and social conservatism, the tangled religiosity for which the author was cherished and pilloried: all these strands are traced, isolated and unapologetically submitted to readers’ scrutiny.

But for one whose own experience was so baldly assimilated into his fiction — and the ­biography reveals that Updike’s short stories, in particular, were often the barest of glosses on experience — the challenge is to present the data in a way that distinguishes between life and art without diminishing the latter, without leaving only the quotidian husk of the bloke and his world. Wary of falling into this trap, Begley quotes Updike early on, from a book review in which the author writes against biographical projects: ‘‘The fiction writer’s life is his basic instrument of perception … only the imagery we have personally gathered and unconsciously internalised possesses the colour, warmth, intimate contour, and weight of authenticity the [reader] demands.’’

Begley creditably lards his account with quotations from Updike’s poems, stories, novels, essays and reviews, never letting us forget it is the uniqueness of the author’s instrument of perception, a magical filter applied to a distinctly mundane American reality, that justifies our interest in the man. The biographer wins our respect by a modesty in approach — an awareness that his earnest aggregation of fact will always seem prosaic beside Updike’s rhapsodic reality.

And what a reality it was! Even those with a sense of the outline of Updike’s celebrated ­career will be startled by how early the writer established himself, how preternatural the development of his talent, how ruthless and ­dogged he was in its exploitation. The son of a decent, plodding high school teacher and a determined mother with writing ambitions of her own, Updike emerged from the small-town idyll of rural Pennsylvania with an ingrained love of the place and an equally keen desire to escape it.

Harvard, which Updike attended on a full academic scholarship, was the exit portal. The university had mostly reverted from its immediate postwar openness by Updike’s arrival in 1950, and his time there was marked by an awareness of the distance between his modest background and that of the clubbable and aristocratic young men with whom he studied and played. Updike’s drive and industriousness, both as a student and as a contributor to the ­storied Harvard Lampoon, marked him as a professional among gentleman amateurs. That he was nonetheless accepted by them speaks as much of Updike’s social ambition as of his quantities of intelligence, wit and charm.

This combination of native brilliance and adopted urbanity soon brought him to the ­attention of The New Yorker. The magazine printed his earliest light verse and short stories, gave him a staff job during his fledgling years, and maintained a close working connection with Updike across almost six decades. ‘‘It’s worth pausing here to marvel,’’ writes Begley of the relationship, ‘‘at the unrelieved smoothness of his professional path. Is there an American writer who so quickly and painlessly established himself with a magazine that could provide a ­lucrative, conspicuous, and highly respected venue for his work?’’

The question is rhetorical, of course: no other writer of his generation achieved such aims (he adored The New Yorker from childhood and wished for no other literary venue) with Updike’s seeming effortlessness. More impressive still is the author’s refusal to rest on his laurels. Within a few years of coming to New York, a 20-something with a wife and family already in place, Updike chose suburban exile and the uncertain life of the independent author.

Begley shows that the novels that followed Updike’s move to a handsome 17th-century house in Ipswich, Massachusetts — The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur and particularly the stunning Rabbit, Run — emerged from the tension between a prosperous, rising man of letters and a gawky youth growing up on a small farm six hours to the southwest. The biographer furnishes more proof, if it were needed, of the degree to which Harry ‘‘Rabbit’’ Angstrom — ‘‘a Pennsylvanian car salesman: averagely bigoted and chauvinistic, perhaps exceptionally gluttonous and lewd, but otherwise brutally undistinguished’’, according to Martin Amis — was a version of Updike who never went to college, a character who lived in the long shadow of the knowledge that he had peaked on the high school basketball court.

Updike’s shifting interests and ambitions as a writer can be traced through the ways in which the Rabbit novels expand over time, away from the small-town cosmos of childhood and merely personal exploration, towards a ­national canvas. Rabbit Redux, published in 1971, assimilates the effect of 1960s counter­culture and newly charged racial politics, while Rabbit is Rich takes on the doleful years of oil shock and stagflation that preceded and ­presaged the Reagan revolution.

At the other end of that decade, in Rabbit at Rest, the author shows us a nation far richer, though darker and less innocent.

The biography mounts a strong argument for the importance of the Rabbit novels. Viewed collectively, Begley sees them as ‘‘one of the most complete expressions of a society in all its workings’’ — the US between 1960 and 1990, condensed into 1500-odd pages tracing the passage from youth to death of a single ­ordinary citizen, told in a prose of immense precision and grace.

The lesson contained in this encyclopedia of human experience is not only social or political in intent, however — it is also aesthetic. Begley returns again and again to the idea that Updike’s intention throughout the Rabbit novels was to demonstrate (again in Amis’s words) ‘‘that the unexamined life is worth examining, that indeed it swarms with instruction and delight’’. In Harry Angstrom, alter ego turned ­Everyman, Updike found his ideal vehicle for granting ‘‘the mundane its beautiful due’’.

Another pillar of Updike’s achievement turns out to have been drawn even more closely from life. The material from which many of the author’s short stories was woven is so autobiographical that his long-time New Yorker editor and friend William Maxwell was obliged to place some of the tales in a ‘‘shadow-bank’’ for delayed publication, lest they alert family and friends of some fresh adulterous liaison. Begley, for instance, mines the 18 stories devoted to the marriage of Richard and Joan Maple — later collected in a single volume — for the real-life tale of Updike’s first marriage to Mary Pennington.

That some of the most spectacular prose of Updike’s career should be contained in stories connected to domestic sadness and rancour is troubling: you return to them with a twinge, admiring the skill on display but ­repelled by the plundering of privacy they ­declare. We are left in no doubt that the author possessed what Graham Greene called the ‘‘splinter of ice in the heart’’ required of true artists.

Yet this poet of suburban adultery, who sealed his reputation for high-toned lubricity with 1968’s Couples, was a practising Episcopalian, a loving father and an upstanding family man in most respects. “The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life,” he wrote, and in every sphere Updike reflected that perversity. A man who was married for his entire adult life, he argued against the “enforced and approved bonds of marriage”, claiming that, in restricting freedom, they weakened love. He was virtually alone in American letters in arguing the case, albeit with more qualifications than his detractors allowed him, for America’s war in Vietnam. The subject matter of his works tested the boundaries of what was permissible in terms of the social mores of the day, and on occasions it could be radically experimental in form, and still he practised his solitary trade (in his words) “as methodically as a dentist practised his”.

Begley struggles gamely to corral these contradictions, knowing that critics and readers have tended to devalue Updike’s work as a result. Harold Bloom spoke for many who distrusted the ease and facility with which Updike produced his work, or who felt that he was too much a member of Richard Nixon’s ‘‘silent majority’’ to be a real writer, when he described Updike as ‘‘a minor novelist with a major style’’.

And it is true that Updike was neither a drunk nor a madman, a criminal nor a prophet. He lacked what his biographer calls the ‘‘professional deformations that habitually plague American writers’’. He was, despite his talent, ordinary — the only sin that a nation in love with the outsized and destructive in its artists can’t forgive. The virtue of Begley’s Updike lies, then, in reminding us that it was from Updike’s affinity with the ordinary — the small-town lives and thwarted dreams of middle America — that his transcendent works emerged.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.