Updike

by Begley, Adam

  In small part because he hadn’t entirely given up the idea of making his living as a cartoonist, he enrolled in the spring of his sophomore year in a drawing class taught by Hyman Bloom, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose reputation was just reaching its peak. Updike later remarked that Bloom’s ultralight pedagogical touch (“his utterances were few, he muttered when he emitted them, and he moved about the classroom on shoes notable for the thickness and the silence of their soles”) taught him that “art was a job you did on your own.” Actually, Updike’s other, rather more pressing reason for enrolling in Bloom’s Advanced Composition was precisely to avoid being on his own: he was pursuing Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major he’d met the previous semester—pursuing her successfully, as it turned out. John and Mary were married a year later, and for the next two decades, art was a job he did in the thick of the large and lively family they started together.

  They met in Frederick B. Deknatel’s course on medieval sculpture in the fall of 1951, and got to know each other smoking cigarettes after class on the steps of the Fogg Museum, where the art history classes were held, and then over coffee. They collaborated on a term paper, and when Mary failed to appear for the final exam, Updike heard to his dismay that she was in the hospital. He rushed to Mass General, where he discovered that she was suffering from a platelet deficiency and would be released in a week; in the meantime, he visited her every afternoon. Lasch found this behavior worrying and told his parents that Updike was “losing sight of his initial purpose in being here”—but when Kit finally met the “lady love,” he conceded that she was “a charming girl.” John didn’t mention his new girlfriend to his mother until mid-December, and when he did, Linda was uncharacteristically silent on the subject. At the beginning of February she passed a tight-lipped judgment: “She sounds alright to me”; he escorted Mary to the Lowell House Dance at the end of that month, and a week later felt free to tell Linda how happy Mary made him. In April, hoping to slow things down, his mother expressed tentative misgivings, but John fought back, and in May he invited his girl home to Plowville for a June visit, after exams. By November there was open talk of marriage; and in early January 1953, Mary’s parents gave a small party to celebrate the engagement. The marriage took place five months later, in Cambridge.

  That Linda didn’t disapprove, that she made no concerted effort to hinder or delay the progress of the courtship, was an unexpected blessing. John’s romance with Nancy Wolf had suffered as a result of his mother’s unwavering opposition. In December of his freshman year, he’d received a letter containing a maternal broadside against Nancy, triggered by Wesley’s report on the girl’s behavior at Shillington High School, where she flaunted tokens of her attachment to the successful Harvard man. “I am no longer amused by her flutterings,” Linda wrote. “I think I know now how much of her energy she uses up in being attractive and how easily her charm will break under pressure. Daddy adds the last straw by saying that ‘she’s got him.’ Be that as it may, don’t ever forget that she ain’t got me and I can sputter just as long as she can flutter.” Against the odds, Nancy was still part of the picture when John came home for Christmas vacation. But in February, with his second semester of college under way, Linda’s sputterings finally achieved the desired effect: John broke it off. Until Mary Pennington materialized in the fall of sophomore year, he led a monkish existence of hard work and conspicuous celibacy. And then suddenly he was eager to marry. The prospect of sealing his escape from Linda surely spurred him on.

  When Kit visited Plowville during spring break of sophomore year, he found “an air of slight unrest in the house,” which he attributed to the poor health of John’s grandparents—and to John’s budding romance with Mary. “I cannot say how much this has upset the balance,” Kit wrote to his parents, “but I had foreseen that, if nothing else, Updike’s interest in home would be greatly diminished by it.”

  In an early, unpublished version of “Homage to Paul Klee; or a Game of Botticelli,”* another short story Updike set at Harvard, the protagonist, a wide-eyed innocent named Isaac, observes the coeds from “the neighboring young ladies’ college” as they traverse the diagonal paths of the Yard, and comes to a decision: “Isaac wanted one, he was desperate to have one. . . . But who was he? An ignoramus; an inlander. Nevertheless, he would get one.” By the end of his freshman year, Isaac (like Updike) begins to feel at home on campus; seeing himself objectively, “he ticked off his baggy-elbowed tweed coat, his unpressed suntans, his button-down shirt, his striped tie, his groping-for-exactitude self-deprecatory stammer, his nicotine-scalded fingers; and realized he belonged here.” Next term, emboldened and relaxed by his sense of belonging, he meets Martha in a medieval art course and woos her—grabbing her attention and making her laugh with a succession of pratfalls. (Updike told Time magazine that he pulled similar stunts with Mary: “I courted her essentially by falling down the stairs of the Fogg Museum several times.” According to Mary, the pratfalls were staged on the Widener steps—a better venue for a breakneck wife-wooing.)

