What do you think?
Rate this book
Self-Consciousness
Self-Consciousness
One of our finest novelists now gives us his most dazzling creation -- his own life. In six eloquent and compelling chapters, the author of The Witches of Eastwick and the wonderful Rabbit trilogy gives us an incitingly honest look at the makings of an American writer -- and of an American man.
Here is Updike on his childhood, on ailments both horrible (psoriasis) and hilarious (his experiences at the hands of a dentist), on his stuttering, on his feelings during the Vietnam War, on his genealogy. and on that most elusive of subjects, his innermost self. What emerges is a fascinating, fully formed portrait -- candid, often very, funny, and always illuminating.
John Updike
One of our finest novelists now gives us his most dazzling creation -- his own life. In six eloquent and compelling chapters, the author of The Witches of Eastwick and the wonderful Rabbit trilogy gives us an incitingly honest look at the makings of an American writer -- and of an American man.
Here is Updike on his childhood, on ailments both horrible (psoriasis) and hilarious (his experiences at the hands of a dentist), on his stuttering, on his feelings during the Vietnam War, on his genealogy. and on that most elusive of subjects, his innermost self. What emerges is a fascinating, fully formed portrait -- candid, often very, funny, and always illuminating.
John Updike
271 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
John Updike
915 books2,242 followersJohn Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
April 13, 2019
My third date with John Updike. And for the third time in a row he's irritated me a good deal more than he's charmed me. There's no question he can write. But so much of what he writes about holds little interest to me. He's a writer obsessed with the minutiae of his childhood and his own appetites. The first section of this memoir is a detailed account of the small town where he grew up. It might have interested me more had it been a small English town and I could relate to the cultural references.
In the second section I began to understand why he fancies himself as a Lothario. He had a skin disease (and a stammer) which seems to have crippled his self-esteem. Every sexual conquest was no doubt a victory over the intimation of ugliness he saw when he looked at himself in a mirror. Nevertheless, I still found his preening boastful tone annoying. At one point he throws in a sentence about masturbating the wife of a friend in a car while his wife is sitting in the front seat. It had no context. Just came across as a schoolboy boast.
Later we discover he was opposed to the peace movement in the 1960s. He spends forty pages telling us why. His arguments make you think he would have made a nicely subservient subject under Nazi rule in Germany. He then admits he doesn't care a jot about the future of the planet. Surprise surprise! You might say he was ahead of his time as he comes across like one of these new Republicans who refer to all liberals as snowflakes.
It also becomes clear that the obnoxious serial adulterer and dutiful Christian in his novel Couples was a self-portrait. He's Mr Bad Boy of domestic arrangements always insisting on the primacy of his own appetites.
Towards the end there's a letter to his grandchildren which I found unreadable in its endless unrolling of localised detail.
One assumes in a memoir the author is telling the truth. Trouble with Updike with his preening pantomime villain act is you wonder if he knows what the truth is. At one point he informs us that he derives little nourishment from writing. Later he refers to himself as the whip holder in all his relationships. His second wife, in an interview, described him as the best tempered person she had ever known. That might also indicate he didn't care very deeply about anything, which, his childhood aside, is how he comes across.
My prediction is his reputation will wane with time. Now I'm looking forward to reading something a lot less self-consciously literary!
In the second section I began to understand why he fancies himself as a Lothario. He had a skin disease (and a stammer) which seems to have crippled his self-esteem. Every sexual conquest was no doubt a victory over the intimation of ugliness he saw when he looked at himself in a mirror. Nevertheless, I still found his preening boastful tone annoying. At one point he throws in a sentence about masturbating the wife of a friend in a car while his wife is sitting in the front seat. It had no context. Just came across as a schoolboy boast.
Later we discover he was opposed to the peace movement in the 1960s. He spends forty pages telling us why. His arguments make you think he would have made a nicely subservient subject under Nazi rule in Germany. He then admits he doesn't care a jot about the future of the planet. Surprise surprise! You might say he was ahead of his time as he comes across like one of these new Republicans who refer to all liberals as snowflakes.
It also becomes clear that the obnoxious serial adulterer and dutiful Christian in his novel Couples was a self-portrait. He's Mr Bad Boy of domestic arrangements always insisting on the primacy of his own appetites.
Towards the end there's a letter to his grandchildren which I found unreadable in its endless unrolling of localised detail.
One assumes in a memoir the author is telling the truth. Trouble with Updike with his preening pantomime villain act is you wonder if he knows what the truth is. At one point he informs us that he derives little nourishment from writing. Later he refers to himself as the whip holder in all his relationships. His second wife, in an interview, described him as the best tempered person she had ever known. That might also indicate he didn't care very deeply about anything, which, his childhood aside, is how he comes across.
My prediction is his reputation will wane with time. Now I'm looking forward to reading something a lot less self-consciously literary!
August 1, 2018
Updike is a terrific writer. He exhibits this "self-consciously" in these reflections on his life, times and family. It's humbling to read someone whose narratives seem to flow with such ease, and with such felicity. He led a special life, and his ability to describe it so fluently gives away why.
I especially appreciated the chapter regarding life during the sixties, "On Not Being a Dove."
I especially appreciated the chapter regarding life during the sixties, "On Not Being a Dove."
June 30, 2012
Having stuck with JU through his formative years,enduring his self-admittedly plebian sufferings over his psoriasis and his dental issues,his painful articulation of his anti-pacifist stance,butI almost chucked the whole thing in my frustration with his egocentric rambling in his chapter dedicated to his two African grandchildren. This book in no way endeared me to the man, nor his writing.
However, I chose this book not out of any affinity with JU, but rather my fasciination with the topic of the title. The last chapter was the one I needed to read, and glad I am that I bothered.I am glad that I read this passage: ...when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical,we are asking ourselves to step aside;we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept-the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. p264
That is so well put and so clear to me that I have have to forgive JU his trespasses against my pacifism and my politics and my own sense of style.
However, I chose this book not out of any affinity with JU, but rather my fasciination with the topic of the title. The last chapter was the one I needed to read, and glad I am that I bothered.I am glad that I read this passage: ...when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical,we are asking ourselves to step aside;we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept-the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. p264
That is so well put and so clear to me that I have have to forgive JU his trespasses against my pacifism and my politics and my own sense of style.
January 17, 2013
For my money, if the Dallas Cowboys are America's team John Updike was America's writer. He writes with such elegance it's a pleasure to read an Updike sentence. Near the end of Self-Consciousness: Memoirs he describes watching Olympic ice-dancing on television and being struck by the poetry of the moves as the dancers glide and shift through their routines. The same could be said of Updike's writing, the fluid movement from thought to thought.
