Updike

by Begley, Adam

  Some falsity of impersonation, some burden of disguise or deceit forms part of myself, an untrustworthy part that can collapse at awkward or anxious moments into a stutter. The burden was present even in Shillington, perhaps as my strong desire, even as I strove to blend in and recognized each day spent there as a kind of Paradise, eventually to get out.

  That “strong desire” (in “Leaving Church Early” he calls it, “How to Get Out of Here: my dastardly plot”) figures as an element of Updike’s “avenging mission”—the idea being that he would make a name for himself elsewhere to “show” Shillington, to avenge his father: “Leaving Pennsylvania, where my father had been pinned by necessity, was . . . a spurning on his behalf.” The entire complex transaction, the effort put in by all parties to get from A to B—from cherished only child to triumphant but tarnished refugee—became the stuff of Updike’s novels and short stories.

  A late story, “My Father’s Tears,” begins with a farewell scene: parents dropping off their only child, Jim, at the railway station in Alton. It’s the end of spring break, and he’s returning to Harvard; they’re going back home to the little sandstone farmhouse where the family, a pair of grandparents in tow, have moved at the mother’s instigation. It’s the familiar grim setup, with the usual tensions:

  The house of my childhood, in the town of Olinger, a mere trolley-car ride from Alton, had been a long narrow brick one, with a long back yard, so there were places to escape to when my mother was, in my father’s bemused phrase, “throwing an atmosphere.” But in the new house we could all hear one another turn over in bed at night, and even the out-of-doors, buzzing with insects and seething with weeds, offered no escape from my mother’s psychological heat. I had grown up with her aggrieved moods, turned on usually by adult conflicts out of my sight and hearing. She could maintain one for days until, coming home from school or a friend’s house, I would find it miraculously lifted. Her temper was part of my growing up, like Pennsylvania mugginess.

  Jim wants to escape, in this passage, from his mother and her psychological heat, but in the story as a whole, the issue is his escape from Pennsylvania. On the platform of the station, he shakes his father’s hand and sees that tears glitter in his eyes: “I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go.”

  The train approaches, and Jim boards: “My parents looked smaller, foreshortened. We waved sheepishly through the smirched glass.” That’s it; he’s gone. “I opened my book—The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton—before Alton’s gritty outskirts had fallen away.” From a literary point of view, it looks as though remorse is setting in quickly; surely it’s Paradise Lost he’s studying. Not at all: the next paragraph finds us already in Boston, where a waiting girlfriend embraces him on the platform, and we learn the name of the poem he’d been reading as the train hurtled northward: Paradise Regained.

  But there’s a final twist to the tale, yet another layer of ambivalence. We learn late in the story that Jim, who has lived his entire adult life in Massachusetts, goes back every five years (as Updike himself did) to his high school class reunion—the most recent was his fifty-fifth. “I have never really left Pennsylvania,” he tells us; “that . . . is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.”

  II.

  The Harvard Years

  What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

  —“The Astronomer” (1961)

  “I have never really left Pennsylvania”—Updike may have harbored a similar sentiment in some nostalgic corner of his heart, and Berks County always remained his richest source of inspiration, but of course he did move away. He got out; he escaped; and as his mother predicted, he flew. When I interviewed him at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Boston in the fall of 2003, just before The Early Stories was published to loud acclaim, he was a grand, celebrated author, seventy-one years old and the perfect picture of a New England gent—spry, white-haired, smartly tailored in his herringbone tweed, tan corduroy trousers, and polished brown loafers. In the half-century since he’d waved good-bye to Plowville, all visible traces of his Pennsylvania boyhood had been erased. Effortlessly articulate (except for a very occasional stammer, which he suppressed, visibly but successfully), he was smoothly cosmopolitan, friendly, and humorous. Because this was a press interview, he was also sensibly guarded; he’d long since mastered every facet of his role as a professional man of letters, including the neat trick of beguiling the interviewer while keeping him at arm’s length. We sat and talked for over two hours in the hushed Ritz bar, at a table pressed up against a huge picture window looking out over Boston Public Garden. (This had been his preferred venue for interviews, he said, ever since his second wife had banned journalists from their home on the North Shore.) “In a way I went abroad when I left Pennsylvania,” he told me. “I feel free in New England, free of being my father’s son and my grandfather’s grandson.” This was a standard Updike line, repeated with variations to a succession of journalists over the decades; by 2003 his father had been dead for thirty years and his grandfather for half a century, so it was no great surprise that Updike felt emancipated from their influence. I wish I had asked him about the more powerful character in his family; fourteen years had passed since his mother’s death—was he free of being her son?

