The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  My only extended meeting with John Updike—a two-hour interview—took place in a Massachusetts hospital (where, for the record, he was scheduled to have a precancerous wart excised from his right hand). That was in 1987; I was thirty-eight, and he was fifty-five. And twenty-two years later, on January 27, 2009, Updike succumbed to lung cancer and breathed his last—in a Massachusetts hospital.

  I do see that the coincidence is hardly staggering. It’s not as if I once went bungee jumping with John Berryman, or tasted the twin barrels of a shotgun while playing Russian roulette with Ernest Hemingway. Nevertheless, in the year of his passing, I have of course been thinking about my interlude with this great American presence—a presence which is now an absence of the same dimensions. And I have been thinking about Updike, and Updike’s art, in the hospitalic setting. Furthermore, our long encounter, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Center in Mass General, Boston, contained its modest portent, its token omen, of a death foretold.

  * * *

  *

  On that summer day the hospital cafeteria, shockingly vast, was the scene of every variety of enfeeblement. I delegate the task of describing it not to Updike, for now, but to his one living superior (at the time), Saul Bellow. This is from Augie March:

  Shruggers, hobblers, truss and harness wearers, crutch dancers, wall inspectors, wheelchair people in bandage helmets, wound smells and drug flowers blossoming from gauze, from colorful horrors and out of the deep sinks.

  And in this galère of morbidity Updike was intensely alive. The hyperactivity of his sense impressions was palpable—almost audible. I felt I was in the presence of a great array, a NORAD of data gathering and microinspection.

  “My God,” he said joyously, “we’re surrounded by all kinds of sick Americans! Look at that woman’s glasses.” A lady groped by in what could have been a pair of welder’s goggles. “I guess she really doesn’t want any light in her eyes….My God, look at him. Look at his shoulders! Look at that girl’s legs.”

  On the question of why we like certain literary characters (the vibrantly corrupt Becky Sharp, for instance) and dislike others (for instance, the deadeningly pious Little Nell), Updike, qua critic, is definitive: “what we like is life.” What we like is life; and life is still life, especially so, perhaps, when it is menaced not only by infirmity but also by the sharpest financial strain. Yes, this is America, where illness is a dual disaster (and where medical costs contribute to 62 percent of all bankruptcies). The endless edifice of Mass General, like a vast and prosperous concentration camp, with its innumerable subsections for hearts, lungs, kidneys, bladders, brains, additionally resembled an emporium or even a mall, where sick Americans, free-enterprising individualists to the last, shopped for longevity.

  I said, “I read ‘The City’ yesterday. A work of Joycean perfection.”

  “Thank you. We’ll come back to Joyce. Look at that lady who’s just come out of the elevator. The one with the…”

  Updike was elated, fascinated, riveted; Updike was among the living.

  * * *

  *

  We remember the somatic mutinies, the horrible turns, and the epic hospitalizations endured by Rabbit Angstrom—Rabbit, as buoyant and dynamic (and as lax and sclerotic) as the America he personifies. And medical dramas and anxieties increasingly intrude on Updike’s later fiction, in the same way that they retard and burden the conversations of everybody over fifty-five. But perhaps “The City,” the 1981 short story from the collection Trust Me (1987), stands out as Updike’s most sharply crystallized visit to the land of the sick.

  “A work of Joycean perfection,” I said. Actually it is not quite perfect, and it is not at all Joycean, to its credit; in my view Updike frittered away several years of his prime in a fruitless attempt to transfer the thought rhythms of Leopold Bloom to the stolid adulterers of suburban America (Couples, Rabbit Redux, and more spottily The Maples Stories). “The City” is pure Updike: it is both embarrassingly intimate and grandly universal.

  The first sentence gives us onset (“His stomach began to hurt on the airplane, as the engines changed pitch to descend”—to descend into the city we will never see), and the second sentence gives us the first twitch of denial, or the quest for proximate cause: “Carson [Bob Carson, a midechelon computer salesman] at first blamed his pain upon the freeze-dried salted peanuts,” of which, on the plane, he has consumed two whole packets, along with a midmorning whiskey sour.

  As he disembarks, Carson vindictively continues to hold the peanuts responsible—the peanuts, the drink, the drone of the aircraft, the corpulent elbows on both his armrests, and then, a little later, and more self-pityingly, the tedium of the middle life: “showering and shaving in the morning and putting himself into clothes and then, sixteen hours later, taking himself out of them.” In the taxi queue, the first decisive episymptom persuades him to skip his appointments and go straight to the hotel: “A sudden transparent wave of nausea, like a dip in the flight of the 747.”

  The stricken creature wants to seek its bedding; first, though, we have the phantasmagoric biliousness of the hotel, where, as Carson follows the “maroon-clad bellhop down the orange-carpeted corridor, not only were the colors nauseating but the planes of wall and floor looked warped, as if the pain that would not break up were transposing him to a set of new coordinates.” New coordinates, queer perspectives:

  For variation, Carson stretched himself out upon the cool bathroom floor, marveling at the complex, thick-lipped undersides of the porcelain fixtures, and at the distant bright lozenge of the foreshortened mirror.

