Once, in a New Yorker article, [John Updike had] quoted the German philosopher Theodor Adorno: “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” But the poems he was writing were good. He knew the poems were good.
Before he got sick, Updike had been afraid that he was losing the dizzying talent of his younger prose. A few years before, he’d written to Ian McEwan that while the younger writer had become a star, he had become just an elderly duffer writing irrelevant and boring stories about suburban sex. His tone was light, but he did worry that his style was faltering, that he had lost or was losing his verve, a quickness and lightness of touch. And yet in his new poems, the wily inventiveness, the powers of observation, the sheer gift with words that both his warmest admirers and sharpest critics found astonishing, are all there on display. …
He said, in his thirties, “Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.” There is implicit in this description a suspicion of this detached, writerly way of coping, of the sweetness of words, but there is also the sheer miraculous fact: turning pain into honey. …
Updike once wrote quite frankly, in a magazine for retired people, about his fears of losing his extraordinary style. He refers to his “nimbler, younger self” as a rival writer. He celebrates the lost time when he was young, when his material was “fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers.” He adds, “No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news.”
And yet, after the shock of his diagnosis, he stumbled again on a startling, fresh subject. The poems he wrote in those weeks, many from the hospital, are not exactly poems as much as dispatches; they snap into focus the blurry experience of the advanced-cancer patient. They carry the urgency of his early work, the sharpness and swiftness he was afraid he had lost: the power of having something pressing he needed to say. …
He did not have time for what Wordsworth called “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Instead, in those arduous last poems, he scrawls through rage, bitterness, bile, jealousy of the living; he works through nostalgia, fond slippage into the past, bewilderment. He writes through magical salvation, resurrection. He imagines himself reading his own death: “Endpoint, I thought, would end a chapter in / a book beyond imagining, that got reset / in crisp exotic type a future I / —a miracle!—could read.” He is writing his way out of death; he is dreaming his way past or through it. …
On New Year’s Eve he wrote to his editor, Judith Jones: “Dear Judith: Maybe the last thing you need from me is another book. But I knew I had enough poems, and the Endpoint theme came crashing home, and so have pushed myself to take this as far as I can.”
Transcribed by me from pages 119, 123–5, 149 of my first edition hardback copy of The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, © 2016, Dial Press.
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