Portrayals of Music Lovers

[Herman]

I've been reading John Updike since he died, and I notice that for such an inteectual polymath, he doesn't write  about music much. The visual arts figure much more prominently in his work. (He did publish art criticism.) For updike, it seemed, music wasn't so much an art practiced by grat masters as it was a kind of memory-trigger. When he he mentioned music at all, he tends to stick to the hits of his youth, stuff that can launch a meditation on the past and lost time. While he will say, for example, that some sight resembles a Goya or a Francis Bacon painting, he will never say that some sound is reminiscent of a Beethoven Symphony.

I'm reading his last book of short stories, "My Father's Tears," right now. It's excellent. The stories tend to cover the same ground over and over, but then that's true of Jane Austen's novels, too.

This is true. We'll never be able to ask him why he avoided music, and did write a whole novel around computer programming. There are plenty references to forties popular music in his work (including a poem in Endpoint), and I suspect he didn't want to alienate readers. Also, popular music is more particular as a mood trigger. Updike's first wife was into early music, and U. did go to the Boston Symphony concerts, including one time with John Cheever, when both writers had been kicked out by their wives. As Updike came to pick up Cheever it turned out Cheeever was so drunk he'd forgotten to put on any clothes.

My Father's Tears is an excellent collection, isn't it?

[Joe Barron]

My Father's Tears is an excellent collection, isn't it?

Yes, so far.

Thanks for the gossip. I remember many years ago --- I'd say back in the late eighties --- Updike wrote a story about a couple that joins an informal group of recorder players, and by the end, of course, everyone has left his or her spouse to live with one of the other members. It might have been inspired by his first wife's interests, though it was written long after his second marriage. It's probably in one of the later collections. I just don't know which one.

Your post confirms what I have always suspected: that Updike was indeed musically aware, but it seems that music as an art form, as something that composers put their minds to, did not interest him as much as the visual arts. Indeed, it didn't seem to interest him much at all.

[Joe Barron]

P.S. The story is "The Man Who Became a Soprano" and apepars in "The Afterlife." Strange, apparently Updike could play the recorder, and yet got only one story out of it. In one instance, he seems to know much more than he was telling.

[Herman]

P.S. The story is "The Man Who Became a Soprano" and apepars in "The Afterlife." Strange, apparently Updike could play the recorder, and yet got only one story out of it. In one instance, he seems to know much more than he was telling.

Here's a picture of Updike and wife nr 1



Obviously Updike got a kick out of putting himself in less-cultured shoes, a car dealer, or, in the very last story he wrote, a life insurance salesman, turned floor polisher. This act of the imagination was an essential part of writing for JU.