  Never quite as coolly calculating as Isaac, Updike at the time was in the grip of young love, and probably not aware of seeking out any particular type of woman. And yet in Mary Pennington he found someone instantly recognizable as a Radcliffe girl, someone who fitted in effortlessly with the college scene—unlike Updike, who saw himself as an outsider, a loner who had to exert himself to blend in. In the much shorter, published version of “Homage to Paul Klee,” the protagonist’s name has been changed to Sam, his avowed determination to acquire a Radcliffe girlfriend is left out, and so are the details of their first meeting. But we do learn that the girlfriend (whose name is still Martha) “had lived all her life in Cambridge,” and that thanks to her “broad and luminous culture,” she plays a mean game of Botticelli. A similar character appears in “Museums and Women,” a story Updike wrote in 1962; unnamed, she’s identified by the narrator, William Young, as “the girl who was to become my wife.” She’s smoking a cigarette, standing out in the cold on the steps of the campus museum in “threadbare sneakers from which her little toes stuck out” (a detail lifted from reality that also appears, nearly verbatim, in the early draft of “Homage to Paul Klee”). William recognizes her from the medieval art class he’s taking and stops to talk with her. He courts her, attracted at least in part by her air of “careless authority”:

  She was a fine-arts major, and there was a sense in which she contained the museum, had mastered all the priceless and timeless things that would become, in my possessing her, mine as well. She had first appeared to me as someone guarding the gates.

  Similarly, in the draft version of “Homage to Paul Klee,” Isaac contemplates Martha’s size (like Mary Pennington, she’s taller than average) and reflects that “in possessing her . . . he seemed to be possessing a whole world.” In a moment of epiphany, he sees her as a member of a social class “that has had the time and fortune to grow grace and knowledge and courtesy in its blood.” This passage is capped with a romantic vision of upward mobility couched in prose purple enough to make F. Scott Fitzgerald blush:

  The territory he had battled for as an invader was in her inherent; so his sense of her size measured a conquest immeasurably vast and sweet, and lifted him into a happiness boundlessly proud.

  These fictional accounts of his courtship suggest that Updike, looking back after a decade or so of marriage, became conscious of his own social climbing; he recognized an underlying motive in his attraction to Mary: She was someone “guarding the gates”—someone who could usher him into an agreeably refined future.

  At the time, Updike expressed no social ambition whatsoever. He was perfectly content to be the country boy on the staff of the Lampoon. But as for artistic and intellectual ambition—it would be hard to overstate the scope of his dreams. While he was at work on Willow, he wrote to his mother about what was missing from the American literary scene. “We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popul
ar,” he told her, “an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.” A great writer who loved America, he thought, could “produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic.” Though not quite ready to throw his hat in the ring—Rabbit was still a decade distant—Updike was already sizing up the job. In junior year, a few months before his marriage, he wrote, “I feel I am on the lip of a great jump forward, and this jump might carry me into the charmed circle.” The charmed circle he had in mind was The New Yorker, not the Social Register.

  In the long summer months after Mary’s visit to Plowville, when John was again working at the Reading Eagle and Mary was waitressing in Cambridge, he sent her letters about his writing and the struggle to get into print and the bitter disappointment of rejection slips. He was certain that he was going to fly, as his mother promised he would. Mary believed it.

