SHORT STORIES: My Father's Tears and Other StoriesBy John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 292pp, £18.99
IT IS THE strangest feeling. Usually the arrival of a new book from John Updike is cause for celebration; somehow, perhaps, all may still be well with the world. But this time it’s different; the volume appears – and it is a beautiful book – but you find yourself swallowing hard. This time the book seems to have come complete with a wryly ironic shrug from Updike confirming with that familiar half-knowing, half-embarrassed clever schoolboy smirk: “this time it really is goodbye.” And so it is – the untimely passing of John Updike, a literary man who wore his love of language and story and life as lightly as his wide ranging erudition, continues to shock. Even at 76 it came too soon. Never as intense or as self-absorbed as his peers, Bellow and Roth, Updike the detached, playful Wasp patrician was alert to the respective nuances of Jewish and Black America, and was the laureate that Obama needed. Here was a writer content in enduring a life-long skin complaint, who loved his country, acknowledged its flaws and its glories and always understood people for what we are because he never forgot he was one of us, a dreamer and a sinner, a lover and a liar. His gracefully fluent, shimmering prose evokes individual lives, and with them the relentless passing of time.
Heroism never much interested him and yet some of his characters, invariably women, such as the mother figure who came increasingly to wander through his stories, are heroic. He was supposed to live to be 100 years old, but he didn’t and he was never awarded the Nobel Prize – the Swedish Academy’s failure, not his.
SO, MONTHS AFTERhis death on January 27th, a final volume of short stories appears to remind us of exactly how good Updike was and is. At his finest – and there are numerous echoes of his sensuous flair throughout these stories – he simply wrote better than anyone. His earthiness balanced his elegance, and his elegant delivery countered the often earthy, messily sexual content. Of the 18 stories, all but one are recent. The Roads of Homewhich appeared – as have nine of the others – in the New Yorker,has been retitled The Road Home. It is a terrific story, most of them are.
Death and age are dominant themes. This is a memory book. "One partner remained who shared Fairchild's old-fashioned aversion to riding a golf cart and was willing to walk with him; then on a winter morning this friend's handsome photograph, 20 years out of date, popped up in the obituary section of the Boston Globe" (from The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe). Updike readers will smile in recognition throughout at a reference here, a gesture there. Later in that story Fairchild, having gone to his barn, asked by his wife to remove a door knob from a pair of heavy doors in storage, ponders an old cupboard, beloved of his long-dead mother and a mute player in his childhood memories. The recently stored doors topple over, smashing the cupboard and with it part of Fairchild's past.
It may sound corny but as Updike inspired a kind of possessive loyalty in his admirers, there is also a flourish of pride; John Updike kept on writing up until the end. Always a civilised and lively observer of the desperate needs that drive people to romance, he grasped the chaotic ambivalence chugging away in the name of love and desire; fear, sex and flight. No writer locates more acutely the point at which anger, jealousy and emotional betrayal collapse into painful regret.
Most readers probably will turn immediately to the title story, I did. It is brilliant, and catches the heartbreaking tone of dignified sadness that informs his finest story, A Sandstone Farmhouse(from The Afterlife,1994). In My Father's Tears, the narrator recalls: "I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran . . . I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and Harvard, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired . . . I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go."
THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER,Updike has always written about fathers and sons; about a man remembering being a son, and invariably about being a parent. No one is better describing a father's shock recognition of his children becoming middle-aged adults – often to hilarious effect as in Rabbit At Rest(1990) – but when Updike is being serious, the impact is devastatingly moving.
It is not surprising that Updike began his artistic life as an art student. His eye is as perceptive as a musician's ear. The narrator of My Father's Tearsrecalls his first wife's Unitarian minister father's summer residence, a farmhouse in Vermont: "The lone bathroom was a long room, its plaster walls and wooden floor both bare, that was haunted by a small but intense rainbow, which moved around the walls as the sun in the course of the day glinted at a changing angle off the bevelled edge of the mirror on the medicine cabinet." Updike's intense, exact visual sense asserts itself. "When we troubled to heat up enough water on the kerosene stove for a daylight bath, the prismatically generated rainbow kept the bather company; it quivered and bobbed when footsteps or a breath of wind made the house tremble. To me, this Ariel-like phenomenon was the magical child of Unitarian austerity, symbolic of the lofty attitude that sought out a primitive farmhouse as a relief from well-furnished urban comfort. It had to do, I knew, drawing upon my freshly installed education with idealism, with Emerson and Thoreau, with self-reliance and taking nature on nature's own, exalted terms."
Elsewhere, in another story, The Apparition, Milford, a retired professor, has taken to travel. "His teaching had been dutiful, and so now was his tourism. The world's wonders seemed weary to him, overwhelmed by the mobs that came to see them." Delicate Wivesis a variation on a theme that Updike worked well from the beginning, the post-affair. It all begins with a non-sexual drama. "Veronica Horst was stung by a bee, and it should have produced no more than a minute of annoyance and pain, but she, in apparent bloom of health at the age of twenty-nine, turned out to be susceptible to anaphylactic shock, and nearly died" but for Gregor, her creepy husband, "who spoke English if not with an accent with a studied precision, as if locking the sense of his words into a compact metal case." Les Merrill hears about the bee attack from his wife. Having had an affair with Veronica the previous summer, Les feels aggrieved. He would have liked to have rescued Veronica, only she ended their relationship because he couldn't leave his wife.
Well the years pass, as they tend to do in Updike’s stories, and when Les meets up by chance with Veronica, he finds the old yearnings intact. She has changed and has a number of medical complaints. “Veronica was less apt now, Les sensed, to be languid; she carried her wide-hipped, rangy body warily, as if it might detonate. There was something incandescent about her, like a filament forced full of current.” Many of Updike’s older characters recall the loves that failed due to a lack of courage.
THE COLLECTION IStypically Updike in its diversity. The opening story, Morocco, is the odd man out in that it was based on a disastrous family holiday experienced in 1969 and was written in 1979 for the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly. All the others are late Updike and include a 9/11 story, Varieties of Religious Experience.
The title story will stay in one's heart, as will The Road Home. Both of these stories have echoes of A Sandstone Farmhouse. In The Road Home, David Kern is returning to his old home and notices the changes wrought on the landscape "now a haven for Philadelphians." The old homesteads are being snapped up; there are commuters. "For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn't get out of the region fast enough." Back east for a conference, and the absentee owner of 50 acres, having sold the farmhouse, he has a date with old school friends, but before that he meets the adult son of the man who rents his land.
While waiting for him, he remembers their shared past. “They had been boys together, on adjoining farms, but their attempts to play together had not been successful. The farmer, Enoch, was a year younger, and had brought a softball and bat over. David had batted the ball so hard that although they searched for it, they failed to find it “and Enoch never came back to play. Today, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge . . .”.
Ghosts increase and multiply. In the final story, The Full Glass,the narrator, approaching 80, muses: "My life-prolonging pills cupped in my left hand, I lift the glass . . . If I can read this strange old guy's mind aright, he's drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned."
For all the novels, the stories, the journalism, essays, poetry, wit and wisdom, his understanding of the US and of life, readers can only thank him. John Updike has taken his final bow with a swan song worthy of his genius.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
