Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story

by Julian Barnes

  ‘We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney … And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead.’ Simone swallows some wine. ‘Love affairs are like that,’ she says. ‘They all are like that.’

  There is serious pain at the edges of some of these stories (a child with cystic fibrosis, one with Down’s syndrome), but the focus is on the tribulations – bitter, occasionally veering to bitter-sweet – of the thirty-something Midwestern female. The harsher critic, lolling in the front seats like an auditioning producer, might be tempted to point and growl, ‘Fine, but what else can you do?’ Whereupon Lorrie Moore proceeds to show us. The next two stories arrive from a male point of view (just in case we were wondering): an acrimonious academic dinner party (‘Albert indicates in a general way where they should sit, alternating male, female, like the names of hurricanes’), and a road story about a blind lawyer and a hopeless house painter scratching their way round the South. From this point the stories grow bleaker (‘He possessed a streak of pragmatism so sharp and deep that others mistook it for sanity’) and invite broader extrapolation.

  Before Audubon painted his Birds of America, we are reminded, he first shot them. There have been stray birds all through the book, bashing into windows, being tough on the dinner plate, flightlessly embodying love. Briefly, they now waddle centre stage, as the road couple attend the famous duck parade at the Peabody hotel in Memphis and watch ‘these rich, lucky ducks’ walk their red-carpeted way from foyer fountain to elevator. And what does this pampered life point up? That ‘all the other birds of the world – the mange-hollowed hawks, the lordless hens, the dumb clucks – will live punishing, unblessed lives, winging it north, south, here, there, searching for a place of rest’.

  The tonality becomes darkest in the last three stories, lit by bright truths to drive you mad. A woman in a traumatised remission from cancer; a baby with cancer; a woman who has accidentally killed a child and retreated from the deed into sudden marriage. But marriage has never been much of a haven in Mooreland, as its endurers report. ‘The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.’ ‘Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.’ Marriage, another character notes, is an institution – as in mental institution. As for cancer: we are reminded of the title story in Moore’s last collection, in which a woman is told that a mole removed from her back is pre-cancerous. ‘ “Pre-cancer,” she repeats. “Isn’t that … like life?” ’

  ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ was the story I was most eager, but also most anxious, to reread. Eager because the subject matter – a baby with cancer – takes Moore into her toughest territory, where every pitch of tone, let alone any joke, good or bad, looks the most exposed. Anxious because when the New Yorker first published the story, they chose to illustrate it with a very large and fetching photograph of Moore herself. Since, in the story, the baby’s unnamed mother is a writer and a teacher living in the ‘Modern Middle West’, as Moore does, the magazine was inciting its readers, despite the ‘fiction’ strap, to treat it as a true-life account. This skewed the story and did Moore a disservice. In Birds of America it is freed into fiction; the rest of the book supports it, indeed builds towards it.

  This doesn’t make it any the less precisely harrowing. What, after all, could be more cosmically bad-jokey than the world of Peed Onk, that jaunty, demystifying reduction of Paediatric Oncology? Here are parents preparing to bury little children, unable to take upon themselves the pain of their little bald boys (statistically, it tends to be boys), moving between guilt and terror, between tormented relaxation in the cramped Tiny Tim Lounge (which would have been larger had Tiny Tim’s child survived, rather than died, at the hospital) and the curt professional lingo of the staff: ‘It’s a fast but wimpy tumour,’ the oncologist remarks consolingly. Reflecting on the experience, the mother wonders, ‘How can it be described? … The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things.’ True, as elsewhere; and Moore gives ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ some light metafictional embellishments to emphasise this. But the story can only work – as it compellingly does – if it is loyal to the full tonality of the original trip, articulating its terrors and banalities, its boredom and its death-defying jokes.

  Lorrie Moore has always been a clever, witty writer. The experimentalism of her early career seems currently in abeyance; Birds of America is formally conservative (indeed, in only one of the stories is the main narrative even intercut with a subsidiary one). As against that, her emotional range has deepened, and the sharp vignettes of her first work have yielded to the richer thirty- or forty-page narrative. Talent and promise often remain just that, throughout a career: Truman Capote had remarkable talent and promise all his life. Moore retains the avian eye of her early books, and an unwavering sense of social tone; she is thankfully still clever and witty, but her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness. I hesitate to lay the adjective ‘wise’ on one of her age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sight of an artist soaring lifts the heart.

  REMEMBERING UPDIKE, REMEMBERING RABBIT

  1

  HEARING OF JOHN Updike’s death, I had two immediate, ordinary reactions. The first was a protest – But I thought we had him for another ten years; the second, a feeling of disappointment that Stockholm had never given him the nod. The latter was a wish for him, and for American literature; the former a wish for me, for us, for Updikeans around the world. Though it was not as if he hadn’t left us enough to read. For years now his lifelong publishers Knopf have been giving back-flap approximations. In the mid-nineties, in a cute philoprogenitive linking, he was ‘the father of four children and the author of more than forty books’. By the time of Early Stories (2003) they had him, in a hands-in-the-air sort of way, as ‘the author of fifty-odd previous books’. Now, with Endpoint, his final collection of poems, they award him ‘more than sixty books’. Why ask for another ten years and another ten books, when even devoted Updikeans have probably only read half or two-thirds of the corpus? (I have only met one person – a British arts journalist – who has actually read all Updike’s books.) Nicholson Baker’s act of homage, U & I (1991), was impudently predicated on the fact that he’d by no means read all of Updike, or fully remembered what he had – and no, he wasn’t going to do any extra homework before paying his tribute. It was a quirky approach, with which fellow Updikeans would sympathise; even if it did dangerously invite the act of imitation. I enjoyed Baker’s book, without feeling obliged to read it all.

