Updike (23 page)

And what name, exactly, does Jack whisper? “Walter Palm” in the unpublished first draft; “Vergil Moss” in the version printed in
The New Yorker
; and “Walter Briggs” in the version printed in
Pigeon Feathers
, Updike’s second collection of stories. Along the way, Updike floated a handful of alternatives, including Edgar Sell, Edgar Moss, Edgar Neebe, Walter Bey, and, enjoying the joke, William Shawn.
*

In all its various incarnations, “Walter Briggs” borrows freely and with unguarded precision from Updike’s own experience. Clare and Jack have been married five years and have two children, a girl of two and an infant boy. Clare resembles Mary down to the cadence of her speech and her habit of going around barefoot. Jack, meanwhile, driven by competitive urges and prone to mildly malicious teasing, is glib and funny, hypersensitive and obscurely dissatisfied; he yearns for intimacy but is in fact himself somewhat withdrawn and self-absorbed. He worries that the excitement has faded from his marriage, and he reflexively blames his wife. He is more fully characterized than she is: whereas the reader is privy to some of his thoughts, none of hers are revealed. The couple closely resemble Jane and Lee from “Incest,” and also Joan and Richard Maple from “Snowing in Greenwich Village”—in all three stories, Updike mines a domestic vein, exploring, as Katharine White urged him to, “the subtleties and affectionate and agonizing complexities” of how husband and wife get along.

Though he pilfered details from life to dramatize the young couples’ marital relations—looks and gestures and quips that speak of stresses and strains—it would be wrong to assume that the stories accurately reflect the state of his own marriage at the time. The stories highlight difficulties, submerged or half-submerged family tensions that animate ordinary domestic scenes. Like many of her fictional avatars, Mary had learned to maintain “a self-preserving detachment.” He clamored for attention; she occasionally withheld it. Acutely sensitive from childhood to the shifting moods of those around him (and to his own state of mind), John registered every twitch of annoyance, heard the echo of every private disappointment—but that’s not what filled his day, or Mary’s. The mood at Little Violet was cheerful; family life was busy, sometimes noisy and chaotic, as in any household where there are two children under three. Despite the burden of parenting, the relationship between John and Mary was warm and collaborative. She read his stories, poems, and casuals as soon as he had finished them, and again when editorial suggestions had been made, and sometimes even when they returned as author’s proofs. She was forthright in her opinions, and her husband regularly quoted her in his letters to Maxwell. When he was working on “A Gift from the City,” for example, Mary was disturbed that the “young Negro” who’s the catalyst for the action of the story is never given a name but repeatedly referred to as “the Negro.” John wrote to Maxwell a short letter in which Mary’s judgment is cited on three separate issues including the problem of “the Negro”; Maxwell, when he received this missive, circled Mary’s name and scribbled at the top, “one wife, one editor is all a man should have.” In fact, she never edited her husband’s work, strictly speaking, and her comments carried no special weight with
The New Yorker
—“the Negro” remained nameless after all—but it’s clear that Updike relied on her as a first reader and respected her views. He called her a “pricelessly sensitive reader” and acknowledged that she advanced her shrewd opinions with gentle tact. When he mentioned Mary in his letters to Maxwell and White, there was no doubting his affection or the strength of their bond.

For his part, John was a conscientious father, a help to his wife and loving with the children. “He was good with the first baby,” according to Mary, “and then he got better and better. He was willing to give baths and feed babies and bring me a baby to nurse in the middle of the night, to burp them. But he didn’t wash diapers, which I had to do by hand until I could find a Laundromat or a diaper service.” Although he was of some help with domestic chores, most of the housework and child care fell to Mary, if only because in Ipswich he soon established a regular routine that ate up most of the daylight hours. From breakfast until late lunch, he wrote. In that summer of 1957, when he was working on
The Poorhouse Fair
, he made up his mind to produce a minimum of three pages every morning (and many mornings, he did better). In the afternoon, he attended to other business—resolving editorial issues on stories and poems that had been bought by
The New Yorker
; checking and correcting galleys and proofs; and reading, for himself and also for the magazine, which was perpetually clamoring for casuals and light verse. His reading time often extended into the evening; his family reports that he always had a book in his hand. (The only place he didn’t read was in bed.) His schedule remained essentially the same for the next fifty years. He never seems to have had any difficulty in getting himself to start work, or to sit still and concentrate for the number of hours necessary to meet his three-page quota. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but he was effortlessly industrious.

