“My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — to give the
mundane its beautiful due.” John Updike upheld this artistic vow from early
success until his death in January at the age of 77. Over this time he
became lionised as a master prose stylist as well as the chronicler of
America’s Protestant middle class. Updike is not without detractors,
however, who often claim that (in the words of David Foster Wallace)
“radical self-absorption” limits the impact of his stylistic brilliance.
With Updike’s death, these opposing views now seem like stubbornly fixed
camps.
But Updike is not done speaking: Endpoint and Other Poems and My
Father’s Tears and Other Stories have now been published
posthumously. The main subject of each is death, addressed with the sad,
piercing urgency of someone who knows that it is near. Together they form
brave and immediate reflections on mortality: it cannot be said, in these
volumes, that Updike’s subject does not match his elevated style.
Endpoint dominates the verse collection, opening with Updike’s 70th
birthday and his mounting ailments: “A faint neuralgia, flitting tooth-root
to/ knee and shoulder-joint, a vacant head.” The poem wanders loosely
between modern-day banality and memories of his creative life: reading
comics as a child, seeing the proofs for his first novel, or watching his
mother try to write prose are all tenderly remembered. “She studied How To,
diagrammed Great Plots ... looking for the clue,/ the ‘open sesame’ to fling
the cave door back/ and flood with the light the shadows in her heart.” An
extended, episodic sequence written in iambic pentameter, this poem feels
like a contemporary take on Wordsworth’s Prelude as Updike
traces early influences and his own emerging talent.
But death is advancing on these memories, as well as physical virility: “Its
ghastly blank/ lies underneath your dreams, that once gave rise/ to
horn-hard, conscienceless erections.” Death is soon more palpable, and Endpoint
becomes uniquely moving when it recounts the onset of Updike’s lung cancer.
“It seems death has found/ the portals it will enter by: my lungs,/ pathetic
oblong ghosts, one paler than/ the other on the doctor’s viewing screen.”
Updike’s singular talent vividly recreates his hospital stay, with its rounds
of tests: “Benign big blond machine beyond all price,/ it swallows us up and
solely spits us out/ half-deadened and our blood still dyed: all this/ to
mask the simple fact that we/ decay and find our term of life is fixed.”
This cancer claimed his life but Updike, by staring it in the face, affirmed
faith in his own art. Recounting his Pennsylvania youth, he says: “I’ve
written these before, these modest facts,/ but their meaning has no bottom
in my mind./ The fragments in their jiggled scope collide/ to form more
sacred windows.” There are many other poems in this collection, addressing
everything from travelling in India to getting a colonoscopy. They vary
widely in quality and appeal, and feel tangential compared with the
courageous title sequence.
While death has always been a primary theme in Updike’s prose, it is often
camouflaged by sexual pleasure. As one critic said of Couples (1968),
the hero’s carnal exploits form “an earnest, often harrowing search for
something to still the voice of death that rings in his ears. In celebrating
body, he also celebrates life itself.”
Forty years later, this sensual distraction is no longer an option. The
narrators of My Father’s Tears and Other Stories might
fantasise about adulterous sex but now they are caught in the dead-ends of
age that block such wish fulfilment. In Free, a widower visits an old
flame, intrigued by new possibilities, but when he meets her “he had trouble
relating the Leila of his memory and imagination to the tiny woman, her nut-
coloured face crisscrossed by wrinkles, who opened the door”. Such alarming
exposures occur throughout the collection, with high school reunions
providing the biggest impact: “The list of our deceased classmates on the
back of the programme grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or
bony cronehood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the
aid of Pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age
when most of our fathers were considerately dead.”
Only attachments beyond sex survive. When a protagonist meets a school crush,
“he observed that her face had been stiffened and distorted by some sort of
stroke. Yet, since his love for her had been born in kindergarten, long
before sex kicked in, it was impervious to bodily change.”