Self-Consciousness is a memoir written in his mid-fifties, twenty years before his death. In 6 essays he describes the life he led, meandering here and there, flowing back and forth in time and focus. Like memory. He comes across as fairly honest, and he's not easy on himself, being frank about the ways he thinks he's failed as father and husband. The essays cover the town of Shillington, Pennsylvania as he remembers it when he was growing up there, his health issues, primarily asthma and psoriasis, his beginning to write and his struggles with stuttering, his unpopular support of the government during the Vietnam War and his inability to keep his stance from becoming public knowledge, an Updike family history, and an essay on how all his past selves contribute to his present self and, more, how his memories of those selves create a consciousness.
To me it seems wise because Updike has the ability to so elegantly and with such clever insight relate what we all experience: sexuality, work, religion, family, our relation to the current events of our day. It's labeled memoir; it's also philosophy. Updike's memoir remembers his experiences as a postwar American who's had moderate (his thought) success at what he chose to do with his life. More than about John Updike, it's about the America he saw in his lifetime. In some of the generalities he makes about himself one can see generalities about America. The man who comes through in these pages is easy for me to like. Some of his attitudes and opinions mirror my own, including his controversial acceptance of our presence in Vietnam. His ability to go along with things and to acclimate himself to any environment in which he finds himself holds great appeal to me. In only one area did I not relate to Updike's expression of his conscious self. In the section entitled "A Letter to My Grandsons," I thought it a little too detailed in Updike family history to be of interest to me, a Murphy.
I thought it a clever structure, to focus on six biographical areas and use them to propel the narrative of one's life. Having been away from Updike for a while I'm always surprised at how impressive, how opulent his prose is. He wrote with great style yet it reads with an ease that encourages you to conclude it came to him easily. This is terrific, grand memoir which looks at a self in the context of the human. But it's only one story. He reminds us that billions of such self-consciousnesses make up history, each the center of the universe. You'll agree, though, that only someone like Updike could articulate with such refinement his place in the world.
Self-Consciousness is a memoir written in his mid-fifties, twenty years before his death. In 6 essays he describes the life he led, meandering here and there, flowing back and forth in time and focus. Like memory. He comes across as fairly honest, and he's not easy on himself, being frank about the ways he thinks he's failed as father and husband. The essays cover the town of Shillington, Pennsylvania as he remembers it when he was growing up there, his health issues, primarily asthma and psoriasis, his beginning to write and his struggles with stuttering, his unpopular support of the government during the Vietnam War and his inability to keep his stance from becoming public knowledge, an Updike family history, and an essay on how all his past selves contribute to his present self and, more, how his memories of those selves create a consciousness.
To me it seems wise because Updike has the ability to so elegantly and with such clever insight relate what we all experience: sexuality, work, religion, family, our relation to the current events of our day. It's labeled memoir; it's also philosophy. Updike's memoir remembers his experiences as a postwar American who's had moderate (his thought) success at what he chose to do with his life. More than about John Updike, it's about the America he saw in his lifetime. In some of the generalities he makes about himself one can see generalities about America. The man who comes through in these pages is easy for me to like. Some of his attitudes and opinions mirror my own, including his controversial acceptance of our presence in Vietnam. His ability to go along with things and to acclimate himself to any environment in which he finds himself holds great appeal to me. In only one area did I not relate to Updike's expression of his conscious self. In the section entitled "A Letter to My Grandsons," I thought it a little too detailed in Updike family history to be of interest to me, a Murphy.
I thought it a clever structure, to focus on six biographical areas and use them to propel the narrative of one's life. Having been away from Updike for a while I'm always surprised at how impressive, how opulent his prose is. He wrote with great style yet it reads with an ease that encourages you to conclude it came to him easily. This is terrific, grand memoir which looks at a self in the context of the human. But it's only one story. He reminds us that billions of such self-consciousnesses make up history, each the center of the universe. You'll agree, though, that only someone like Updike could articulate with such refinement his place in the world.
July 1, 2015
Without trying, I was always reading something by John Updike. It was hard not to, especially if you read The New Yorker, where his fiction, essays, and reviews appeared for fifty years. I love his memoir, Self-Consciousness, much of which explores what made Updike awkward and shy: his introverted boyhood, his stutter; and his many adult afflictions, especially psoriasis and bad teeth. It’s a fascinating inquiry into the nature of subjectivity and memory.
Early in Self-Consciousness Updike unfolds a scene where, as a student working on an art project after hours in his high school, he realizes that his teacher and the stern principal appear to share a secret romantic life. “To this quiet but indelible memory,” he adds, “attaches a sensation that one of these two teachers came over and ruffled my hair, as if we had become a tiny family; but it may be simply that one of them stood close, to see how far along I was, because when I was finished we could all go to our separate homes.”
Thus Updike gives readers the dual effect of memoir and fiction. He pulls this skillful having-it-both-ways trick a few times, as when he portrays a strange feed-store proprietor who “always wore dark clothes” and one day would be found murdered. Then Updike pauses: “Did he really always wear dark clothes, or has my memory, knowing of his grisly end, dressed him appropriately? Spying from our front windows, I would watch him descend his long cement steps with an odd sideways bias, favoring one leg, looking like a dark monkey on a string.”
The brilliance of this is in its vivid imagery, resonant with emotion, and in Updike’s insight that his memory may be lying—and then in playing out the scene with that suspect material to bring the vision in his mind to life. Most writers wouldn’t have noticed or questioned such a detail in the first place; but Updike understood the interaction among sensibility, history, and imagination. With his confessions, by his calling attention to what might be his mind’s creative lies, he won my complete faith, that famous conjurer, that his memoir was truthful. His scruples were neatly practical, moral, and aesthetic. And his little asides amount to sophisticated criticisms of the unquestioned and the allegedly factual. For what is the truth of most memory beyond one mind’s knowing? Probably no one living but Updike, at the time, remembered that twisted little man—or perceived him that way in the first place.
Of course the passage also underscores Updike’s theme of self-consciousness in showing both his secretive boyhood attentions to life and his adult preoccupation with literary creation. In experiencing the layered subjectivity of this gifted writer, readers find in Self-Consciousness powerful affirmation of their own private selves.
Early in Self-Consciousness Updike unfolds a scene where, as a student working on an art project after hours in his high school, he realizes that his teacher and the stern principal appear to share a secret romantic life. “To this quiet but indelible memory,” he adds, “attaches a sensation that one of these two teachers came over and ruffled my hair, as if we had become a tiny family; but it may be simply that one of them stood close, to see how far along I was, because when I was finished we could all go to our separate homes.”
Thus Updike gives readers the dual effect of memoir and fiction. He pulls this skillful having-it-both-ways trick a few times, as when he portrays a strange feed-store proprietor who “always wore dark clothes” and one day would be found murdered. Then Updike pauses: “Did he really always wear dark clothes, or has my memory, knowing of his grisly end, dressed him appropriately? Spying from our front windows, I would watch him descend his long cement steps with an odd sideways bias, favoring one leg, looking like a dark monkey on a string.”
