by Begley, Adam
Updike gave an unfortunate interview just as the novel landed in bookstores, in early March 1988. Meeting a New York Times journalist in the Knopf offices, he announced that S. was another attempt to “make things right” with his “feminist detractors”:
I saw this as being a woman’s novel by a man. And indeed, the binding of the book is pink. It’s really sort of rose, I’d like to think, but it looks pretty pink to me—a feminine, hopeful, fresh pink.
To signal to the reader that Updike was being facetious, teasing in his wicked, unsettling way, the journalist (male, and apparently sympathetic) drew repeated attention to the “permanent twinkle” in the author’s eyes. Much of the interview was tongue-in-cheek, in the manner of Updike’s self-mocking exchanges with Henry Bech. Updike went on to declare that The Witches of Eastwick was “a very determined effort to write about women who did have careers of a sort—they were professional witches,” a preposterous remark that might have endeared him to ironists but could only exasperate the feminist critics he claimed to want to mollify. S., he said, was “a sincere attempt to write about a woman on the move”—sure, except that her move is to an ashram presided over by a fraud who not only exploits her but enlists her help in exploiting others, hardly liberation as the women’s movement conceived it. Updike was keenly aware that his readership was mostly female (as any readership generally is), but his misguided attempt to kowtow (“a feminine hopeful, fresh pink”) careened in the direction of satiric, self-defeating mischief. Reviews of the novel were sour, and sales, despite Knopf’s high hopes, underwhelming. A decade later, when he came across a well-thumbed copy of S. in a small public library in the Hudson Valley, he remembered how he had put his “heart and soul” into the heroine and concluded that the novel had at last been “recognized”: “A sort of blessing seemed to arise from the anonymous public; I had been, mutely, understood.” Forsaking irony, he embraced a retrospective sincerity that smacks of wishful thinking.
Infinitely more complicated than S., and far more rewarding, Self-Consciousness was published a year later, on his fifty-seventh birthday. Its genesis, Updike acknowledged, was defensive: having heard that someone might be eager to write his biography, and repulsed by the mere thought of anyone appropriating his life story (“this massive datum that happens to be mine”), he resolved to write his memoirs—a tactical maneuver, purely preemptive. And indeed, the best way to make sense of these six linked autobiographical essays is to think of them as a kind of damage control: here was his chance to put a factual frame around the poetry and prose into which he’d poured so much of his experience. That frame would naturally draw attention to the aspects of his life he considered most important, just as it would obscure whatever he preferred not to publicize. Though indiscreet, a peepshow revealing flashes of cruelty, promiscuity, narcissism, and petty vindictiveness, the essays are only selectively indiscreet. His fits of avarice, for example, and his tendency to meet emotional crises with a vacillating indecision that amounted to what he elsewhere called emotional bigamy—those faults are not on show. In a draft ending eventually dropped from the manuscript, he conceded that he was peddling a kind of “cagey candor” and proposed that the title of the book should be Self-Serving or Self-Promotion. Like the author of every memoir ever published, he was engaged in a calculated attempt to shape his reputation. “These memoirs feel shabby,” he wrote. It made him uncomfortable to be burnishing his personal rather than his literary reputation, his self rather than his books.
As a record of his life as experienced from within, the memoirs are wonderfully, distressingly intimate. “A writer’s self-consciousness,” he tells us, “is really a mode of interestedness.” In these pages, he offers a demonstration of how that intense interestedness turned both inward and outward; one minute he was picking psoriatic scabs (figuratively and literally) and the next looking out the window of the house in Shillington and noting exactly how the mailman walks, “leaning doggedly away from the pull of his leather pouch.” We get as rich an account of his boyhood as anyone would wish—and in the fifth essay, a genealogical digression that’s more than most readers can bear; as Martin Amis quipped, “here we see Updike nude, without a stitch of irony or art.” As an objective record of his life, especially his adult life, a record of the facts an acquaintance or a loyal reader might find useful, it’s sketchy at best. Neither of his wives is named, and Martha (“my second wife”) barely figures. Of his children, only David is named (in passing); they, too, barely figure. Whereas family life in Shillington and Plowville is lovingly evoked, there’s precious little sense of how he lived after leaving home. If the details of his first marriage are hazy, the second is utterly opaque. There’s no career narrative. He provides very few glimpses of himself as a friend or a colleague. Reading Self-Consciousness, you would probably not suspect that up until his self-inflicted banishment from Ipswich, Updike was a clown, a manic entertainer, an aficionado of the pratfall and the silly gag. You might not even grasp that he was funny, that an enduring part of his charm was an eagerness to make others laugh. Instead of humor, he offers up a veteran hypochondriac’s litany of complaint, his bodily ills aggravated by social insecurities and political quarrels—“a parading,” as he put it, “of my wounds.”
