Updike (14 page)

Elsewhere, what catches the eye—what caught Guérard’s eye (he praised Updike’s authentic portrait of “ordinary, ‘everyday’ damnation”)—is the telling use of minute, convincing detail. Relying strictly on dialogue, gesture, and bursts of clear-eyed description, Updike shows us (without telling us) that things won’t get any better for Flick and Evey, though Flick still tries to summon some of the old high school magic to block out the grim reality of their predicament. Here is Flick, fresh from being fired, driving home, listening to the radio:

[H]e picked a cigaret from the pack on the sunshield, hung it from his lower lip, snapped a match across the rusty place on the dash, held it to the cigaret, dragged, and blew out the match, all in time to the music. He rolled down the window and flicked the match so it spun end over end right into the gutter. “Two points,” he said and laughed for a syllable. He cocked the cigaret toward the roof and sucked the smoke way in, letting it bounce out of his nostrils a puff at a time. He was beginning to feel like himself, Flick Anderson, for the first time that day.

This is fast-paced, entertaining prose based on keen observation of lived life—already an achievement for a twenty-one-year-old still in college. What makes it especially good is the rich detail: the rust on the dashboard; the hint of foreshadowing in the match’s trajectory; the unforced allusion to basketball, source of Flick’s brittle self-esteem; the way he tries to calm his nerves with rote physical gestures. It adds up to a convincing psychological and sociological snapshot of a young, distressed, working-class American circa 1953. From his father, Updike had heard many stories about how the students at Shillington High School, especially the star athletes, fared after graduation. “Flick” captures the type exactly, by showing us a quirky, undeniably real individual. Impressed, Guérard suggested to Updike that he submit the story to
The New Yorker
.

“Flick” was rejected, but a year later (after several poems and another story had been accepted) he resubmitted it as “Ace in the Hole.” Though the nickname of the protagonist (now Ace) had changed along with the title (now a clever play on words), the story published in the April 9, 1955, issue of
The New Yorker
is otherwise almost exactly the same story Updike handed in for his Harvard writing class.

Richly evocative of a particular time and place, the original version takes its sociology for granted; it focuses narrowly, without making any explicit judgment whatsoever, on an hour or so of Ace’s unhappy afternoon. When Updike revised the story nearly fifty years later for
The Early Stories
, however, he superimposed a layer of ethnic and religious tension: Evey is now a Roman Catholic, and defensive about it; Ace allows himself to call an Italian-looking kid who taunts him a “miserable wop”; Ace’s boss has a new name (Goldman instead of Friedman); and Ace, offering his opinion of his boss, who’s just fired him, reveals what looks like an anti-Semitic streak: “He just wanted too much for his money,” he says. “That kind does.” These changes are significant, if only because they underscore the clean simplicity of the earlier version, which is like a peephole on a world utterly different from the Harvard milieu in which it was written. The lively accuracy of the scene he paints is its own reward; it pleases, much in the way Herrick pleases, because it treats—to borrow Updike’s undergraduate assessment of the poet—“tiny phenomena with the full attention and sympathy due to a ‘major’ theme.” Or to put it another way, he fulfilled, age twenty-one, his writerly duty as he still saw it half a century later: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”

The same can be said for “Friends from Philadelphia,” a story he wrote immediately after graduation, at the Penningtons’ summer place, in South Duxbury, Vermont, near Montpelier. He and Mary took the train north, and a neighbor picked them up and drove them out to the farmhouse, a rustic spot three miles off the main road, up the side of a mountain. Leslie Pennington had bought the property for two hundred dollars during the Depression, and the family used it only during the summer months. John and Mary had volunteered to open it up and get it ready for her parents’ arrival. John didn’t really like the house—it was too much like Plowville, and even more isolated—but once they’d done their chores, there was certainly plenty of time to write.

