On Jonathan Galassi's "Updike's Violin"

Jonathan Galassi, in his absorbing “Updike’s Violin” (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2015), criticizes John Updike’s poetry for failing to be transformative. Galassi says, “He sees, he denotes, but he does not transform. His observations nearly always remain the beginning and the end of his writing in verse.” I agree that Updike’s poems, particularly the brilliant ten-poem sequence, “Endpoint,” that appeared in the March 16, 2009 New Yorker, aren’t transformative. That’s exactly why I treasure them. They are poems of untransformed reality. For example, consider "Fred Muth, Peggy Lutz," the seventh poem in the “Endpoint” sequence:

December 13, 2008

They’ve been in my fiction; both now dead,

Peggy just recently, long stricken (like

my Grandma) with Parkinson’s disease.

But what a peppy knockout Peggy was!—

cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN.

Pigtailed in kindergarten, she caught my mother’s

eye, but she was too much girl for me.

Fred—so bright, so quietly wry—his

mother’s eye fell on me, a “nicer” boy

than her son’s pet pals. Fred’s slight wild streak

was tamed by diabetes. At the end,

it took his toes and feet. Last time we met,

his walk rolled wildly, fetching my coat. With health

he might have soared. As was, he taught me smarts.

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,

scant hundred of you, for providing a

sufficiency of human types: beauty,

bully, hanger-on, natural,

twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,

all there in Shillington, its trolley cars

and little factories, cornfields and trees,

leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life. Even then were tears

and fear and struggle, but the town itself

draped in plain glory the passing days.

The town forgave me for existing; it

included me in Christmas carols, songfests

(though I sang poorly) at the Shillington,

the local movie house. My father stood,

in back, too restless to sit, but everybody

knew his name, and mine. In turn I knew

my Granddad in the overalled town crew.

I’ve written these before, these modest facts,

but their meaning has no bottom in my mind.

The fragments in their jiggled scope collide

to form more sacred windows. I had to move

to beautiful New England—its triple

deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets—

to learn how drear and deadly life can be.

That “The town forgave me for existing” gets to me every time I read it. The poem is an exceptionally beautiful, heartfelt tribute to Updike’s hometown of Shillington. The reference to “these modest facts” reminds me of Lowell’s “poor passing facts” in his great “Epilogue.” Galassi is right when he says the “Endpoint” poems “recall Robert Lowell’s work of the late 1960s and 1970s.” Reviewing Lowell’s Day by Day (1977), Helen Vendler said, “Accuracy and fidelity to perception have rarely received such a desperate pledge of faith” (Part of Nature, Part of Us). 

Accuracy and fidelity to perception – these, it seems to me, are the hallmarks of Updike’s late style, as expressed in his magnificent “Endpoint” poems – poems that do not alter, dramatize, fictionalize, or otherwise transform the world, but strive to show it exactly as he sees it.