LIT FOR LIVING: My Father's Tears and Other Stories

 

 

It's broadly agreed upon that John Updike, who died this year at the age of seventy-six, never met a blank page he didn’t like or couldn’t fill with pristine lines of shimmering words, be it verse, criticism, short stories, or a novel. Still, it seems fitting that his last published work, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories—eighteen newish stories, all with one exception written in the last years of his life—should be a collection of short stories, the form that will certainly secure Updike’s literary immortality (although his quartet of “Rabbit” novels could just as easily do the trick), regardless of the uneven nature of this last grouping.

 

Albeit deferentially, there have been more than a few who have ungenerously pointed out that the old master (now that he is truly out of earshot) might have been slipping just a bit—perhaps most notably the writer Martin Amis, who has pointed out a few examples of minor stylistic infractions. Though one might blame a less than diligent editor rather than Updike himself, the general point that Updike was not quite at the peak of his powers late in life seems hardly worth mentioning. (A bit like saying John Smoltz’s fastball doesn’t quite have the zip it once did. Gee. You think?)

 

What is of more interest (at least to this reader) is how the great realist of our time, who simply and consistently recorded the small, everyday moments of his characters’ lives better and more believably than perhaps anyone has ever done—certainly better and more consistently than anyone of his time—continued to call it as he saw it, even when age and diminished powers (though ever so slight) and the knowledge of his own imminent death were so close at hand.

 

And yet, while it’s also hard to think of a book of stories that captures the frailties of old age better than this one does, curiously, this is not a depressing book. Melancholic? Sure. But morose? Not at all. While Updike has always been preoccupied, somewhat perversely at times, with situating his people in the harsh and often unglamorous light of the everyday, as opposed to a more dramatic or even romantic one, these last stories are even more slice-of-life than usual. Not too surprisingly, nothing much really happens to Updike’s men and women (mostly men) now that they’re as old as Updike was himself, and yet we’re happy to go along for the ride because, embedded in the mundane, Updike still manages to find the profound.

 

Although such profundity isn’t always immediately apparent; much of what is told here are hazy memories that these men recall, or sometimes don’t recall; moments in their lives that are so unimportant to them that they sometimes forget them, having to be prodded by another, as in “The Walk With Elizanne,” when David Kern attends an old high school reunion and is reminded of a walk he once took that led to a kiss, Elizanne’s first ever, as it turns out, and quite memorable for her. Despite such prodding, David, at least initially, still has no recollection of such a walk, this kiss.

“I remember the walk,” he said. But did he … He had loved her, for a season. When? Why had the season been so short?… Had it been spring, shot through with sudden green and yellow, or summer, when bugs swarmed and girls wore shorts, or winter, when your cheeks stung?

And yet, eventually, David, twisting and turning that same night in bed and unable to sleep, recalls the walk in more precise detail than Elizanne or most other mortals (with maybe the exception of Proust) ever could, going so far as to take us down each tree-lined street of the now-changed neighborhoods.

The trees along the streets changed from horse chestnuts in the old section where he lived to dense lines of Norway maples on the solidly built-up rectilinear streets to drooping, feathery elms and blotch-barked sycamores, locally called buttonwoods, on the streets that curved.

“Blue Light” is so digressive that it reminds one a little of the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, whereby one thing leads to another and then another. What begins with an appointment at the dermatologist’s office leads back to a time when Fritz Fleischer’s skin better tolerated the sun, which then leads to recollections of his three wives and the three children Fritz had by each, and therefore his children’s children, and the condition of their skin—two of his grandchildren are darker-skinned, their father African-American. This leads to memories of recent visits to these children. And just as the mood of one’s day can veer off suddenly, this story, too, changes course yet again, becoming, like so many of the others in My Father’s Tears, one more meditation on aging. So close to the end, Fleischer (and presumably Updike) tries to imagine the world going on without him in it:

Fathering children, Fleischer had never pictured their gray hairs or their own children. He had just selfishly wanted to create little beings who would look up to him, despite his bad skin, and brighten his life with their sunny innocence. But he had abandoned them all, with their mothers, when their innocence gave out. And now each had created another generation, extending rootlets into the world’s hard substance. He could not imagine what his grandchildren would do in the world, how they would earn their keep. They were immature cells, centers of potential pain.

But while there is certainly resignation, and even occasional sadness in being the type of writer, person, and observer, where, as Henry James once said, nothing is lost on him, noticing the world as it goes by minute by minute is apparently its own timeless reward. Originally a visual artist, one of Updike’s exceptional talents has always been his uncanny ability to bring the physical world into sharper focus: each moment in time as worthy of describing, of capturing, as the next, and perhaps the key to Updike’s fifty years of almost maniacal productivity and popularity.

 

Like a young boy given his first video camera, Updike seems to want to record it all: a type of boyish innocence and curiosity and optimism about the world that apparently refused to diminish. Updike, now posthumously, strikes one as the kind of person who even near the end was still happy enough to wake up each day and notice whatever was going on around him. Who knew what small, unexpected pleasures awaited him, just what he might want to record on this day?

 

In his last story, “The Full Glass,” as optimistic a title as you’re likely to find, an unnamed first-person narrator (one of the few in the collection) remembers visiting a spring at his great-cousin’s house when he was just a boy. “The icy water held an ingredient that made me, a boy of nine or ten,” Updike writes, “eager for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another.”

 

It’s truly hard to imagine the world and all its “brimming moments” still going on without Updike there to experience it, without these novels and stories appearing in print year after year to record such moments, forcing us to pay closer attention to them. Such graceful consistency may have been taken for granted at the end, but who will now encourage us also to try and be that person upon whom nothing is lost? Who will be there, in this world of daily cable news dramas and distractions, to refocus our attention on the small, resonant, but mostly undramatic moments that make up the rest of our everyday lives? [SEPTEMBER 2009]

Chris Newbound is managing editor of Berkshire Living. You can read his blog and theater reviews at www.berkshireliving.com.

 

THE GOODS

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf
www.aaknopf.com

 

Photo by Elena Seibert