Authors: Adam Begley
He never moderates his joy, though I am gradually growing deafer to it. That must be the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn as remarkable as the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses.
Growing gradually deaf to the rooster’s joy is analogous to being blind to Joy’s good looks. For Updike as a writer, calluses on the soul would be nothing short of catastrophic; after all, his self-appointed mission was to “give the mundane its beautiful due.” For Updike as a father and a husband, the deadening calluses were inescapable, a stubborn fact of family life; he became hardened not just to its joys but to its sorrows.
Like “Daughter, Last Glimpses Of,” “Son” is less a story than a meditation. It begins with a portrait drawn from life, an exact likeness of the guitar- and soccer-playing David as a sensitive, precocious, emotionally volatile fifteen-year-old with an adolescent’s impatient yearning for perfection. Updike then travels back in time to give us a quick look at himself as a son, of his father as a son, and even of his grandfather as a son. Of the many threads linking the generations, the most conspicuous are blocked or conflicted emotion (“I love touching him,” Updike writes about David, “but don’t often dare”) and the sons’ urge to escape, their disappointment, their rage. The absence of any kind of narrative seems entirely appropriate to the many-sided relations between a son and his parents; the confusing admixture of love, hate, yearning, and disdain is almost too clotted and messy for the stricture of organized plot.
And yet Updike tried to work three generations’ worth of conflicted father-son feeling into “The Gun Shop,” which was inspired by a trip John and David and Wesley took to have a Remington .22 repaired during the family’s Thanksgiving visit to Plowville in 1971. Firing the gun, which Wesley had given to John the Christmas after they moved to the farm (the exact weapon wielded by David Kern in “Pigeon Feathers”), was one of the treats David and Michael associated with visits to their grandparents. On this occasion, the rifle refused to fire, David threw a tantrum, and Wesley suggested they take it to a nearby gunsmith, who fashioned a new firing pin on the spot. The arc of the story Updike constructed from this “adventure” runs from the tantrum the boy (Murray) throws in front of his father (Ben) after the gun refuses to fire to the father’s relief and pride the next day when the repaired gun works and the boy hits the target. Simmering below the surface, and sometimes erupting into full view, is a fierce, almost deadly oedipal struggle declared in the first paragraph: Ben remembers Murray’s fourteenth birthday party, when he had “tapped the child on the back of the head to settle him down, and his son had pointed the cake knife at his father’s chest and said, ‘Hit me again and I’ll kill you.’ ” This note is sounded throughout: After Murray’s “infantile” tantrum when the gun won’t fire, Ben is in a “murderous” mood; in the gun shop, which “smelled of death,” the talk is of combat, “blood and guts”; Ben’s father, also called Murray, says wryly that his motto is “Kill or be killed”; and at the end of the story, when his son’s shots, aimed with “murderous concentration,” are hitting the target and his own are not, Ben tells the boy, “You’re killing me.”
*
The age-old pattern—the new generation pushing the old out of the way—was much on Updike’s mind, not just because the adolescent David was crowding up from behind but because his father, now past seventy, was visibly unwell.
The elder Murray is the spitting image of Wesley; imagine George Caldwell from
The Centaur
after he has plodded on for another twenty-odd years. A retired schoolteacher who had trouble maintaining classroom discipline, he’s a kindhearted, garrulous, irrepressibly enthusiastic man who nonetheless embarrasses and irritates his son. It’s a vivid likeness:
Ben’s father . . . had become an old man, but a wonderfully strange old man, with a long, yellow-white face, a blue nose, and the erect carriage of a child who is straining to see. His circulation was poor, he had been hospitalized, he lived from pill to pill, he had uncharacteristic quiet spells that Ben guessed were seizures of pain; yet his hopefulness still dominated any room he was in.
Wesley had been in poor health since his heart attack in 1961, and was hospitalized after suffering a mild stroke in late 1969. Updike was clearly anticipating his death when he wrote “The Gun Shop” in February 1972—and two months later, Wesley was rushed to the hospital, again with heart trouble. John and Mary were in Florence, on vacation with André Deutsch, when Linda telephoned to say that Wesley was gravely ill. They took the next flight to London, rushing to catch a connection to New York, but in London they learned that Wesley had died only a few hours after Linda’s call. Updike’s story, when it was published in
The New Yorker
in November, became a kind of memorial to his father, a clear-eyed and affectionate tribute, as honest and unsparing as
The Centaur
.
