by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
John Updike, Calling John Donne
Literary biography is a habit of mind: no less than fiction, it involves playing hunches and following them where they lead you.
The other day, Louis Menand’s characterization of John Updike as a novelist who understood his way of writing as “transubstantiating” got me thinking again about the ways in which writers at mid-century understood creativity as religious and devotional.
Meanwhile, for other reasons I found myself in the Georgetown library yesterday hunting down Helen Gardner’s edition of John Donne’s Divine Poems, which I hadn’t read, or seen, or much thought of, since I used it as the basis for an essay in my senior year of college in 1987.
Donne, Dame Helen hypothesized, based his twelve “holy sonnets” of 1609 on the pattern of meditation developed by Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises:
The influence of formal meditation lies behind the `Holy Sonnets’, not as a literary source, but as a way of thinking, a method of prayer. Louis Martz has convincingly shown that the Ignatian method of meditating by points and the use of parallel sets of meditations for mornings and evenings of a week provided Donne with the structure of the two Anniversaries. That such different works as the ‘Holy Sonnets’ and the Anniversaries can be shown to depend on the same exercises points to real familiarity with the method. When we are genuinely familiar with something we can use it with freedom for our own purposes.
This led me to wonder whether Updike read Donne – and whether he read Donne’s “divine poems” in Gardner’s edition – when he was in college.
The literary-biography instinct started firing. Well, let’s see. Gardner’s edition was published in 1952 – and a quick check of a capsule biography of Updike online confirmed what I thought: that in 1952, Updike was a Harvard undergraduate … a Harvard undergraduate who read Donne, as this poem he later wrote about his college years for the Phi Beta Kappa Society spells out:
We thought one war as moral as the next,
Believed that life was tragic and absurd,
And were absurdly cheerful on that basis.
We loved John Donne and Hopkins, Yeats and Pound,
Medieval history was rather swank,
Psychology was in the mind; abstract
Things grabbed us where we lived; the only life
Worth living was the private life, and—last,
Worst scandal in this characterization—
We did not know we were a generation.
Updike was just the kind of avid reader who would have read Gardner’s edition when it came out: if not as an undergraduate, then soon afterward at Oxford, where he studied drawing after graduating from Harvard in 1954 — and where Gardner was a fellow and a key contributor to Oxford University Press’s Clarendon editions of Donne’s vast body of work.
The next thing is to plumb Updike’s vast body of work to see whether he referred specifically to Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” or Gardner’s theory about them. Here’s guessing that he did in one way or another – that his sense of art as an act of “transubstantiation” had a root in the work of the Dean of St. Paul’s.
