Create your own free news widgets.

A 'big-bellied Lutheran God' within the young Updike looked on in contempt as he struggled to give up cigarettes. Many years later the older Updike, now giving up alcohol, coffee and salt, put into the mouth of that God the words of Frederick the Great excoriating his battle-shy soldiers - 'Dogs, would you live for ever?' But all the life-enhancing substances were set aside, and writing became Updike's 'sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality.' In the mornings, he could write 'breezily' of what he could not contemplate in the dark without 'turning in panic to God'. The plain facts of life were 'unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light - in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it - approaches blasphemy.'And now this masterly blasphemer, whose literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean, is gone, and American letters, deprived in rece