It's hard to imagine that John Updike is dead: he was so patiently prolific, right up to his latest book, The Widows of Eastwick, and in his regular reviews and stories in the New Yorker, and had made no public mention of his illness. But people have been imagining the event for some time: the New Yorker posted today a famous passage from John Cheever's Journals, in which he gets a false-alarm phone call in the middle of the night that Updike has died. He makes the kind of sweepingly elegiac statements about the supposed deceased that one makes at a time like that, but is more memorable for the bitter and generous asides about his own family life that make those journals so incredible:
The telephone rings at four. “This is C.B.C. John Updike has been in a
fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?” I am crying. I
cannot sleep again. I think of joining Mary in bed, but I am afraid she
will send me away. I think I am right. When there is a little light I
feed the dogs. “I hope they don’t expect to be fed this early every
morning,” she says. I do not point out that John will not die every
morning, and that in any case it is I who feed them. This restraint
costs me nothing. When I go into the kitchen for another cup of coffee,
she empties the pot into my cup and says, “I was just about to have
some myself.” When I insist on sharing the coffee I am unsuccessful. I
do not say that the pain of death is nothing compared to the pain of
sharing a coffeepot with a peevish woman. This, again, costs me
nothing. And I see that what she seeks, much more than a cup of coffee,
is the gratification of a sense of denial and neglect—and that we so
often, all of us, put our cranky and emotional demands so far ahead of
our hunger and thirst. As for John, he was a man I so esteemed as a
colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He
was a prince. I think it not difficult to kiss him goodbye—I can think
of no other way of parting from him, although he would, in my case,
have been embarrassed....
And one of my favorite one-of-a-kind books, Nicholson Baker's U and I, is constructed entirely around the conceit, inspired by the death of one of Baker's literary heroes, Donald Barthelme, of writing an obituary for another hero, Updike, while he is still alive. (In fact, in a perfect Bakerian moment, I had conflated the two--I had remembered U and I as beginning with that false alarm about Updike's death when it in fact begins with Barthelme's. Incredibly to me, since it fits so well into his subject and theme, Baker doesn't mention the Cheever anecdote, or even Cheever's name, as far as I can tell, anywhere in his book.) Here's a bit of his charge to himself:
I knew now that I had a real deadline: I had to write about Updike while people could still conceivably sneer at him simply for being at the top of the heap, before any false valedictory grand-old-man reverence crept in, as it inevitably would. The literary world demanded some sort of foreignness as the price of its attention: failing geographical distance, senile remoteness would do. But what it lost in this demand was the possibility for real self-knowledge; for you can never come up with truths of an acceptable resolution if what you select for study is estranged by time or language or background or by a physiognomy in its authoritative, slow-talking decline. I would study my feelings for Updike while he was still in that phase of intellectual neglect that omnipresence and best-selling popularity inspire.
And he does. It's the best thing I've ever read on the actual relationship a writer (or a reader) has to the books he reads and authors he admires, including his refreshingly honest list of all the Updike books he has hardly begun or never finished, despite being "obsessed" with him. My own relationship with Updike is a few steps removed from obsessed. My strongest association with him is that he was one of the writers my dad, who reads a lot but not a whole lot of contemporary fiction, was interested in, I think mostly because they both grew up in small-town Pennsylvania, not too far from each other. My dad's favorite of his books, I think, was The Centaur, that early autobiographical novel.
My own Updike reading has been mostly confined to the things he seemed comfortably sure would be the ones he'd be remembered by: the early stories, and the Rabbit novels. I ran across a few of my own very early tries at stories not too long ago, and it was embarrassing how indebted (and poorly so) they were to his, especially "A & P." (The '50s-ish phrase "young married" sticks in my memory as one I tried inserting into my own voice in a remarkably unconvincing way.) And like any reader I've come across a small fraction of his incredible output of workaday reviews, essays, etc., which he collected every decade or so in dauntingly massive omnibuses like Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, and More Matter. And maybe because of them, my main impression of him has been his facility (which I say, mostly, without the negative connotation of "facile"): he could take almost anything in, at least as a reader, and spin it out into golden, tactile phrases. In the introductions to those collections he's a little daunted himself by his affable output (and also proud, like a man standing next to a stack of split wood), counting up totals of books and pages read and compiling lists like this, from Odd Jobs:
Clearly, the present writer said Yes not infrequently. In one especially affirmative phase, toward the end of 1988, as I was trying to muster my scattered resources and commence a novel, I found myself obligated to write an introduction to an album of New Yorker covers, a study of our national monuments from the engineering angle for Popular Mechanics, a hymn to winter golf for Golf Digest, and an essay upon the Gospel of St. Matthew for a book on the New Testament--an anthology of amateur exegeses called Incarnation, a wispy Christian sequel to an Old Testament bodice-ripper titled Congregation--not to mention an adaptation of an old short story of mine into a brief play, a commentary upon a poem of mine for a children's anthology, a speech on computers to be given at M.I.T., and definitive reviews of a Chinese Communist sex novel, a historical treatise upon a certain John Hu who happened to go crazy in eighteenth-century France, and two giant tomes devoted to the further glory of George Bernard Shaw.
One of the professional tasks he often ably set himself to was the sort of postmortem summing-up we're all doing about him now. Baker remembers his piece on Nabokov ("Vale, VN"), mainly for "its tone: gentle, serious, unmaudlin, fluent without affectation, deliberately unspectacular and unrivalrous." Going back to it (it's collected in Hugging the Shore), what stands out for me is his description of Nabokov--characteristically sparkling--which, with a few slight adjustments, could describe himself:
What matters now is that the least of his writings offered a bygone sort of delight: a sorcerer's scintillant dignity made of every sentence a potentially magic occasion. He wanted the reader to share his extraordinary intimations; this generosity gave even his scholarly dissertations and diatribes a certain spaciousness, a giddying other dimension. He lived in the world, and more peripatetically and traumatically than many of us, yet in his art declined to submit to the world; rather, he asked that the world submit to the curious, spotty evidence of its own mimetics, its streaks of insane tenderness, its infinitely ingenious markings.
Similarly, I see more than a little self-reflection (and -justification) in his note following the death of Italo Calvino:
The modern writer has often taken a mordant and hostile attitude toward human institutions; Calvino by contrast was a respectful sociologist, an amused and willing student of things as they are.
For Cheever, meanwhile, who, unknown to Updike (I assume, since the Journals hadn't been published yet), had already composed a premature elegy to him, he graciously ceded the primacy as bard of the suburbs that they each had variously been given:
He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognize within ourselves, wherever we are or have been. Only he saw in its cocktail parties and swimming pools the shimmer of dissolving dreams; no one else satirized with such tenderness its manifold distinctions of class and style, or felt with such poignance the weary commuter's nightly tumble back into the arms of his family.
I'm not sure what Updike will end up remembered for--perhaps, as most people expect, it will be those stories and the great Rabbit set--but I think what will stay with me is that "sorcerer's scintillant dignity," put in the service of "an amused and willing student of things as they are," a working writer driven, not by the mania and outrage that seems to push his equally prolific fellows like Oates or Vollmann, but by a calm curiosity that delighted in ordering whatever he turned to into words. --Tom
coffee on January 30, 2009 at 12:39 PM
Interestingly, i just recently discovered John Updike... I haven't fallen in love with all of his work yet, but i'm warming up to his candid writing style;
his passing is a sad loss indeed
antonio gonzalez on February 01, 2009 at 08:08 PM
I think I like your essay better than anything you, Tom, have written. Thanks.