Updike

by Begley, Adam

  The Coup was liberating in all sorts of ways, opening up space and time, making room for a wild freedom of invention. A land of “delicate, delectable emptiness,” Kush covers nearly half a million square miles and seems to be exempt from conventional chronology (“even memory thins in this land”), so that it’s difficult, sometimes impossible, for the reader to track the passage of days and years (though the action, we’re told, occurs sometime around “the last year of Richard Nixon’s presidency, with flashbacks to the Eisenhower era”). On a map, Kush “suggests . . . an angular skull whose cranium is the empty desert”; it’s less a geographical entity with an unfolding history than a fantasy played out in a jumbled, dreamlike sequence.

  Whose head dreams the dream that is Kush? Our narrator is Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, the country’s deposed dictator, who is now writing his memoirs—sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third—in a seaside café in Nice, “dreaming behind his sunglasses, among the clouds of Vespa exhaust, trying to remember, to relive.” As Joyce Carol Oates noted in her review of the novel, The Coup is at heart Nabokovian; behind Ellelloû stands Charles Kinbote, the exiled ruler who scribbles in the margins of Pale Fire. Within the framework of Updike’s novel, Colonel Ellelloû’s opposite number, so to speak, is Colonel Sirin, the officer in charge of a secret Soviet missile installation buried in the Kush hinterland; Sirin was the nom de plume adopted by Nabokov in his twenties and thirties, while he was still writing in Russian. The outrageous pyrotechnics of Ellelloû’s language (“mandarin explosions,” Updike called them) bring to mind Nabokov’s more florid moments. Consider, for example, this dazzling description of the Kush landscape as glimpsed from the air-conditioned comfort of Ellelloû’s presidential Mercedes: “the low, somehow liquid horizon, its stony dun slumber scarcely disturbed by a distant cluster of thatched roofs encircled by euphorbia, or by the sudden looming of a roadside hovel, a rusted can on a stick advertising the poisonous and interdicted native beer.” This is Updike on a tear, spooling out his prose, letting his sentences take whatever rococo shape strikes his fancy.

  As the presence of Soviet missiles deep inside Kush suggests, domestic politics are inseparable from global politics, the push and pull of the superpowers waging their Cold War, what Ellelloû calls “the paramilitary foolery between the two superparanoids.” A day after leaving the Soviet installation, he thinks he spies in the distance “two golden parabolas”: the golden arches of McDonald’s, inevitable symbol of American cultural hegemony. The Russians’ missile silos are no match for the insidious encroachment of their enemy’s crass commercialism. Ellelloû is rabidly anti-American, a prejudice that gave Updike license to satirize both anti-American rhetoric and those aspects of the national culture he himself deplored. When Ellelloû calls the United States a “fountainhead of obscenity and glut,” we hear the echo of Updike’s laughter and a little bit, too, of his scorn.

  He wrote The Coup in part because he had things to say about Africa and about geopolitics, and in part for more personal, not to say selfish, reasons. He wanted to go back to Africa (which he eventually did, for two and a half weeks in the spring of 1984); inventing Kush was a way of taking a trip without leaving New England. And he also wanted to explore his own domestic experience, distanced by an exotic setting. One reason adultery is not an issue in the novel is that Ellelloû has four wives. When Updike began The Coup, he and Mary had already filed for divorce; by the time he finished, he was married to his second wife, Martha.

  FOR MORE THAN three decades, Updike and Martha traveled indefatigably. Not a year went by without two or three foreign excursions—and sometimes, when Updike was promoting a new book, several more. New scenery still thrilled him, and still stimulated his writing: “Out-of-the-way places,” he noted in the mid-nineties, “seem to excite me to my best and brightest prose.” And if a foreign publisher or the sponsors of a far-flung festival offered sufficient monetary inducement, avarice compelled him to say yes. Posing as a writer, he complained, often paid better than staying home and actually writing. But whether he was traveling for money or for pleasure, some part of him always wanted to be back at his desk, absorbed in his work.

