Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

The last time I saw John Updike, he was seated at Charlie Rose’s massive round table; impeccably dressed in a tan suit, starched white shirt and a speckled salmon-colored tie. He was talking about his newest book, The Widows of Eastwick, and hinted that his next historical novel set in the 1st Century A.D. -- The Last Epistle --would be his last.

Updike died on January 27th from the ravages of lung cancer. Updike and Andrew Wyeth, my two most consistent muses, passed away 11 days apart and I am orphaned again.  There is something about the possibility of the next that has been a bond to my literary and artistic heroes.  I still tenaciously cling to the belief Mark Twain alive and well.

This past October, Updike talked with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times about the craft of is writing.  “I don’t think of myself as writing stylishly, I think of myself as trying to write with precision, what my mind’s eye conjures up.  So if out of this the sentences become shapely and vivid, that’s great, but I’m mostly concerned with trying to deliver to the reader, my images, and my sense of human behavior and landscape.”

In 1988, he echoed a similar thought with Terry Gross. “I find that the main charge, let’s call it, that I get out of writing, is when I feel that I’ve gotten something down accurately.  The main bliss, whether I read Henry Green or Nabokov or Proust or Tolstoy, is the sense that they’ve described precisely a certain moment of experience, whether it’s a dress, a chair or how a person’s face looks.”

The novelist Nicholson Baker beat me the punch when he wrote U & I, a book that chronicles his magnificent obsession with Updike. Out of admiration and memory mixed with a seemingly unhealthy does of envy, Baker created a disarmingly touching look into the often unrequited relationship between readers and writers.

Much like Wyeth, Updike had the ability to breath life into the seemingly mundane.  A trip to the blood bank.  An underused swimming pool.  A man walking his wife’s friend home while snow begins to fall.  But what made Updike one of my favorite writers, is that his work always resonated with me although we were a generation apart.

There is no clearer example, than his autobiographical musings – Self-Consciousness. Updike remarked, "A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward."   I believe that a writer is always a bit schizophrenic – he or she is observing and recording and marrying images and thoughts while interacting with others.  You are there and not there.

Even Mark Twain’s best friend, William Dean Howell’s said, “You were always there for him, but he wasn’t always there for you.” It was less a chide than an observation that Twain was somewhere else in his mind.  This “self-consciousness” is about living a dual life, liver and observer.  Updike describes those minute and intimate details that make up the fabric of the extraordinary that lies hidden in the ordinary.

Since I am an Uncle many times over, I will share one of my favorite Updike’s essays, My Uncle’s Death. 

“He died while shaving; when I was told of this, I pictured him staggering back heavily, stricken, his own amazed face in the mirror the last thing he ever saw. His face flashed there for him, hung there, slipped backward; and then the mirror was full of the blank bathroom wall.  I pictured this so sharply I seemed to have been there.

At his funeral, I felt, for the first time my adult height. The Manatees are not a family of breeders, and the number of relatives was small; walking up the aisle to the front pew with my parents, my aunt and my two cousins, I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught from the faces of those still seated, an odd motionless, intent look, almost an odor of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief.

...

“I cannot reach him. I can remember nothing about him that is quite real except his death; he is like a celestial body which only an eclipse renders measurable. He was six feet, four inches tall, but his immensity was narrow-shouldered, small boned and unmuscular. He was vain of having, for so outsized a man, rather small feet.  He usually wore neat black loafers, virtually slippers, of English leather, and sprawling, soddenly in a chair,  he generally contrived to thrust his feet forward on the floor, or up on a stool,  so they were noticed.  I can remember my mother – I must have been ten or eleven – teasing him about his dainty feet. I cannot recapture her words, but she was still slim then, and her pose as she spoke – head tilted back, hands half lifted – stuck in my my mind; she so seldom struck an unmotherly attitude that it was as if a strange spirit had come for a moment and possessed her body.  My uncle, presumably, responded with a dry flutter of  the sheepish gallantry that he seemed to reserve for my mother and waitresses in restaurants.  My mother seemed exempt from the rather lazy distaste with which uncle viewed the rest of the world, and perhaps as her son, I was included in this exemption, for he was kind to me.”

Updike’s self-consciousness reveals itself at the funeral.  “I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught from the faces of those still seated, an odd motionless, intent look, almost an odor of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief.”

His awareness at 10 or 11 of the subtle interactions between his mother and his Uncle are remarkable. While it is viewed from the prism of an older version of himself, he self-consciously remembers that “I was included in this exemption, for he was kind to me.”  It is as much about Updike as it is his Uncle.

My Uncle Carl’s funeral was the first funeral I ever experienced.  I was about the same age as Updike when his uncle died.  I remember my Uncle’s widow wailing.   It is impossible to know another’s grief, but I do remember my mother whispering to my grandmother that it was “a bit much.”  I remember the chairs arranged at the grave site and how there was a kind of hierarchy of who sat where.  And I remember the American Flag folded tightly and given gently to my Aunt.

But I remember nearly every detail about the service and the post-funeral gathering at my Uncle’s home. I recall the sublime taste of Ginger ale that flowed freely. I saw walls filled with porcelain figurines he collected while he was stationed as a Colonel in Germany.  But mostly, I remember that it was the first sibling death for my mother.  Much like Updike’s uncle, my mother and Carl had an especially close relationship and even at 16, I understood this and it was difficult to gauge her own grief.

Updike’s acute observation and his mingling of memory and detail continue to move me.  He is often the catalyst to discovering what I missed in life by being equally self conscious. The creativity of John Updike is about honoring his gift of observation and dancing with the alphabet.

In Updike’s honor and with much feeling, I am opening up a bottle of ginger ale and it will flow freely.  I will miss him.