  She was two years older than John, and had grown up in Cambridge with a younger sister in a highly cultured, politically progressive household. Her father, Leslie Talbot Pennington, an intellectual with a scholarly bent, was a Quaker who converted to Unitarianism, went to the Harvard Divinity School, and became minister of the Unitarian Church in Harvard Square, where his daughter was later married. Her mother, Elizabeth Entwistle Daniels, had been to Radcliffe (class of 1923), and taught Latin at Buckingham, a private day school in Cambridge. In 1944, Leslie Pennington was appointed minister of the First Unitarian Church in Chicago, and Mary moved to the Midwest with her parents. She stayed for only a few years before returning to Cambridge to live with family friends and spend her last year of high school at Buckingham before enrolling at Radcliffe in 1948.

  Mary was a very attractive undergraduate, a smart, good-looking, and capable young woman with a broad, engaging smile and a dash of bohemian style—sandals, ballet slippers, peasant blouses, dark hair worn long or cut dramatically short, no makeup, no lipstick. Her bicycle is mentioned nearly as often as her smile: she’s wheeling it across the Yard, or pushing it purposefully down Massachusetts Avenue, with John trailing a step or two behind. One of John’s Harvard friends told me about meeting him for the first time—but John barely figures in the story: “I saw this girl in the library who was just stunning. There was this skinny guy across from her but I didn’t pay him any attention.”

  Beginning in the second half of her last year at Radcliffe, Mary lived with a roommate (a friend from Chicago called Ann Rosenblum) in a small penthouse apartment perched atop a redbrick Victorian building on Sparks Street; Ann papered the bathroom walls with New Yorker covers. After graduating, during John’s junior year, Mary found a job as an unpaid apprentice teacher at the Shady Hill School, first with the fifth grade, then in the studio, teaching ceramics and painting. Evenings and weekends, she was often spotted in Updike’s Lowell House room. One of his Lampoon colleagues recalls being surprised to find her “in residence,” and wondering what John “did with the inevitable roommate.”

  Actually, there were several junior year roommates. Kit and John were still up on the fifth floor, but they’d moved across the hall, to E-52, a four-man suite. Choosing from the pool of Lowell “floaters” (residents in search of roommates), they added a senior named Charles Neuhauser. Meanwhile, Reginald Hannaford had withdrawn from college in order to receive psychiatric care,* and he recommended that they take in his place a sophomore named David Archibald.

  Still remarkably concentrated on his work, Lasch was on his way to compiling a first-rate academic record capped by a summa in history and the 1954 Bowdoin Prize for best senior essay. He was also taking writing courses, churning out short stories, and announcing every so often to his parents that he was at work on a novel. At the very beginning of junior year, he and Updike collaborated on a short play for the Congregational youth group (of which Hannaford and Archibald were members). After John and Kit polished off the play in an afternoon, Lasch told his parents, “If only he would write a musical with me. We would be a great combination, with his brilliance and my capacity for drudgery.”

  John was still confiding in Kit during his last semester at Lowell House. He let his roommate know when he was briefly seized with cold feet about marriage (“The financial aspect is beginning to weigh on him,” Kit reported to his parents). And yet their friendship was clearly strained in those final years at Harvard, partly because of Lasch’s moodiness and his fits of belligerence, and partly because of their academic rivalry—the competition, so fruitful freshman year, began to grate as the stakes grew higher. A false rumor circulated on campus that Kit had lost his temper with John one day during junior year and that the quarrel had come to blows. It’s certainly true that Kit failed utterly to suppress the note of bitter envy when he described to his parents John’s latest triumph:

  Updike was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society, one of only eight juniors so honored. I of course was passed over. I don’t really mind it except for the implied superiority of Updike over me. If he really is a better student than I am, then I fear for myself. His seems a pedantic and lazy mind, and one limited to a small area of knowledge. But he does get better grades.

  It’s hard to act the part of a genial roommate when you’re prey to that kind of resentment. Lasch was envious, and his envy obviously clouded his judgment: Updike may have been lazy the way many young men at college are lazy—unhelpful in matters of housekeeping, say—but he never exhibited any sign of having a lazy or pedantic mind. Lasch knew it, too; this outburst came only six months after his spontaneous acknowledgment of his roommate’s brilliance. Mary—John’s fiancée as of January 1953—realized there was a kind of battle between the two of them, the nature of which she never fully understood; it’s possible that she herself contributed to the tension. Thanks to Mary, Updike was moving on. He was less interested in home life, as Kit observed—and he was less interested in dorm life, too.

