Updike (43 page)

To Maxwell, Updike expressed the hope that each country he visited would yield a short story. Not quite, but nearly. Less immediately rewarding, but useful in the long run, was the authority that extensive travel bestowed on him. Thanks to a decade of cultural mission work and literary hobnobbing, by the mid-seventies he’d been practically everywhere; if he happened to go somewhere new, he could assimilate the novelty with dizzying speed and assurance. When he first saw Helsinki in 1987, for instance, he confidently compared it with Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo, hatching opinions with the unhesitating conviction of a seasoned traveler. It was with the same easy confidence that he turned a slight acquaintance with a country or region into a novel, a feat he accomplished with both
The Coup
(1978) and
Brazil
(1994).

In January 1973, a month before journeying to Africa, he drew up a new will, just as he had done before setting out for Russia. (This time he named Judith Jones as his literary executor.) Despite the usual jitters—a sense of insecurity sharpened in Nairobi—the trip went smoothly, with Kenya providing both urban unease and the wildlife bonanza of a brief photo safari. Mary remembered that she and John weren’t getting along well—certainly not as well as they had been on the Russia trip. On their return, Updike flew down to Washington, tanned and long-haired, to deliver a public debriefing at the State Department, where he explained that he was never happy with the lecture he’d planned to deliver in each of five countries visited, and that eventually he’d substituted remarks about himself—which seemed to be what his audience wanted. He looked back with some satisfaction on an experience that, he later said, “slightly enlarged my sense of human possibilities.”

It also helped expand his literary range. He waited three years before mining his African expedition for material he could use in a novel; the four weeks spent traveling eastward across the continent were essential to the invention of Kush, the landlocked sub-Saharan nation, not unlike Chad or Ethiopia, at the heart of
The Coup
. Updike supplemented memories of his journey with copious research—this is the first of his novels to include an acknowledgments page listing source materials. He also let his fancy roam more freely than ever before—
The Coup
is his first novel set abroad, but more important, it’s his most radically experimental novel; the many critics who seemed incapable of resisting the urge to call it a “departure” weren’t just pointing to the exotic setting. Updike was deliberately turning his back on the domestic realism readers and critics expected from him. For the first time in more than a decade, he produced a novel in which adultery played no significant part.

The Coup
was liberating in all sorts of ways, opening up space and time, making room for a wild freedom of invention. A land of “delicate, delectable emptiness,” Kush covers nearly half a million square miles and seems to be exempt from conventional chronology (“even memory thins in this land”), so that it’s difficult, sometimes impossible, for the reader to track the passage of days and years (though the action, we’re told, occurs sometime around “the last year of Richard Nixon’s presidency, with flashbacks to the Eisenhower era”). On a map, Kush “suggests . . . an angular skull whose cranium is the empty desert”; it’s less a geographical entity with an unfolding history than a fantasy played out in a jumbled, dreamlike sequence.

Whose head dreams the dream that is Kush? Our narrator is Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû, the country’s deposed dictator, who is now writing his memoirs—sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third—in a seaside café in Nice, “dreaming behind his sunglasses, among the clouds of Vespa exhaust, trying to remember, to relive.” As Joyce Carol Oates noted in her review of the novel,
The Coup
is at heart Nabokovian; behind Ellelloû stands Charles Kinbote, the exiled ruler who scribbles in the margins of
Pale Fire
. Within the framework of Updike’s novel, Colonel Ellelloû’s opposite number, so to speak, is Colonel Sirin, the officer in charge of a secret Soviet missile installation buried in the Kush hinterland; Sirin was the nom de plume adopted by Nabokov in his twenties and thirties, while he was still writing in Russian. The outrageous pyrotechnics of Ellelloû’s language (“mandarin explosions,” Updike called them) bring to mind Nabokov’s more florid moments. Consider, for example, this dazzling description of the Kush landscape as glimpsed from the air-conditioned comfort of Ellelloû’s presidential Mercedes: “the low, somehow liquid horizon, its stony dun slumber scarcely disturbed by a distant cluster of thatched roofs encircled by euphorbia, or by the sudden looming of a roadside hovel, a rusted can on a stick advertising the poisonous and interdicted native beer.” This is Updike on a tear, spooling out his prose, letting his sentences take whatever rococo shape strikes his fancy.