The brilliance of this is in its vivid imagery, resonant with emotion, and in Updike’s insight that his memory may be lying—and then in playing out the scene with that suspect material to bring the vision in his mind to life. Most writers wouldn’t have noticed or questioned such a detail in the first place; but Updike understood the interaction among sensibility, history, and imagination. With his confessions, by his calling attention to what might be his mind’s creative lies, he won my complete faith, that famous conjurer, that his memoir was truthful. His scruples were neatly practical, moral, and aesthetic. And his little asides amount to sophisticated criticisms of the unquestioned and the allegedly factual. For what is the truth of most memory beyond one mind’s knowing? Probably no one living but Updike, at the time, remembered that twisted little man—or perceived him that way in the first place.
Of course the passage also underscores Updike’s theme of self-consciousness in showing both his secretive boyhood attentions to life and his adult preoccupation with literary creation. In experiencing the layered subjectivity of this gifted writer, readers find in Self-Consciousness powerful affirmation of their own private selves.
April 21, 2009
This book has significantly lowered my opinion of Mr Updike: it really represents everything that is good and bad about him. On the good side, it is very well written.
On the bad side there is much to say. I came across an interview of Gore Vidal the other day which raised the two central objections to Updike: firstly, 'he describes to no purpose'; secondly, his work shows 'a bland acceptance of authority'. Once I had this pointed out by Vidal, I couldn't help noticing it in almost every sentence of this confused autobiography. He constantly goes into pointless descriptions and he constantly says things like ''well, it will be alright in Heaven'' and ''we are lucky really'' that make me cringe. In this work, Updike frequently flies into ecstatic heights of self-pity:
''My album of sore moments includes a memory of crouching above my tray in the Lowell House dining hall at Harvard, miserably retching at something in my throat that would not go up or down, while half-swallowed milk dribbled down from my mouth and the other students at the table silently took up their trays and moved away. On the edge of asphyxia, I sympathized with them and wished that I, too, could shun me.''
On the other hand, the prose is frequently extremely embarassing in detail. Now, I am not easily offended and it is very rare indeed that I have been offended by something I have read in a book. Feast your eyes on this then (lets see if I can bear to type this out):
''I seem to remember on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rythmically irradiated with light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbough through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off''.
Maybe a bit too much detail, John? Another important flaw: whilst Updike was a clear observer, his thinking was deeply muddled and confused and nowhere does that come through more than in this book. For example:
''We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods''.
And yes, he does intend this to be a serious argument for his belief in the Christian religion. I think in this book Updike reveals himself as a fortunate fool. A fool with a gift for language, observation and word-play. He emerges not so much as an illusionist, but as an illusion: there is something false, something inauthentic and empty at the core of his writing. He used his gift for word-play to spin infinite sentences out of nothing, soaking up literary prizes and critical praise but I think future generations will recognise him simply as a minor novelist with a major style.
On the bad side there is much to say. I came across an interview of Gore Vidal the other day which raised the two central objections to Updike: firstly, 'he describes to no purpose'; secondly, his work shows 'a bland acceptance of authority'. Once I had this pointed out by Vidal, I couldn't help noticing it in almost every sentence of this confused autobiography. He constantly goes into pointless descriptions and he constantly says things like ''well, it will be alright in Heaven'' and ''we are lucky really'' that make me cringe. In this work, Updike frequently flies into ecstatic heights of self-pity:
''My album of sore moments includes a memory of crouching above my tray in the Lowell House dining hall at Harvard, miserably retching at something in my throat that would not go up or down, while half-swallowed milk dribbled down from my mouth and the other students at the table silently took up their trays and moved away. On the edge of asphyxia, I sympathized with them and wished that I, too, could shun me.''
On the other hand, the prose is frequently extremely embarassing in detail. Now, I am not easily offended and it is very rare indeed that I have been offended by something I have read in a book. Feast your eyes on this then (lets see if I can bear to type this out):
''I seem to remember on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rythmically irradiated with light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbough through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off''.
Maybe a bit too much detail, John? Another important flaw: whilst Updike was a clear observer, his thinking was deeply muddled and confused and nowhere does that come through more than in this book. For example:
''We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods''.
And yes, he does intend this to be a serious argument for his belief in the Christian religion. I think in this book Updike reveals himself as a fortunate fool. A fool with a gift for language, observation and word-play. He emerges not so much as an illusionist, but as an illusion: there is something false, something inauthentic and empty at the core of his writing. He used his gift for word-play to spin infinite sentences out of nothing, soaking up literary prizes and critical praise but I think future generations will recognise him simply as a minor novelist with a major style.
January 13, 2019
A striking passage from Updike’s memoirs Self-Consciousness taken from the essay ‘On Being a Self Forever’:
I’ve often read material by writers before and after they���ve won some major literary award – like the Nobel Prize or Pulitzer – and there seems to be something more authentic in the earlier work. The argument isn’t necessarily limited to prizes but perhaps even controversy or simply brilliant writing that attracts the kind of attention it deserves.
Sometimes I wonder if feeling this way about the texts of an established writer are based on the expectations I have built after the writer’s recognition, and therefore expect each new text to surpass the previous one. Other times I think it’s the writer’s responsibility since the writer didn’t produce a text with the same or even better literary quality.
Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an example, his work continues to grow and improve in time despite having received the Nobel Prize at the age of 55 some thirty years ago. So how can this be explained?
Updike enlightens us by stressing that the material – the substance – that makes up the stories of writers, that stuff needs to come from a time before fame and fortune – before literary acclaim. Those thoughts, ideas, emotions, and instincts that shape us, as well as the challenges and obstacles that life impedes us with before we finally have a breakthrough, there is where the ink lies mingled with our blood. It’s in our veins to be tapped out and used on the page.
Afterward? We’re probably too corrupted.
Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip – all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dinning-room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.
I’ve often read material by writers before and after they���ve won some major literary award – like the Nobel Prize or Pulitzer – and there seems to be something more authentic in the earlier work. The argument isn’t necessarily limited to prizes but perhaps even controversy or simply brilliant writing that attracts the kind of attention it deserves.
Sometimes I wonder if feeling this way about the texts of an established writer are based on the expectations I have built after the writer’s recognition, and therefore expect each new text to surpass the previous one. Other times I think it’s the writer’s responsibility since the writer didn’t produce a text with the same or even better literary quality.
Take Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an example, his work continues to grow and improve in time despite having received the Nobel Prize at the age of 55 some thirty years ago. So how can this be explained?
Updike enlightens us by stressing that the material – the substance – that makes up the stories of writers, that stuff needs to come from a time before fame and fortune – before literary acclaim. Those thoughts, ideas, emotions, and instincts that shape us, as well as the challenges and obstacles that life impedes us with before we finally have a breakthrough, there is where the ink lies mingled with our blood. It’s in our veins to be tapped out and used on the page.
Afterward? We’re probably too corrupted.
September 29, 2013
I skipped his letter to his mixed raced grandsons as they seemed a little bit self-congratulatory-white-guy for my taste ("Look at me! My DNA is in a brown person! How bohemian of me!" etc. etc.), so my thoughts are about the remainder of his essays.
