by Begley, Adam
Updike chose to include in his tour the local lovers’ lane—“where we used to neck,” he explained to Ecenbarger. The actor steers the interviewer to the “necking place” and is amazed to find it still there. His thoughts turn to Ermajean Willis, the girl he’d “acquired” at age seventeen, and he drives the few blocks to her house.
“My girlfriend used to live here,” he confessed to his interviewer.
“You had only one?”
“Well, yes.”
Parked in front of her house, the actor feels “swamped by love.”
From the scant but sharply focused information divulged about Ermajean, it’s obvious that she’s one of many fictional incarnations of Nancy Wolf (“my only girlfriend”), a girl Updike wrote about as Nora in his 1989 memoir, Self-Consciousness.* We know she’s the same girl because of a conspicuous architectural detail (a detail he mentions twice in Self-Consciousness as a feature typical of Shillington): the concrete balls decorating the retaining wall in front of both Ermajean’s house and Nora’s. Though he once insisted (unconvincingly) that the Shillington he used in his fiction was more a stage in his “pilgrim’s progress” than an actual spot on the map, his instinct was always to borrow the signature detail from the bricks and mortar of the town.
What are we to make of this whole incident? Ecenbarger was at first mildly disturbed to find that in Updike’s version, the actor doesn’t enjoy playing tour guide. He slips from wary impatience and annoyance into a bittersweet reverie that triggers a powerful romantic longing for a place and a time and a self forever gone. At the very end of the story, the spell broken (in part because the interviewer is plainly bored, blind to the “glory” of vivid private memories), the actor reverts to a brusque, comic annoyance: “Keep your pencil out. You son of a bitch, I’m going to tell you the names of every family that used to live on this block.” Ecenbarger had been under the impression that the courteous, even genial, Updike had quickly forgotten his irritation, that their nostalgic excursion had given the author pleasure. (It very likely had: “I become exhilarated in Shillington,” he once wrote, “as if my self is being given a bath in its own essence.”)
Leaving aside the reporter’s momentary distress, there was no harm done. Updike took the incident, reshaped it slightly to accentuate the dramatic arc, and gave it the twist of the actor’s final petulant outburst. Retaining intact the details that suited his purpose, he adjusted others strategically—and so turned a day’s drive into a perfectly adequate New Yorker story, a slick comic vignette with a moment or two of poignant depth. That was his job, Updike might have said with a shrug, a profitable trick of alchemy.
Or digestion. In a story he wrote in 1960 about his maternal grandmother (a story closely based on the facts of Katherine Hoyer’s life), he described with a startling simile the writer’s creative process: “We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves.” Twenty-five years later, addressing an appreciative crowd in a packed theater in downtown Albany, New York, Updike elaborated on his scatological theory of the creative imagination: “Freud somewhere claims that a child’s first gifts, to its parents, are its feces, whose presentation (in the appropriate receptacle) is roundly praised. And as in this primal benefaction, the writer extrudes his daily product while sitting down, on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain. The artist who works in words and anecdotes, images and facts wants to share with us nothing less than his digested life.” The audience laughed, as Updike surely hoped they would, but he was also making a serious point. The joke depends on the scabrous suggestion that all writing, including his own, is crap. We can dismiss that notion with a smile and still see in it a speck of truth: the writer who feeds off his raw experience, walking through volumes of the unexpressed and then excreting or extruding fiction, is engaged in a magical transaction that produces wonders, a fabulous gift presented to the reader—but isn’t there something ever so slightly repellent about this offering? Isn’t there the hint of a foul odor? Fiction is a “dirty business,” he once confessed; his art had “a shabby side.”
A year or so after his encounter with Bill Ecenbarger, Updike wrote an autobiographical essay about yet another tour of his old neighborhood, a solo walk he took through streets he’d described in story after story—“a deliberate indulgence of a nostalgia long since made formal in many words.” In “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” (which ran in The New Yorker in late 1984 and eventually became the first chapter of Self-Consciousness), Updike voices his regret at plundering his memories of Shillington, “scraps” that have been “used more than once, used to the point of vanishing . . . in the self-serving corruptions of fiction.”* His regret, his suspicion that in his writing he’s betraying a place he loves (“a town that was also somewhat my body”), is balanced against the stubborn fact that he depends for his livelihood on the sale of his fiction—“scribbling for my life,” he calls it. In his speech on creativity, he mentioned the “simultaneous sense of loss and recapture” he experienced when his memory seized upon a scene from his past he knew he could use in his fiction. This ambivalence stayed with him throughout his career, but he never gave up the habit of reusing the scraps that came his way; even the writing that isn’t nakedly autobiographical is flecked with incidents and characters drawn from life with disconcerting accuracy—a host of Ecenbargers opportunistically fictionalized.
It’s not too great a stretch to say that John Updike’s entire career was an extended tour of his native turf, or that the later adventures in far-off places were made possible by the intensity of his preoccupation with his small-town beginnings. In one of his last poems, written just a month and a half before his death, when he already knew he was terminally ill, he thanks his childhood friends and high school classmates
. . . for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,
twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,
all there in Shillington . . .
