The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, July 26, 2025

Byblos: John Updike wrote The Poorhouse Fair in 1959, a decade before his divorce. He imagines Updike’s own second marriage and how his new wife and stepson would play out in front of his mother. By 1959 he was already a serial and boasting adulterer, his stories sometimes reading like France’s Retif de la Bretonne’s Calendar (“Mon calendrier”), a diary-like chronicle of his marital exasperations on one hand and his sexual exploits on the other. For Updike, his tales were “his special brand of lightly fictionalized, peekaboo autobiography,” as Adam Begley described it in his generous Updike (2014), five years after his subject died of lung cancer. His women are stylized and adjectified to seem less objectified but the veil is transparent. “The Maples” is the calendar of “the decline and fall of a marriage,” as Updike described it in his 1979 introduction to the story collection, as if to suggest that Richard/Updike’s philandering drew legitimacy or succor from the deviance of Roman emperors. “Updike,” Nicholson Baker wrote in his U and I, the admiring and revolted memoir of Baker’s infatuation with Updike (1991), “wrongly took sexual advantage of his irresistible prestige as a young writer to poach on suburban marriages while the husbands were off at work.” Baker calls Updike as he sees him: “Mean? Yes, he is mean.” He’d been especially struck by a passage in “Wife-Wooing,” a story not just mean but cruel. Richard Maple fails to win his exhausted wife’s sexual favors one night in the seventh year of their three-child marriage. There’s misogyny (“Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl”), juvenile jealousy (“You love the baby more than me”) and cynicism hooked to the crudest pun, double-barreled just in case you miss it the first time (“You are asleep. Oh, cunning trick, cunning”). The cruelty is still ahead: “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman.” The description struck Baker as “inexcusably brutal.” He found unimaginable the sadness of Updike’s “real, non-fictional wife reading that paragraph.” Updike did not relent. In Rabbit Is Rich, when Rabbit is into the third decade of his dark-age marriage to Janice, he reduces her to mere game: “Her waist is thicker, has less of a dip, as she grows into that barrel body of women in late middle age, their legs getting skinny, their arms getting loose like cooked chicken coming off the bone.” In Toward the End of Time, toward the end of Updike’s career, he gave us this: “The earth is like a nude woman flash-bulbed in her bathroom at an awkward transitional moment of her toilette. Despite her wrinkled ugliness, we lust for her.” Updike never heeded John Lennox’s advice to Stephen Baxter in Henry James’s “Story of a Masterpiece”: “… you can be real without being brutal—without attempting, as one may say, to be actual.” Ugliness has the fascination and attraction of an abyss for men, who don’t tire of describing it. You find Voltaire describing Ninon de Lenclos, the octogenarian benefactress of his youth, in terms that anticipated Updike’s in “Wife-Wooing.” De Lenclos “had on the bones nothing but yellow skin trending to black.” Casanova in his memoirs tells of an encounter with an older woman who “showed half of her flabby breasts, which were disgusting precisely because it showed what they could have been.” (In the original French: “Elle laissait voir la moitié de sa flasque gorge, qui dégoûtait précisément parce qu’elle montrait ce qu’elle avait pu être.”) Let’s not get started with Dostoevsky, who outdoes Upike in demeaning women’s looks. He had a thing about comparing ugly women to chicken, too. You recall his early description of the old woman Raskolnikov ends up hatcheting to death: “Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag…” (I like my French translation better, “son cou long et décharné comme une patte de poule,” which Google translates to “her long and emaciated neck like a chicken’s leg.”) Dostoevsky believed that all women turn ugly because they give all their beauty to their lover (“their beauty quickly passes to their beloved”). After all this, we need a little beauty. 

—P.T.

 

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Human imagination never conceived hobgoblin or witch more ugly than she. You could count all her ribs through the wrinkles of the leathery skin that covered them. Her withered face more resembled an old skull than the countenance of a living being, even to the hollow, darkened sockets, at the bottom of which glittered her little black eyes. Her arms had dwindled away into nothing but whipcord and wire. Her hair, half black, half gray, hung in total neglect nearly to the ground, and her sole garment consisted of the remnant of a discarded buffalo robe tied round her waist with a string of hide. Yet the old squaw’s meager anatomy was wonderfully strong.” 

–From Francis Parkman’s  The Oregon Trail (1849).

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