I found Updike most compelling when his pieces were grounded in a physical place, and/or at least involve scenes into which I could plant my mental feet. (This offers a hint to how I can improve my own writing, i.e., plagiarize off Updike; write about my childhood in Shillington.) By doing so, he could go off for fifty pages about all manner of WTF without losing me as a reader, because I was right there with him as he perigrinated and peripatetic and perambulated and perimetered and then all of a sudden we are back in downtown Shillington waiting on a misty night for his luggage. Who knows if that night even happened -- it was a most excellent frame for the telling of that essay.
It's a bit downhill from there, particularly since he reveals himself as a pretty unsympathetic dude. He cheats on his wife, leaves his family, and is also able to make a really good living off being a writer = loathsome. There were some interesting bits about psoriasis (an acute case of which my older sister has) and some moderately insightful moments regarding the delta between how one sees oneself vs. how one is perceived by others.
Some good lines IMHO:
- "The burden of activity, of participation, must plainly be shouldered, and has its pleasures. But they are cruel pleasures."
- "In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person became as good as I could make it."
- "My war with my skin had to do with self-love, with finding myself acceptable, whether others did or not."
- "Between the thought and the word falls a shadow, a cleavage; stuttering, like suicide and insomnia and stoicism, demonstrates the duality of our existence, the ability of the body and soul to say no to one another."
- "But basically I was a cultural bumpkin in love not with writing but with print, the straight lines and serifs of it, the industrial polish and transcendence of it."
- "[My Harvard classmates], secure in the upper-middle class, were Democrats out of human sympathy and humanitarian largesse, because this was the party that helped the poor. Our family had simply _been_ poor, and voted Democrat out of crude self-interest."
Made the time in which he as a child come more alive to me. Also made me mourn the birth of private equity-funded malls which, along with other forces, murdered walkable small towns and the concomitant social capital that once came with.
I found Updike most compelling when his pieces were grounded in a physical place, and/or at least involve scenes into which I could plant my mental feet. (This offers a hint to how I can improve my own writing, i.e., plagiarize off Updike; write about my childhood in Shillington.) By doing so, he could go off for fifty pages about all manner of WTF without losing me as a reader, because I was right there with him as he perigrinated and peripatetic and perambulated and perimetered and then all of a sudden we are back in downtown Shillington waiting on a misty night for his luggage. Who knows if that night even happened -- it was a most excellent frame for the telling of that essay.
It's a bit downhill from there, particularly since he reveals himself as a pretty unsympathetic dude. He cheats on his wife, leaves his family, and is also able to make a really good living off being a writer = loathsome. There were some interesting bits about psoriasis (an acute case of which my older sister has) and some moderately insightful moments regarding the delta between how one sees oneself vs. how one is perceived by others.
Some good lines IMHO:
- "The burden of activity, of participation, must plainly be shouldered, and has its pleasures. But they are cruel pleasures."
- "In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person became as good as I could make it."
- "My war with my skin had to do with self-love, with finding myself acceptable, whether others did or not."
- "Between the thought and the word falls a shadow, a cleavage; stuttering, like suicide and insomnia and stoicism, demonstrates the duality of our existence, the ability of the body and soul to say no to one another."
- "But basically I was a cultural bumpkin in love not with writing but with print, the straight lines and serifs of it, the industrial polish and transcendence of it."
- "[My Harvard classmates], secure in the upper-middle class, were Democrats out of human sympathy and humanitarian largesse, because this was the party that helped the poor. Our family had simply _been_ poor, and voted Democrat out of crude self-interest."
Made the time in which he as a child come more alive to me. Also made me mourn the birth of private equity-funded malls which, along with other forces, murdered walkable small towns and the concomitant social capital that once came with.
August 4, 2021
The reputation of the works of John Updike, like that of most of his literary lion contemporaries of the latter half of the 20th century, has taken an unhappy hit over the past few years. He remains one of my very favorite authors, though. Self-Consciousness is a six-chaptered 1989 memoir with subjects ranging from his struggles with psoriasis and stammering to his non-dovish views during the Vietnam War. As elsewhere, he writes of his growing up in east central Pennsylvania during the Great Depression and WWII with an insight only having later emigrated can bring. His mid-century modern years as a wealthy and successful New England writer are unmistakably Updikean, too. The final chapter, “On Being a Self Forever,” gets a little meditative for my tastes, but contemplations on religion and Self are not something which any deep reader of Updike will be unsuspecting.
I did a double-take when, after six pages of his laying out for his grandsons the lineage of Updikes in the United States, beginning with Gysbert op den Dyck in 1638, he writes, “Yet he, and all of the Rhode Island Updikes, were not really my relation, or yours.”
I did a double-take when, after six pages of his laying out for his grandsons the lineage of Updikes in the United States, beginning with Gysbert op den Dyck in 1638, he writes, “Yet he, and all of the Rhode Island Updikes, were not really my relation, or yours.”
April 20, 2022
Something at the beginning of the book reminded of a blog post I wrote on Goodreads once. Updike describes someone asking him about writing his biography. But that idea seemed "repulsive" to Mr. Updike. Lots of writers have biographers, why not him? If he doesn't want one, that is fine too, but repulsive? That is too much.
Here is the blog post where I describe meeting Mr. Updike once:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
I loved a quote at the end of the book:
". . . it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept--the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."
"I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning."
Here is the blog post where I describe meeting Mr. Updike once:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
I loved a quote at the end of the book:
". . . it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept--the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."
"I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning."
February 15, 2023
“But in truth all views have something glorious about them.”
April 25, 2009
For the Updike reader, this is an indispensable volume. He's not afraid to show some of his warts along the way of writing this memoir. I think it's clear that his relationship with his mother was very important as she too was a writer. Along the way, he admits to reading comic books and science fiction as a young boy. He often had choking fits at dinner (nervous swallowing habit) which may also have been brought on by being too self-conscious. In total, it feels like a pretty honest account and it's a fascinating read.
November 14, 2013
A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter—all that is not said—remains, buzzing.
I became determined to hunt down John Updike's Self-Consciousness after coming across this article , and was quite relieved that I managed to locate it at a nearby local library (glad to have avoided the pains of my 3-month search for William Maxwell's So Long, See you Tomorrow). I was - to put it simply -bummed, therefore, when the first few pages did not immediately suck me in, and resignedly headed back to the library to return it a week after. Bored on the bus, I flipped to around page 28 and by the time I got to the bus stop, I couldn't stop reading it... classic.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever. If we keep utterly still, we can suffer no wear and tear, and will never die.
Self-Consciousness is Updike's memoir, throughout which his life is unfolded to us not via chronological accounts but rather six compelling essays. In each, he explains different reasons for his self-consciousness, without which he - "a boy who loved the average, the daily, the safely hidden" - could not have become a "prolific, adaptable, ruthless-enough writer."
