Updike (15 page)

That afternoon, Maxwell sent a memo to his colleague Katharine White; it offers a shrewd portrait of the twenty-two-year-old writer:

Just a note to tell you that Updike turned up and I took him to lunch. Had you met him? Very modest, shy, intelligent humorous youngster, slightly gawky in his manner and already beginning, being an artist, to turn it into a kind of style, by way of self-defense.

In later years, Maxwell emphasized the idea that Updike was putting on an act. “The first time I took him to lunch,” he told a journalist in 1972, “John was amusing and charming—and pretended to an awkwardness he clearly didn’t feel. I knew that he couldn’t be that talented and perceptive and still be a country boy.” Maxwell wasn’t alone in identifying Updike’s manner as a kind of self-defense. Others noted that he paraded his mix of teasing humor and gawkiness (the uneasy, apologetic, blundered-through-the-wrong-door routine) in order to keep the world at arm’s length. One old friend called it his “passive-aggressive aw-shucks pose.” Another friend who met Updike in the early days at
The New Yorker
disagreed with Maxwell’s suggestion that the “youngster” was “very modest.” This friend believed that “despite the veneer of shyness, John was confident in his way of being.” In any case, Maxwell liked the youngster very much; with the blessing of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, he offered Updike a job, telling him that when he got back from his year in England there would be a place waiting at
The New Yorker
, a message repeated by Katharine White nine months later when she and her husband visited Oxford. The door was now open to the most successful and prestigious magazine of the day—“the object,” as Updike put it, “of my fantasies and aspirations since I was thirteen.”

It’s worth pausing here to marvel at the unrelieved smoothness of his professional path. Is there an American writer who so quickly and painlessly established himself with a magazine that could provide a lucrative, conspicuous, and highly respected venue for his work? F. Scott Fitzgerald made a great deal of money in his twenties writing for
The Saturday Evening Post
, but he later came to see the association as a blot on his literary reputation—and nobody would argue that the manic Fitzgerald had a smooth ride. Among the other twentieth-century American writers who made a splash before their thirtieth birthday (the list includes Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, William Saroyan, Norman Mailer, Flannery O’Connor, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon), none piled up accomplishments in as orderly a fashion as Updike, or with as little fuss. If he was, as he later claimed, angry, he tamped it down. He wasn’t despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn’t alienated or conflicted or drunk; he quarreled with no one. In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers. Even his neuroses were tame. Except for his psoriasis, his stutter, and his intermittent religious doubts, he faced no obstacle that hard work and natural talent couldn’t overcome.

This frictionless success has sometimes been held against him. His vast oeuvre materialized with suspiciously little visible effort. Where there’s no struggle, can there be real art? The Romantic notion of the tortured poet has left us with a mild prejudice against the idea of art produced in a calm, rational, workmanlike manner (as he put it, “on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain”), but that’s precisely how Updike got his start. When he arrived at
The New Yorker
, he hadn’t yet written anything resembling a masterpiece (he sensibly aimed at the achievable goal of turning out stories and poems his favorite magazine would be likely to buy), but he was building for himself, plank by plank, a stable platform on which to perform more daring feats.

III.

The Talk of the Town

If ever a writer, a magazine and a time were made for each other, the writer was John Updike, the magazine was the
New Yorker
and the time was the 1950s.

—Ben Yagoda,
About Town: The
New Yorker
and the World It Made

The arrow took a detour en route to the target. John and Mary, who was by now two months pregnant, sailed from New York on September 4, 1954, aboard the RMS
Caronia
. Waving good-bye from the pier were both sets of parents, two aunts, a great-aunt, and friends from Cambridge. Although Mary was very seasick, they both found the crossing quite wonderful; luxurious, even for passengers who weren’t traveling first class; and exciting: neither of them had been to Europe before, and this was the first great adventure of their married life. They arrived in Southampton after ten days at sea, made their way by train to Oxford, and set about finding a place to live.

Their address for the next ten months was a basement flat at 213 Iffley Road, a half-hour walk from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (housed, in those years, in a wing of the university’s Ashmolean Museum). Their comfortably furnished sitting room was three steps down from the street; looking out the bay window, they could watch the legs of passersby. A long corridor led to a bedroom heated by a metered gas fire, a bathroom with a tub and a sink, and a kitchen with a cold stone floor. Outside the kitchen door, in the small backyard, was the outhouse, a feature of midcentury English plumbing that brought back memories of Plowville.

Though dank and gray, pinched by British postwar austerity and their own modest means, and made gloomier by bouts of homesickness, the young couple’s Oxford interlude was nonetheless an idyll of sorts. John had nearly a month to get settled before his art classes began. Mary registered with the maternity ward of Oxford’s Radcliffe Hospital, which told them to expect the baby on or about March 20, 1955. The National Health Service wanted all mothers to give birth at home if they possibly could, and declared that that was what Mary should do, but she tearfully insisted that she could
not
—that she had no relatives in the country and needed the reassurance of a hospital staff. She got her way, but was soon attending compulsory natural childbirth classes.

