Tribute to John Updike

For nearly all of my adult life I've been a subscriber to The New Yorker magazine.  The first thing I would do each week when I picked up the magazine was scan the table of contents for a story or review by John Updike.  If there was an Updike piece, it was a good week.  Now the good weeks have come to an end: John Updike died yesterday from lung cancer at the age of 76.

Updike was a well-known in Germany.  Many Germans learned about postwar  American middle class life by reading Hasenherz (Rabbit Run) and the many other novels wonderfully translated by Maria Carlssn.  And it was none other than the "Pope" of German literature - Marcel Reich-Ranicki - who recommended Updike to German readers.  Reich-Ranicki made this comment about Updike, when asked about the Nobel Prize:

"Ob John Updike ein würdiger Literatur-Nobelpreisträger wäre? Wer, wenn nicht er, wann, wenn nicht jetzt?" (Does John Updike deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature?  Who, if not he? When if not now?)

Of the many tributes to John Updike in the German media, the best is Michael Naumann's piece in  Die Zeit:

...dass sein Talent zum schönen Schreibstil Ausdruck einer hochmütigen Teilnahmslosigkeit am Jammer der Welt seien, behauptete einer seiner strengsten Rezensenten, James Wood. Ein ungerechtes Urteil; denn genau diesen Jammer zu beschreiben – ob in Ehebrüchen und antiklimaktisch verblühenden sexuellen Exzessen, ob in abgebrochenen Karrieren oder dem Verlust religiöser Empfindsamkeit –, das war in Wirklichkeit die Stärke dieses großen Dichters. (One of his most severe critics, James Wood, claimed that his (Updike's) talent for beautiful prose was mere a sign of his arrogant indifference to the world's sorrows.  But that criticism is unjust:  for in reality it was his ability to describe this sorrow that was one of his great strengths - sorrow in adulterous affairs, in the fading pleaure of sexual excesses, in interrupted careers or the loss of religious sensitivity.)

Naumann also comes up with a felicitous phrase to describe Updike: "his prose is successful libretti to the melody of the American national anthem' (geglückte Libretti zur Melodie der amerikanischen Nationalhymne).

My favorite Updike works, besides the Rabbit series, are the New Yorker short stories and his essays on art  Few writers - Siegfried Lenz also comes to mind - could write about painting as well as Updike. Updike had wanted to be a cartoonist before he turned to writing, and he wrote with the eye of a painter. American art was his passion, and books such as Still Looking: Essays on American Art, were love letters to the painters he loved.  Here's a tip: one of Updikes last novels was Seek My Face (German version: Sucht mein Angesicht). The novel was pretty much ignored by the critics, but it successfully fuses Updikes fiction and his love of painting.  The book is astonishing for two reasons: first, the novel is written from the first person narrative perspective of an aging woman painter and it is not often that a male writer can convincingly project himself into a 73-year old female body and mind.  Secondly, the book is an amazing history of postwar American painting, from the New York abstract expressionists in the 1950s to the pop art scene of the 1960s.