The first essay, A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, begins with Updike's lost luggage and ends with his "self-conscious" walk around his hometown, Shillington; the next, At War with My Skin uncovers Updike's long struggle with psoriasis, a skin disease that counted him out of any jobs "that demand being presentable'' yet helped him develop a"thick literary skin" and become a writer. In the third essay, Getting the Words Out, Updike describes his habit of stuttering and fear of "being misunderstood,"hence his eagerness of getting "the words out." The fourth essay, On Not Being a Dove, outlines Updike's self-consciousness (and frustration) regarding being named, in the Times, "the lone American writer 'unequivocally for' the US intervention in Vietnam" and his adolescent teeth pain. The next essay, A Letter to My Grandsons, I skimmed (more interested in Updike's ideas than his family history), and the final - On Being a Self Forever - is the most poignantly written, in which Updike writes of his pensées de la mort and what it means to be a self.
So voilà, through 6 essays Updike has pinpointed the main sources of his self and self-consciousness: his hometown (with the "chilly thrilly taste" of his self), his skin, his stuttering, his teeth, his self... and he has done so in elegant, freely structured prose. In fact, one of the best similes I've ever read is presented in Getting the Words Out, in which Updike describes "a microphone cowled in black sponge" as "uptilted like the screened face of a miniature fencer." The picture of him standing on the stage, anxious to stutter, opened up to me.
Updike also discusses his self-consciousness of being a writer:
As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. [...] Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip – all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dinning-room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.
So we see that Updike has struggled and benefited from self-consciousness all his life. Psoriasis may have sent him running to the sun during summer and his "dread of death" left him distressed, but without them, he would have never been impelled to pursue the "papery self-magnification and immortality of printed reproduction" - writing.
"Do I really want it, this self, these scattered fingerprints on the air, to persist forever, to outlast the atomic universe?" Updike asks in the final essay. He gives us all something to think about.
An illusion of eternal comfort reposes in clubbiness,” he explains, “the assurance that no earthly adventure, from puberty to death, is unprecedented or incapable of being shared and that one's life is thoroughly witnessed and therefore not wasted.
It was potentially terrifying to advance into time - every day, a new newspaper on the porch! - toward death.
Those who scoff at the Christian hope of an afterlife have on their side not only a mass of biological evidence knitting the self-conscious mind tight to the perishing body but a certain moral superiority as well: isn't it terribly, well, selfish, and grotesquely egocentric, to hope for more than our animal walk in the sun, from eager blind infancy through the productive and procreative years into a senescence that, by the laws of biological instinct as well as by the premeditated precepts of stoic virtue, will submit to eternal sleep gracefully? Where, indeed, in the vast spaces disclosed by modern astronomy, would our disembodied spirit go, and, once there, what would it do?
We do find it hard to picture any endlessly sustained condition or activity that would not become as much a torture as live entombment.
If we picture the afterlife at all, it is, heretically, as the escape of something impalpable — the essential “I” — from this corruptible flesh, occurring at the moment of death. . . . The thought of this long wait within the tomb afflicts us with claustrophobia and the fear of being lost forever; where is our self during the long interval? … The idea that we sleep for centuries and centuries without a flicker of dream, while our bodies rot and turn to dust and the very stone marking our graves crumbles to nothing, is virtually as terrifying as annihilation. Every attempt to be specific about the afterlife, to conceive of it in even the most general detail, appalls us.
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.
Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance.
September 6, 2021
This book is one of so very many that have been sitting on my shelves "to be read some day." I finally picked it up last week and read it, starting with the last chapter, which is where he reflects on life and approaching death, as well as his faith. I then proceeded to the opening chapter, where he wanders the streets of the small Pennsylvania town where he grew up, finding it fascinating because it's an experience I never had (having grown up overseas).....so much of what I appreciated is his fascination with the small details of life, as well as his ability to write well about those things, things that we generally take for granted.
He deserves his status as one of the great writers of the 20th Century.
He deserves his status as one of the great writers of the 20th Century.
June 3, 2016
John Updike's writing always meant a lot to me because, early in his career, he focused on the part of Pennsylvania where he and I both were born, he some 20 years earlier. This self-portrait renews his encounter with southeastern Pennsylvania, its fertility, simplicity, directness, friendliness, modesty and self-absorption.
Shillington, Pa., his hometown, is a suburbanized nothing sort of place whose metropolis is Reading, an urban nothing sort of place, but in his childhood, it was intensely fascinating, almost luxurious, and left a deep impression on Updike long after he moved to New England.
This book is the nonfiction cousin of the fiction found in Olinger Stories, Pigeon Feathers, The Poorhouse Fair, and The Centaur. That's Shillington. Reading is to be found in the Rabbit novels. Writing fiction or nonfiction, Updike had a descriptive gift, an antic, lyrical, puckish style, equal to anyone's. Another writer from the same terrain, John O'Hara, explored some of the latent melodrama in the big houses, bedrooms and bars of Pennsylvania, but he was not devoted to its details, its boxwoods, its spiders, its high school hallways, its front porches or linoleum floored kitchens. That was Updike's forte: the quotidian and undervalued specificity of person and place.
Updike's approach in this 6 part memoir extends past, but is deeply rooted in, his hometown. He writes about childhood, his lifelong problems with his psoriasis and bad teeth, his stubborn faith in the good intentions of politicians, his love affair with Ipswich, Mass., and his religious faith. He was a believer because he thought it made sense to believe; God provided him with the fullness that even a lifetime of self-consciously written words could not give him.
Curiously, he was the successor to John Cheever as a short story darling of the New Yorker, but he didn't like mingling with his literary counterparts, especially agents, publicists, reviewers, and high-living publishers. He made excellent money, was considered somewhat conventional in his politics and views, suffered praise to the effect that he wrote beautifully about nothing of consequence, and just did his best to stay out of New York and its cocktail parties, if not some of its feuds.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once worried to Edmund Wilson that he might not be as intelligent as he'd like to be. He wasn't as intelligent as Wilson--who was?--but Fitzgerald had plenty of smarts and a gift for condensing his sense of life into fiction a great deal more moving and successful than Wilson's. Updike wore his erudition lightly, but it was there. He thought deeply about social change, theology, science, and the arts. That may be more visible in this book than in some of his novels, where his knowledge played a background role, deferring to the lives his characters actually lived.
I've always known Updike was crazy about Henry Green, the British novelist. I didn't know that Proust was another great influence on him, or that he believed he'd learned many valuable literary lessons reading mystery and crime novels when he was in his teens. Proust's endless peeling of the onion does seem reflected in Updike's dazzling details. The shortcuts and plot twists Updike thinks he picked up from Erle Stanley Gardner are not so apparent, at least to me. You don't read Updike for what happens next; you read him for his sentences and feel for human experience in the latter half of the 20th century.
The dreariest part of this book is the section devoted to a genealogical exploration of the clan Updike. It meant more to him than it could possibly mean to someone who isn't an Updike. The best part may be the final passage where he is brooding about the indignities of old age, the infirmity of his frail, elderly mother, and his many defects and deficiencies.
