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I n one of John Updike’s early stories, the narrator urges us to contemplate his dead grandmother’s thimble. Moving through a dark house, heading downstairs, he upends a sewing basket left on the landing. The moment’s dislocation encourages one of Updike’s greatest strengths, his flair for simile and metaphor. Retrieving the thimble from the floor, briefly uncertain what it is, he describes it as a “stemless chalice of silver weighing a fraction of an ounce.” The metaphor’s religious overtones are brightly suited to his succeeding sensations: “the valves of time parted, and after an interval of years my grandmother was upon me again, and it seemed incumbent upon me, necessary and holy, to tell how once there had been a woman who now was no more, how she had been born and lived in a world that had ceased to exist.” He is inviting us to partake in one of literature’s mystical rites—to drink deep and slake our souls from a chalice smaller, lighter than a tulip.

Updike was still in his twenties when he wrote these words, which appear in a story that bore, I suppose, the lengthiest title of any piece of fiction he ever published: “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island.” The young writer had already received, or was soon to receive, a host of propitious honors: a summa cum laude undergraduate degree from Harvard; employment at The New Yorker; book publication in three different genres (novel, poetry, short stories); and a widespread critical recognition that he’d already become, and promised long to be, a decisive shaper of contemporary American literature.

By contrast, the woman whose life’s lineaments he was urging on his readers was a figure of little worldly consequence: elderly, insular, and infirm. She was sketched closely from life, and the fictional thimble was an actual thimble. She was Katherine Ziemer Kramer Hoyer, Updike’s maternal grandmother, with whom—along with his mother, his father, and his grandfather—he lived throughout his childhood, much of it in a century-old farmhouse in Plowville, Pennsylvania, outside Reading. Though financially strapped, it was a richly populous household for the rearing of an only child. It was also what might be called the House of His Life; though Updike wrote lovingly and knowingly about various homes and buildings throughout his career, this sandstone farmhouse (bought at his mother’s insistence, over the objections of her husband and her son, who resented its isolation) became his soul’s dwelling place.

There’s something touching in the distance between the blazing young man, so clearly bound for international fame, and the obscure woman who “never to my knowledge went outside the boundaries of Pennsylvania,” who “had no possessions,” who never attended a movie, and whom he never saw reading a book. But there’s something more touching still in the way that, since Updike’s death in January of 2009, the distance between them foreshortens. Updike wrote unforgettably well about dying (arguably, the most moving scene he ever created was the drowning of the infant in Rabbit, Run), and he often meditated profoundly on how death serves as a great equalizer. With the closing of his life, after his amazing delivery of some sixty-plus books over his seventy-six years, it turns out that his long, weighty shelf of books bears a spiritual resemblance to that small, flyaway thimble. The shelf speaks, in effect, of “how once there had been a man, a writer, who now was no more,” who was born and lived “in a world that had ceased to exist, though its mementos were all about us.”

And I can think of no better way to contemplate that vanished man than through his poetry. Verse entranced him from the outset. Updike dated his career as a professional writer from his first acceptance by The New Yorker, at the age of twenty-two, of a light-verse poem, “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums.” The experience was bookended, in the last months of his life, by his final great creative project, a blossoming of verse that sprouted from the cracked vase of his diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. He received this news in November of 2008, and was dead two months later. It wasn’t much time to polish a surpassingly poignant poem-sequence, but even while he was deeply ailing, his inspired productivity endured.

That final book of poems, Endpoint, carries a dedication to his wife of thirty years: “for martha, who asked for one more book:/ here it is, with all my love.” The words capture the aura of happily answerable gratitude—of yearning to offer some artistic repayment for all of life’s unreckonable bounties—that suffuses most of his work. He spoke once of a writing studio “where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me—to give the mundane its beautiful due.” The man felt summoned.

Some writers retire, but it’s impossible to imagine Updike forsaking his writer’s desk. Endpoint’s valedictory poems pulsate with a deep, soon-to-be-thwarted wish to resume his labors. One is reminded of Hokusai, who on his deathbed, at the age of eighty-eight, was reported to have cried, “If only Heaven will give me another ten years . . . . Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.” Updike seemed to feel that in his writing life he’d tapped into something exterior and inextinguishable; the task was still beckoning him forward, even as he was severed from it.

