I met up with Updike at Mass General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9.30 that morning.
It was 10.30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. "You know what I look like," he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, "storklike," distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban.
"How are you?" I said, with some urgency.
"They didn't take it out: it's still here. He raised his hand to the light. It seemed a flattering intimacy, after 10 seconds' acquaintance. John Updike, warts and all. Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual. Updike's is called psoriasis, "skin disease marked by red scaly patches," as my COD unfeelingly puts it. He has written about the condition himself, rather more feelingly, in the New Yorker. Actually the growth seemed quite inoffensive, like a sizeable and resolute freckle.
"How frustrating. You must be ..."
"Yes, I'm very sad," he said, and looked - as he would continue to look for the next two hours - like a man barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. This generalised twinkliness has been much remarked. It is almost the demure expression a child has when gratified to the point of outright embarrassment - but with an extra positive charge, flowing from hyperactive senses. "No, apparently it's more complicated than I thought. They're going to do it later in the year. The incision will go from there to there. I'll have to wear a support for a while. I won't be able to play golf. I won't be able to type! But listen. How are you?'
This, too, was said with unusual concern. Updike ducked and briefly grappled with the Boston Globe. He pointed to a piece that I had read, with quivering fingers, half an hour earlier. The previous evening I had flown in from Provincetown: 15 minutes in a Wright-Brothers seven-seater. That same day, according to the Globe, one of these little aeroplanes had lost height and come skimming in over Boston Bay. Sunbathers had dived into the sea from their rafts.
The article ended with a reassuring review of the airline's safety record; it was grounded, quite recently, after a series of accidents, all of them rich in fatalities.
"You flew! I warned you not to."
"Yes, and I'm flying back. After I've done you."
And he said to me what I had been planning to say to him: "You're very brave."
The hospital cafeteria was bright, airy, oceanic; there was foliage, a sun-trapping terrace, a smoking section: it seemed positively fashionable. The atmosphere differed from its British equivalent in many ways - most crucially in that its patrons were, of necessity, on some kind of spree, pushing the boat out, spending big. We joined the queue with our tray. I had coffee, while Updike bemusedly dithered over the half-dozen kinds of tea on offer.
"The ordeal of choice," I said, suavely enough - though one should stress that these occasions are not suave at all. However genial, they are always anxious and exhausting, with the interviewer fielding about 80 per cent of the nerves. "Have you read Saul Bellow's new novel?" I went on. "He says that in the East the ordeal is one of privation, in the West one of choice."
"Yes, I keep meaning to get it. There's just something about forking out the 20 bucks. Why don't I carry that?" he said, and accepted the trembling tray. The gesture was protective, courteous, very, able, above all. "So, the Observer is paying for my tea? How nice."
The tea cost 50 cents. Nor was this the extent of the monies I would disperse on Updike's account. Later, when we drove to Harvard, I gave the novelist a quarter for the parking meter. He fanned a handful of change at me, but I told him that Tiny Rowland [then owner of the Observer] would pick up the tab. Throughout he showed, not a sensitivity, but an awareness about money. "I was raised in the Depression," he has said, "when there was a great sense of dog eat dog and people fighting over scraps." This feeling has partly survived two decades of book-a-year bestsellerdom and the fact that "Reagan has turned America into a tax haven". Nowadays Updike could probably hold his own with the other Midases of the age: the arbitrageur, the greenmail raider, the arms dealer, the video vicar.
"My God," he enthused as we sat, "we're surrounded by all kinds of sick Americans." The breakfast crowd in the Wang Centre were wary in step and gesture. They were trussed in trusses, braced in braces, coated in powerful lotions, creams, elixirs. "Bending and bowing in a variety of friezes", to quote from The Poorhouse Fair (1959), John Hoyer Updike's youthfully solemn first novel.
All the illness on view had a tonic effect on me. After three weeks of holiday "parenting" (Updike's word: his speech and prose are permissively sprinkled with modernisms like "frontal", "focusing", "conflicted" and "judgmental"), I felt like checking into Mass General myself.
"It makes a change," I said, "from the triumphalism of the beach."
"My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. Look at that woman's glasses!" A lady groped by in what could have been a pair of welder's goggles. "I guess she really doesn't want any light in her eyes. My God, look at him!"
As Updike feasted his senses on the scene, I reached grimly for the tape- recorder. He hesitated. "We're not really going to do this, are we? We're just going to have a nice chat," he said, prophetically enough, "and then you're going to go home and write a long piece about me and my work."