He links these defects and deficiencies to Original Sin in a curiously beneficent way. I've never looked at an infant and thought he or she was a sinner from the first suckle, but I understand what Updike is getting at. Believing we are imperfect (obviously), we can accept our failures more easily; it is not such a tragedy when we discover we are not divine. If we leave our first wife and four children, well, that's very difficult and unfortunate, but we are apt to make mistakes and do not control the order of the universe. Even in our worst moments, there may be something of value, if not benefiting us, perhaps benefiting someone near to us.
I don't buy this line of thought. It's exactly the kind of comforting reflection that turned off many of Updike's snootier, more "worldly" critics. But he is admirable in praising the average performance of average people, counting himself more or less among them, and standing up for them. Somehow Original Sin gave him the latitude to be mischievous as well as earnest, outlandish as well as insightful.
In many ways, Updike was a writer's writer. All he did was write, write well, and make a good living from it, eschewing not only Cocktail New York but Distinguished Professor Academe. Nonetheless, this is not really a writer's autobiography. There's a person in these pages. That's no mean feat.
Shillington, Pa., his hometown, is a suburbanized nothing sort of place whose metropolis is Reading, an urban nothing sort of place, but in his childhood, it was intensely fascinating, almost luxurious, and left a deep impression on Updike long after he moved to New England.
This book is the nonfiction cousin of the fiction found in Olinger Stories, Pigeon Feathers, The Poorhouse Fair, and The Centaur. That's Shillington. Reading is to be found in the Rabbit novels. Writing fiction or nonfiction, Updike had a descriptive gift, an antic, lyrical, puckish style, equal to anyone's. Another writer from the same terrain, John O'Hara, explored some of the latent melodrama in the big houses, bedrooms and bars of Pennsylvania, but he was not devoted to its details, its boxwoods, its spiders, its high school hallways, its front porches or linoleum floored kitchens. That was Updike's forte: the quotidian and undervalued specificity of person and place.
Updike's approach in this 6 part memoir extends past, but is deeply rooted in, his hometown. He writes about childhood, his lifelong problems with his psoriasis and bad teeth, his stubborn faith in the good intentions of politicians, his love affair with Ipswich, Mass., and his religious faith. He was a believer because he thought it made sense to believe; God provided him with the fullness that even a lifetime of self-consciously written words could not give him.
Curiously, he was the successor to John Cheever as a short story darling of the New Yorker, but he didn't like mingling with his literary counterparts, especially agents, publicists, reviewers, and high-living publishers. He made excellent money, was considered somewhat conventional in his politics and views, suffered praise to the effect that he wrote beautifully about nothing of consequence, and just did his best to stay out of New York and its cocktail parties, if not some of its feuds.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once worried to Edmund Wilson that he might not be as intelligent as he'd like to be. He wasn't as intelligent as Wilson--who was?--but Fitzgerald had plenty of smarts and a gift for condensing his sense of life into fiction a great deal more moving and successful than Wilson's. Updike wore his erudition lightly, but it was there. He thought deeply about social change, theology, science, and the arts. That may be more visible in this book than in some of his novels, where his knowledge played a background role, deferring to the lives his characters actually lived.
I've always known Updike was crazy about Henry Green, the British novelist. I didn't know that Proust was another great influence on him, or that he believed he'd learned many valuable literary lessons reading mystery and crime novels when he was in his teens. Proust's endless peeling of the onion does seem reflected in Updike's dazzling details. The shortcuts and plot twists Updike thinks he picked up from Erle Stanley Gardner are not so apparent, at least to me. You don't read Updike for what happens next; you read him for his sentences and feel for human experience in the latter half of the 20th century.
The dreariest part of this book is the section devoted to a genealogical exploration of the clan Updike. It meant more to him than it could possibly mean to someone who isn't an Updike. The best part may be the final passage where he is brooding about the indignities of old age, the infirmity of his frail, elderly mother, and his many defects and deficiencies.
He links these defects and deficiencies to Original Sin in a curiously beneficent way. I've never looked at an infant and thought he or she was a sinner from the first suckle, but I understand what Updike is getting at. Believing we are imperfect (obviously), we can accept our failures more easily; it is not such a tragedy when we discover we are not divine. If we leave our first wife and four children, well, that's very difficult and unfortunate, but we are apt to make mistakes and do not control the order of the universe. Even in our worst moments, there may be something of value, if not benefiting us, perhaps benefiting someone near to us.
I don't buy this line of thought. It's exactly the kind of comforting reflection that turned off many of Updike's snootier, more "worldly" critics. But he is admirable in praising the average performance of average people, counting himself more or less among them, and standing up for them. Somehow Original Sin gave him the latitude to be mischievous as well as earnest, outlandish as well as insightful.
In many ways, Updike was a writer's writer. All he did was write, write well, and make a good living from it, eschewing not only Cocktail New York but Distinguished Professor Academe. Nonetheless, this is not really a writer's autobiography. There's a person in these pages. That's no mean feat.
April 25, 2008
This is a fine memoir, more reflections on a few topics of his life than a traditional "then in 1971 I did this..." type of memoir. There are sentences that stop you in your tracks. Especially good is "A Soft Spring Night in Shillington," a walking tour of the Pennsylvania city of his youth and his childhood memories, and "On Being A Self Forever." One compelling sentence from the latter: "Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?"
July 2, 2014
Some amazing discourse on the sentimentality of our youthful remembrances, how we deal with our inexorable death, and why humans need religion (for reasons less to do with death than you would suppose). All wonderfully written in a great autobiography that would have been better with less begats and family history, and more how Updike thinks Spiderman is the only comic worth reading and why the need for religion is the same as the need for hyperbole in art and writing.
September 12, 2011
I've never been a huge fan of John Updike, although I admire his writing talent and skill, his perceptiveness, and his compassion for ordinary people. This memoir confirmed all of that and also surprised me in its revelation of the extent to which his fiction draws on his life.
July 21, 2007
There's an awesome essay in here about his skin condition and how it maybe influenced his prose style, how he tries to make the language as clean-gleaming as possible compared to his skin . . .
December 6, 2021
My third date with John Updike. And for the third time in a row he's irritated me a good deal more than he's charmed me. There's no question he can write. But so much of what he writes about holds little interest to me. He's a writer obsessed with the minutiae of his childhood and his own appetites. The first section of this memoir is a detailed account of the small town where he grew up. It might have interested me more had it been a small English town and I could relate to the cultural references.
In the second section I began to understand why he fancies himself as a Lothario. He had a skin disease (and a stammer) which seems to have crippled his self-esteem. Every sexual conquest was no doubt a victory over the intimation of ugliness he saw when he looked at himself in a mirror. Nevertheless, I still found his preening boastful tone annoying. At one point he throws in a sentence about masturbating the wife of a friend in a car while his wife is sitting in the front seat. It had no context. Just came across as a schoolboy boast.
