Readers of the late John Updike will know what I mean when I say that, although he had all the virtues a writer could want, when he was alive he was just too much.
photo credit: SapphireblueReaders of the late John Updike will know what I mean when I say that, although he had all the virtues a writer could want, when he was alive he was just too much. He was too glib, too polished, too prolific, too kind-hearted, too equanimous, too wide-ranging, too tolerant, too knowledgeable, and, if this can be considered a fault, too good to be true. He was so consistently and abundantly and unceasingly excellent you often wanted to throttle him. Nicholson Baker’s U & I: A True Story is the classic statement about how difficult it was to write under Updike’s shadow, which was like a roaming cloud range that sometimes blotted out the sun. Now that he’s no longer the rival who most clearly illustrates our inferiority, we can start to gauge the size of his achievement.

Aside from his own copious output of novels and short stories, Updike was a distinguished art critic, memoirist, and book reviewer. And, oh yes, a poet. Perhaps because of the fame of his fiction, Updike’s poetry hasn’t received that much critical attention, but other poets were paying attention. In the latest issue of The Walrus, Evelyn Lau has a lovely poem called “Dear Updike.”

Lau’s elegiac reflections on the post-Updike world called to mind another poem, “In John Updike’s Room,” by Christopher Wiseman (to be found in a 2005 Porcupine’s Quill volume of the same name). Wiseman’s poem was based on his experience of staying at a Scottish hotel room where Updike had been a guest in 1998 (an event Updike wrote about in his poem “Marine Hotel, North Berwick, Scotland, May 1998,” which can be found in his 2001 volume Americana: And Other Poems.)

Literary historians might do well to trace the trajectory from Baker to Wiseman to Lau. For Baker, Updike was an anxiety-producing elder rival; for Wiseman, a famous contemporary who shared a common feeling of aging; and for Lau, a marker of a world that is slowly receding into the past.

“But damn you, John, something’s prickling my eyes,
That thing you knew here, and darkness is coming fast.”
— Christopher Wiseman

Tags: John Updike, literature, obituary, poetry
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