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Overview
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least of the reviews here—those that “come about and draw even closer to the land with another nine-point quotation”—are distinguished by a novelist’s style, insight, and accuracy, not just surface sparkle. Indeed, as James Atlas commented, the most substantial critical articles, on Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman, go out as far as Updike’s fiction: They are “the sort of ambitious scholarly reappraisal not seen in this country since the death of Edmund Wilson.” With Hugging the Shore, Michiko Kakutani wrote, Updike established himself “as a major and enduring critical voice; indeed, as the pre-eminent critic of his generation.”
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780679645849 |
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Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 01/15/2013 |
Sold by: | Random House |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 896 |
File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
March 18, 1932Date of Death:
January 27, 2009Place of Birth:
Shillington, PennsylvaniaPlace of Death:
Beverly Farms, MAEducation:
A.B. in English, Harvard University, 1954; also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, EnglandRead an Excerpt
INTERVIEWS WITH INSUFFICIENTLY FAMOUS AMERICANS
The Pal
THE PAL IS PALE, like water. He is everywhere, in different forms. On the golf course, he is present as a swing and a slice, then a swing and a hook. Or as the rattle of the ball into the cup, unexpectedly, from far away. He is a good putter, the pal.
At poker, he is inscrutable. He is a face above cards one cannot see. He raises the bet. What does this mean? Is he going high or low? If he loses, he will borrow money from one. If he wins, he will keep it. When he shows his cards, he has the cased King. Or he was bluffing and folds, scrambling his cards together in a quick exasperated little tent-shape, beside the tall golden cylinder of beer. He is most lovable then.
Look at that pal ski! Swish, swish, down the chute, over the moguls, away! He is not easy to keep up with, but one wants to. One wants to for the camaraderie of the ski lodge, his pale face ruddy above the steaming coffee mug. Or the camaraderie of the long drive home, in the chain of headlights, his eyes blinking, his head nodding, with sleepiness. A sleepy pal is a dear pal. Even were he to nod off and drive head-on into a trailer rig, it would be a good way to go, there would be no grudge.
At tennis is he less benign. He slashes, he wheels, he whaps an easy overhead into the net. “Come up to the net,” he insists. Fuck you, one thinks. Still, the parallel patter of sneakers on the clay is pretty, though the opponents lob over our heads, and we lose the set.
At parties, one never talks to the pal. In this he is like a mistress. He observes and he sulks. He dances only the slow dances, often with one’s wife. That, too, is a mode of palship. That, and calling one’s children “Butch,” no matter what their names.
Interviewers find him elusive, almost rude.
Q: Could you in a word or two describe the gratifications of being—how shall we put it?—a pal?
A: Meagre. Few.
Q: Would you advise young men, freshly graduated from college and as yet undecided about their careers, to follow in your footsteps and become pals?
A: No.
Q: What has been the principal ingredient, in your experience, of palship?
A: Beer.
Q: And its sustaining teleology and ambient essence?
A: Death.
Q: Thank you very much, sir.
A: Forget it.
Then he is on the phone, trying to set up a paddle-tennis date, or a fishing trip, or a rendezvous in a duck blind at 4 A.M. Refused, he sounds hurt. He has no other fun. He is at the bottom of one’s swimming pool in a snorkeling mask, picking up hairpins and pennies. He is silhouetted on one’s roof, adjusting the television aerial. One returns from a trip, and the dregs of his dinner wine are on the table, his pajamas are underneath the bed. Ambushed, he is unembarrassed. “Butch here cut his knee while you were gone.” What can one say? One says, “Have a beer.”
The pal is a mist, he is a puddle. He fogs the rearview mirror, he is a gratefully gulped glass of water at the kitchen sink. As at sea, there is a horizon of melancholy, which recedes, and cannot be crossed, though one sails for days, in stubborn silence, the rigging creaking, the waves slapping the prow, a single gull weeping off the stern. His beauty is, he opens up this horizon within oneself. For if he is your pal, you are his. The male desert within us is coterminous. He is a mirage.
One’s Neighbor’s Wife
WHAT IS THERE about this wonderful woman? From next door she comes striding, down the lawn, beneath the clothesline, laden with cookies she has just baked, or with baby togs she no longer needs, and one’s heart goes out. Pops out. The clothesline, the rusted swing set, the limbs of the dying elm, the lilacs past bloom are lit up like rods of neon by her casual washday energy and cheer, a cheer one has done nothing to infuse.
