by John Updike
Though he turned aside to cook, to eat, to swing his ax into a fallen birch, the sensation remained, singing in the spaces between ax strokes, permeating the day. It was within reach, the graduation he sought, the final clarity, a tissue width removed from apprehension; it was waiting for him to be totally still. Then, he knew, this vaporous presence would condense into words and pour itself generously into his mind. He bathed, dried himself, dressed in fresh clothes he had himself washed in the brook and to whose clean faded fibres adhered a few reddish granules of sand, like sacred salt. He composed himself on the broad flat threshold, and listened. A single twig lay half in, half out of an oval of moisture that the shape of the stone had collected. A breeze transparently touched the treetops, and in a flickering of green the high leaves sharpened themselves against the whetstone of light. A silence embraced all phenomena; the sound beneath the silence approached. Stanley leaned his back against the door frame, wondered vaguely what the wood itself felt, and relaxed into a joy not very different from fear.
The forest shattered; Morris broke from the trees and ran panting toward him, shook him, cursed him. “You’ve ruined us! You’ve made fools of all of us!”
Stanley could not speak, he was so deeply locked in the fibrous grasp of what had almost overtaken him. He looked up at his brother and saw a walking fever, a flushed pink skin that seared his green mind painfully.
“What got into you? The kid was so scared he went for days without telling. Bernie’s been fighting to keep you out of jail. They’re right behind me. I ran ahead to get you to put your clothes on.”
But he had them on. Though tempted to protest, and aware that Morris wanted a response, Stanley chose not to desecrate his portion of the silence. He turned his head and saw the erect shadows that had appeared on the far edge of the field of ferns. Bernard, his two boys eager like hounds, the third boy, quailing, transfixed in the cataract of misunderstanding. There were two other men. One wore wine-colored slacks, a zebra shirt, and sunglasses, which he removed. It was Tom, come from California, clothed more strangely than a hermit. And a man in a gray business suit: with his new clarity of vision Stanley saw that he was a medical officer, or an agent of the steel company. He saw them all as standing upon a sea of more than crystalline fragility, achieved cell by cell in silence. Then they came rapidly toward him, and there was a thumping, a bumbling, a clumsy crushing clamor.
Books by John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)
PLAY
Buchanan Dying (1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)
JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.