by Begley, Adam
In keeping with the playful, mirroring mood of the novel, Updike (at Vogue’s behest) summoned Henry Bech to interview him about it. Bech calls the new book a mishmash, and Updike, playing the huffy author, calls it “my Tempest, my valedictory visit to all my themes,” and, less grandly, a sequel of sorts to A Month of Sundays. Although both novels are narrated by promiscuous men separated from their wives, and both are saturated with sex and liberally footnoted, the earlier novel, full of frantic and abrasive wordplay, feels more like an anguished release; Memories of the Ford Administration is a more mellow and contemplative affair, a spinning out of might-have-beens, and a fond, lingering look at old memories. One senses the pleasure Updike took in make-believe. He even made room for a cameo appearance by his mother (in the guise of Alf’s mother), a canny, widowed octogenarian who adores her only son, disapproves of his defection from his marriage, and revels in the kind of portentous family mythology that had been Linda’s stock-in-trade. Meanwhile, Alf tells us that James Buchanan’s mother—“like many a mother in the biography of a successful man”—was “sensitive, spiritual, fond of poetry,” and fond, too, of bantering with her son: “What woman henceforth will entertain, ridicule, inspire, empathize as this one did?” That rhetorical question is followed by another: “Is it not the biological cruelty of mothers to leave, so to speak, too big a hole?”
THREE WEEKS AFTER the publication of Memories of the Ford Administration, William Shawn died. (Like Linda, he died of a heart attack, also at the age of eighty-five.) He’d been ushered out of The New Yorker five years earlier by its new owner, S. I. Newhouse Jr.—a momentous event in literary circles, cataclysmic in the eyes of many of the magazine’s editors and contributors aghast at the perceived mistreatment of “Mr. Shawn.” When Newhouse announced that Robert Gottlieb would be the new editor, the staff promptly drafted a letter urging him not to take the job. There were 153 signatories, including a galaxy of illustrious contributors. (A few of these disaffected souls subsequently quit to register their protest more emphatically.) Updike declined to sign the letter. The precipitous retirement, however awkward, of the man who played such a huge role in his career (“What would have happened to me if William Shawn had not liked my work?”) seemed to him in fact overdue. Although he remembered clearly a time when his fundamental sense of himself was mixed up with Shawn’s approval, he believed that the great man’s saintly devotion to the magazine had, in the twilight of his tenure, degenerated into a somewhat sinister megalomania. As he clung to power, his resistance to change became a fetish, and the magazine suffered. Once celebrated for its wit and bounce, it was now too often dull and didactic.
Unlike his agitated colleagues, Updike had no reason to be apprehensive about the new editor. Gottlieb came to The New Yorker from Knopf, where he’d been in charge for nineteen years. Just eleven months older than Updike, he was already a legendary figure in book publishing, with a reputation as a brilliant, prodigiously hardworking editor. He had no experience with magazines, but among the hundreds of books he’d edited were Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved—so there was little doubt about his versatility or his will to succeed. Like Shawn, he was thought of as an eccentric (in part because of his collection of more than five hundred vintage plastic handbags), and he, too, involved himself intimately in every aspect of the editorial process. But the similarities ended there: he was neither shy nor secretive nor devious nor crushingly polite. No reverent hush was likely to surround a character who bounded along the corridors in tennis shoes, who chatted easily and cheerfully with his colleagues and expected them to call him Bob.
Updike found it briefly disconcerting to have a spirited contemporary at the helm of the magazine he always thought of as his literary home. Gottlieb made it clear straightaway that he was not interested in cultivating the kind of “shamanistic mystique” associated with the cult of Mr. Shawn, but he was also obviously not interested in sweeping aside his predecessor’s legacy. As a devoted, lifelong reader of the magazine, he saw himself as a conservator, the guardian of a noble tradition. What changes he made were subtle and sympathetic. There was never any chance that he would put in jeopardy the mutually beneficial alliance between Updike and the magazine.
But Gottlieb’s reign was short-lived; five years after his tumultuous accession, Newhouse asked him to step down. Although The New Yorker’s finances had improved under his stewardship, it was still losing several million dollars a year. But money wasn’t the main issue for Newhouse (who’d paid $170 million for the magazine); he was impatient with Gottlieb’s policy of incremental change. To shake things up he brought in Tina Brown, a young British editor newly famous for breathing life into the relaunched Vanity Fair, another title in Newhouse’s Condé Nast portfolio. Whereas Gottlieb was in many ways an obvious choice to run the magazine, Brown was not, and longtime contributors such as Updike needed to be reassured that this thirty-eight-year-old Brit wouldn’t lay waste to cherished New Yorker values. Unsurprisingly, she invited Updike to lunch less than a month after the appearance of her first issue.