In certain party lights the mat slant of the plane of her cheek wears beneath the lamp the somber rose glow of earth seen from the window of a jet pouring west against the sunset; to fall would be death.
Her house is full of crannies, of cluttered drawers and dusty shelves, repositories of wedding gifts and high-school charm bracelets and snapshots of herself as a child. These are unimaginable treasures—bones of her flesh, relics her life has generated. One studies her husband wonderingly: how can he withstand such a daily pressure of bliss? His skull looks two inches thick, all around.
She touches her children, and they rotate in the oven of her love. Her dog, too, dumb sharer of her hours, is stroked and ruffled. Her hands, oval and firm, bear no trace (if one excepts the wedding ring) of awareness that they are sacred instruments—much like those Renaissance paintings wherein the halo of the Christ child, having dwindled from the Byzantine corolla of beaten gold to a translucent disc delicately painted in the perspective of a three-dimensional caplike appurtenance, disappears entirely, leaving us with an unexpectedly Italian-looking urchin.
Her conversation is inane, sublimely.
There is a scent to her, a scent to the sight of her in her clothes, that rustles free into the air when she moves, though her movements are brisk rather than voluptuous. Desire attaches, one notices, less to her person than to her surroundings, to the landscapes she walks through, the automobile she slides packages in and out of, the garden she tends, her crannied house, its curtains and rugs and towels—as though she were a sachet of lavender scent in a drawer of tumbled, cloudy fabrics.
Her person. She has freckles wherever one can see. A bikini reveals the demure little saddle of fat that pads the base of her spine. When she lifts her arms, shaved and powdered patches are revealed. What color would her pussy be?
A: My pussy is the color of earth, of fire, of air shuddering on the vein of a rock by the side of a stream, of fine metals spun to a curly tumult, of night as to the expanded eye of the prowler it yields its tints of russet and umber, subtle husks of daylight colors. Each hair is precious and individual, serving a distinct rôle in the array: blond to invisibility where the thigh and abdomen join, dark to opacity where the tender labia ask protection, hearty and ruddy as a forester’s beard beneath the swell of belly, dark and sparse as the whiskers of a Machiavel where the perineum sneaks backward to the anus. My pussy alters by the time of day and according to the mesh of underpants. It has its satellites: the whimsical line of hairs that ascend to my navel and into my tan, the kisses of fur on the inside of my thighs, the lambent fuzz that ornaments the cleavage of my fundament. Amber, ebony, auburn, bay, chestnut, cinnamon, hazel, fawn, snuff, henna, bronze, platinum, peach, ash, flame, and field mouse: these are but a few of the colors my pussy is.
Q: How can you bear to be the constant carrier of such splendor?
A: I don’t think about it most of the time. Just when I take a bath, and when Joe says something.
Q: That shmoe.
A: Think you could do better?
One’s neighbor’s wife’s life, not her womb, is the theatre wherein covetousness raves. One wishes to curl up on her furniture, to awaken to the dawns that break upon her windows, to see the eleven o’clock news on her set. Would it be the same old news? Impossible.
