Impudent Companion

I picked up the latest and last John Updike today, Endpoint and Other Poems. That his last was a book of poems seems fitting and good. The last thing I read of his while he was alive was probably a poem in "The New Yorker." That seems appropriate too. Updike was the last great magazine writer, his artistic career shaped and directed by that preeminent example of the glossy American culture, born roughly with him and probably not long to outlast him, at least so far as fiction and poetry are concerned. When he was very young, he wanted and intended to become a cartoonist, even went to art school, but did not pursue that line. (Will we see a posthumous collection of his drawing, I wonder?) Instead, he began again as a poet, was first published in "The New Yorker" as such, though a short story followed soon thereafter. His first book, in 1958, was a collection of poems,The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. In his generation, it was not unusual to begin as he did. From poetry to short story to novel was seen as a natural progression; from brief to sustained, from light to serious, from least remunerative to most. As he said of those early days, "a poem might buy a pair of shoes," but he intended to support himself, and eventually a family, by his writing, and did. Novels were the way one did that without teaching. Hard to imagine a poem buying even so much as that now, or serious fiction paying a mortgage, for that matter. The culture his life represented is passing. As he said in his poem, Perfection Wasted, "who will do it again?"

His verse was usually dismissed as "light," presumably because its subject was usually more mundane than grand, and his line never purposefully obscure, his style disciplined, his mood most often bemused or at worst, rueful. Even in these last poems, facing his own death, he continued to celebrate, as he had in the earlier poem Burning Trash, "the cheerful fullness of most things." He turned every experience, even treatment for Cancer, to whatever advantage it might have in words. His mind was a writer's to the end, his eye an artist's, and a comic one at that. His delight in life was tempered by experience, and he knew, well before his final illness, the petty betrayals of the body, but at these, at least in his poetry, he was always more inclined to smile than weep. He might write an elegy, but never a lament. As he wrote in his poem Tossing and Turning:

"The spirit has infinite facets, but the body
confiningly few sides."

It is interesting to me that a man who wrote so much of bodies in his fiction, whose descriptions of the physical, even athletic aspects of sex once made his novels at least mildly controversial, and whose prose could be so undisciplined, even loopy in it's indulgence of adjectival flights, could and would consistently write poetry without the least experimentation, his only indulgence as a poet being a taste for parody and jokes. His humor as a novelist, particularly in his persona of "Henry Bech," his parody of the typical Jewish novelist of his generation, could be cerebral, but more often came from an almost boyish pleasure in mucking around in the manifestations rather than the mysteries themselves. What could seem harsh and unfeeling, even misogynist, in his fiction, dependent as it usually was on the realistic portrayal, as he saw it, of the internal lives of men of his own generation, seldom came into his poetry, where I think he spoke, if not always more gently, more honestly, not as a representative man, but as a rather mild and accomplished intellectual in his "off hours," puttering about the house his novels bought, raking leaves, running errands, smiling at his grandchildren, reading the newspapers. He could, in this last collection, but always when writing poetry, look up with only his own eyes, and consider, for instance, the night sky:

"For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated
from the system's less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?"

In his poems, even his own aging body could be interesting of itself, without being made to represent any mortality but his own, as in a poem he wrote in 2002, on the occasion of his birthday:

"Wife absent for a day or two, I wake
alone and older, the storm that aged me
distilled to a skin of reminiscent snow,
so thin a blanket blades of grass show through."

If I turn now most often to Updike in his essays, it is because that is where his erudition and wide ranging curiosity were almost always expressed in enthusiasms and where, it must be said, he was least likely to take out his dick -- an unfortunate habit in his generation of male writers, raised in repression, Depression and War and liberated by Freud and booze and the end of censorship, and so giddy at being freed, yet so preoccupied with the loss of genital mystery, they could not, to a man, keep it in their pants, at least when writing fiction. In his essays, Updike is always a gentleman of letters. But in his poetry, it seems to me, he is most at ease with himself. I like him best when the formalities of form allow for his most informal, least portentous voice. It is where I feel nearest the man, subject to his charm, invited to share his wonder, enjoy his jokes, without embarrassment at either my own lack of sophistication or his vulgarity, which in his poems, unlike his novels, never goes beyond being naughty to make some larger, less believable point about the supposed unknowableness of women, or the inflated tragedy of lost status, or waning erections. As a poet, I respect his respect for tradition, and his obvious pleasure both in it and in the commonplaces of American life.

Here now my favorite poem, as light and delightful as any he ever wrote. I reproduce it here, unabridged, just for the pleasure it brings me, and in tribute to the poet so recently passed:

VENETIAN CANDY

BY John Updike

How long will our bewildered heirs
marooned in possessions not theirs
puzzle at disposing of these three
cunning feignings of hard candy in glass—
the striped little pillowlike mock-sweets,
the flared end-twists as of transparent paper?

No clue will be attached, no trace
of the sunny day of their purchase,
at a glittering shop a few doors
up from Harry’s Bar, a disappointing place
for all its testaments from Hemingway.
The Grand Canal was also aglitter
while the lesser canals lay in the shade
like snakes, flicking wet tongues
and gliding to green rendezvous.

The immaculate salesgirl, in her aloof
Italian succulence, sized us up,
a middle-aged American couple,
as unserious shoppers who,
still half jet-lagged, would cling to their lire
in the face of any enchanted vase
or ethereal wineglass that might shatter
in the luggage going home.

Yet we wanted something, something small ....
This? No ... How much is ten thousand? Dizzy,
at last we decided. She wrapped
the three glass candies, the cheapest
items in the shop, with a showy care
worthy of crown jewels—tissue,
tape, and tissue again sprang up
beneath her blood-red fingernails,
plus a jack-in-the-box-shaped paper bag
adorned with harlequin lozenges, sad
though she surely was, on her feet waiting
all day for a wild rich Arab, a compulsive Japanese.
Grazie, signor ... grazie, signora ... ciao.

Nor will our thing-weary heirs decipher
the little repair, the reattached triangle
of glass from the paper-imitating end-twist,
its mending a labor of love in the cellar,
by winter light, by the man of the house,
mixing transparent epoxy and rigging
a clever small clamp as if to keep
intact the time that we, alive,
had spent in the feathery bed
at the Europa e Regina.