The Violet Hour (20 page)

Many people violently disliked
Toward the End of Time
, which he wrote at sixty-five, but it addresses this question; in a series of semi-hallucinatory scenes, it offers up the story of an old man still cheating, still thrilling to the powder-blue underwear of a fourteen-year-old girl. The scene of the sixty-six-year-old man fondling the barely teenage Doreen in the woods could be disturbing, except that it is not a portrayal of a child molester but a dreamer, a fantasist; it is a scene about being carried back to a time before he was old. In her review in
The New York Times
, Margaret Atwood says another mistress of Turnbull's is either “a working-class slut” or a “superheated fantasy.” One can't be sure. The line between what is in his mind and outside it is that blurred.

Toward the end of
Toward the End of Time
, Turnbull gets prostate cancer and is impotent, but the dreams and fantasies, the scenarios playing out on the screens of inner life, are potent, present, real. Ben Turnbull sinks back into the heated
early days when he was courting his second wife. He gets lost in reveries about a dirty limerick the boys passed around and studied in his school. He is buoyed and buffeted, drifting into the past and then jarred into the present. He thinks, “With a deadly lurch in my stomach I realize I will never attend high school again.” The idea of a linear life is something Updike keeps discovering, stumbling into, marveling at; it doesn't come naturally to him. He is so busy undoing it, opening it up, blasting it apart.

The redemption Updike wrote about through sexual adventure would be inscrutable to coming generations and difficult to discuss even for his own. This would not surprise him. He once wrote, “Will the future understand…how much sex, with Freud's stern blessing, meant to us?” The future, it turned out, would not, or rather would claim not to. It would mock and deride how much sex meant; the future would think itself above or beyond that overinvestment with sex. David Foster Wallace, for one, wrote that Updike “persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair.” He goes on to say that Updike views Turnbull's “impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it….I'm not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it.”

In the impotence Updike extravagantly imagined, there is a fiercely potent mind: “Her tight butternut ass, with its white thong shadow, up in the air, the little flesh-knot between the glassy-smooth buttocks visible in the moonlight that entered
the third-story window at just the right celestial angle. The flat planes of her face harking back to the Egyptian Sphinx or some heavy Aztec head of solid sandstone, only transposed to a smaller, female scale, with modern nihilist nerves.” He was still playing with words. The idea he was playing with was escape through sex, transport—travel, almost—a mythical transcendence.

Updike's eternal interest in fantasy gets richer and wilder and lusher in his later work. In much of his often-painful writing of old age, fantasy is almost uncomfortably unloosed; in an essay in
The New Yorker
, he quoted Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who wrote that in artists' late works “the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.”

Updike wrote to a friend, in 2006, that he had found himself at a dinner party where he was the only person at the table who remembered Pearl Harbor. He said that he had to teach himself that he was an old man. This hints at the impossibility of thinking of oneself as old, maybe even the desirability of losing touch with the current self in favor of more-vivid past ones. Updike's characters are richly attuned to their past experiences. Memory is more vivid in Updike, more intrusive, more gorgeously rendered, than in most people's actual days. His characters swim through dreams, memories.

Whether the encounters in
Toward the End of Time
are real physical encounters is not the point. Updike was writing epic
sexual affairs, even if he wasn't having them. The lavish, colorful, wild affairs exist in the writing.

He wrote in that novel: “I would not die, I realized; all would be well. All the fleeting impressions I had ever received were preserved somewhere and could be replayed.”

In
Self-Consciousness
, Updike describes himself as “a distracted, mediocre father,” which was, according to his children, both true and not true. After he exited the family, in the mid-seventies, to live with Martha and her children, he became distracted and mediocre, but when he was living with them he had his wonderful side.

The children in Updike's novels and stories, especially in
The Maples Stories
, are not shadowy; they are not, as one might think, indistinct blobs one is responsible for while the more interesting business of flirtation ensues. They are lovingly, singularly delineated.

