Updike (17 page)

No harm done: the next day, he got back into the Ford and made the journey without incident, all by himself. Shawn offered him the promised job.

Finding a place to live in the city meant more trips to town in the new car, and there was also an unavoidable visit to a Manhattan draft board. Because of the poor condition of his skin, which had been starved of sunlight in England, he was exempted from military service; on his form the examining doctor wrote, “4-F: Psoriasis.” John felt relieved, though somewhat guilty, and Mary was delighted. Linda, according to John, “seemed saddened, as if she had laid an egg which, when candled by the government, had been pronounced rotten.”

John, Mary, and four-month-old Elizabeth moved into a small apartment at 126 Riverside Drive, near Eighty-Fifth Street on the Upper West Side. Despite the crumbling ceiling, the odd triangular kitchen, and the carpet, to which Mary took an instant dislike, Updike thought the place was fine and admired the view across the Hudson River to New Jersey. The apartment was on the fifth floor, reached by a tiny, creaky elevator. Outside the front door of the building were steep, rounded steps down to the sidewalk, difficult to negotiate with the baby carriage, and beyond the sidewalk was the speeding traffic on Riverside Drive. Just to get out of their apartment, in other words, they had to negotiate a series of specifically urban challenges.

John began work as a reporter for The Talk of the Town on Monday, August 15, 1955. He was installed on the eighteenth floor, in a spartan cubicle equipped with a typewriter, a metal desk, a telephone, and a supply of freshly sharpened pencils. “It was all pretty monastic,” according to Anthony Bailey, an Englishman a few months younger than Updike who started work as a Talk reporter in early 1956 and became his lifelong friend. “I found myself in an office right next door to him,” said Bailey. “Ten o’clock was opening time, and I generally got there around ten-thirty. John would already be at his desk. You could hear his typewriter going—going from dawn to dusk, it seemed to me. It was very intimidating; his work rate was astonishing.” (Actually, dawn was out of the question: always a late sleeper, Updike rarely reached the office before nine-thirty.) As astonishing as his work rate were the ease and rapidity with which he settled into his new environment. He was unhappy for a couple of weeks, mostly because he couldn’t see how he would make time for his own writing, but by mid-September his misgivings had vanished. The job suited him perfectly. There was no period of adjustment, no apprenticeship; he appeared on the scene fully formed. Said Brendan Gill, who’d been at the magazine for two decades when Updike arrived, “He struck
The New Yorker
like an absolute bombshell.” As Bailey put it, “John was the star.” During the nineteen months he worked at the office, the magazine published more than three dozen of his Talk pieces (many of them classics of the genre), a half-dozen of his short stories, another half-dozen parodies, and a steady stream of light verse. The time he spent in the building working alongside the staff writers and getting to know the editors helped cement what would become the longest and most important professional association of his career.

“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 made that sweeping claim in
About Town: The
New Yorker
and the World It Made
, and it would be hard to refute.
*
The American economy was ascendant, the magazine was ascendant, Updike was ascendant—and the confluence of these trends flattered all parties. Writing to Maxwell four decades later, Updike confessed that “ever since you accepted in one summer ‘Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums’ and ‘Friends from Philadelphia,’ I have been in a writerly bliss nothing could shake.” Maxwell, as early as 1958, assured Updike, “It is a slightly different magazine because you are now published in it.” (That may sound like faint praise, but
The New Yorker
has always been notoriously resistant to change; Updike had caused the mountain to move.) From the beginning, and sometimes to his chagrin, critics identified Updike as a typical
New Yorker
writer, as though he had been concocted in-house, the product of a singularly fruitful editorial meeting. Everything was going right for the magazine (from 1950 to 1964, circulation grew by 40 percent, ad pages by 70 percent, and prestige and influence by an unquantifiable yet unmistakable degree)—surely the sudden appearance of the wunderkind Updike was simply part of that fabulous chain of success.

