Updike (60 page)

One of his aims in
Rabbit at Rest
was to offer a plausible portrait of “a specimen American male’s evolution into grandpaternity.” A poor dad, Harry tries to be a better grandpa; his nine-year-old granddaughter in particular brings out his willingness to empathize, his openness to experience. Contemplating Judy, “Harry tries to imagine the world seen through her clear green eyes, every little thing vivid and sharp and new, packed full of itself like a satin valentine.” This sweet moment of identification, necessarily brief given Rabbit’s attention span, is typical of the tugs of hope that pull against the tide of his encroaching doom. His appalling relations with his coke-addled son hit bottom when Nelson learns that Harry has welcomed Pru, his daughter-in-law, into his bed; that semi-incestuous encounter seals off the possibility of any meaningful father-son reconciliation. As Harry lies in extremis in the Deleon intensive coronary care unit, Nelson cries in anguish, “Don’t
die
, Dad,
don’t
!”—but it was always too late for them. If Harry ever wanted to think of himself as a patriarch, head of the Angstrom clan, the grandchildren were his best bet. When his slapstick heroism keeps Judy safe after their Sunfish capsizes, the “it” he sought on the golf course with Eccles thirty years earlier returns in predatory mode, in the shape of his first heart attack: “Whatever it is,
it
has found
him
, and is working him over.” Delivering Judy unharmed to the safety of the beach while racked with pain is perhaps his finest moment as a family man.

Updike’s son David married a Kenyan woman, Wambui Githiora, in the summer of 1989. Their son, Wesley, born that same year, was Updike’s third African American grandson. Michael and Miranda had two sons each during the 1990s, bringing the total of Updike’s grandchildren to seven, without a single granddaughter among them. Martha’s sons narrowed the gender gap by producing six girls and one boy. But the Updike and Bernhard grandchildren rarely mixed. Martha preferred not to blend the two families, and so at Christmas, for example, the youngsters were entertained in two batches.
*
For the most part, John went to see his grandsons at their parents’ houses, dropping by for tea every month or so; or he took them to Disney movies. He dutifully marked their birthdays, sometimes a little late, with hand-drawn cards, asked what they might want for Christmas, and made an effort to spend some time with each of them. But he found it difficult to get past the polite, awkward stage, to make himself seem less remote. “I think he was emotionally shy with us, and with his grandchildren, too,” said David. “He was always looking for something to do with them but not sure it was the right thing.” Michael was less charitable, saying his father “just didn’t have room for grandchildren.” John’s attempt to forge a bond was more successful with the older boys. In later years, a round of golf with Grandpa was his most popular offer.

If a pack of small children invaded Haven Hill, it was much more likely to be the Bernhard grandchildren visiting during school holidays. For the rest of the year, the house was often empty except for the writer working quietly in his suite of rooms over the kitchen, interrupted only by the Federal Express truck’s daily visit and the faint rumble of passing commuter trains. Martha was not often at home. When her youngest, Teddy, followed his brothers to boarding school, she enrolled in a master’s program in social work at Simmons College in Boston; she earned her degree in 1988 and took a job at Massachusetts General Hospital as a psychiatric social worker. The commute made for a long day; in the winter months she set off in the early morning dark, returning home with grisly tales of broken lives and domestic violence. When she wasn’t working, there were bridge parties, church committees, and the North Shore Garden Club.

During the daylight hours it seemed to Updike, alone in the big house, that he spent much of the time tying up loose ends. With the Scarlet Letter trilogy completed, his memoirs assembled and published, and Rabbit laid to rest, he put together a fourth collection of essays and reviews,
Odd Jobs
(1991), as huge as
Hugging the Shore
, and even more eclectic. Despite all his efforts to give the book a shape, to establish categories and subcategories, to slot each scrap of prose into its assigned place, there was no disguising a great big grab bag—hence the title. He cheerfully admitted in the preface that he had a problem turning down editors’ requests, and blamed his word processor for exacerbating the condition: “With his wonderful new tool of ease how can a writer say No?” He said yes to a bewildering array of editorial invitations, including an essay for
Popular Mechanics
on the engineering feats that produced our national monuments; for
Sport
magazine a meandering Ted Williams retrospective; for the
Harvard Gazette
a breezy reminiscence on the occasion of his thirtieth reunion; and for
W
, a paragraph about beauty: some two hundred words handsomely arranged
.

