Excusing John Updike’s Serial Cheating Because He’s a ‘Great Man’
A reviewer of John Updike’s letters finds his serial cheating droll. Women pick me dancing for a Great Literary Icon is just how the story is supposed to go.
***
A common side effect of chumpdom is media-induced infidelity intolerance. After you’ve had your world upended by a fuckwit, you often fail to appreciate sexy affair storylines or find cheaters to be sympathetic characters. But this antipathy is a matter of degree. I can still enjoy Willie Nelson’s music even though I know that his former wife once sewed him into a sleeping bag and bludgeoned him for his philandering. Yet, I completely reject the dreck of Bridges of Madison County.
The problem is, I just can’t enjoy cheater romance because my mind always wanders back to the unknowing chump.
It doesn’t matter that person is portrayed as a frigid harridan or hapless milquetoast, it makes me queasy to see people conspired against. I question the storyteller’s motives.
Which brings me to John Updike. If you’ve never heard of him — good. He deserves obscurity.
That’s very cancel culture of you, Tracy.
I have loathed John Updike since I was 18 years old and read “Rabbit, Run” as a college freshman in an American Literature class. “Misogyny” wasn’t a word on small Midwestern campuses in 1984, but John Updike was my first literary introduction to it. I was sickened by the way he described women, but then I felt foolish and ashamed for feeling that way because John Updike was part of the literary canon. His Rabbit series won TWO Pulitzer prizes! What the hell did I know?
Rabbit, Run is a story about a middle-class schlub (“Rabbit”) from a small town in Pennsylvania, who’d been a star athlete, but is bitterly disappointed by adulting. In particular, his spousal appliance Janice frustrates him, how she fucks, how she fails to serve him properly. So, he abandons her while she’s pregnant and shacks up with his mistress. Hey, he is TORTURED BY MIDDLE-CLASS CONVENTION. Rabbit sexually assaults the mistress, denies her contraception, and she becomes pregnant too. But ultimately our hero returns to Janice just as she’s about to give birth. Pick me dance won!
We’re supposed to identify with Rabbit.
Hey, it’s post-modernism. All I remember from reading this book as a teenager is the bathtub scene. He’s describing his pregnant wife, how repellent she is, yet how he desires her. The ape-like hair on her arms. Her mottled skin, her distended belly.
I thought then: “OMG. He hates her.” But then my young self wondered: Is that how men really look at women?
As I was putting together this column, I was flailing about to find anyone as disturbed by Rabbit as I was. Instead, I found this in the Guardian by Julian Barnes in 2009.
Yet familiarity renders him likeable – for his humour, his doggedness, his candour, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgments – for example, preferring Perry Como to Frank Sinatra.
But not for cheating on his pregnant wife and raping his mistress (in fiction). Okay. Let’s go with Perry Como.
Rabbit is a fictional character, of course. But then Dwight Garner wrote about John Updike’s collected letters in yesterday’s New York Times (gift link).
You’ll be shocked, just shocked to learn that John Updike was a prolific and enthusiastic serial cheater.
Not that Dwight Garner is the least bit bothered by this. No, it’s just a bit of droll commentary on a beloved literary titan. Hey, this was midcentury misogyny. It’s not like men’s sexual entitlement is something we have to worry about today!
Come for the love letters, dedicated to wives (Updike married twice) and to lovers he freely took, especially near the end of his first marriage. These are wonderfully filthy. “Will I ever be able to suck hard enough to please you?” is a rare line that can be printed here. Sexual dysfunction is recounted. He wrote to one lover that he planned to buy “Superballs” for a son’s birthday present, then joked about how his own were not so super during a recent encounter.
Yeah, children’s birthday parties always make me think fondly of my fuckbuddies.
Mr. CL would like to interrupt today’s column to state that absolutely no one cares about literary criticism and John Updike. “THAT WORLD IS DEAD!”, says the man who has a useless masters degree in comparative literature from Columbia University.
“But excusing John Updike’s serial cheating IS NOT!” I replied. Why do we keep normalizing this shit? Why doesn’t anyone care about the women The Great Literary Man used and abused?
Show me their Pulitzer prizes, Tracy.
Sigh.
Updike was ‘upfront about his affairs.’
He was usually up front about these affairs. Shortly before their marriage in 1977, he confessed to Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he would spend the rest of his life, about having an apparent threesome in Australia. In another sort of accounting, he tells her that she is the 13th woman he slept with. The divorce letters to his first wife, Mary Pennington, are a painful reckoning. Mary once knocked Martha to the floor at a neighbor’s house.
What you’re excusing as unvarnished frankness, Dwight Garner, is deliberate mindfuckery. John Updike writing about all the other people he enjoys having sex with to his current sexual partner is the pick me dance. He’s saying: Don’t you want to compete for the Great One’s favor and beat out the competition?