  But Updike’s fertility was matched by his courtesy – both as a man and as an authorial presence. His fiction never set out to baffle or intimidate – although he certainly could intimidate. Philip Roth, with memorably mock-aggrieved generosity, said of Rabbit is Rich:

  Updike knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America. I don’t know anything about anything. His hero is a Toyota salesman. Updike knows everything about being a Toyota salesman. Here I live in the country and I don’t even know the names of the trees. I’m going to give up writing.

  Yet Updike always treated the reader as a joint partner in the artistic process, an adult equal with whom curiosity and delight in the world were to be shared. Departing, he left us not just one extra book, but two. It was an act of courtesy, but also of necessity. While Updike breathed, he wrote, and his entranced attentiveness to the world continued all the way to his deathbed. His final utterances, poems specifically dated from ‘11/02/08’ to ‘12/22/08’, are about hospital life, pneumonia, dead friends, needle biopsy, CAT-scan, ‘endpoint’; and the tone and truthfulness of
this last looking-around –

  Days later, the results came casually through:

  The gland, biopsied, showed metastasis.

  – are both exemplary to any writer and infinitely touching to any long-term reader.

  After the first shock of death came the admission that even a Nobel could guarantee only temporary permanence. (In Bech is Back, Izzy asks Bech if he’s ever wanted to be a literary judge. ‘ “No,” Bech admitted. “I always duck it.” “Me, too. So who accepts? Midgets. So who do they choose for the prize? Another midget.” ’) Then began a cautious, provisional assessment among Updikeans as to which of those ‘more than sixty books’ would remain after the inevitable historical shakedown. The Rabbit Quartet and the stories, most agree; beyond that, there is little unanimity. If Couples is his most famous single title, it is also his most contested; opponents might argue that The Maples Stories add up to a swifter, sparer analysis of American marriage in the same period. There are votes for Of the Farm and The Coup (my own would go to Roger’s Version). The man himself said (in 1985, anyway) that his own ‘particular favourite’ was the very atypical (because intrusively metaphorical) The Centaur. Updike’s later work was rather undervalued, and at times insultingly reviewed; perhaps In the Beauty of the Lilies will stay the course, or Terrorist (2006). The latter book has as much authorial boldness as Roth’s The Plot Against America, even if both share the same unwillingness to push the narrative to its logical conclusion (the Roth would thus end with the setting-up of the first American concentration camp, the Updike with the successful blowing-up of the Lincoln Tunnel). As Lorrie Moore put it, Updike is ‘arguably our greatest writer without a single great novel’ – a matter of particularity rather than any dishonour.

  Updike’s stories were generally written closer to his own life than his novels; and his final collection, My Father’s Tears, contains numerous familiar tropes, set-ups and situations. The infant crouched on carpet or linoleum, surrounded by crayons and mammoth adults; the child of a quadrilateral household (two parents, two grandparents) which cossets and protects him; the small boy losing his mother’s hand in a department store and wetting his pants; the artistic yet temperamental mother and the philistine yet stoical father; the key move from town (the father’s locale) to farm (the mother’s); the necessary escape from family to university, then professional life and marriage; the fathering of four children; the period of a year or so living alone in Boston; divorce, followed by a second, childless marriage; the young man with psoriasis who grows into the elderly man with sun-damaged skin; the adult whose stutter returns in times of crisis or embarrassment; the serial attender of high-school reunions; the grandfather with a tendency to get lost, whether in foreign cities or his own once-familiar, now forever-changed home environment. These set-ups are so consistent that when, in ‘Blue Light’ (ex-psoriatic grandfather with sun-damaged skin), Updike proposes a protagonist with a massive three wives and a measly three children, we rear back not so much in disbelief as mild offence. Think we can’t see through that? Anyway, three plus three or two plus four, it’s still six, isn’t it?

  At the same time, the very existence of such solid tropes will make Updikeans hope that their man gets a non-reductivist biographer; it is what he does with his givens, not the identifiability of their origin, that counts. Thus, ‘Blue Light’ starts with Fritz Fleischer’s visit to a dermatologist who advises a new treatment to flush out pre-cancerous cells. Yet each establishing detail proposes the story’s wider concerns – damage and its lingering consequences (‘the skin remembers’, Fleischer’s previous dermatologist has told him), the infliction of pain, genetic inheritance and ageing (with pre-cancerous cells, ‘ “Maturing” seemed to be a euphemism for death’). It spins out into a story about ‘personal archaeology’ (as another title has it), about memory and family, innocence and age, selfishness and its consequences. The last two sentences stitch the story closed with a neat suture: ‘He could not imagine what his grandchildren would do in the world, how they would earn their keep. They were immature cells, centers of potential pain.’

