The literature of death

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John Updike’s ‘Endpoint and Other Poems,’ out today, is the first in what is likely to be a long string of posthumous releases from the prolific author; a collection of stories, ‘My Father’s Tears,’ is due in June. But what’s most interesting about ‘Endpoint’ is the material that deals with Updike’s impending death, which was bearing down on him when he put the book together late last year.

Updike died of lung cancer in late January, but he wasn’t diagnosed until November, and in poems such as ‘Hospital’ and ‘Needle Biopsy,’ he balances the mundane realities of illness with the existential press of death. ‘Strontium 90 — is that a so-called / heavy element?’ he writes in ‘The City Outside’:

I’ve been injected,
and yet the same light imbecilic stuff —
the babble on TV, the newspaper fluff,
the drone of magazines, banality’s
kind banter — plows ahead, admixed
with world collapse, atrocities, default,
and fraud. Get off, get off the rotten world!

It makes sense that Updike, who spent his career translating everything into language, would not back away from writing about dying. It also makes sense that he would do it in poetry — no time to construct a narrative with existence so compressed.

What’s curious, though, is how few writers have reported back on their experience of the end of life. Janet Hobhouse was at work on her final novel ‘The Furies,’ when she died of cancer in 1991; the closing chapters chart the vagaries of ‘this dying business’ with a fierce unwillingness to look away.

Raymond Carver’s poetry collection ‘A New Path to the Waterfall’ was completed days before his death in August 1988; here’s the last poem, ‘Late Fragment,’ in its entirety:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Carver’s willingness to lay it bare makes this as succinct and heartbreaking a piece of writing as any I’ve ever read, a cry of human dignity in the face of obliteration — just like Hobhouse’s work in ‘The Furies’ and Updike’s final poems.

So why, I wonder, aren’t more writers compelled to tell us what it’s like when the inevitable arrives?

-- David L. Ulin