b i o g r a p h y premature death at the age of 38 – and not dear old Engels, who now lived in London and acted as a second father to Eleanor after the death of her own in March 1883.
The grieving young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with Aveling worked furiously, translating Madame Bovary, acting in readings of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, reciting Browning’s ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ at Browning Society meetings, joining the New Shakspere Society of the philologist Frederick Furnivall, helping Engels to arrange and edit her father’s manuscripts, writing and translating socialist and feminist essays, co-founding (as the only woman) the Social Democratic Federation led by Ernest Belfort Bax, Morris and Aveling – ‘three more unpractical men for a political organisation’, said Engels, ‘are not to be found in all England’ – and in due course leading a number of trade unions, which she represented on platforms up and down Britain and in America. A regular in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, like her father before her, she was approached by other readers, including Shaw and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). The latter described Eleanor in her diary in 1883 as ‘comely, dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair flying about in all directions’ and ‘fine eyes full of life and sympathy’.
As a political essayist and public speaker she was sharp, eloquent and knowledgeable – her father’s daughter. She had something of his astute sense of the ironies involved in progress, as well as his ability to employ metaphor as a shock technique. In an article in Justice in 1897 she wrote of ‘the great mass of workers in the north’ unintentionally ‘devouring their children’ by protesting against a proposal to put an end to child labour. On the question of female equality she went further than her father, though she used Marxist terms to stress the importance of socialist feminism as opposed to the middle-class movement that campaigned for female property rights.
She was a remarkable woman from a remarkable family, and her life story contains more love, humour, fun, pathos, disappointment, achievement and final tragedy than most. Rachel Holmes’s ambitious, wideranging, scrupulously researched, lively and sympathetic biography does her full justice. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 15
i a n s a n s om
Rabbit Revealed
Updike By Adam Begley (Harper 558pp £25)
Updike: ‘I drank up women’s tears’
According to Adam Begley, John Updike was the ‘poet laureate of American middleness’. Updike was also the laureate of American massiveness – sprawling across genres, enormously prolific, and insatiable in his demand to be loved and lodged, as Begley puts it, ‘in the heart of the American people not just today but tomorrow’. Updike’s strenuous efforts have now been rewarded with the traditional prize: a major scholarly biography.
Begley is a freelance journalist and a former editor at the New York Observer – certainly no slouch, but no centaur either. This is his first biography, and not surprisingly he is slightly in awe of Updike, a rare, almost mythological creature who seemed to spring fully formed from Harvard onto the pages of the New Yorker in his early twenties and who never failed or faltered on the path to greatness. He bestrode American letters for fifty years, from the publication of his first book of verse in 1958, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, to The Widows of Eastwick, his final novel, published shortly before his death in January 2009 at the age of 76. He produced more than sixty books in all, spanning non-fiction, fiction and poetry. ‘He was tall and lanky’, writes Begley, ‘but not remotely feeble or doddery. On the contrary, he exuded a vigorous self-confidence, an almost palpable centeredness.’ For many years, Updike was simply there: as reliable, as consistent and as unarguably American as Strunk and White and the Super Bowl.
Begley attributes Updike’s extraordinary long-lived success to four qualities: ‘hard work, talent, “undeceived” intelligence’ and, the essential ‘binding agent’, ambition. Right from the start, according to Begley,
‘the small-town boy aimed high, with posterity’s judgment never absent from his thoughts. As a college student he dreamed of becoming a “universal artist,” by which he meant someone both great and popular.’
He had a head start on his way to universal acclaim. Updike was an only child, born in Reading, Pennsylvania. His mother, Linda, was a Cornell graduate and a wannabe writer who eventually published a novel of her own, Enchantment (1971), and several stories in the New Yorker. She coaxed and coached and forever urged her son onwards, and was fiercely proud of his achievements, which usefully also fulfilled her own dreams: ‘Johnny knew it was possible to be a writer because he saw me trying,’ she told an interviewer. ‘To say that Linda Hoyer Updike encouraged her only child and nurtured his precocious talent’, writes Begley, ‘is to understate and simplify an unusually close and complicated relationship.’
Begley does not go much into the complications: Updike is a brisk old-school biography rather than some weird and wonderful exercise in amateur psychology.
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