  Denial is now diversified by blind faith in resurgence, just as Carson’s identity, too, diversifies and bifurcates: the hastily rescheduled appointments bother him only “remotely, for it would all be taken care of by quite another person—his recovered, risen self.” He visits the hotel pharmacy (shocked by a lobby mirror and the image of “a thin-limbed man in shirt sleeves, with a pot belly and a colorless mouth tugged down on one side like a dead man’s”), and buys the familiar patented remedy: a bottle of Maalox. “The medicine tasted chalky and gritty and gave the pain, after a moment’s hesitation, an extra edge, as of tiny sandy teeth.” By now habituation is doing what little it can. “In the room’s shadowy spaces his pain had become a companion”; “he let the afternoon burn down into evening and thought how misery itself becomes a kind of home.”

  * * *

  *

  Gathering the last shreds of his willpower (and wanting to hear a human voice), Carson calls the front desk. A young clerk breezily recommends the emergency clinic at the city hospital. It is the spur meek Carson has been waiting for, because habituation is ready to glissade into capitulation. After a cab ride of “surprising” duration, he reaches the “vast and glowing pile”; he expects—he hopes—“to surrender the burden of his body utterly, but instead found himself obliged to carry it through a series of fresh efforts—forms to be filled out, proofs to be supplied of his financial fitness to be ill…”

  This last phrase, with its sheepish little irony, is the story’s first acknowledgment of the peculiar American barbarism: that is to say, the fatal synergy of public health and private gain. Still, the peculiarity, mentioned again only once, is from here on quietly dramatized. Updike, as a man, accepts the American way; but as an artist he is alive to its deformations. His subliminal mind knows that being ill in America is not like being ill anywhere else. And it can’t be right, can it—that inequality should dog you to your deathbed?

  The medical operatives who go on to process Carson show no trace of vocational sympathy; they are “elusive” apparitions who give the impression that they have far better things to do and should really be somewhere else entirely—at a dinner party, say, or otherwise immersed in “a festive domestic world” from which Carson has “long fallen.” Getting sick invariably involves a demotion of the self; if you’re an American, the demotion is also socioeconomic. Carson, after all, is petit bourgeois (not high bohemian, like his creat
or). “Slowly Carson dressed again, though the clothes looked, item by item, so shabby as to be hardly his.” It’s straightforward enough: if you feel poorly in America, then you’re going to feel poor, too.

  After a battery of tests, Carson is given a bed in a holding area, with other patients who moan, plead, and retch. “Carson was comforted by these evidences that at least he had penetrated into a circle of acknowledged ruin.” At some point in the night he opens his eyes and a new and grander doctor (another refugee from the beau monde) is gazing down at him:

  Carson wished to make social amends but was in a poor position to, flat on his back and nearly naked….He was very aware that, though the debauched hour and disreputable surroundings had become his own proper habitat, the doctor was healthy and must have a decent home, a family, a routine to return to.

  Appendicitis (with one well-understood complication) is triumphantly diagnosed; the godlike sawbones will operate at once; Carson’s “promotion in status” infuses the medical team with a new esprit de corps; “on soft swift wheels” he floats “feet first” into the theater:

  A masked and youthful population was already there, making chatter, having a party. “There are so many of you!” Carson exclaimed; he was immensely happy. His pain had already ceased.

  The happiness persists and ramifies, and the second half of “The City” is one of Updike’s odes to communitarian rebirth—rebirth, in the harmonial American setting. Carson’s internal vandal, “the burning, undiscourageable demon he had carried,” is tamed by medical science, reduced to “cool facts,” and this “vindicated Carson. For the sick feel as shamed as the sinful, the fallen.” Further vindication is delivered during a late-night visit from a beautiful nurse, whose “queenly smooth black face” smiles wordlessly down at him; “I forgive you, her presence said.”

  Rebirth involves regression. The suave surgeon gives him brief tutorials “about eating and walking and going to the bathroom—all things that needed to be learned again.” Carson, touchingly, becomes absorbed in a jigsaw he finds in the recreation room. At night he is comforted by unseen presences. “Lights always burned; voices always murmured in the hall; this world no more rested than the parental world beyond the sides of a crib.”

  Now reality conspires to delight him; and his gratitude is circumambient. “A television had been mounted on the wall opposite him and was obedient to a panel of buttons that nestled in his palm”; at night the “set became an even warmer and more ingratiating companion, with its dancing colors and fluctuant radiance.” Carson exercises, as he must, hampered at first by the “spindly, rattling IV pole,” but he finds that there’s “a certain jaunty knack to it,” and his handling of the “faithful” apparatus comes to seem positively “debonair.”

  By this stage, Carson is hemorrhaging nothing more dangerous than dollars and cents. His nonchalant doctors, always about to “take off” and go somewhere nicer, look in on him—for a price. But Carson is an American, and doesn’t notice. Watch the way his mind wanders even as he draws attention to the twinkly avarice of his carers:

  There materialized a host of specialists in one department of Carson’s anatomy or another, so that he felt huge, like Gulliver pegged down in Lilliput for inspection. All of them paid their calls so casually and pleasantly—just dropping by, as it were—that Carson was amazed, months later, to find each visit listed by date and hour on the sheets of hospital services billed to him in extensive dot-matrix printout—an old Centronics 739 printer, from the look of it.

