One more week of February, and it’s possible I’ll make it to the end of my Fifth Section.  I’m writing the last chapter right now.  The problem is that I’m also rewriting the last chapter.  For me, every writing session begins with rewriting the work I did the day before.  I often think of the expression: two steps forward, one step back. 

I think about Penelope as well, working on her loom.  During the day, she works at her weaving, but every night she unravels her tapestry–putting off completion.  I’m certainly not trying to put off finishing my novel!  But the older I get, the more I need to rewrite.  I reread and rewrite in order to move forward.  I have three reasons for this:

1. Rereading and rewriting is my way of maintaining continuity in the face of constant interruptions.

2. Rewriting each day is quality control.  I ensure I have a solid foothold before I move forward.  You can’t build a novel (or climb a mountain, or run a race) without preparation every step of the way.

3. Rewriting prevents me from rushing.  I force myself to go back and develop underwritten dialog and scenes.

I teach a graduate seminar on revision at Boston University, and I always ask my students at the beginning of the semester, “How many of you regularly revise your work?”  Often, no one raises a hand.  Sometimes one student–usually a journalist–admits to revising.

Gifted writers have good intuitions about what works in a story and what does not.  They get along on instinct and inspiration–and in fact they are loath to mess with the creative impulse.  It seems reductive, even demeaning, to consider that the first and freshest ideas might not be the best.  But this romantic notion does not hold up well over time.  The dream-vision has its place, but requires slow and steady development and revision to work as art.  Therefore lyric poets consider every word, and novelists must test every scene.

And so I rewrite as I go, tapping and testing like a structural engineer.  Each line must hold its weight if I’m to finish my suspension bridge–my long arc of a novel.

I arrived home yesterday to find a big blue duffel bag on the porch.  The bag was printed Par Avion FRANCE.  The customs tag read printed matter, so I figured my French publisher was sending me copies of The Other Side of the Island.  But no, I found several copies of the English edition of Intuition.  My first book published in the UK! 

I’ve been thinking about John Updike, so masterful and also so familiar.  Losing him is like losing a member of the family.  My friend Deborah recently lost her mother, and she says that a thousand times she imagines picking up the phone to call–only to remember that her mother cannot answer.  Many readers will feel that way about Updike.  A thousand times we will pick up The New Yorker and expect to see a new short story, or one of his elegant book reviews.  He won’t be there.

Of course, his books remain.  Millions of words.  I must say that I prefer his short fiction to his novels, and I like the early work better than the late.  There was something about those youthful stories of his.  Sentence by sentence, he wrote with such clarity and grace.  He never lost his limpid style, and he never surpassed the freshness of his early vision.  He excelled at the first kiss, the soft flesh on a girl’s upper arms, the sudden nakedness revealed by bathing suits–oh those girls walking into the A&P.  The stories of divorce and infidelity and aging were good too, but those tales in “Pigeon Feathers” speak with such immediacy.  They are my favorites.  He was gifted at the young point of view, an innocent awareness.  He inhabited the older man’s perspective with authority, but I’m not drawn to his middle aged adulterers in quite the same way.  Updike could write sixteen, or twenty-three, or even twenty-eight like no one else.

I think people mistake rough edges for ideas.  Philip Roth is a rougher writer than Updike.  Saul Bellow more loquacious, his narratives more dialectical.  This does not mean that Roth and Bellow have more to say than Updike.  He had ideas as well.  He wrote about America as well.  He wrote about love and sex and betrayal and religion and materialism and history and memory with great intelligence.  He also chose to dissolve his themes in observation and description.  He was not as didactic as Roth and Bellow.  He had a lighter touch, and, I think, ultimately, a comic imagination.  He was more playful than his peers. 

Updike’s great subjects are conjugal, familial, and domestic.  He did attempt allegory–The Witches of Eastwick, and myth–The Centaur, and experiments in alien points of view–The Terrorist, but he is at his best where he treats the classroom and the gym, the small town boy, the high school reunion, the young couple driving home from their parents’ house, the disintegrating marriage.  Call Roth and Bellow Hals and Rembrandt.  Updike is Vermeer, suggesting so much with such delicacy, the young girl’s glance, the light through the window. 