  Six months before his second marriage, while he was still writing The Coup, he escorted his widowed mother and the sixteen-year-old Miranda to Spain for eight days, mostly to satisfy Linda’s craving for things Spanish and to facilitate her research for yet another unpublishable historical novel. Arriving in the capital, he suffered from insomnia, and took advantage of his sleeplessness to write a remarkable sequence of eight sonnets that mix impressions of Madrid, Toledo, Ávila, and Valladolid with yearning for Martha back at home. Howard Moss of The New Yorker thought “Spanish Sonnets” contained some of the best poetry Updike had ever written. Certainly there’s a bracing freedom and a daring to some of the lines:

  The land is dry enough to make the rivers

  dramatic here. You say you love me;

  as the answer to your thirst, I splash,

  fall, and flow, a varied cool color.

  Here fountains celebrate intersections,

  and our little Fiats eddy and whirl

  on the way to siesta and back.

  They say don’t drink tap water, but I do.

  The imagery is jumbled like the cascading thoughts of the sleep-deprived.

  After the trip to Spain, which figures in a late short story as a “fraught and sad . . . expedition,” there were no more family excursions to foreign countries, no more holidays abroad with the Updike children (who by the eighties were grown up and beginning to have children of their own). He traveled either alone, alone with Martha, or with Martha on guided tours. He also went on a handful of rain-sodden golfing trips to Scotland and Ireland organized by the Myopia Hunt Club.*

  In January 1981 he paid a second visit to Venezuela, this time with Martha. They were the guests of Bill Luers, the young diplomat who looked after Updike in Russia and was now the American ambassador in Caracas. Luers sent the tourists on an expedition, via helicopter, to see the remote and spectacular Angel Falls, but the helicopter crashed as it was landing atop Auyán-Tepui. In his memoirs, Updike gives a dramatic account of the accident:

  As it hoveringly descended, with its battering big rotor blades, toward the cross painted on a flat rock as a landing field, it swerved out of control and plopped down on a nearby set of rocks shaped like diagonally stacked loaves of bread. The amazed helicopter, its rotors still cumbersomely battering the air, came to rest at a sharp tilt, and the tipped interior of the plane was flooded with excited Spanish in which the word puerta distinctly sounded. I was next to the door, and deduced that the general wish was that I open it and jump out; this I did, running out from under the whirling blades. I assumed that my youthful wife would irresistibly follow, but evidently I should have stopped and let her jump onto me, for when another man, an officer of the American Embassy, saw her balk and attempted to help her down, both fell, and she sprained her ankle so severely I had to push her, a day or two later, in a wheelchair through the Caracas airport.

  Updike was pleased by his “inner coolness” in the midst of this emergency, but the anecdote, as recited at dinner parties in years to come, turned into a tale of Updike’s cowardice. It was in any case not the only unfortunate story to emerge from this South American adventure. Four months after his return, The New Yorker ran a travel piece, “Venezuela for Visitors,” in which Updike anatomized the country’s class system with broad satiric strokes. He begins with this: “All Venezuela, except for the negligible middle class, is divided between the Indians (los indios) and the rich (los ricos),” and ends with this: “Los indios and los ricos rarely achieve contact. When they do, mestizos result, and the exploitation of natural resources. In such lies the future of Venezuela.” In between, there’s more of the same facetiousness. Needless to say, the Venezuelans who read it were unimpressed with the way he chose to repay their hospitality.