To leaf through
The New Yorker
at midcentury was to celebrate a nation and a city triumphant. In that postwar moment, New York became the center of the world—“continuously insolent and alive,” in Cyril Connolly’s memorable phrase, the mighty beating heart of the most powerful country on the globe.
*
“The city,” E. B. White rhapsodized in 1948, “is like poetry. . . . The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”
The New Yorker
was both a gloss on that poem and a mirror reflecting its magic. Although it attracted a growing number of suburban and rural readers, not all of whom shared in the rising postwar prosperity, the message broadcast in its pages, in the advertisements as well as the short stories, casuals, columns, reported pieces, and reviews, was cosmopolitan, affluent, upwardly mobile. When Updike called to mind the typical
New Yorker
reader of the time, the words he used were “pampered and urban”—certainly the condition to which many aspired.

And yet these upwardly mobile middle-class readers were sensitive enough to have qualms about avid economic and social aspirations. The ads in the magazine—the vast majority of them hawking luxury goods—mostly pandered to naked snobbery and greed. Sometimes they challenged the consumer to be more “modern,” or winked at the bad taste of others; occasionally they offered forthright instruction in the art of living. The content of the magazine inclined in somewhat different directions. The cartoons often gently mocked the conspicuous consumption of the rich, and sometimes even cast an eye over the precincts of the poor. In the writing, lowlifes came in for much scrutiny, notably in profiles by A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. The magazine had a well-developed social conscience, and played, at times, the role of crusader, exposing national and international wrongs—this was the magazine that devoted the entire editorial space of a sixty-eight-page issue, just a year after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” Seduced by ads for jewelry and perfume, liquor and furs, but braced by the probity of the editorial content,
New Yorker
readers could allow themselves to feel slightly superior to the grasping multitudes. They were consumers, too—but they consumed tastefully, conscientiously. They belonged, or wanted to belong, to an elite club, a meritocratic aristocracy, and liked to think of the magazine as an island of civilization, a virtual community of the
bien
-
pensant
. (All clubs, as Updike remarked of the Lampoon, feed off “the delicious immensity of the excluded.”) A 1946
New Yorker
marketing pamphlet boasted that its readers were “at least all of the following: Intelligent, well-educated, discriminating, well-informed, unprejudiced, public-spirited, metropolitan-minded, broad-visioned and quietly liberal.” Who wouldn’t want to join such an enlightened crew?

It’s important to remember that when he fell in love with it,
The New Yorker
, though ascendant, was hardly the only game in town, as it would be just a few decades later. An aspiring writer might more plausibly have set his or her eyes on
Life
or
The Saturday Evening Post
or
Collier’s
or
Cosmopolitan
—all of which could claim a much wider circulation, and paid much higher fees to freelancers. By comparison,
The New Yorker
was still a small magazine. But it spoke to Updike in irresistible, seductive tones. As a thirteen-year-old, he had been ready to reshape himself radically so that he could literally merge with it: “I loved that magazine so much I concentrated all my wishing into an effort to make myself small and inky and intense enough to be received into its pages.” Reporting for work at age twenty-three, he was still desperately eager to be received into its pages—but less willing to transform himself and his writing to achieve that end. In the marketing department’s crowing checklist of
New Yorker
qualities, there was at least one that didn’t exactly suit the young man from Berks County: “metropolitan-minded.”

Otherwise, yes: Updike and
The New Yorker
in the fifties—it was indeed a perfect fit. Yagoda wisely refrained from stretching his claim to include New York City itself. Despite his adolescent fantasies of escaping Plowville for the glittering metropolis, epicenter of sophistication, Updike and the City of New York were not, in fact, made for each other. When he arrived in town, the possibility of becoming a New York writer was still open to him. In theory, he could have chosen urban life as his great subject and embraced the bustling literary scene as a natural habitat (the way, for example, Norman Mailer and Harold Brodkey did at about the same time). Instead, less than two years after he arrived, Updike retreated to Ipswich, Massachusetts, and he made New England his home for the rest of his life. His urban stint did play an important part in shaping both his writing and his idea of himself, but mostly in a negative sense. Turning his back on the splendors of midcentury Manhattan, he elected to leave. He would not be a New York writer, and New York would not be his subject.