A lifelong habit of self-deprecation made the opposite unthinkable: he would never parade his triumphs—prizes, riches, accolades. When self-satisfaction spills out onto the page, he adopts a self-mocking tone: “I have preened, I have lived.” Although he knew it was laughable for a “good-tempered,” supremely successful author to insist on telling sob stories about the trouble he’d seen (“Suffering and I,” he admitted, “have had a basically glancing, flirtatious acquaintanceship”), he nonetheless felt compelled to dwell on infirmities and obstacles, disagreements and imminent decline, circling back in every essay except “A Letter to My Grandsons” to some physical or emotional hurt, as though his wounds were his essence.
And in a curious way they were. Relentlessly metaphorical, Self-Consciousness is the trace of a mind speeding back and forth like a weaver’s shuttle between idea and thing, knitting together abstract and concrete, word and flesh. In the first essay, a nostalgic stroll through rainy Shillington blurs the boundary between his physical being and the enchanted precincts of his childhood: “I had propelled my body through the tenderest parts of a town that was also somewhat my body.” In the second, musing on his “troubled epidermis,” he asks, “What was my creativity, my relentless need to produce, but a parody of my skin’s embarrassing overproduction?” In the third, he describes the “obdurate barrier” in his throat that trips up his speech, then tells us that the “paralysis of stuttering stems from the dead center of one’s being, a deep doubt there”; he explains the “ingenious psychosomatic mechanism” of his asthma: “I tried to break out of my marriage on behalf of another, and failed, and began to have trouble breathing.” In the fourth, he pivots from “not being a dove” to his epic, lifelong ordeal in the dentist’s chair—and ends facetiously, “I gave my teeth to the war effort.”* In the last essay, written when he was fifty-five, he complains of being old, repeating the word as though he were banging on a funeral drum. Everywhere, he sees symptoms of his deterioration: “As I age, I feel my head to be full of holes where once there was electricity and matter.” Similar laments sound throughout the book; he was actually only fifty-three when he composed the maudlin final paragraph of “At War with My Skin”:
Between now and the grave lies a long slide of forestallment, a slew of dutiful, dutifully paid-for maintenance routines in which dermatological makeshift joins periodontal work and prostate examinations on the crowded appointment calendar of dwindling days.
Even in the genealogical essay, the body, the skin we live in, gets the last word. He wraps up “A Letter to My Grandsons” with a saying attributed to his maternal grandfather, John Hoyer: “You carry your own hide to market.”
His body was his self, and vice versa, so he wrote his memoirs as thoug
h he were tattooing the words on every inch of his hide—inscribing his story on the body, inside and out. “Truth,” he writes, “is anecdotes, narrative, the snug, opaque quotidian.” An anecdote is a body in motion, animated clay. Truth, for Updike, reveals itself in the interaction between the corporeal (skin, teeth, throat, lungs) and the spirit. Is it any surprise that he was prone to psychosomatic illness? Or that sex meant so much to him? This is how he conceived of human meaning: memory, emotion, conscience, all the precious intangibles of our consciousness, affixing themselves to living tissue, to flesh and bone.