  Charles Neuhauser, one of the two new junior year roommates, was a poet, high-strung and uncompromising. He and another friend of Updike’s, David Chandler, both of whom were on the editorial board of the Advocate, privately printed a slim volume of their poems, An Antique Drum, recouping the cost by selling copies to friends. Updike bought one, and probably still had it on hand in 1969 when he wrote a story, “One of My Generation,”* a satiric portrait of a relentlessly literary roommate who writes tortured poems full of exotic, overheated imagery (lifted, unkindly, from An Antique Drum). The story is weak and sour, but it opens a window, somewhat distorted by caricature, on the book chat of Harvard English majors circa 1954. Ed Popper, the poetically inclined, somewhat unhinged roommate modeled on Neuhauser, insists on ranking, like some minor-league T. S. Eliot, the English poets. The narrator, a nameless, featureless version of Updike, is impressed by Popper’s fixation on Robert Lowell, by his “passionate discrimination” in making literary judgments (“Literature had ceased to be his study and become his essence, an atmosphere he merely breathed”), and by the minuscule knot in his necktie (“the tiniest, driest, most intense necktie knot I had ever seen”). Both roommates are committed to the kind of close textual analysis favored by Harry Levin:

  To train one’s mind to climb, like a vine on a sunny wall, across the surface of a poem by George Herbert, seeking the handhold crannies of pun, ambiguity, and buried allusion; to bring forth from the surface sense of the poem an altogether other, hidden poem of consistent metaphor and, as it were, verbal subversion; to feel, in Eliot’s phrase, a thought like an emotion; to explicate—this was life lived on the nerve ends.

  Despite his devotion to poetry and his neurotic tendencies, Popper (like Neuhauser) ends up working for the CIA—which is the punch line, so to speak, of the story. The narrator weighs his generation against the “riot-minded” youth of the late sixties, with their “drug-begentled eyes” and their contempt for the “power structure”; the Pentagon protests of the flower children, he points out, are aimed at old English majors, poetry lovers adept at exegesis—in other words, people just like
Ed Popper.

  “One of My Generation” gives an indication of how far Updike traveled from Shillington High to Harvard College. He arrived in Cambridge a “cultural bumpkin,” having read very little but mystery novels, science fiction, humor writing, some Hemingway, some Thornton Wilder, and random volumes picked up on a whim. At age fourteen, having borrowed from the Reading public library Edmund Wilson’s newly published Memoirs of Hecate County, he was given his “first and . . . most vivid glimpse of sex through the window of fiction.” For high school English he read Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice, but not Hamlet or King Lear or Antony and Cleopatra. Now, just a few years later, the names of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English poets—Cowley, Traherne, Cowper—tripped off his tongue. Midnight found him in his dormered room in Lowell House, a cigarette in one hand, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the other, alive to the glamour of becoming a connoisseur of the classics. Having discovered Swift and Pope, he discovered in himself “a yen to read great literature.” He had been rocketed into a literary universe; he remembered how he and his fellow English majors “worshipped, and gossiped about, Eliot and Pound and those other textual Titans.” Instead of playing pinball after class, he was attending poetry readings: Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens (a native of Reading and therefore the object of Updike’s close scrutiny). Eliot, whose towering reputation seemed “like an encompassing gray cloud, the very atmosphere of literature,” also read on campus, but Updike stood so long in line waiting to get into Sanders Theatre that he fell asleep during the reading.

  Sometimes the Harvard scene got to be too much for him. In junior year, writing to a high school classmate just before Christmas break, he was desperate to hear of any plans for a New Year’s Eve party in Shillington: “The only thing that has sustained me in this orgy of erudition is the vision of a beautifully non-intellectual brawl during the holidays.” The party materialized, a sloppy ad hoc affair attended by his whole gang of friends; five years later Updike captured it with exquisite precision in one of his finest stories, “The Happiest I’ve Been.”