John Updike: The Final Ornament

In an aptly titled collection of essays called Picked-up Pieces, published more than 40 years ago, the late John Updike wrote of a childhood habit:

“…whose pleasure returns to me whenever I assemble a collection of prose or poetry or whenever, indeed, I work several disparate incidents or impressions into the shape of a single story…I would draw on one sheet of paper an assortment of objects – flowers, animals, stars, toaster, chairs, comic-strip creatures, ghosts, noses – and connect them with lines, a path of two lines, so that they all became the fruit of a single impossible tree. The exact age when this creative act so powerfully pleased me I cannot recall; the wish to make collections, to assemble sets, is surely a deep urge of the human mind in its playful, artistic aspect.”

In a later interview alluding to this essay, Updike added that “(a) kindred human urge, I suppose, is toward the exhaustive. We like a feeling of mopping up, of complete fullness.”

Connecting, and completing, were indeed the life project of Updike. A kind of psychic recycler, he never let anything go to waste – no view of the passing landscape, no theological rumination, no illicit sexual experience, it seemed, failed to be composted into one of his journals, and from there to blossom in his novels, essays, short stories, or poems.

The observations were invariably acute and the manner in which they were integrated into his plots were rarely awkward or forced. He was John Updike, after all; his least observation or image surpassed the best of almost any of his contemporaries not named Nabokov.

Book: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

Author: John Updike

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday

Publication date: 2009-06

Length: 292 pages

Format: Hardcover

Price: $25.95

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/u/updike-fatherstears-cover.jpgBut the overall effect of this productive neurosis could be wearying. It wasn’t so much that Updike was self-centered; as a critic, he was tremendously sympathetic to his fellow writers, and as a fiction writer, he was not incapable of creating fairly well-drawn portraits of characters other than his invented alter-egos.

But the anxiety that lurked behind every one of his short stories and novels, that compulsion to cram in everything that had ever happened to him, was all too evident, and eventually shuffled him into the second rank of novelists. It had something to do, I think, with his failure to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

As a younger writer, he often wrote about sex as if he were a gangly kid terribly proud and surprised to have actually lost his virginity. The way he went on about his own experiences, and/or those of his male protagonists, made him sound like an acne-scarred sophomore in the locker room, albeit the smartest sophomore of all.

Well into middle age, his fictionalized accounts of his real-life infidelities were exhaustive in their psychological and physical ornamentation, and the braggadocio was often inadvertently undercut by his metaphoric use of a magnifying glass to examine in the minutest detail the women he or his characters had slept with. (A female friend of mine grumpily noted that although she admired Updike’s evident genius, she had finally stopped reading him because she was “tired of reading detailed descriptions of women’s nipples.”)

In his later years, Updike seemed to focus upon the wrinkles of old age just as eagerly as he’d once embraced sex; in a weird parallel with his earlier preoccupations, he seemed almost to take pride in his various infirmities and detumescences. Put it this way: As a loyal reader of Updike, I became weary of reading about his encroaching decrepitude years before his actual death, and so his passing came as a particular shock to me precisely because his forebodings had seemed to me so put-on and exaggerated.

But he did die, and rather too young, and now his posthumous volume, My Father’s Tears, serves as something like the tombstone that the hypochondriac arranged to have engraved upon his passing: “See, I told you I was sick.”

Cutting the Power

Cutting the Power

Read retrospectively, then, My Father’s Tears embodies a grave sort of authority, although the stories themselves, though ruminative in tone, are not lugubrious. This is, in part, because of Updike’s old habit of focusing in great detail on very small things, so that the symbols of death take on more force than the impending death itself.

“Personal Archaeology”, for example, tells of an elderly landowner, Craig Martin, who uncovers strata of forgotten household accoutrements: “his grandfather’s Fraktur-inscribed shaving mug; a dented copper ashtray little Craig had often watched his father crush out the stubs of Old Gold cigarettes in; a pair of brass candlesticks, like erect twists of rope…”

At the story’s end, Craig tells of coming across “half-buried golf balls, their lower sides beginning to rot. He remembered how, when first moving to this place, and still hopeful for his game, he would stand on the edge of the lawn and hit a few old balls – never more, thriftily, than three at a time – into the woods down below. They seemed to soar forever before disappearing into the trees.”

