The Violet Hour (16 page)

They were at the doctor's, and Martha got out her appointment book. Updike said, “I'm not coming back,” and she put away her book. He did not want to go through a second round of chemotherapy.

He wrote the last poem for the book three days before Christmas. Once, in a
New Yorker
article, he'd quoted the German philosopher Theodor Adorno: “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” But the poems he was writing were good. He knew the poems were good.

Before he got sick, Updike had been afraid that he was losing the dizzying talent of his younger prose. A few years before, he'd written to Ian McEwan that while the younger writer had become a star, he had become just an elderly duffer writing irrelevant and boring stories about suburban sex. His tone was light, but he did worry that his style was faltering, that he had lost or was losing his verve, a quickness and lightness of touch. And yet in his new poems, the wily inventiveness, the powers of observation, the sheer gift with words that both his warmest admirers and sharpest critics found astonishing, are all there on display. He had been writing about death since he was young, but now he had a fresh subject: his dying.

Updike writes constantly about cheating as an antidote to death; in his fiction it is through sexual adventure that one accesses immortality. One of his characters says of a mistress, “Whenever I am with her, no matter where, just standing with
her on a street corner waiting for the light to change, I know I'm never going to die.”

The idea that cheating bestows upon its participants eternal life is on the face of it a little outlandish. But there is a certain logic here. If you have a secret, submerged, second life, you have somehow transcended or outwitted the confines of a single life. You are not settled, finished. You start again. You live doubly. You take more than one path at the same time. As he explained in
Marry Me:
“His panting under the effort of running uphill seemed delicious to him…his renewed draft on life. Since the start of their affair he was always running, hurrying, creating time where no time had been needed before; he had become an athlete of the clock, bending odd hours into an unprecedented and unsuspected second life.”

Somewhere embedded in this elaborate argument, which extends over many stories and novels, is the belief that sex itself is about grasping at life, that located in women's bodies is some near-mystical source of vitality. In one story, Updike wrote about bumping into a former lover in a parking lot: “I felt in her presence the fear of death a man feels with a woman who once opened herself to him and is available no more.”

In his memoir,
Self-Consciousness
, he explains how he himself had transcended the dread of mortality through love affairs. As a young married father in Ipswich, he had affairs with his and his wife's friends. He writes about one of these affairs: “Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time. My
marriage, I knew, was doomed by the transgression, or by those that followed, but I was again alive, in that moment of constant present emergency in which animals healthily live.” The feeling of immediate emotional crisis somehow negates the “devouring gray” of time spent imprisoned in a single life. “At least for the time being,” he wrote, “the dread of eventual death was wholly replaced by immediate distress and emotional violence.” The idea, crudely noted, is something like “philandering = being alive.”

It's easy to mock or condemn this view, and many have, but for Updike sex was a powerful motor, a creative force. It was the shake-up he was interested in, the flight, the motion, the unsettling of the settled. The destructive and creative power of love consumed him, the idea that you could make or ruin something with it. One of his characters in
Couples
gets a happy ending to his romantic life, and Updike says of him in an interview: “he becomes a satisfied person and in a sense dies.” Life here is, specifically, the search, the conflict, the quest, the flirtation, the frisson of sexual longing, the erotic restlessness that carries you to another place. Being happy, being settled, is death.

Updike often wrote about periods of morbid apprehension as “gray” or a “gray sensation.” For a writer who was nothing if not preternaturally alert to the vividness of his surroundings, there is a dullness he felt periodically, a loss of color, a blanching or paling of experience. One wonders if this could have been a depression he was fighting off, a descending malaise of some threatening or unmanageable sort, though he worked so
efficiently, so functionally throughout, it is hard to credit this theory. In
Self-Consciousness
, he writes: “These remembered gray moments, in which my spirit could scarcely breathe, are scattered over a period of years; to give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men's wives.”

After a deep, riveting affair in the mid-sixties with a woman named Joyce Harrington, during which he tried and failed to leave his first wife, Mary, Updike began to have trouble breathing. He described lying on the old floorboards in front of the fireplace in their house in Ipswich, struggling for air. He said that a doctor friend once came home with Mary and, watching him gasp on the floor, observed calmly that it was usually teenage girls who suffered from that particular form of hysteria, and after they fainted (which Updike himself didn't) they were fine. In reporting these events, he was, of course, making fun of himself, exploiting the comedy in a graceful way, but the breathing trouble and ensuing terrors were real. When he left the family, years later, his asthma lifted.

Updike had always had death panics, where he was suddenly flooded by the idea that he was going to die. In an early story, “Pigeon Feathers,” he writes of his alter ego, David Kern, as a boy: “Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel.”

In
Self-Consciousness
, he describes another such moment, where he is making a dollhouse in the cellar for one of his daughters, under the cobwebs of the low ceiling, and is suddenly flattened by the idea that both of them were going to die. He later put this in a novel: “I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die, would die an old lady in whose mind I had become a dim patriarchal myth….There was no God, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse.” There is a moment in another book when the main character wakes his wife up in the middle of the night in a cold terror about dying, and she says sleepily, “Dust to dust,” with a casualness that he never forgives.

Of course, it is sometimes hard to take seriously a healthy young man's fear of death as anything but a metaphor, a useful abstraction, a romantic or attention-getting ploy of some kind, a showy and highbrow form of self-pity, but Updike's descriptions of these panics are so constant, so detailed, so deeply woven into everything he wrote or observed, it is impossible not to take them seriously or to believe, at least, that he took them seriously. He never spoke to Mary about these moods; he was, she says now, “private” about them, by which she means that he poured them into his writing, to be consumed by strangers, but did not discuss them with his family.

He said, in his thirties, “Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming
pain into honey.” There is implicit in this description a suspicion of this detached, writerly way of coping, of the sweetness of words, but there is also the sheer miraculous fact: turning pain into honey.