Updike

by Begley, Adam

  Making light of his genuine grief, he exaggerated for comic effect: “You might say it’s a depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man.” In fact, Rabbit at Rest resembles in tone and texture Rabbit Is Rich, the volume Updike thought of as the happiest, most buoyant of the tetralogy. Although the ever-present drama of Harry’s deteriorating health hangs threateningly over the action, in other respects the final installment is no less cheerful than its predecessor (which begins with Harry’s downbeat verdict: “The fucking world is running out of gas”). The new book was hugely successful, again winning three prizes: a second Pulitzer, a third National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal, bestowed by the Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of American fiction published in the previous five years. The critical acclaim was louder than ever, in part because it was cumulative. Reviewers were shouting hurray for all four novels at once; some, including Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, hardly Updike’s most sympathetic critic, decided to spread the praise even more widely. Kakutani declared that Updike was “working at the full height of his powers, reorchestrating the themes that have animated not only his earlier Rabbit novels but his entire oeuvre.” Rabbit at Rest became the measure of his achievement as a novelist. Jonathan Raban, a British writer whose rave ran in The Washington Post, boosted Updike into exalted company, insisting that he had produced “one of the very few modern novels in English . . . that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft.”

  Much of the critics’ praise was heaped on Harry Angstrom, his irreducible individuality and his emblematic ordinariness. Reviewers marveled at Updike’s ability to funnel so much of American life through his hero’s sensibility. In a ten-page account of the Mt. Judge Fourth of July parade, Rabbit, dressed up as Uncle Sam to please his granddaughter, achieves his apotheosis as the American Everyman. Here Updike was reporting on his own experience: as a celebrated former resident, he’d been invited to march, though not in costume, in that summer’s Georgetown parade. He grafted onto Harry the eerie experience of walking alone on the yellow double line of a main street rimmed with citizens celebrating Independence Day as they do every year, a friendly, unbuttoned congregation, a “human melt.”

  Once again, Updike was pledging allegiance “to the mild, middling truth of average American life.” That particular phrase comes from a lecture he delivered at Harvard in May 1987, a 250th-birthday tribute to William Dean Howells in which he’d praised the novelist’s realism. He described Howells’s agenda in terms that made it sound very much like his own, quoting with approval from a letter in which Howells reaffirmed that he was “always . . . trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.” Rabbit’s parade, which is refreshingly free of drama and extreme effects, was made from the “common, crude material” that Howells considered “the right American stuff.” Harry worries about his goatee coming unstuck, and the reader worries, as always, about Harry’s heart as he trudges in the summer heat up and down the streets of his hometown, but nothing actually happens except for the step-by-step unfurling of everyday life, witnessed by Harry in the top hat and striped trousers of our national symbol. As Updike remarked in his Howells lecture, “It is, after all, the triumph of American life that so much of it should be middling.”

  There’s no drama to the Fourth of July parade, but there’s a punch line, a venting of our hero’s gung ho patriotism, the twist that turns a set piece into “a piece of literature”:

  Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.

  Coming from a corpulent ex-athlete who still hears ringing in his ears the cheering of fans jammed into the high school gym, Harry’s expression of patriotic pride doubles as an ironic comment on the inalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Rabbit recognizes that he’s living in a consumer paradise; his ravenous pursuit of happiness has clogged his “typical” American heart, which is now “tired and stiff and full of crud.” As he would say, “Enough.”