When the Ruskin opened its doors in October, Updike was put to work drawing from plaster-cast copies of antique statues tucked away in far-flung corridors of the Ashmolean; he also painted still lifes of fruit and crockery. By mid-November he’d been “promoted” to the life drawing class; he complained, comically, that the model kept staring at him and sneering (“Nothing like a sneering nude to set a man’s pencil trembling”). In the winter term, calculating that she had several months before the baby was born, Mary enrolled as a part-time student and joined one of John’s still-life classes. As far as his future was concerned, the Ruskin was a dead end: by the time he left England, his dream of becoming the next Walt Disney had been definitively abandoned, largely because his writing career was flourishing. And yet his association with the school remained a source of bemused pride; in the vast majority of his books, even those published more than a half century after he’d put his paintbrushes away for good, he continued to cite on the jacket flap, in the caption beneath the photo of the gradually graying author, that year in Oxford (and occasionally the Knox Fellowship that funded it). Studying at the Ruskin did improve his draftsmanship, but even he could now clearly see where his talent lay. (A talent demonstrated in the exact and evocative prose he summoned to describe the school’s grand museum home: “the sooty, leonine sprawl of the Ashmolean.”) He said that his year of professional training in the visual arts sharpened his writing: “I’ve never done anything harder than try to paint things the way they are. The amount of concentration it takes to mix a color and put it in the right spot was really a very good lesson for me as far as accuracy in all things artistic.” Another, more concretely profitable benefit was a short story, “Still Life,” written in 1958 and promptly sold to
The New Yorker
, about a young American studying at the Constable, a British art school housed in a “vast university museum.”

At Christmas they went to Paris for a week. Directly across the Seine from Notre Dame they found a large but shabby room with a flaking ceiling and a bidet (which John thought “blandly obscene”) next to the bed; the floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the cathedral. Despite the cold, they wandered on foot through the city, climbing to the top of Notre Dame, though Mary was by now six months pregnant. Like good art students, they explored the Louvre. They spoke so little French, as John remembered it, that in restaurants they could order only “omelette aux champignons”:

Mary, in need of a bathroom, asked, as Radcliffe French 101 had told her to . . . for the salle de bain.
*
“Salle de bain!? Ut, ut, alors”—all the waitresses, cooks, etc. rushed forward to examine this charming (and by now fiercely blushing) young American lady to discover why, at eleven o’clock in the morning, she needed, in a restaurant, such abrupt ablution. It was, of course, a toilette she needed. Ah, toilette, toilette—and everything came right at last.

Paris is largely absent from Updike’s fiction, but that particular scene came back to him, years later, with “almost unbearable affection.”

In the week before their trip to Paris, he’d written “March: A Birthday Poem,” which
The New Yorker
bought in January and published in mid-February. A celebration of the month in which his first child would be born, it’s the best verse Updike wrote in Oxford, playful but essentially serious, keenly observed, wide-ranging, and imbued with a kind of folk wisdom, as though the young poet were eager to claim a degree of maturity before becoming a parent:

The color of March is the one that lies

On the shadow side of young tree trunks.

Despite the long, bouncy bus rides the couple took through the countryside hoping the jolts would bring on labor, the baby was late. As the last days of March trickled away, Updike saw the joke coming—sure enough, Elizabeth Pennington Updike was born on April Fools’ Day. Updike’s only consolation was that at the early morning hour when Elizabeth came into the world, it was still March in the United States—just barely.

John’s parents had to content themselves with drawings of Elizabeth sent in the mail, accompanied by a burst of rapturous emotion; later there were photos, and humorous, baffled descriptions of the neonate’s endearing habits. Mary’s parents, however, had an early chance to see their granddaughter in the flesh. The Penningtons arrived in England shortly after Easter, for a three-month exchange: Leslie was to serve as minister at the Unitarian Church of Liverpool, while his English counterpart took up duties in Chicago. The Penningtons and the young Updikes, baby Elizabeth included, spent a week together in the Lake District, walking and admiring the scenery.

It was on this otherwise happy excursion—the weather was excellent—that John and Leslie had their first long religious discussion, which was fraught, according to Mary: “I think John really disapproved of Unitarian theology, and was trying to hold on to his own faith. They were quite quarrelsome and I was shocked. He was insulting my father, who took it pretty calmly.” Updike confessed in
Self-Consciousness
that he and his “gentle” father-in-law had “tense” arguments in which John “insisted that the object of faith must have some concrete attributes”—that is, that God must be actual, Christ divine, and the human soul immortal. He was, essentially, attacking Unitarianism—and hence Leslie’s ministry. The mild Unitarian outlook, exemplified by Leslie’s notion that the “human need for transcendence should be met with minimal embarrassments to reason,” was an insidious threat to the tenets of John’s sometimes wobbly faith: the Lutheran doctrine of sacramental union, for instance, is meaningless if one isn’t prepared to believe in the “concrete attributes” of the Eucharist. That kind of belief, which John grew up with, puts reason under pressure. Though the dispute was awkward for Mary, her father, however gentle, was resolute in his beliefs; he stood his ground (as John’s own father would probably not have done), and John, unused to contending with a strong male figure, refused to drop it, even for Mary’s sake. In fact, Mary’s presence probably made John more stubbornly argumentative.

