[This piece, copiously illustrated, also appears in
Autosavant, 12/14/2009.]
John Updike, who died
last January, was a man of many interests and broad horizons: novelist, art
critic, short-story writer, poet, and, up to a point, car guy—or should I say,
automotive esthete. Not for him the oil-stained T-shirt and under-the-hood
exertions of a weekend. He couldn’t have cared less about the 0-60 time or
highway mpg of a car. Nevertheless, as he says in Due Considerations,
his last collection of essays and reviews, he truly loved cars. “One lives in
these machines, and loves them sometimes without knowing it,” as he says. So,
in a delightful short piece called “My Life In Cars,” he sketches an
auto-autobiography.
He starts by reminiscing
fondly about his first car, “a ’55 four-door Waterfall Blue Ford,” but fails to
state whether it was a Fairlane or a Crown Victoria. I’d go for the Fairlane,
as the more common model, and one commonly available, my research tells me, in
Waterfall Blue.
This car survived for
several years as a transporter first of the young bachelor, then of the married
man and his growing family; and it made the transition from New York City,
where, Updike says, his indignation still simmering, “the Waterfall Blue paint
got spattered with drops of tar” to halcyon Massachusetts. In the countryside, no
further such outrages occurred. Updike raised his first family, started writing
for The New Yorker, and drove the Ford back and forth to New York City.
It died at a respectful age, having been traded in, then bought back, by its
deeply affectionate owner, who never forgot it, as if it were a faithful dog,
or an old horse. But after all, as he says, “We in America make love in our
cars, and listen to ball games…small wonder the landscape is sacrificed to
these dreaming vehicles of our ideal and onrushing manhood.”
More Fords followed, mostly
convertibles, as the author’s successes grew: The Centaur; Rabbit,
Run, innumerable short stories…. He had the wherewithal. Thunderbirds?
Galaxies? He doesn’t say, but moves briskly on to his first non-Ford, a “dear
little dove-gray 1965 [Chevy] Corvair with a convertible top you pulled up by
hand.” Alas, as a certain Mr. Nader took some pains to point out at around the
same time, this dear little car was also, shall we say, unsafe at any speed.
Updike discovered this when he first rammed his into another car, then crashed
into a telephone pole. In the latter case, he hints elsewhere, the mishap
occurred at least partly because of “too many Stingers under his belt,” but the
car’s general flimsiness was also to blame, result: Exit Corvair. And, in 1968,
exeunt Updikes, to England.
In England he fell for a
Citroën, and brought it along when he returned to the States. Again, he doesn’t
say what model, but choices were limited, and his description can leave no
doubt: “When the engine started, the chassis rose up on cushions of air, and
when the trip was over it sighed regretfully while subsiding back.” His DS was
green, unspecified as to hue, but probably the metallic-celery that was a
common selection from the palette back then. This car became, as you might
expect, something of a taskmistress; Updike loved it, but found its Gallic
flair wearing thin after a year or so back in the States. “Under the hood,” he
says, “it harbored a snake pit of tightly packed connections that only a very
slender and determined contortionist could reach.” He found just such a
contortionist, a French-car specialist, but more than an hour’s drive from his
home. Still, he made the journey whenever necessary, until the day when his “green-skinned
inamorata” had a coughing fit and nearly expired in a tunnel; the affair, says
Updike, was then over, but adds wistfully that he caught sight of his ex-DS “in
a muddy front yard in Haverford” and that he had assured himself that the next
owner would treat the car with the respect it deserved.
After a divorce, Updike
took up with a Mustang, but this must have been around 1975, era of the
misbegotten Mustang II; no surprise, then, that his disappointment is palpable.
“No Citroën substitute,” he observes. The Mustang soon passed into the hands of
his older son, and thence into those of the young man’s girlfriend, from where
it was expertly connected with a row of concrete guard posts and murdered–and
good riddance, too, reads the subtext. But our man, whose literary star was
rising ever higher with Rabbit Redux and The Coup, had even
further to sink in the automotive realm, even from a Mustang II. Newly
remarried, Updike went out and bought a used red Ford Maverick. Now, the
Maverick was a fine-looking car, but God help us, what a lemon it was. Updike
bought his “because I liked the name and the pattern of ranch brands on the
black leather seats,” he explains, then adds “it proved to be my boyhood
nightmare: a car that would not start.” It demonstrated this allergy to
ignition first on rainy mornings, then on damp ones, then whenever there was
the hint of moisture in the air–which, in Massachusetts, is all the time.
It was time for more
foreign metal. Updike tried Audis, but couldn’t warm to them, and had a hard
time coaxing them up the snowy hill atop which he lived (evidently they weren’t
Quattros). He reverted to Ford, buying a Taurus–or maybe two, he couldn’t
remember. Finally, after a lifetime resisting (“I had vowed never to buy a
Japanese car”), he gave in and bought a Subaru, for that snowy hill. The Subie
conquered it, and his Nippophobia, and was soon joined in the Updike garage by
yet another Japanese, an Infiniti, again unspecified, but probably—given the
terrain, climate, and era (early to mid ‘90s) a QX4. It is with the
Infiniti and the Subaru cohabiting in his garage that Updike finishes his
lovely car-memoir, and sums up with a most Updikean flourish.
“Looking back, I can
pluck certain flowers of sensation from the blurred roadside. The ticking of
the heater warming up in my father’s ’36 Buick; …the powerful notched feel of
the floor shift of the lime-green Mustang, summoning RPMs from the vasty
gearbox…. The blasé sweep of the brilliantly engineered windshield wipers as I
drove my children, through a London downpour, to school in the Citroën, its
pointy green hood imperviously beaded with raindrops…Heaven itself may not
know, exactly, the number of miles my cars have carried me—back and forth, most
of them, on forgettable errands that seemed important at the time. Not just “seemed”—were
important, if a mundane life is important. I am proud of all my miles.”
So
should we all be, of all of ours.
