{"id":81486,"date":"2015-01-14T12:30:19","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T17:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81486"},"modified":"2015-01-14T13:57:14","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T18:57:14","slug":"updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/","title":{"rendered":"Updike: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Updike\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t remember the moment when I fell in love with cartoons, I was so young,\u201d John Updike once recalled in Hogan\u2019s Alley <\/em>magazine. \u201cI still have a Donald Duck <\/em>book, on oilclothy paper in big-print format, and remember a smaller, cardboard-covered book based on the animated cartoon Three Little Pigs<\/em>. It was the intense stylization of those images, with their finely brushed outlines and their rounded and buttony furniture and their faces so curiously amalgamated of human and animal elements, that drew me in, into a world where I, child though I was, loomed as a king, and where my parents and other grownups were strangers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is one of many passages where Updike talks about his childhood love of comics, a theme that recurs not just in essays but also in poems and short stories. What deserves attention in this passage is not only what Updike is saying but the textured and sensual language he\u2019s using when he recalls the \u201coilclothy paper\u201d and the \u201cbuttony furniture.\u201d His tingling prose, where every idea and emotion is rooted in sensory experience, owes much to such modern masters as Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov, but it was also sparked by the cartoon images he saw in childhood, which trained his eyes to see visual forms as aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, the comparison with Nabokov is instructive since the Russian-born author of Lolita<\/em> was also a cartoon fan. The critic Clarence Brown has coined the term bedesque<\/em> (roughly translated as \u201ccomic strip-influenced\u201d) to describe the cartoony quality of Nabokov\u2019s fiction, including its antic loopiness, its quicksilver movement from scene to scene, and its visual intensity. I think one reason Updike felt an affinity for Nabokov is because they both wrote bedesque prose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The origins of creativity is a riddle that can never be solved; yet if we love an artist, we want to find clues to the secret source of his or her gifts. Literary biography\u2014an enterprise Updike regarded with some skepticism\u2014is largely a hunt for such deeply buried evidence. As an aid to future biographers and anyone else interested in pursuing the mystery of Updike\u2019s prodigious talent, I\u2019d suggest paying attention to his lifelong love affair with cartooning, a passion that burned hottest when he was young but remained warm until his dying days, when he ceased to draw but still repeatedly referred to the comics he had loved in childhood.<\/p>\n

The outlines of the story are clear enough. Before he could read, Updike was enamored by the anthropomorphic kingdom of talking rodents and fowls presided over by Walt Disney, enjoying both the moving Mickey Mouse seen on the silver screen and the still Mickey found in Big Little Books and newspaper funnies. This passion for all things Disney fed early ambitions of being an animator. Updike\u2019s interest soon spread to all the other characters found in the newspaper funnies section, and he was regularly following strips like Barney Google<\/em>, Captain Easy<\/em>, Terry and the Pirates<\/em>, Alley Oop<\/em>, Little Orphan Annie<\/em>, Li\u2019l Abner<\/em>, and many others.<\/p>\n

Branching out from comic strips and animation, the young Updike also developed a taste for comic books, a new form of pop-culture ephemera that mushroomed in popularity in the 1930s and that initially reprinted old strips but soon offered vibrant four-color fantasies featuring masked vigilantes and superbeings like Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Updike\u2019s taste ran toward the more humorous of the superheroes rather than the more earnest examples of the genre: C.C. Beck\u2019s Captain Marvel, Jack Cole\u2019s impossibly stretchy Plastic Man, and Will Eisner\u2019s masked avenger the Spirit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the cusp of adolescence, Updike\u2019s cartooning fervor intensified when he discovered the single-panel gag cartoons found in\u00a0magazines like Collier\u2019s<\/em> and The Saturday Evening Post<\/em>. When he was twelve, his Aunt Mary bought his family a subscription to The New Yorker<\/em>, which quickly became the most important magazine for Updike, as he yearned to appear in its sophisticated pages. Although he would go on to become the preeminent New Yorker <\/em>writer, he was at first far more interested in the drawings by Thurber and Steinberg than in the magazine\u2019s acres of prose.<\/p>\n

