Updike (58 page)

On that Sunday morning when he experienced a sudden access of happiness strolling up the driveway from the mailbox, he was wearing, he tells us, his “churchgoing clothes.” He and Martha had joined St. John’s Episcopalian Church in Beverly Farms. A replica of an English country church set back from the road behind a low stone wall, it was just a brisk ten-minute walk from the house. John almost always went on his own, and favored a pew on the baptistery side. A frequent lector at services, he occasionally supplied introductions to the lessons he read. But though he helped out with St. John’s annual book fair, he was no longer an active churchman as he had been at the Congregational church in Ipswich. He dodged the committee work—“I have stayed out,” as he put it, “of the business end of St. John’s.”

Golf, another reassuring constant in his Beverly Farms life, provided equally essential uplift. Sometimes, choosing the fairway over the pew at St. John’s, he arranged his second round of the week for a Sunday morning. Having joined the venerable Myopia Hunt Club, he now mostly played on its gorgeous, undulating, tree-lined links. His foursome might have a sandwich in the clubhouse looking out over the eighteenth hole, before their round or after. The dining room, with its understated old-school club décor, became a favorite spot for family dinners—on John’s birthday, or if Linda was visiting from Plowville, special occasions his children remember as relaxed and jolly.

“R
ELAXED AND JOLLY
” is what his next novel,
S.
, should have been, to judge from the premise. The concluding installment of his Scarlet Letter
trilogy, it’s a chance for Hester—reinvented as Sarah Worth, a rich, snobby housewife from the North Shore of Boston who leaves her philandering husband for the spiritual adventure of life at an Arizona ashram—finally to have her say.
S.
is funny in places and sharply satiric, but for the most part it’s thin and stretched and uncomfortably manic, as though Updike were straining for an effect beyond his reach, or trying to reconcile incompatible aims. He had hoped to pay fitting tribute to Hester Prynne, whom he thought of as the only flesh-and-blood female in American fiction before Henry James’s heroines.

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 though 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.