So they die at exactly the moment I die.
In actuality, needless to say, I die and they live, and are bereaved of me. But I am bereaved of them – all of them, all my loved ones, all my pretty ones.
The only consolation I can see in this is that there won’t be any time to miss them and wish they were here.
∗
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.
Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an –ly adverb. The –ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.
Literary English seems to want to be end-stressed. Maybe it’s the iamb. With the exception of Housman and not many others, the meter of serious poetry is ti-tum.
∗
A longlasting sonic charge is packed into any word that directly precedes a punctuation mark – most especially a full stop. Look at this quote from Updike’s final collection of stories, My Father’s Tears (published posthumously in 2009):
…Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.
So we have ‘…his land’ full stop, and then ‘…his land’ full stop. The word preceding a full stop is invested with treacherous stamina: as a result, ‘land’ and a fortiori ‘his land’ are effectively unusable for at least half a page – until the sonic charge wears off, and the ear forgets.*2
For a whole other order of inadvertency, contemplate this: ‘The grapes make a mess of the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall.’ (The most ridiculous thing about that sentence, somehow, is its stately semicolon.) And what follows here is not a sample quatrain of Updikean light verse:
ants make mounds like coffee grounds…
except for her bust, abruptly out-thrust…
my bride became allied in my mind…
polished bright by sliding anthracite…
No, not poetry, not doggerel. Those are just four separate snippets of deaf prose.
∗
Ian became friends with John; they corresponded, and Mr and Mrs McEwan went to stay with Mr and Mrs Updike in Massachusetts in the late-middle 2000s – anyway not long before the death. And what was Updike’s destined mood? You can tell from My Father’s Tears, which contains a fair amount of life-writing, that the ‘uncanny equanimity’ Updike once laid claim to was in the end replaced by mild but unalleviated depression. And did Updike know he was losing his inner ear? Clearly not, I would say. How else could the clangers quoted above survive the two or three rereadings he must unavoidably have given them?
In 1987 I spent most of a summer day with Updike. We started off in the enormous cafeteria at Massachusetts General Hospital (where he faced a minor procedure that was belatedly postponed). At one point I asked if he would mind a brief interlude in the smoking section, and he said, ‘Not at all. I envy you. I quit.’ He quit in his early thirties. But oncologists call lung cancer ‘the long-distance runner’, and it came for him in his mid-seventies.
Literary talent has perhaps four or five ways of dying. Most writers simply become watery and slightly stale. In others the subtraction is more localised and more conspicuous. Nabokov lost his sense of moral delicacy and reserve (the last four novels are heedlessly infested with twelve-year-old girls). Philip Roth lost the ability to imbue his characters with a convincingly independent life. Updike lost his ear – his mind’s ear; he forgot how to use it in the formation of his prose…
The body, on the other hand, confronts a multiplicity of exit routes. And Updike’s lungs remembered, and neither did the cancer forget.
*1 I know an American teenager who holds up the thumbs and index fingers of either hand – forming the shape of a W – to spare herself the effort of saying Whatever. This in its way is self-parody of considerable wit.
*2 The sonic charge is strangely uneven when it comes to common prepositions and other nuts and bolts. ‘With’, ‘to’, and ‘of’ – these are almost instantly forgotten by the inner ear. But ‘up’ (perhaps flexing its status as an adverb) has real staying power. It takes two or three hundred words before the mind forgets an ‘up’.
Chapter 3 Philip: The Love of His Life
The bod from Realisations
‘What d’you think I should wear?’ said Phoebe on the phone (it was late morning). ‘I’m not asking for your advice. I just want to hear your opinion.’
‘One of your summer dresses.’
‘That’s no good. I
