Two links a propos "adults imigrants" (Steinberg, Forman,
Nabokov) and America's "great prose stylist" (Updike):
I - In John Updike on Comics: a dream anthology « sans everything
9 Dec 2007, from the memoir Self-Consciousness (1989),
sanseverything.wordpress.com/.../john-updike-on-comics-a-dream-anthology, Jeet
Heer writes: "Years ago while doing some research at Boston University...I came
across a fan letter that was unusually eloquent:... it was a missive sent in
1948 by John Updike, then an aspiring cartoonist, when he was 15 years
old... I’ve put together a mini-anthology ...to bring together some of
the more obscure and wayward remarks that often appeared as marginal asides in
novels or memoirs.
Excerpt On Saul Steinberg: “Like Nabokov and Milos Forman, to name
just two other affectionate adult immigrants, Steinberg saw America afresh, with
details to which natives had grown blind or numb. America parades,
American cowboys, American mountains of Art Deco, New York taxis in their
screaming, bulbous décor, the quaint gingerbread pomp of suburban mansions and
railroad stations – these visual events were mixed, not so paradoxically, with
the emblems of intended Utopia, the Latinate slogans involving Lex and Lux and
Pax and Tax and Vox Populi, the Statue of Liberty enjoying her deadpan marriage
with Uncle Sam, the practical partnership of S. Freud and S. Claus.” From an
obituary in the New York Review of Books (February 24, 1999) which I think is
reprinted in the new book Due Considerations (2007).
II - "Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the
sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian...and also
class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike
is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the
postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent
language hanging on austere forms...The precision is painterly in the
way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that he
imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to
catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene
"visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.") The grace of the
style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of
physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only
rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to
yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he
writes."...Do writers as inimitable as Updike leave heirs? Or just
addicts?
It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be
the worst writer Knopf has ever known. Last month, Updike justly earned a
lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction
Awards...The same refinement of sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned
to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of aestheticizing sexual
experience to awkward effect." Rabbit at Rest: The best of Updike, the worst
of Updike, and why the two are connected.
By Troy
PattersonPosted Jan. 27, 2009, All contents © 2011 The Slate Group, LLC.
All rights reserved.
Two more curiosities, linking Updike and Nabokov:
I - On a Spree With Updike by Anatole Broyard (December 2, 1975
)Books of the Times (on Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike)
"It is a
tricky business for writers of fiction to review other people's work. One can
hardly be committed to the novel or short story without also embracing a set of
idiosyncratic attitudes toward them. Sometimes, as in the case of
Vladimir Nabokov, these idiosyncrasies are so strong and pervasive as to make
his criticism more an examination of himself than of the authors in
question. Other writers seem too private to wish to share their views:
I find it difficult to imagine Bernard Malamud, for example, turning his hand to
criticism.One feels that Saul Bellow is too impatient with other writers'
imperfections... Philip Roth is a good critic because he is still rummaging
through the possibilities of fiction...Norman Mailer...too little room in his
ego for other characters. John Updike is such a conscious craftsman, such a
deliberate conjurer with words, rhythms, forms and ideas, that one would expect
him to be more disdainful, less generous, toward the cruder gropings of most of
his contemporaries. However, "Picked-Up Pieces" contradicts this impression.
In fact, in his major essays, those on Jorge Luis Borges, Kierkegaard
and Nabokov, he strikes me, at least, as being too kind ...As I see it,
the relationship between Updike and Nabokov might be described as "there but for
the grace of God go I." The implacable archness, the gratuitous word games, the
lepidopterous frivolity, the sense of the author's ego breathing down your neck,
in Mr. Nabokov's fiction are potential faults that John Updike has increasingly
repressed or brought under control in his own work. It must be nostalgia for his
avoided vices that impels Mr. Updike to call the author of "Ada" and "Pale Fire"
"the best-equipped writer in the English-speaking world." His reading of "Ada"
is so ingeniously convoluted as to be almost indistinguishable from parody. The
same is true of a sentence like this one: "If 'Transparent Things' is a
splintered hand-mirror, and 'Ada' cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset
cumulus, 'Look at the Harlequins!' is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments
as a magician's sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness." In
treating Borges, Mr. Updike is only slightly less indulgent. While he concedes
that "discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision," he
forgives Mr. Borges by remarking that "his driest paragraph is somehow
compelling." That uncharacteristic "somehow" is a confession of Mr.Updike's
inability to justify Borges's bibliomanic sereneness, those pages that make you
feel you are locked in a library during an earthquake, in danger of being buried
under the weight of books....The daily reviewer, who has to eat the plat du jour
and gulp it down at that, may feel a pang of envy on reading the luxurious
lubrications of Picked-Up Pieces." After this, he ought to be grateful, for John
Updike is an unassailable refutation of the old saw that those who can, do,
while those who cannot, criticize. Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
II - Numéro Cinq: Updike on Nabokov in Guernica, a formerly
unpublished interview with John Updike which circles around through various
topics, some not so interesting anymore, but mainly keeps coming back to
Nabokov.
John Updike: "I first encountered his prose, and I think
the stories as they appeared in The New Yorker. Not all of them appeared. But
I'd never seen writing quite like this before, writing so precise and witty, and
full of little surprises. And it was those surprises that gave me a kind of
ecstatic feeling. I think there is a rapture in Nabokov, which you can take to
be a love of life, and also a love of consciousness; a love of the motions of
the mind as it deals with whatever-chess is an example. He was a contriver of
chess puzzles. And that kind of joy and manipulation is there in a lot of the
prose. I don't really feel the darkness, much-it's true there's a lot of
dying, a lot of death in Nabokov. The end of Lolita, almost every character
in it is either dead or going to die. But I take dying to be for a lepidopterist
like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin,
becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved. There's a novel I reckon called
The Eye, in which he describes the transition from life to death. And it's a
kind of metamorphosis rather than a termination."( Tagged with Guernica, John
Updike, Vladimir Nabokov / 2010 Numéro Cinq Rondeau ).
Raging feuds?