The Violet Hour (15 page)

“The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” As he had written, he died in the manner he chose to die, at the time he wanted to die. He chose and controlled something most of us are not privileged to choose and control. He imagined for himself this death. It looked to others like he had fallen asleep. He stopped breathing in the early hours. Anna wrote, “I believe there is nothing worse than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities for which one loves them. I was spared that with my father, who was himself to the last minute.” He was so much himself to the last minute that Anna would feel as if he were just off on one of his journeys, with her keeping things in order until he came back.

Right up to the moment he took the shot of morphia, it would almost seem as if Freud were taking notes, organizing his thoughts, readying himself for the great essay he would write about dying if he could sit down, after the troublesome part was over, and write it. That essay, ghostly, unwritten, imaginative, wild, hung in the air in the room by the garden. “We cannot observe our own death,” Freud wrote so authoritatively, so convincingly, and all the while he was trying his best to do exactly that.

Credit 3.1

Updike had a bad cold that he couldn't shake. He came back from a trip to New York, in his words, enfeebled and coughing. He went to the doctor, who told him he had pneumonia, and he retreated into one of the boys' old rooms in his seaside home in Massachusetts and worried about being a burden to his wife, Martha.

He wrote to his friend Ted Hoagland that he remembered convalescing as a child as being pleasurable, with his mother bringing him strips of cinnamon toast while he was in bed listening to the radio and reading, but that this time it wasn't like that. Now it was just empty, anxious time.

One of the problems with this convalescence was that he wasn't convalescing: The trouble in his lungs persisted. He was still getting up to go to the drafty room to write on his “word processor.” He was working on a draft of a new novel about the epistles of Saint Paul and was about a hundred pages
in. He was also putting together a collection of poems, called
Endpoint
. But he was still feeling rotten.

He nonetheless went through with a planned book tour for
The Widows of Eastwick
. He and Martha moved to a different city every night, and he was so worn out he would lie down between interviews.

The winter before, an interviewer called Updike to talk about “nothingness.” When Updike came to the phone, he apologized for being out of breath. He'd been playing kickball with his grandsons. “I find when I play kickball, which I did with ease most of my life, that at seventy-five it's a definite strain,” he said. “You listen to your heart beating and hear your own rasping lungs. It's a good way to keep in touch with what stage of life you're at.”

It should be easy to keep in touch with what stage of life you are at—all it takes is one glance in the mirror—but it slips away, that knowledge, and one floats back into other stages of life. This is a feeling Updike knew well, an essential part of his creative stirring. He wrote a similar scene about his character Rabbit playing basketball at fifty-six, before his final heart attack: “His sweat is starting to cake on his legs, with the dust. He's afraid he's going to lose the rhythm, the dance, the whatever it is, the momentum, the grace.”

Updike was not improving, in spite of antibiotics. The week before Thanksgiving he went to a pulmonologist, who walked him down to get a CAT scan. A man in the waiting area grumbled
that the author was going first because he was famous. A nurse said to him, “if your wife were as sick as that man, she would go first.”

The scan revealed that his lungs were riddled with tumors. He had stage 4 lung cancer. He was seventy-six, but this was still a shock, still sudden. Only a couple of months before, he had been healthy, vigorous, playing golf. In spite of his rapid deterioration over the fall, neither he nor Martha was remotely prepared for this news.

In his novel
Couples
, there is a scene where the thirty-ish hero visits a dying man in the hospital: “he saw, plunging, how plausible it was to die, how death, far from invading earth like a meteor, occurs on the same plane as birth and marriage and the arrival of the daily mail.”

In the hospital later that day, Martha took out some proposed covers, in various shades of blue, for his upcoming book,
My Father's Tears
. Updike told Martha he didn't care which one they used. “Call Judith and tell her I don't care,” he said. “They can use whatever blue they want.” This was unlike him. He had long and lovingly controlled every aspect of his covers.

But if he had succumbed to an entirely reasonable black paralysis, it lasted less than twenty-four hours. When Martha arrived the next morning, he asked her if she had made the call to his editor, Judith Jones. She said that she hadn't. He asked her if she still had the covers, and she said she did. He said,
“Now let's figure out which one we like,” and they sat together and talked over the different blues.

After that he asked her if she had a piece of paper. She said that she didn't but he should use the back of one of the cover proofs, because it was white, and she handed him a pencil. He began to write a poem.

When his children came to visit him at Massachusetts General Hospital, he was, as his youngest son, Michael, put it, “a good host.” The common human impulse to entertain, even in a hospital room, seems to have been especially strong in Updike, though he also saw through the impulse, resented it, examined it. At the same time, he was writing a poem about lying in the hospital, making small talk with visiting children and grandchildren: “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,…My tongue / says yes; within, I lamely drown.”

Once, an enchanted young graduate student named Cathy Hiller wrote a profile of him. She tried to sell it to
The New York Times
, but they turned it down. Updike read it and told her that she had portrayed him as too much of a “sweetie pie” and it was boring: He told her that if anyone was going to be interested, it would be because of the unlikely juxtaposition of the pleasant social surface of his life and the subterranean darkness of his fiction.

The word his visitors during this time use most frequently about his manner is “cheerful.” He wrote once about trying to be “droll” in the middle of a very bad asthma attack, struggling for air, in the car with the doctor en route to the emergency room. That was how crucial his social persona was to him: Drollness was more important than air. The protagonist in his little-read and little-loved play
Buchanan Dying
says, “Dying, I discover, is rather like dancing, and not unlike diplomacy; legerity and tact are paramount.”

Outside Updike's room, the oncologist asked Martha if her husband wanted chemotherapy. The doctor gave Martha the impression that there was no hope. She said he would have to ask Updike himself. Yet the oncologist gave Updike a far less bleak scenario than the one he gave to Martha, saying that Updike could buy himself a year or at least some quality months. Updike, tears running down his face, agreed to give it a try.

When they got home from the hospital, Martha managed to get Updike, using a walker, up to his office to type the poems. He worked in a series of four rooms, up the back staircase, off a hallway, which had formerly been used as maids' quarters. The little rooms were lined with books; one was for answering mail, one for writing poems and stories, one, with only an armchair, for reading, and one for using the computer.

Updike had to type up the poems himself because his handwriting was too hard for anyone else to tackle; it had never been easy to read, but these poems from the hospital were
written in an even more cramped, incomprehensible chicken scratch than usual.

There in the drafty study, the prospect was too daunting. He put his head down on the typewriter and said, “I can't do it.”

“Oh, yes, you can, John,” said Martha. “Just one more book.”

The chemotherapy in the middle of December turned out to be more grueling than anyone had thought. He wrote another poem from the hospital, this one about sitting there with the drip of the chemotherapy, absorbing the “babble on TV, newspaper fluff,” which was “admixed with world collapse, atrocities.” He wrote with something like desire: “Get off, get off the rotten world!” (In fact, in the original handwritten version, he wrote and crossed out that it was “good” to get off the rotten world, revising himself, presumably, into a slightly better attitude.)

Updike's oldest daughter, Elizabeth, one of the four children from his first marriage, visited him in the hospital. He mentioned that he had written a poem the night before. He wanted to know if she felt her life was happy. She'd had a rough patch when she was younger, a bad marriage to a much older man, before her happy marriage to her current husband and before their sons were born. She reassured him that it was, very happy.