He liked her. She was attractive, calmly self-confident, and utterly undaunted at the prospect of reshaping an institution notorious for clinging to its traditions. But he did not like what she was doing to the magazine. He considered her taste coarse, her redesign a kind of vandalism. The sober, dignified pages he was used to were suddenly “sharply angled,” splashed with crassly provocative layouts, and freighted with sensational content. Brown brought photography into the magazine, gave the writers bylines instead of taglines, inserted a contributors page, and printed letters to the editor—all unheard of under the old regime. Worse, Updike worried that she was printing the work of writers who wouldn’t have made the grade in Shawn’s day. Along with a host of disgruntled subscribers, he deplored Brown’s reliance on shock tactics, her seemingly uncritical fascination with celebrity culture, and her mania for novelty and timeliness. He longed for the days before “Tina’s barbarians” sacked and pillaged the elegant magazine he’d fallen in love with.
Her tenure lasted only a little longer than Gottlieb’s. She became the first editor of The New Yorker to leave the job voluntarily, and was succeeded in 1998 by David Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who joined the magazine as a staff writer in the final year of the Gottlieb era. Remnick was even younger than Brown, but although he had no experience as an editor, he was a fast learner, a hard worker like Gottlieb, and still in charge when Updike reached a rare milestone: by midsummer 2004, he’d been a New Yorker contributor for fifty years.
Tina Brown was a nine-month-old baby when “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums” earned Updike a check for fifty-five dollars, the first of more than 150 of his poems published by the magazine in his lifetime. When he collected his verse in 1993, he included 128 poems that had first seen print in The New Yorker, an impressive haul for a full-time poet, let alone a writer busy in so many other genres. Working on Collected Poems, 1953–1993, he experienced the by now familiar pleasure of sorting, arranging, and polishing: “There is a bliss in making sets of things, and in bringing something imperfect closer to perfection.” He was extending the scope of his housekeeping.* “My poems are my oeuvre’s beloved waifs,” he wrote in the preface, “and I feared that if I did not perform the elementary bibliographic decencies for them no one would.” That remark may smack of reflexive modesty, but it was also true enough; his poetry was often overlooked by both his critics and his fans. At this point in his career, any Updike novel or book of short stories was bound to be reviewed in newspapers from coast to coast, and in dozens of magazines and quarterlies. A book of his poetry was likely to attract fewer than twenty reviews all told, most of them in out-of-the-way places.
Updike was consciously evoking funeral rites when he talked of performing “the elementary bibliographic decencies” for his poems. Publishing Collected Poems,
he said, was “packing my bag a little bit” and preparing for posterity’s judgment: “Well,” he asked, “why would you collect your poems unless you were getting ready to go on a journey?” Linda’s death haunted him, just as the prospect of his own death had haunted him since adolescence, and yet his poems (which he chose to segregate from his light verse) had always been and continued to be predominately cheerful, characterized by a jaunty, chin-up defiance. “Perfection Wasted,” for example, was written just a few months after he buried his mother.
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
The in-medias-res opening line, the verve, the rapid flow, the cheeky cynicism of the complaint—even the deflated last line—all remind us that despite his worries about death (and however much he might miss Linda’s “brand of magic”), the poet himself was very much alive. And thanks to the performance captured in “Perfection Wasted,” he lives to this day, at least in the sense that his magic is preserved in the fourteen lines of the sonnet.
But the old Shakespearean ploy of cheating death by grafting the perishable self onto “eternal lines” of poetry works only if the sonnet continues to be read. Collected Poems was largely ignored by reviewers. In The New Criterion, X. J. Kennedy, defying received opinion, declared that “John Updike is a far better poet than the sort now growing up.” Although he decided that “Updike isn’t bitter enough to be our American Larkin,” Kennedy listed a handful of poems he thought worthy of the beloved British poet Philip Larkin, stretching from “Shillington,” written in 1958, to “Enemies of a House,” composed three decades later. Thomas Disch’s review in Poetry magazine appeared almost a year after the publication of Collected Poems; he noted that the “entertainment quotient” in Updike’s verse “offends the poetry establishment and provokes its resolute inattention to his works”—perhaps a roundabout way of apologizing for the delay. Echoing Kennedy, Disch said that Updike was one of the best poets writing today and could be America’s Larkin—if only there were an American audience for poetry. As if in fulfillment of a prophecy, Updike’s next book of poems, Americana (2001), was greeted with near-total silence. Dismayed, he announced to Joyce Carol Oates that he had stopped writing poetry. (He hadn’t, but his output slowed noticeably. He was unwilling to deprive himself entirely of his “secret bliss.”)
In the spring of 1994 he was asked by the literary quarterly Antaeus to write a version of Borges’s famous “Borges and I,” a tiny, teasing conundrum of an essay in which the writer’s private self (“I”) struggles to stake out an identity distinct from the public persona of the author (“Borges”). The last sentence, “I do not know which of us has written this page,” invites the reader to wander in an epistemological maze. Rather than get lost in it, we might as well skip straight to the issue of mortality and the posthumous fame of the author. The private self, says Borges (or “Borges”), is “destined to perish, definitively”; if some sliver is to survive, it will be in the work of the author. At times Updike embraced this hope; at times he mocked it, as in the comically escalating panic in the final paragraph of his preface to More Matter:
[A]ny illusion of “permanent form” struggles against the realizations, come upon me late in life, that paper decays, that readership dwindles, that a book is a kind of newspaper, that the most polished composition loses edge to the flow of language and cultural context, that no masterpiece will outlast the human race, that the race is but an incident in the fauna of our planet, that our planet is doomed to die in a hiccup of the sun, that the sun will eventually implode and explode, and that the universe itself is a transitory scribble on the surface, so oddly breached fifteen billion years ago, of nothingness. Wow! Zap!
