Updike (81 page)

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During the early months of his stay in New York, Updike was himself engaged in anxious theological investigations. This was when he first read Kierkegaard: an Anchor edition of
Fear and Trembling
and
The Sickness unto Death
bound together.

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Mary Updike, who liked Klee (but preferred Cézanne), was pregnant with their second child when her husband was writing “A Trillion Feet of Gas”; David Updike was born eight weeks later.

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The magazine was considerably fatter in the late fifties. For example, the issue in which “Sunday Teasing” appeared (October 13, 1956) ran to 204 pages. During the fall season, the magazine often hit the upper limit set by Shawn: 248 pages.

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Decades later, he provided generous notes for his
Collected Poems, 1953–1993
, most of them autobiographical (and therefore a kind of self-exegesis), but neither condescending nor pretentious.

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The exception is “Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers,” which he wrote having taken Arthur Waley’s
Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China
to the ballpark and peeked at it between innings. Perhaps not light verse, but not exactly heavy, either.

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This line of thought evidently struck a chord. In his mid-seventies manifesto (“Why Write?”), he declared, “We must write where we stand; wherever we do stand, there is life; and an imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.”

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The letter is handwritten (somewhat unusually for Updike) on all four sides of a folded sheet of notepaper; the cramped writing space suggests that perhaps Updike was uncertain about the message he was sending. If he’d typed out his rant on a full-size sheet, perhaps he would have thought better of mailing it.

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Updike was dismissive of what he called “Harold Bloom’s torturous dramatization of literary history as a running battle between creative spirits and their oppressive predecessors.”

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A decade earlier, in 1959, he told an interviewer that after he finished
Home
, he made the decision not to rewrite it, but rather to “chalk it up to practice.” There was no mention of a publisher rejecting it.

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The joke continued: the surname he finally picked was again that of a real person, his Harvard friend Austin Briggs. Bizarrely, in a 1968 Penguin edition of
The Same Door
, published in the United Kingdom, Updike inserted the original version of “Walter Palm”—its only unbowdlerized appearance.

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The Updikes subscribed to a variety of mainstream publications, including
Life
,
National Geographic
,
The Atlantic
,
The New Republic
,
Saturday Review
, and also some smaller, left-wing journals:
Commonweal
,
Commentary
(which lurched to the right in the seventies), and
The Catholic Worker
. John, Mary explained, wanted to understand liberal positions.

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Gollancz took a similarly dim view of the novel’s commercial prospects: he wrote to Mike Bessie, “I doubt whether we shall sell more than about 1500 copies of this particular book.” He published it all the same.

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No sooner had negative word arrived from Harper than he set to work on yet another new novel,
Go Away
, which he abandoned a year later, having accumulated some 250 pages of typescript. To his mother he described it as “a long account of the good old days in Shillington.”

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Such was the magazine’s lofty sense of its own integrity that it never hesitated, at midcentury, to review books by its own regular contributors—without deigning to note the affiliation or acknowledge the apparent conflict of interest.

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Many of them had been to Harvard or Radcliffe, but with a few exceptions the friendships began only after college.

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For a few summers some of the women tutored African American children in Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood blighted by poverty.

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He originally thought of calling the book
One of Us
, but changed his mind; Knopf published it as
The Same Door
in August 1959.

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The green eyeshade, probably a memento from his stint at the
Reading Eagle
, was actually part of his regular freshman year outfit—he put it on for concentrated bouts of studying. The sleeve garters could be dismissed as a trick of Briggs’s memory if they didn’t seem like a touch of pure Updike ebullience.

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Moreover, he restored the excised material as soon as he had the chance, in a British paperback edition of 1964.

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In Updike’s crowd there were two couples who joined in all the fun, the sports, the parties, the community projects, but
not
the extramarital sex. Those two couples were still together decades after the rest had split up.

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To protect their privacy, and to encourage those I met to tell me about their encounters with Updike, I agreed not to name any of the women with whom he conducted casual affairs.

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The characters are unnamed, but Updike eventually included “Wife-Wooing” among
The
Maples Stories
, a chronicle of his twenty-two-year marriage parceled out in eighteen stories written over the course of thirty-eight years.

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This is a direct quote from a letter John sent Linda from Harvard a few weeks after her father’s death: “I miss Grandpa, even at this distance. . . . But he died well . . . and I am glad that his final utterance was such a level-headed and snappy one.”

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Updike recycled this episode, and indeed the entire vicious circle of thanatophobia and adultery, in
Toward the End of Time
(1997). The narrator’s first affair brings with it a “colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt [which] eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time.”

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Two-year-old Miranda was apparently left behind—too young for the dump.

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The name Tarbox was actually coined a year earlier, in “The Indian,” a story devoid of adultery (and of narrative incident, for that matter).

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In an early draft, Richard was a Jew; Mary wisely advised him to abandon that idea; when Judith Jones, his editor at Knopf, echoed Mary’s advice, Updike turned him into an atheist.

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I exclude Rabbit’s dalliance with Ruth on the basis that she was an unmarried part-time hooker; the whole episode is emphatically
anti
-suburban.

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There was a brief second act to this affair, in the early seventies.

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That there are just four voices is only technically true, since in church the minister delivers a sermon, which Updike paraphrases.

