It’s Mike Ettner’s Blog

John Updike died January 27, 2009, at age 76.  Some thoughts:

It was always easy to acquire Updike’s books on the cheap, especially after Couples became a monster best-seller and his publisher, Knopf, got in the habit of printing each subsequent book in an overly-optimist quantity, large enough to build ample stacks on book stores’  remainder tables.   Also, at used book sales organized by libraries and charities in suburban Philadelphia you usually could find copies of earlier and rarer items (poetry, non-fiction), though sometimes sans book jackets. 

As physical objects, the books Knopf produced for Updike were things of delicate beauty, Shaker-like in the simple dryness of their cloth-and-board bindings and crisp clear print on clean paper.  A long marriage of quality writing and quality presentation ensued.  I’m sure Updike, who had a thing for the “thingness” of objects, must have had something to do with this. 

Also notable was the traditional stitch-sewn binding of the books released in the first half of Updike’s career, a mark of quality whose discontinuance sometime in the 1980s could well be cited as a marker of cultural decline.  Let me stop to go downstairs and see if I can tell when this occurred.   (…)  I’m back to report that Updike’s 30th book, the novel Roger’s Version (1986) is stitch-sewn, while his 31st, a 1987 collection of short stories entitled Trust Me, begins the post-lapsarian glue era.

Every reader of Updike soon learns he is an author who had intimate relations with the world and everything in it.  A fresh reminder of this appears in The New Yorker  this week where you’ll find sixteen pages of excerpts from works that appeared in the magazine from 1954 through 2008.  (Updike made more than eight hundred contributions to The New Yorker !) 

Consider, for example, a man’s visit to a dentist’s chair, described in a 1955 short story, “Dentistry and Doubt”:   

     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, clung trembling to the needle’s tip.  Burton opened his mouth while the dentist’s back was till turned.  When at last the man pivoted, his instrument tilting up, a tension beneath his mustache indicated surprise and perhaps bemusement at finding things at such readiness.  “Open a little wider, please,” he said.  “Thank you.”  The needle moved closer.  It was under Burton’s nose and out of focus.  “Now, this might hurt a little.”  What a kind thing to say!  The sharp prick and the consequent slow, filling ache drove Burton’s eyes up, and he saw the tops of the bare willow trees, the frightening white sky, and the black birds.  As he watched, one bird joined another on the topmost twig, and then a third joined these two and the twig became radically crescent, and all three birds flapped off to where his eyes could not follow them.

     “There,” the dentist sighed, in a zephyr of candy and cloves.

In most of us a visit to the dentist arouses feelings of trepidation and surrender, a condition you might casually liken to that of a baby strapped into a high chair.  We grown-ups are “reduced to an infantile state.”  But Updike avoids that puerile thought and slyly heads straight  for the provocative, in this passage conjuring up, behind the objective reality experienced by the male patient, the unfolding of a parallel scene:  a bedded woman eyeing the approach of her new lover.  Updike and sex is a subject beyond the limits of this post.  But let it be said that this most knowing writer’s intimate relations with the world did not exclude a close connection to his penis, through which he traces a ritual from Cowper’s fluid (clung trembling to the tip) to penetration (slow, filling ache) to release (sigh).