Thank you Mr. Updike

I distinctly remember when I first read John Updike. Intrigued by what I had read of the scandal that had greeted his publication of Couples a few years earlier, I pulled Rabbit, Run - a novel that had been published when I was two - down from my father's bookshelves when I was thirteen or so, much as my youngest son was in the habit when five or six of pulling down Villages from my bookshelves to stare at the illustration of naked women on its cover.
Since that time 37 years ago when I joined Rabbit Angstrom in an alley in Mt. Judge, Pennslyvania - that "unlikely rabbit...twenty-six and six three," as he put down his business suit and joined "boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it," and I saw the legs, and heard the shouts and the "scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles" which seemed to "catapult the [boys'] voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires" - I have rarely opened a New Yorker magazine, or perused an issue of the New York Times Book Review without looking first to see if Updike had written anything. He was stupendously prolific and it was part of the magic of his writing that I became fascinated by any topic he touched upon, and he wrote as an expert on an impressivley broad spectrum of topics - most memorably on literature, the visual arts, and theology, but also on golf and baseball, to name just a few. Yet, he seemed so unassuming and unpretentious when interviewed, displaying only the barest hint of genius in the knowing twinkle in his eye when he smiled, which he was quick to do.

Updike's magic also included an ability - especially in his early short stories and in the Rabbit series - to pierce the layers of self-protective armor which I already had felt growing around me, armadillo like, when I first read him, at the tender age of thirteen. Later in life, it was a chance reading of one of his greatest short stories - Separating - which unleashed my floodgates in the wake of my first divorce.

And now he's gone and I feel like I did just after finishing Rabbit, Run - crying and dumbstruck - then, at the power of words, and now at the intense feelings of loss I have for a man I have never even met. I always thought I would meet him one day. Maybe at some suburban Christmas party north of Boston, with scotch in hand and snow falling. And we would drift from the crowd and talk. And he of all people would understand that reading alone can be enough. There was plenty of time. But then again, I didn't go to many suburban Christmas parties north of Boston and neither, I expect, did he.

A few of his words in memory:

"Even toward myself, as my own life's careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefullness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.
In this interim of gaining and losing, it clears the air to disbelieve in death and to believe that the world was created to be praised. But I inherited a skeptical temperament. My father believed in science ('Water is the great solvent') and my mother in nature. She looked and still looks to the plants and the animals for orientation, and I have absorbed the belief that when in doubt we should behave, if not like monkeys, like 'savages' - that our instincts and appetites are better guides, for a healthy life, than the advice of other human beings. People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled, within human institutions-churches, banks, madrigal groups-but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self's responsibility, then is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let's say, the walk from the mailbox."

Self-Consciousness (Fawcett Crest 1989).

"'Can't you say anything? Talk to me, Dad!' the kid is yelling, or trying not to yell, his face white in the gills with the strain of it, and some unaskable question tweaking the hairs of one eyebrow, as they grow up against the grain.
* * *
From his expression and the itch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's direction. 'Don't die, Dad, don't!' he cries, then sits back with the question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.
'Well, Nelson,' he says, 'all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.' Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough."

Rabbit at Rest (Knopf 1990).

Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.