Authors: Adam Begley
Which McEwan understood entirely: “I felt my question,” he said, “was a little vulgar.”
Be with me, words, a little longer.
—“Spirit of ’76”
Updike spent the last twenty-six hours of his life at the Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers, Massachusetts, about a quarter of an hour’s drive from Haven Hill. His room was in a private suite in a low-slung, gray clapboard building called the Kaplan House, a mildly pretentious, tastefully landscaped example of suburban-sprawl architecture, a place he would have skewered in exact and loving detail in the Rabbit tetralogy. He would have noted, too, an unswerving devotion to euphemism; the promotional brochure available at reception never mentions the word Rabbit fingered like a rosary,
death
.
When Updike returned in late September 2008 from his last trip abroad (to Russia and the Baltic states), he was nursing “a cold,” as he put it, “that wouldn’t let go.”
The Widows of Eastwick
was published in October, and he dragged himself through publicity duties in New York and Washington. Back home and still coughing, he went for his annual checkup at Mass General and was told by the doctor that he had pneumonia; X-rays revealed a cloud on his lungs. The news scared him, yet he resolved to go ahead with a weeklong four-city publicity tour on the West Coast. One event, in Seattle, was already sold out, and he couldn’t conceive of disappointing his audience. He never did back out of a speaking engagement and never would, though he did cancel one other commitment: home again, he told
The
New York Review of Books
that he was too feeble and wheezy to fly down and review the Joan Miró exhibition at MoMA.
Martha moved him into a “sickroom”—one of her sons’ old bedrooms, a cozy spot for what he hoped would be a quick convalescence. Housebound, and bedridden for much of the day, far too ill to help with yard work, he watched from the windows as autumn leaves blanketed the lawn. He found the election of Barack Obama hugely consoling. As he wrote to a Harvard classmate, “What a great country we have here when it decides to be.” And he distracted himself with work, reading and writing in bed. He was reviewing a “mammoth” biography of John Cheever, and feeling weighed down by the too-generous share of embarrassment and unhappiness his old friend had suffered.
*
He knew he was sick, he knew that pneumonia could be a danger for someone his age, but he was utterly unprepared for the diagnosis that came at the end of the month, after a further visit to Mass General: stage-four metastatic lung cancer. The oncologist prescribed radiotherapy, and a round of chemotherapy in mid-December, but Updike decided to give up the treatment when it became clear, just before Christmas, how widespread and aggressive the cancer was.
He wrote a handful of poems, in his last months at Haven Hill, recording his ordeal with unflinching honesty and a complete absence of sentimentality. Fear, sorrow, pain, anger—all acknowledged—were pushed aside in the interest of clear-sighted observation. “Is this an end?” he asks. “I hang, half-healthy, here, and wait to see.” He stopped living “as if / within forever”; he abandoned the idea that his endpoint “would end a chapter in / a book beyond imagining.” He watched with resigned intensity to see what dying would do to him, to his cherished self, to the life he defended so conscientiously.
He surrendered to a world of medical technology, of invasive procedures made bearable by painkilling drugs. In these grim circumstances he remained an avid collector of jargon; he savored the phrase “CAT-scan needle biopsy” even though it brought news of metastasis: cancer cells in one of the adrenal glands.
For the sake of others he was brave, masking grief and bitterness, but in the poems he hid nothing:
My visitors, my kin. I fall into
the conversational mode, matching it
to each old child, as if we share a joke
(of course we do, the dizzy depths of years)
and each grandchild, politely quizzing them
on their events and prospects, all the while
suppressing, like an acid reflux, the lack
of prospect black and bilious for me.
Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture which, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within I lamely drown.
A lifetime of writing about himself is here rewarded in a way he couldn’t possibly be happy about. Lying in the hospital with the news of his death sentence echoing in his head, he could still manage gratitude and compassion—and note how those feelings fight for room against the selfish, viscerally powerful longing for comfort:
My wife of thirty years is on the phone.
I get a busy signal, and I know
she’s in her grief and needs to organize
consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;
her body is the only locus where
my desolation bumps against its end.