The teenage Updike\u00a0mailed off a steady stream of cartoons in the hopes of breaking into the visual-humor market. He would continue cartooning as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he sprinkled the pages of the Lampoon<\/em> with his drawings, but Updike\u2019s undergraduate years also marked the end of his cartooning career and his transformation into a writer. He felt that the other artists at the Lampoon<\/em> were simply much more talented than he was, and he\u2019d also discovered his facility for light verse and narrative prose. It could be that Updike was too harsh on his early cartoons. The samples reprinted in his collection More Matter <\/em>(1999) display a memorably jagged bluntness that calls to mind the work of Virgil Partch, who was on the cutting edge of the stylistic revolution of the forties and fifties that opened up cartooning to energetically angular, poking shapes. In any case, Updike\u2019s past as wannabe cartoonist has left many residual traces on his work, like little flecks of ink that get caught in an illustrator\u2019s fingernail. \u201cOne can continue to cartoon, in a way, with words,\u201d he noted. \u201cFor whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manqu\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

The connection between Updike\u2019s drawing and writing is evidenced, too, by the letters he sent off to newspapers and cartoonists. When he was nine or ten, the local newspaper stopped carrying the Mickey Mouse<\/em> comic strip, provoking the future novelist to write an indignant protest letter. That missive was the first in a long string of comics-inspired correspondence that included his beseeching inquiries to cartoonists asking for original art. \u201cOur acquaintance was slight but long,\u201d Updike recalled of his affection for Steinberg:<\/p>\n

\n

In 1945 I wrote him from my small town in Pennsylvania asking that he send me, for no reason except that I wanted it, the original of a drawing I had seen in The New Yorker<\/em>, of one man tipping his hat and another tipping back his hat with his head still in it. At this time I was an avariciously hopeful would-be cartoonist of 12 or 13 and Steinberg a 31-year-old Romanian Jew whose long American sojourn had begun but four years before. Perhaps he thought that his new citizenship entailed responding to the importunities from unknown American adolescents. He sent me not the original but a duplicate he had considerately made, with his unhesitant pen, and inscribed it, in impeccable New World Fashion, \u201cTo John Updike with best wishes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As with Nabokov, Updike found in Steinberg an unexpected kindred spirit, someone who taught the American-born writer to see his native land with foreign eyes. Steinberg, when Updike wrote to him, was in the midst of instigating a stylistic revolution at The New Yorker<\/em>. While artists such as Otto Soglow and James Thurber had already expanded the stylistic range of magazine cartooning by bringing in starkly simple and expressive drawings, Steinberg took this newfound liberty a step further by doing cartoons that avoided easily understood gags based on social humor and instead offered elliptical comments on the American visual landscape. In Steinberg\u2019s cartoons, the line between words and pictures disappeared as he drew glyphs and signs that conveyed human passions. Appropriating images from advertising and popular entertainment while giving them a satirical tweak, Steinberg in the 1940s anticipated everything from the paintings of Andy Warhol to the experimental fiction of Donald Barthelme. Steinberg also prefigured the future attempts of his fan John Updike to write poems and stories that mashed up words and images, as in \u201cMid-Point\u201d or \u201cThe Invention of the Horse Collar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from the Steinberg drawing, Updike solicited \u201ctreasures\u201d from other artists. In a letter to me, he mentioned that his dispatches to cartoonists earned him \u201can Otto Soglow Little King, and a Thurber dog he drew for me when he was all but blind. Also I have a Barnaby<\/em> strip with the pasted-on lettering falling off, and half of a \u2018Sunday Mickey Finn.\u2019 I must have had 20 or more in my prime.\u201d Luckily enough, at least two of the letters the adolescent Updike wrote still survive.<\/p>\n

On September 6, 1947, Updike wrote to Milton Caniff, then among the most famous cartoonist in America for his two major strips, Terry and the Pirates<\/em> and Steve Canyon<\/em>. Terry and the Pirates<\/em> was one of the great comic strips of the thirties and forties: it had action, lovely ink-rich noir art, a winsome young hero who matures during the course of his adventures, an exciting Asian backdrop (which in the late thirties became timely and even urgent), and sexy femme fatales (most prominently the famed Dragon Lady). In 1946, Caniff left Terry<\/em> and started a new strip, Steve Canyon<\/em>, a move that caught the attention of comic strip fans all over the nation. John Updike, then fifteen and living in his mother\u2019s ancestral farm in Plowville, Pennsylvania, was one such Caniff follower and used the fact that Caniff was in the news to entice him to send some original art.<\/p>\n

