books
The Last Years of John Updike
Review of John Updike's Endpoint and Other Poems
In a recent article in Newsweek, the novelist Claire Messud noted the unwillingness of contemporary authors to deal seriously (if at all) with what seems the most obvious of subjects: Death. Championing the 19th century novel for grappling so obsessively with the inevitable destination of life, Messud specifically mentions the famous deaths of Emma Bovary and Ivan Ilyich. In all fairness we should probably add that recent novels by Philip Roth (Everyman, 2006) and Marilyn Robinson (Gilead, 2004) have tackled the biological and spiritual ramifications of what Philip Larkin memorably called “the anesthetic from which none come round” rather honorably. But on the whole Messud has a strong case: for many contemporary writers death as indeed become, in Auden’s words, an “unmentionable odor.”
Leave it to the late, great John Updike to offer what is one of the finest meditations on death in recent history. The title sequence of his new collection of poems, a section of which appeared in The New Yorker, is one of the great writer’s most intimate and personal achievements. “Age I must, but die I would rather not,” he writes early on in a series of annual birthday poems (“Birthday, death day -- what day is not both?”). From these occasional musings evolve a genuinely moving account of hospital visits, childhood memories, and the past deaths of friends and family. Updike considers his mother’s failed career as a writer (she was never published) as a kind of stepping stone for his own success: “Mine was to be the magic gift instead, / propelled to confidence by mother-love / and polished for the New York market by / New England’s wintry flair for education.” But for all these reflections -- including, of course, Updike’s unprecedented flair for capturing the details of everyday life -- it is Death that lurks everywhere in “Endpoint”. Updike writes: “How not to think of death? Its ghastly blank / lies underneath your dreams, that once gave rise/to horn-hard, conscienceless erections.” Is this a thinly disguised, typically self-deprecating reassessment of his literary oeuvre? Maybe not:
Be with me, words, a little longer; you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.
John Updike has been called the John Keats of the sidewalks, and the stanza above demonstrates his tendency toward, if not Romanticism, then at least the exquisite charm and beauty of the Romantic poets. Yet his voice remains unique and nowhere more personal than in this brilliant and painfully constructed narrative of “the sure extinction that we travel to” (Larkin again).
The remaining poems of the book, sectioned under “Other poems”, “Sonnets”, and “Light and Personal”, are less interesting and some of them, perhaps, superfluous. Even so, we can marvel at the generosity of Updike’s meticulous eye as it scans Rembrandt’s art, a city in India, and a routine colonoscopy. But it is “Endpoint” that astonishes, revealing the slow decline, from March 2002 to a mere month before his death, of one of the greatest writers of our time.