Later we discover he was opposed to the peace movement in the 1960s. He spends forty pages telling us why. His arguments make you think he would have made a nicely subservient subject under Nazi rule in Germany. He then admits he doesn't care a jot about the future of the planet. Surprise surprise! You might say he was ahead of his time as he comes across like one of these new Republicans who refer to all liberals as snowflakes.
It also becomes clear that the obnoxious serial adulterer and dutiful Christian in his novel Couples was a self-portrait. He's Mr Bad Boy of domestic arrangements always insisting on the primacy of his own appetites.
Towards the end there's a letter to his grandchildren which I found unreadable in its endless unrolling of localised detail.
One assumes in a memoir the author is telling the truth. Trouble with Updike with his preening pantomime villain act is you wonder if he knows what the truth is. At one point he informs us that he derives little nourishment from writing. Later he refers to himself as the whip holder in all his relationships. His second wife, in an interview, described him as the best tempered person she had ever known. That might also indicate he didn't care very deeply about anything, which, his childhood aside, is how he comes across.
My prediction is his reputation will wane with time. Now I'm looking forward to reading something a lot less self-consciously literary!
In the second section I began to understand why he fancies himself as a Lothario. He had a skin disease (and a stammer) which seems to have crippled his self-esteem. Every sexual conquest was no doubt a victory over the intimation of ugliness he saw when he looked at himself in a mirror. Nevertheless, I still found his preening boastful tone annoying. At one point he throws in a sentence about masturbating the wife of a friend in a car while his wife is sitting in the front seat. It had no context. Just came across as a schoolboy boast.
Later we discover he was opposed to the peace movement in the 1960s. He spends forty pages telling us why. His arguments make you think he would have made a nicely subservient subject under Nazi rule in Germany. He then admits he doesn't care a jot about the future of the planet. Surprise surprise! You might say he was ahead of his time as he comes across like one of these new Republicans who refer to all liberals as snowflakes.
It also becomes clear that the obnoxious serial adulterer and dutiful Christian in his novel Couples was a self-portrait. He's Mr Bad Boy of domestic arrangements always insisting on the primacy of his own appetites.
Towards the end there's a letter to his grandchildren which I found unreadable in its endless unrolling of localised detail.
One assumes in a memoir the author is telling the truth. Trouble with Updike with his preening pantomime villain act is you wonder if he knows what the truth is. At one point he informs us that he derives little nourishment from writing. Later he refers to himself as the whip holder in all his relationships. His second wife, in an interview, described him as the best tempered person she had ever known. That might also indicate he didn't care very deeply about anything, which, his childhood aside, is how he comes across.
My prediction is his reputation will wane with time. Now I'm looking forward to reading something a lot less self-consciously literary!
February 25, 2018
3.5 stars. There are six essays that provide some interesting comments on who John Updike is. I particularly liked that essay on psoriasis, where he discusses the affect the condition had on his life choices. His statements about his life in the 1960s are interesting in providing his political views at the time and their basis. The 'Updike' family history was a little too detailed for me though I can understand other readers finding it interesting how unique the name is in the USA. There is little discussion of his novels. For people interested in John Updike, this well written memoir is a worthwhile read.
October 6, 2021
While dwelling on several of his self-preoccupations, such as psoriasis, Updike tells much of the story of his life. He seems very self-revealing, but doesn't go into his womanizing and infidelity much--it plays a much bigger role in his novels. He does admit to it, but analyzes it less than other aspects of his life.
He's such a good writer, it's all quite interesting!
He's such a good writer, it's all quite interesting!
July 25, 2018
You can do better, John. So he had a skin disease and he stuttered (or stammered?). A lot of genealogy. Nice name, yes. He knows what consciousness is. But unfortunately, he fails to mention Julian Jaynes. A pity. Since he had written about him. 7/10
November 26, 2018
A self indulgent, but well written as ever Updike, working his way through his life with a long review of why he did not come out against the Vietnam War. You gotta be an Updikean to stick with it or love his sentences at the least.
September 30, 2022
The chapter on the American war in Vietnam is one of the most obtuse and deeply silly things I’ve ever read. The musings on religion are an embarrassment to human intelligence. Updike was a hugely intelligent man; I don’t really understand why this book is so laughably bad.
October 21, 2022
A bit too erudite,
It's tiring as a memoir.
It's tiring as a memoir.
February 23, 2024
An Updike memoir. Masterfully written stories of one man's life. Lots of good Berks County references throughout. Updike just may be the best sentence builder ever.
November 23, 2020
A middle-aged man elucidates a few key details from his life to illustrate the wider arc. He used many gorgeous sentences to do so.
May 14, 2013
Magical Memoir
It is fashionable among some intellectuals and critics to deride dead white authors, but reading John Updike's unusual and revealing memoirs remind me of his now past greatness. As an avid reader, Updike is one of the great stylists I have read, a chronicaler of ordinary lives and times, a man who sees through the detail of everything he confronts with a clarity that defies comparison. He was great, and this memoir, strange as it is, is great.
Updike chooses to tell fragments of his life story in six highly unusual chapters. The first is all about his upbringing in Shillington PA. It is told through an anecdote about waiting for lost luggage in his birth town much later in life, while his spouse and daughter watch a film he has alredy seen. The second is all about his psoriasis - the bane of his life. All his life, he was uncomfortable in his own skin, and this chapter explains, in part, his awkward and detailed observational style. The third chapter is about his stutter and asthma - it too displays the humility and wisdom of the author. The idea of an autobiography driven by ones own faults cuts the egotism - or magnifies it. Who cares about these odd faults? But that is his magic.
Chapter four is odd too- his relative support to the American war in Vietnam made Updike stand out in the 1960's and caused great bitterness in his personal and professional life. His defense is stunning - he is a moderate, loyal man, brought up to vote and believe in morals - and he found his world gone mad. In this, he is like the great Saul Bellow, who also embraced the classics and other vestiges of old,white civilisation. Chapter five is a long letter to his racially mixed grandsons, an amazing and quite detailed sketch of the white Updike clan, who had been in America since the early 17th Century. I found it fascinating but not as much as the other chapters. He betrays his liberal feelings - he was an early supporter of civil rights, and he has nothing but love for the boys.
The last chapter, is, of course, the best - all about death. Updike is a religious man - and I am not. That said, he puts his faith driven worldview out in front of the reader, and it is beautiful. This chapter is worth the cover price alone.
So no more output from Updike, but that means, read all that is published. He writes so well, about nothing but life itself. The critics who accuse him of having nothing to say about big issues miss his talent. He was great at detailing real life, one of the best writers in English to ever grace a blank page.
Stunning and memorable, quirky and revealing
It is fashionable among some intellectuals and critics to deride dead white authors, but reading John Updike's unusual and revealing memoirs remind me of his now past greatness. As an avid reader, Updike is one of the great stylists I have read, a chronicaler of ordinary lives and times, a man who sees through the detail of everything he confronts with a clarity that defies comparison. He was great, and this memoir, strange as it is, is great.