He was still at work on the last two essays in November 1987 when he spent a couple of nights in Plowville. He visited his mother frequently during these years, usually by himself and in conjunction with a journey to New York or farther afield. This particular visit was sandwiched between a trip to Missouri to pick up a literary award at Saint Louis University and a research expedition to Trenton, New Jersey, to hunt for traces of his paternal grandfather, Hartley.* He slept badly in the cold, damp guest room, brooding about his mother. During the summer, she had taken a bad fall in the kitchen. Bruised on her back and abdomen, she retreated to her bed—and stayed there for weeks, getting up only to feed the dog, the many cats, and sometimes herself. She had lost her appetite for food, and for reading and writing, and even for her favorite television game shows. She was eighty-three, and though she was livelier now that she was back on her feet, her health remained fragile. He worried with every visit that this would be his last.
A year and a half later, in April 1989, she was hospitalized with cardiogenic pulmonary edema, an accumulation of fluid in the air sacs of the lungs—she could barely breathe. He spent much of the month traveling back and forth from Plowville, visiting her in the hospital, and looking after the farmhouse. The underlying cause of her condition was a weak heart. The cardiologist recommended open-heart surgery and a coronary bypass. To her son’s unspoken relief, she refused, saying she wanted to go home and “take what comes.” That summer, breathing more easily and regaining some of her feistiness, she worked with John on the proofs of her second book, which was scheduled for October publication. Pencil in hand, he went over her stories, making changes; he was amused to note that when she looked back over what he’d done, she erased a few of his emendations. She insisted on riding the lawn mower and put him to work digging stones from the lawn. She announced that she wanted to put an end to the visits of the nurses monitoring her condition. But she couldn’t summon the indomitable spirit of her younger years. She was frail, fragile; her son wondered how soon he would be making decisions for her.
Early on the morning of Tuesday, October 10, she suffered a fatal heart attack standing by her kitchen sink with her coat and hat on. (Although she’d been forbidden to drive by her doctor, she was planning that morning to take her car to the garage in nearby New Holland.) Falling, she broke her glasses and cut her eye. Updike was told by the coroner—and believed—that she died instantly. Her body was discovered only the next day, when the neighboring farmer, alarmed by her repeated failure to answer the door or the telephone, finally broke into the house and summoned the undertaker and the local minister.
On the Tuesday she died, her son was giving a reading at Minnesota State University Moorhead. On Wednesday, before flying back to Boston, he allowed himself to be persuaded to visit Moorhead’s twin city, Fargo, North Dakota. He was ferried across the Red River in a swollen stretch limo adorned inside with a tiny chandelier. Outside a downtown print shop, he was inducted into Fargo’s newly established Celebrity Walk of Fame. He gamely pressed feet and hands into wet concrete, and signed his name—and all the while, as he wrote to Oates, his mother’s body was cooling on the kitchen floor, between the sink and the stove. When he reached Haven Hill, he found on the front door a neighbor’s note announcing her death.
His immediate reaction was guilt. He wrote a poem nine days later, “The Fall,” describing the moment he arrived at the empty farmhouse and discovered on the kitchen floor the broken glasses and bloodstained hat:
“O Mama,” I said aloud, though I never called
her “Mama,” “I didn’t take very good care of you.”
Feeling guilty and inadequate, he summoned his children for the funeral. Afterward came the dismal work of sorting through the vast jumble of her possessions, emptying the house and cleaning it. From countless shelves and drawers and trunks emerged mementos of her life and his, so that as he worked he relived his childhood in random, haunting flashes. Michael had stayed behind after his siblings left and helped his father load furniture into a rented van, which they drove together back up to Massachusetts. In early November, Updike drove back down to Plowville to finish the job, a sad, lonely visit. After sleeping in the farmhouse for the last time, he locked up and drove north, the car loaded with maternal souvenirs destined for storage in the barn at Haven Hill. He stopped at a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike for a coffee and a cinnamon doughnut. Sitting there, gazing out at the exit ramps, he was visited by an emotion remembered from adolescence, a feeling that came to him when he was stranded after school for a long stretch in Stephen’s Luncheonette, waiting for his father so that they could drive the eleven miles home from Shillington: “I was an orphan, full of the triumphant, arid bliss of being on my own.”