Updike’s distinctive voice carries the collection, but overall its style falls
short of his glittering best. There is a brilliant, small moment in the
opening story, when an anxious American family boards a Moroccan bus. Taking
the only available seats near the back, “an indigenous smell, as of burnt
rope, intensified”. Updike’s precise use of simile, assonance, alliteration
and even a half-rhyme works here, in a highly efficient form of description.
But in Varieties of Religious Experience similar tools are used to
describe the southern tower’s collapse on 9/11, and they fail to convince:
“As abrupt as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper
dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise.”
Likewise, smaller details sometimes lose focus. In The Apparition,
Updike describes a beautiful woman named Lorena: “Her eyes seemed nearly
golden ... she had given the tucked and folded cloth her shape — the
inviting pelvic width, the exercise-flattened abdomen.” This is not terrible
writing, but without real wit or invention it dilutes the story — especially
when there is not much plot. Lorena briefly arouses the geriatric narrator,
giving him small redemption against age as “he rejoiced to be tasting lust’s
folly once more”. But it is hard to be convinced by his lust for Lorena if
we are not convinced she is worth lusting after.
Updike’s success has always depended on this particular brilliance. When a
girl wanders into a shop wearing only her bathing suit in his early story A&P,
the store amplifies her beauty in an odd but totally convincing way: “You
know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach,
where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and
another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights,
against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over
our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.” By the end of the
sentence you can practically see her walking through the store’s cool
interior, a figure who has become both more exotic and desirable.
Beyond the visual, Updike’s rare metaphors and turns of phrase can infuse
typical crises with vast psychological depth. After the adulterous Harry
“Rabbit” Angstrom leaves his pregnant wife, he rejoins her for the birth of
their second child. Exiled from his own home, he takes a bed at the local
rectory: “Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must
consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself, into which he
shrinks while the claws of the bear rattle like rain outside.” The
fantastical provides accuracy, and makes such moments difficult to forget.
This breakthrough novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), takes place in a small
Pennsylvania town, and this is where his final stories find comfort:
recalling his Depression-era childhood provides Updike with much-needed
peace. The Guardians recreates youthful belief that his parents were
“propelling him like a tiny human crew within a tall, walking armature of
DNA. They would not steer him wrong; his death would come tactfully, and was
nowhere near close.”
Experience refutes this, of course, as does the title story, in which the
author recalls leaving for Harvard. At the station his father cries,
shocking Updike. Only after his father’s death can Updike finally understand
that moment: his father’s tears acknowledged disturbing certainties
that the son — leaving for university in 1950 amid America’s rising
prosperity and hopes — still chose fervently to deny.
If these volumes provide a capstone to Updike’s writing, they carry a final
anxiety about the future. The audience for fiction continues to shrink and,
as Updike told interviewers, the trend will disable even the most prolific
author. Endpoint foresees a second death, now almost visible: “A life
poured into words — apparent waste/ intended to preserve the thing
consumed./ For who, in that unthinkable future/ when I am dead, will read?
The printed page/ was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder.”
Hopefully this is mere pessimism, but it should be kept in mind. As the months
pass after Updike’s death he deserves more than glib media commentary on
what he “meant” to America. He deserves to be read.
My Father’s Tears and Other Stories by John Updike Hamish
Hamilton, £18.99; Buy
this book; 292pp
Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike Hamish Hamilton, £12.99; Buy
this book;112pp
Early days John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1932. His
mother’s unsuccessful literary attempts, paradoxically, inspired the bookish
young Updike to become a writer. “I remember the brown envelopes that
stories would go off in — and come back in,” he said.
Writing and views Updike took as his subject “the American Protestant
small-town middle class”. Some considered Updike rather too Waspish in his
own views, which included supporting US intervention in Vietnam.A prolific
writer, Updike was also a well-laurelled one: two Pulitzer Prizes, two
National Book Awards and, in 2008, a Lifetime Achievement award for Bad Sex
in Fiction.
Family man Updike’s private life, unlike his libidinous characters, was
quite conventional. In 1953 he married Mary Pennington, with whom he had
four children. The couple divorced and in 1977 Updike married Martha Ruggles
Bernhard, a psychologist. Updike died of lung cancer in January.
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