Updike (59 page)

His immediate reaction was guilt. He wrote a poem nine days later, “The Fall,” describing the moment he arrived at the empty farmhouse and discovered on the kitchen floor the broken glasses and bloodstained hat:

“O Mama,” I said aloud, though I never called

her “Mama,” “I didn’t take very good care of you.”

Feeling guilty and inadequate, he summoned his children for the funeral. Afterward came the dismal work of sorting through the vast jumble of her possessions, emptying the house and cleaning it. From countless shelves and drawers and trunks emerged mementos of her life and his, so that as he worked he relived his childhood in random, haunting flashes. Michael had stayed behind after his siblings left and helped his father load furniture into a rented van, which they drove together back up to Massachusetts. In early November, Updike drove back down to Plowville to finish the job, a sad, lonely visit. After sleeping in the farmhouse for the last time, he locked up and drove north, the car loaded with maternal souvenirs destined for storage in the barn at Haven Hill. He stopped at a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike for a coffee and a cinnamon doughnut. Sitting there, gazing out at the exit ramps, he was visited by an emotion remembered from adolescence, a feeling that came to him when he was stranded after school for a long stretch in Stephen’s Luncheonette, waiting for his father so that they could drive the eleven miles home from Shillington: “I was an orphan, full of the triumphant, arid bliss of being on my own.”

After seventeen years of worrying about a widowed mother living alone on an isolated farm, and seven years of worrying about her declining health, his sorrow was tinged with relief. He missed her Saturday phone calls, a recap of her week salted with her distinctive wit and self-deprecating irony. He pored over the treasure of knickknacks and snapshots salvaged from Plowville, and in the new year began a long story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” a sequel to
Of the Farm
, in which his mother is resurrected with unsentimental candor and evident affection. Feeling that he now possessed her life made him at once sad and exultant. He filled the story with incidents snatched directly from her last six months, quoting her verbatim and giving the precise circumstances of her demise.
*
It was both a memorial—an attempt to immortalize the most important person in his life—and a kind of therapy.

Joey Robinson, narrator of
Of the Farm
, is here a third-person protagonist suddenly orphaned by the death of his widowed mother. At the funeral, he’s treated gingerly by relatives and neighbors: “He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally close.” But Joey harbors an old grudge against her for having turned him, at age thirteen, into a yokel by moving the family out of town, out into the countryside, back to the farm where she was born, her paradise regained. Although he feels that “she betrayed him with the farm and its sandstone house,” he makes a conscious effort to channel his resentment: “He couldn’t blame his mother, he still needed her too much, so he blamed the place.” Updike did something similar in writing the story, working through memories of the embarrassment, boredom, and discomfort of his rural exile, and his galling sense that his mother loved the farm as much as or more than she loved him, that he and her eighty acres were rivals. When Joey cleans out the house, he does it “ruthlessly, vengefully,” gradually erasing all trace of her life there and his. Updike, in a “frenzy of efficiency,” did the same in the late fall of 1989, calling in an auctioneer for the unwanted furniture and sifting through a “stifling” amount of stuff worthless to anyone but a nostalgic relative. Like Joey, he asked his ex-wife to take the dog, and the county humane society to trap and gas the cats. He quickly sold the house and thirty acres to a second cousin (keeping fifty acres that were rented out to Mennonite farmers). But unlike Joey, he could transfer all this onto the page, thereby turning a ruthless and vengeful activity into a form of unblinking tribute. The reader recognizes the essential beauty of the place, and also the semi-squalid condition in which his mother left it. The place is an extension of the person. One admires the monstrous force of her will, her vitality, her youthful aspirations, even while cringing at the revelation of her obscure sexual incompatibility with Joey’s father. The story won the O. Henry Prize and was included in
The Best American Short Stories
1991
.

To Maxwell, Updike confided that Linda had never been well suited to the role either of mother or of writer, but that she made “gallant stabs in both directions.” His ambivalence about her talent as a mother is less pronounced than his ambivalence about her writing talent, which is summed up by the peculiar inconsistency of the hardcover edition of
Self-Consciousness
: On the dust jacket’s flap copy, his mother is described as “a writer”; between the covers, in the Note About the Author, she’s merely “an aspiring writer”—even though her second book was about to be published. It’s unlikely, given the care with which Updike checked and rechecked galley proofs, that the discrepancy was accidental.

“A S
ANDSTONE
F
ARMHOUSE
” was by no means his final farewell to Plowville—or to his mother. Ten days before she died, he finished the longhand draft of
Rabbit at Rest
. Her “unignorable” decline during the year he spent writing it contributed to what he called the “mortal mood” of this final volume of the tetralogy; her stints in the Reading hospital under the care of cardiologists provided medical details he “shamelessly” fed into his terrifyingly vivid descriptions of Harry Angstrom’s cardiovascular traumas. (Anyone wondering how it feels to have an angioplasty under local anesthetic will find out midway through the novel.) Rabbit’s second heart attack kills him in the city of Deleon, Florida, so named in honor of Juan Ponce de León, hero of Linda’s oft-revised and perennially rejected novel. Saying good-bye to Rabbit, Updike was also saying good-bye to his mother, and to Berks County, a part of the world that he knew he would be visiting only very rarely from now on. All this leave-taking affected him viscerally. He suffered chest pains like Rabbit (“that singeing sensation he gets as if a child inside him is playing with lighted matches”), a kind of empathetic heartache. “Deciding to wind up the series,” he remarked, “was a kind of death for me.”

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 Res
t, 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.