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IMAGINATION AND IDEALISM IN JOHN UPDIke’s FICTION MICHIAL FARMER Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction FFarmer.inddarmer.indd i 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:54:59:54:59 PPMM Mind and American Literature Edited by Linda Simon (Skidmore College) FFarmer.inddarmer.indd iiii 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:30:56:30 PPMM Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction Michial Farmer Rochester, New York FFarmer.inddarmer.indd iiiiii 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:30:56:30 PPMM Copyright © 2017 Michial Farmer All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2017 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-942-9 ISBN-10: 1-57113-942-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Farmer, Michial, 1982– author. Title: Imagination and idealism in John Updike’s fiction / Michial Farmer. Description: Rochester, New York : Camden House, 2017. | Series: Mind and American literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016041258| ISBN 9781571139429 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1571139427 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Updike, John—Criticism and interpretation. | Imagination in literature. | Idealism in literature. Classification: LCC PS3571.P4 Z66 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041258 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. FFarmer.inddarmer.indd iivv 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:31:56:31 PPMM Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Hawthorne, Updike, and the Immoral Imagination 1 1: John Updike and the Existentialist Imagination 10 Part I. The “Mythic Immensity” of the Parental Imagination 2: “Flight,” “His Mother Inside Him,” and “Ace in the Hole” 39 3: The Centaur 45 4: Of the Farm, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” and “The Cats” 51 Part II. Collective Hallucination in the Adulterous Society 5: “Man and Daughter in the Cold,” “Giving Blood,” “The Taste of Metal,” and “Avec la Bébé-Sitter” 67 6: Marry Me 75 7: Couples and “The Hillies” 89 Part III. Imaginative Lust in the Scarlet Letter Trilogy 8: “The Football Factory,” “Toward Evening,” “Incest,” “Still Life,” “Lifeguard,” “Bech Swings?” and “Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author” 107 9: A Month of Sundays 119 10: Roger’s Version 129 11: S. 138 FFarmer.inddarmer.indd v 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:31:56:31 PPMM vi CONTENTS Part IV. Female Power and the Female Imagination 12: “Marching through Boston,” “The Stare,” “Report of Health,” “Living with a Wife,” and “Slippage” 151 13: The Witches of Eastwick 159 Part V. The Remembering Imagination 14: “In Football Season,” “First Wives and Trolley Cars,” “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” “Leaving Church Early,” and “The Egg Race” 173 15: Memories of the Ford Administration 184 16: “The Dogwood Tree,” “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” and “On Being a Self Forever” 192 Conclusion: Updike, Realism, and Postmodernism 201 Bibliography 207 Index 215 Credits 223 FFarmer.inddarmer.indd vvii 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:31:56:31 PPMM Acknowledgments EADING AND WRITING about an author whose fiction deals so thor- Roughly and explicitly with unhappy marriages and the adultery they engender makes me particularly thankful for my own marriage. With that in mind, I would like to dedicate this book to Victoria Reynolds Farmer, along with her favorite Updike quote, from his essay on Proust: “While our baby cooed in her white, screened crib, and the evening traf- fic swished north on the West Side Highway, and Manhattan at my back cooled like a stone, and my young wife fussed softly in our triangular kitchen at one of the meals that, by the undeservable grace of marriage, regularly appeared, I would read.” Thank you for the undeservable grace you grant me daily. My first reader for this book was my research assistant, Amberle Copeland, who did her level best to purge it of unclear language and fuzzy logic, as well as performing the even more tedious clerical tasks required of her. I am grateful for her ministrations, as well as those of my friends and colleagues who were subjected to early drafts: Danny Ander- son, Nathan Gilmour, and Christina Bieber Lake. Thanks is also due to my editor at Camden House, Jim Walker. I first encountered Updike (“A&P,” of course) as a college freshman at the capable hands of Todd Truffin, to whom I am grateful. Much of this book was written in various quiet rooms at the St. John’s Abbey Guesthouse in Collegeville, Minnesota. Thank you to the monks of the abbey for providing a contemplative space for projects like this one, and for their general hospitality and witness to pilgrims of all kinds. Finally, thank you to my English majors and other students at Crown College, whose classes surely suffered thanks to my obsession with Updike and this book. I’d like to promise that it’ll be better from here on out, but I know myself too well to think that. I hope you’ll keep bearing with me. FFarmer.inddarmer.indd vviiii 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:31:56:31 PPMM FFarmer.inddarmer.indd vviiiiii 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:31:56:31 PPMM Introduction: Hawthorne, Updike, and the Immoral Imagination T THE BEGINNING of one of his earliest sketches, “Sir William Phips” A(1830), Nathaniel Hawthorne—John Updike’s predecessor as chronicler of New England adultery—laments the fact that “few of the personages of past times . are anything more than mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our Imaginations like men. The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer, is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map—minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes—but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm produced by landscape paint- ing.”1 We have the world of facts, historical and objective, but brute nev- ertheless, and then we have the world of art, life-giving and memorable, the stuff of the spirit. Hawthorne’s schema here represents, of course, an upending of Plato’s metaphysical hierarchy, wherein the world of ideas, the really real world, has no corporeal form, and the world as depicted by the arts is debased and debasing, a mere copy of the physical world, which is itself a mere copy of the ideal world. It is also a variation on Philip Sid- ney’s vision of poetry, which lies halfway between philosophy and history, gaining its superiority from its liminality: For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary con- sequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.2 In Hawthorne’s analogy, the historian is a cartographer, and the world of mere facts that he sketches out is accurate but two-dimensional. The philosopher,3 on the other hand, carves the air, and his sculptures are much too abstract to do the bulk of humanity any real good. But the artistic imagination—the landscape painter of the sketch or the fiction writer who creates it—can abstract from the merely actual but keep things thick enough, as it were, to actually have an effect on those who encounter the result. FFarmer.inddarmer.indd 1 11/9/2017/9/2017 55:56:31:56:31 PPMM 2 INTRODUCTION The artistic imagination, in other words, must make the dull facts of life interesting—and, for Hawthorne at least, instructive: “A license must be assumed in brightening the materials which time has rusted, and in tracing out the half-obliterated inscriptions on the columns of antiquity; fancy must throw her reviving light on the fading incidents that indicate character, whence a ray will be reflected, more or less vividly, on the per- son to be described.”4 Art can be moral because it is imaginative. The real-life story of William Phips has little or nothing to teach us until the artist’s imagination blows it up like a balloon. Events are mere events; his- torical fiction, in turning them into art, allows them to speak to us. John Updike, Hawthorne’s conscious successor, performed a simi- lar operation over his five-decade career. The raw materials on which his imagination worked its alchemy came not from Cotton Mather or the Salem Custom House but from his own life. Adam Begley’s 2014 biogra- phy confirms what Updike’s readers had doubtless all suspected: much of Updike’s fiction is intensely personal, autobiographical in everything but name. And yet his unmatched lyrical gift—though many readers find fault with Harold Bloom’s infamous assessment of Updike as a “minor novelist with a major style,”5 almost no one would quarrel with the second half of that formulation—turns the anxieties and embarrassments and trespasses of daily life into something glittering and powerful.6 The imagination, for Updike as much as for Hawthorne, invigorates the flatness of history and is thus indispensible for human life.

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