Requiem for Updike

Author John Updike died this week.  His novels, short stories, poems, and essays have been woven into my imagination for about twenty years now.

I began reading Updike voraciously around 1990.  I went from one novel to another for several years.  I did not, however, read the four Rabbit novels back to back to back to back, as did my brother in law.  I have not read everything he’s written.  But the lion’s share of it.  I have always seen Updike as the clearest manifestation of North American Mainline Protestant Christianity.  Perhaps one of its patron saints, if it has any.  Though Protestant, Updike is the kind of person who needs the cleansing fires of purgatory.  Don’t we all?

Updike attracted me because of his irreverent reverence.  His was a “broken hallelujah,” to quote song writer Jeff Buckley.  Some were drawn to his irreverence and brokenness.  Others to his reverent hallelujah as a writer with real, something like orthodox, faith.  I loved both sides of him.  His writing was a penetrating mirror in which late 20th century America could catch a glimpse of itself.  I wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t without hope either.

Once, when asked about the relationship of his faith and his fiction, Updike responded: “every act of description is an act of praise.”  Yes, I suppose it is.  Was it that figuring of his literary work as a form of praise that enabled him to write nearly a book a year for 40 years?  Was that what got him to his desk every morning, chipping away at the pace of three pages a day?  Whatever got him there, I’m sure glad he executed so dutifully and artfully what he took to be his life’s vocation.

I look forward to the release of his long poem, Endpoint, a poem about dying begun in 2002 and completed as he himself lay dying of cancer this year.  Another good poem about dying was one entitled, “Perfection Wasted.”  There were dozens of times I’ve wanted to read it for funerals, but I never have.

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

which took a whole life to develop and market -

the quips, the witticisms, the slant

adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their tears confused with their diamond earrings,

their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone, the memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again?  That’s it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren’t the same.