John Updike’s Goodbye

Mills on Updike’s Last Poems

IT IS hard to think of two American writers more different than Ernest Hemingway and John Updike. Hemingway was a man who couldn’t seem to pass up a war, a bullfight, or the chance to go hunting. When given the opportunity by the New Yorker’s Lillian Ross to assess his writing career, he answered her with a boxing metaphor, observing. “I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. De Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one.”

By contrast, John Updike always seemed more at home in a museum than the great outdoors. It is impossible to imagine him picking up a gun, let alone shooting a gazelle or a wildebeest. As for saying where he should be placed in the world’s pantheon of writers, that, too, is out of the question. Updike preferred to link his talents to the country he never stopped observing. “My assets as a novelist,” he once declared, “I take to be the taste for American life acquired in Shillington, a certain indignation and independence also acquired there, a Christian willingness to withhold judgment, and a cartoonist’s ability to compose within a prescribed space.”

Yet, when it came to dealing with the end of life and illness, it was the macho Hemingway who cracked, committing suicide by shooting himself at his home in Idaho with a double-barreled English shotgun he had bought at Abercrombie & Fitch. Updike, knowing he was dying of lung cancer, made the opposite choice, continuing to write poetry up to the weeks before his death this January 27.

Updike’s final poetry is often grim. In “Oblong Ghosts,” he writes, “A wakeup call? / It seems that death has found the portals it will enter by: my lungs / pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than / the other on the doctor’s viewing screen.” And in “Euonymus,” he notes, “My house is now a cage / I prowl, window to window, as I wait / for time to take away the cloud within.”

But grimness is never the full story for Updike. In “A Lightened Life,” he takes pride in fulfilling his final literary obligations. “Last novel proofs FedExed— / the final go-through, back and forthing,” he notes, and in “Hospital,” he accepts the need to be a cheerful patient for the sake of his grandchildren: “My visitors, my kin. I fall into/the conversational mode, matching it / to each old child, as if we share a joke/ (of course we do, the dizzy depths of years).”

Above all, in the final months of his life Updike has a heightened sense of the world he is about to leave. In “The City Outside,” he writes of the Boston cityscape, “The sky is turning that pellucid blue / seen in enamel behind a girlish Virgin— / the doeskin lids downcast, the smile demure. / Indigo cloud-shreds dot a band of tan; / the Hancock Tower bares a slice of night.”

Finally, in “Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth,” a poem written in the month before his death, Updike holds back nothing. “Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you, / scant hundreds of you, for providing a / sufficiency of human types,” he concludes. “To think of you brings tears less caustic / than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps / we meet our heaven at the start and not / the end of life.”

These differences between Hemingway and Updike at the ends of their lives do not, of course, change the gap in their accomplishments. Hemingway transformed modern American writing. He remains by far our most influential twentieth-century novelist. Nothing can take that distinction away. Updike’s accomplishment, one that makes him the heir of the nineteenth-century essayist and novelist William Dean Howells and a kindred spirit with John Cheever, was more modest. But how lovely to find in Updike a writer so worthy of personal admiration! How often does any writer offer us such a gift?

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.