The body of his verse gives us a remarkably full autobiographical portrait. In this, he’s somewhat unusual. American poetry in the twentieth century abounded in wonderful poets from whose collected poetry it would be hard to concoct even a sketchy biography: John Crowe Ransom, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Weldon Kees, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Donald Justice. For such writers, we must turn to their letters or to outside biographers to satisfy our hunger about the workings of their daily and their inner lives. But in Updike’s case, he is often most openly and freely himself in poetry. He comes to it with an assured ease, instinctively constellating his thinking in that reverse Heaven whose stars are black balls of type and whose sky is the unbroken field of whiteness between stanzas.

I’m tempted to call what he does naked poetry, not least because he so often focused on erotic and bodily functions. He wrote poems called “Fellatio” and “Squirrels Mating” and “Mouse Sex” and “Elderly Sex” and “Cunts” and “Two Cunts in Paris” and “Klimt and Schiele Confront the Cunt”; he wrote a poem about a memorable defecation (“The Beautiful Bowel Movement”) and gave us a detailed account of a colonoscopy. You could say that he offered us his body. It’s in his poetry that we learn which hand he relied upon to perform which intimate ministrations.

But the poems are naked in a broader sense. They typically come to us unmediated through any fictional presence. You feel that it’s Updike himself (or perhaps John himself, since the poems foster, even between strangers, a companionable familiarity) who is addressing you. There’s nothing in his oeuvre like Richard Wilbur’s “The Mind-Reader” or Anthony Hecht’s “The Venetian Vespers”—gorgeous poems channeled through a complex, contrived persona. Though Updike was autobiographical throughout various genres, in his fiction I’m often uncertain how much of any particular incident is drawn from life directly and how much from artifice. With his poems, though, you typically sense he’s chronicling his day-to-day existence; for more than half a century, poetry served as a diaristic outlet. Some of the poems are as casual as Polaroid snapshots. Others have the apportioned stiffness of a studio portrait. But in the aggregate the poems present an album of himself more accurate and intimate and multifaceted than any similar-sized collection of his prose.

Still, the term “naked poetry” might misleadingly suggest an abandonment of formal constraints, whereas little of Updike’s poetry was written in free verse. The form he found most congenial was the unrhymed, loosely iambic sonnet—a structure whose packet of approximately a hundred-forty syllables granted him room to traffic in syntactic complexity while allowing for the brevity of casual utterance. The earliest of his unrhymed sonnets was “Topsfield Fair,” of 1967, and the last were composed on death’s threshold, as he completed the title sequence to Endpoint.

A s a fiction writer, Updike became far more venturesome over time. The young man who grounded his first four novels in his local corner of southeast Pennsylvania wound up setting later books in four different continents. The poems, too, wandered further afield as he went along; he gave us dispatches from Russia, Japan, Italy, Greece, India. But regarded by another light, the poems became less exploratory. In his versification, Updike tended to innovate and divagate less over the years. Some of the early poems have quite eccentric shapes and look a little peculiar on the page (“Seven Stanzas at Easter,” “Hoeing,” “The Great Scarf of Birds,” and, especially, “Midpoint”). Later poems have, visually, a more staid deportment. Some readers may see this evolution as unfortunate; others will view at it as an example of an author gradually locating the forms he found most hospitable and returning to them with increasing self-possession. In any event, his farewell to verse, Endpoint, was the summit of his poetry collections.

“Nature is never bored,” Updike observes in Endpoint’s title poem. He goes on:

and we whose lives

are linearly pinned to these aloof,

self-fascinated cycles can’t complain,

though aches and pains and even dreams a-crawl

with wood lice of decay give pause to praise.

The striking word-choice here is “self-fascinated.” This is a notion or an image that surfaces constantly, in both his poetry and prose: the meticulous onlooker who could hardly be described as an interloper or a trespasser, since the autonomous body under consideration is oblivious of any surveillance. Updike was forever gazing down through the round-cornered window of an airplane, or a magnifying glass, or a microscope, noting and speculating about the lives below. He does something similar in his extra-terrestrial journeys, as in “The Moons of Jupiter,” which begins:

Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io:

these four, their twinkling spied by Galileo

in his new-invented telescope, debunked

the dogma of celestial spheres . . .

Updike plays cicerone in the succeeding stanzas, providing a guided excursion to each of the four moons. Not surprisingly, the tours turn out to be metaphorical forays, into the recesses of memory and appetite. Cold Callisto is a terrain

of unforgiven wrongs and hurts preserved—

the unjust parental slap, the sneering note

passed hand to hand in elementary school,

the sexual jibe confided between cool sheets,

the bad review, the lightly administered snub.

