John Updike Biography

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

by: John Updike

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Updike is one of the few remaining true men of letters, the kind of writer who is equally at home in almost all forms and formats. Following two other staggeringly incisive, broad-ranging collections of his nonfiction prose, Odd Jobs (1991) and More Matter (1999), his latest such compilation is, like its predecessors, an elegant leviathan. Books, primarily, are the raison d'etre for these pieces; most are reviews, and most were previously published in Updike's favorite home-away-from-home, the New Yorker. As a critic, Updike has long demonstrated honesty, intelligence, judiciousness, open-mindedness, and never an ounce of superciliousness. For instance, what he writes about Margaret Atwood here is particularly perceptive (especially in his comparison of her to fellow Canadian Alice Munro), and his commentary on Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient may come as a surprise: that the movie version "elucidates the novel and was the clearer, more unified work." Other essays gathered here are of a more personal nature-that is, not geared to book reviewing or to introducing new editions of books. These essays range topically from art and architecture to the author's estimation of his own personal predilections. A lush book to be savored over a long period of time. (Hooper, Brad - Booklist)

Release Date: 10/23/2007

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Lectures on Literature

by: Vladimir Nabokov

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Not really essays, not genial and general E. M. Forster-ish talks either, nor stirring defenses nor rhetorical destructions, these lectures Nabokov prepared and gave at Cornell in the Fifties are just that: he talks and reads, we listen (the same general approach - heirophant picking out the mystery from the dross - that Nabokov used in his own fiction); and literature is taken apart like a boxful of toys: "impersonal imagination and artistic delight," "the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole." There are diagrams and drawings, quiddities made visual: a map of Sotherton Court in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; exactly what kind of beetle Gregor Samsa turned into in "The Metamorphosis" the facade of 7 Eccles St., Bloom's house in Ulysses; what Odette's orchid looked like in Swann's Way. The more specific and crammed the writer, the more specific and crammed Nabokov's lecture: Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce. He finds Bleak House's tricks delicious, the richness and the pity; in Ulysses he swats away the Freudian interpretations ("a thousand and one nights [made] into a convention of Shriners") in favor of the devilish intricacy of Joycean synchronicity: "the hopeless past, the ridiculous and tragic present, and the pathetic future." Where sheer lush orchestration is less the thing, Nabokov falls back on thematic layering and transformation; before Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" he is almost brief, enchantedly synopsizing although with microscopic attention still. In Nabokov a crankiness is always near the surface (here he rants against movies, even music); and he betrays a certain anxiety by detailing so much, as though a great work might try and fool him: there's something at the same time eccentric and regimental to his appreciation. But finally there is a personal, fussy, high rapture to these lessons and illustrations, not quite analytical (Nabokov was too defensive and contentious for analysis - maybe too brilliant, too) - more a delight in literature-as-camouflage. Distinctive and demanding.

Release Date: 12/31/1969

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Collected Poems 1943-2004

by: Richard Wilbur

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In a 1966 essay titled "On My Own Work" -- included in Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976 -- Richard Wilbur describes his ars poetica:

"The unit of my poetry, as I experience it, is not the Collected Poems which I may some day publish; nor is it the individual volume, or the sequence or group within the volume; it is the single poem. Every poem of mine is autonomous, or feels so to me in the writing, and consists of an effort to exhaust my present sense of the subject. It is for this reason that a poem sometimes takes years to finish. No poem of mine is ever undertaken as a technical experiment; the form, which it takes, whether conventional or innovating, develops naturally as the poem develops, as part of the utterance. Nor does my poem ever begin as the statement of a fully grasped idea; I think inside my lines and the thought must get where it can amongst the moods and sounds and gravitating particulars which are appearing there."

I suspect that all poets hope to be valued for their "gravitating particulars" -- such charged precision is practically a definition of art. Certainly Wilbur has long been admired (and envied) for his urbane dexterity, his ability to make lines run smoothly, almost effortlessly down the page. Sometimes his vocabulary can reach for the recherch%uFFFD -- "toward lost Amphibia's emperies" -- but his syntax always remains clear, his voice gentlemanly, his verse-music as sparkling and elegant as a Mozart piano sonata played by Mitsuko Ushida.

