Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (8 page)

'My God,' he enthused as we sat, 'we're surrounded by all kinds of sick Americans.' The breakfast crowd in the Wang Center were wary in step and gesture. They were trussed in trusses, braced in braces, coated in powerful lotions, creams, elixirs. 'Bending and bowing in a variety of friezes', to quote from
The Poorhouse Fair
(1959), John Hoyer Updike's youthfully solemn first novel.

All the illness on view had a tonic effect on me. After three weeks of holiday 'parenting' (Updike's word: his speech and prose are permissively sprinkled with modernisms like 'frontal', 'focusing', 'conflicted' and 'judgmental'), I felt like checking into Mass. General myself.

'It makes a change', I said, 'from the triumphalism of the beach.'

'My
actinic caritosis
is a
result
of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. Look at that woman's glasses!' A lady groped by in what could have been a pair of welder's goggles. 'I guess she really doesn't want any light in her eyes. My God, look at him!'

As Updike feasted his senses on the scene, I reached grimly for the tape-recorder. He hesitated. 'We're not really going to do this, are we? We're just going to have a nice chat,' he said, prophetically enough, 'and then you're going to go home and write a long piece about me and my work.'

Lauded, harassed, honoured, microinspected, Updike is by now simply stoical about the 'attention' his work attracts. And he is a gentleman, and a good old pro. The enemies of promise — or of reasonable productivity — used to be Hollywood, fancy journalism, alcohol, and so on. These days the main enemy is being interviewed. Updike could spend his life doing little else. In a recent
New Yorker
he published a story (and it is a full-time job keeping up with Updike: everywhere you look he is blurting out essays, poems, memoirs, reviews) in which a dissident Czech poet yearns to be rearrested and put back in jail, so that he can write some verse and stop being interviewed.

'A Korean professor might come and torment me for an hour. German TV keeps thinking it wants to stop by. A number of American universities are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. Once a year or so I rise early and do
Good Morning America.
It's kind of a raffish experience. You go in all groggy and sit in the Green Room with Mel Tormé or the father of seventeen girls or some such celebrity of the moment.

'Writers can get over-interviewed. The whole performance indicates that you are quite a swell fellow just by being
you,
whereas we know that what merit we have, if any, resides elsewhere. It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.'

Updike can hardly complain - and he doesn't complain — about the abrasions of self-exposure, because he has taken care of all that in his stories and novels. For some reason (won't anyone tell us why?), modern fiction tends towards the autobiographical, and American fiction more than most, and John Updike more than any. The tendency is still regarded as a 'flaw', in Updike and in general; but one might as usefully accuse Shakespeare for having, in his tragedies, a 'weakness' for kings and noblemen and warriors. The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are now.

Yet the case of Updike is unquestionably extreme. The textural contrast between your first and second wife's pubic hair, for instance, is something that most writers feel their readers can get along without. The novelists of yesteryear would gallantly take leave of their creations at the bedroom door. Updike tags along, not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom. Indeed, he sends a little Japanese camera crew in there after them. Humbert, in
Lolita,
wishes that he could turn his nymphet inside out and gorge himself on her very organs. Updike unpeels and vivisects his characters in this way. (If humans do it, it's fair copy.) And so it is with all the other intimacies of thought and feeling. 'It's all in
Couples,'
he will concede. Or: 'The novels are a fair record of what I felt.' Or: 'It's all in the books.'

It is also all in the
New Yorker.
When I was a student, living on the Iffley Road, Oxford, I sometimes wished that E.B. White would call by, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to offer me a job on the
New Yorker.
It never happened. But it happened to Updike. He was at the Ruskin; the call came on the strength of early stories and proven versatility on the
Harvard Lampoon.
He was already married ('hand in hand, smaller than Hansel and GreteP), already a father. Pictured with his first child, he looks to me like an oddjobbing baby-sitter, willing and gentle enough, no doubt, but far too young to be of much use. He was twenty-three.

