Updike (21 page)

However easy and mutually beneficial his relations with the magazine, he knew that he should be expanding his professional horizons—in other words, that he should start publishing books. Like many of
The New Yorker
’s star contributors, including E. B. White and James Thurber, he turned to Harper and Brothers, a venerable publishing house established in the early nineteenth century. Updike’s choice was made easy by the fact that he’d already promised the head of the house, Cass Canfield, a first look at anything he wrote for “book publication.” Early in 1957, in response to Canfield’s yearly reminder, Updike indicated that he had very nearly finished work on a novel, and was also eager to publish a collection of light verse and a collection of stories.

By then, however, he’d already made the decision to quit
The New Yorker
and leave Manhattan.

T
HE
U
PDIKES’ SECOND
child, David, was born on January 19, 1957. It was immediately apparent, when mother and baby came home from the hospital, that they would have to move out of the apartment on West Thirteenth Street; a family of four needed more space. They planned to look for a new place near a park, with an elevator, if possible. One week after the baby was born, on Mary’s twenty-seventh birthday, as it happened, the Updikes were invited to a
party at Brendan Gill’s house in Bronxville. Mary couldn’t go because she was nursing her newborn, but John decided that he would go anyway. Though she was unhappy about being left behind on her birthday, Mary kept her feelings to herself—her mother was staying with them, helping out with Elizabeth, now a toddler of nearly two, and she didn’t want her disappointment to show. John set off in his Ford coupe, taking with him Tony Bailey and Faith McNulty, another Talk reporter. He returned several hours later with his mind made up: he told Mary that night that they should leave New York entirely. It was obvious that something had upset him, but he wouldn’t say what it was, except that he had the feeling, an overwhelming feeling, that he had to get out of the city—or else he would become like everybody at the Gills’ party, the writers and hangers-on all competing with one another.

Half a century later, after seeing McNulty’s obituary in the newspaper, Updike wrote to Bailey saying that the obit had summoned up a “dreamlike” recollection of the party—“the great and the near-great looking tired and tiddly”—and of the drive back from Bronxville: Bailey and McNulty quarreling about something, a distracted Updike ending up on the wrong side of the East River, and Bailey pointing out the view of the Manhattan skyline “shimmering across the water.” Looking back on that evening and his impulsive decision to leave New York, he wrote, “A major turning point in my life, I see now.”

The Gill residence in Bronxville, described by its owner as “a large, semi-ruinous mock-Tudor mansion,” was an imposing pile. The guests would have included a sizable
New Yorker
cohort—the art editor, James Geraghty; cartoonists Charles Addams and Peter Arno; and writers Wolcott Gibbs, A. J. Liebling, Geoffrey Hellman, St. Clair McKelway, Philip Hamburger, E. J. Kahn Jr., Niccolò Tucci, and Robert Coates, among others. Despite the size of Gill’s house, the noise of the booze-fueled chatter and the prodigious volume of cigarette smoke may have produced a claustrophobic effect—too many old tweed jackets and gray flannels, too much understated wit. Updike’s brief description of the festivities—“the great and the near-great looking tired and tiddly”—is of course based on a fifty-year-old memory, as is his account of the drive home with quarrelling colleagues and the picture-postcard view of the skyline. But even taking into account the vagaries of memory and the seventy-three-year-old’s lifelong habit of massaging his past into pleasing dramatic shapes, it seems safe to say that at that particular moment in early 1957, any large gathering of
New Yorker
staff—sober or not, illustrious or less so—was bound to stir up his competitive instinct. And if they were indeed looking “tired and tiddly,” that dispiriting aspect would have reminded him, like a nagging sore, of his own unfulfilled ambitions.