Come to hate-read, if you suspect Updike’s letters will be an electric subset of what might best be termed dead white mail. You will mostly be disappointed, though Updike was a man of an earlier era, and a colonoscopy of such creatures generally turns up polyps. Witness his comment about Edna O’Brien’s novel “Night,” which he admired: “It seemed to me a beautiful brilliant book, although a bit like being inside a cow’s vagina during a warm May rain. Awfully liquid, somehow, her vision. Miss O’Brien’s.”
If this is admiration, what’s disdain?
Updike famously trashed Toni Morrison for essentially being a bummer. On her book Mercy: “A betranced pessimism saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to human adventures.”
Toni, you should smile more. But hey, he got to say “betranced” so there’s that.
B*tch Be Crazy
Or this one, to Mary during their estrangement before their divorce: “I am left with the sad possibility that women who suit me sexually are necessarily crazy.” He was an imperfect father and grandfather. There are more arrows in Updike than St. Sebastian, and this book will help add a few more.
The women put up with Updike’s degradations, and he respects them less for it. Wow, what a charmer.
Look, all three people out there who care about John Updike and literary criticism, STOP PERSECUTING JOHN UPDIKE. St. Sebastian was a Christian martyr famously tied to a tree and shot to death with arrows. (In other tellings, he’s clubbed to death, which is a more Willie Nelson sort of exit.) But the point is, you all just want to take pot shots at a GREAT MAN and use his own words against him in your vile judgements.
I leave you with these words by Saint Sebastian Updike.
“Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You’re a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don’t.”
John Updike
Absolutely dreadful. The Rabbit poem (read the Wiki summary just now) reminds me of what I endured in my marriage. The similar details are disturbing.
When I was young and yes, even for most of my adult life, I did not know and/ or really understand that some / many men literally do have such contempt, hate and disregard for women as their fellow Human beings. Well I’m the wiser now. Finally.
Thank you, CL. I read Updike’s Rabbit books during my formative years and was horrified also. I still remember one passage where Rabbit’s wife asks him after they met an attractive woman, how badly he wanted to f— her? And Rabbit replies “hardly at all” and tells his wife he is disturbed by that. This conversation apparently sophisticated marital dialogue. But real women do not speak like this, and the snaphot look at the mind of a misogynist is still with me all these years later. Yes, you can feel his hatred and disgust for women. That Updike abused the women in his own life is no surprise.
I so dislike the convention that saying crude things is sophisticated and a necessary part of literary brilliance. It is not, and it doesn’t age well. At the end of the day, it is no different than the drunk partygoer who announces in a loud voice that he has to take a shit and asks where the bathroom is.
RIP Updike. I’m not sure if Updike is still alive, but same sentiment if he is.
He died years ago, but his fanbase lives on.
Never read him, never will. I do remember reading some acclaimed works as a young woman and thinking that if the thoughts and behaviors written about were an acceptable part of adult life I was in for a rough ride. And I was correct. I now know that if Cheaty McLiarface’s thoughts had been written on paper I would have never given him the opportunity to speak to me. He knew his thoughts were unacceptable and so began a decades long manipulationship based on misleading and misdirecting. What a waste for all parties involved.
Brilliant! “Manipulationship” I want to borrow that term. Describes my marriage to a T.
When I read it, I remember thinking that there is no way someone can create a protagonist as vile and entitled as Rabbit and it not be somewhat autobiographical. It made me feel icky to read it.
Updike, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Camus … There is a rather lengthy list of literary icons who have been elevated to god-like status who were pretty rotten cheating bastards at their core. It seems society has a rough time distinguishing between glorifying the works instead of the crappy guy or gal who created them. (Am I the only one who cringes at life advice memes that quote a despicable person like child rapist Oscar Wilde??)
I thought you were maligning Oscar Wilde, whom I’ve always loved. But then I found this article by Carolyn Gage, a playwright (who is lesbian, so it’s not LBGTQ bashing.) The father was a monster. And the rent boy habit puts the emphasis on “boy.” Wow. https://carolyngage.weebly.com/blog/oscar-wilde-his-fathers-son
Oscar Wilde is another one. Yes as a lesbian I appreciate his activism but not his pedophilia.
In Fun Home Alison Bechdel writes about her coming to terms with her father’s predatory behavior with teenage boys and the need to keep that in mind along with her sympathy for his closeted life. Just because he was a gay man with all the discrimination of the 1970s didn’t make his behavior toward these boys ok (and his cheating and bringing home STIs to his wife).
Yes, I wrote a long-form nonfiction narrative last year about the abuse of chloroform in sexual assault (and one murder) cases during the Gilded Age and came across the case against Wilde’s father during my research. I already knew about Wilde’s crimes against young boys, but discovering his father’s grotesque ness was eye-opening.
My daughter’s college class read “Lolita” in 2023 and then the class of young men and women discussed its merits with the male professor.
Tell me the name of a male “literary great” who didn’t discard or physically or emotionally brutalize women and/or children in their real lives. I’ll wait.
William Blake??
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mark Twain.