Lauded, harassed, honoured, micro-inspected, Updike is by now simply stoical about the "attention" his work attracts. And he is a gentleman, and a good old pro. The enemies of promise - or of reasonable productivity - used to be Hollywood, fancy journalism, alcohol, and so on. These days the main enemy is being interviewed. Updike, if he isn't careful, could spend his time doing little else. In a recent New Yorker he published a story (and it is a full-time job keeping up with Updike: everywhere you look he is blurting out essays, poems, memoirs, reviews) in which a dissident Czech poet yearns to be rearrested and put back in jail, so that he can write some verse and stop being interviewed.
"A Korean professor might come and torment me for an hour. German TV keeps thinking it wants to stop by. A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. Once a year or so I rise early and do Good Morning America. It's kind of a raffish experience. You go in all groggy and sit in the green room with Mel Torme or the father of 17 girls or some such celebrity of the moment.
"Writers can get over-interviewed. The whole performance indicates that you are quite a swell fellow just by being you, whereas we know that what merit we have, if any, resides elsewhere. It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician."
Updike can hardly complain - and he doesn't complain - about the abrasions of self-exposure, because he has taken care of all that in his stories and novels. For some reason (won't anyone tell us why?), modern fiction tends towards the autobiographical, and American fiction more than most, and John Updike more than any. The tendency is still regarded as a "flaw", in Updike and in general; but one might as usefully accuse Shakespeare of having, in his tragedies, a "weakness" for kings and noblemen and warriors. The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are now.
Yet the case of John Updike is unquestionably extreme. The textural contrasts between your first and second wife's pubic hair, for instance, is something that most writers feel their readers can get along without. The novelists of yesteryear would gallantly take leave of their creations at the bedroom door. Updike tags along, not only into the bedroom but into the bathroom. Indeed, he sends a little Japanese camera crew in there after them. And so it is with all the other intimacies of thought and feeling. "It's all in Couples," he will concede. Or: "The novels are a fair record of what I felt." Or: "It's all in the books."
It is all also in the New Yorker. When I was a student, living on the Iffley Road, Oxford, I sometimes wished that E B White would call by, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to offer me a job on the New Yorker. It never happened. But it happened to Updike. He was at the Ruskin College of Art; the call came on the strength of early stories and proven versatility on the Harvard Lampoon. He was already married ("hand in hand, smaller than Hansel and Gretel"), already a father. Pictured with his first child, he looks to me like an oddjobbing babysitter, willing and gentle enough, no doubt, but far too young to be of much use. He was 23.
"I left New York after only two years there. The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect. The literary atmosphere struck me as ugly, and still does. Resentful, poisonous, a squeezed feeling. I came up here to be out of harm's way: inaccessibility is the best way of saying no. But Boston is becoming an honorary borough of New York."
Under the enlightened patronage of the magazine - an unbroken relationship - Updike established himself in Ipswich, Mass. "There was space here. We raised the children - or they seemed to raise themselves." And so did the poems, stories and novels: earnest, gawky, forgiving, celebratory. He did his "secluded and primitive" Pennsylvania childhood in Olinger Stories and elsewhere, his dad in The Centaur, and his mum in Of the Farm. Fame, sophistication, modernity and wealth arrived with Couples (1968), when Updike did Ipswich.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal. Couples struck enough people this way, and was soon labelled "the anatomy of a generation". Its broad success also depended on a combination of the intensely literary and the near-pornographic. A cat's-cradle of vigorous adultery, as filtered through the sensibility of a modern James - or a modern Joyce. What Joyce did for the residents of Dublin, Updike recklessly offered to do for the dreamy dentists and Byronic building contractors of Tarbox:
... the neighbours' boy linked to her by a handkerchief, lithe. Lower classes have that litheness. Generations of hunger. Give me your poor. Marcia brittle. Janet fat. Angela drifty and that Whitman gawky, resisting something, air. Eddie's Vespa but no Ford, Carol's car. He home and she shopping. Buying back liniment. I ache afterwards... Death. Hamster. Shattered glass. He eased up on the accelerator.
Didn't ease up. Pressed on. 500 pages like this. Couples is littered with brilliancies; but the smiles and the flinch alternate too rapidly for the reader's comfort. The book seemed to be Updike's pinnacle at the time. Now it looks more like a shimmering false summit.
