Just as quickly as good news comes, bad news is right there to take its place. I'm sure plenty of you know by now that yesterday John Updike died. This news made me feel very sad, and I'm not exactly sure why. I have read some of his short fiction, but I've yet to dip into any of his novels (though this year one of my reading goals was and still is to start reading some of his works). I guess I'm sad in part, because these days 76 just seems too darn young to go, especially if that someone was as talented and prolific as Mr. Updike. Yesterday someone on Twitter made the sharp comment, "I am sort of shocked that JD Salinger is 90 years old and John Updike is dead". Not that I would wish ill on any writer, but geez – it just seems so damned unfair, ya know?
A couple of Updike memories, for what they are worth:
I can recall as a kid seeing on my mother's writing desk a copy of one of the Rabbit books, and being very perplexed, wondering why the heck my mother would be interested in reading a book about rabbits.
Last fall, I was so enchanted by Updike's piece in The New Yorker ('A Desert Encounter', October 20, 2008), that I read sections of the story aloud to my husband, who was also charmed by this marvelous personal tale. In this story, Updike recalls a rather unique encounter with two gentlemen, who help Updike after he has lost his treasured hat in the desert. Miraculously, the hat is found by one of the gentlemen. Here's the last section of the story:
"My hat!" I exclaimed. "It is!" I hurried over and, as if to prove my
ownership to my two new companions, put it on my head. "Thank you,
thank you," I said to each.
The man in khaki smiled, his
share of my pleasure appropriately moderate, as he coiled his rooter
and distributed the last of his tools to their places in the back of
his truck. The older man, however, bent and bowlegged as he was, made
my happiness his own. Quizzically beaming, he came closer to me, the
shadow of his cane elongating to the east, where the last golfers,
calling to one another like birds at dawn, were finishing their rounds
before darkness fell. "What does it say on your hat?" he asked me.
In the world of retirement, customary reticence is discarded, as
needless baggage from the forsaken world of midlife responsibilities.
We say what we think and ask what we wish. I was taken aback only for
those seconds I needed to remember that this man had been a party to my
finding what I was about to assume had been lost forever, my precious
hat. I took it off my head and read aloud to him, in case his eyesight
was poor, the words stitched on its crown. "American Academy of Arts
and Letters," I enunciated.
"And what is that?" he asked, his eyes as lively as those (as I imagine
them) of Socrates driving a pupil, question by question, toward an
inarguable conclusion.
I did balk, a bit. My privacy began to feel invaded, and I could hear
from behind the hedge the brittle sounds of my wife preparing dinner.
Yet the other witness's silent eavesdropping and the benign mood of a
desert sunset enabled me to locate a certain humor in his effrontery; I
took the plunge and held nothing back. "An honorary organization in New
York City," I explained, "that includes writers, composers, painters,
sculptors, and architects. Two hundred and fifty of them, no more and
no less. Fewer than one for every million Americans--think of it! Some
years ago, the Academy celebrated its hundredth anniversary, and as
part of the celebration all the members were given, in a spirit of
dignified fun, hats like this."
I felt the sun reddening the western side of my face. My interrogator
was slightly downhill from me, wearing, I noticed now, a hat of his
own--a daintily checkered wool cap, with a bill too small to keep out
much sun. His hair crept out from under its protection in white curls
whose length suggested that he had not yet surrendered a youthful
self-image.
"Isn't that wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Did you hear that?" he asked the
Roto-Rooter man, who softly slammed his truck's back door. "Did you
ever hear of such a nice organization? Writers, composers, painters,
and sculptors, the best in the country."
"Well," I said, my embarrassment growing. "They'd like to think that. Some people would disagree."
"Of course," he said. "There are always those. There's always that."
"I was elected to it years ago. It cheered me up at the time." I
refrained, modestly, from also telling him that I had been chairman of
the anniversary observances. It all seemed long ago, and, at this
distance of two thousand miles, rather preposterous. I had wanted
everybody to dress up in formal clothes, but, in the event, only I wore
a tuxedo. Arthur Miller didn't even wear a necktie. Yet my new friend
could not be detached from his glow of approbation; it was as if he
had, from my meagre description, bored straight into the inner essence
of the Academy, its stately and elitist hopes for itself at its
founding, more than a century ago--hopes long since run afoul of
modernism, East Coast parochialism, the decline of print, and diverse
scorn for any notion of a canon or an elect.
"This is so exciting!" he affirmed. A fresh idea struck him. "You must
do something for me. Please. Could I dare ask you?" His bright eyes
grew brighter. He took a step closer, uphill, as if he were about to
impart a whispered secret. "Could I ask you to sign a piece of paper?"
I would have begun to suspect a put-on, an impish tricksterism leading
to some intricate fraud, except that irony doesn't carry across the
Mississippi; Ivy League graduates have to fly it over the nation's
great heartland direct to Hollywood. Itching to turn my back on this
encounter, I reminded myself that here in the desert people have a
stake in one another, especially people over a certain age. We have
come out here to put our striving to rest, amid barren landscapes and
big-box stores. "I'd be happy to," I told the other old man, "but I
have no paper, and no pen. Do you?"
Together we looked around for a piece of paper lying on the asphalt or
among the cacti, and saw none. "What do you need?" the younger man
called over to us. "Paper?"
"And a pen," the merry old gentleman said. Both items were produced,
and, when I scanned the environment for a desk or lectern to sign at, a
clipboard appeared. Sighing with the unexpected exertion, I signed my
name. Still, my fresh acquaintance wanted more. "And the name and
address of the organization," he said. "Did you hear," he asked our
provider, who was patiently waiting for the return of his pen and
clipboard, "what a wonderful organization he belongs to? It does all
this good."
"You know," I confided to him, willing to be frank now that I foresaw
our encounter soon ending, "this is beginning to be humiliating."
"I know." He smiled. "But isn't it nice? Writers, composers,
sculptors." They were for him, it seemed, a faraway frieze, on the
eastern rim of possibility. They loomed, as our membership had been
intended to loom, as immortal. "And its phone number."
This was too much. "I don't know it," I told him, truthfully.
I had signed the back of a Roto-Rooter invoice. My petitioner tucked
it, twice folded, into the pocket of his striped shirt, and handed back
to the third man his ballpoint pen. "Hasn't this been something?" he
asked the repairman, who didn't deny it. I could hear my wife calling
my name, beyond the shorn hedge and the pruned ocotillo. Trash
collectors will not touch ocotillo--it is too invincibly thorny--and my
trimmings lay in an uninviting heap on the dusty, stony caliche.
Slipping backward out of the old man's magnetic field, I looked for the
first time at his shoes; they were not the bloated patchwork running
shoes with which the elderly in the Southwest anchor and ease their
weary feet but real shoes, two-tone wingtips, like those of a dancer in
a musical comedy. Along with the point of his cane, they held him
there, on the slant surface, defying gravity. Dressed with a brave
brightness, he had been headed for some festivity, and had confused the
festivity with me. The encounter, when all was said and done, had been
no stranger than those in "Krazy Kat," which had given me my first idea
of the American desert.
The dusk was threatening to enwrap us. The calls of the golfers to one
another had been silenced. At our feet a sizable city had begun to
display its shimmering grid. The Roto-Rooter operative moved,
uncertainly, toward his door of the truck. I felt that some concluding
statement was expected from me. "I am delighted," I announced, "to have
my hat back," and tipped it, floppy as it was, to the two of them,
first one and then the other, overcoming my fear that they might
suspect irony, where none was intended.