As the presence of Soviet missiles deep inside Kush suggests, domestic politics are inseparable from global politics, the push and pull of the superpowers waging their Cold War, what Ellelloû calls “the paramilitary foolery between the two superparanoids.” A day after leaving the Soviet installation, he thinks he spies in the distance “two golden parabolas”: the golden arches of McDonald’s, inevitable symbol of American cultural hegemony. The Russians’ missile silos are no match for the insidious encroachment of their enemy’s crass commercialism. Ellelloû is rabidly anti-American, a prejudice that gave Updike license to satirize both anti-American rhetoric and those aspects of the national culture he himself deplored. When Ellelloû calls the United States a “fountainhead of obscenity and glut,” we hear the echo of Updike’s laughter and a little bit, too, of his scorn.

He wrote
The Coup
in part because he had things to say about Africa and about geopolitics, and in part for more personal, not to say selfish, reasons. He wanted to go back to Africa (which he eventually did, for two and a half weeks in the spring of 1984); inventing Kush was a way of taking a trip without leaving New England. And he also wanted to explore his own domestic experience, distanced by an exotic setting. One reason adultery is not an issue in the novel is that Ellelloû has four wives. When Updike began
The Coup
, he and Mary had already filed for divorce; by the time he finished, he was married to his second wife, Martha.

F
OR MORE THAN
three decades, Updike and Martha traveled indefatigably. Not a year went by without two or three foreign excursions—and sometimes, when Updike was promoting a new book, several more. New scenery still thrilled him, and still stimulated his writing: “Out-of-the-way places,” he noted in the mid-nineties, “seem to excite me to my best and brightest prose.” And if a foreign publisher or the sponsors of a far-flung festival offered sufficient monetary inducement, avarice compelled him to say yes. Posing as a writer, he complained, often paid better than staying home and actually writing. But whether he was traveling for money or for pleasure, some part of him always wanted to be back at his desk, absorbed in his work.

Six months before his second marriage, while he was still writing
The Coup
, he escorted his widowed mother and the sixteen-year-old Miranda to Spain for eight days, mostly to satisfy Linda’s craving for things Spanish and to facilitate her research for yet another unpublishable historical novel. Arriving in the capital, he suffered from insomnia, and took advantage of his sleeplessness to write a remarkable sequence of eight sonnets that mix impressions of Madrid, Toledo, Ávila, and Valladolid with yearning for Martha back at home. Howard Moss of
The New Yorker
thought “Spanish Sonnets” contained some of the best poetry Updike had ever written. Certainly there’s a bracing freedom and a daring to some of the lines:

The land is dry enough to make the rivers

dramatic here. You say you love me;

as the answer to your thirst, I splash,

fall, and flow, a varied cool color.

Here fountains celebrate intersections,

and our little Fiats eddy and whirl

on the way to siesta and back.

They say don’t drink tap water, but I do.

The imagery is jumbled like the cascading thoughts of the sleep-deprived.

After the trip to Spain, which figures in a late short story as a “fraught and sad . . . expedition,” there were no more family excursions to foreign countries, no more holidays abroad with the Updike children (who by the eighties were grown up and beginning to have children of their own). He traveled either alone, alone with Martha, or with Martha on guided tours. He also went on a handful of rain-sodden golfing trips to Scotland and Ireland organized by the Myopia Hunt Club.
*

In January 1981 he paid a second visit to Venezuela, this time with Martha. They were the guests of Bill Luers, the young diplomat who looked after Updike in Russia and was now the American ambassador in Caracas. Luers sent the tourists on an expedition, via helicopter, to see the remote and spectacular Angel Falls, but the helicopter crashed as it was landing atop Auyán-Tepui. In his memoirs, Updike gives a dramatic account of the accident:

As it hoveringly descended, with its battering big rotor blades, toward the cross painted on a flat rock as a landing field, it swerved out of control and plopped down on a nearby set of rocks shaped like diagonally stacked loaves of bread. The amazed helicopter, its rotors still cumbersomely battering the air, came to rest at a sharp tilt, and the tipped interior of the plane was flooded with excited Spanish in which the word
puerta
distinctly sounded. I was next to the door, and deduced that the general wish was that I open it and jump out; this I did, running out from under the whirling blades. I assumed that my youthful wife would irresistibly follow, but evidently I should have stopped and let her jump onto me, for when another man, an officer of the American Embassy, saw her balk and attempted to help her down, both fell, and she sprained her ankle so severely I had to push her, a day or two later, in a wheelchair through the Caracas airport.

Updike was pleased by his “inner coolness” in the midst of this emergency, but the anecdote, as recited at dinner parties in years to come, turned into a tale of Updike’s cowardice. It was in any case not the only unfortunate story to emerge from this South American adventure. Four months after his return,
The New Yorker
ran a travel piece, “Venezuela for Visitors,” in which Updike anatomized the country’s class system with broad satiric strokes. He begins with this: “All Venezuela, except for the negligible middle class, is divided between the Indians (
los indios
) and the rich (
los ricos
),” and ends with this: “
Los indios
and
los ricos
rarely achieve contact. When they do,
mestizos
result, and the exploitation of natural resources. In such lies the future of Venezuela.” In between, there’s more of the same facetiousness. Needless to say, the Venezuelans who read it were unimpressed with the way he chose to repay their hospitality.

Five years later, Updike was again Luers’s guest, in Prague this time, on his own and behaving with his accustomed good manners. Two notable events from this trip to Communist Czechoslovakia are recorded with only minimal adjustment in “Bech in Czech”: a visit to Kafka’s grave and a book signing at the U.S. embassy. On the day Updike arrived, Luers whisked him in the embassy limousine to the “newer” Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of the city, where Kafka is buried with his parents—but the gates were locked shut, the caretaker unmoved by the ambassador’s flag-waving assertion of diplomatic privilege. Luers was about to give up when two young men in plaster-splattered overalls appeared with a key. Although Luers did his best to convince them that he and his guest must be allowed in, his appeals were met with blank indifference—until Updike’s name was mentioned, whereupon the men exclaimed, “Updike!
Rabbit, Run
! We love his works!” The men were only too happy to unlock the cemetery gates for the distinguished author and escort him to Kafka’s grave. Though gratifying, this unexpected display of literary ardor was less stirring than the long, patient line of Czechs of all ages, many of them young, spilling out of the embassy and onto the sidewalk, waiting for Updike to sign tattered volumes of his work. They waited in plain sight, despite the presence of policemen taking photographs. (The Communist authorities kept a keen eye on anyone eager for an American’s autograph.)

Updike bestows all this adulation on Henry Bech, who feels flattered and flustered—and inadequate. He feels like an impostor—Updike’s cue to supply him with this teasing reflection: “That was why, he supposed, you travelled to places like this: to encounter fictional selves, the refreshing false ideas of you that strangers hold in their mind.” As if poor Bech didn’t have enough to contend with, he has to cope with the baggage of his ethnic identity: “For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all—up in smoke.” Here of course, Updike is the impostor. He and Bech combine to produce a kind of comic postmodern duet:

More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer, a literary man, and in this dimension, too, he felt a cause for unease. He was a creature of the third person, a character. A character suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop.

In bed on his last night at the ambassador’s residence, a sumptuous palace built by a Jewish banker whose family was forced to flee Hitler’s menace, Bech panics, his sense of imposture and of his own insignificance magnified by the extreme seriousness of literary endeavor in a country ruled by a “Kafkaesque” Communist state. He worries that he will “cease to exist,” and Updike makes a tidy package of the whole by looping back to the phrase he uses as a synecdoche for the Holocaust: Bech worries that he, too, will go “up in smoke.”