Authors: Adam Begley
The unnamed narrator could be David Kern, but he could just as easily be John Updike. Identifying himself as a writer, he claims authorship of one of Updike’s published poems, “Shipbored,” and tells us that he composed it sitting by the bedside of his ailing grandmother in his parents’ kerosene-lit house. Though he reminds us of the digestive process whereby “would-be novelists” such as he condense and transform experience (“We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves”), and though he does fictionalize certain minor details (his father-in-law is a surgeon rather than a Unitarian minister), it’s more than usually tempting to treat the personal elements of this story as undiluted autobiography.
Much as
The Poorhouse Fair
had been a tribute to his maternal grandfather, John Hoyer, “Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their
best
present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength.
Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories.
Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by
The New Yorker
. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at
The New Yorker
he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least.
Published in
The New Yorker
on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy
died
,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt him going.” Eric climbs the stairs to view the body and announces on his return, “He died
well
.”
*
Linda laughs at the oddity of the remark. “Perhaps,” she tells us, “I had expected Eric to see the chariot of fire and feel the whirlwind and show me the mantle.” For her, the important thing is that Eric felt her father “going”—proof that he has inherited the “prophetic spirit,” that the mantle has been passed.
Updike never commented on the fanciful mythology his mother elaborated in her fiction (the idea that she married only to conceive a son, and that her son’s writing career was somehow related to her father’s “prophetic spirit”—in other words that she was a crucial link in a generational chain of spiritual and creative greatness), but
his
version of the story she embroidered so lavishly in “Translation” is utterly free of supernatural agency—nobody feels anybody “going.” Updike’s approach suggests that when he chose to revisit his grandfather’s deathbed scene, essentially rewriting the passage from Linda’s story, his aim was to debunk; he wanted both to set the factual record straight and to remind Maxwell (and anyone else in a position to compare) that he possessed a “quality of mind” quite
un
like his mother’s.
Updike’s version begins with a delusional episode. The old man becomes convinced that his bed is on fire, bellows, and tries to spring from it. His wife struggles to restrain him, and they fall together to the floor, which is where their only daughter, bursting into the room, finds them. She asks what they’re doing, and her father (“with level sarcasm”) answers, “Why, we’re on the floor.” Whereupon he dies—“his heart stopped.” When the grandchild (the unnamed narrator) arrives with his wife and in-laws, his father greets them with the news: “Jesus . . . you’ve come at a funny time; we think Pop’s died.” At the crucial moment, when the old couple are on the floor by the bed, Linda has the dying man addressing her in a “matter-of-fact and conversational” tone; Updike substitutes “level sarcasm”—that sarcasm, I suspect, was intended to deflate his mother’s grandiose mythic notions about the “prophetic spirit.” The only remaining trace of biblical allusion in Updike’s version is the burning bed—a figment of a ninety-year-old’s delirious imagination, part of a pattern of imagery rather than a supernatural occurrence. As if to underline his distaste for mystical mumbo-jumbo, the narrator mentions that the grandfather’s funeral was made “ridiculous” by the “occult presumption” of his fellow Masons.
It would be misleading to say that Updike’s story is devoid of religious sentiment. If “Blessed Man” registers his response to the death of beloved grandparents (his first intimate exposure to death of any kind), the lesson he seems to have learned is that ceremonies are of limited use, but that faith may be helpful. With trembling knees, the narrator comes downstairs from the room where his grandfather’s body lies and is “shocked to discover . . . that we have no gestures adequate to answer the imperious gestures of nature.” As the family waits for the undertaker, they carry on with their impromptu wake; the narrator is “amazed” by the poverty of their social gestures. In addition to the death of the grandparents, elsewhere in the story Updike presents us with the inexorable dwindling of a company of Polynesian men cast ashore on a remote island (“No women were among them, so their numbers could only diminish”), a story, he says, “of life stripped of the progenitive illusion.” He quotes this famous, disheartening passage from Pascal’s
Pensées
:
Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope.
Pascal tells us that this is an image of man’s condition—it’s also Updike’s worst nightmare. Condemned to death, we devise social rituals that are ineffectual, offering scant comfort, let alone hope. There
is
hope, however, for the efficacy of faith—or at least that’s what the balance of the story seems to suggest. Faith bridges the gap between our good intentions (the desire, say, to resurrect a grandparent with words alone) and what we actually achieve: a dozen pages of prose fiction. The story is impressive and profoundly moving, but it can’t mitigate the crushing certainty of our doom or the possibility (very real to the narrator) of imminent collective extinction (“I feel the world is ending”). This is how Updike leaves it: “I thought that this story, fully told, would become without my willing it a happy story, a story full of joy; had my powers been greater, we would know. As it is, you, like me, must take it on faith.”