  Five years later, Updike was again Luer
s’s guest, in Prague this time, on his own and behaving with his accustomed good manners. Two notable events from this trip to Communist Czechoslovakia are recorded with only minimal adjustment in “Bech in Czech”: a visit to Kafka’s grave and a book signing at the U.S. embassy. On the day Updike arrived, Luers whisked him in the embassy limousine to the “newer” Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of the city, where Kafka is buried with his parents—but the gates were locked shut, the caretaker unmoved by the ambassador’s flag-waving assertion of diplomatic privilege. Luers was about to give up when two young men in plaster-splattered overalls appeared with a key. Although Luers did his best to convince them that he and his guest must be allowed in, his appeals were met with blank indifference—until Updike’s name was mentioned, whereupon the men exclaimed, “Updike! Rabbit, Run! We love his works!” The men were only too happy to unlock the cemetery gates for the distinguished author and escort him to Kafka’s grave. Though gratifying, this unexpected display of literary ardor was less stirring than the long, patient line of Czechs of all ages, many of them young, spilling out of the embassy and onto the sidewalk, waiting for Updike to sign tattered volumes of his work. They waited in plain sight, despite the presence of policemen taking photographs. (The Communist authorities kept a keen eye on anyone eager for an American’s autograph.)

  Updike bestows all this adulation on Henry Bech, who feels flattered and flustered—and inadequate. He feels like an impostor—Updike’s cue to supply him with this teasing reflection: “That was why, he supposed, you travelled to places like this: to encounter fictional selves, the refreshing false ideas of you that strangers hold in their mind.” As if poor Bech didn’t have enough to contend with, he has to cope with the baggage of his ethnic identity: “For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all—up in smoke.” Here of course, Updike is the impostor. He and Bech combine to produce a kind of comic postmodern duet:

  More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer, a literary man, and in this dimension, too, he felt a cause for unease. He was a creature of the third person, a character. A character suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop.

  In bed on his last night at the ambassador’s residence, a sumptuous palace built by a Jewish banker whose family was forced to flee Hitler’s menace, Bech panics, his sense of imposture and of his own insignificance magnified by the extreme seriousness of literary endeavor in a country ruled by a “Kafkaesque” Communist state. He worries that he will “cease to exist,” and Updike makes a tidy package of the whole by looping back to the phrase he uses as a synecdoche for the Holocaust: Bech worries that he, too, will go “up in smoke.”

  Just before his sixtieth birthday, in March 1992, Updike spent a week touring Brazil on his own, sampling a small section of a country the size of the continental United States. He visited São Paulo, the well-preserved colonial mining town of Ouro Prêto, Brasília, and Rio de Janeiro, where his Copacabana hotel room overlooked the beach, which he described to Joyce Carol Oates as “one of the globe’s great animate spectacles.” Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the easy hedonism of the near-naked crowd, excited by the idea of a world of mixed skin colors, he used this glimpse of “teeming bodies” as the starting point of his new novel. His week of sightseeing was the impetus for Brazil, but not the principal ingredient; much of the book is set in parts of the country where Updike never set foot. He acknowledged his reliance on other books, principally Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha, and Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. He benefited from the liberating influence of that great South American literary export, magic realism, and from his hard-earned familiarity with the theme that obsessed him during the sixties: courtly love as exemplified by his favorite archetypes of illicit passion, Tristan and Iseult.

  Tristão and Isabel, Updike’s hero and heroine, meet on Copacabana Beach in the mid-sixties. Their love overcomes barriers of race and class—he is poor and black; she is rich and white—survives marriage and children, and endures for more than two decades, longevity that would have surprised Denis de Rougemont. It certainly strained the patience of many book reviewers, who felt that the narrative petered out toward the end, particularly after our hero and heroine, thanks to powerful sorcery, swap skin colors. It would be unfair to say that Updike was taking it easy—he was never less than hardworking—but he did think of Brazil as a lark, a “little” novel with enough open space to let his imagination roam free. Critics who approached it hoping to match their own high seriousness with a correspondingly lofty literary tome were baffled or dismayed; some were angered. It collected fewer friendly reviews than any other Updike novel.