Some of his afternoon reading was a way of courting inspiration for humorous writing. He’d flip through magazines and newspapers on the lookout for an item worth spoofing, some germ that might grow into a full-blown satire.
*
To Katharine White, who wrote in midsummer asking for casuals, he replied, “I came up here to get into a novel-writing groove. And have succeeded to the extent that I haven’t an idea in my head.” In September, when he’d nearly finished revising the draft of
The Poorhouse Fair
, she repeated her request, begging for “something funny and reasonably short”; he came up with “And Whose Little Generation Are You? Or, Astrology Refined,” a quirky riff on the folly of classifying people according to their generation (as in the “Lost Generation” and the “Silent Generation”). The idea came to him when he picked up an article by literary critic Leslie Fiedler in the May issue of
The New Leader
, a bloated essay ripe for parody, full of dubious, would-be-clever classifications. The specific irritant was a self-serving assertion about Updike’s age group: “The young, who should be fatuously but profitably attacking us, instead discreetly expand, analyze, and dissect us. How dull they are!” Updike actually quotes this pompous expostulation at the end of his casual, adding a clever kicker: “Anyone found discreetly expanding Leslie Fiedler may be assumed to be Silent.” Most of the casual is taken up with “The Roll of Generations,” Updike’s tongue-in-cheek description of the cohort born each year from 1925 to 1934 (the Silent Generation). For the year of his own birth, he veers surreally into field guide jargon:

b. 1932 The Cooler Generation. Much smaller and decidedly thinner than a song sparrow. Mostly blue-gray above, white beneath; white eye-ring, white-sided black tail. Voice: sharp
speeng
; high wiry
chee zee zee
. Prefers woodlands. Breeds north to southern parts of New Jersey, Michigan, Iowa. Winters along coast north to South Carolina.

Although amusingly absurd, this is hackwork, what he hoped to avoid by leaving New York—he would have called it an “afternoon labor.” The morning writing slot was reserved for higher purposes.

Many afternoons were filled, starting in the late summer of that first year, with long-distance fiddling with the contents, design, and title of his book of poems, which Harper had scheduled for publication in March 1958. The name of the book changed even more frequently than that of “Walter Briggs”; after
Biscuits for Cerberus
came
Celery Hearts
,
Gingerly
,
Enough Poems
,
Noble Numbers
,
Round Numbers
,
Verse, Wellmeant Verse
,
Whatnot
,
Hoping for a Hoopoe
(which became the title of the English edition), and
The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures
, the title Harper finally agreed to at the beginning of October. Finding the perfect title was a team effort, husband and wife (and mother) mulling over the possibilities. Each time he came up with a new idea, he tried it out on Mary; if it won her stamp of approval, he put it forward to Harper with a surge of confidence. Other matters he wrestled with on his own. He was as deeply involved in the making of this first book as he was in the making of the scores that followed. From the beginning, he was passionate about the physical object, the item you held in your hand—the feel of it, the look of it, even the smell of it. Early on he insisted to Lawrence that he had to have the last word on any editorial changes, however small; in the months that followed he sent off long, precise letters concerning typography and layout, the weight and color of the paper, the jacket illustration, and the design of the title page. No detail was too tiny for him to consider, and his focused attention summoned a corresponding attentiveness at Harper. When the book finally appeared he was delighted. Relieved not to find a single typo, he exclaimed, “The poetry book is a
lovely
job”—though he noted changes he would like to make to the layout of a couple of poems if ever there was a second printing. He told Lawrence how pleased he was that on the shelf the spine of the book was just as tall as the last section of Pound’s
Cantos
.