His children asked their children to write to their grandfather; he answered the letters, and when they visited him just before he was moved to the hospice, when he could barely breathe and his mind was fuzzy from painkillers, he did his best, eager to please even on his deathbed, to ask them about their lives, to carry on with the “social lie.” A golfing pal came to spend a few hours with him while Martha was in Boston, and found him dozy, eager to look through old photograph albums, angry rather than sad. The anger came from being at long last unable to write.
Writing, like poring over old snapshots, took him back to Shillington. Just as he so often did in his late stories, in his late poems he revisited his boyhood, his family, his playground friends. The kaleidoscope of memories, simple facts about his hometown (“their meaning has no bottom in my mind”)—to put them down again on paper brought him a precious rush of happiness. He assured us one last time that Shillington “draped in plain glory the passing days.” Distilled over the decades, his nostalgia was now as pure as sunlight in the dead of winter: “Perhaps / we meet our heaven at the start and not / the end of life.”
Three days before Christmas, in his final poem, “Fine Point,” he played with a combination of words that touched the core of his religious conviction, his lifelong inability to make what he called “the leap of unfaith.” He took as his text the last lines of Psalm 23, the psalm that invites us to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” In the first stanza, he questions the value of religious ritual practiced without faith: “Why go to Sunday school, though surlily, / and not believe a bit of what was taught?” The answer comes in the second stanza:
The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying,
Surely
—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life
, my life, forever.
A well-worn prayer, its rhythm as comfortably regular as the beat of a tambourine, elevates the everyday, gives it spirit; as he memorably remarked about his hopes for his fiction, the idea is “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” But “blood tinges lips”—those three words neatly wrap up Christ’s sacrifice and the ritual of the Eucharist, and cast a somber shadow. It’s the unmistakable Updike touch, to ground the metaphysical mystery of transubstantiation in such an intimately physical phrase. Sticking with the corporeal, he observes the effect of the tongue uttering “papyrus pleas” (the psalm, in this case). He caresses the word
surely
—which sends us back to that curious
surlily
in the first line. The ritual or ceremony of religious observance, whether enacted surlily or cheerily, remained for him the best path to goodness and mercy, and to faith in the hereafter. Shaky or solid, his faith was essential to him; he could never do without it—especially not now.
When his eldest child visited, he asked if she was happy with her life. Elizabeth told him that she was—assuring him, in other words, that he had done well as a parent. Later, at the hospice, she and David and their father linked hands with the Episcopalian minister and recited the Lord’s Prayer.
He was still at home when Mary telephoned Martha and said she’d like to come see her ex-husband. Martha suggested that she bring her daughter Miranda, which Mary readily agreed to. Martha met them at the door, and the two wives exchanged a tense hug. After sterilizing their hands, they went up to the sickroom. Miranda sat on one side of the bed, Mary stood at the foot; Martha was opposite Miranda. Updike tried to look cheerful, buried under the covers, trying to keep warm, but the effect, as far as Mary was concerned, was miserable. “I felt I shouldn’t touch him,” she remembered, “except for his feet, so I was massaging his feet, and that seemed to be all right.” They talked about the children, very briefly, and about how he was feeling, also very briefly. Mary was struck in particular by a remark out of the blue: “He said to me, ‘Now remember Aunt Polly’—my great-aunt, whom he knew, who lived to be ninety-something or other. He was telling me, I thought, that I should remember that and try to live as long as she had.” After twenty minutes, Martha said it was time to go. On the way downstairs, Mary said she’d like to come again and was told that it would not be possible.
To the consternation of the Updike children, Martha continued to restrict access to her husband even after he’d been moved to the hospice, even after the point when prolonging his life was no longer the primary object of the nurses charged with his care.
He died eight weeks after the cancer was diagnosed, on Tuesday morning, January 27, 2009, less than two months shy of his seventy-seventh birthday.
There was a crowded funeral service at St. John’s in Beverly Farms, austerely Episcopalian, with no eulogy, but several readings from his work woven into the service; Updike had chosen the hymns himself.