Or are you talking about 20th century only?
Yes! Mark Twain, I think that’s true. And I love him. And Hawthorne… ok! Thank you!
I gave our first born son the middle name of Clemens.
Mark Twain was scathing about Jane Austen. I can’t see him as an ally, and I’ve managed to dodge his books all my life (faked my way through it for freshman English in high school).
Well, that doesn’t mean he hated all women, does it? I think he just didn’t like her writing style. He was devoted to his family.
Kipling is another. And Tolkien. Good people are out there.
They have to be “great” right? Not just enjoyable or clever? But exalted? I’m coming up blank too.
Charles Dickens is failing the test. Class, anyone? Anyone?
Gah. I wish I could un-read that book.
riiiight? What the hell are we doing, assigning it to 21-year-old girls as part of college curriculums? Like, assign another Nabokov book, if you love his writing that much.
I’m legit trying to think of one: Rohinton Mistry, perhaps? Shakespeare?
Also, why does Willie get a pass? The soulful/funny/stoner/counterculture ones get away with the worst stuff with their little acts!
I’ve never read John Updike, but I remember the disappointment I felt as a young adult when I realized how many of the “great,” “classic” authors I loved and admired absolutely detested women. It felt like such a betrayal.
Yes, it was pretty much the culture of the day. People like to rail about how universities have rejected the classics. Well, if that’s all you read, you’re lacking the diversity and nuance that make modern life better in some ways.
I immediately looked up Barnes, wondering if he had a backstory to explain why he was a cheater apologist. There was. He, too, was a celebrated and successful author. As a teen, began an intense, multi-year relationship (at the very least an emotional affair) with a married woman in her 50s. Later, his own wife, who was also his agent, chumped Barnes. They reconciled and remained married until her death. Much of his fiction deals with infidelity. It’s detailed in an article, “A Very Grownup Affair” that ran in The Times in 2018.
I’ve started to wonder if cheater apologists are cheaters, and how many are chumps who remain with their cheaters and are desperate to justify their decision.
Updike was never more than a third-rate hack, the Dan Brown of mid-century Angsty Bad Boy Lit. Happily, no one today under the age of 50 has heard of him, and he’s as irrelevant as NYT click-bait “feature” articles. #RabbitDone
He is consigned to the WASP museum of mid-century FWs.
Reminds me of trying to read On the Road by Kerouac at 17. Women were only valuable if they served his sexual desires. I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time to articulate what was just a very uncomfortable feeling that seemed to be everywhere in the world.
I often feel lucky to be a lesbian even though I’ve seen some shitty lesbians.
Yes! I too have LOATHED Updike since I first read him at 17. Misogynistic FWit!
In “A Round-heeled Woman,” the late Jane Juska mentions a very famous writer who replied to her personal ad and enclosed a full-frontal nude pic. Juska did not reply, and as far as I know, she never named him. My money has always been on Updike.
More recently, the brilliant Patricia Lockwood wrote about him. She compared him to “a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.”
I love Patricia Lockwood and never ever could read Updike- he sucks on many levels. Terrible writer, person, gross! Will google her take on him now. It is harder for me to with other horrible male writers.. but not him because he’s a bad writer as well as a bad man.I have problems when they are “good writers”..although recently have been able to let go of Nabokov..but not Hemingway.. anyway. F Updike. On many levels. He hated women and he was proud of that. Sadism. We have fancy things like OCPD, or even “sociopath” but nothing wrong with an old fashioned Sadist as a term. I’m leaning into it as I encounter so many people whose main pleasure is causing suffering.
Reading this made think of a number of things that are all somewhat interconnected.
Firstly, that the” traditional values” of the 40, 50s and 60s that many might advocate a return to do not bear anything like close scrutiny; a lot of the sh*t that “flew” then (or was at least successfully swept under the rug) would rightly not be tolerated now. Secondly, that separating the art from the artist is problematic; I personally think that the two are inseparable, but that’s just me.
And lastly, John Updike was clearly something of a d*ck.
LFTT
I remember all of the accolades about Updike. My mother was a librarian at the time, and she checked out one of his books for me. I didn’t finish it.
There are others who were horrid people behind the scenes who nonetheless came up with solid work. Einstein and Rembrandt come to mind. Oh, well.
But no Updike here. Just ick through-and-through.
I somehow never read Updike, but Vonnegut was essential. Read him in high school as a science fiction writer, but came to realize how he represented the consecutive traumas of the Great Depression and WWII. Post DD and divorce I read his biography and was so put off by his adulterous abuse of his long suffering wife. He surely suffered with undiagnosed PTSD from WWII and family trauma growing up. This was the germ of his brilliance in literature, but I cannot use it to excuse his serial cheating on his devoted wife.
His son Mark Vonnegut wrote 2 very good non-fiction books, one that details his father’s shittiness a bit, but also explores substance abuse and mental illness in a way that isn’t backward and shaming. He I like more than his father.