But Updike is unlike Vermeer in one crucial measure: his body of work.  While Vermeer left few paintings, Updike was prolific, returning again and again to his people and personas, his Pennsylvania landscape, his New England towns.  He was constantly writing–not only a book a year, but essays and reviews and poetry.  The essays show what an insightful and curious reader he was all through his life.  He was a fine critic, and a generous one, clearly fascinated by new fiction.  He loved to read and he loved to work, and I think this life of reading and writing sustained him.  For he did have a cheerful face.  I noticed that, on the few occasions that I spoke to him.  Those small bright eyes, that scholarly proboscis, that playful smile–hovering just this side of smirk, but never settling.

Updike had the look of a man who enjoyed his gift.  Of course he was one of the most successful writers in America, and had been lionized since his youth.  I am sure that he had periods of doubt.  I’m sure he suffered in his life.  I don’t think writing was necessarily easy for him, although he made it seem so.   However, he was comparatively well paid and well praised.

Quite apart from the praise, the best sellers, and the prizes, I think Updike took an artisanal pleasure in his writing.  He always struck me as a man who took huge joy in drawing from life and from memory–every detail, down to a boy’s wonder at girls:  “(do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?)”  The language is stagy overly literary.  No boy has ever articulated this question so beautifully, but Updike’s language conceals and at the same time reveals the deeper question:  who are these creatures?  The boy’s mind–his little buzz, his bafflement at girls’ mystery–is what Updike captures again and again.  Everyone is young once, but Updike could write young.  That’s lightning in a bottle. 

After bitter cold weather, the sun is shining and the ice is finally melting on the sidewalks.  All night I heard the drip of melting snow from the eves–a pleasant sound!  The sparrows have returned in small but cheerful numbers to sun themselves in the bushes in front of our house.

I’m not sure I will succeed in meeting my goal to finish Part Five of my novel this month. Suddenly February seems rather short, and this spring like weather reminds me how quickly the seasons melt into each other.  I worked hard this past week, but spent much of my time rewriting earlier chapters.   Well, we shall see.

My greatest reading pleasure this winter has been Simon Schama’s magnificent book Rembrandt’s Eyes.  The first two hundred pages on Rubens confused me.  I wondered when Schama was going to get to Rembrandt.  But once he began writing about Rembrandt’s apprenticeship and early career, I began to understand Rubens’ importance as the model Rembrandt studied, envied, tried to imitate and eventually left behind.

Once Schama begins to tell Rembrandt’s story through his paintings, I found the book fascinating and deeply moving.  Time and again, Schama takes a familiar masterpiece and shows the depth of Rembrandt’s innovation, his daring, his technical and conceptual imagination.  He also shows how Rembrandt worked out his own ideas even when they were unfashionable, even when he was suffering and bankrupt.  What a hero, Rembrandt was.  Perhaps not a hero in his life, but in his stubborn and revolutionary art.

It’s extraordinary to me that when his life was in turmoil, his reputation battered, and his house and goods, even his own work repossessed, Rembrandt found within himself the strength to continue creating, and that he kept working out his own ideas about light and texture and character and color.  That he kept drawing the world, that he kept trying to capture the inner self in his portraits, even as he kept painting his own aging face.  He never stopped learning and experimenting. 

The last chapters of Schama’s book are the best.  At his lowest ebb financially and socially, Rembrandt is richest as an artist.  In these last chapters the reader understands the almost novelistic contrast Schama has been developing.   Rubens, the prince of painters died in a blaze of glory, while Rembrandt dies in poverty and leaves behind work more idiosyncratic, more radical, and more personal.  No wonder Van Gogh loved him so much!

Today is the first day of February, and I can report that I have achieved my January resolution of finishing Part Four of my new novel.  I hereby commit to a new resolution to finish Part Five this month (although this seems rather challenging!)

Well, I am resolved to try.