U and I

(The title of this post is borrowed from the title of Nicholson Baker's deliciously quirky book on his literary obsession with John Updike.)

John Updike died last week.

He was one of the most skillful craftsmen (or is it craftspersons in these politically correct times?) of the English Language. One of my personal favourites certainly, right up there with Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, and G. H. Hardy.

He was a remarkably versatile writer: fiction and non-fiction; prose and poetry; art criticism and literary criticism; short stories and novels; plays and plays-on-words; a humourist and a "serious" writer; journalist and essayist; children's books and adults' books; and on and on it goes. He even tried his hand at an African novel (The Coup, 1978) and, post-9/11, a terrorism novel (Terrorist, 2006). Oh, and he was a cartoonist too.

He was also a remarkably prolific writer: literally hundreds of pieces for The New Yorker alone; almost 30 novels; and much, much else besides.

One of the tests of great writing for me is simply this: Does it live on in the mind long after it's been read?

Does Updike's writing pass this simple test?

Let me answer obliquely by reference to a personal reading experience of mine of a few years ago. It was The Oxford Book of Short Stories (1981) edited by V. S. Pritchett, himself one of the finest exponents of the short story form. The book contains masterpieces by a veritable who's who of the greats of literature in English: Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, Conrad, Kipling, Maugham, Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pritchett (no false modesty here), Narayan, Welty, Lessing, and others. But for me, the story that really stood out then and still stands out now was the very last one in the anthology: Lifeguard by John Updike, which was first published in 1961 in The New Yorker. Out of all those outstanding stories, it is Updike's story, as short and plotless and apparently ephemeral as it is, that has left the deepest impression on my mind. If you're not a subscriber to The New Yorker, there's a bootleg version of Lifeguard here.

A word about the name Updike. It's an Americanised version of the Dutch name Op de Dijk.