Updike (32 page)

H
IS LOVE AFFAIR
with Joyce Harrington disrupted his writing life in the short term, because he found himself compelled to write about their relationship even though he knew that what he wrote couldn’t for now be published. But the affair also cracked open the seemingly inexhaustible topic of suburban adultery. It heated up dangerously during the spring, and at the beginning of summer, just before he began teaching, he confessed to Mary, who had begun to suspect that something serious was going on. She in turn confessed to her own affair and asked him to wait before taking any drastic steps, to do nothing and keep everything secret until summer’s end. So the affair carried on—with a deadline for decision looming and both marriages in jeopardy—during the eight summer weeks when Updike was driving to Harvard Square on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Once again, his remarkable ability to compartmentalize guaranteed a smoothly functioning professional life.

Joyce Harrington turned thirty in the summer of 1962. She was the mother of three, two boys and a baby girl. Not classically beautiful but striking and sexy, with a long narrow face, a brilliant toothy smile, and lots of auburn hair, she stood out in the couples crowd, a bright, compelling presence. A description of one of Updike’s fictional lovers captures the essence of her look: “Her eyes were the only glamorous feature of a freckled, bony, tomboyish face, remarkable chiefly for its sharp willingness to express pleasure.” (The freckles are his concession to fiction.) He had met her soon after moving to Ipswich, while he was living at Little Violet. The Harringtons and the Updikes were as yet barely more than acquaintances when Herbert and Joyce asked if John and Mary would be willing to babysit for their infant son, Gus, who was the same age as David. The Updikes were surprised to be asked, but the plan went ahead all the same; the Harringtons dropped Gus off at Little Violet, drove to Boston for the evening, stayed out late, and picked him up on the way home. The ice was broken.

Herbert Harrington was a Harvard graduate, a building contractor and property developer who had inherited money from his father. The couple lived well, with flashes of extravagance. Joyce had a flair for clothes and furniture; glamorous, she dressed stylishly, for show, and the interior of her house was sleek and modern. They were very sociable, conspicuously outgoing even by the standards of this gregarious group. They had a motorboat and arranged trips to Plum Island and picnics on the beach. Mary thought their sophistication superficial, and was annoyed by Herbert’s habit of dispensing glib psychoanalytic insights into the behavior of others. He had a diabolical streak, a way of manipulating people into uncomfortable situations so that he could then observe the consequences. John’s early impression, at one of the Harringtons’ dinner parties, was that Herbert had “the manner of the local undertaker, and indeed does somehow embalm his guests.”

When Herbert found out about the affair (thanks to a close examination of the household telephone bill), he forced a dramatic showdown. Late one evening in early October, he called up and demanded that the Updikes come right away to the Harringtons’ house, on Argilla Road, so that the four of them could thrash it out. Mary arranged for last-minute babysitting, and she and John dutifully drove over. Herbert sat them down with Joyce in the living room, served them all wine, and insisted that they resolve the situation there and then. His forceful attitude goaded John into taking precisely the step he knew he couldn’t take, which was to declare his intention to leave Mary for Joyce. The next day, Herbert persuaded Mary to consult a lawyer—she and John would have to divorce so that John could marry Joyce. When Mary did drive down to Boston to see a lawyer (Herbert’s own lawyer, in fact), she was sitting in the office, about to set the legal process in motion, when the telephone rang; it was John, asking to speak with his wife. “I took the phone,” Mary remembered, “and John was saying that he’d changed his mind, that he wasn’t going to leave me, that he didn’t want a divorce—so I went home.”

