And notes tremendous too

Amit Chaudhuri

COLLECTED POEMS by John Updike Hamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 387 The poems in this collection, says Updike in his Preface, are 'the thready backside of [his] life's fading tapestry'. Despite the deprecating anatomical pun, one could say there is some truth in this categorisation, in that, compared to the prose of this impeccable writer — a supple, finished prose, capable of both fastidious reverence towards minutiae and moods of verbal extravagance — the poems often have the 'threadiness' of isolated attempts and doodlings. Thus, there is something touching about them; the supreme stylist, temporarily casting aside his authorial voice, allows us to catch him off-guard, cogitating, remembering, and, in the latter half of the book, entitled 'Light Verse', cartooning with words.

While the poems share Updike's charac- teristic interests, in smalltown middle-class America, in the enigmatic sexuality of daughters, in prim ex-spouses, in sex, they lack the characteristic authorial voice; that voice can be heard, in fact, in the little notes at the back, which qualify and embel- lish the poems with information and digres- sion, and seems to emanate not from the man who sat writing these poems in this house and that airport lounge, but from a source altogether more mysterious. It is a voice so confident that it can coax us into imagining and delighting in the moment of the poem's conception, even while appear- ing to apologise for it.

One of these small gems is the note to `Seagulls', three sentences full of drama, the pressure of chronology, and a real affection for the floundering poet:

My distinct impression is that I was ponder- ing gulls while lying on Crane Beach in Ipswich when the first stanza came over me

And when the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie said "I'm gay." '

in a spasm of inspiration. Penless and paper- less, I ran to the site of a recent beach fire and wrote in charcoal on a large piece of unburned driftwood. Then I cumbersomely carried my improvised tablet home:

The best poems (there are many good poems in this collection, and no bad or unintelligent ones) do have the generosity and receptivity, the desire to record the sensory tremors of an era, that his fiction does. 'Apologies to Harvard', for instance, contains an acute but forgiving anatomy of a generation for whom 'Blacks were beauti- ful/But seldom met,' and which, not least, `did not know we were a generation'. The poem also has the excellent and irreducible lines: 'The white/Of Truman's smile and Eisenhower's brow/Like mildew furs our hearts.'

The poems also afford recurrent and tan- talising glimpses of members of Updike's family, who appear in his novels and stories only in their fictional disguises. 'Plow Cemetery', which is about the place where Updike's Germanic forbears have been laid to rest, has, among other lovely lines, these remembering a maternal grandfather recalling a dentist's appointment:

... The drill, the dentist warned him, would approach the nerve.

`And indeed it did approach it, very close!' he said, with satisfaction, savouring the epic taste his past had in his mouth.

The strange, liquid intermingling of saliva, pain, poetry, memory — this is Updike telling us about the nature of his craft. It will also be apparent from the last two quotations that Updike, like other novelists who also write poetry (Lawrence, for instance), tries to be religiously conscientious about form and scansion, and in the weaker poems he is sometimes impeded by the pentameter. But while metres seem to creak occasionally in the first half of the book, they come to life in supple and greased ways in the 'Light Verse' section. These poems are often responses to newspaper reports, a kind of good-natured 'quarrel with others'; Updike himself says that his

principle of segregation has been that a poem derives from the real (the given, the substantial) world and light verse from the man-made world of information — books, newspapers, words, signs.

Thus, reading a report in the New York Times that

the Zulu lives in around world . . . [if] he does not leave his reserve, he can live his whole life through and never see a straight

Updike composes a poem that ends:

Anfractuosity is king.

Melodic line itself is banned, Though all are hip enough to sing There are no squares in Zululand.

There are enough good poems by Updike to make us accept them as an unignorable part of his oeuvre., and, for the sake of their survival, to make a Selected Poems a necessity.