The way things fade away and rot on their own, independent of the observer, is one of the themes of My Father’s Tears, as in the story “Free”, in which the main character, Henry, remembers his former mistress Leila, and how she had “abruptly stripped, one sunny but chill October day, and executed a perfect jackknife – her bottom a sudden white heart, split down the middle, in the center of his vision – into the lake, off the not yet disassembled dock and float. She surfaced with her head as small and soaked as an otter’s, her eyelids fluttering, and her mouth exclaiming, “Woooh!”

Many years later, “freed” by his wife’s death, Henry visits Leila, and discovers that not only had the years “redistributed her weight toward the middle and loosened the flesh of her brown arms,” but that she had “become vulgar, in the way of a woman with not enough to do but think about her body and her means.” So her problem, apparently, is not only that she is sagging, but that she’s trying to do something about it. Henry, accordingly, decides against resuming the old affair, but (to his credit and Updike’s) not without at least acknowledging “her small serious mouth, its upper lip weathered to a comb of small creases, and her lovely eyes, gleaming like jewels in crumpled paper…”

Updike, who was not an inexplicable genius like, say, Haruki Murakami, but rather an entirely explicable one, always seems to get the little things right. An Updike-like figure named David Kern gets hopelessly lost in the exurbs on the way to a reunion with some old high-school classmates (including, naturally, a decrepit old love), and finds that “the highway surroundings were thinning into countryside – distant isolated house windows, darkened low stores for carpeting and auto parts. He wanted to scream.”

The best story in this collection, “The Walk With Elizanne”, is, yet again, a reminiscence of a long-ago love affair, and also centers on David Kern. In this case, the affair consisted of a couple of innocent kisses between David and a high-school classmate, never to be repeated. Between kisses, “they stared at one another, her black eyes button-bright in the sodium streetlight, amid the restless faint shadows of the half-brown big sycamore leaves.”

But after the second kiss, they back off, thinking, wrongly as it turns out, that this is merely the beginning of a long-term relationship. Anyone who has ever missed a romantic or sexual opportunity and come to regret it later (which is to say, anyone breathing) knows that there are few misconceptions about life more irredeemable or heartbreaking than this one, a version of the words with which this story ends: “We’ll have plenty of time.”

Updike took full advantage of his own limited time, and managed to write memorably about all of life’s memorable moments except, of course, for the moment of his own death. In fact, halfway through this volume, remembering reading that account of Updike’s childhood habit, I developed an image in my own head of a Christmas tree in which the ornaments have been “hung” in bare air before the tree that connects them had been completely drawn. A few decorations, accordingly, were left floating, and this sense of incompleteness – that Updike’s grand life project, whatever its shortcomings, would be forever unfinished – began to nag at me as the pages in the volume dwindled down to the final few.

What, specifically, was bothering me? Perhaps it was that, however understandably, Updike was never able to describe his own death in the same manner that he had described everything else in his life.

But then, by some startling synchronicity, I came across this passage in the very last piece of this very last collection of his short stories, just a couple of pages from the end:

“Another curious habit of mine can be observed only in December, when, in the mid-sized sea-view Cape Ann colonial the wife and I moved to thirty years ago, I run up on the flagpole five strands of Christmas lights, forming a tent-shape that at night strongly suggests the festoons on an invisible tree. I have rigged two extension cords to connect with an outside spotlight so the illusion can be controlled from an inside switch. Before heading up to the bedroom … I switch it off. I could do it without a glance outdoors but in fact I move to the nearby window with my arm extended, my fingers on the switch, so that I can see the lights go out.

In one nanosecond, the drooping strands are burning bright, casting their image of a Christmas tree out into the world, and in the next, so quick that there seems no time at all while the signal travels along the wires from the switch, the colored, candle-flamed-shaped bulbs – red, orange, green, blue, white – are doused … the lights are there, imprinting the dark with holiday cheer, and then they are not.”

And then he was not. Ever the completist, Updike had managed to come full circle and to finish his life-long project of drawing, and connecting, the things of his world. And then, like the master performer that he was, he turned off the lights and disappeared.