The cover of John Updike’s final book bears two phots of the author: the one on the inside of the fly leaf is taken by his wife Martha, and shows a smiling Updike, presumably caught in an unguarded moment of familial intimacy; the Jill Krementz photo that forms the cover is a more familiar Updikean pose – the clothes that are somewhere between Sunday school teacher and golf club roué, the slightly stern look at the camera, and the suggestion in the tree-lined avenue stretching behind him that he’s off to do a little more research, find some more life to observe for the benefit of his readers. While it may seem excessive for a book to bear two photos of its author, here they work effectively as a metaphor for the contents, a collection of poems in which Updike flits between the personal and the professional, between playing the roles of the loving, aging husband and the great American author who still has plenty left to say.
There is something ironic in the way that Updike, whose mega-novel Rabbit Angstrom dwarfed most of his contemporaries’ novels in both word count and achievement, should have a slim volume of poetry as his final work. Divided into four sections, ‘Endpoint’, ‘Other Poems’, ‘Sonnets’ and ‘Light and Personal’, the book may not be the final testament that Updike’s fans would have wished for. Indeed, were the whole of the book of the standard of the ‘Light and Personal’, whose clunking, clumsy rhymes explain as much as anything else why Updike wrote mostly in blank verse, the publishers would stand accused of marring his reputation in their pursuit of the posthumous dollar.
Thankfully, however, Endpoint is a subtle and rewarding end to Updike’s prodigious output. Often marked by a light touch (the demise of a computer has him wishing ‘May I, too, have a stern and kindly hand | bestow upon my failing circuits peace.’), the poems range over familiar Updike concerns: age, art, writing, travel, America, and death. There is still that uncanny ability to recast his childhood in Shillington as if it happened only yesterday, most noticeably when he remembers how as a child ‘I wet | My pants a drop or two, I felt space widen’ after temporarily losing his mother in a department store. Yet there are signs that time is drawing to a close even for the world of his memories: a lovely elegy gives thanks to dead classmates for the inspiration they gave him for his fiction, but carries with it the sure knowledge that Updike too will soon be dead, with no one left to remember the way his mother, in her desire to be published:
… studied How To, diagrammed Great Plots
some correspondence course assigned, read Mann,
Flaubert, and Faulkner, looking for the clue,
the “open seasame” to fling the cave door back
and flood with light the shadows in her heart
to turn them golden, worth their weight in cash.
(from ‘My Mother at Her Desk’)
The poem on his mother comes from the ‘Endpoint’ section, which is the book’s strongest. The first poems here were written on each of his birthdays, starting in 2002, and the final ones written in winter 2008, as biopsies revealed that his cancer had metastasised. They read like Updike’s final engagement with the existential questions that he’s dealt with throughout his career, particularly in the magnificent run of works focussing on death and old age that started with Rabbit at Rest and took in Afterlife and Towards the End of Time.
In the first poem he says: ‘I settle in, to that decade in which, | I’m told, most people die.’ This air of impending finality hangs like a shadow over everything he writes afterwards. A gift of a watch from his wife will tick in his coffin, the mailing of final proofs and tax returns makes him ponder ‘What’s left of me?’. Reflections on the changes in the euonymus outside his window segue into ‘A cold that wouldn’t let go | is now a cloud upon my chest X-ray: | pnuemonia. My house is now a cage | I prowl, window to window, as I wait || for time to take away the cloud within.’
Yet this is not a self-pitying collection by a man approaching death. There is plenty that Updike eulogizes here, from the ‘beauty, | bully, hanger-on, natural, | twin, and fatso–all a writer needs’ that Shillington gave him, to Payne Stewart’s golf ‘swing, so silky | its aftermath shimmered in air: dragonfly wings.’
As a writer who never made a secret of his unfashionable belief in God, there is surprisingly little on religion here; it’s as if he decided that his final work should forego musing on heaven and hell and instead mostly celebrate life, even as he considers its end. The result is something both touching and intimate, warm and sincere. A final farewell from the master.