  The younger writer is avid for the world and its description; the older writer, while still avid for description, is more suspicious about the world, both what it is and whom it might be for: ‘It had taken old age’, the narrator of ‘The Full Glass’ reflects, ‘to make me realise that the world exists for young people.’ But the older writer has also realised the extent and limitations of his own myth-kitty, and learned how best to eke it out. Those early memories which famously come back in old age are too precious to be wasted on just a single-layer, hey-look-what-I’ve-just-remembered story. The older writer (well, an older writer like Updike) has also learned how to move through time, a much harder task in the short story than in the novel. Not just the technicality of fast-forward and rewind, freeze-frame and wide shot, but the psychology of how memories of quick youth fit in with – or disturb – the slower travails of age, how we live not just in the present indicative but also the passive, the conditional and the subjunctive (‘German Lessons’), how guilt works in the long haul, how unexpectedly some things still move us while others trigger nothing, and how far we can admit that our deepest and most companionable certainties were often wrong.

  Updike’s world often appears a superficially stable place, of mainly white, mainly middle-class suburbia, of houses and families and children and golf and drinking and, of course, adultery – that most conventional way to rise above the conventional, in Nabokov’s phrase. But just as Hemingway, the supposed hymner of masculine courage, writes best about cowardice, so Updike, delineator of conventional, continuing America, is incessantly writing about flight. For the small, carpet-level boy with the dominant mother in ‘The Guardians’, ‘crayoning was Lee’s way of getting away from her’. Later will come the actual, necessary escape from the family (see the great early story ‘Flight’), an action usually leading to marriage and a new family. That would have been the end of it for the generation of Updike’s parents: in a pre-Elvis, pre-pill, still-puritan America, escape was theoretically possible but rarely feasible. For the next generation, it is not just an occasional dream but a constant possibility – though never a simple one. Little Lee, for instance, is comforted by the fact that his parents and grandparents do not die until he is ‘safely away’ at college. This is, perhaps, the underlying, paradoxical dream of Updike’s characters: to be away, and yet to be safe. The Rabbit Quartet is bookended by Harry Angstrom’s two instinctive southerly fugues: his opening panicked drive from home and family and life in the ’55 Ford in Rabbit, Run (‘The title can be read as advice,’ Updike noted in his preface to the one-volume edition of the Quartet); and the mirror trip in Rabbit at Rest, Harry’s closing, migratory trek in the Toyota Celica down to Florida to find his place to die. Updike’s epitomal marrieds, the Maples, try the easiest escape from marriage, adultery, then the second one, divorce. But what lies beyond? A second marriage, perhaps further dreams of leaving, and so on, until life’s final escape, into death. If Lee, at the end of ‘The Guardians’, finds temporary consolation in the fact that his DNA at least promises him longevity, Martin Fairchild, in ‘The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe’, knows that in cosmological terms, ‘We are riding an aimless explosion to nowhere’.

  What can’t be escaped from, and which runs all through this final collection of stories, is memory. The escapee must always return, mentally or physically, if not both. In ‘The Road Home’, David Kern (to whom most tropes apply) goes back to his mother’s farmland and his father’s townscape, places from which ‘only he’ among all his family ‘had escaped’. He has the hesitant nostalgia of the returnee, and also the guilt: if the place has changed unacceptably, then he himself, by his chosen absence, will be complicit in its decline. The past is somewhere you get lost in, literally and figuratively: your memory is partial, and the place itself has changed. And so have you: Kern, a city slicker worrying that rain-sodden fields might dirty his shoes and trousers, mak
es the discovery that ‘ancestral soil’ for him ‘was just mud’. And sometimes not even that. The boy who once humiliatingly sold strawberries on the roadside of Route 14 sees how the fruit are grown today: under season-defying plastic, four feet off the ground, and hydroponically, with nutrients trickled in by hose. If the ‘ancestral’ has lost its meaning, so too has the ‘soil’.

  The final paradox and contradiction of escape is laid out in ‘Free’. Henry and Leila, small-town adulterers who never made the break together, meet up again in their sixties. Henry’s wife has died, and Leila, now out of her third unsatisfactory marriage, is living in a Florida condo with ‘metal furniture and mall-bought watercolours’. Visiting her there after thirty years – and an hour overdue, since Henry, a true late-Updike male, is disoriented by directions – he finds her wrinkled from the sun, sharper-tongued and more vulgar than he remembered, sassy rather than cute. He is also disconcerted that there is both more time and more conversation than back in the old days, when ‘Fuck and run had always been his style’. These changed circumstances make him indecisive, and when he defeatedly suggests getting back to his hotel, Leila has to coax him into bed with, ‘You were always getting back … but you’re free now.’ Yet with time comes not just memory but reassessment. Afterwards, as he prepares for a long drive into a setting sun, Henry asks, ‘Well, what is free? … I guess it’s a state of mind. Looking back at us – maybe that was as free as things get.’