'I left New York after only two years there. The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect. The literary atmosphere struck me as ugly, and still does. Resentful, poisonous, a
squeezed
feeling. I came up here to be out of harm's way: inaccessibility is the best way of saying no. But Boston is becoming an honorary borough of New York.'

Under the enlightened patronage of the magazine — an unbroken relationship - Updike established himself in Ipswich, Mass. 'There was space here. We raised the children — or they seemed to raise themselves.' And so did the poems, stories and novels: earnest, gawky, forgiving, celebratory. He did his 'secluded and primitive' childhood in
Olinger Stories
and elsewhere, his dad in
The Centaur,
and his mum in
Of the Farm.
Fame, sophistication, modernity and wealth arrived with
Couples
(1968), when Updike did Ipswich.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
Couples
struck enough people this way, and was soon labelled 'the anatomy of a generation'. Its broad success also depended on a combination of the intensely literary and the near-pornographic. A cat's-cradle of vigorous adultery, as filtered through the sensibility of a modern James — or a modern Joyce. What Joyce did for the residents of Dublin, Updike recklessly offered to do for the dreamy dentists and Byronic building-contractors of 'Tarbox':

. . . the neighbours' boy linked to her by a handkerchief, lithe. Lower classes have that litheness. Generations of hunger. Give me your poor. Marcia brittle. Janet fat. Angela drifty and that Whitman gawky, resisting something, air. Eddie's Vespa but no Ford, Carol's car, He home and she shopping. Buying back liniment. I ache afterwards .. . Death. Hamster. Shattered glass. He eased up on the accelerator.

Didn't ease up. Pressed on. Five hundred pages like this.
Couples
is littered with brilliancies; but the smile and the flinch alternate too rapidly for the reader's comfort. The book seemed to be Updike's pinnacle at the time. Now it looks more like a shimmering false summit.

Meanwhile, as
New Yorker
readers must have been only too aware, all was not well with the Updike marriage. The annual damage-checks were arriving in the form of the Maples Stories, worldly comedies of disintegration with titles like 'Waiting Up', 'Sublimating', 'Separating' and 'Divorcing: A Fragment'. Sample home truth, sample gallantry (the subject here is 'guilt-avoidance'):

'I've decided to kick you out. I'm going to ask you to leave town.'

Abruptly full, his heart thumped; it was what he wanted. 'O.K.,' he said carefully. 'If you think you can manage.'

. . . 'Things are stagnant,' she explained, 'stuck; we're not going anywhere.'

'I will not give her up,' he interposed.

'Don't tell me, you've told me.'

'Nor do I see you giving him up.'

'I would if you asked. Are you asking?'

'No. Horrors. He's all I've got.'

Soon, young David Updike was publishing his account of the divorce, in the
New Yorker.
Then Updike's mother ('I'm in a writer sandwich,' says Updike warily) weighed in with her version, in the
New Yorker.
'I've gotten used to being written about,' says his ex-wife Mary, quoted (for a change) in the
New York Times.
Open marriages are not often as open as this. The loop, I mean to say, the circuit or the food chain, is shockingly brief. There is something predatory or vampiric in it - a hint of domestic cannibalism. It represents a kind of love to set these things down, as Updike has always claimed ('loving if not flattering'), and a kind of fidelity too. But a writer's kind, and therefore quite ruthless.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is
like.
Far more compellingly, to some, it will tell you what a writer is
like to interview.
A personality is more palatable than a body of work, so all the faceting and detail of the life and writing is subsumed into thumbnail approximation. Who is John Updike? A garrulous adulterer who lives near the sea? By rights, he should have turned up at Mass. General with lipstick on his collar, and then disappeared every ten minutes to supervise abortions for Mabel and Missy and Charity and Hope. For the record, he was charm incarnate. But as for what Updike is
like —
in his head, in his private culture — I knew all that already.