He typed out “Friends from Philadelphia” on his father-in-law’s typewriter and sent it off to
The New Yorker
. By the time he received a letter from William Maxwell (dated August 5) announcing that the magazine was “delighted” with the story, and inviting him to the city to discuss over lunch his future as a
New Yorker
writer, Updike and his wife had migrated south to Plowville, trading one set of parents for the other. He never forgot the moment when he retrieved the envelope from the mailbox at the end of the drive, the same mailbox that had yielded so many rejection slips, both his and his mother’s: “I felt, standing and reading the good news in the midsummer pink dusk of the stony road beside a field of waving weeds, born as a professional writer.” To extend the metaphor, though the gestation period that led to this gratifying birth had been quite long (he’d fallen in love with the magazine a full decade earlier), the actual labor was brief and painless: he passed from unpublished college student to valued contributor in less than two months—“the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life,” he later called it.

His very first
New Yorker
short story (following the acceptance of two poems “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums” and “Ex-Basketball Player”), “Friends from Philadelphia” also marks the first appearance of John Nordholm, Updike’s original Olinger alter ego, one of a succession of fictional teenage boys blessed and burdened with the author’s character traits and family situation. Like “Ace in the Hole,” the story appears at first to be a modest affair. There are only four characters, and the action, which amounts to a trivial errand, is complete in little more than half an hour: fifteen-year-old John Nordholm, trying to buy a bottle of wine at his mother’s behest for the eponymous friends from Philadelphia, enlists the help of the Lutz family—Thelma Lutz, his classmate, and her parents. Again, the heart of the story is the revelation of character through dialogue, detail, and gesture. John is too young—too young to buy wine and too young for Thelma (just barely). The first line of the story (“In the moment before the door was opened to him, he glimpsed her thigh below the half-drawn shade”) suggests that John is on the brink of new experiences; the door will be opened, the shade will be raised, and the mystery obscurely typified by that glimpse of thigh will be laid bare. But not yet. “Friends from Philadelphia” is cheerful and sly; it winks broadly at sexuality (“When she looks like that, John thought, I could bite her lip until it bleeds”) without allowing the clamor of adolescent urges to take center stage. John and Thelma play somewhat larger roles than Thelma’s mother and father, but each of the four characters is complex enough to excite the reader’s curiosity. As a result, the story never feels slight—a faint air of mystery gives it depth and poignancy, and balances the gentle comedy.

In the introduction to
Olinger Stories
, Updike felt obliged to respond to the charge that the story has no point: “The point, to me, is plain, and is the point, more or less, of all these Olinger stories.
We are rewarded unexpectedly
.” The reward, in this case, takes the form of a twist at the very end of the story: the bottle of wine Thelma’s father buys (and pays for), a Château Mouton Rothschild 1937, is much finer than anything John or his parents would have thought to ask for, an act of random generosity that lifts the ending like an exclamation point.

Updike gave competing versions of the genesis of the story (which not only launched his professional career but remained, despite his prodigious output, his mother’s favorite). At one point he claimed he was reacting against the sardonic tone of a John Cheever story, “O Youth and Beauty!” (which was published in
The New Yorker
a full year earlier, in the summer of 1953): “Cheever’s story involved drunkenness and a sudden death by pistol shot, and to my innocent palate it tasted as rasping and sour as a belt of straight bourbon. I thought to myself, ‘There must be more to American life than this,’ and wrote an upbeat little story, with an epiphanic benefaction at the end, to prove it.” It’s true that in his senior year Updike had taken against Cheever, calling him “one of my greatest enemies” and deploring his cocky writing and his anger at his miserable characters. But in the introduction to
The Early Stories
(written nearly half a century after the fact), he gave credit to J. D. Salinger. Leaving Cheever out of it entirely, Updike confided that the unexpectedly excellent bottle of wine (the “epiphanic benefaction”) “owes something” to the dead Easter chick in the bottom of the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” Neither account is wholly persuasive. More important than either Cheever or Salinger was the inspiration Updike drew from setting the story in Shillington—or Olinger, as he decided to call it several years later.

