Speak, Memory 3 comments

By John Murphy
Guest Blogger

It seems appropriate to describe my relationship with the work of John Updike—poet laureate of the upper-middle class American bedroom—as a love affair: much more than a one-night stand, but much less than a committed, trusting marriage. His passing in January at the age of seventy-six inspired me, like a protagonist in one of the elegiac stories in My Father's Tears, his last collection, to revisit our shared past.

It began explosively when I was fifteen and stealing treasured, intimate moments with The Centaur between classes my sophomore year of high school. I was aflame with passion for this prose-poet of the quotidian, whose literary vocation was "to give the mundane its beautiful due," as Updike himself once put it.

My Father's Tears revisits old Updike territory, literal and thematic. Nearly every story in the new collection contains a variation on Proust's proverbial madeleine. Whether a glass of water or a trip to the dermatologist, these are seemingly insignificant moments that start, like small pebbles, avalanches of memory.

I remember plucking The Centaur off a shelf in my parents' basement a decade ago. A battered paperback, its blue cover long gone and its thin pages faded to the color of creamy coffee, it seemed like an unopened letter, something lost and forgotten in the family history. It smelled like my basement, that storehouse of memory-haunted objects: an ancient steam trunk, a rocking horse with faded, frazzled hair, framed family photos with splintered glass, and books...all those books! Teetering in unsteady towers, growing like fungus from the walls.

In a coincidence that had the ring of providence, one of The Centaur's protagonists turned out to be exactly my own age and temperament. For me, Updike held a mirror up to the vulnerable seriousness of being fifteen, the intensity of roiling hormones, first loves, and budding ambitions.

School could be like drowning: "I would sweat with claustrophobia, and swim into the cold air and plunge at home into my book of Vermeer reproductions, like a close-to-drowned man clinging to the beach."

Art occupied a holier realm, and the simple physical existence of a Vermeer "seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not have been surprised to die in the encounter."

I wasn't reading Updike—he was reading me, right down to the melodramatic idea of "death" at seeing a Vermeer in person. He was hinting at mysteries, in life and art, that I was just beginning to glimpse. He was showing me that mystery was woven into the threadbare fabric of daily life: you could sense it just by describing it.

There was something serendipitous, I felt, in my discovery of The Centaur. It came into my life at exactly the right moment, unasked-for, unlooked-for, like God's grace. The beauty of Updike's prose coaxed me out of my own incarnate reality, represented by my doppleganger, Peter, and transported me into that of Peter's father, George Caldwell, the true hero of the book. His was the "Real Presence" Updike retrospectively entered into, trying to understand from within this "walking junk heap," an unappreciated Man of Sorrows.

Myths are not made about men like Caldwell, but Updike compares his father to Chiron, the noble centaur-god and instructor to Hercules, unconsciously echoing Victor Hugo's observation that "To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man...would be to swallow up all the epics in a superior and final epic."

Of the new stories, the one that comes closest to capturing the beauty and pathos of The Centaur is "A Walk with Elizanne." Here he rises to an occasion that begs for the vintage Updikean treatment: a fifty-year high school reunion, set in the same Pennsylvanian town that inspired The Centaur. The protagonist's “madeleine” moment is when a half-remembered classmate, Elizanne, confides to him that he was her first kiss, a kiss that arrived at the end of a long walk home their senior year. The stunned recipient of this confidence "could imagine no better way to spend eternity than taking that walk with Elizanne over and over, until what they said, how they touched, whether or not he dared hold her hand in his, and each hair of the fine black down on her forearms all came as clear as letters deep-cut in marble."

Perhaps this was the touching dream that sustained Updike throughout the course of his unflagging career. No writer has ever been more adept at enshrining memories and capturing the poignancy of beautiful moments that would otherwise pass into oblivion. Updike's thoroughly examined life had a spiritual dimension, unwilling as he was to submit to the "unresisted atheism [that] left people to suffer with the mute, recessive stoicism of animals."

We are more than animals, in Updike's estimation, and literature is a form of worship, an expression of love for compromised creation through the simple acts of attention and description. Updike helped open my eyes to the mystery of what is.

John Murphy is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Northwestern University.