Updike chooses to tell fragments of his life story in six highly unusual chapters. The first is all about his upbringing in Shillington PA. It is told through an anecdote about waiting for lost luggage in his birth town much later in life, while his spouse and daughter watch a film he has alredy seen. The second is all about his psoriasis - the bane of his life. All his life, he was uncomfortable in his own skin, and this chapter explains, in part, his awkward and detailed observational style. The third chapter is about his stutter and asthma - it too displays the humility and wisdom of the author. The idea of an autobiography driven by ones own faults cuts the egotism - or magnifies it. Who cares about these odd faults? But that is his magic.
Chapter four is odd too- his relative support to the American war in Vietnam made Updike stand out in the 1960's and caused great bitterness in his personal and professional life. His defense is stunning - he is a moderate, loyal man, brought up to vote and believe in morals - and he found his world gone mad. In this, he is like the great Saul Bellow, who also embraced the classics and other vestiges of old,white civilisation. Chapter five is a long letter to his racially mixed grandsons, an amazing and quite detailed sketch of the white Updike clan, who had been in America since the early 17th Century. I found it fascinating but not as much as the other chapters. He betrays his liberal feelings - he was an early supporter of civil rights, and he has nothing but love for the boys.
The last chapter, is, of course, the best - all about death. Updike is a religious man - and I am not. That said, he puts his faith driven worldview out in front of the reader, and it is beautiful. This chapter is worth the cover price alone.
So no more output from Updike, but that means, read all that is published. He writes so well, about nothing but life itself. The critics who accuse him of having nothing to say about big issues miss his talent. He was great at detailing real life, one of the best writers in English to ever grace a blank page.
Stunning and memorable, quirky and revealing
July 22, 2016
«Lo más profundo que hay en el hombre es la piel.»
En el segundo capítulo de su autobiografía, Updike habla de su psoriasis, enfermedad que le sobrevino con seis años y fue arrastrando durante toda su vida. Esta afección de la piel fue uno de los motivos por los que terminó siendo escritor. Desde la perspectiva de la piel, Updike se explica la mitad de su vida. Su temprano matrimonio, su huída de Nueva York y de sus sombras urbanas, los constantes y fugaces vuelos al sur en los meses de invierno, cuando su piel se rebelaba y solo el sol podía castigarla...
En el tercer capítulo, Updike habla de su tartamudez y explora posibles causas. La voz de Updike se atragantaba cuando tenía que explicarse en voz alta a sí mismo: no tenía problemas ante un gran auditorio que se hubiera congregado para escuchar lo que tuviera que decir, pero sí los tenía ante un policía de tráfico que requiriera su documentación.
Estos capítulos son los más interesantes de su autobiografía. Partiendo de dos afecciones menores, dos trivialidades, Updike explora su propia identidad y medita sobre cómo estas aparentes insignificancias han modulado la persona que ha terminado siendo.
También es interesante el capítulo sobre Vietnam, en el que trata de explicar su controvertida posición respecto a la guerra. Era una posición controvertida porque se alejaba de la negativa palmaria de la gran mayoría de sus contemporáneos liberales. Y si el capítulo es interesante, es porque ni siquiera años después Updike termina de explicarse su posición y -sobre todo- la intensidad con la que la sentía; de modo que más que un texto tipo yo-llevaba-la-razón, este capítulo da mucho contexto histórico, señala bajezas propias y ajenas y explora sus motivos como exploraría los de un personaje ficticio ajeno a él mismo.
La autobiografía termina con un capítulo de tono crepuscular en el que JU se asoma a las puertas de la muerte desde la perspectiva de su vejez y de la de su madre. Está muy bien porque resuena con la sinceridad de alguien que busca recibir y dar consuelo con la escritura. Antes de llegar a esta sección final hay que superar un capítulo titulado "Una carta a mis nietos" en el que se dedica a explorar el árbol genealógico de la familia Updike. El capítulo podría haber quedado, efectivamente, como una carta a sus nietos, porque a nadie que no comparta su sangre puede interesarle ese listado de datos, fechas, tíos y abuelas condenado a la lectura en diagonal. En cualquier caso, debemos ser justos, que lo más autoindulgente de la autobiografía de un autor catalogado muchas veces de egocéntrico sea la genealogía de su familia resulta tolerable y hasta simpático.
En el segundo capítulo de su autobiografía, Updike habla de su psoriasis, enfermedad que le sobrevino con seis años y fue arrastrando durante toda su vida. Esta afección de la piel fue uno de los motivos por los que terminó siendo escritor. Desde la perspectiva de la piel, Updike se explica la mitad de su vida. Su temprano matrimonio, su huída de Nueva York y de sus sombras urbanas, los constantes y fugaces vuelos al sur en los meses de invierno, cuando su piel se rebelaba y solo el sol podía castigarla...
En el tercer capítulo, Updike habla de su tartamudez y explora posibles causas. La voz de Updike se atragantaba cuando tenía que explicarse en voz alta a sí mismo: no tenía problemas ante un gran auditorio que se hubiera congregado para escuchar lo que tuviera que decir, pero sí los tenía ante un policía de tráfico que requiriera su documentación.
Estos capítulos son los más interesantes de su autobiografía. Partiendo de dos afecciones menores, dos trivialidades, Updike explora su propia identidad y medita sobre cómo estas aparentes insignificancias han modulado la persona que ha terminado siendo.
También es interesante el capítulo sobre Vietnam, en el que trata de explicar su controvertida posición respecto a la guerra. Era una posición controvertida porque se alejaba de la negativa palmaria de la gran mayoría de sus contemporáneos liberales. Y si el capítulo es interesante, es porque ni siquiera años después Updike termina de explicarse su posición y -sobre todo- la intensidad con la que la sentía; de modo que más que un texto tipo yo-llevaba-la-razón, este capítulo da mucho contexto histórico, señala bajezas propias y ajenas y explora sus motivos como exploraría los de un personaje ficticio ajeno a él mismo.
La autobiografía termina con un capítulo de tono crepuscular en el que JU se asoma a las puertas de la muerte desde la perspectiva de su vejez y de la de su madre. Está muy bien porque resuena con la sinceridad de alguien que busca recibir y dar consuelo con la escritura. Antes de llegar a esta sección final hay que superar un capítulo titulado "Una carta a mis nietos" en el que se dedica a explorar el árbol genealógico de la familia Updike. El capítulo podría haber quedado, efectivamente, como una carta a sus nietos, porque a nadie que no comparta su sangre puede interesarle ese listado de datos, fechas, tíos y abuelas condenado a la lectura en diagonal. En cualquier caso, debemos ser justos, que lo más autoindulgente de la autobiografía de un autor catalogado muchas veces de egocéntrico sea la genealogía de su familia resulta tolerable y hasta simpático.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews