Updike

by Begley, Adam

  That remark, tossed off casually at the end of one of the thousands of print-crowded three-by-five postcards he mailed out over a lifetime, was another way of saying something he said again and again: how grateful he was just to write. More than fifty years after his first New Yorker check, he was still happily amazed that he could make a living this way, that his boyhood plan to ride “a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts” had succeeded quite so brilliantly. And yet it seemed to him, as it did to many others, that his profession was in trouble, the industry (“Ink, Inc.”) in decline, his pencil line in danger of being rubbed out:

  For who, in that unthinkable future

  when I am dead, will read? The printed page

  was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder.

  In the digital future suddenly upon us, the screen looked certain to displace the page. Hanging over literary enterprise for decades had been the threat of a dwindling readership as the book competed with various forms of electronic entertainment: first television, then computers. More recently, with the emergence of the Internet and the spread of handheld digital devices, a new villain was exposed in the ongoing plot to snuff out literature.

  Fascinated and troubled since the early eighties by the speed and power of computing, Updike had been writing about it since Roger’s Version. Dale Kohler’s vain attempt to model reality on a mainframe computer and thereby furnish scientific evidence of God’s existence was never likely to undermine the printed page or the livelihood of professional authors; it merely ruffled Roger Lambert’s theological feathers—and Updike’s. Owen Mackenzie’s invention in Villages is potentially more worrisome. In his retirement Owen finds himself dizzied and disgusted by the “chip-power” of a desktop PC and the “Library of Babel” on the Internet, but in his heyday he created a software package called DigitEyes, “a method of drawing with a light pen on a computer screen”—an innovation that injects technology into the heart of the creative process. The logical next step is to do without the artist’s hand entirely—to “DigitEyes” the creative act. Finding God through computation and graphic interface rather than faith and prayer, producing an illustration without putting pen to paper—in each case the electronic age was making a raid on an aspect of the culture Updike felt the urgent need to protect. As with Terrorist, he was examining his own fears.

  Another excursion into the brave new world of technology points in a happier direction. Robin Teagarden, Bech’s young girlfriend in the last two stories in Bech at Bay, has a job in a computer store; when Bech visits her, he’s anxiously aware of the industry’s “lightning-swift undertow of obsolescence,” which makes the latest model outdated within months—and which, typically, Bech associates with his own “dispensability.” He’s seventy-two, his “sidekick” twenty-six; they represent past and future. She helps him navigate the new IBM his publisher talks him into buying, one thing leads to another, and together they make a baby; a successful “interface,” Robin might say. Their infant daughter in turn helps Bech deliver his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a collaboration that raises the possibility of some accommodation between technological advancement and old-fashioned literary values.

  Despite the research he did for Roger’s Version and Villages, in practical terms Updike remained something of a Luddite. He could grasp the science driving the digital revolution—and pepper a paragraph with daunting high-tech terminology—but the day-to-day applications didn’t suit him. His computer competence evolved only slowly. He replaced his original Wang word processor, acquired in 1983, with a succession of more sophisticated models; then, in the early nineties, he made the jump to his first PC (an IBM with a Windows operating system)—a machine, he told Oates, that only his stepsons could help him with. He never felt completely at ease with the blank gaze of the computer screen, and even after using the buttons of a computer keyboard to type out a dozen books, he still preferred the feel of typewriter keys. The Internet made him nervous; he was fearful of viruses that might corrupt his files and wipe out his work. If he wanted to do research on the Web, he went down to the public library in Beverly Farms. Martha told him that if he had access to e-mail he would spend every waking hour responding to messages, so he steered clear, relying on the postal service and FedEx. He never owned a cell phone.

  As for the e-book, he could conceive of it only as a threat to the paper book, his favorite object since childhood: “Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.” If books became obsolete, he reasoned, so would he: “Without books, we might melt into the airwaves, and become another set of blips.” Even more distressing was the prospect, revealed by Google’s plan to scan the contents of major research libraries, of a vast digital databank containing the sum of the world’s knowledge. Sent by Knopf to promote Terrorist at a national booksellers’ convention in Washington in May 2006, he mounted a vigorous defense of the “printed, bound and paid-for book.” The title of his talk, “The End of Authorship,” reflects the apocalyptic view he took of the anarchic future promised by Internet gurus. The idea of a universal library, accessible to all through the Web—what boosters envisioned as a paradise of free-flowing text—Updike saw as ruin for writers dependent on royalties. Defending not only the economic model that had sustained him but also his fundamental conception of literature, which he understood to be a private, silent communication between two individuals, author and reader, he was arguing for “accountability and intimacy.” Because the paid-for book had made him rich years ago, his own prosperity was not at risk; his call for accountability wasn’t motivated by petty self-interest. His concern was for an entire industry: writers, publishers, booksellers. A threat to that industry felt like a threat to his sense of self, which was always inextricably entwined with printed volumes, his own and others’. His identity was forged in solitary communion with an open book. The teenage boy who escaped the crowded Plowville farmhouse by immersing himself in a P. G. Wodehouse farce or an Agatha Christie murder mystery became in time the white-haired literary grandee on the podium warning that readers and writers of books were “approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electric sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village.”

  When he told that auditorium full of booksellers, “Defend your lonely forts,” Updike had for a couple of years been the proud owner of not one but two lonely forts: his grand Beverly Farms mansion and also a small “casita” in a gated development in the foothills above Tucson, Arizona—a house he bought in 2004 as an escape from the harsh New England weather (which Martha found more and more painful) and to extend his golf season. For five years running, they went west for a month, leaving in early March, hoping to miss the late winter storms and the early spring mud. On March 18 they would go out for a celebratory meal.

  Our annual birthday do: dinner at

  the Arizona Inn for only two.

  White tablecloth, much cutlery, décor

  in somber dark-beamed territorial style.

  That description comes from a series of birthday poems written out west, elegiac verses grappling with advancing age. Laced with worry that his powers are dimming, they are proof to the contrary—for instance this neat twinning of his two enduring preoccupations:

  How not to think of death? Its ghastly blank

  lies underneath your dreams, that once gave rise

  to horn-hard, conscienceless erections.

  Just so, your waking brain no longer stiffens

  with careless inspirations—urgent news

  spilled in clenched spasms on the virgin sheets.

  The Arizona poems, along with a short essay, “A Desert Encounter,” offer a glimpse of the author in a ruminative mood brought on by another milestone passed and uncommon amounts of free time: he had little to do in the desert but golf, garden und
er Martha’s close supervision, and write poetry about the inexorable passage of time. It was as close as someone so tirelessly industrious could ever come to retirement.

  Lonely forts: often on his own, sometimes on his own with Martha (“dinner . . . for only two”)—that’s the tenor of these years in both the Southwest and New England. A birthday poem composed in Beverly Farms when he turned seventy in 2002 strikes the characteristic note: “Wife absent a day or two, I wake alone, and older.” He had his golf and poker buddies and his literary pen pals such as Oates, but few close friends, none of them intimate. He and Martha kept his children at arm’s length, and none of her children lived nearby. The big house echoed with solitude, with the absence of his mother, his father, his grandparents, the constellation of loved ones who’d brightened his childhood.

  ON VERY RARE occasions, John and Martha had houseguests to stay. In November 2006, Ian McEwan and his wife, Annalena McAfee, a newspaper editor, came to Beverly Farms for a long weekend, an uneventful, harmonious visit that lowers the drawbridge on Updike’s lonely fort and allows us to take a farewell peek at his well-defended life.

  He and McEwan were not close friends; in fact, they met only three or four times over the course of many years, and exchanged no more than a handful of letters. But McEwan was an Updike enthusiast. They first met in 1993, when Updike was in London promoting Memories of the Ford Administration and McEwan interviewed him for a BBC television program. At the time, McEwan was a promising novelist with half a dozen books to his name. He remembered being “awestruck” by Updike: “The fact that he seemed to enjoy talking to me was deeply flattering. When I was young I was always looking for intellectual father figures. That desire completely left me in my mid-twenties, but I found it reanimated in meeting Updike.” A decade later, Updike wrote a rave review in The New Yorker of McEwan’s Atonement, a widely acclaimed bestseller that ensured his place among leading British novelists. When they met for a second time, in London in early summer 2004, they taped an hour-long program for Channel 4: two authors on equal footing “in conversation” in front of the cameras. Because of the sixteen-year age gap, the ocean between them, and McEwan’s unwavering admiration, there was never any hint of competition.

  Updike was the star attraction that year at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in Hay-on-Wye, a tiny market town in Wales, 180 miles west of London. At the time, the Hay Festival was sponsored by The Guardian, where McEwan’s wife worked as the founding editor of the paper’s literary supplement, The Guardian Review. It was McAfee’s responsibility to give a short speech at a festival dinner and hand Updike a check for thirty thousand dollars—the carrot that had lured him across the Atlantic. Just two years earlier he had turned down twenty thousand dollars to spend a week at the University of Michigan, where he would have had to teach a writing seminar as well as give a reading and a “public lecture.” His duties at Hay were lighter: a reading and an onstage interview with a BBC journalist.

  Martha and McEwan sat next to each other in the audience watching the live interview, which was marred by the interviewer’s spotty knowledge of Updike’s work and an uncomfortable emphasis on the author’s attitude toward the Vietnam War. As questions piled up about his nonparticipation in the antiwar protests of the late sixties, the audience grew restive, and Martha began to fume. Finally she leaned over and hissed in McEwan’s ear, “Who is this man?” She was livid. This was McEwan’s first glimpse of her protective instinct—“tigerish, strong, and loving,” was how he described it.

  The McEwans arrived at Haven Hill bearing a gift. Having read in Self-Consciousness about Updike’s Dutch heritage, McEwan acquired (through his Dutch publisher) an eighteenth-century print of Elburg, the town in Holland on the edge of the Zuiderzee where the Opdyck family had lived before sailing for the New World. This tribute gratefully received, the Updikes took their guests out to dinner at Myopia Hunt Club, where they were joined by two other writers, James Carroll and his wife, Alexandra Marshall. The conversation turned to reviewing, and Updike said that sitting in his study still unread after five months was the Hitchens review of Terrorist, which he knew to be toxic. Martha stepped in, saying, “Oh, you don’t need to read it; I’ll read it.” Her husband responded tetchily, or so it seemed to McEwan: “I can take it,” he said.