In her capacity as self-appointed gatekeeper, Martha did her best to screen out some of the importuning editors. I’m not alone in having telephoned Updike to beg for some literary doodle (as I did, for example, in the late nineties to ask for his top five books about loving), only to hear the author’s wife, in the background, urging him to reject the idea—telling him to hang up. John would be affable and charming, seemingly amused; Martha would be audibly unamused, reminding him of other, more pressing obligations and of his repeated promises not to take on ephemeral and unremunerative assignments. She wanted him to concentrate on serious work, and it’s hard to look at
Odd Jobs
and the three collections that followed—
More Matter
(1999),
Due Considerations
(2007), and the posthumous
Higher Gossip
(2011)—and not agree with her. Behind the question of whether he should have bothered to preserve miscellaneous trifles such as the squib on beauty for
W
or “Five Great Novels About Loving” (which he included in
Due Considerations
) lies the deeper question of whether he should have written them in the first place. But as he would say, he couldn’t help himself.

Martha kept a vigilant eye on his incoming mail. This was gatekeeping of an essential kind, made necessary by his fame. In addition to the editors soliciting work, and the academics from all over the world who wrote inviting him to read or lecture or participate in workshops and seminars, there were eager characters with more complicated agendas: literary groupies and other overzealous fans; avid and avaricious collectors; unscrupulous journalists hungry for a revealing interview; and dogged scholars with intrusive biographical queries. Martha occasionally made notes on letters of this kind, highlighting particularly egregious requests with a yellow marker and scrawling ferocious comments and directives in the margins. The gist was always that the supplicant was hoping to take advantage of Updike, invade his privacy, or profit in some nefarious way—and that Updike must protect himself with a categorical
no
. She warned again and again against agreeing to projects that would allow the curious and the greedy to eat up his time and encroach upon his private life or his copyright.

On the morning of Wednesday, March 18, 1992, he found his mailbox flooded, but with more welcome missives. Elizabeth had come up with the idea of contacting all his friends, along with a variety of celebrities, and asking them to send sixtieth-birthday greetings; hundreds complied. Saul Steinberg sent a drawing; Susan Lucci of the soap opera
All My Children
sent a signed photo; Norman Mailer sent a friendly note. Martha and John drove to Boston that morning, to the Gardner Museum, where they saw the empty frames marking the places where paintings had once hung, paintings stolen on his birthday two years earlier.
*
(This was the notorious heist in which thirteen works of art were snatched, including three paintings by Rembrandt and one by Updike’s favorite, Vermeer.) In the afternoon there was a small birthday party back at the house, with a cake. Later there was yet another cake: it was poker night, and his cronies had decided that they, too, would celebrate his big birthday.

The novel he wrote in his sixtieth year was another project that tied up loose ends. In
Memories of the Ford Administration
, he recycled his Buchanan material and paired it in a kind of prose diptych with an imaginative reworking of the many months of “sexual disarray” he spent in Boston, vacillating between Mary and Martha, a period more or less coterminous with Gerald Ford’s presidency. “I’ve been carrying Buchanan around with me for years,” he explained to Dick Cavett, “and I had to get rid of him.” Updike succeeded at last in writing historical fiction, but with a postmodern twist: he invented a historian, Alf Clayton, who’s also been carrying Buchanan around for years, and presented fragments of Alf’s incomplete opus, a kind of speculative biographical history padded out with fiction. Alf’s writings about a president criticized for vacillating between North and South (“There is a civilized heroism to indecision,” says Alf defensively) fitted snugly with Updike’s framing narrative, which is all about his own domestic dithering, circa 1975: Alf has left his wife but can’t fully commit to his mistress. Updike was doubling back to the fork in the road that led to his life at Haven Hill. But there’s another twist: he guides the wavering Alf along the road he himself did not take. At the end of the Ford administration, Alf does not marry his mistress or even divorce the mother of his children; dropped by his mistress, he returns to the family home, where he and his wife resume their marriage and are, for the next fifteen years and counting, “fairly content.” Alf tells us, “Real life is in essence anti-climactic.” Dizzying depths of irony are contained in that simple sentence, which reminds us, among other things, of the real-life climax of the story Alf and Updike tried so hard to write: the slaughter of the Civil War that began six weeks after the end of Buchanan’s presidency.

Framing the Buchanan material, the memoir of Alf’s domestic secession reads like a counterfactual history of Updike’s own adventures: the story of the time he almost married Martha but ended up back with Mary instead. Alf’s wife, Norma (“the Queen of Disorder”: artistic, vague, maternal), and his mistress, Genevieve (“the Perfect Wife”: peremptory, efficient, snobbish), bear only an incidental physical resemblance to Mary and Martha, but the psychic tug-of-war played out between them is a replay of what actually happened—except, of course, for the eventual outcome. Would John and Mary have been “fairly content” had they stayed together? Was John any more than “fairly content” with Martha? As Alf would say, real life is anticlimactic. On the back cover of
Memories of the Ford Administration
, a grinning Updike plays peekaboo, hands in front of his face; on his ring finger one can just make out a glint of gold, the wedding band he wore after his marriage to Martha.
*

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?”

T
HREE 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.