Updike (16 page)

His first conquest was Katharine White. A formidable woman who went to work at
The New Yorker
in 1925, just six months after Harold Ross founded it, she was almost single-handedly responsible for the magazine’s emergence as a prestigious venue for serious fiction. Over the course of her career, she edited John O’Hara, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Stafford, and Mary McCarthy, to name just a few. In her obituary, William Shawn wrote, “More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave
The New Yorker
its shape, and set it on its course.” Born Katharine Sergeant to a Brahmin family in Boston, she arrived at the magazine as Katharine Angell (her first husband was Ernest Angell, a lawyer with whom she had a son, Roger, who eventually became Updike’s editor—an unusual dynastic succession); in 1929 she married a younger
New Yorker
colleague, E. B. (“Andy”) White. By the time she began editing Updike, she was in her early sixties, and treated him, as she did her other authors, with a firm maternal hand, mixing encouragement with the occasional reproof. She also made evident her affection for him. Ten years after her death in 1977, he wrote about the warmth she conveyed, her “aristocratic sureness of taste,” her “instinctive courage and integrity,” her “ethical ardor”; he also stressed that her “good humor and resilience were as conspicuous as her dignity and (when provoked) her hauteur.” All these qualities (and also a meticulous, sometimes comical attention to minutiae) are on display in the letters that arrived almost daily at the Updikes’ basement flat. They provided what Updike (like any writer just starting out) needed most: critical approbation from someone who radiated commanding authority.

White was motherly, but not like his mother. Though they were both forceful, tenacious, intelligent women with strong opinions, their styles were utterly different: Linda Updike had none of Katharine White’s polish and none of her “hauteur”; she was more impulsive, irascible, and unconventional than the
New Yorker
editor. Twenty-three years of coping with his mother had nonetheless been excellent training for Updike’s first important relationship of his professional career. In particular, his correspondence with his mother during the Harvard years prepared him for the challenge of coping at a distance with another demanding character who was observing him intently and doing her best to further his career.

By taking scrupulous care with his work, by engaging sympathetically with every aspect of his writing, from subject matter to punctuation, White encouraged Updike’s equally scrupulous commitment. They bonded over dashes, colons, and commas—most amazingly in an exchange of letters in the last two months of 1954 concerning two poems, “The Sunflower” and “The Clan.” She wanted to make his punctuation consistent; he wanted to make his light verse flow in a manner pleasing to the ear and the eye. When he suggested changes to the proof of “Sunflower”—literally begging for a colon rather than a dash at the end of a particular line (“A colon is compact, firm, and balanced: a dash is sprawling, wishy-washy, and gawky. The colon suggests the Bible: the dash letters and memoirs of fashionable ladies”)—she replied with a three-page “treatise on punctuation” and a transcription of the relevant paragraph from H. W. Fowler’s
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(the standard reference at
The New Yorker
, thanks to Harold Ross, who always kept a copy handy). She urged him to “try to feel more kindly toward the dash”—and closed with characteristic graciousness: “I want to add that I am delighted to find anyone who cares as much as this about punctuation and who is as careful as you are about your verse. . . . And I thank you for a very interesting and amusing letter.”

The back-and-forth between these two sticklers grew more and more affectionate; in March, she suggested that soon she would have to “break down” and begin her letters “Dear John.” In the same missive, she announced that she and her husband were planning a trip to England in the first weeks of June, and proposed that they visit the Updikes in Oxford. As the plans for this visit took shape, he continued to address her as “Mrs. White” (he never graduated to “Dear Katharine”), but he now launched freely into personal matters, with a charming description, for example, of the infant Elizabeth; he sent bulletins, as the baby grew, giving her precise weight.

An intelligent, fastidious, clear-sighted editor, White did Updike far more good than harm—but her advice wasn’t always for the best. She steered him away from writing about his Pennsylvania background, and discouraged him from indulging in wistful reminiscence, which turned out to be one of his most fruitful fictional modes. In February, rejecting a story called “Have a Good Life,” about a young man from a small town very much like Shillington who plays a game of pickup basketball on his last day at home before going off to get married, White suggested that he should avoid stories in which “a young man looks back nostalgically at his basketball-playing days.”
*
She noted that they had two similar items by him awaiting publication (“Ace in the Hole” and “Ex-Basketball Player”), and warned of a glut of characters looking back regretfully: “[W]e get so many that we have to be extra severe in our judgment of all stories on this theme.” Eager as always to please, Updike apologized, admitting that he hadn’t noticed how often he was writing about nostalgia, and as a result of her intervention, there were no more stories about his youth for the next two years. Not until she’d retired and he’d left New York for Ipswich did he produce “The Alligators” and “The Happiest I’ve Been,” two Olinger stories dripping with nostalgia (the latter featuring John Nordholm, the boy from “Friends from Philadelphia”)—a breakthrough that allowed him to write some of his finest fiction. It’s a dirty trick of literary fate that White’s description of the kind of story Updike should avoid—a young man who looks back nostalgically at his basketball-playing days—is precisely the starting point for
Rabbit, Run
, his first major success.