  He certainly wasn’t when he quit Pennsylvania as an eighteen-year-old and found himself “abroad” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John and his mother drove up alone; classes at Shillington High were already in session, so Wesley stayed home. They left Plowville on September 20, 1950, stopping for the night in Greenwich at Aunt Mary’s. The next day, they arrived at Hollis Hall, a large, redbrick dormitory on the west side of Harvard’s Old Yard, which in those days was graced with tall, spreading elms.

  Linda wrote to her son from her hotel room opposite the Cambridge Common just hours after they parted, the first volley in an extraordinary correspondence that continued until the week of her death, nearly four decades later. During his freshman year, she wrote virtually every day—in other words, she appeared in his mailbox in the morning, a palpable, reassuring presence thanks to her remarkable skill as a letter writer. Nearly all these missives were typed out on her Remington, single-spaced and generally a page long; they came stuffed with fresh news of the farm, a detailed emotional weather report, and heaps of encouraging maternal advice on topics ranging from the medical to the literary. John wrote back often, about every three days to begin with, then once a week. Proud of her letters, he preserved them all, and even suggested that after graduation they sit down together and edit them, cutting out the purely personal, so that they would be “ready for posterity.” In every letter, she conveyed the sense that the two of them were in cahoots, partners in a project with the twin aim of sending art out into the world and sending John out into the world. The very first one, on Commodore Hotel stationery, ends with a typically probing query: “Goodnight—Is it Mamma? Linda? What am I to a Harvard man?” Teasing, flirtatious, demanding, her question betrays both pride in her son and well-founded apprehension about her role in his new life.

  She knew what John would soon come to understand: that four years at Harvard would transform him in irreversible ways. By the time he left Cambridge with his bachelor’s degree in June 1954, Updike had achieved success of a kind the excitable, insecure kid who savored idle hours in Stephen’s Luncheonette could only have dreamed of. The Harvard graduate was a married man flush with prizes and academic honors, courted by publishers and only weeks from fulfilling his cherished ambition of appearing in The New Yorker. A few months after graduation, he and his bride sailed for Europe—off to Oxford on a fellowship. He was well and truly launched. “Harvard took me,” he later reflected, “a raw youth out of Pennsylvania . . . and made me to some modest degree an educated man”; he added that there was a cost: “I lost something very essentially me.” In “Apologies to Harvard,” he pictures the college’s role in thi
s transformative process in “gourmet terms”:

  To take me in, raw as I was, and chew

  And chew and chew for one quadrennium,

  And spit me out, by God, a gentleman.

  He adds that he felt “little gratitude” for all that well-intentioned Ivy League mastication. In fact, he felt an urge to trash his alma mater, to tell people that he was “in some obscure way ashamed of the Harvard years,” that he had been “obscurely hoodwinked” and “pacified” by the college. He once said, reaching for another bold metaphor, “I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly.” Though it was exactly what he wanted, what he worked so hard for, his time at the most famous of elite American universities sealed his betrayal of Shillington. Having emerged from the cocoon a Harvard man, he would be in some sense forever alienated from Shillington—though not, of course, in his memory and in his writing, where his hometown remained lovingly enshrined. The metamorphosis necessarily added to the store of guilt associated with getting out: “We have one home, the first, and leave that one. / The having and leaving go on together.”