There were two memorial events. The first, hosted by Knopf and
The New Yorker
, was held in the New York Public Library. Judith Jones, Roger Angell, and David Remnick spoke, along with several other editors and two writers, Lorrie Moore and ZZ Packer, neither of whom knew Updike particularly well. David Updike also spoke, a late addition to the program. Although someone, possibly Martha, was opposed to the idea, David persuaded the organizers to let a member of the family say a few words. After a brief, poignant speech, he read passages from his father’s last
New Yorker
story, “The Full Glass.” The second memorial event was held a few months later, at the Kennedy Library in Boston. Elizabeth Updike spoke, as did Nicholson Baker, Updike scholar William Pritchard, and several others. Martha did not attend.
Some of Updike’s ashes are buried four miles from Haven Hill, in a memorial garden behind the Emmanuel Chapel in Manchester-by-the-Sea, the spot marked only by his name on a bronze plaque, second on a list. The Emmanuel Chapel was Martha’s summer church. (Services are held there from Memorial Day through Labor Day.) The rest of the ashes are buried next to his parents, in Plow Cemetery, downhill from Robeson Evangelical Lutheran Church in Plowville, in the plot his mother bought for him. Michael Updike carved a black slate headstone with a winged portrait of his father on the front, above a collection of the names he went by, all the signatures in faithful imitation of his hand: Johnny, John, John Updike, JHU, Dad, and Grandpa. On the back of the gravestone, Michael carved a crow in flight and, in its entirety, his father’s best early poem, “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked”:
The old men say
young men in gray
hung this thread across our plains
acres and acres ago.
But we, the enlightened, know
in point of fact it’s what remains
of the flight of a marvellous crow
no one saw:
each pole a caw.
The great stack of books Updike left behind is the monument that matters most. Several posthumous volumes have been added to the pile: a collection of stories,
My Father’s Tears
; a final miscellany,
Higher Gossip
; and
Always Looking
, more essays on art. But as far as he was concerned, his final book, also posthumous, was
Endpoint
, a slim collection of poems he put together when he knew without a doubt he was dying; it includes the birthday poems from his last six years and the poems he wrote about his illness.
*
In a late essay, he expressed the “irrational hope” that his last book might be his best. It came mighty close.
In the late fall of 2005, he complained uncharacteristically to Joyce Carol Oates, “I find producing anything fraught with difficulty these days, and tinged with a certain word-disgust, for which there must be an excellent German term.” Even as he was formulating this complaint, enthusiasm was bubbling up for a hypothetical German locution, some formidable compound word that might capture his meaning with Teutonic precision. In truth, he never tired of writing, never tired of “creation’s giddy bliss.” Up until the last weeks of his life, when he was too sick to write, he was always that little boy on the floor of the Shillington dining room, bending his attention to the paper, riding that thin pencil line into a glorious future, fulfilling the towering ambition of his grandest dreams. “I’ve remained,” he once said, “all too true to my youthful self.”
For the five years that I’ve been working on this book, I’ve been piling up debts, both professional and personal.
Mary Weatherall, who was married to Updike from 1953 to 1976, has been an inspiration to me from the day of our first interview. She made me want to write a book she would recognize as a faithful portrait of Updike’s life and work. The four children she and John raised together, Elizabeth Cobblah, David Updike, Michael Updike, and Miranda Updike, have been generous with their help, often in awkward circumstances.
Among Updike’s Shillington friends, Joan Venne Youngerman, Jackie Hirneisen Kendall, Harlan Boyer, and David Silcox kindly granted interviews. Updike’s Harvard friends, many of them Lampoon members, shared their anecdotes and insights. I want to thank James E. Barrett Jr., Austin Briggs, William M. Calder, David Chandler, William Drake, David Ferry, Charles Bracelen Flood, Edward Stone Gleason, Reginald Hannaford, Edward Hoagland, John Hubbard, Peter Judd, Ann Karnovsky, Benjamin La Farge, Samuel Stewart, Bayard Storey, and Eric Wentworth. Many of Updike’s
New Yorker
colleagues took time to answer my questions and ferret out correspondence. I’m very grateful to Roger Angell, Anthony Bailey, Henry Finder, Ann Goldstein, Fran Kiernan, Susan Morrison, David Remnick, and Alec Wilkinson. Several members of Updike’s Ipswich crowd offered friendly assistance. I’d like to thank Vera Cobb, Toni Crosby, Helen Danforth, Judy Fouser, David and Mary Louise Scudder, Dan Thompson, William Wasserman Jr., and Bob Weatherall. Two of the children of the Ipswich crowd, Gus Harrington and Hatsy Thompson, were kind enough to grant me interviews, as were Updike’s golfing buddy Richard Purinton and his poker pal Charlie Tsoutsouras. Three of Updike’s students, Nicholas Delbanco, Jonathan Penner, and Mary Webb, generously shared memories of his Harvard summer school writing class.
