1954 It fantasised the moment when Rolls met Royce ‘where grey walks sloped through shadows shaped like lace / Down to dimpleproof ponds, a precious place’, and Rolls asked:
‘Ah—is there anything you’d care to make?
A day of it? A fourth at bridge? Some tea?’
Royce murmured, ‘If your afternoon is free,
I’d rather, much, make engineering history.’
John Updike (1932–2009), one of America’s most prolific and gifted fictional realists, wasn’t best noted for his poetry – even if he did publish ten volumes of it between 1958 and 2009 – nor for his stories, critical essays and other short pieces. What made him popular with such a wide and varied readership were his novels like Couples (1968), his exploration of suburban adultery, The Witches of Eastwick (1984), popular social satire with an edge, and above all, the near-epic span of the four volumes, running from the fifties through the eighties, that filter the anxieties and satieties of each decade through the limited perception and wide emotional range of Harold C. Angstrom, better known by his nickname ‘Rabbit’.
Alongside the novels, Updike wrote over 800 poems, stories and essays for the New Yorker alone. It made an ideal medium. Started in 1925, the (usually) weekly magazine, with over a million subscribers in the top quartile of the American incomes, has published fiction by John O’Hara, John Cheever, Philip Roth and many others, long non-fiction features like John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), biographical essays, book and film criticism, political commentary (fastidiously neutral until George W. Bush came along) – not to mention its classic cartoons by Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, Otto Soglow and William Steig.
Updike’s contributions to the New Yorker show the same closely observed detail and critical accuracy apparent in his longer work – whether in a patient’s fear of the dentist:
Burton’s heart beat like a wasp in a jar as the dentist moved across the room, did unseeable things by the sink, and returned with a full hypodermic. A drop of fluid, by some miracle of adhesion, hung trembling to the needle’s tip.’ (‘Dentistry and Doubt’, 1955)
Or in the legendary Ted Williams hitting his last home run for the Boston Red Sox:
From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. (‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’, 1960)
Or (just to show that he could also write about writing) on Herman Melville’s faith, which was also his own:
Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reason we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive. (‘Herman Melville’, 1982)