John Updike: a eulogy and correction

I have been shocked and stunned to receive the reviews of John Updike's final and posthumous work My Father's Tears and Other Stories. It is utterly debilitating to read 'reviews' from writers once in thrall to a totally respectful awe of America's greatest living logodaedalus who now choose to trample on his grave now that he is departed. These malicious and vile excreta should and must face rebuttal.

The overall thrust of these hideous critiques is that, in his later years, Updike no longer turned the sharpest of phrase or constructed the finely-honed sentences of yore. This crypto-ageist whinge hinges on the pitiful view that his final piece lacked sound redaction and proof-reading. The vultures pounce upon various examples of unfortunate terminology and crow their triumphant and frightful battle cries of ridicule. Where once they abased themselves in Updike's titanic shadow, they now pick over his bones with withering scorn and ghastly glee.

The most appalling Judas is without a doubt Martin Amis. Writing in the UK Guardian, he invites the reader to swoon at his (Amis') own intelligence in spotting and excoriating perceived miswritings in the original text. Indeed, the writer who once praised Updike to the hilt, now uses his crass 'review' as a vehicle to puff his own vainglorious claims to greatness, if not inherit the mantle of the Great Man himself. But we are not duped by the dripping poison of this duplicitous lackey of the quill, this withered scion of a far greater forebear.

Consider, if you can bear the pain, this excruciating extract. "The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing - one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear." After crudely patronising the reader he proceeds to move his case. The two factors he describes are firstly the proximity of 'prior' and 'prime' in the text "as etymological half-siblings (that) should never be left alone together without intercessionary chaperones." (my brackets) And the major howler? Two consecutive sentences ending with the words "his land". What miniscule point is this?

Having patronised the reader he then moves on to patronise Updike himself, ridiculing a "blizzard of false quantities - by which I mean rhymes and chimes and inadvertant repetitions, those toe-stubs, those excrescences and asperities that all writers hope to expunge from their work..." This is not pedantry per se. A true pedant would acknowledge this final work in the living continuum of Updike's grand oeuvre. In doing so it would be clear enough that these pastiches and apparent malapercus are intentionally deliberate and proud. Indeed Updike ("perhaps the greatest viruoso stylist since Nabokov" sneers an ungrateful Amis) is intentionally playing with his minions and provoking them from beyond the grave. And lo, the fools take the bait.

In more courteous times it was held to be self-axiomatic that "De mortuis, nil nisi bonum" (For those tragic unfortunates without the benefits of a classical education I translate: Say nothing but good things about the Dead). Yet these myopic pygmies dash to defile the tombstone of a giant of Ozymandian proportions. It may be controversial to say so, but it is my firm-held belief that these malignant ingrates were to some measure aware of the waning might of the septuagenarian Updike, but remained locked in their grossly sycophantic embrace of his work until his death. Amis, indeed, was Updike's most enthusiastic acolyte. Then, post-mortem, like rancid ghouls they emerge from their dark damp holes to gloat, only now finding the 'courage' to snipe and ridicule. It is only possible to hold such feeble actions in the deepest contempt, and pillory these miscreants pitilessly and ceaselessly.