Meanwhile as New Yorker readers must have been only too aware, all was not well with the Updike marriage. The annual damage-checks were arriving in the form of the Maples Stories, worldly comedies of disintegration with titles like "Waiting Up", "Sublimating", "Separating" and "Divorcing: A Fragment". Sample home truth, sample gallantry (their subject here is "guilt-avoidance"):
"I've decided to kick you out. I'm going to ask you to leave town."
Abruptly full, his heart thumped; it was what he wanted. "OK," he said carefully. "If you think you can manage."
..."Things are stagnant," she explained, "stuck; we're not going anywhere."
"I will not give her up," he interposed.
"Don't tell me, you've told me."
"Nor do I see you giving him up."
"I would if you asked. Are you asking ?"
"No. Horrors. He's all I've got."
Soon, young David Updike was publishing his account of the divorce, in the New Yorker. Then Updike's mother ("I'm in a writer sandwich," says Updike warily) weighed in with her version, in the New Yorker. "I've gotten used to being written about," says his ex-wife Mary, quoted (for a change) in the New York Times. Open marriages are not often as open as this. The loop, I mean to suggest, the circuit or the food chain, is shockingly brief. There is something predatory or vampiric in it - a hint of domestic cannibalism. It represents a kind of love to set these things down, as Updike has always claimed ("loving if not flattering"), and a kind of fidelity too. But a writer's kind, and therefore quite ruthless.
The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview. A personality is more palatable than a body of work, so all the faceting and detail of the life and writing is subsumed into thumbnail approximation. Who is John Updike? A garrulous adulterer who lives near the sea? By rights, he should have turned up at Mass General with lipstick on his collar, and then disappeared every 10 minutes to supervise abortions for Mabel and Missy and Charity and Hope. For the record, he was charm incarnate. But as for what Updike is like - in his head, in his private culture - I knew all that already.
In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity. The brain itself is serendipitous and horrendously encyclopaedic; he knows about home-improvement ("20 feet of 2 inch pine quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1½inch finishing nails"), music, cars ("padded tilt steering wheel, lumbar support lever for adjustable driver comfort, factory-installed AM/FM/ MPX'"), trees, computers, painting ("she halts in the pose of Michelangelo's slave, of Munch's madonna, of Ingres' urn-bearer"), boats ("Arthur's newly bought gaff-rigged Herreshof 12½"), photosynthesis ("the 5/6 of the triosephosphate"), pornography, theology, nuclear physics, linotyping, gold futures, aerodynamics, Africa, cookery, cosmogony and I don't know what-all else.
The unblinkingness of his eye is opposed by the mighty wooziness of his heart. He is a romantic, an Arcadian, a tremendous (and not always a tasteful) yearner for purity, innocence, the cadences of goodness. He is greedy, androgynous, devout, determined, intolerably sentimental and unforgiveably bright.
What makes this chaos meaningful, and what lifts the work from the merely phenomenal, is the way time is acting on it. Countervailingly, and increasingly, Updike is sour, withering, crafty, painfully comic. Such an immersion in the physical world, it seems, will tend not towards nostalgia but towards an invigorating and majestic cynicism. Mortality and its terrors were the fount of much of the early mawkishness; now they form the backing for a new robustness, a humorous pessimism that Updike has grudgingly embraced.
"Yes, it's another part of me, isn't it?" he says. "Maybe it's the best part of me. It's strange that I can be so sour when I'm such a sunny, cheerful individual. But when I get going on it...""
"It comes."
"It comes. It comes."
It comes in the form of a revitalised Harry Angstrom, Rabbit, the vulgar bohunk he left behind in Pennsylvania. Rabbit is not the "Updike who never went to Harvard", as some commentators claim; he is part of Updike's mind and always has been, part of our minds, the material man who sulks and gloats about sex and money. With Rabbit is Rich (1982), the third novel in the sequence, the hitherto fruitless homage to Joyce finds a truly modern application; at last Updike is elaborating and not just annotating Ulysses, urging it further and deeper into the 20th century.
It comes in the form of Henry Bech, the eponym of Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech is Back (1983). "I keep meaning to kill Bech," says Updike, viciously, "but he won't go away." Rabbit differs from Updike the man. Bech differs from Updike the writer: he is highbrow, cosmopolitan, single and Jewish, thus allowing Updike, through a feat of empathic daring, to arrogate a culture that has "kept the secret of [its] laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of the literary world." Updike echoes Malamud: "By developing a Jewish persona I was saying something like: 'Look, I'm really Jewish too. We're all Jewish here.'" But he was also challenging that domination, typically demanding more than his fair share. Another voice, another "third person", witty, wounded and historically central.