  If Updike was sad to say good-bye, he was also relieved to get Rabbit off his desk. He enjoyed the sense of tidying up, the neatness of “a squared-off tetralogy, a boxed life.” After Rabbit Redux, he realized he was headed not just for a tetralogy but for a fifteen-hundred-page “mega-novel,” and it was the mega-novel he had in mind when he designed the last installment so that it echoed the first in structure and imagery. In the final volume (Updike’s longest novel), Rabbit’s younger incarnations jostle on the page with our middle-aged hero, echoes and allusions piled on top of the steadily accreting wealth of new images and information, a superabundance Updike ruefully acknowledged: “So many themes convene in Rabbit at Rest that the hero could be said to sink under the burden of the accumulated past.” Rabbit running away to Florida in Rabbit at Rest, as he tried unsuccessfully to do in Rabbit, Run, is only the most obvious of the structural parallels Updike engineered to anchor the end to the beginning. Our very first glimpse of Harry comes when he’s a twenty-six-year-old watching a handful of Brewer kids playing basketball: “Legs, shouts.” The same two-word sentence recurs at the end of Rabbit at Rest, along with other echoed phrases, when Harry again finds himself watching kids shoot baskets, this time black kids in Deleon. The youthful Harry thought, “[T]he kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.” Three decades later, on the brink of oblivion, he’s charmingly relaxed about the youngsters pushing up from behind. These black kids have “that unhurried look he likes to see.” Harry has found an apt stage for his swan song—“the world isn’t yet too crowded to have a few of these underused pockets left.” When he collapses after his last layup, there’s pathos and even a hint of grandeur in the isolation of his stricken body, “as alone on the court as the sun in the sky, in its arena of clouds.”

  Many readers noted that Harry was old before his time. Updike inclined the same way: he seemed to be practicing for old age while still a young man. In his late twenties he began to complain about his hair being grizzled with gray. When he was thirty-six and writing “Midpoint,” this is what he saw in the mirror:

  Ten thousand soggy mornings have warped my lids

  and minced a crafty pulp of this my mouth . . .

  At forty-five he was “over the hill.” By the time he was in his mid-fifties, his hair had turned almost entirely white—but what he said and wrote did more to shape impressions than his hair color or the crow’s-feet around his eyes. As Self-Consciousness amply demonstrated, he felt the need to tell everyone within earshot that he was already old and sprinting toward the grave. He was not yet sixty when he wrote with an insider’s authority a poem called “Elderly Sex.” And he was not yet sixty when Rabbit at Rest was named the winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize—yet he told The New York Times that he’d decided to make it the final volume because he wasn’t sure he’d be around to write another in a decade’s time. He wasn’t particularly concerned about the early onset of dementia when he wrote, “I wanted to cap my series and make it a tetralogy while I still had most of my wits about me,” but referring to his age had become a habit he couldn’t shake. All the time he spent reliving the past in his fiction made him acutely conscious of his otherwise irretrievable youth. And after decades of observing himself intently and minutely, he couldn’t help registering every new wrinkle, every stiff joint, every trivial memory lapse.

  One of his aims in Rabbit at Rest was to offer a plausible portrait of “a specimen American male’s evolution into grandpaternity.” A poor dad, Harry tries to be a better grandpa; his nine-year-old granddaughter in particular brings out his willingness to empathize, his openness to experience. Contemplating Judy, “Harry tries to imagine the world seen through her clear green eyes, every little thing vivid and sharp and new, packed full of itself like a satin va
lentine.” This sweet moment of identification, necessarily brief given Rabbit’s attention span, is typical of the tugs of hope that pull against the tide of his encroaching doom. His appalling relations with his coke-addled son hit bottom when Nelson learns that Harry has welcomed Pru, his daughter-in-law, into his bed; that semi-incestuous encounter seals off the possibility of any meaningful father-son reconciliation. As Harry lies in extremis in the Deleon intensive coronary care unit, Nelson cries in anguish, “Don’t die, Dad, don’t!”—but it was always too late for them. If Harry ever wanted to think of himself as a patriarch, head of the Angstrom clan, the grandchildren were his best bet. When his slapstick heroism keeps Judy safe after their Sunfish capsizes, the “it” he sought on the golf course with Eccles thirty years earlier returns in predatory mode, in the shape of his first heart attack: “Whatever it is, it has found him, and is working him over.” Delivering Judy unharmed to the safety of the beach while racked with pain is perhaps his finest moment as a family man.