  The next day, Saturday, was Veterans Day, and the Updikes marked the occasion by ferrying the McEwans to Concord, Massachusetts, a forty-five-minute drive from Beverly Farms. Updike enjoyed the role of tour guide, eager to show off the precise spot near the North Bridge where the militiamen made their stand in the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War, the “shot heard ’round the world.” The battlefields were crowded with tourists, and McEwan remarked on the large number of Muslim families. He said to Updike that it would be inconceivable in England—or France, or Germany—to find so many Muslims parading around historic sites on Remembrance Day, paying tribute to the fallen of past wars; whatever else one might say about America, it still had this powerful pull, making people want to be part of it, to be included. Updike agreed, saying that there was something about America that was still a success, though it was no longer fashionable to boast about it: it didn’t fit the liberal frame of the Democrats or the xenophobic frame of the Republicans.

  From the Minute Man National Historic Park, the two couples drove to Walden Pond, where they signed their names in the guest book inside the replica of Thoreau’s hut, and thence to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Thoreau and Emerson are buried. All in all, it was a long day of patriotic and literary tourism, and they were on their feet for quite a lot of the time, yet it seemed to McEwan that Updike, who walked a little stiffly, was in good physical shape.

  Saturday night they stayed home. Martha didn’t cook—she bought dinner from the local deli. Before they sat down to eat, John and Martha told a story in the classic contrapuntal style of a married couple, the one finishing the sentences of the other. They had decided to clear out their barn and cellar and so hired someone to cart away a load of unwanted junk; soon thereafter an article appeared in The Boston Globe about Updike selling off his honorary degrees: a bookseller in nearby Marblehead had a stack of them, priced at around $750 each. The Updikes explained that it was an accident, that the degrees had ended up in the wrong pile. The upshot of this unfortunate incident—and the climax of the couples’ story—was a sudden onslaught of journalists arriving unannounced at Haven Hill looking for comment, maybe even a photo of the man who had so many honors stashed in his cellar that he could afford to put them out with the trash. Updike particularly enjoyed telling his guests how an incensed Martha shooed a pair of pesky paparazzi off the lawn and pursued them halfway down the driveway.

  Having guests in the house did not mean that Updike altered his work schedule; he shut himself away as usual for his daily three hours. McEwan was again impressed by Martha’s protectiveness. “She made a very good writing environment for him,” he said, “and he clearly valued that. She made a lot of space around him, which meant keeping people away. She organized everything and left John to imagine.” It was Martha who decided what restaurant they would go to on Sunday evening, Martha who made the reservation, Martha who set the time for leaving the house, Martha who made sure no one was late. “She was determined to make our stay a success,” said McEwan, “and it was. She was fantastically hospitable and friendly and lively.”

  The house was spotless, though there was no suggestion that Updike had any hand in keeping it tidy. He did help out in the garden—and the guests joined in: for an hour or two they were all four busy on the lawn, raking and bagging leaves. One of the rakes was plastic, and McEwan made the connection with Ben Turnbull’s hymn to the “silkily serviceable” excellence of his orange plastic snow shovel on the first page of Toward the End of Time—which detail Updike claimed to have forgotten. Doing yard work made Updike look like an Updike character (late Updike), and McEwan asked about the mailbox down at the bottom of the drive. Was it the same mailbox Be
n Turnbull used to walk to? Was it the mailbox that yielded that memorable rush of Sunday morning bliss in Self-Consciousness? Updike gave a noncommittal answer.

  Which McEwan understood entirely: “I felt my question,” he said, “was a little vulgar.”

  XII.

  Endpoint

  Be with me, words, a little longer.

  —“Spirit of ’76”

  Updike spent the last twenty-six hours of his life at the Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers, Massachusetts, about a quarter of an hour’s drive from Haven Hill. His room was in a private suite in a low-slung, gray clapboard building called the Kaplan House, a mildly pretentious, tastefully landscaped example of suburban-sprawl architecture, a place he would have skewered in exact and loving detail in the Rabbit tetralogy. He would have noted, too, an unswerving devotion to euphemism; the promotional brochure available at reception never mentions the word Rabbit fingered like a rosary, death.

  When Updike returned in late September 2008 from his last trip abroad (to Russia and the Baltic states), he was nursing “a cold,” as he put it, “that wouldn’t let go.” The Widows of Eastwick was published in October, and he dragged himself through publicity duties in New York and Washington. Back home and still coughing, he went for his annual checkup at Mass General and was told by the doctor that he had pneumonia; X-rays revealed a cloud on his lungs. The news scared him, yet he resolved to go ahead with a weeklong four-city publicity tour on the West Coast. One event, in Seattle, was already sold out, and he couldn’t conceive of disappointing his audience. He never did back out of a speaking engagement and never would, though he did cancel one other commitment: home again, he told The New York Review of Books that he was too feeble and wheezy to fly down and review the Joan Miró exhibition at MoMA.