The old man in “The Gun Shop” is, as he himself would admit, “a pain in the old bazoo”—and at the same time unquestionably virtuous, a good man, like George Caldwell. When Ben tells his wife, “I’d like to be nice like my father, but he was so nice I can’t be,” it has the ring of autobiographical confession. Ben knows what a good father he’s had; he knows that he’s been “much less a father than his own had been”; he knows that he’s “hard” on his son, teasing and troubling him, itching to correct his faults. Generally exasperated by his father’s bumbling kindness, Ben is especially annoyed when the elder Murray’s awkward and fulsome flattery is directed at his grandson; one Murray praising the other means that Ben has been bypassed. He resents being squeezed out by the generation on either side.
Read in the context of Updike’s family life, “The Gun Shop” is a highly personal and revealing self-assessment. It underscores a sad paradox: although he could anatomize his own failings with perfect clarity, he seemed incapable of changing how he behaved. He wanted to be as kind to David as Wesley had been to him, but couldn’t. Similarly, he wanted
not
to be embarrassed and irritated by his father, but couldn’t. He was powerless to make up for his own shortcomings as a father and as a son—a fact he saw plainly as a writer.
His father’s death brought with it regret, liberation, and a weight of responsibility. In another memorial, “The House Growing,” a melancholy poem he wrote less than a week after the funeral, Updike imagines that each new death—first his grandparents’, now his father’s—is “adding rooms of silence” to the old sandstone farmhouse. The poem doesn’t mention Linda, now its sole occupant, but she was never far from his thoughts. Wesley’s absence gave John a new burden to shoulder: a sixty-seven-year-old widow living alone on an isolated farm 350 miles from her only child. She had become for him exactly the mother he’d invented in
Of the Farm
.
In June, John and Mary and the children took an American vacation: three weeks of driving around western states from motel to motel, starting in Albuquerque and ending up in San Francisco, at Mary’s sister’s house. (The bereaved Linda, writing from Plowville, waved them on cheerfully, advising them to “stay on the right side of the road.”) Thrifty as ever with his experience, and fast as ever, Updike recycled his impressions in a short story—an expert distillation of the trip—and sold it to
The New Yorker
, which ran it in mid-August. “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time”—the title a sly twist on the ubiquitous sixties bumper sticker—is charmingly evocative of both the American West and happy family life, and salted with epigrams about the nation, such as “America conceals immense things” and “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy” and “This is America, a hamburger kingdom, one cuisine, under God, indivisible, with pickles and potato chips for all” and “[W]hen we say ‘American’ it is not a fact, it is an act, of faith, a matter of lines on a map and words on paper, an outline it will take generations and centuries more to fill in.” The children on this road trip aren’t given names (nor is the wife, who develops a headache when the husband’s sexual interest is aroused by her nakedness); they’re a corporate entity that the parents must bargain with and satisfy by supplying them with food and distractions at scheduled intervals. The paterfamilias observes minutely (and narrates in the second person), registering a mellow, musing contentment. The constraints of a sightseeing vacation with four kids aged eleven to seventeen leave plenty of space for his stubborn patriotism, his undisguised love of the “natives” and the landscape they inhabit. His eye takes in the “tawny” valley and, beyond it, “a lesser range of mountains, gray, but gray multitudinously, with an infinity of shades—ash, graphite, cardboard, tomcat, lavender.” He adds, “Such beauty wants to make us weep.”
It’s difficult to avoid the impression that the family portraits Updike executed in the early seventies were merely warm-up exercises, studies he made in preparation for a more ambitious and powerful work. He was feeling his way toward something bigger, and two years after his father’s death he bumped up against it. “Separating” is the dramatic climax of the Maples saga. Richard, who now hopes to marry another woman, is intent on making his “escape,” but before he goes, he must tell his children that he is leaving their mother, leaving home, leaving the family. More minutely accurate than its predecessors in the depiction of a real-life episode, and vastly more distressing, “Separating” was written in mid-July 1974, just a couple of weeks after the events it so faithfully describes.
