Authors: View from the Catacombs

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death—and I don't know what it all means. I spent a lot of time in high school throwing myself over stair railings."

Imitations & Echoes. The technique worked so well that he was elected class president and editor of the school paper, the Chatterbox, to which he contributed countless drawings and a flood of articles and light verse, not the least of which was a poem called "Child's Question": "O, is it true/ A word with Q/ The usual U/ Does lack?/ I grunt and strain, /But, no, in vain, /My weary brain/ Iraq." He also earned straight A's. His mother, leafing through an anthology of prizewinning short stories calculated that more prizewinning authors had gone to Harvard than any where else, and thereupon dispatched John to Cambridge, where he was given a full scholarship.

He arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1950, scrawny, big-nosed, friendless cabbage green, and lugging three scrapbooks of poems with their rejection slips from The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. His four years in Cambridge were marked by a series of triumphs, marred only by his failure three times running to get accepted into Poet Archibald MacLeish's creative-writing seminar. He poured his energies into the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine. At the end of his sophomore year, he met a fine-arts major at Radcliffe named Mary Pennington, two years his senior and the daughter of a Unitarian minister in Chicago. "I courted her essentially by falling down the stairs of the Fogg Museum several times," Updike recalls.

They were married after his junior year. He graduated summa cum laude in English, after turning in a thesis titled "Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick's Imitations and Echoes of Horace." It was a splendid college career, but in retrospect, Updike feels that Harvard somehow sapped him of some vague, irreplaceable vitality. "I feel in some obscure way ashamed of the Harvard years. They were a betrayal of my high school years, really. Harvard, in exchange for a great deal of work, made me a civilized man. It's somehow painful."

Optic Nerve. After his graduation, the Updikes took a year just for fun at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, and in time he landed a staff job on The New Yorker. "He thought he'd be only a humorist," Mary remembers. "He didn't think of himself as a serious writer." Yet he spent words profligately in an attempt to translate his painter's eye into language, to catch and fix the thing seen and bring all the colors and shapes and textures of the visible world to bear on his narrative. Novelist John Earth calls Updike the "Andrew Wyeth of literature," adding: "I think one has the same mixture of admiration and reservation for the work of both."

The sum of Updike's work is astonishing for a young man: to date, in addition to the novels, he has written more than 23 articles, 24 reviews, 185 short stories and 23 poems, most of them appearing in The New Yorker. The poems are wry, tightly turned and "light"—meaning that they make their point comically rather than gravely, even when, as in three little quatrains called "Bestiary," he comments on something as complex as natural man's unnatural rationality. The critical and reportorial essays,