Then there is mainstream Updike, the fiction from the horse's mouth. Or (it must be said) from the horse's backside, in the case of The Witches of Eastwick (1984), which has just been filmed. The movie is so preposterous that critics have been protective about its source, forgetting that the book is preposterous too: crammed with beauties, but winsome, whimsical, haloed in a seamless futility. It would appear, though, that Updike is the better for the occasional holiday from merit (or therapeutic indulgence), because his most recent novel is the near-masterpiece Roger's Version. A meditation on death and creation in the pale light of a modern city, it is the richest, funniest and gloomiest book that Updike has yet written. To him, the future may not look as bright as it once did, but it has never looked brighter to his readers.
"Shit," said Updike. It was his one profanity of the morning. He had just led me into the wrong car-park. We were leaving Mass General and proceeding to Harvard, where Updike had a lunch.
"You once wrote a novel, or a romance, called Marry Me," I said. "Your new book of stories is called Trust Me. But maybe you should have called it Divorce Me."
For the book is riven with divorce and its aftermath. Brave ex-wives and their watchful replacements, half-grown children seldom seen, possessions divided, houses scoured and then abandoned. "They don't call them orphanages any more, do they?" asks one character. "They call them normal American homes." I put this to Updike, and quoted the line: "In the pattern of his generation he had married young, had four children, and eventually got a divorce."
"A pattern, that's right. Marriage was very erotic when I was growing up. You got married in college and had kids when you were still kids yourselves. Four children in two-year notches. It was the same for everybody we knew. The marginal couples stayed together. The ones who were any fun all broke up. In my case we'd just had enough of each other. It was terrible for the children, having to become grown-ups overnight."
This turned out to be the third time Updike and I had met. He couldn't remember the second time, when I had shaken his hand at a London publishing party. And I couldn't remember the first time, when I was a nine-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. "I spent an evening with your mother and father and some other people. Were you there? You might have been in bed. We played cards. We were all drunk but no one, I think, was as drunk as your father."
"Those were wild times. Everyone was at it."
"So I've read," said Updike. "So I've read. It was a revolution for all of us - not just for Abbie Hoffman. Kind of a dark carnival. We were all wearing love-beads, in a way."
Three years later, my parents duly divorced. Divorce, in those days, was like a dreadful disease that everyone's parents kept catching. It occurred to me for the first time that this had determined the pattern of my generation. The children of these divorcees, we married late, had children late - too late, perhaps, for the body's good. Updike was delighted to hear about our strained backs and spongy knees, our pleading ankles.
We left the hospital grounds and drove to Cambridge in Updike's powerful Audi. We drove from American sickness to American health - Harvard Yard, in July sunshine - and the student body, muscular and tanktop, yelling, jogging, frisbeeing, cartwheeling, and necking and quarrelling and breaking up. Updike's kids passed through here some time ago. Whereas my first-born will be three in November.
Sprawled here on the lawns, this particular batch seem to be oddly poised. Seventy-five per cent of them think that they will die in a nuclear war. Probably even more of them believe that they will meet their fate in a singles' bar. Marriage has been re-eroticised for them, whether they like it or not. "Nature is hard to outsmart," as Updike said. "It's always one jump ahead. Nature doesn't really care about us at all."
He was dropping off some paperwork at the Widener Library: correspondence, the galleys of Trust Me - no sooner published than cleared away, the decks cleared for the next thing. We parted, and then he called me back, telling me to give his best to my parents. Watching him strut away, head in the air, I felt - suddenly and ridiculously - what it was to have been one of his children, and how I would have hated to see him go.
I sat on the grass and looked again at one of the new stories. The passage verges on the sentimental (the weakness for the word "little", the cutely agrammatical "that" towards the end); but then I was verging on the sentimental myself.
Though Foster was taller, the boy was broader in the shoulders, and growing. "Want to ride with me to the dump?" Tommy asked.
"I would, but I better go." He, too, had a new life to lead. By being on this forsaken property at all, Foster was in a sense on the wrong square, if not en prise. He remembered how once he had begun to teach this boy chess, but in the sadness of watching him lose - the little furry bowed head frowning above his trapped king - the lessons had stopped ...
Seeing his father waver, he added, "It'll only take 20 minutes." Though broad of build, Tommy had beardless cheeks and, between thickening eyebrows, a trace of that rounded, faintly baffled blankness babies have, that wrinkles before they cry.
"OK," Foster said. "You win. I'll come along. I'll protect you."