Brushing aside this excursion into cosmic pessimism, he reverted in a blink to human scale: “Nevertheless, the living must live, a writer must write.” But his anxieties about posterity were actually closely related to precisely the question of how much living and how much writing he should be doing. Curating his reputation entailed not just producing new work but also tending to his “ponderously growing oeuvre”—forty books and counting, dragging behind him “like an ever-heavier tail.” Squeezed between those two engrossing activities, he found that living his life had begun to seem a neglected hobby.
“Updike and I,” his version of “Borges and I,” presents what looks at first like a clear-cut division between two entities: “Updike,” an awkward, golemlike creature fashioned from the sticks and mud of a Pennsylvania boyhood, is purely a writer; he “works only in the medium of the written word.”* His counterpart, “I”—we’ll call him John—is a slick character who thinks fast on his feet, skimming over the “qualificatory complexities” that preoccupy Updike. John boasts that he moves “swiftly and rather blindly through life, spending the money” Updike earns. Yet instead of being grateful, John is irritated:
That he takes up so much of my time, answering his cloying mail and reading his incessant proofs, I resent. I feel that the fractional time of the day he spends away from being Updike is what feeds and inspires him, and yet, perversely, he spends more and more time being Updike, that monster of whom my boyhood dreamed.
Every morning, John reluctantly goes upstairs to “face the rooms that Updike has filled with his books, his papers, his trophies, his projects.” Sitting at the desk, in front of the “blank-faced word processor,” John wonders, “Suppose, some day, he fails to show up? I would attempt to do his work, but no one would be fooled.” The Borges conundrum returns the moment we start asking ourselves which one of these two wrote “Updike and I.”
The answer is that there can be no meaningful distinction between the selves we’ve designated as John and Updike. The slick white-haired gent with the teasing manner and wolfish grin, the avid golfer and mediocre poker player who went to church on the Sabbath, mostly, and did his best to remember his grandsons’ birthdays, is always also the sedentary writer, awkward and stuttery, who hogged a disproportionate number of the daylight hours.
“A Rescue,” composed in early summer of 1999, addresses the issue by weighing the writer’s accomplishment and his wavering faith in print-based immortality against a poignant, fleeting encounter with a trapped bird:
Today I wrote some words that will see print.
Maybe they will last “forever,” in that
someone will read them, their ink making
a light scratch on his mind, or hers.
I think back with greater satisfaction
upon a yellow bird—a goldfinch?—
that had flown into the garden shed
and could not get out,
battering its wings on the deceptive light
of the dusty, warped-shut window.
Without much reflection, for once, I stepped
to where its panicked heart
was making commotion, the flared wings drumming,
and with clumsy soft hands
pinned it against a pane,
held loosely cupped
this agitated essence of the air,
and through the open door released it,
like a self-flung ball,
to all that lovely perishing outdoors.
There’s little enthusiasm here for the tenuous “forever” of the arti
st’s immortality; the action in the garden shed is far more compelling—wonderfully vivid and immediate. But as he explains in “Updike and I,” “hours of time can be devoted to a moment’s effect.” We mustn’t forget that Updike had to retreat upstairs to his office, sit alone, undistracted, and take the time to fix in perpetuity that evanescent moment, a process he thought of as the “packaging of flux.” Releasing the yellow bird, that “agitated essence of the air,” is a matter of instinct, done without thinking. Finding the words to convey, for instance, the sensation of the bird leaving his hand—the weirdly apt “self-flung ball”—is another matter. The title of “A Rescue” refers of course to the freeing of the trapped bird, but it applies equally to the rescue, through art, of this particular moment’s effect, which would otherwise have been consigned to the oblivion of the unexpressed. Both bird and poem now have a small stake in a literary “forever.”
One lesson here is about the value not of living but of reliving. An obvious solution for an author who finds himself short of time to gather fresh experience (who spends most of the day “being Updike”) is to indulge liberally in nostalgia, to replay the past, frame by frame, and wring every last drop out of reminiscence—a technique Updike had mastered as early as 1958, in “The Happiest I’ve Been.” But though a great deal of the material he worked with in the years at Haven Hill was dredged up from distant memory, and some of the writing he produced was clogged with full-fat nostalgia, Updike needed to feel that in the process of refining that raw material, he opened up new directions. “You have to be in some way excited,” he said, “and in a way frightened.” He acknowledged that the struggle to avoid repeating himself grew more urgent and more arduous with the passing years—“you reach an age when every sentence you write bumps into one you wrote thirty years ago”—and consoled himself with the thought that the wisdom of experience could be substituted for the innocent enthusiasm of youth. But young or old, the writer had to add one final ingredient: “You have to give it magic.”