At certain periods over the almost 60 years of his career -- his first book, The Beautiful Changes, appeared in 1947 -- Wilbur has nonetheless suffered attacks from poets of the wilder shores. Doesn't his suavity and verbal flair signal a glib shallowness, his skills those of a juggler who merely performs while more sensitive spirits plumb the troubled soul's dark night? After all, Wilbur has turned to every poetic form with remarkable success: Now-standard translations of Moliere's plays, the best versions of Baudelaire (and many other poets) in English, the delightful children's verse of Opposites ("What is the opposite of soup?/ It's nuts. . ."), even some of the most dazzling song lyrics in Leonard Bernstein's "Candide," including those to Cunegonde's famous aria, "Glitter and Be Gay."

Obviously, Wilbur isn't confessional like Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell, but do we only want the poetry of self-laceration? Comedy, after all, is harder than tragedy, and Wilbur's consummate linguistic skill always serves deeper purposes than mere display. As is increasingly clear, the work in these 500 or so pages has been one of the saving graces of poetry in our time, as beautiful and moving as it is artful and accomplished. The great merit of this latest edition of Wilbur's Collected Poems lies in its inclusiveness. The 1987 New and Collected left out the verse for children, the show lyrics, Mayflies (published in 2000) and, naturally, the 15 new poems printed in this volume. These last include delightful vers d'occasion (e.g. "An Eightieth Birthday Ballade for Anthony Hecht") and the lovely meditation "The Reader," in which an old woman returns to the books that "charmed her younger mind." Having lived in the world, she now recognizes the folly and tragedies lying in wait for so many of literature's young heroes and heroines:

"But the true wonder of it is that she,/ For all that she may know of consequences,/ Still turns enchanted to the next bright page/ Like some Natasha in the ballroom door -- / Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,/ The blind delight of being, ready still/ To enter life on life and see them through." If, as Wilbur says, the individual poem is what counts, then the great pleasure of a collected edition lies in knowing that all those highly individual poems are in one convenient place, where one can return to old favorites and discover new ones. Such a volume will see a reader through quiet evenings and noisy Metro commutes, indeed through one's whole life.

For me, whenever I first pick up Wilbur I always turn to the opening lines of "Walking to Sleep." They seem so delicately right, the perfect visual correlatives of supreme self-confidence:

"As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,/ Or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses,/ Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind./Something will come to you."

Just as "The Reader" focuses on an older woman, so an earlier classic, "The Writer," describes Wilbur's young daughter working on a story, the "commotion of type-writer keys like a chain hauled over a gunwale." The poet wishes her a "lucky passage," a facile bit of wordplay, it would seem, for which he quickly berates himself. But Wilbur makes that jokey phrase into something deeper. He pauses to remember a dazed starling that had once been trapped, frightened, in that very room, and how the iridescent creature had battered itself against windows, floors, walls until it was "bumped and bloody," and then, suddenly, "It lifted off from a chair-back,/ Beating a smooth course for the right window/ And clearing the sill of the world.// It is always a matter, my darling,/ Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish/ What I wished you before, but harder."

Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection. Besides, they are so beautiful one simply wants to go back to them again and again.

Take the end of "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World," in which laundry hanging on a clothes line is likened to an angelic host, afloat in the breeze, welcoming the morning light. The poem grows into a meditation on the soul and the body, and concludes with this stanza:

Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.

It's tempting to keep quoting this marvel-filled poetry, but there's really no need. You should already be familiar with Richard Wilbur's work -- and if you're not, then you know what present to ask for this holiday season. -- Washington Post

Collected Poems: 1953-1993

by: John Updike

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If this collection is any indication, Updike is as prolific a poet as he is a novelist and critic. Nothing--airplane travel, a bug in the sink, a darning egg, a pair of eyeglasses--is too mundane a subject for the many sonnets, odes, and other traditional verse forms that seem to flow effortlessly from his pen. Many of the poems read like limbering-up exercises for the intricately wrought prose of his novels. The greatest weakness here (as in the fiction) is the preciosity and coyness of style, which, thankfully, is relieved by an unerring eye and self-deprecating wit: a pillow is "a bowl of dreams," light switches are "nipples on the walls' flat chests," and July evokes "deep pools of shade beneath dense maples/ the dapples as delicious as lemon drops--/ textures of childhood, and its many flavors!" Perhaps a slender selected poems would have better shown off Updike's gift for light verse than this exhaustive, bricklike volume. Recommended for comprehensive collections of American literature or poetry.
- Christine Stenstrom

Release Date: 07/04/1995

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