This is a true story about telling the truth—and concealing it. The Maple parents, we’re told early on, “stood as a thin barrier between the children and the truth”—the sad truth, that is, of the imminent breakup of the family. However, there are some aspects of that truth Richard and Joan are unwilling to reveal: the offstage presence, for instance, of Richard’s lover. They also pretend the decision to split is one they arrived at together, though it’s clear that Richard is the instigator. They delay the unveiling of this partial, repackaged truth, and try to stage-manage the announcement. Though surely convinced that their prevarications are in the children’s best interest, the parents stand between the children and a full and accurate understanding of the circumstances; the “thin barrier” remains. At the last moment, Richard is granted an epiphany, and discovers another, equally sad truth—not one he would be inclined to share.
The lobster-and-champagne dinner he and Joan arrange for the family (ostensibly a homecoming for Judith, who has been away in England for a year, as Liz had been) is meant to set the stage for a serial breaking of the bad news, first to Judith, then John, then Margaret, who is thirteen now and no longer called Bean. Dickie is at a rock concert in Boston, and Richard is to tell him last, after picking him up at the train station. The plan misfires thanks to the copious flow of Richard’s tears, a soggy display of grief that begins as soon as he sits down to dinner:
They became, his tears, a shield for himself against these others—their faces, the fact of their assembly, a last time as innocents, at a table where he sat the last time as head. Tears dropped from his nose as he broke the lobster’s back; salt flavored his champagne as he sipped it; the raw clench at the back of his throat was delicious. He could not help himself.
The tears were Updike’s own, a glandular secretion rather than a literary device, and yet they take on the multivalent meaning of a cleverly chosen metaphor, a token of Richard’s guilt, of his yearning for absolution, and of his stubborn separateness. The tears also demonstrate his ample gift for self-dramatization, self-pity, and the self-serving manipulation of others; they remind us of his fondness for irony, and that he’s essentially incorrigible—he can’t help himself.
Taking a step back from the fiction (in this case, bare fact artfully arranged), we see Updike’s tears flowing at the same prodigious rate, with the same range of significance, and more: the added amazement that he could sit weeping through this traumatic meal and navigate its equally traumatic denouement, all the while gathering up and filing away the detailed impressions that would later give life to a short story. According to two of the three children present, when their father began to cry, their mother said to him, “Coward!” Mary herself had no recollection of saying it, though she thought her children were probably right; “I must at least have thought it,” she said, “that John was using his tears to let the children know right then and there instead of telling them individually as I had wanted him to do.” Whether or not she called him a coward, the tears were certainly his “shield” against the others, behind which the never-resting author was busy doing his work. And in a sense his fiction was a shield, too, a way for him to relive (and reorder) events and emotions at a slight remove from the intensity of the actual, real-time experience of announcing the end of family life as he knew it.
In the story, the tears that distance and protect also hasten the moment of reckoning. Asked why Daddy is crying, Joan is forced to supply the answer, thereby relieving Richard of the obligation to tell his children one by one, face-to-face—“You were having your way,” Joan later points out, “making a general announcement.” Now that the secret is out, Joan elaborates, “levelly, sensibly, reciting what they had prepared.” The younger boy, John, slightly tipsy on champagne, becomes hysterical, and Richard leads him outside, past the clay tennis court the Maples—just like the Updikes—had recently built (“Years ago the Maples had observed how often . . . divorce followed a dramatic home improvement”). They sit together on a grassy rise in the last of the sun. As he comforts his son, he begins to take measure of his actions: “How selfish, how blind, Richard thought. His eyes felt scoured.” The sore eyes are a taste of penance, but the moment of contrition is short-lived. In bed, Richard congratulates himself on having cleared a hurdle; he points out to Joan that the children “never questioned the reasons we gave.” In other words, they never entertained the idea that “a third person” (Richard’s lover) was involved. Joan’s reply drips with irony: “That
was
touching.” She reminds him, “You still have Dickie to do.”