What made John Updike run?

Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and scores of others, John Updike (1932 – 2009) is best known for his graphic but lyrical portrayal of the sexual infidelities of middle America in the 1960s and beyond. It was not for nothing that he was called the poet laureate of modern adultery. The most famous of his 60-odd books was Couples, the story of a band of spouse-trading friends, one of whom greeted her lover with the legendary words, “Welcome to the post-pill paradise.”[1]

Updike was a man of many contradictions. Spiritual and religious, he was a serial adulterer. Widely celebrated as one of America’s greatest writers, his work was dismissed by some critics as stylized pornography with nothing serious to say. Although he recognized the devastation the Sexual Revolution was wreaking on families, he abandoned his first wife and children to marry one of his mistresses. Often frustrated by a stuttering tongue, he found freedom in the written word to write about sex and love in ways that titillated and enchanted millions of readers. Yet the millions of words he produced caused some to complain that he hid behind them because what mattered more to him than either of those human mysteries was his own need to be heard.

Surprisingly, Updike was stubbornly religious throughout his life. He told an interviewer, “I’m a religious writer . . . I try to show people stuck with this kind of yearning [for other men’s wives and for morality and religion].”[2]  He was a regular churchgoer, recited the Lord’s Prayer with his children when he tucked them in for bed at night, and defended Christian theism from his days at Harvard in the early 1950s until his death sixty years later. Even Couples is shot through and through with religion. The two principal adulterers are the only regular churchgoers in the book; its fictional town Tarbox (modelled after Updike’s real town Ipswich, MA) has streets called Charity and Divinity leading to the Congregational Church with its “pricking steeple and flashing cock”; and the end of the story climaxes with the destruction of the church by lightning, suggesting divine judgment. The main antagonist and adulterer Piet concludes, “God doesn’t love us anymore.”[3]

Writing as love

For Updike writing, which he said was his “addiction,” was also an act of love. Love for God, who “is the God of the living,” not “the God who chastises life and forbids and says No.”  He learned through his Lutheran Sunday School lessons, even in their “clumsy” attempts to say it, that life is a blessing, and that he was called to accept that blessing. In return for that gift, he was offering “only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art.”[4]

The heart of that art, the heart of true writing, was imitation. To get the world and human relationships right was to imitate properly. If done right, “imitation is praise.” So the art of describing accurately, which means to show the beauty of all that is, even in its tragedy, is to express love. Faith in this God of blessing gave Updike courage to tell it like it is. “What small faith I have has given me what artistic courage I have. My theory was that God already knows everything and cannot be shocked.”[5]

Even in the grittiness of sexuality there is goodness and beauty, shocking as it is to many. His job was to show it all, especially what has been hidden from view by the worst kinds of tradition. “The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.” But prudery and bad art have kept us from the goodness and beauty of created life. “Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining underbase.”[6]

Updike’s biographer Adam Begley (Updike, Harper-Collins, 2014)concludes that Updike saw his writing as a series of “acts of worship.” His lyrical descriptions of ordinary human life, lovingly depicted in all of its most shocking detail, expressed love for the Creator.  His literary art was a service to God that purified all that was tawdry in the world: “From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe . . . . Such writing is in essence pure. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books. They are trim, crisp, clean . . . before the reviewers leave their smudges all over them.”[7]

Sex as divine

Begley reports that Updike “threw himself with reckless enthusiasm into the tangle of Ipswich infidelities.” Updike conceded in his memoirs that he had slept around in Ipswich, “a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife-does.”[8]

How could a man be so religious and yet be so enthusiastic for infidelity?

The answer seems to lie in his religion. It was a strange sort of Christianity that rejected the strictures of traditional faith, choosing divine comfort while rejecting divine commands. In other words, it was gospel without law, grace without repentance, the love of God without the holiness of God.

To be sure, Updike held on to parts of historic Christian belief. He rejected philosophical materialism as a failure to make sense of emotion and conscience, and defended Christ’s divinity against his first wife’s Unitarianism. But at the same time he took from Kierkegaard the idea that Christian faith is subjective in intellectual terms, not a conclusion from rationality or objectivity. So he insisted that resurrection from the dead is “unthinkable” to the modern mind, that God can be known only as “the self projected onto reality” by our natural optimism, and that the closer one moves toward Christianity the more it disappears, “as the fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it.”[9]

Updike’s Christianity was a religion of self-affirmation. His greatest fears were of death and its threat of nothingness. But religion, he wrote, “enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”  It puts us at ease, reassuring us that our efforts are not futile. So for us in this age of anxiety, God is a “tranquilizer.” He reinforces the “endless pardon we bring to our own self.”  He guarantees the meaning of our existence and serves as “a protector”– even in those moments when he recalled the abortion one of his lovers procured after a tryst with him.  Updike’s God helped him to, as Begley puts it, “cherish whatever happened to him.”[10]

If Updike’s God seemed to affirm whatever he did, this included his affairs. For in a manner not unlike that of D.H. Lawrence, Updike viewed sex as a mystical route to the divine. “Sex is the foremost means,” he told a CBS interviewer, “of conducting the moral and religious search.” It brings “ecstasy” and a sense of “transcendence.” Begley reports that it was his adulterous passion that “made him feel alive.”   He said as much himself: “To give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men’s wives.”[11]

So too for his characters in his fiction. When one of the Couples adulterers found in his lover a beauty she did not find in herself, this reminded him of his own beauty and the way sex brought down divine power: “This generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.” In the novel A Month of Sundays a Rev. Marshfield concludes that his first mistress helped reclaim “a wedge of mankind for the Good and the Beautiful,” and preaches in a sermon that “the sacrament of marriage . . . exists but as a precondition for the sacrament of adultery.” Critic Marshall Boswell opines that Marshfield at this point “about two-thirds believes [this], and Updike about half.”  Rev. Marshfield rationalizes the seduction of his divinity professor’s daughter by proclaiming, “I was slaying him that the Lord might live.” Kathleen Verduin observes that for Updike illicit sex can become “an act of righteous punishment.”[12]

A rather antinomian Christianity

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.”  There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.[13]

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that are not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all/ the days of my life, my life, forever.”[14] [1] Updike, Couples (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 52.

[2] CBSNews.com staff, “Going Home with John Updike,” http://www.cbsnews.com/news/going-home-with-john-updike/, accessed Jan. 2, 2015. [3] Couples, 200. [4] Updike, “On Being a Self Forever,” in Self-Consciousness, 230-31. [5] Ibid., 231. [6] Ibid., 230. [7] Adam Begley, Updike (New York: Harper-Collins, 2014), 231; “On Being a Self Forever,” 231. [8] Begley, Updike, 210;Updike, “On Being a Self Forever,” 222. [9] Updike, “On Being a Self Forever,” 250; Begley, Updike, 107; Updike, “On Being a Self Forever,” 215, 218, 230. [10] Updike, “On Being a Self Forever,” 228, 231, 273; Begley, Updike, 258. [11] Begley, Updike, 224; GWO, 98. [12] Lodge, “Post-Pill Paradise Lost,” 32; Marshall Boswell, “Updike, religion, and the novel of moral debate,” in Stacey Olster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),53; Kathleen Verduin, “Updike, women, and mythologized sexuality,” in Olster, ed., The Cambridge Companion, 68-69. [13] Updike, “On Being a Self Forever,” 229, 257, 234; Begley, Updike, 197; Frederick Crews cited in Verduin, “Updike, women, and mythologized sexuality,” 72. [14] Begley, Updike, 482.