He began by writing down what had happened to him, at home, next door, and down the street, “the drab normalities of a Pennsylvania boyhood.”* This became both his method and, for a time, his credo. His stated aim was to “realize . . . the shape, complexity, diffidence, and tremor of actuality.” In the mid-seventies—in a lecture with a manifesto title, “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.” But the accurate transcription of surface detail wasn’t enough; in the service of his “relentless domestic realism,” he dug deeper, mining the lode of family life, the lives of his friends and acquaintances, for buried nuggets of serviceable material. No one was spared this ritual excavation, not his parents, not his two wives, not his four children—as he conceded in Self-Consciousness, he exempted himself from “normal intra-familial courtesy.” Or, more bluntly, “[T]he nearer and dearer they are, the more mercilessly they are served up.” In a heartbreaking interview for the 1982 public television documentary What Makes Rabbit Run? Updike’s eldest son, David, acknowledged that his father “decided at an early age that his writing had to take precedence over his relations with real people.” Later in the film Updike frankly concurs: “My duty as a writer is to make the best record I can of life as I understand it, and that duty takes precedence for me over all these other considerations.” The writing took precedence even over his personal reputation: Updike’s alter egos were at times convincingly hideous individuals. “I drank up women’s tears and spat them out,” he wrote in a late confessional poem, “as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.”
In a Paris Review interview he gave twenty years before he published his memoirs, he made a pro forma attempt to deny that the autobiographical elements in his fiction were anything more than “teasing little connections.” (It’s worth noting that the interview was conducted in 1968, the year Couples was published; Updike wo
uld have been eager to discourage any investigations into the parallels between the adulterous high jinks in the novel and the state of his own marriage.) Although he couched his remarks in the unequivocal language of a legal deposition (“I disavow any essential connection between my life and whatever I write”), he never bothered to make it stick. He talked, in virtually the same breath, about the “submerged thread” of autobiography connecting his early books. (The thread, hardly submerged, was thick enough to wrap in a single package The Centaur, Of the Farm, and most of the stories in The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers.) And his disavowal was clearly forgotten by the time he made his speech on the creative imagination. “Creative excitement,” he said on that occasion, “has invariably and only come to me when I felt I was transferring, with a lively accuracy, some piece of experienced reality to the printed page.” The process put an insulating distance between his private self and his Updike-like characters: “I don’t really feel it’s me,” he told an interviewer who asked if he felt he was exposing too much of himself in print. “The fact that it’s happening on paper makes it seem very removed from me.”
John Updike wrote about himself. Dozens of adverbs present themselves, all vying for the honor of capping that sentence so that it reveals the exact nature of his special brand of lightly fictionalized, peekaboo autobiography. John Updike wrote about himself copiously. That’s indisputable and modestly neutral, but too vague. John Updike wrote about himself reflexively. (Why not push it further and say that he wrote about himself compulsively, or even—as some would claim—ad nauseam?) One could argue that he wrote about himself religiously, and there’s a truth there: “Imitation is praise,” he wrote. “Description expresses love.” He also wrote about himself lucidly. That fits well, in part because lucid was one of his pet words, in part because it’s friendly without necessarily implying approbation. Many of the adverbs that come to mind prejudge the issue, offering a ready-made verdict either aesthetic (he wrote about himself brilliantly, ingeniously) or moral (he wrote about himself honestly, bravely, with abiding curiosity). The verdict can of course go the other way: he wrote about himself indulgently, or ruthlessly, with callous disregard for his family and other, collateral victims. It’s clearly safest to stick with the cautious neutrality of objective criticism. If you polled a seminar room stuffed with scholars and literary theorists you’d come away with a slippery exam question: John Updike wrote about himself ironically—discuss.
Of the many adverbs auditioning for the role, three seem particularly well-suited: John Updike wrote about himself naturally, then very quickly learned to write about himself professionally. On his best days, he wrote about himself creatively, and his fiction became part of his autobiographical legend. From an early age, prodded by ambition, he exploited with remarkable and enduring discipline his knack for imitating the life he knew. One of the wonders of his career is that he never lost interest in the material nearest to hand (just ask Bill Ecenbarger). Unlike the actor in “One More Interview,” he was never jaded—never the weary sophisticate. (And he never tired of reliving his Pennsylvania boyhood: more than a third of the stories in My Father’s Tears, published five months after his death, circle back to Shillington and Plowville and the family that nurtured him.) At the very end of his life, after five decades of prodigious literary production, when suddenly faced with the prospect of his own imminent death, he could still write about himself with what seemed, triumphantly, an artless ease.
A wake-up call? It seems that death has found
the portals it will enter by: my lungs,
pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than
the other on the doctor’s viewing screen.