  Updike’s son David married a Kenyan woman, Wambui Githiora, in the summer of 1989. Their son, Wesley, born that same year, was Updike’s third African American grandson. Michael and Miranda had two sons each during the 1990s, bringing the total of Updike’s grandchildren to seven, without a single granddaughter among them. Martha’s sons narrowed the gender gap by producing six girls and one boy. But the Updike and Bernhard grandchildren rarely mixed. Martha preferred not to blend the two families, and so at Christmas, for example, the youngsters were entertained in two batches.* For the most part, John went to see his grandsons at their parents’ houses, dropping by for tea every month or so; or he took them to Disney movies. He dutifully marked their birthdays, sometimes a little late, with hand-drawn cards, asked what they might want for Christmas, and made an effort to spend some time with each of them. But he found it difficult to get past the polite, awkward stage, to make himself seem less remote. “I think he was emotionally shy with us, and with his grandchildren, too,” said David. “He was always looking for something to do with them but not sure it was the right thing.” Michael was less charitable, saying his father “just didn’t have room for grandchildren.” John’s attempt to forge a bond was more successful with the older boys. In later years, a round of golf with Grandpa was his most popular offer.

  If a pack of small children invaded Haven Hill, it was much more likely to be the Bernhard grandchildren visiting during school holidays. For the rest of the year, the house was often empty except for the writer working quietly in his suite of rooms over the kitchen, interrupted only by the Federal Express truck’s daily visit and the faint rumble of passing commuter trains. Martha was not often at home. When her youngest, Teddy, followed his brothers to boarding school, she enrolled in a master’s program in social work at Simmons College in Boston; she earned her degree in 1988 and took a job at Massachusetts General Hospital as a psychiatric social worker. The commute made for a long day; in the winter months she set off in the early morning dark, returning home with grisly tales of broken lives and domestic violence. When she wasn’t working, there were bridge parties, church committees, and the North Shore Garden Club.

  During the daylight hours it seemed to Updike, alone in the big house, that he spent much of the time tying up loose ends. With the Scarlet Letter trilogy completed, his memoirs assembled and published, and Rabbit laid to rest, he put together a fourth collection of essays and reviews, Odd Jobs (1991), as huge as Hugging the Shore, and even more eclectic. Despite all his efforts to give the book a shape, to establish categories and subcategories, to slot each scrap of prose into its assigned place, there was no disguising a great big grab bag—hence the title. He cheerfully admitted in the preface that he had a problem turning down editors’ requests, and blamed his word processor for exacerbating the condition: “With his wonderful new tool of ease how can a writer say No?” He said yes to a bewildering array of editorial invitations, including an essay for Popular Mechanics on the engineering feats that produced our national monuments; for Sport magazine a meandering Ted Williams retrospective; for the Harvard Gazette a breezy reminiscence on the occasion of his thirtieth reunion; and for W, a paragraph about beauty: some two hundred words handsomely arranged.

  In her capacity as self-appointed gatekeeper, Martha did her best to screen out some of the importuning editors. I’m not alone in having telephoned Updike to beg for some literary doodle (as I did, for example, in the late nineties to ask for his top five books about loving), only to hear the author’s wife, in the background, urging him to reject the idea—telling him to hang up. John would be affable and charming, seemingly amused; Martha would be audibly unamused, reminding him of other, more pressing obligations and of his repeated promises not to take on ephemeral and unremunerative assignments. She wanted him to concentrate on serious work, and it’s hard to look at Odd Jobs and the three collections that followed—More Matter (1999), Due Considerations (2007), and the posthumous Higher Gossip (2011)—and not agree with her. Behind the question of whether he should have bothered to preserve miscellaneous trifles such as the squib on beauty for W or “Five Great Novels About Loving” (which he included in Due Considerations) lies the deeper question of whether he should have written them in the first place. But as he would say, he couldn’t help himself.