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The purchase price of the Plowville farm was $4,743.12.

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Knowing how proud she was of the inscription, her husband included a photograph of it in her collected works, published the year she died.

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Eight years later, out of the blue, Aldridge invited Updike to participate in a writers’ conference. Updike declined with an impish display of wit: “I guess I’ve recovered from your review of Of the Farm, but it was nip and tuck for a while, with intravenous glucose and months of staying quiet in a dark room, and I’m still too weak to do anything like the conference . . . that you describe.”

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Though surely truthful, this claim had the added benefit of deflecting attention from the autobiographical basis of the numerous Tarbox infidelities.

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Missing from the blurb was Trilling’s acid kicker: “But to what purpose?”

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Or was it the other way around? From Australia, Updike wrote a friendly postcard to Maxwell reporting that the weather was balmy and the skirts short; “Henry Bech is bleary,” he added, “but in good voice.”

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A typically damp and blustery week in Scotland in October 1990 inspired one of his best golf stories, “Farrell’s Caddie.”

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This isn’t as paranoid as it sounds. “The Hillies” was finished at the end of August 1969, a little more than eight months before the Kent State shootings.

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Updike hadn’t written a Maples story since “Eros Rampant,” in 1966; his next would be “Sublimating,” written a year after “Plumbing,” in May 1971.

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In the concluding lines of “Enemies of a House,” Updike neatly, chillingly extends the list of threats that menace one’s home: “voracious ivy; frost heaves; splintering; / carpenter ants; adultery; drink; death.”

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He typed the first draft, an anomaly; the first drafts of the other three Rabbit books were all handwritten with a soft pencil.

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Redux
, a word Updike claimed to have brought back into circulation, means “brought back”—back to health, back to life; it shares with
educate
the Latin verb stem
duc-
.

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Skeeter certainly assaults her sexually, but the extent of the assault is unclear. In the first edition of the novel, Harry thinks that “she is liking it, being raped.” In later editions, the reference to rape was deleted: Harry thinks that “she is liking it, this attack.”

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Updike went out of his way to explain that Jill’s death was inspired by “a piece of authentic social violence”: Updike’s parents had told him of a biracial couple’s house in Berks County that had been burned to the ground in a racist arson attack. The black man who was living in the house had attended Shillington High School.

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Though he concealed the fact, Broyard was himself African American, a light-skinned black man who passed as white. His judgment is complicated by that experience but not necessarily invalidated; few critics can have devoted more thought to what it means to be black in America.

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“I’m rather baffled,” Updike told Jones, “by this book’s progress . . . and wonder if it wasn’t somebody else who wrote it. Skeeter Johnson, perhaps.”

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Updike crafted a scene for Eccles in
Rabbit Redux
, but decided to leave it out. Harry sees his old golf partner on the bus in Brewer, and they talk briefly. Telling Janice about the encounter, Harry remarks, “The Sixties did a number on him, too.” The scene was restored in the omnibus
Rabbit Angstrom
.

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The “Far Out” stories were also Updike’s way of keeping up with the avant-garde—Donald Barthelme, whose strikingly original stories began appearing in
The New Yorker
in the early sixties, and also John Barth, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis.

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Pure fiction, according to Mary. She and John never pledged to give up sex—and besides, sex was hardly “the only sore point”; politics and religion also caused trouble.

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Updike revised “The Gun Shop” when it was collected in
Problems
(1979). The revisions accentuate oedipal aggression at the expense of other, more nuanced aspects of the father-son relationship.

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David told me that he had no specific memory of his father mentioning his grandfather that night, but that the account of their conversation was essentially accurate. The only element of fiction was the rock concert in Boston; in fact, David had been to a jazz club in Harvard Square.

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Updike never wrote about a man visiting a mistress who lives in a house he used to own, a house where he once lived with his wife and children—too complicated a setup, perhaps, for fiction.

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Competition was provided by Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates; Norman Mailer, another worthy contender, couldn’t quite keep pace.

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A Month of Sundays
is only the first installment in a trilogy of novels linked to
The Scarlet
Letter
; in the second,
Roger’s Version
(1986), a modern-day Chillingworth, also an elderly cuckold, takes center stage; and the third,
S.
(1988), is a tribute to Hester Prynne herself. As even a cursory comparison of Marshfield and Dimmesdale would suggest, Updike’s serial appropriation of Hawthorne’s characters is part homage, part subversion—
askew
is the apt word Updike uses.

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Whatever his private sentiments, in public Updike never spoke ill of any of his books. Once or twice he claimed to have special affection for
A Month of Sundays
.

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He was well aware of the comic effect of marrying in succession a Mary and a Martha. To Delbanco he wrote, “If I marry a third time, it’ll have to be Lazarus.”

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A story about a man and his mistress written while Updike was still a semi-bachelor begins bluntly, “She was good in bed.”

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The hierarchical distinction within the Academy-Institute was abolished in 1992 when the fifty members of the Academy invited all the members of the Institute to join them. At the same time, the entire organization adopted the name American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Although the divorce hearing in “Here Come the Maples” brought down the curtain, Updike summoned Richard and Joan for an encore a decade later in “Grandparenting,” when their eldest daughter gave birth to their first grandchild.