  Although he had the habit, which persisted well into middle age, of thinking of himself as a hick or a hillbilly, Updike was never, not even as a teenager, as raw as he implied. It’s true that until the age of eighteen he spent no more than a half-dozen nights outside Berks County, but both his parents had been to college; his mother possessed an advanced degree from an Ivy League university; his high school education was certainly adequate; and his home, though for the last five years a primitive, isolated farmhouse, was nonetheless a lively place where intellectual and artistic achievements were prized. Working as a copyboy at the Reading Eagle, he consorted with reporters and editors in a “palace of print” and honed his typing skills. In short, he could hardly be counted among the most disadvantaged and backward of freshmen. Yet “the shock of Harvard,” as he later called it, was jarring all the same. Updike, who would become the poet laureate of American middleness, had left behind his familiar, homespun America and landed, with a bump, in an exclusive zone of rare privilege, a place far removed from the comfort of the mainstream.

  His first year was marked by homesickness, hemorrhoids, and an understandable case of performance anxiety. The straight-A student from the small-town high school worried about his grades, especially in Latin (a full year of Lucretius and Virgil)* and math, which he briefly considered choosing as his major; the prolific contributor to Chatterbox worried about getting elected to the Lampoon, Harvard’s legendary undergraduate humor magazine. At night he was troubled by bouts of insomnia; during the day, his “freshman melancholy” took over. He suffered a succession of colds, eye infections, and stomach complaints, some of which required visits to the university health service. He also went to the infirmary for chest pains, though X-rays showed nothing sinister; it eventually occurred to him that smoking thirty or forty cigarettes a day might have contributed to the problem. His mother was concerned about his health (and he was, too—his hypochondria was operating at full force), but most of these ailments were nothing more than the jitters of a sensitive boy from the provinces plunked down in the midst of an accomplished peer group from all over the country, many of them expensively educated at private schools, some slick with big-city smarts, some eccentric in ways unknown to Shillington. He confessed to his mother that he was frightened by the intelligence of his classmates and the variety of talent they displayed. When his fear and unhappiness passed, when he realized toward the end of freshman year that he would prosper at the college, his psychosomatic illnesses largely vanished—leaving him just the psoriasis and the stammer to contend with.

  The student body at Harvard, though more diverse than it had been in the 1920s, say, when it was overwhelmingly WASP, was still notably preppy at midcentury, with the well-groomed private school boys topping the social hierarchy and setting the tone. In the immediate aftermath of the war, veterans on the GI Bill, worldly-wise and full of purpose, made the college particularly vibrant, but most of them had graduated by 1950. The prewar status quo (elitism, somewhat diluted by a vigorous assertion of the meritocratic ideal) reimposed itself with impressive rapidity, though as a hangover from the war years and the Depression, some of the undergraduates may have worked a little harder, with an eye on a safe corporate career. One thing, certainly, had changed for good: coeducation in the classroom. Beginning in 1943, Radcliffe women were allowed to enroll in nearly all Harvard courses, though they continued to live on a separate campus, and their visits to Harvard dorms were regulated by strict parietal rules (not always strictly enforced).

  Hollis, where the rooms were relatively cheap, was unusually free of preppies; almost all the students in the dorm came from public schools, and many were on scholarship. Updike shared Room 11, on the third floor, overlooking the Yard, with a kindred spirit, a powerfully intelligent young man named Robert Christopher (“Kit”) Lasch, who went on to become an eminent historian and cultural critic. (His most famous book, The Culture of Narcissism, was a national bestseller in 1979.) Lasch, who died in 1994, grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, then Chicago, and came from a family even more conspicuously articulate than Updike’s. His father, who’d been a Rhodes Scholar, was a newspaperman who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing; his mother, equipped with a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, eventually taught logic at the university level. The roommates became friends, though Kit was both volatile and solemn: “prickly,” as Updike put it. The pressure to get along with an assigned roommate surely helped John to accept Kit as a companion rather than a rival, but he couldn’t help thinking that putting two would-be writers in the same small room was like “rubbing two tomcats together.” As it happened, the friendship helped him get through what he later called the “compression bends” of freshman year. Both boys were exceptionally hardworking, ambitious, and academically successful; both wrote all the way through college. One of Kit’s short stories was published in his senior year in The Harvard Advocate, the venerable undergraduate literary magazine. He also wrote poetry, and even a novel, which remained unpublished. John told his mother about his roommate’s literary aspirations, and when Kit visited Plowville over spring break in freshman year, Linda asked both boys to read the latest draft of her much-revised historical novel, Dear Juan, which they did. Kit, when he got back to Cambridge, sent her a kind but stiff letter of appreciation.

