The Violet Hour (17 page)

His final illness would test this impulse or capacity in a way that it had not been tested. Over the years, he had dutifully and gloriously turned the pain of divorce, loss, fear, guilt, and psoriasis into the honey of words, but the approach of death, and the dwindling of self, involved a whole other, physically and emotionally trickier level of pain. Was it possible, in extremis, to turn pain into honey? Would that trusted ability still be available to him in the last weeks of life?

Updike once wrote quite frankly, in a magazine for retired people, about his fears of losing his extraordinary style. He refers to his “nimbler, younger self” as a rival writer. He celebrates the lost time when he was young, when his material was “fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers.” He adds, “No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of
bringing news
.”

And yet, after the shock of his diagnosis, he stumbled again on a startling, fresh subject. The poems he wrote in those weeks, many from the hospital, are not exactly poems as much as dispatches; they snap into focus the blurry experience of the advanced-cancer patient. They carry the urgency of his early work, the sharpness and swiftness he was afraid he had lost: the power of having something pressing he needed to say.

A poem in mid-December: He notes that his experience of the CAT scan and needle biopsy is not what you would expect; suspended in the donut-shaped machine, he does not feel dread or claustrophobia or panic. Rather, in the “dulcet tube,” he feels a great spreading sense of peace and well-being (“Plans flowered, dreams”). He describes with great, mischievous narrative zest the narcotized loveliness of the moment. And then a few days later the biopsy comes back with the worst possible news; the tumor has metastasized. The ironic slap of this story is Updike at the top of his form. The words are electric on the page, the impatience of bringing news again, of journalistic reports from the places we are most afraid of and curious about, the sheer writerly pleasure of unlikely juxtaposition. It is a variety of excitement that one would prefer not to feel, of course, but he was suddenly accessing something creative, he wrote, as in his “fading prime.” The storyteller rises, in other words, from the hospital bed.

On New Year's Eve, he wrote to his editor, Judith Jones: “Dear Judith: Maybe the last thing you need from me is another book. But I knew I had enough poems, and the Endpoint theme came crashing home, and so have pushed myself to take this as far as I can.”

In the first weeks of January, he was still working on editing a tiny volume of his famous baseball piece, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which was being put out by the Library of America. He exchanged letters with the editor there, Chris Carduff. He
found this untaxing work soothing, the minutiae of proofreading and shepherding the book into print comforting.

Other than that, Updike was withdrawing from the world. He stopped talking on the telephone. He stopped reading his mail. Noticing this, Martha began to open the mail with a letter opener and leave it for him, but he still didn't read it.

On his bedside table were the two books he was reading,
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
and
The Book of Common Prayer
. He had once written about Tolstoy's vision of Ivan Ilyich's death as “being pushed deeper and deeper into a black sack.” He talked to Martha about Ivan Ilyich, specifically about how isolated Ivan is in his own head. There is in that book a slow falling away of the world, a brittle aloneness.

There was also a book he was not reading, Barack Obama's
The Audacity of Hope
, which Martha had given him for Christmas. It lay next to his bed, untouched, until she took it away. She had originally gotten him an Hermès tie on a trip to New York, but that seemed like the wrong gift, so she didn't give it to him.

Martha asked him if he had it to do over again, would he decline the one arduous bout of chemotherapy. He said no. He said he had to do it so he'd know he had tried everything.

None of Updike's four children from his first marriage felt wholly comfortable at Haven Hill, the stately house in Beverly
Farms, Massachusetts, high on a hill, overlooking the ocean. Dropping by was not encouraged. It seemed to them that the Updikes spent more time with Martha's grandchildren, rather than his, running through its rooms.

Instead, Updike would come to their houses for tea or meet the grandchildren at the movies. It was their impression that when there was a family gathering, Martha often had an exit strategy, an appointment or movie they had to leave for. Updike wrote in a letter that Martha was uncomfortable with the gatherings of his clan.

When Updike's children called, Martha would often get on the line after ten minutes, apparently needing the phone, and the conversation would end. Among the children, there was a perception that she was policing his time, a perception bolstered by his letters, on which she scrawled angrily at the presumption on his time of various interlopers, from lowly bibliographers on up to Nadine Gordimer. What is surprising in these marginal scribblings is her level of outrage, her protective fury. David Remnick, the editor of
The New Yorker
, would later, in eulogizing Updike, refer to Martha as his “lion at the gate.” But even to some of his children, it appeared that Updike wanted or needed that lion there; he was complicit, secretly colluding, complexly involved, as married people always are in these sorts of things.

David, his oldest son, decided to write his father a letter. Elizabeth had told him about Updike asking her if she was happy. This seemed to David a search for reassurance, a request for
confirmation that Updike hadn't damaged them with the upheaval of affairs and divorce. David wrote in this letter that he did feel that he overall had made a good life for himself. This was not a conversation he felt he could have in person. In person there was small talk.

David describes an awkwardness that fell between Updike and his children. Updike himself wrote that after he left the family, he developed a stutter with them, out of guilt or unease, meaning words were literally hard to get out. Updike on the page has an unusually fine or precisely calibrated sense of the deeper emotions, but with his children he seems to have tended toward a deflecting charm, a highly evolved form of shyness.

David attributes some of his father's lack of expressiveness to the old German Pennsylvanian stock, which may have merged with the New England Waspishness that Updike had been cultivating since Harvard; feelings were not easily or liberally expressed. Updike wrote about an extreme family reserve in one of his early stories. The character's mother is dying of cancer; on her last visit to her son and grandchildren, “she knew it was the last time but disdained to admit it, as she disdained to admit she was dying; she had been a lifelong understater; her last words, to the attending nurse and me, were ‘Well, much obliged.' ”

In the middle of January, David came to Beverly Farms with his nineteen-year-old son, Wesley. Martha had something to do in town, and David and Wesley spent seven or eight hours with Updike. At this point, he was still walking, with difficulty,
with the walker, and he came downstairs to sit at the table with them for lunch. In order to make small talk, David asked his father about Martha's family and they talked about her children and grandchildren.

When Updike dozed off, David and Wesley wandered around the big house.

At one point Updike said, “Oh, David, what will become of me?”

Having grown up with grandparents in his house, Updike was prematurely engrossed by the various declines of old age. It's a little shocking to realize that Rabbit is in his early fifties in
Rabbit at Rest
, which is a meditation on Rabbit's old age. He might be, like Updike himself at that age, in full bloom, but instead he is old, retired, in Florida, worrying about salty snacks and gazing out on his decline. Rabbit is very much not Updike in that sense, the Updike who would “retire” only weeks before his death, but he is Updike in that he's interested in—one could say almost reveling in—the character of “old man” way before his time. Updike seemed to relish the character of genial, successful old man of letters. He saw a certain doomed grandeur, a ruined beauty, in old age, a richness of experience that he wanted or had to get on the page. For a certain type of artist, the question “Is it fun to be old?” might be less important than “Will it be good to get on the page?”