In later life he remembered Elizabeth Lawrence, indistinctly, as lanky and prissy, professionally capable but rather humorless. He liked her crisp voice over the telephone. When he wrote to her, his tone was businesslike but not unfriendly, occasionally sarcastic and jokey, but not flirtatious (as he was now and then in his letters to Katharine White); they certainly never settled into the kind of freewheeling good fellowship he enjoyed with Maxwell. When Updike waxed ironic, Lawrence was sometimes puzzled (“Is the young man joking?” she scrawled at the top of one of his letters; “I can’t decide”). She liked him, and wanted to hold on to him as a Harper author, but despite her good intentions and a flurry of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, she was too cautious and insufficiently deft to secure his loyalty.

The endgame played out as a two-month, slow-motion crack-up that would have shaken the confidence of a less sturdy writer. Shortly after he delivered the manuscript of
The Poorhouse Fair
in mid-December, he heard positive noises from Harper—Lawrence professed to be interested and admiring. Then, in a letter she sent off on the last day of 1957, she reversed field, telling him that she was “troubled about the impact of the story as a whole”; the second half, and in particular the ending, seemed weak to her, but as with
Home
, she was withholding final judgment until she could provide “a round-up of opinions” from other readers.

In addition to those other readers, Harper sought advice and assistance from Victor Gollancz, who had already bought the U.K. rights to
The Carpentered Hen
. Canfield was hoping that his British counterpart would offer to publish
The Poorhouse Fair
—subject to certain stipulated changes. The idea was to present a unified front; as Canfield put it in a letter, if Harper and Brothers and Victor Gollancz Ltd. took a “joint approach,” asking for roughly the same revisions, Updike would be more likely to comply. The plan collapsed, partly because Gollancz liked the book more than Canfield and Lawrence (on the evidence of the novel, the Englishman thought the budding author “too good to lose”) and partly because, as Lawrence recognized early on, Updike had a precocious sense of the sanctity of his own artistic aims: he was never inclined to compromise on what he considered essential matters, even when faced with concerted pressure. She declared that it would be “a mistake to publish [the novel] as it stands” and recommended that he cut it by a third and turn it into a “novelette,” a term that surely rankled. His response was to ask, politely, with expressions of regret, for a more precise accounting of the book’s defects—and to request the return of the manuscript. “I think we knew already,” Lawrence wrote to Canfield in a scribbled note at the top of Updike’s letter, “that this is a young man you take or leave, as is.” She nonetheless elaborated on her concerns, in a two-page letter that for Updike closed out the possibility that he would ever come to terms with Harper. She argued that the central thematic conflict (identified by Updike as “humanism vs. supernaturalism”) is “not carried to a satisfactory or satisfying conclusion.” (What she refrained from telling him was that she believed the novel’s fate in the marketplace “could be dismal.”
*
) Updike responded to her letter by saying he had always intended to leave the thematic conflict unresolved; “You went to the heart of its unacceptability to Harper,” he wrote, “which is also the heart of the book.” In subsequent letters, Lawrence tried to reassure Updike that “the doors at Harper’s are wide open,” not just to him but to the novel; he remained convinced, however, that they were shut tight. He complained to Maxwell about the difficulty of convincing Harper that it had in fact turned the novel down.

Indeed unwilling to let go, Canfield wrote to Katharine White to ask whether she thought Updike might be cajoled into making revisions. She replied with a long, exceptionally frank letter that failed to answer the question—she was in Maine; she no longer “handled” Updike, was less frequently in touch with him, and therefore couldn’t know how he was likely to react—but she did deliver an opinion on the state of his career. She was not surprised that Canfield didn’t like the novel—“I always felt that he was starting to write one too soon.” She continued in the same vein:

It is still a moot question whether fiction is his best vein, though please never say this to him. He is, perhaps, too versatile for his own good and my personal feeling is that he is at his best when writing satire and humor and perhaps even essays. But I doubt that he thinks so at the moment, and every so often he writes a really brilliant short story that is novelistic in treatment, so I could well be wrong.