On steamy, volcanic Io,

[t]he bulblike limbic brain, the mother’s breast,

the fear of death, the wish to kill, the itch

to plunge and flee, the love of excrement,

the running sore and appetitive mouth

all find form . . .

What is surprising is the delight he takes in rendering with a geologist’s precision his extra-planetary landscapes; Updike was distinctive among contemporary poets in the unforced ease with which he appropriated the nomenclature and the rigors of the scientific imagination. Here is a more naturalistic view of Io:

Kilometers away,

a melancholy puckered caldera

erupts, and magma, gas, and crystals hurl

toward outer space a smooth blue column that

umbrellas overhead—some particles

escaping Io’s seething gravity.

And Callisto:

Its surface underfoot is ancient ice,

thus frozen firm four billion years ago

and chipped and peppered since into a slurry

of saturated cratering.

One is reminded of H. G. Wells, whose The Time Machine revels in unthinkably remote panoramas, and of the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, who in Solaris beamed such bizarre planetary formations down the heavens’ icy starways and whom Updike, in words applicable to himself, extolled for his “easy access to the scientific terminology where he is at home, and a poet.”

Updike’s fiction abounds in portraits of the scientific temperament: the botanist in Couples striving to untie the knotted carbon-string mysteries of photosynthesis; the computer scientist in Roger’s Version who seeks a digital proof of the existence of God; the Hungarian with “an air of seeing beyond me” in “The Astronomer”; the paleontologist manqué in “The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals.” His scientific interests often crossed and blurred the border he kept between his “poems” and his “light verse.” He divided and delimited them in his preface to Collected Poems:

In making this collection, I wanted to distinguish my poems from my light verse. My principle of segregation has been that a poem derives from the real (the given, the substantial) world and light verse from the man-made world of information—books, newspapers, words, signs.

Following this designation, he offered “poems” about a lunar eclipse, a limestone fossil, entropy, a malfunctioning computer, and “light verse” about a dwarf star, neutrinos, neoteny, and the synthetic polyester known as Terylene (“In Praise of (C10H9O5)x”).

The critic Randall Jarrell once noted, “When you know Frost’s poems, you know surprisingly well what the world seemed to one man.” This strikes me as about as handsome a compliment as can be paid to any writer, and it could certainly be said of John Updike. You leave his poems (or his short stories, or his novels, or his essays) feeling that you’ve encountered someone in great intimacy and wholeness. And Updike’s accomplishment looks all the more striking in that he created this subtending unity across at least five genres: novels, short stories, essays, poems, and light verse, though perhaps some of these categories call for further subdivision. In any case, it appears beyond argument that no other American writer has written successfully in a greater diversity of modes.

W ith his early poems, there’s a keen pleasure in contemplating the directions the poet took and also might plausibly have taken—where he actually went and what he forwent. There’s always something a little rueful to any such investigation. As Updike memorably reminded us in “The Bulgarian Poetess,” one of his Bech stories, “Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility.” As one wanders through hisearlier poems, one keeps coming upon Roads Not Taken, potentially fruitful pathways that turned out to be cul-de-sacs. A poem like “Shillington,” for instance, composed when Updike was twenty-six, has a charm reminiscent of Frost or Richard Wilbur:

Returning, we find our snapshots inexact.

Perhaps a condition of being alive

Is that the clothes which, setting out, we packed

With love no longer fit when we arrive.

While quite dexterously done, this sort of foursquare, somewhat folksy writing, with its clean rhymes and mostly strict iambic pentameter, wasn’t a direction Updike would pursue with any fervor. Something similar occurs in a very early poem where you find him rhyming umbrella and ele (inelegantly breaking “elegant” across two lines). Though he’d continue to dally with this sort of forcible, antic splicing in his light verse, you won’t find much of it among what he classified as his poems, where he gradually took a more casual and collected tone. Likewise, there’s something quite promising in the roly-poly rhyming and the rhythmic rollick of the early “Vermont,” though no subsequent poem sounds much like it. It concludes:

Hawks, professors,

And summering ministers

Roost on the mountainsides of poverty

And sniff the poetry,

And every year

The big black bear,

Slavering through the woods with scrolling

mouth,

Comes further south.