Updike began his letter, \u201cFor a long time, I was under the impression that Terry and the Pirates<\/em> was the best comic strip in the United States. Imagine my dismay, then, when I heard that its creator, its mastermind, was going to desert Terry<\/em>, leave it in the lurch, and wander off to some new interest, called Steve Canyon<\/em>. Apprehensively I subscribed to the paper that carried Steve Canyon<\/em> and waited for the results. It didn\u2019t take me long to discover that Steve Canyon<\/em> was now the best comics strip in the United States. Obvious conclusion: Milton Caniff is the best cartoonist in the world.\u201d The charm of this letter is inseparable from the exuberantly adolescent longings that course through it. Already a fluid writer, Updike manages to be brassy even as he lays on the flattery in an obviously obsequious manner. Part of the tone of the letter owes something to the very cartoonist Updike was praising, since Caniff\u2019s dialogue tended toward wise-guy knowingness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Updike never forgot Caniff. In his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick<\/em>, a trip to China includes a description of the country\u2019s history in the early twentieth century that shows the author was still mindful of Terry and the Pirates<\/em>: it is a land of \u201cPearl Buck peasants, dragon ladies, rickshaws, and comic-strip pirates.\u201d What started as a fannish passion became part of Updike\u2019s mental furniture till the end of his life.<\/p>\n

A few months after writing to Caniff, Updike sent some equally enthusiastic fan mail to Harold Gray, creator of Little Orphan Annie<\/em>. A Dickensian melodrama about a poor orphan named Annie who struggles against an oppressive society while being intermittently aided by her guardian, \u201cDaddy\u201d Warbucks, Gray\u2019s strip was notable for its strident right-wing politics. In Gray\u2019s universe, the bad guys were invariably do-gooding reformers, union bosses, pointy-headed academics, and other liberal types while the heroes were he-man entrepreneurs. I\u2019d guess that in growing up in a household that cherished Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal, Updike would have had little use for Gray\u2019s politics, but his love of cartooning transcended any ideological litmus test. Dated\u00a0January 2, 1948, Updike\u2019s letter to Gray contains a marvelously confident and crisp account of Little Orphan Annie<\/em>\u2019s blustery melodramatic universe. \u201cYour villains are completely black and Annie and crew are perfect, which is as it should be,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOne of my happiest moments was spent in gloating over some hideous child (I forget his name) who had been annoying Annie toppled into the wet cement of a dam being constructed.\u201d This is an extremely astute bit of criticism. As in traditional melodrama, Gray orchestrated his audience\u2019s indignation by showing his heroine constantly suffering at the hands of self-satisfied brutes. The moments when these villains get their comeuppance are always a highlight. Yet while much has been written about the strip by journalists and academics, few have gotten to its emotional core with as much insight as the teenage Updike.<\/p>\n

Updike\u2019s future career as a part-time art critic can also be seen in the authoritative way he describes Gray\u2019s art. \u201cYour draughtmanship is beyond reproach,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe facial features, the big, blunt fingered hands, the way you handle light and shadows are all excellently done. Even the talk balloons are good, the lettering small and clean, the margins wide, and the connection between the speaker and his remark wiggles a little, all of which, to my eye, is as artistic as you can get.\u201d\u00a0Updike\u2019s attention to details such as Gray\u2019s portrayal of hands or his distinct lettering style bespeaks the eyes of a fellow craftsman. The cartoonist Chester Brown once told me he loved Gray\u2019s expressive use of hands. He was surprised when I told him that John Updike had also taken note of the same aspect of Gray\u2019s art.<\/p>\n

Updike\u2019s poems, short stories, and novels are rich in cartooning allusions. His sensual prose\u2014which was arguably nonpareil in its responsiveness\u00a0to the visual world\u2014owed something to the long hours he spent pouring over cartoons and learning to draw. But what exactly did Updike mean when he wrote that \u201cone can continue to cartoon, in a way, with words\u201d? I\u2019ve often talked about Updike with my friend Chris Ware. Like me, Chris is an Updike addict. He once told me that he felt Updike\u2019s attempts to cartoon with words can be most effectively seen in the Maple and Bech stories. Although both these story cycles deal with very adult subjects\u2014notably adultery and divorce\u2014they are often written in a bright, chipper, affectionate tone that evokes classic cartooning.<\/p>\n

\"Bech<\/a><\/p>\n

The critic William H. Pritchard notes that the first Bech book was written with a \u201ccomic lightness and brio\u201d that distinguished it from some of Updike\u2019s weightier fiction of the sixties. Pritchard takes note of a sentence from the story \u201cBech Panics\u201d where the hero goes to a hotel for an unsuccessful assignation with a lover:<\/p>\n