Very few of White’s judgments were off the mark. She encouraged him, for instance, to write about “the domestic scene and the subtleties and affectionate and agonizing complexities of husband-wife-children relationships.” Her taste was for short stories about relatively refined characters—better educated and more privileged than would ordinarily be found in Shillington. Confronted with Berks County material, she expressed the hope that he would choose “an entirely different locale”—England, for instance. She suggested he try writing about “a young married American who is doing graduate work at Oxford.” Updike obliged with a story that’s essentially made to order.

“Dentistry and Doubt,” which he sold to
The New Yorker
in April (shortly before his theological altercation with his father-in-law), is a slice of Updike’s English life, about a young American clergyman’s visit to an Oxford dentist’s office. The clergyman, Burton, is writing his master’s thesis on Richard Hooker, an early Anglican theologian. As he endures the dentist’s ministrations (“Now, this may hurt a little”) and the stilted small talk specifically tailored for an American patient (“What part are you from?”), Burton’s mind drifts to the religious doubts he was experiencing earlier that morning, a brief tussle with faith that gives the story some heft. But the best thing about “Dentistry and Doubt” is the intensely observed detail, Burton’s catalogue of sights and sensations, all made more vivid because they’re unfamiliar, this being his first visit to a foreign dentist.

Katharine White gratefully expressed her approval: “We think it is the best written prose you have done yet.” And indeed, Updike’s prose is subtly different in this story—bolder and richer—a sign perhaps that his training at the Ruskin was already having an effect. But the Ruskin must share any credit with Henry Green, whose novels Updike discovered soon after he arrived in England.
*
Green’s influence helps to account for a new softness in Updike’s writing—a lingering, tender touch—and a new daring. The syntax is looser, more flowing, and the metaphors more striking. Updike gives us Burton’s view from the dentist’s chair with minute precision, and an audacious simile: “The dentist’s eyes were not actually gray; screwed up, they seemed more brown, and then, as they flicked toward the tool tray, rather green, like pebbles on the bed of a fast-running creek.” When the drilling is done, Burton becomes aware of the dentist’s array of tools “as things in which an unlimited excitement inhered.” Updike lists various items—tweezers, picks, drill burrs, tiny cotton balls—and tells us that they traveled to Burton’s senses “burdened with delight and power.” Here, as in the many lively descriptions of the birds at the feeding station outside the dentist’s window, one can see the early traces of Green’s enduring influence.
*

The first sentence of Updike’s introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of three Henry Green novels,
Living
,
Party Going
, and
Loving
, begins, teasingly, “If I say that Henry Green taught me how to write . . . ,” and then sidesteps the issue by asserting that writing isn’t learned. Part of what appealed to Updike was that he and Green (another unusually precocious talent) shared certain writerly traits, including a fascination with seemingly unimportant quotidian detail. There was admiration, and also the shock of recognition. “He is a saint of the mundane,” Updike wrote, “embracing it with all his being.” Updike praised the “intensity of witnessing” in Green’s “limpid realism.” Green’s accomplishment reassured Updike that his own inclination was leading him along the right path. Green unlocked in him a lyrical impulse, and spurred him to make his prose style an active, expressive element in his fiction. Also important were Green’s “formal ambitiousness” and his “allegiance to the modernistic tradition.” Along with Proust, whom Updike began to read the next year, when he was living in New York, Green served as a kind of literary goad: “Both quite bowled me over,” Updike remembered, “showing me what words could do, in bringing reality up tight against the skin of the paper.” He gave the two authors credit for a “considerable expansion” of his literary ambitions. Although “Dentistry and Doubt” isn’t actually all that much more ambitious than “Ace in the Hole” (and it would be hard to claim that it’s a better story), Green had left his mark. Updike added him to the pantheon of modern “textual Titans” he’d worshipped at Harvard—the difference being that now, less than a year out of college, he began to hope that he, too, might one day be hailed as a titan.