In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity. The brain itself is serendipitous and horrendously encyclopaedic: he knows about home improvement ('twenty feet of 2" pine, quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1
½"
finishing nails'), music ('the gigue was marked
allegro.
It began with some stabbing phrases —
dit-duh (a-d), dit-duh (b-c)'),
cars ('padded tilt steering wheel, lumbar support lever for adjustable driver comfort, factory-installed AM/FM/MPX'), trees ('the sapling sugar maples and the baby red oaks'), computers ('rotate (molecule (protein 293)) (angles (from alpha) (to delta) (steps (*0.001 (– delta alpha))))'), painting ('she halts in the pose of Michelangelo's slave, of Munch's madonna, of Ingres' urn-bearer'), boats ('Arthur's newly bought gaff-rigged Herreshoff 12½"), photosynthesis ('the five-sixths of the triosephosphate pool that does not form starch is returned to ribulose 5-phosphate'), pornography, theology, nuclear physics, lino-typing, gold futures, aerodynamics, Africa, cookery, cosmogony and I don't know what-all. The unblinkingness of his eye is opposed to the mighty wooziness of his heart. He is a romantic, an Arcadian, a tremendous (and not always a tasteful) yearner for purity, innocence, the cadences of goodness. He is greedy, androgynous, devout, determined, intolerably sentimental and unforgivably bright.

What makes this chaos meaningful, and what lifts the work from the merely phenomenal, is the way time is acting on it. Countervailingly, and increasingly, Updike's prose is sour, withering, crafty, painfully comic. Such an immersion in the physical world, it seems, will tend not towards nostalgia but towards an invigorating and majestic cynicism. Mortality and its terrors were the fount of much of the early mawkishness; now they form the backing for a new robustness, a humorous pessimism that Updike has fatalistically embraced.

'Yes, it's another part of me, isn't it?' he says. 'Maybe it's the best part of me. It's funny that I can be so sour when I'm such a sunny, cheerful individual. But when I get going on it. . .'

'It comes.'

'It comes. It comes.'

It comes in the revitalised form of Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, the vulgar bohunk he left behind in Pennsylvania. Rabbit is not the 'Updike who never went to Harvard', as some commentators claim; he is part of Updike's mind and always has been, part of all our minds, the material man who sulks and gloats about sex and money. With
Rabbit is Rich
(1982), the third in the sequence, the hitherto fruitless homage to Joyce finds a truly modern application; at last Updike is elaborating and not just annotating
Ulysses,
urging it further into the twentieth century.

It comes in the form of Henry Bech, the eponym of
Bech: A Book
(1970) and
Bech is Back
(1983). 'I keep meaning to kill Bech,' says Updike, viciously; but he won't go away. Rabbit differs from Updike the man. Bech differs from Updike the writer: he is highbrow, cosmopolitan, single and Jewish, thus allowing Updike, through a feat of empathic daring, to arrogate a culture that has 'kept the secret of its laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of the literary world'. Updike echoes Malamud: 'By developing a Jewish persona I was saying something like: "Look, I'm really Jewish too. We're all Jewish here." ' But he was also challenging that domination, typically demanding more than his fair share. Another voice, another 'third person', witty, wounded and historically central.

Then there is mainstream Updike, the fiction from the horse's mouth. Or (it must be said) from the horse's backside, in the case of
The Witches of Eastwick
(1984), which has just been filmed. The movie is so preposterous that critics have been protective about its source, forgetting that the book is preposterous too: crammed with beauties, but winsome, whimsical, haloed in a seamless futility. It would appear, though, that Updike is the better for the occasional holidays from merit (or therapeutic indulgences), because his most recent book is the near-masterpiece
Roger's Version.
A meditation on death and creation in the pale light of a modern city, it is the richest, funniest and gloomiest book that Updike has yet written. To him, the future may not look as bright as it once did, but to his readers it has never looked brighter.