In life, Updike was very concerned about the “black hole” of his divorce, the violence toward the children, which was a large part—though not all—of what kept him from leaving the first time he seriously entertained the possibility. In one
Maples
story, “Separating,” he writes a scene that his children say is a very accurate rendering of the night he and Mary told them they were splitting. The parents agree to tell the children separately, after a celebratory dinner to welcome the eldest
daughter home. But as they sit down to eat lobster and drink champagne, the Updike character begins to cry at the table, hijacking the announcement with his own rush of emotion, forcing the Mary character to explain his tears to the children, while he plays for sympathy. The character based on their then-fifteen-year-old son, Michael, gets drunk and eats a cigarette out of grief.

Michael, who says that on that particular evening he did drink champagne and eat a cigarette, talks about how quickly Updike's concerns about the family transmogrified into “a little pity party for himself.” Michael remembers him coming by the house to pick up a chair and saying wistfully that now he would have to learn to cook for himself.

But before that year he was, for all his wanderlust, for all the intensity of his drive to write, not a bad or even a mediocre father. When his four children were infants, he woke up in the night and carried them to their mother to be nursed, which was above and beyond for a fifties' father. As they got older he threw himself into board games—Parcheesi, Monopoly—with zeal; he played kickball, softball, something called “roofball.” He drew them whimsical birthday cards with their pictures on them. Because he did not go off to the city on the train to work, he was a less remote and shadowy presence than many fathers of that time. David remembers him as unusually available to them. He was not one of those writers who create a sacred, hushed space around writing time. “There was no sense of the preciousness or importance of his time.”

Elizabeth remembers him as playful and fun, when you got his attention. “He was often deep in thought, even when he wasn't actively working at his desk,” she says. “It could take him a moment to leave that thought and wrap his head around the simplest of questions.”

When Michael and Miranda were little, he told them bedtime stories in which an animal in distress seeks out the help of the sometimes-grumpy Wise Wizard. These bedtime stories would later be repurposed in his story “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?” in which a storytelling father becomes estranged from his wife. He deftly used this moment his children thought of as sweet and intimate as part of his rich fictional exploration of domestic ironies, an impulse that they—because they were his children, and artists themselves—basically understood.

As Michael and Miranda got older, maybe nine, ten, eleven, the Wise Wizard got grouchier and grouchier, until one day he was on a beach in Florida, with his long flowing white hair and long white beard, in an orange Speedo, much like one a neighbor of theirs wore; when the wizard got exasperated, his balls fell out of the Speedo. Michael says, “That was very close to the end of the Wise Wizard stories.”

Updike's daughter Miranda wonders if the cheerfulness, the resolute evasion of his evident decline, was his last attempt at protectiveness, his final act as a father protecting his daughter
from the reality of death; it was also in keeping with his notions of stoicism, of not talking excessively about one's fears or pains or fantasies or anxieties. The talk went onto the page. The talk had always gone onto the page.

Updike had long written about stoic virtues in relation to death, which involve not complaining, not kicking up a fuss, not being overly grandiose; stoicism, for him, involved continuing his wryness under duress, not failing to see either the big picture or the joke. He lays out this perspective in
Self-Consciousness:
“Isn't it terribly, well,
selfish
, and grotesquely egocentric, to hope for more than our animal walk in the sun, from eager blind infancy through the productive and procreative years into a senescence that, by the laws of biological instinct as well as the premeditated precepts of stoic virtue, will submit to eternal sleep gratefully?”

And yet so much of his work, his life, is about not submitting gratefully to that eternal sleep, cheating, tricking, denouncing it, protesting it, fixating on it; so much involves the hope for more than our animal walk, an afterlife or, better yet, more life.

In some of his novels he rehearses attitudes of graceful resignation. “If these gnats were not oppressed by death, why should I be?” asks one of his aging gentlemen. Of course, both Updike and the characters he dreamed up
were
oppressed by it, prickled, irritated, tormented, or he would not have written those lines. On some level he liked the idea of a cool or wry resignation; he just did not, for most of his nearly eight decades, inhabit it.

Even some of Updike's last poems, written in the fluorescence of Mass General, seem to be about convincing himself that he is going to die. They ask the question, more than once, of whether he is dying. “Is this an end? I hang, half-healthy, here, and wait to see.” The pale, penciled handwriting on the pink paper of that particular poem is so slanted that the words are dangling, literally hanging. He knew, of course, from the medical facts laid out clearly in front of him, that he was dying, but that knowledge may be something that has to be wrestled to the ground.