The excitement and glamour of living in New York had always, for Updike, come bundled with less agreeable sensations. He felt “crowded, physically and spiritually” by the city’s “ghastly plentitude, its inexhaustible and endlessly repeated urban muchness.” He groused about a literary scene “overrun with agents and wisenheimers” all too willing to give a twenty-four-year-old helpful hints about how he should live his life. This barrage of advice, some of it from fellow writers (the competition), some of it from editors and publishers, compounded his discomfort. According to Michael Arlen, his Lampoon friend who was at the time working at
Life
magazine and would later join
The New Yorker
, this kind of complaint was a regular lunchtime refrain as early as 1955. Updike, Arlen said, worried that “whatever you might do or achieve in New York, you could never feel important because there was always greater or at least noisier stuff going on all around you.” Arlen was under the impression that Updike had been plotting an exit for some time, that his ambition required him to be a big fish in a little pond. In his letters home, Updike first mentions, in May 1956, his desire to escape both
The New Yorker
and the city: “Not quite right for me, as the rejection slips say.” The Bronxville party, in other words, should be thought of as accelerating a process already under way.

The genial host offered a prime example of the kind of career Updike had no intention of pursuing. At age forty-two, Gill had been at
The New Yorker
for twenty-one years—half his life. Charming, talented, ebullient, relentlessly energetic—it’s hard to imagine him looking tired, however tiddly—he was also a graceful, engaging writer admired for his commitment to the magazine. But divide the room into the great and the near-great and he would without a doubt fall into the latter category. As Updike observed in a memorial tribute, Gill “came to
The New Yorker
young, as a writer of short stories, and stayed as a jack of all trades”; he failed to “take his own artistic gifts quite seriously enough.” Updike wasn’t going to make that same mistake. He wanted to be an artist, not an “elegant hack,” as he put it in a letter to his mother, who would have agreed wholeheartedly. After a year and a half at the magazine, his immediate professional ambitions had been met. New and lofty cultural ambitions had meanwhile sprung up in the breast of the young man who had once hoped to be the next Walt Disney—and to those ambitions, the magazine itself was an obstacle.

The guest of honor at the Gills’ was Victor Gollancz, a British publisher with nearly two dozen
New Yorker
writers in his stable, who was visiting on his yearly American tour. Gill had written to Gollancz a few months earlier to tell him about Updike, calling him “easily the finest writing talent that has shown up on this magazine in the twenty years that I’ve been here.” Gollancz was understandably eager to meet this young phenomenon. In the thick of the crowded party, they had a lively chat about Updike’s work-in-progress,
Home
, which Gollancz offered to buy sight unseen; about book printing, always a topic dear to Updike’s heart; and about the philosopher A. J. Ayer—because Gollancz thought Updike resembled Ayer: each had a thin face and a long nose. Updike, for his part, found in Gollancz (also a striking individual, bald, bespectacled, and mustachioed, with dramatically dark, bushy eyebrows) exactly his idea of what a publisher should be: “gallant, wise, and willing to lose money on a book.” This encounter was the beginning of a complicated relationship built on mutual admiration that nonetheless ended badly—and it was also a reminder that writing Talk pieces and casuals for
The New Yorker
, filling his quota so as to achieve his “quantity bonus,” was not going to be Updike’s lifework. It was time to publish a book.

A nostalgic thumbnail self-portrait he contributed to
Horizon
magazine offers a glimpse of the earliest stirrings of his new ambitions. It was the autumn of 1955, when he was freshly arrived in New York and already making a splash at the magazine. Everything was falling into place for the young author, and it was in this “atmosphere . . . of dreams come true” that he succumbed to the influence of yet another textual titan.

While our baby cooed in her white, screened crib, and the evening traffic swished north on the West Side Highway, and Manhattan at my back cooled like a stone, and my young wife fussed softly in our triangular kitchen at one of the meals that, by the undeservable grace of marriage, regularly appeared, I would read.

He was reading the first volume of Proust, and his very Proustian remembrance of that “paradisiacal” moment continues with a description of the powerful effect
Swann’s Way
had on him:

It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes . . . that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

Proust—together with Henry Green—upped the ante; as Updike put it, “Those two woke me up.” They encouraged his belief that the dream of high artistic achievement could also come true—just at the moment when his new employer expected from him something decidedly more ordinary. In those first busy months in New York, he fretted that his career as a freelancer might be over, that he would never be able to write serious fiction in the evening after writing Talk pieces during the day. His solution to that problem—writing for himself in the office before the workday began, a stolen morning hour alone in his bare eighteenth-floor cubicle—didn’t solve the larger problem. Caught up in the excitement of his success at
The New Yorker
, he ignored the stark choice his aspirations would eventually force on him: stay at the magazine and risk becoming an elegant hack, or gamble on a freelancer’s precarious life and commit to the dream awakened in him by Proust and Green.

