Talk:Author! Author!
Author! Author! contains two short stories and a novella, with famous authors as the leading characters. In «The Transfiguration of W. H. Auden», the great poet dies and goes, not to heaven, but someplace better. Victorian England! In «The Man Who Met Joyce Carol Oates», an admirer discovers that encountering genius is not without peril. In «The Apotheosis of John Updike», the poet of suburbia encounters catharses without number west of the Hudson.
«The Transfiguration of W. H. Auden»
To be rich, or at least comfortable, was not beyond Wystan’s capabilities, but it was beyond his desire. There was a comfort in his wretchedness. He was free, after all, from the necessity of keeping up appearances, of pretending that he wished to be presentable, which he did not. It was pleasant to see people wince at the sight of him; it was worth even wearing glasses, which unfortunately obscured his hideous, rheumy eyes. ¶
«The Apotheosis of John Updike», Part I
He didn’t mind the opportunity to absorb, in solitude, this lower upper-level baronial setting. For the Momsons, he felt, though completely successful, still had a budget of some sort.
ib.
It was all “honesty”, that desperately Wyethian affectation that affectedly fled affectation in all directions.
ib.
The grossest shit in history had been the cleanest as well. ¶
ib.
There was a great deal of money around [at John Updike's reading at Hotel Marriott], and some taste, but as for wit, as for beauty, there was nothing. ¶
Part II
A young wife! How wicked! Too wicked, really, for Updike, a spoiled adulterer, who wanted both his sin and his self-respect! How vulgar, how deserving the contempt of smug virtue and wanton corruption alike! His dick slept, as well it should. ¶
ib.
How powerless he was before the cliché, the little metal man on his little metal track, jostling between home and hotel and back, his little metal feet welded to a rude magnetic mass that defined him and his alternating pursuit of “freedom” and “sanctuary”. How pathetic was “vice” and equally so “virtue”!<ref>compare preceding quotation</ref> Squirrel in a cage! Squirrel in a cage with an aching ass! ¶
ib.
Why the fuck had he married into one of his own novels?
ib.
What self-confidence, what self-awareness, and what lack of self-consciousness!
ib.
By the second page [of Henry James's The Ambassadors], poor Strether was enjoying “such a consciousness of personal freedom as he had not known for years”! Well, poor Strether was well ahead of poor Updike, as hampered and hemmed by success as Strether was enabled by failure!
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