\n

But the overflowing meal at the boorish roadside restaurant, and their furtive decelerated glide through the crackling gravel courtyard of the motel (where a Kiwanis banquet was in progress, and had hogged all the parking spaces), and his fumbly rush to open the tricky aluminoid lock-knob of his door and to stuff his illicit guest out of sight, and the macabre interior of oak-imitating wallboard and framed big-pastels that embowered them proved in sum withering to Bech\u2019s potency.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Pritchard rightly sees Nabokov as a source for the adjectival mirth of this passage (\u201cboorish\u201d and \u201caluminoid\u201d), but behind the Russian master there is also Updike\u2019s love of cartooning with words. What makes this passage cartoony is the playfulness of tone, achieved by Updike\u2019s attention to surface visual details (\u201ccrackling gravel courtyard\u201d) keeping comically\u00a0incongruous\u00a0company with diction that runs from the excessively abstract (\u201cfurtive decelerated glide\u201d) to the implausibly poetic (\u201cembowered,\u201d which echoes Milton\u2019s account of Adam and Eve in Paradise). When he wanted to, Updike could write with clear-glass\u00a0transparency, but in a sentence like this one, he is writing gleefully attention-getting prose, as stylized and artificial as the comic strips he loved. It\u2019s no accident that the covers of the Bech books all contain caricatures of the hero done by one of Updike\u2019s favorite cartoonists, Arnold Roth. Nor is it surprising that in \u201cBech Noir\u201d the writer takes on a superhero identity, becoming a kind of literary Batman avenging writers who have been mistreated by critics. Bech as Batman even has a sidekick named Robin, an eventual lover and spouse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A full inventory of the impact of cartooning on Updike\u2019s writing would require a much longer essay. It would include a discussion of a poem that features Al Capp (creator of L\u2019il Abner<\/em>); Harry \u201cRabbit\u201d Angstrom\u2019s resentful affection for the girlie comic strip Apartment 3-G<\/em>; the superhero references in the later Rabbit books; the story \u201cIntermission,\u201d about a young writer of comic strips; the novel Marry Me<\/em>, which features a character who works in advertising animation; and the essays Updike devoted to cartoonists such as Ralph Barton, James Thurber, and Charles Schulz. Such a discussion would also look more deeply at the visual potency of Updike\u2019s prose and also his habit of limning vividly grotesque secondary characters (think for example of the story \u201cThe Madman\u201d), a fictional practice that owes as much to the tradition of caricature as to the model of Dickens.<\/p>\n

Updike stopped cartooning while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. This is a factually true statement, but it ignores a larger reality. While Updike might have ceased cartooning, the visual language of comics was never far from his mind. Cartooning was an inextricable strand in his creative DNA.<\/p>\n

Jeet Heer is a Canadian cultural critic and the author of two books: <\/em>Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays, & Profiles<\/a>, from which this essay is adapted, and <\/em>In Love with Art: Fran\u00e7oise Mouly\u2019s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI can\u2019t remember the moment when I fell in love with cartoons, I was so young,\u201d John Updike once recalled in Hogan\u2019s Alley magazine. \u201cI still have a Donald Duck book, on oilclothy paper in big-print format, and remember a smaller, cardboard-covered book based on the animated cartoon Three Little Pigs. It was the intense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":785,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[16582,10345,131,16579,615,16580,16577,1483,16578,16576,967,16581],"class_list":["post-81486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-arnold-roth","tag-chester-brown","tag-comics","tag-harold-gray","tag-john-updike","tag-little-orphan-annie","tag-milton-caniff","tag-saul-steinberg","tag-terry-and-the-pirates","tag-virgil-partch","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-william-h-pritchard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy John Updike Loved Comics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As a boy, John Updike adored comics\u2014he wrote fan letters to cartoonists, and their work influenced his distinctive prose style.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Updike: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan by Jeet Heer\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 14, 2015 \u2013 \u201cI can\u2019t remember the moment when I fell in love with cartoons, I was so young,\u201d John Updike once recalled in Hogan\u2019s Alley magazine. \u201cI still have a\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-01-14T17:30:19+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-01-14T18:57:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/6a00d8341c630a53ef013484409f0d970c-pi.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"338\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jeet Heer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jeet Heer\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Jeet Heer\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/a25855a6e9f9c43214693eef5fd20730\"},\"headline\":\"Updike: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan\",\"datePublished\":\"2015-01-14T17:30:19+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-01-14T18:57:14+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/\"},\"wordCount\":2888,\"commentCount\":1,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/14\/updike-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-fan\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/6a00d8341c630a53ef013484409f0d970c-pi.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Arnold Roth\",\"Chester Brown\",\"comics\",\"Harold Gray\",\"John Updike\",\"Little Orphan Annie\",\"Milton Caniff\",\"Saul Steinberg\",\"Terry and the Pirates\",\"Virgil Partch\",\"Vladimir Nabokov\",\"William H. 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