A number of poems in his last book seem to extend a comradely wave to his earliest creations—a sort of Road Returned To. Endpoint offers a tribute to the singer Frankie Laine. The poem’s first line is “The Stephens’ Sweet Shop, 1949.” We’re in “an opium den of wooden booths,” of “milkshakes thick as tar/ and Coca-Cola conjured from syrup and fizz.” Or you might say we’re back in Mae’s Luncheonette, the site of “Ex-Basketball Player,” one of Updike’s earliest poems (written when he was twenty-two) and a poetic prefiguring of his best-known prose creation: Harry Angstrom of the Rabbit tetralogy. “Ex-Basketball Player” gives us another breed of rabbit, this one named Flick, who is a master of the luncheonette’s pinball machine. He ignores Mae, the proprietor, having an eye instead for an audience whose sweetness has turned cloying:

Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods

Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers

Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

We have a further return to the sweet shop in one of my favorite poems in Endpoint, the disarmingly whimsical “Her Coy Lover Sings Out.” It’s an homage—not Updike’s first—to Doris Day, for whom he fell hard in his teens and carried a torch till the end of his days. The poem is a modest construction, a paper airplane sent winging across that all but unbridgeable chasm that separates fandom from stardom. Here’s the first stanza:

Doris, ever since 1945,

when I was all of thirteen and you a mere

twenty-one,

and “Sentimental Journey” came winging

out of the juke box at the sweet shop,

your voice piercing me like a silver arrow,

I knew you were sexy.

And here’s the fifth and last stanza, by which time most of the poem’s silliness has bled away, leaving behind something poignant and measured:

Still, I’m not quite ready

for you to breathe the air that I breathe.

I huff going upstairs as it is.

Give me space to get over the idea of you—

the thrilling silver voice,

the gigantic silver screen. Go

Easy on me. Cara, let’s take our time.

As his title makes clear, Updike is having some fun with another coy lover, Andrew Marvell’s. In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell begs his beloved to forgo courtship’s dilatory flirtations: “Now let us sport us while we may,/ And now, like amorous birds of prey,/ Rather at once our time devour . . .” Updike, by contrast, asks that everything be slowed down. We enter a world without hurry—a notion that haunted his last years. His poem’s final line also echoes the conclusion of what I think of as his last great story, “The Walk with Elizanne,” from My Father’s Tears:

David felt as he had when, his one weekend at the Jersey Shore the past summer, a wave carrying his surfing body broke too early and was about to throw him forward, down into the hard sand. “I want to hear it all,” he told Elizanne. “We have t-tons of time.”

But something still more interesting is going on here. I’ve rarely felt so strong a sense, in reading any poem, of a completely balanced dual audience. Love poems typically branch into two categories. There are those that feel ultimately intended for the loved one’s ears, rendering the reader a somewhat superfluous outsider. (T. S. Eliot, in “A Dedication to My Wife,” teases this notion: “These are private words addressed to you in public.”) And there are those aimed at a broader audience, in which case the poet likely preens a bit, making a fine exhibition of his unparalleled passions. In recounting his crush on Doris Day, Updike is doing both. You feel he’s showing off for us, letting us know what an irresistibly charming lover he can be. But you likewise, and equally, sense that he really is addressing Miss Day, with an adolescent’s aching wishfulness that he has somehow managed to preserve, as something worth cherishing, across two thirds of a century.

O ne of my favorite moments in Updike’s fiction is, like so much in Endpoint, a hospital insight. It’s found in Rabbit at Rest. After heart surgery, Harry Angstrom sprawls in a recovery bed, contemplating a row of old buildings across the way, and once again, as with Grandma’s thimble, the valves of time open:

Lying there these days, Harry thinks fondly of those dead bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three buildings across the street with such festive patterns of recess and protrusion, diagonal and upright, casting shadows in different ways at different times of the day, these men of another century up on their scaffold . . .

The passage is quintessential Updike in its hunger to prise out the idiosyncratic moment, the human story, from a surface that might initially appear remote and inhospitable and bland. It also attests to his fascination with every sort of work, especially visible, manual labor. Whether it’s Joey Robinson in Of the Farm so lavishly choreographing the mowing of a field by tractor; or Harry Angstrom in Rabbit Redux operatinga linotype machine; or Hummel’s clanging garage in The Centaur; or the gunsmith in “The Gun Shop” with hands “battered and nicked and so long in touch with greased machinery that they had blackened flatnesses like worn parts”—Updike was forever eulogizing the virtues of tactile toil.

It’s a trait shared with his friend L. E. Sissman, who once wrote a poem called “Work: A Sermon.” Given the title, you might suppose irony was to follow, but instead we have a paean:

Work, sisters and

Brothers, not for riches or a land

Of glory, but to write our testament

Of love upon the day we seize.