Not all his encounters with eminent literary figures took place between the covers of a book. At a tea party in Oxford, Updike met his first celebrated author, the Irish novelist (and
New Yorker
contributor) Joyce Cary, and found him to be “full of a tender excitement, the excitement of those certain they are loved.” Updike’s Lowell House classmate Peter Judd, who was studying at Magdalene College, drove him to London in his Hillman Minx convertible to meet James Thurber. The occasion had been arranged by a Radcliffe friend, Nora Sayre, whose father, Joel Sayre, was a longtime
New Yorker
contributor. Her idea was that the magazine’s future should come face-to-face with its past. (Though Thurber was still contributing stories and cartoons to the magazine in the 1950s, he was no longer as prolific as he’d been in previous decades.) Sayre knew, moreover, that Updike adored both Thurber’s drawings and his writing. And yet the meeting was a flop. A tall, big-boned man with an unruly thatch of white hair, Thurber was by this time completely blind. After being led into the room by his wife, he launched into a monologue that lasted all afternoon. The assembled youngsters listened with rapt attention—except for Updike, who was dismayed to discover that he was bored by the rote recitation of anecdotes he’d read with delight as a child. He later claimed to have made some fawning attempts at conversation with the great man, but, according to Judd, Updike “rose to no bait, asked no questions.” He was “diffident”—“clearly not willing either to present himself as a rising star or to sit at the feet of the master.” The experience had the unfortunate consequence of diminishing his pleasure in Thurber’s work.

Despite the disappointment of the encounter with Thurber, Updike was eager to greet his
New Yorker
editor Katharine White and her husband, E. B. White, another childhood hero and a great favorite of his mother, who adored White’s essays about his Maine farmhouse. The Whites, who were stopping in Oxford on the way to the Cotswolds, pulled up outside the basement flat on Iffley Road in a black limousine driven by a liveried chauffeur, a fact the instinctively decent and unassuming Andy White remembered with considerable embarrassment. Whereas Thurber was oblivious, absorbed in his own performance, White was scrupulously attentive to those around him; when he spoke, what he said was designed to put his listeners at ease. His wife, who surprised the Updikes by being plump and short, as opposed to tall and regal, also thrilled them by reiterating over lunch William Maxwell’s promise: a job at
The New Yorker
would be waiting for John when he returned from Europe.

T
HE
U
PDIKES LEFT
England in early July, first traveling by train to Liverpool to stay with Mary’s parents, then sailing from there aboard the MV
Britannic
. They were greeted at the docks in Manhattan by John’s parents and Mary’s aunt and great-aunt, then taken by Wesley and Linda back to the farm in Plowville, a car ride revisited in “Home,” a story Updike wrote five years later. He lifted one incident from the journey—the young wife accidentally tipping a live ash from her cigarette onto the naked tummy of her baby girl—straight from life. The story also features vivid thumbnail portraits of Updike’s parents, similar to ones he’d already produced in “Flight” and “Pigeon Feathers,” miniatures that would be expanded in
The Centaur
and
Of the Farm
.

He had written from Oxford to arrange a job interview with William Shawn. After a few days at home in Plowville, he set off for Manhattan in his brand-new car (the family’s first; his father could afford only used cars), a 1955 four-door Ford coupe, waterfall blue. Paid for with his
New Yorker
earnings, the Ford had been the subject of earnest transatlantic negotiations; John gave his father detailed instructions about the precise model and color he wanted, and stressed the importance of a radio.
*
His mother accompanied him to New York, and though the car performed flawlessly, the trip ended in failure: they never made it to the city. There are two accounts of this odd little episode, one from a memoir of Shawn that Updike composed in 2000, the other from a story Linda wrote in the sixties called “The Mantle and Other Blessed Goods.” Updike remembered driving to the interview “with my mother along for the ride.” He became “hopelessly lost in a traffic jam under the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey; it was my humiliating task to find a phone booth and call [Shawn] to say, while trucks roared overhead, that I would be hopelessly late.” Shawn politely offered to wait, but Updike insisted on turning back and rescheduling the appointment for the next day. Linda’s version makes use of the same facts but ends with the narrator’s italicized conviction that the next day her son would be driving to the city on his own: “[He] would make
this
trip alone.” The emphasis practically begs the reader to ask why the mother had ever even thought of tagging along with her adult son to “meet the man who was going to be [his] first employer.” In Linda’s story, as in real life, the answer is that she thought of herself as enmeshed with his career.
The New Yorker
, for Linda as for Updike, was Mecca; she wanted to take part in the pilgrimage. And her son clearly had difficulty opposing her wishes. He could only thwart her accidentally, by getting hopelessly lost in a traffic jam.