In some later accounts of his “defection” from
The New Yorker
, the pressure of having a toddler and an infant at home weighs as heavily as concern for his career—“the city itself,” he wrote, “was no place to raise a family or hatch novels.” But it was the unhatched novels rather than the children that tipped the scales. Although he’d written a sequence of stories set in the city, he felt that New York was not his fictional turf—it was “too trafficked, too well cherished by others.” He had the impression, moreover, that in Manhattan he was exposing himself to only a thin slice of the American scene. He later complained that “immense as the city is, your path in it tends to be very narrow. I only knew people I went to college with and other writers.” And the metropolitan magic was wearing thin; he called it “a vast conspiracy of bother.” He wrote, “When New York ceased to support my fantasies, I quit the job and the city.”

His path in the city was narrow also because at this stage he wasn’t an especially adventurous young man. The self-declared prophet of “middleness” was squeamish about the extremes lying in wait up and down Manhattan from Harlem to the Lower East Side to Park Avenue. Blacks, Jews, aristocratic WASPs—all these were foreign to him. In a fundamental sense, he didn’t feel safe in New York. And thanks to his inherited “Depression mentality,” he balked at the cost of city living. If the magic was wearing thin, one suspects that it was partly because he’d closed his eyes to it.

Pushed out by the crowds, and by his anxieties, and pulled along by a secret faith in his own grand literary destiny, he announced to Shawn that he would leave town and become a freelance writer. He cited his growing family as his excuse. Shawn (“sweet as a mint paddy”) promptly volunteered to find him a larger, more suitable apartment, but that generous gesture addressed only the most superficial aspect of the problem. And so, at the end of March, a week after his twenty-fifth birthday, John and Mary and their two children decamped to Ipswich. “The crucial flight of my life,” he called it, perhaps forgetting that he’d already described his exile from Shillington at age thirteen as “the crucial detachment of my life”—one difference being that that when he looked back on the flight from Manhattan, it was almost wholly without regret. In 1968 he told
Time
magazine that New York City was “always still where I live in my heart, somehow,” and in a documentary filmed in the early eighties, he claimed, riding in a yellow taxi from LaGuardia to Manhattan, to still feel like a citizen of New York: “My money comes out of here, and my manuscripts go towards here, and in a funny way when I come down I feel like I’m going home”—but I suspect he said these things only to please the interviewer. To
Time
, he owned up to a “sneaking fondness for elegance, for people whose apartments are full of money and the martini comes all dewy and chilled.” And then he launched into this remarkable riff:

There’s a certain moment of jubilant mortality that you get on a Manhattan street—you know, all these people in the sunshine, all these nifty girls with their knees showing, these cops, these dope addicts, everybody swinging along, and they’re never going to be in the same pattern again and tomorrow a few of them will be dead and eventually we’ll all be dead. But there’s a wonderful gay defiance that you feel in New York in the daytime.

A fabulous tribute, but it smacks of performance rather than sincerity. Another, more compact expression of his feelings—“being in New York takes so much energy as to leave none for any other kind of being”—takes into account his most pressing priority, which was to secure for himself time and space to write.

He left New York without ever detaching himself from
The New Yorker
. As he was about to discover, geographical distance alone would do little or nothing to separate him from the magazine in the eyes of various prominent critics. On his last Sunday in town, a review appeared in
The New York Times
of John Cheever’s
The Wapshot Chronicle
. The reviewer referred in the very first sentence, as though it were common knowledge, to the “many critical strictures” aimed at “the
New Yorker
school of fiction.” He then expressed his hope that Cheever would “break loose” from the group, and applauded the point at which the novel finally “breaks through the proper confines of ‘sensibility’ in the typical
New Yorker
story.” For Updike, who was by this time appearing in the magazine as often as any other short story writer (more frequently, in fact, than Cheever) and whose fiction relied less on incident than sensibility (fine perception, gestural nuance, delicately modulated tone), this amounted to a direct attack.