Though he never gives the name of the place where Thelma lives, he was picturing his hometown, inhabiting the location with a ferocious intensity, creating Olinger with the force of his Shillington memories. In a letter to his editor, he specified that the Lutzes’ house is at 17 Spruce Street and the liquor store at the corner of Lancaster Avenue and Sterley Street. He had in mind both an exact address and real people. The characters were immediately recognizable to any Shillington reader as John himself and the family of his classmate Joan Venne.

Looking back ten years later, he had the impression that “Friends from Philadelphia” was written by someone to whom “everything outside Olinger—Harvard, marriage, Vermont—seemed relatively unreal.” He entered completely into the world of his story, the recollected world of a tall, awkward, eager small-town teenager named John; in the grip of this creative fervor, he lost sight of his current surroundings—his wife, her parents’ lonely farmhouse, the chill of the early summer evenings—and saw only the Shillington of his boyhood.

He paid his hometown another virtual visit in a poem written in midsummer called “Ex-Basketball Player,” which
The New Yorker
accepted three days before “Friends from Philadelphia.” Updike’s most popular poem, widely anthologized and often taught in school, it’s a portrait of Flick Webb, a sadder, more remote sibling of Ace Anderson (whose name was Flick in the first draft of the story). Here, too, the geography is exact, and cleverly blended into the narrative, the mise-en-scène being an abortive sprint up the court:

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

Is on the corner facing west, and there,

Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

The garage itself, with its anthropomorphic gas pumps, is pure Olinger, and so is the luncheonette where Flick spends his time when he’s not working, the details lovingly observed and ingeniously shaped to fit the requirements of a lyric poem.

Even as he was meditating on postgraduation failure, Updike was achieving exactly the opposite. “I had given myself five years to become a ‘writer,’ and my becoming one immediately has left me with an uneasy, apologetic sense of having blundered through the wrong door.” The proximate result of his rapid launch was twofold: a redoubling of his ambition (he peppered
The New Yorker
with submissions in the weeks after his breakthrough) and, perversely, a simmering, low-key grudge against his alma mater.

In “The Christian Roommates,” Updike wrote that Harvard “demands of each man, before it releases him, a wrenching sacrifice of ballast.” To judge from other equivocal remarks about a college career that changed his life in many ways, he obviously felt that he himself had made some such sacrifice. What kind of ballast had he felt obliged to jettison? And was the loss truly wrenching? Harvard made him an outsider in Shillington—a blow, to be sure, though the distance this estrangement opened up allowed him to use the town for his fiction. Harvard took away Shillington, but it gave him Olinger—or, at the very least, sharpened the tools he would need for the excavation of his home turf. And yet instead of feeling grateful to the institution, he felt grateful to the town. It was Shillington he thanked in the poems collected in
Endpoint
, when he knew he was dying (“ . . . Perhaps / we meet our heaven at the start and not / at the end of life”). For having finished off the project begun by his mother when she insisted on moving him out of Shillington to the Plowville farmhouse, the college received no thanks at all. If anything, he associated it with his betrayal of the town he’d loved as a child and still cherished in memory.

“Four years was enough Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.” His formal education was at an end; his education as a writer was under way. He was, for now, an arrow aimed at the bull’s-eye of
The New Yorker
.

The day before he sailed for England to take up his place at Oxford’s Ruskin School, he stopped by the magazine’s offices at the invitation of William Maxwell, the editor who’d sent the momentous letter accepting “Friends from Philadelphia.” The
New Yorker
waiting room was blandly anonymous, and the linoleum corridors a drab maze, but the young college graduate was nonetheless dazzled by the visit. Maxwell showed off his sunny office, then ferried him a short distance along Forty-Third Street for lunch at his club, the Century Association, a venerable establishment housed in an elegant and imposing Beaux Arts building designed by McKim, Mead and White. Updike himself would become a member of the Century in 1972—the membership is composed of “authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts”—but on the day of that first lunch, September 3, 1954, he was being vetted by an even more exclusive organization.