The Violet Hour (21 page)

He did not have time for what Wordsworth called “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Instead, in those arduous last poems, he scrawls through rage, bitterness, bile, jealousy of the living; he works through nostalgia, fond slippage into the past, bewilderment. He writes through magical salvation, resurrection. He imagines himself reading his own death: “Endpoint, I thought, would end a chapter in / a book beyond imagining, that got reset / in crisp exotic type a future I / —a miracle!—could read.” He is writing his way out of death; he is dreaming his way past or through it.

On their assorted sheets of scrap paper, the penciled writing of the poems is scrunched, lines crushed together, radically slanted, tilted on the page, handwriting gnarled, and impossible to make out, but the labor comes across. He had very little time and a very long way to go. When he wrote to his editor that he was pushing the poems as far as they could go, that was an understatement; the work is unthinkable, compressed. Words are crossed out for better ones, lines added in, sections
scratched out, verbs thought and rethought and rethought again. He wrote to his editor: “My first book was poems; it would be nice to end with another.”

In the poems, he also seems to be working toward acceptance, toward a broadening out into the cool universe; he is working toward grace. “God save us from ever ending, though billions have. / The world is blanketed by foregone deaths, / small beads of ego, bright with appetite.”

Predictably, one of his strategies is comic deflation. The jokes, the interludes of irony, are comforting because they are in a way an extension of his life, an assertion of personality over the unknown. He writes about his lifelong fear of heights, of flying: “I'm safe! Away with travel and abrupt / perspectives! Terra firma is my ground, / my refuge, and my certain destination. / My terrors—the flight through dazzling air, with / the blinding smash, the final black—will be / achieved from thirty inches, on a bed.”

The poems burn through the idea of death, with a new heat and crispness; they process it, synthesize it, master it, to the extent that it can be mastered. They take it from every angle. If style could defeat death, Updike would have.

One of the last poems he wrote was a lovely, wishful expression of an accepting stance toward dying, a new, late iteration of stoicism. It is perhaps the most graceful expression of a peaceful death that I can think of:

Is he beginning to understand how acceptance might work, or is this something more like a wish or prayer? One can't know, of course. The writer controls words in ways one can't control feelings. But the beauty convinces; the late poems breathe calm.

He wrote in the dedication of
Endpoint:
“For Martha, who asked for one more book.” This is a private reference to that moment when he put his head on the typewriter, saying he couldn't do it, and Martha saying, “Just one more book.”

In
Rabbit at Rest
, as Rabbit lies in the hospital dying, he sees on his son's face “some unaskable question.” He “feels sorry about what he did to the kid.” But he can't quite put into words what he wants to say. The last conversation is perhaps the feeling that there is something more to say.

Updike himself does not have a “last conversation” with most of his children. He does not try to exhume old hurts or apologize or resolve. He tries to be cheerful, to be lively, to make conversation. He goes for the smooth and amiable surface. As Miranda put it, “Maybe his struggle to stay cheerful was his form of a last conversation.”

He does, however, say formal and eloquent goodbyes to each of his grandsons. He talks to them about their various interests, encourages them. “I thought it was going to be a casual visit,” Michael remembers. “And he saw them and he had an agenda, and it was about them. He was wheezing and struggling to get air in his lungs, but he turned over in bed to face them. It was the first time he had focused on them in such an intense way.”

In
Endpoint
, Updike wrote about seeing each grandson, “politely quizzing them / on their events and prospects, all the while / suppressing, like an acid reflux, the lack / of prospect black and bilious for me.”

Unlike most people, Updike never seemed to regard his children and grandchildren as a feint toward immortality. He referred to the knowledge of his DNA going into the future as “cold comfort.” One of his characters “looks at the children and says they're sucking the life out of him.” And in the Rabbit books, when Rabbit's granddaughter is born, he thinks: “Fortune's hostage, heart's desire, a granddaughter. His. Another nail in his coffin. His.”

He had been, according to Michael, “aloof” as a grandfather. He observed the forms, but there was a lack of real involvement, which most of his children felt to varying degrees. “He would buy a silver cup, but he would not invite his grandkids over to his house. When he would come to visit them, it was like slipping out of the house to see a mistress.”

The children and grandchildren were always invited to Haven Hill to watch the fireworks on July 4, but they would watch from the beach. If it rained, Michael says, they either watched in the rain or went home. They were not invited to come into the house and watch from the porch.

On Sunday afternoon, Miranda and her sons came to see him. It was a clear, frigid day, and there were snowdrifts on the ground. Fourteen-year-old Kai had written a novel called
Crystal
. Updike told him that he had started it and would try to finish it. He said that he admired Kai's inventiveness and that he hadn't had the stamina to write a whole novel at that age.

He talked to Kai's younger brother, Seneca, who was eleven, about his acting gift and a performance of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
he had seen him in, in October, right before he got sick.

This moment with the grandchildren had a certain formality; it was not the warm, effusive rush some grandparents go in
for, but it had meaning for Updike's children. “It was kind of magical,” Miranda says. “And I am grateful for it.” He was talking to each grandchild specifically, and this specificity seems to be what struck his children. He was responding not to the idea of grandchildren but to the boys in front of him; it was like a blessing, or maybe a statement that he had seen them.

Later that evening, Martha managed to move him out of bed and struggled to get him into a wing chair in their upstairs library for a change of scene. Martha, inveterate traveler, was a big believer in changes of scene. In the chair, he suddenly crumpled up. She wasn't sure what was happening. Could it be a stroke? In a panic, she called the hospice nurse, who came and carried up the box of medications that they kept, according to hospice instruction, in their refrigerator. The nurse gave him some morphine under his tongue with an eyedropper, which immediately calmed him. Together, she and Martha got him into her desk chair, wheeled him to bed, and got the oxygen going again.

The nurse showed Martha how to fill the eyedroppers with morphine. Martha was shaking. She said, “What if I make a mistake?” The nurse said, “There are no mistakes.”

The nurse told Martha that he might die in the night and she should be prepared for that. Martha had to wake him every two hours to give him morphine. He made it through till dawn. “It was,” Martha says, “the most beautiful night.”

As they waited for the ambulance to arrive for the fifteen-minute ride to the small hospice in Danvers, Updike said to Martha, “Are you ready for the leap?”

Martha did not want to say that she was or wasn't ready for the leap. Instead, she asked, “Are you?”

He said, “Yes!”

“I am too,” she said. “And so is God.”

He'd said yes so loudly, she was surprised.