SK-B [ for the Irish, it’s always PERFIDIOUS ALBION! The phrase is indivisibule! [...] I quickly tired of Updike’s explicit sex; after 2 promising rabbits! Did VN’s admiration last longer than mine?[...] David Foster Wallace’s biting critique quoted in today’s Times: “No US novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than Updike"]

JM: Solipsists, unite? I always thought Updike was the perfect example of small communities' Biblical "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself". To recover VN's commentaries on Updike would take up some time and I cannot recollect any specific reference to "admiration" on his part. I didn't read the Rabbits (1-2-3-sorry Dad! -4-5-6) but I did enjoy "Bech at Bay" and the first chapters of "Marry Me".
// reluctant snip

Jansy: want you to know that I love the “sorry Dad” bunny tale! Perhaps we should add “Thou SHALT commit adultery,” as Exodus 20:14 appears in the infamously mis-printed “Sinner’s Bible” of 1631! The same Bible garbles the word “greatness” leading to the “great arse of God” (Deut. 5:24) Warning to printers and editors: the Sinner’s Bible crew, some claim, were hung, drawn and quartered. Updike’s “Couples” certainly ignored the commandment “Do not covet thy neighbour’s ASS.” But we digress!

VN’s “admiration” for Updike was expressed in an interview [exact ref.? — the DATE would be significant!] when Nabokov was asked one of those irritating questions: what he thought of contemporary American writers. VN usually fenced off such questions with generalities (oft negative), so I recall being surprised that VN favourably ventured a few real names, inc. Updike’s. I had just read Updike’s 98%-glowing post-word to the Penguin “Luzhin’s Defens[c]e.” That and other snippets indicated some measure of mutual Updike/VN respect. I was only marginally interested in such opinions. We must read and judge for ourselves.

Now here’s an interesting find, or rather NON-FIND: I’ve just read Updike’s long intro to the new Everyman Library composite edition of the Angstrom Quadrilogy. This intro appeared over 4-pages of small print, “Updike on Updike,” in the Times2, Jan 29, 2009, so I was spared the expense of buying all them Rabbits! JU mentions many influences and counter-influences: Dostoevsky, Joyce (esp. the female soliloquies!), Roth, Mailer, Miller, Caldwell, JM Cain, DH Lawrence, ... NO VN, not a murmur, but DRUM-ROLL ... Edmund Wilson (“one of my models in sexual relations,” referring specifically to Wilson’s 1946 prosecution over “Memoirs of Hecate County.” Updike writes of restoring cuts in “Rabbit, Run” as a result of the “censorship retreat” following the Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer trials. THERE IS STILL NO MENTION OF NABOKOV, where, in the context of famous literary censorships, one might surely have expected a ref to Lolita. And this silence, recall, from one whose prose-style is often said to show Nabokovian influences? Funny, as in Peculiar? Nil nisi Bonham Carter, as we say in Liverpool. (We have our own malapropisms called “malapudlianisms.”)

In the Feb 2, 2009 Sunday Times, we find a quote from Nicholson Baker’s memoir “U and I: A True Story.” (Granta). Baker imagines BEFORE THE EVENT the mourners gathered at Updike’s fun[f]eral (inspired by Henry James’s account of the “popular manifestation” at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s funeral):

“ ...  In grieving for Updike, the sombre, predominantly female citizens would be grieving for their own youthful sexual pasts, whose hardcore cavortings were now insulated by wools and goose downs of period charm, vague remorse, fuzzy remembrance, spousal forgiveness and an overall sense of imperfect attempts at cutting loose; they would be mourning the man who, by bringing a serious Prousto-Nabokovian, morally sensitive, National Book Award-winning prose style to bear on the micromechanics of physical lovemaking, first licensed their moans.”

Bravo! Baker himself is cunningly Prousto-Nabokovian, n’est-ce pas? A writer to watch out for.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

PS: I’ve worked on several text-search algorithms over the years (see e.g., my “Assembly Language Programming for the MC6800x,” SAMS/MacMillan — search “Kelly-Bootle” on amazon). One challenge is handling such Boolean search criteria as “Updike-but-NOT-Nabokov.”

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.