After seventeen years of worrying about a widowed mother living alone on an isolated farm, and seven years of worrying about her declining health, his sorrow was tinged with relief. He missed her Saturday phone calls, a recap of her week salted with her distinctive wit and self-deprecating irony. He pored over the treasure of knickknacks and snapshots salvaged from Plowville, and in the new year began a long story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” a sequel to Of the Farm, in which his mother is resurrected with unsentimental candor and evident affection. Feeling that he now possessed her life made him at once sad and exultant. He filled the story with incidents snatched directly from her last six months, quoting her verbatim and giving the precise circumstances of her demise.* It was both a memorial—an attempt to immortalize the most important person in his life—and a kind of therapy.
Joey Robinson, narrator of Of the Farm, is here a third-person protagonist suddenly orphaned by the death of his widowed mother. At the funeral, he’s treated gingerly by relatives and neighbors: “He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally close.” But Joey harbors an old grudge against her for having turned him, at age thirteen, into a yokel by moving the family out of town, out into the countryside, back to the farm where she was born, her paradise regained. Although he feels that “she betrayed him with the farm and its sandstone house,” he makes a conscious effort to channel his resentment: “He couldn’t blame his mother, he still needed her too much, so he blamed the place.” Updike did something similar in writing the story, working through memories of the embarrassment, boredom, and discomfort of his rural exile, and his galling sense that his mother loved the farm as much as or more than she loved him, that he and her eighty acres were rivals. When Joey cleans out the house, he does it “ruthlessly, vengefully,” gradually erasing all trace of her life there and his. Updike, in a “frenzy of efficiency,” did the same in the late fall of 1989, calling in an auctioneer for the unwanted furniture and sifting through a “stifling” amount of stuff worthless to anyone but a nostalgic relative. Like Joey, he asked his ex-wife to take the dog, and the county humane society to trap and gas the cats. He quickly sold the house and thirty acres to a second cousin (keeping fifty acres that were rented out to Mennonite farmers). But unlike Joey, he could transfer all this onto the page, thereby turning a ruthless and vengeful activity into a form of unblinking tribute. The reader recognizes the essential beauty of the place, and also the semi-squalid condition in which his mother left it. The place is an extension of the person. One admires the monstrous force of her will, her vitality, her youthful aspirations, even while cringing at the revelation of her obscure sexual incompatibility with Joey
’s father. The story won the O. Henry Prize and was included in The Best American Short Stories 1991.
To Maxwell, Updike confided that Linda had never been well suited to the role either of mother or of writer, but that she made “gallant stabs in both directions.” His ambivalence about her talent as a mother is less pronounced than his ambivalence about her writing talent, which is summed up by the peculiar inconsistency of the hardcover edition of Self-Consciousness: On the dust jacket’s flap copy, his mother is described as “a writer”; between the covers, in the Note About the Author, she’s merely “an aspiring writer”—even though her second book was about to be published. It’s unlikely, given the care with which Updike checked and rechecked galley proofs, that the discrepancy was accidental.
“A SANDSTONE FARMHOUSE” was by no means his final farewell to Plowville—or to his mother. Ten days before she died, he finished the longhand draft of Rabbit at Rest. Her “unignorable” decline during the year he spent writing it contributed to what he called the “mortal mood” of this final volume of the tetralogy; her stints in the Reading hospital under the care of cardiologists provided medical details he “shamelessly” fed into his terrifyingly vivid descriptions of Harry Angstrom’s cardiovascular traumas. (Anyone wondering how it feels to have an angioplasty under local anesthetic will find out midway through the novel.) Rabbit’s second heart attack kills him in the city of Deleon, Florida, so named in honor of Juan Ponce de León, hero of Linda’s oft-revised and perennially rejected novel. Saying good-bye to Rabbit, Updike was also saying good-bye to his mother, and to Berks County, a part of the world that he knew he would be visiting only very rarely from now on. All this leave-taking affected him viscerally. He suffered chest pains like Rabbit (“that singeing sensation he gets as if a child inside him is playing with lighted matches”), a kind of empathetic heartache. “Deciding to wind up the series,” he remarked, “was a kind of death for me.”