  I am suddenly reminded of a sentence I wrote about Lolita, and the meticulous moral reckoning to which Nabokov subjects Humbert Humbert: “As in an American hospital, every tear-stained pillowslip, every scrap of soiled paper tissue, has eventually to be answered for.”

  Carson is being rebaptized—purification, regeneration, readmission. His favorite perch is the external staircase:

  The raw outdoor air had raked through his still-drugged system like a sweeping rough kiss, early-fall air mixing summer and winter, football and baseball, stiff with chill yet damp and not quite purged of growth.

  From the staircase he can glimpse the city that he never knew and will never know again:

  The drab housing and assembled rubble that he saw through the grid of the cement barrier, which permitted no broader view, nevertheless seemed to Carson brilliantly real, moist and deep-toned and full. Life, this was life. This was the world.

  * * *

  *

  “Joycean, you think?” said Updike, as our meeting drew to an end.

  “In its perfection. Or near perfection.”

  “Well, nothing’s perfect. A short poem can be perfect, but a short story of any length is soon open to ‘the natural sin of language.’ In Eliot’s phrase.”

  I said, “You know Nabokov, when he taught, he used to grade the stories they studied. The worst mark he gave was a Z-minus, but Joyce got an A-triple-plus for ‘The Dead.’ He might’ve given you the same for ‘The City.’ He said he loved your prose, isn’t that right?”

  “He did. He signed off his little letter ‘Cordially.’ It was pretty minimalist, that note. Making me suspect that Nabokov only loved my prose when it was lauding the prose of Nabokov. I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you read Finnegans Wake?”

  “All of it? No. Just the beginning and the end and some bits in between.”

  “Me too. Mm. Surprising. I thought you had about you the air of a man who had read Finnegans Wake.”

  I felt flattered—probably mistakenly. What sort of air would that be, after all? Obsessive, thick-spectacled, onanistic. “Nabokov called Ulysses ‘a noble book,’ ” I said. “But he called Finnegans Wake ‘a snore in the other room.’…I can’t get over how cheerful everyone looks. They’re in hospital. And it’s costing them an arm and a leg.”

  “When the bill comes—that’s the really painful part. But Americans are all insured. Except of course for the millions who aren’t.”

  “It seems grotesque to me. Paying to be ill.”

  He said, “Socialized medicine would seem grotesque to us. Not to pay, not to be able to pick and choose, not to have your panoply of discretionary powers—when it’s something as important as life and death. That’d be un-American.”

  Present-day readers of “The City” will be surprised to see how much smoking gets done in Updike’s hospital. But there was a smoking section in the cafeteria at Mass General, too, and after some hesitation I asked if we could move into it for ten minutes.

  “While I have a cigarette.”

  “Yes of course,” he said. Updike welcomed the move to another table: it gave him more sick Americans to look at.

  “This is grotesque, too,” I said. “Smoking in hospital. Well, I suppose it’s good for business.”

  “I envy you. I quit.”

  Updike quit; but lung cancer is the marathon runner of fatal diseases. It took human beings quite awhile to discover that smoking—the metronomic ingestion of mouthfuls of formaldehyde and benzene—was bad for their health. The official declaration came in 1964, when Updike was thirty-one, and already the veteran of many cigarettes (and then many cigars).

  “That woman—see the size of the brace she has to wear? That man in the hat. He’s got a loudspeaker screwed into his throat. The old guy with the…”

  Looking, now, at the yardage of Updike’s books on my shelves, I find it hard to believe that he was ever addicted to anything except the work ethic. Oh, and to life, of course. Those busy eyes of his, the set of the mouth (as if containing, with difficulty, a vast and mysterious euphoria), his turban-shaped hair still forcefully thriving, his hands on the tea tray so much firmer than my own (“Why don’t I carry that?”)—my own, which trembled at the size and vigor of his presence and his talent. That day at Mass General, John Updike was alive.

  Areté 2009

  Postscript. Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was a passionate Slavophile, a devout Orthodox Christian, and a convinced tsarist. He was a defender of serfdom,
allowing only that its practices might be made more profitable. And yet his Dead Souls (1842) was the bible of the Abolitionists (serfdom, after seven centuries, was abolished in 1861), and reads today like a ruthless satire on that peculiar institution. As a citizen, Gogol accepted state slavery; as an artist, he rejected it. The man said yes, but the talent said no. The same duality applies to Updike and the American system of health care.

  Jane Austen and the Dream Factory

  Jane Austen, as they might say in Los Angeles, is suddenly hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomenon is, let us first establish what it is not.

  About eighteen months ago (in the summer of 1996) I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after ten or fifteen minutes. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons—various security reasons—we had to stay. Thus Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and flinches, of pleadings and whimperings. So one was obliged to submit, and to absorb a few social lessons.

  It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone around me (save the author of The Satanic Verses) giggled and gurgled, positively hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit came when you realized that the titular funeral would be dedicated to Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. No particular disrespect to Simon Callow—but at least one of them was going to die.