  Lasch’s letters home to his parents, almost comically self-serious documents, offer many sharp glimpses of his “roomie.” On September 26, only five days after they’d first met, Lasch summed up his impression of his new friend:

  My roommate has stood the test of time better than any of the other people in the hall. He is a very intelligent kid; his i.q. is round 150 or something like that. He writes poetry, stories, and draws cartoons and sends all of these to various magazines. He has even had a few things accepted. He is more industrious than I, but I think his stuff lacks perception and doesn’t go very deep. He is primarily a humorist. As he himself admits, he is probably a hack. At least, he has more of the hack in him than the profound artist. He is very funny, and is the first person I’ve met who seems to appreciate my own humor.

  One can imagine the dorm room chatter that furnished Lasch with the material for these peremptory judgments—Updike, eager to impress, letting slip his IQ (which is comfortably in the genius range), and mentioning the poems he’d sold to obscure magazines; and then, worried that he’d been boastful (after discovering the fact that Kit’s own submissions, to The Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Yorker, had all been rejected), making a self-deprecatory quip about being just a hack. Luckily, the exchange of manuscripts that led to Lasch’s private reservations about his roomie’s capacity for profundity didn’t give rise to any immediately destructive jealousy on either side. Competition eventually eroded their frie
ndship, with most of the blame on Kit’s side, but for that first year, they were a well-matched pair. In a poem written after Lasch’s death, Updike remembered the “unexpressible friction” between them—and also a kind of love.

  In March they agreed to stick together sophomore year, and having applied to Lowell House along with another boy from Hollis, Reginald Hannaford, they were rewarded with exactly the suite of rooms they wanted, on the top floor, E-51.

  Because they worked so hard, Updike and Lasch managed only a meager social life as freshmen. They went to the movies at the UT, in Harvard Square, a vast, plush movie theater that presented a nightly double bill; or they took the T to Boston’s Back Bay to the Exeter Street Theatre, a converted Spiritualist church built in Romanesque Revival style. (That first year they saw, among others, King Solomon’s Mines, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and All About Eve; after his first-semester Latin exam, Updike took in an afternoon double feature: Joseph Cotten in Walk Softly, Stranger, and James Stewart in The Jackpot.) Sometimes he dropped by at Cronin’s, a scruffy student haunt with comfortable booths. On Saturdays, if there was a home football game, they would trudge across the river to the stadium at Soldiers Field to witness the almost inevitable defeat. John played some poker in the dorm, and on Sunday mornings slept late and treated himself to a cinnamon doughnut and a cup of coffee at Daley’s Pharmacy (a “haven from Latin and Calculus”)—and that’s about it. Whereas Lasch made several visits to the women’s college at Wellesley, he reported to his parents that his roommate didn’t go on a single date during the fall semester.

  Updike was at least somewhat constrained by the offstage presence of Nancy Wolf (“Nora” in Updike’s memoirs, the “so-called girlfriend,” as Lasch dubbed her), who was back in Shillington, a senior at the high school. In the run-up to Christmas vacation, following an argument with his mother (sparked when she discovered that he’d put in a telephone call to Nancy but not to his parents), Updike vowed not to see Nancy while he was home. His resolve failed him: on January 11, Lasch wrote to his parents that Updike had “spent a good deal of time with his high-school flame, the infamous Nancy, who seems to have made her move and got her talons even more firmly fastened in him.” Agreeing with Linda (and, so it seemed to Updike, with nearly everyone in Shillington) that this long-distance affair was a poor idea, Lasch expressed regret that the inevitable end of the romance had been delayed: “It is too bad; he just seemed to be getting loose.” But even if he’d succeeded in shaking free from Nancy, Updike’s work habits and his various ailments would probably have kept other girls out of the picture.