  Just after he finished Brazil, he and Martha went on a quasi-educational two-week cruise of the Mediterranean, complete with onboard lecturers—“ill-advised” was Updike’s verdict. Nine months later, “Cruise,” a slight, sour fantasy, appeared in The New Yorker. For three years running in the late nineties, they spent a couple of weeks traipsing around Italy on their own, peering at churches and picture galleries, indulging their shared passion for art. These Italian adventures resulted in a clutch of poems and a single short story, “Aperto, Chiuso”—two words that govern the tourist experience in Italy. A quarreling couple features in many of the stories Updike set abroad; in this case the sightseers bicker from beginning to end. In April 2002, on a trip to southern Spain, Updike and Martha were mugged on the narrow streets of Seville, pushed over by purse snatchers. Updike smacked into the asphalt facedown, and his right eyebrow was cut open; at the hospital a doctor closed the wound with nine stitches. A month later, his eyebrow still occasionally hurt—but a short story followed in due course, “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe,” with a blow-by-blow description of the mugging. (The narrator regrets not having dragged the culprit “down to the dirty asphalt with him, and pulverized his . . . face with his fists.”)

  When their destination was more exotic, they signed up for expensive guided tours. In September 1998, they were in China for three weeks under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. The New Yorker essay he wrote promptly on his return is as much about the experience of being on a tour—lumped with 120 others and shepherded by three bilingual tour guides and a tour manager from the Smithsonian—as about the vast, crowded, “still imperfectly tourist-friendly” nation pivoting from communism to “superheated mercantilism.”

  They were back in Asia two years later, and again in 2006, when they spent two weeks temple hopping in India—more curated group travel. Updike confessed to a friend that he found the Indian expedition “existentially damaging”; it forced him to contemplate “how many people the world contains, and what weird and dank religions they hold to as shields against their hunger and struggle.” Resilient as ever, he made efficient use of the experience in a short story called “The Apparition,” about a museum-sponsored tour of the splendors of South India.

  In his seventies, he was less and less eager to travel. Although he managed to glean new material from every destination, the law of diminishing returns was at work. After the trip to India, he complained, “It shatters my composure to leave my little shell . . . but my wife’s lust for adventure and warmer weather drives me to it.” He felt he’d seen the world; Martha wanted to see still more, so he accompanied her to Cambodia in 2007, and to Egypt and Jordan the year after that. The first third of his final novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), is essentially a sequence of travelogues. The narrative takes us to the Canadian Rockies, where the Updikes had toured for ten days in September 2006; then to Egypt; then to China—all to see the sights. The Updikes’ last foreign excursion was a three-week tour of Russia and the Baltic republics in September 2008. It came too late to be transformed into fiction.

  VIII.

  Tarbox Redux

  In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person became as good as I coul
d make it.

  —Self-Consciousness (1989)

  A thick, smoky summer beam, three hundred years old, held up the ceiling of the Updikes’ living room at 26 East Street. On the underside of the beam were an outsize nut and washer; this hardware—also antique in appearance, though of more recent vintage—was fastened to the end of a long bolt, an iron rod that ran all the way up to a truss in the attic, a triangular configuration of timbers that provided structural support. Updike used to tell his children that if they loosened the nut the whole house would collapse: “If that nut goes, everything goes.” They never tried it—and eventually, after a dozen years in the Polly Dole House, the family left East Street. Later, unable to resist a dramatic flourish, Updike tacked an ending onto his little fable: “Once we moved, things fell apart. The big nut and bolt were holding us together as well.”

  John and Mary had been thinking about moving before they left for their year in London. They looked at some new houses in and around Ipswich, grand and spacious dwellings, and also at plots of land on which they could build. Nothing was quite right, and they put the plan on hold. Then, in the fall of 1969, several months after their return from England, they were offered the chance to buy a property they knew of and liked, a handsome white clapboard house, built in the late nineteenth century, with a broad, symmetrical facade. Standing on the site of an old farmhouse that had burned down, the house came with a barn, a cottage, and seven and a half acres of land with waterfront access to a tidal creek—all this not much more than a mile from the center of Ipswich. They bought it without hesitation.