Herbert’s reaction to John’s change of heart was typically peremptory; first he threatened to sue John for alienation of affections, already an antiquated concept in 1962; then he decreed that the Updikes would have to leave Ipswich for a while—a banishment they accepted. John and Mary threw themselves a farewell cocktail party, packed up the family, and on the eighth of November boarded an Italian ocean liner and set sail for Europe. Traveling the “sunny southern route,” the SS
Leonardo da Vinci
steered close to the Azores (hence the charming poem “Azores,” about a “rural landscape / set adrift” in the mid-Atlantic) and through the Strait of Gibraltar en route to Naples, where John joined some other passengers for a disappointing tour of Pompeii. The family eventually disembarked at Cannes, and spent several days at the Hotel Savoy before finding a villa to rent in the hills just above Antibes. The house, called La Bastide, was modern, of modest size, and not particularly charming, but the terrace was warm in the sun, with a view of the Mediterranean, the orange roofs of Antibes, and to the east the snow-covered peaks of the Maritime Alps. A brief exile on the Riviera a few miles from where Gerald and Sara Murphy had played host to the leading lights of the Lost Generation doesn’t sound especially grim, but Updike was indifferent to the glamour (except when he spotted Marlene Dietrich at the Nice airport). “He was pretty darn miserable,” according to Mary. “He needed a lot of cheering up.”

This sudden crescendo of momentous decisions and equally momentous reversals was the predictable result of Updike’s affair. He’d known for months that he would have to choose between Mary and Joyce. In late September he’d taken the extraordinary step of writing to Alfred Knopf and asking him to remove from the biographical note to
The Centaur
, which was then in production, the line stating that he lived with his wife and four children in Ipswich; by the time of the book’s publication, he confided, his circumstances might have changed. It was a likelihood, not a certainty. In fact he knew—though he needed to be pushed to the brink before admitting it—that his conscience would compel him to choose Mary. The predicament is mapped out in “Solitaire,” an anguished story written in early August, two months before Herbert issued his ultimatum. The first words (“The children were asleep . . .”) alert us to the crux of the dilemma confronting a husband who must decide between wife and mistress:

How could he balance their claims and rights? The list was entirely one-sided. Prudence, decency, pity—not light things—all belonged to the guardian of his children and home; and these he would lose. . . . And he would as well lose his own conception of himself, for to abandon his children and a woman who with scarcely a complaint or a quarrel had given him her youth was simply not what he would do.

Updike’s own children now numbered four. Elizabeth, the eldest, was seven; the two boys, David and Michael, were five and three; Miranda was a toddler not yet two. Abandoning them would indeed dent the self-esteem of a father with any claim to prudence, decency, and pity. The narrator of “Solitaire,” we’re told, “was the son of parents who had stayed together for his sake.” Updike felt that this was true of his parents as well; it’s a theme that recurs regularly in his fiction.

And what of the other woman? In “Solitaire,” the rights and claims of the mistress are dismissed as “nothing, or next to nothing.” Her desire for him, her sense of him “existing purely as a man,” is gratifying. The two women are roughly sketched, certain qualities vaguely suggested (“His wife had the more delicate mind, but his mistress, having suffered more, knew more that he didn’t know”), yet the larger questions (Why does he desire his mistress? Why doesn’t he desire his wife?) are left hazy—possibly to imply that this unhappy man is himself in the dark. With duty ranged against desire, he’s stuck: “Back and forth, back and forth, like a sore fist his heart oscillated between them.”

“Solitaire” was Updike’s attempt to imagine how he might actually bring himself to make a decision overshadowed by the stubborn fact of his four young children. From the day Liz was born and he made a tiny, darling sketch of her to send to Plowville, he was a delighted and meticulous observer of his progeny. As the first baby grew and the others were born, he continued to watch with unflagging intensity. To his mother he sent detailed reports on the children’s progress, weekly bulletins that were clearly as much for his benefit as hers. As so often with Updike, looking, seeing, and noting on paper were acts of worship: description expresses love.

“My Children at the Dump,” a poem he sent to
The New Yorker
in the midst of the Harrington fiasco, hints at how the children weighed on his mind. It is, we learn in the first line, “The day before divorce.” Shedding “remnants” of “a life / no longer shared,” a father takes his three children on an excursion to the dump.
*
(Updike thought of the Ipswich dump as “one of the most peaceful and scenic places in the town.”) Innocently oblivious of the looming trauma, the kids are “enchanted” by the “wonderland of discard”; the girl wants to take home “a naked armless doll,” the boys covet bent toy tractors. The father’s guilty imagination transforms them into “stunted starvelings cruelly set free / at a heaped banquet of food too rich to eat.” Their poignant willingness to make do with damaged goods puts to shame the wasteful profligacy of the father who, one gathers, has thrown away his marriage, tossed it “among tummocks of junk”—“These things,” he says by way of self-justification, “were considered, and dismissed / for a reason.” Updike twists the knife at the very end of the poem; the father tells his daughter that she cannot keep the broken doll she’s scavenged: “Love it now,” he tells her. “Love it now, but we can’t take it home.” Home, the last word of the poem, resonates along with the repeated exhortation to love, sending us back to the root cause of this dismal situation. Father and children will no longer live together; the family home, having suffered like the amputated doll an irreparable loss, is now broken—ready for the scrap heap, which is where his children find themselves, wandering in a “universe of loss.”