The poignant intimacy of the valedictory poems published posthumously in Endpoint—the sense of a direct connection between the terminally ill poet and his sympathetic reader—is a heightened version of the effect Updike contrived to produce in his earlier autobiographical fiction: a self is exposed (the writing a kind of viewing screen), and from the moment we recognize and identify with this X-rayed character, the story begins to exert a powerful fascination. “We read fiction because it makes us feel less lonely about being a human being,” he once remarked. The pen pals he provided for us were most often variations on the theme of John Hoyer Updike. Even critics who dismiss his work as snippets of experience padded out to make a story are implicitly acknowledging the compelling accuracy of the writing; with no knowledge of Updike’s life, they assume they’re reading fragments of autobiography. When we think we recognize his presence in the work, we’re also recognizing its potent realism; as he pointed out, “only the imagery we have personally gathered and unconsciously internalized possesses the color, warmth, intimate contour, and weight of authenticity the discriminating fiction-reader demands.” His alter egos seem real to us because they are real, or near enough. They seemed real, in any case, to the author.
Consider, for example, “Flight,” a short story written at the beginning of 1959 that’s every bit as densely autobiographical as “One More Interview,” though in this case the Updike stand-in is Allen Dow, a seventeen-year-old high school student burdened with both Updike’s family history and his “special destiny.” Allen’s mother tells him that he will transcend his small-town beginnings (“You’re going to fly”), and this prophecy touches his “most secret self.” His deep belief that he’s somehow extraordinary coexists with a natural desire to be just like everyone else, and in the crosscurrent of those contradictory impulses a character is born with whom the reader forges a bond. Allen—who remembers being a “poorly dressed and funny-looking” teenager who “went around thinking of himself in the third person . . . ‘Allen Dow smiled a thin sardonic smile’ ”—is like us, at once vulnerable and instinctively self-protective; his secret self is our secret self.
Although Allen is clothed in the particulars of the young John Updike’s circumstances, circa 1949, a few strategic changes enhance the dramatic possibilities. Allen’s maternal grandfather (in all other respects a portrait of Updike’s maternal grandfather, John Franklin Hoyer) is dying, and his illness is making Allen’s mother understandably miserable.* In her “desperate state,” she launches a scarcely disguised assault on Allen’s girlfriend, Molly; their teen romance, he tells us, “brought out an ignoble, hysterical, brutal aspect of my mother.” Allen’s “special destiny” is the main objection: he mustn’t have a girlfriend who will hold him back. “The entire town seemed ensnared in my mother’s myth, that escape was my proper fate.” Allen himself is ensnared in the myth, and he, too, is cruel to Molly. This part Updike borrowed directly from his own experience. In Self-Consciousness, he explains that his relationship with his girlfriend Nora was fatally undermined by his mother’s disapproval and the expectation that he would be moving on to better things: “I was never able to relax into her; the perfect girl for me would take me away from Shillington, not pull me down into it.”
Here’s how it was with Updike and Nora, a ruthless portrait of the author as a callow youth mistreating his girl:
It was courtesy of Nora that I discovered breasts are not glazed bouffant orbs pushing up out of a prom dress but soft poignant inflections. . . . She was as fragrant and tactful and giving as one could wish; in the relative scale of our youth and virginity, she did all that a woman does for a man, and I regretted that my nagging specialness harried almost every date and shared hour with awareness of our imminent and necessary parting.
And here’s how it is with Allen and Molly:
We never made love in the final, coital sense. My reason was a mixture of idealism and superstition; I felt that if I took her virginity she would be mine forever. I depended overmuch on a technicality; she gave herself to me anyway, and I had her anyway, and have her still, for the longer I travel in a direction I could not have taken with her, the more clearly she seems the one person who loved me without advantage.
In Self-Consciousness, Updike showcases the memory of a particular evening, after he’d suf
fered the humiliation of stuttering on the stage of the high school auditorium, when he hung around on the curb opposite Nora’s house, “hoping she would accidentally look out the window or intuitively sense my presence, and come out to comfort me. And she did. Nora did come out, and we talked.” In “Flight,” Allen parks the family car opposite Molly’s house on an evening when he’s especially traumatized by his grandfather’s illness, his mother’s despair, and his own restlessness. Like Nora, Molly intuitively senses that he’s outside her house and comes out to see him: “She came. When I have forgotten everything else—her powdery fragrance, her lucid cool skin, the way her lower lip was like a curved pillow of two cloths, the dusty red outer and wet pink inner—I’ll still be grieved by this about Molly, that she came to me.”
The memoirs give us the painful facts, a circumspect account delivered in a stiff, chilly tone barely softened by nostalgia; the short story, gentler but more devastating, draws us into a complex web of desire, guilt, and memory, the intensity of the emotion concentrated in that sexually suggestive close-up of Molly’s lips. The story ends with a bitter quarrel between Allen and his mother, which results in a final betrayal of his girlfriend. In the memoirs, the betrayal is suggested rather than dramatized (“I did not let Nora’s satiny skin and powdered warmth and soft forgiving voice prevent me from going on with my show”); the nostalgia is tinged with mild, passing regret. Updike, like his mother, believed in his own special destiny—his show must go on.
