Painting with Words

I knew John Updike as an author.  I remember him as a force of art.

John Updike once described an elderly Edward Hopper as painting as an “old conjurer… calling up images with hardly a glance out the window.”  I’d like to use that notion to recall Updike.  With nary a glance to his work, I can feel the caress of his words upon the page. 

There are critics who are to be quoted stating, in jealousy, that Updike was not a good steward of his profound poetic gifts.  Though at times it may ring true, that the message of his stories rarely matched the strength of his prose, time after time Updike captured the soul of what he was describing, showing us, in ways unthinkable without his tremendous gift, how we might imbue our brushes were we artists painting the world.

Updike ends his commentary on Hopper, an artist he critiqued late in life, by wishing he could rush back and examine one last time all of his works and find a “final word torn from the depth of what Henry James may have termed “the so beautifully unsaid”.”  As Updike yearned to snatch at something vital felt, or just unsaid, in a lifetime of another’s work, so we, the immediately bereaved, are initially compelled to turn back and rediscover his writing, we settle for casting our thoughts inward and reflecting on the impression he has left on us.