The
New Yorker
rejected “My Children at the Dump.” Howard Moss, the poetry editor who did so much to encourage Updike, gave an uncharacteristically dopey account of the reasoning behind the decision. “The general feeling,” Moss wrote, “was that a personal situation is its central point and the poem tends to avoid that point, though, at the same time, having been brought up, it’s inescapable to the reader.” Why not praise instead the poet’s calculated (and evidently effective) indirection? I suspect that the editors felt squeamish about the “personal situation” in this intensely sad poem (originally entitled, as if to ram home the personal element, “My Children at the Dump at Ipswich”); they were uncomfortably aware that Updike was, as Maxwell put it, “a conspicuously autobiographical writer” and weren’t quite ready to hear about “the day before divorce.”

But the “personal situation” remained Updike’s obsessive concern for the next few years, causing difficulties for Maxwell as it did for Moss. “Solitaire” was accepted by
The New Yorker
, but Updike knew it couldn’t be published just yet. In early October, as the storm was breaking, he submitted another story about a love affair in tatters, “Leaves.” He asked that it not be put “on the bank”—that is, with the other stories ready to be printed in an upcoming issue. Dutiful and discreet, asking no awkward questions, Maxwell agreed to put it to one side until circumstances (the state of the marriage, the state of the affair) allowed its publication. Eventually Updike had more than half a dozen stories about unhappy adulterers parked on what he called “the shadow-bank,” some for longer than two years. Among them were “Solitaire,” “Leaves,” “The Stare,” “Museums and Women,” “Avec la Bébé-Sitter,” “Four Sides of One Story,” and “The Morning”; about the last of these he wrote, “though the vessel of circumstantial facts is all invented, libel-proof, etc. the liquid contained may, if spilled soon, scald somebody.” He was well aware that heaping the magazine with stories it couldn’t run was an imposition, but as he admitted, stories of the “non-troublesome” variety didn’t seem to engage his interest. Even after he’d renounced the dream of marrying Joyce, he was still thinking about her, still writing about her—or, rather, about the misery of renouncing her. The stories that did engage his interest were dense, bitter meditations on loss and longing, all short, all notably artful, not to say baroque.

In “Leaves,” grief comes crashing down: “It does not stop coming. The pain does not stop coming.” The narrator has given up his lover (“My heart shied back”), and is now in despair. Updike inserts an accurate thumbnail version of Mary’s trip to the lawyer and the phone call that granted his marriage a last-minute stay of execution. The wife drives off to Boston “to get her divorce,” dressed in a black sheath dress (as Mary often was); while she’s conferring with the lawyer, the husband changes his mind: “By telephone I plucked my wife back; I clasped the black of her dress to me and braced for the pain.” In “The Stare,” another piece of the drama is played out. The adulterous husband faces the fury of his lover when she realizes that he won’t be leaving his wife. “Don’t you love me?” she asks. “Not enough,” he replies. He states his answer “simply, as a fact, as something that had already been made plain.” Updike emphasizes the shameful weakness of a character whose courage has failed him: “Two households were in turmoil and the rich instinct that had driven him to her had been transformed to a thin need to hide and beg.” In “Museums and Women,” after a half-dozen gorgeous pages based on reminiscence (memories of his mother taking him to the Reading Museum as a child, memories of meeting Mary outside the Fogg Museum as an undergraduate), Updike once again presents us with the forsaken lover. The woman, still distraught though the breakup occurred some time ago, asks what went wrong; the Updike alter ego shrugs: “Cowardice,” he tells her. “A sense of duty.” The story ends with a melancholy reflection on the steady diet of disenchantment that awaits him.