He went to church a few times during the year in England, but not regularly. He told his mother he was trying hard to be a Christian. To ward off doubt, he turned to theology: G. K. Chesterton, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, C. S. Lewis. He remembered with particular fondness a pamphlet by Ian T. Ramsey, an Oxford don who later became bishop of Durham, called “Miracles: An Exercise in Logical Map-Work.” Although clearly uneasy about his faith, John did not share his worries with Mary.

In letters to Harvard classmates he complained of the damp and the cold (“The English climate doesn’t seem suited to anything but trying to build fires and going to sleep”) and the natives (“Englishmen are astoundingly ignorant about the U.S. . . . and proud of it. A bad lot. Easy to see why the 19th century, author of all our woes, was so mismanaged—the British were in charge”). He asked for baseball news and despaired of ever understanding cricket. The infrequent gripes are either lighthearted or tongue-in-cheek. He might as easily have complained of his homesickness or the disorientation of being a stranger in a strange land. The aim of the letters was at least in part to solicit replies. Linda helped in that regard, showering the young couple with the news from Plowville, along with her bracing brand of encouragement. Coming from across the Atlantic, these maternal missives were suddenly very welcome.
*

On the whole, isolation and foreignness seemed to work in Updike’s favor: he kept up the furious rate of production he’d achieved the previous summer. “He typed automatically, whenever he could,” according to Mary, often at a little table by the bay window.
The New Yorker
bought three new stories, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth,” “Dentistry and Doubt,” and “The Kid’s Whistling,” along with a dozen poems, so that by April he’d triggered a “quantity bonus” in his agreement with the magazine; for the rest of the year his work commanded a higher rate. He was already, in other words, a frequent contributor.

Relations with the magazine were formalized even before the Updikes had settled in at Iffley Road. A letter from Katharine White dated September 15, 1954, and addressed to “John H. Updike, General Delivery, Oxford,” proposed that he sign a “first-reading agreement,” a scheme devised for the “most valued and most constant contributors.” Up to this point, he had had only one story accepted, along with some light verse. White acknowledged that it was “rather unusual” for the magazine to make this kind of offer to a contributor “of such short standing,” but she and Maxwell and Shawn took into consideration the volume of his submissions (including the stories and poems that had been rejected), and their overall quality and suitability, and decided that this clever, hardworking young man showed exceptional promise. In return for a first look at his “verse, fiction, humor, reminiscence, casuals, etc.,”
The New Yorker
agreed to pay him 25 percent “extra” for any work it did buy, plus a quarterly “cost of living adjustment” (known in-house as a COLA), which usually amounted to a bonus of about another 25 percent. To further sweeten the deal, White included a check for one hundred dollars—“a symbol of our good faith,” she said, “to bind the bargain.”

It sounded like a generous deal—Updike signed without hesitation—and he made a considerable amount of money from his
New Yorker
fiction right from the start. But White’s phrase—“bind the bargain”—is a reminder that the purpose of the deal was in fact to bind the young writer to the magazine. The truth of the matter is that
The New Yorker
paid what it liked (above a certain minimum). “We price every manuscript separately according to what we think its value is to us,” White frankly acknowledged, “and this pricing may, I suppose, often seem whimsical to a contributor. It is.” Some of Updike’s contemporaries (notably John Cheever) were consistently underpaid by the magazine—but this shabby treatment seemed curiously arbitrary, or as White put it, whimsical. Updike himself was never underpaid; on the contrary, he reaped immediate benefit from the first-reading agreement: for “Friends from Philadelphia,” the story he sold before signing the agreement, he was paid $490; for his next, “Ace in the Hole,” he was paid $612.50; and for his third, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth,” $826. For Updike, at the time, these were staggeringly large sums. His father’s yearly salary was $1,200; the idea that he could earn more than his father with just a few stories made a lasting impression.
*

Of course, there were also many, many rejections; over the course of the year,
The New Yorker
turned down roughly half the work he submitted. He weathered each verdict without protest. (“In many ways,” he bravely claimed, “a rejection is more bracing than an acceptance.”) Early on, he tried submitting rejected poems to other magazines,
Punch
, say, or
The Atlantic Monthly
, but he met with scant success, and soon enough he was writing with only
The New Yorker
in mind. The magazine with the first-reading agreement was thus the only one doing any reading at all; in the early years, a story or poem that was turned down was almost always abandoned rather than revised.

He was exceedingly polite in his long-distance dealings with the editors, saying thank you again and again, making it clear that he venerated
The New Yorker
and was grateful even to be in glancing contact with it. To both White, who edited the majority of the work he sent from England, and Maxwell, who took charge when she was away from the office, he expressed his confidence in the magazine’s judgment and admiration for its legendary attention to detail. Very quickly he added a flirty personal edge to his correspondence. His letters were professional, in that he was negotiating from across the Atlantic the business of getting his words into print in the best possible shape—but he also wanted to make friends. And he did.