Presentation of CCL Lifetime Achievement Award to John Updike

Abstract

Commending the work of John is a bit like praising democracy or defending the value of freedom. You don't know where start, and you feel embarrassed be stating the obvious. Yet it is always right and proper celebrate the highest standards of beauty and truth. Even so, Updike's productivity has been so constant for so many years that it is hard know by what standard his achievement should be measured. He has mastered so many literary forms--memoirs, poems, novels, short stories, and even a play!--that few scholars have the requisite breadth of learning assess his impact on the American imagination. Updike's accomplishment, as Nicholson Baker underscores in U and I (1991), leaves the best hyperboles ineffectual No wonder that Baker confesses in that book spending more time thinking about the of Updike than reading him. We know a writer this good exists, but in this day and age, how could that be possible? The wonder of his prose lies in not just the impression made by the accumulation of so many artful pieces but also the gracefulness by which individual sentences make a claim perfection. His sentences serpentine their way a delayed satisfaction, prolonging our desire for reality redeemed by description, yet they look relaxed and natural, stretched out on the page. For all of his inspired literary play, remains a respondent an order that humans have not created. For Updike, the miracle of the world resides in its God-given objectivity, not licentious human creativity, which is why his prose, even at its most bounteous, is never imprecise. Celebrating is, a great extent, celebrating America as well. Though known as a stylist, history is his metier. His stories, from autobiographical re-creations of rural Pennsylvania the epic Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, provide an exhaustive map of the transformations of American society after the Second World War. More than maps, these stories are the territory itself--the place where Americans visit in order discover who they are. Updike's imagination is almost capacious enough contain the idea of America, which has do, as he suggests in his poem Americana (2001), with a beauty that is left / make it on its own, with no directives / from kings or cultural commissars on high. Though no cultural commissar, is frequently called the last American man of letters for the care he gives the public discussion of literature and art in his many essays and reviews. His intention, as he explains in the foreword The Early Stories, 19531975, has always been to give the mundane its beautiful due. Submission of any form in America today is seen as an insult against individualism, just as the payment of a debt in the age of consumerism is an onerous duty. …