The decision came after a brief but thorough immersion. The Talk of the Town was in those days more geographically focused than it is today; its purview was mostly Manhattan, with only rare excursions beyond the outer boroughs. As a Talk writer, Updike had to walk a local beat, to know the cityscape inside out—sometimes literally, as in the delightful piece published in early 1956 in which he reports on an ingenious feat of urban navigation: how to make one’s way from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without ever setting foot on either Fifth or Sixth Avenue. (The trick is to pass through and under city blocks, thanks to vast department stores, arcades, and conveniently located subway stations.) His work peeled open the city for him, and provided material for the short stories he wrote during and immediately after his stay. His press pass access—the reporter’s license to poke around, to eavesdrop, to stare openly—earned him a fund of expertise, urban know-how he would draw on for the rest of his life; it gave him the courage to create in the mid-sixties an alter ego, Henry Bech, who is a New Yorker through and through. His Talk job, in other words, allowed him to claim the city as his own, even after he’d left, even though a fundamental part of him had resisted it all along.

His first assignment was to investigate Magi-Green, “a lawn invigorator that dyes grass green.” It was a somewhat unusual assignment in that it entailed a visit to the out-of-town headquarters of the Lockery Company, makers of Magi-Green, which was located in Southampton, New York, near the end of Long Island. Updike, on a whim, decided to drive—and to take his little family along. In an account of this adventure, written decades later, he emphasized his “country innocence”—he had no idea how
long
Long Island was, how heavy the traffic would be, or that having the Ford in New York was a mistake to begin with. By the time they reached their destination, Mary and Elizabeth were “so wilted as to need a rejuvenating spray themselves.” But Updike got the job done nonetheless, and the resulting journalistic trifle is mildly amusing and fairly typical of The Talk of the Town, save for the exurban expedition and a subject matter (lawn care) so quintessentially suburban. The reporter (“we,” by hallowed
New Yorker
convention)
*
gathers a comically copious amount of information about the product, allows its makers to display a comical commercial enthusiasm, and adds to the comedy by appearing (almost) to share that enthusiasm. It’s a gentle kind of wit that Updike mastered on the spot. Within a few days, William Shawn telephoned him at the Riverside Drive apartment and offered him a promotion: henceforth Updike would be a Talk
writer
rather than a Talk reporter, which meant that his pieces would bypass the magazine’s rewrite men—and that he’d earn two hundred dollars per piece.
*

The Talk of the Town was essentially ephemera, one of the least consequential sections of the magazine; most of the items were designed to amuse, and the amusement was generally fleeting. Updike remembered three types of Talk story: “interviews, ‘fact’ pieces, and ‘visits.’ ” His Magi-Green piece was a visit piece (fortified with facts trumpeted by the Lockery Company), and visits became his specialty. He preferred them because they required “no research and little personal encounter.” He developed the knack of planting himself in a particular place—Central Park, the cocktail lounge of the Biltmore Hotel—and simply looking and listening, making himself utterly receptive to sensory impression, noticing everything. Having soaked up the ambience, he put his writing skills to work: “An hour of silent spying” was followed, as he put it, by “two hours of fanciful typing.” (The average Talk piece was seven hundred to eight hundred words.) He made the job of translating his perceptions into “
New Yorker
-ese” look effortless. “His success rate was a hundred percent as far as one could make out,” said Tony Bailey. It was true; every single item Updike wrote for The Talk of the Town the magazine printed. According to Brendan Gill, who was one of the Talk rewrite men, “It was perfectly obvious that he was writing better Talk stories than anyone who had ever written them.”