During the course of my research the following people were helpful in ways large and small: Stephen Aris, Diana Athill, James Atlas, Margaret Atwood, Blake Bailey, Nicholson Baker, Ben Batchelder, Sandy Batchelder, Katharine Bava, Ann Beattie, Timothy Beeken, Anne Bernays, Philip and Maya Bobbitt, Isabel Buchanan, Benjamin Cheever, Susan Cheever, Ron Chernow, Joel Conarroe, Jeffrey Cunard, Virginia Dajani, William Ecenbarger, Scott Eyman, Mark Feeney, Molly and Sarah Fisk, Arthur Fournier, Janet Groth, Judith and Victor Gurewich, Donald Hall, Eric Homberger, Glenn Horowitz, Michael Janeway, Ward Just, James Kaplan, Justin Kaplan, William Kennedy, Deborah Miller Lizasoain, William and Wendy Luers, Janet Malcolm, Nancy Malloy, Ian McEwan, John McTavish, David Michaelis, Leon Neyfakh, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O’Brien, Jed Perl, Lucie Prinz, Francine Prose, Mary Rhinelander, Andrew Rosenheim, Philip Roth, Stacy Schiff, Robert Silvers, Peter Spiro and Merin Wexler, George Steiner, Sam Tanenhaus, Benjamin Taylor, David Thomson, David Ulin, David Wallace-Wells, Ted Widmer, Leon Wieseltier, John T. Williams, Brenda Wineapple, Barbara Woodfin, and Ben Yagoda.
Various Updike aficionados have been helpful along the way. I want to thank Ward Briggs, James Plath, William Pritchard, and James Schiff for their assistance and kind encouragement. Without the herculean efforts of Jack De Bellis, a tireless collector of Updike facts and Updike treasures, all Updike scholars would have to work twice as hard as they do.
A small army of librarians guided me through various archives: Leslie Morris and the helpful staff of Harvard’s Houghton Library; Charlie Jamison and his colleagues at the Myrin Library, Ursinus College; the kind and patient folk in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library; the staff of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin; Sean Quimby of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library; Dennis Sears of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois; Mary Huth of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department, University of Rochester Library; Alison Greenlee at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; the staff of the Ipswich Public Library; and Sharon Neal of the Dr. Frank A. Franco Library Learning Center, Alvernia University.
My agent, Georges Borchardt, does exactly what an agent should do: lower the stress levels. My editor, Tim Duggan, came up with the idea that I should write about Updike—for which I am deeply grateful, as I am for his encouragement and his sharp critical eye. His colleagues at HarperCollins, Emily Cunningham, Jenna Dolan, and Martin Wilson, have been friendly, helpful, and efficient.
Two old friends, André Bernard and Michael Arlen, read the manuscript and gave me very useful advice. Bob Gottlieb read successive drafts and managed to make me laugh even as he was recommending that I cut great chunks of my precious prose.
The late Peter Kaplan, my boss, my friend, pushed me to write this book. I wish he could have read it.
My thanks to my mother, Sally Begley; my siblings, Peter Begley and Amey Larmore; my stepmother, Anka Begley; and my exceedingly generous father, Louis Begley, who has been an unfailing source of moral, intellectual, and financial support.
Speaking of financial support: I was very fortunate to receive fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Finally, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Anne Cotton; and my stepchildren, Tristan and Chloë Ashby. They have put up with me for more than a decade now—and for almost half that time have shared me graciously with John Updike.