Seven months after “Blessed Man,” he wrote a sequel of sorts, also in stitched-together, “fugal” form. It’s hard to read “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” which he sent off to Maxwell in early May 1961, and not think that we’re once again reading raw autobiography. Here’s another death-haunted young writer, this time consumed by adulterous passion and horrified by the idea of actually cheating on his wife: “The universe that so easily permitted me to commit adultery became, by logical steps each one of which went more steeply down than the one above it, a universe that would easily permit me to die.” And yet these are the words of a character, David Kern, subject to fears and scruples not necessarily shared by the author. Updike was surely quite aware that he could break a vow spoken at the altar without being struck dead or ejecting God from the heavens—without, indeed, disturbing the universe in any way. There’s no doubt that he’s working here with intimate autobiographical material, dogmatically inserting at every opportunity incidental detail plucked from real life, such as the name of the street where he lived in Oxford and the exact day and hour of his daughter’s birth—and that he’s counting on the sense of authenticity those details convey. In the letter he sent to Maxwell along with the manuscript, he reported that the events “shadowed” in the story continued to unfold in his own life, making him wonder where to end the tale.
There are backward glances in “Packed Dirt,” but there’s nothing like the sustained nostalgia of “Blessed Man.” David Kern’s narrative—or, rather, his string of juxtaposed narratives—is rooted in the present, and certain scenes buzz with an astonishingly urgent immediacy. The kernel of the story is again an actual event. On March 18, 1961, his twenty-ninth birthday, Updike learned that his father had been taken to the Reading hospital with heart trouble. Wesley had been experiencing chest pains and shortness of breath, and when Linda finally convinced him to see the doctor, an electrocardiogram revealed the seriousness of his condition: he had suffered a mild heart attack. Like David Kern, Updike made the eight-hour drive down to Pennsylvania. He spent the night at his parents’ farm, and in the morning he drove with his mother to sit by his father’s hospital bed. Then he drove home again, straight back to Massachusetts. All in all, a 750-mile round-trip.
In the story, on the night before David’s birthday (which falls on a Saturday, just as Updike’s did in 1961), he and his wife attend a party. He dances with another woman, a “friend”; as they dance, they touch, and between dances touch some more, ratcheting up the erotic tension:
Her back seemed mysteriously taut and hard. . . . In a sheltered corner of the room we stopped dancing altogether and talked, and what I distinctly remember is how her hands, beneath the steady and opaque appraisal of her eyes, in agitation blindly sought mine and seized and softly gripped, with infantile instinct, my thumbs. Just my thumbs she held, and as we talked she moved them this way and that as if she were steering me. When I closed my eyes, the red darkness inside my lids was vibrant, and when I rejoined my wife, and held her to dance, she asked, “Why are you panting?”
The specificity of the gestures is a powerful, almost hypnotic moment for the reader—as it is for David. Later, home in bed, he and his wife make love: “Irritated by whatever illicit stimulations, we took it out on each other.” Then, unable to sleep, he replays the events of the party (“That feathery anxious embrace of my erect thumbs tormented me in twenty postures. My stomach turned in love of that woman”) and plunges into a spiritual black hole, terrified by the unavoidable certainty of death and the nonexistence of God. The crisis is fueled by his Sunday school conviction that “to lust after a woman in thought is the same as committing adultery.” For comfort he turns to his wife (“Wake up, Elaine. I’m so frightened”); the irony goes unmentioned. The next day, his birthday, the crisis continues, at least until his mother’s phone call; when she delivers the bad news about his father’s illness, David perks right up: “All day death had been advancing under cover and now it had declared its position. My father had engaged the enemy and it would be defeated.”
From the moment his mother telephones about his father, there’s no further mention of Friday night’s events, of “illicit stimulations” or his “love of that woman.” On the contrary, David becomes a cheerleader for marriage, telling a hitchhiking soldier he picks up on the way to Pennsylvania that the young man should “absolutely” marry his girlfriend: “I told him I had married at the age of twenty-one and had never been sorry.” At his parents’ farm he sleeps badly: “I missed my wife’s body, that weight of memory, beside me. I was enough of a father to feel lost out of my nest of little rustling souls.” The irony again goes unmentioned. The proximate cause of this astonishing transformation from would-be adulterer to model family man is the thought of his ailing father—whose role as his son’s protector assumes a vast importance now that he’s unwell. When David is cold during the night after his long drive (“My mother had mistaken me for a stoic like my father and had not put enough blankets on the bed”), he drapes an old overcoat over his blankets to keep him warm; the overcoat belongs to his father, of course. The next morning, when mother and son set off for the hospital, David insists that they drive his car. He doesn’t want to get behind the wheel of the family’s ’53 Dodge—not just because it’s an old secondhand heap but also because he doesn’t want to assume the role of the patriarch: “My father’s place was between me and heaven; I was afraid of being placed adjacent to that far sky.” Fear of his own death, love of his father, fear of his father’s death—a potent blend of emotion reinforces David’s conservative streak. Having driven so far to perform a time-honored ritual, the bedside visit to a relative in the hospital, he discovers what he believes to be the moral of his story: “We in America need ceremonies, is I suppose . . . the point of what I have written.”