  Martha kept a vigilant eye on his incoming mail. This was gatekeeping of an essential kind, made necessary by his fame. In addition to the editors soliciting work, and the academics from all over the world who wrote inviting him to read or lecture or participate in workshops and seminars, there were eager characters with more complicated agendas: literary groupies and other overzealous fans; avid and avaricious collectors; unscrupulous journalists hungry for a revealing interview; and dogged scholars with intrusive biographical queries. Martha occasionally made notes on letters of this kind, highlighting particularly egregious requests with a yellow marker and scrawling ferocious comments and directives in the margins. The gist was always that the supplicant was hoping to take advantage of Updike, invade his privacy, or profit in some nefarious way—and that Updike must protect himself with a categorical no. She warned again and again against agreeing to projects that would allow the curious and the greedy to eat up his time and encroach upon his private life or his copyright.

  On the morning of Wednesday, March 18, 1992, he found his mailbox flooded, but with more welcome missives. Elizabeth had come up with the idea of contacting all his friends, along with a variety of celebrities, and asking them to send sixtieth-birthday greetings; hundreds complied. Saul Steinberg sent a drawing; Susan Lucci of the soap opera All My Children sent a signed photo; Norman Mailer sent a friendly note. Martha and John drove to Boston that morning, to the Gardner Museum, where they saw the empty frames marking the places where paintings had once hung, paintings stolen on his birthday two years earlier.* (This was the notorious heist in which thirteen works of art were snatched, including three paintings by Rembrandt and one by Updike’s favorite, Vermeer.) In the afternoon there was a small birthday party back at the house, with a cake. Later there was yet another cake: it was poker night, and his cronies had decided that they, too, would celebrate his big birthday.

  The novel he wrote in his sixtieth year was another project that tied up loose ends. In Memories of the Ford Administration, he recycled his Buchanan material and paired it in a kind of prose diptych with an imaginative reworking of the many months of “sexual disarray” he spent in Boston, vacillating between Mary and Martha, a period more or less coterminous with Gerald Ford’s presidency. “I’ve been carrying Buchanan around with me for years,” he explained to Dick Cavett, “and I had to get rid of him.” Updike succeeded at last in writing historical fiction, but with a postmodern twist: he invented a historian, Alf Clayton, who’s also been carrying Buchanan around for years, and presented fragments of Alf’s incomplete opus, a kind of speculative biographical history padded out with fiction. Alf’s writings about a president criticized for vacillating between Nor
th and South (“There is a civilized heroism to indecision,” says Alf defensively) fitted snugly with Updike’s framing narrative, which is all about his own domestic dithering, circa 1975: Alf has left his wife but can’t fully commit to his mistress. Updike was doubling back to the fork in the road that led to his life at Haven Hill. But there’s another twist: he guides the wavering Alf along the road he himself did not take. At the end of the Ford administration, Alf does not marry his mistress or even divorce the mother of his children; dropped by his mistress, he returns to the family home, where he and his wife resume their marriage and are, for the next fifteen years and counting, “fairly content.” Alf tells us, “Real life is in essence anti-climactic.” Dizzying depths of irony are contained in that simple sentence, which reminds us, among other things, of the real-life climax of the story Alf and Updike tried so hard to write: the slaughter of the Civil War that began six weeks after the end of Buchanan’s presidency.

  Framing the Buchanan material, the memoir of Alf’s domestic secession reads like a counterfactual history of Updike’s own adventures: the story of the time he almost married Martha but ended up back with Mary instead. Alf’s wife, Norma (“the Queen of Disorder”: artistic, vague, maternal), and his mistress, Genevieve (“the Perfect Wife”: peremptory, efficient, snobbish), bear only an incidental physical resemblance to Mary and Martha, but the psychic tug-of-war played out between them is a replay of what actually happened—except, of course, for the eventual outcome. Would John and Mary have been “fairly content” had they stayed together? Was John any more than “fairly content” with Martha? As Alf would say, real life is anticlimactic. On the back cover of Memories of the Ford Administration, a grinning Updike plays peekaboo, hands in front of his face; on his ring finger one can just make out a glint of gold, the wedding band he wore after his marriage to Martha.*