Among contemporary poets, Sissman was Updike’s closest sibling. Contemplating his ill-fated friend, who developed cancer in his thirties and died at the age of forty-eight, Updike observed that his “outburst of autobiographical verse, mostly blank, powered by the nearness of his death and a prodigious festive way with the English language, was to me the most impressive event in poetry in the 1960s.” (Updike may have suffered a few premonitory shivers in writing those words, which so aptly foreshadow his own experience, decades later, when completing “Endpoint” under a death sentence.)

H ard, honest work will always be associated with Updike, chiefly for the unbroken way he turned out so much lucid and lively prose over the decades. The wonder of it is how little of his prose or poetry feels workaday, how much feels spirited and effervescent; this particular workhorse loved to caper. Praising Nabokov, Updike once spoke of how his sentences embrace the “body of a moment” with the “crunch of a superb adjective”—one of those occasions, common in his criticism, when the praise he offers reflects back on himself: you admire his word choice even as he’s praising another’s word choices. Updike made it look so easy, concealing all the struggling that went into selecting the right adjective, noun, verb. If a concordance of his complete works were to be assembled—an immense undertaking, but no daunting task for a computer—it would reveal a more far-reaching vocabulary (drawing on the nomenclature of biology, astronomy, architecture, painting, music, mathematics, sports, fashion, as well as contemporary and outdated slang, and a generous swath of Victorian verbal furbelows) than that employed by nearly all of his contemporaries. He put the dictionary through its paces.

But a still more impressive aspect to his labors is something that, I’m happy to say, might not be immediately amenable to computer analysis: the flexible uses to which he put those least glamorous parts of speech, prepositions and conjunctions. Over them he seemed to wield an instinctive, athletic mastery, encouraging him to create an elaborate sentence architecture that was tensile and yet delicate. Time and again, he managed to slip smoothly and unsnagged through the grammarian’s dense thickets of coordinating, subordinating, and correlative conjunctions. They were the little fulcra upon which his long sentences could shift their direction and weight in such unexpected, magnificent ways. Like any writer, he had his tics and his crutches, but in total he exhibited an almost astonishing ability to listen to the complex demands of what he wanted to say and devise for it a suitable linguistic structure, one that suffered remarkably little loss of nuance and brightness in the conversion from idea to implementation. Physicists have a non-technical-sounding technical term, waste heat, to describe an unwanted, inevitable entropic by-product—like the warmth emitted by a refrigerator. Some of Updike’s sentences feel like physics-defying miracles of efficiency.

To my mind, he was the twentieth-century American writer who created the greatest number of zingers—sentences you want to place check marks beside, and extract from their surroundings to scrutinize as separate entities, and eventually perhaps tinker with, in an attempt to understand better why they perform so well. (In this, he was to the twentieth century what Henry James was to the nineteenth.)

One such sentence comprises the envoi in Updike’s penultimate volume of verse, Americana and Other Poems. Its title is “A Sound Heard Early on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” with Updike again alluding to a canonical figure, in this case John Milton, whose “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is sometimes seen as his first masterpiece. If the poem is harking back to Milton, it’s also another meditation about physical labor. On a dark and despondent morning, a manger’s glow unites both the outdoor deliveryman and the indoor wordsmith. Everything hangs together. And a noun left dangling at the end of line four clasps its verb at the start of the sonnet’s final line:

The thump of the newspaper on the porch

on Christmas Day, in the dark before dawn

yet after Santa Claus has left his gifts:

the real world reawakens; some poor devil,

ill-paid to tear himself from bed and face

the starless cold, the Godforsaken gloom,

and start his car, and at the depot pack

his bundle in the seat beside his own

and launch himself upon his route, the news

affording itself no holiday, not even

this anniversary of Jesus’ birth,

when angels, shepherds, oxen, Mary, all

surrendered sleep to the divine design,

has brought to us glad tidings, and we stir.

It was only one year after Updike’s death that the chairman of the board of the nation’s leading newspaper conceded, “We will stop printing The New York Times sometime in the future.” Paper isn’t in the paper’s future. Its destiny is digital, and Updike’s poem, however unwittingly, gathers to itself an elegiac air. Once a symbol of the up-to-the-minute, our morning newspapers become, in the fullness of time, objects as quaint as a manger; their percussive thump upon a concrete front porch joins the musical cooing of the passenger pigeon.