Table of Contents
Foreword xvii
Persons and Places
Interviews With Insufficiently Famous Americans
The Pal 3
One's Neighbor's Wife 5
The Running Mate 6
The Counsellor 8
The Golf Course Proprietor 11
The Child Bride 12
The Mailman 14
The Widow 16
The Undertaker 18
The Bankrupt Man 20
The Tarbox Police 23
Venezuela for Visitors 28
The Chaste Planet 32
Invasion of the Book Envelopes 37
Golf Dreams 39
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Masters 41
New England 52
The First Kiss 52
Out There 55
Going Barefoot 56
Common Land 59
New England Churches
A Meld 'Complaint' 63
Other People's Books
Three Talks on American Masters 67
Hawthorne's Creed 67
Melville's Withdrawal 73
Whitman's Egotheism 97
Letters 109
The Bear Who Hated Life 109
Simple-Minded Jim 120
Advancing Over Water 128
Nothing Is Easy 138
An Armful of Field Flowers 139
Hem Battles the Pack; Wins, Loses 146
The Doctor's Son 164
The Shining Note 173
Wilson and Nabokov 182
Edmund Wilson's Fiction: A Personal Account 182
An Earlier Day 192
The Cuckoo and the Rooster 201
An Introduction to Nabokov's Lectures 207
The Fancy-Forger Takes the Lectern 220
Proud Happiness 226
Vale, VN 227
Bellow, Vonnegut, Tyler, Le Guin, Cheever 230
Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil 230
Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul 237
All's Well in Skyscraper National Park 245
Family Ways 254
Loosened Roots 259
Imagining Things 263
On Such a Beautiful Green Little Planet 272
Some British 279
Jake and Lolly Opt Out 279
Indestructible Elena 286
An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green 289
Green Green 298
Through the Mid-Life Crisis with James Boswell, Esq. 306
Spark, Murdoch, Trevor, Drabble 318
Topnotch Witcheries 318
Worlds and Worlds 327
Drabbling in the Mud 336
Of Heresy and Loot 340
Coming into Her Own 344
Some Irish 350
Small Cheer from the Old Sod 350
Flann Again 358
An Old-Fashioned Novel 363
Jarry, Queneau, Céline, Pinget 368
Human Capacities 368
Thirty-four Years Late, Twice 375
The Strange Case of Dr. Destouches and M. Céline 383
Robert Pinget 389
Northern Europeans 396
A Primal Modern 396
Saddled with the World 401
Scheherazade 405
Brecht's Dicta 412
Discontent in Deutsch 413
Disaffection in Deutsch 419
Calvino, Grass, Böll 427
Metropolises of the Mind 427
Card Tricks 432
Readers and Writers 440
Fish Story 446
The Squeeze Is On 451
Eastern Europeans 459
Polish Metamorphoses 459
Czarist Shadows, Soviet Lilacs 465
Czech Angels 416
Lem and Pym, Stead and Jones 482
Lem and Pym 482
Selda, Lilia, Ursa, Great Gram, and Other Ladies in Distress 491
Eva and Eleanor and Everywoman 491
Some Nachtmusik, From All Over 504
No Dearth of Death 504
Dark Smile, Devilish Saints 512
Layers of Ambiguity 521
Stalled Starters 528
Frontiersmen 532
Barthes, Berlin, Cioran 539
Roland Barthes 539
Texts and Men 546
The Last of Barthes 553
A Monk Manqué 558
Poets 565
The Heaven of an Old Home 565
Alone but Not Aloof 578
Owlish and Fishy 584
Sissman's Prose 588
Sissman's Poetry 591
Three Poems on Being a Poet, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko 595
Stand Fast I Must 603
Tales 609
Magic Mirrors 609
Fiabe Italiane 613
A Feast of Reason 620
Happy on Nono Despite Odosha 627
The World Called Third 633
African Accents 633
Mixed Reports from the Interior 643
Journeyers 657
Raman and Daisy and Olivia and the Nawab 665
India Going On 671
The Far East 677
Spent Arrows and First Buddings 677
From Fumie to Sony 687
The Giant Who Isn't There 695
The Long and Reluctant Stasis of Wan-li 702
Art and Act 710
Gaiety in the Galleries 710
Tote That Quill 716
Wright on Writing 723
Borges Warmed Over 727
Pinter's Unproduced Proust Printed 733
Suzie Creamcheese Speaks 740
Female Pilgrims 749
Long Views 759
A Cloud of Witnesses 759
Who Wants to Know? 765
To the Tram Halt Together 771
Appendix: On One's Own Oeuvre 783
Index 821
What People are Saying About This
“No living American novelist can match Updike in the range and responsiveness of his reading. . . . [Literature is] a house with many mansions, and in Hugging the Shore Updike gives a splendid, striding tour.”—James Wolcott, Harper’s
“These reviews are models of craft—and something more. . . . Hugging the Shore bristles with erudition, energy, and (quietly asserted) high seriousness; it is also one of the year’s most entertaining books.”—Bruce Allen, The Christian Science Monitor
“[Updike’s is] a body of literary criticism unmatched in range, discrimination and eloquence by any American novelist since Henry James.”—The Boston Globe