Updike

by Begley, Adam

  His grumbling about an “orgy of erudition” was mostly a pose for his pals back home. He really did worship the textual titans; this was a time in American life, as he later remarked, when literature “was revered as it would not be again.” After almost half a century he still remembered going to hear Robert Frost at Sanders Theatre, an event attended by “the flower of the English faculty,” including the distinguished poet and professor Archibald MacLeish—the man who twice declined to admit Updike to his writing seminar. Though Updike warned that his memory of the evening was fallible, the details he provided when he wrote about it are sharply etched, and the scene is compelling, a vivid snapshot of a literary and political moment. MacLeish had recently written a radio play called The Trojan Horse, the burden of which was an anti-McCarthyite message: the United States should bar the gates to the Trojan horse of totalitarian tactics of the sort practiced by the junior senator from Wisconsin. Frost evidently disagreed, and after he’d finished reading his poems, he indulged, as he often did, in some extemporaneous commentary; he took as his text MacLeish’s liberal notion that all manifestations of totalitarianism are anathema.

  “You know,” he told his old friend and admirer in the astonished hearing of us worshipfully assembled undergraduates, “if you’re going to beat a fella, you got to get to be like him.” He may have said “sort of like him” or some such qualification, and I believe he continued a while on this theme, long enough for his anti-anti-McCarthyite drift to register. It was Frost in action, cruelly playful, a cat reaching out from the stage to tease its mouse, an eminent mouse who had been faithful in the hospitality, cordiality, and homage he had granted, over the years, to the greater poet. . . . As I remember it, Frost didn’t raise his voice, and spoke as if helpfully, to an obtuse student. MacLeish smiled, slightly, through the assault; he knew his man, and perhaps had heard it all before. But we of the young audience had not, and this flash of bullying rather soured, for me, the charm of hearing [Frost’s poems] in the voice of their maker.

  Was it a form of delayed revenge to replay the scene of this “assault” on MacLeish? Though Updike claims to have been put off by Frost’s “bullying,” it doesn’t appear to have dimmed his admiration for the “greater poet”; he goes on, in fact, to praise Frost for breaking loose from “consensual politics.” It’s possible that when he wrote those lines, Updike was thinking back on his own experience as a reluctant supporter of the Vietnam War beset by bien-pensant antiwar critics.

  In his undergraduate years, Updike’s politics were nothing if not consensual, as he indicated with this humorous checklist of his unimpeachably liberal responses to the era’s various “excitements”: “Joe McCarthy (against), Adlai Stevenson (for), the Checkers speech (against), the Korean War (for, as long as somebody else was fighting it).” He retained a “vivid civic memory” of signing up, along with his assembled classmates, for a student deferment. He no more questioned the justice of this temporary exemption from the draft than he did the overwhelmingly masculine tone of his university (“Not one class I took,” he noticed years later, “was taught by a woman”). Like many of his classmates (but unlike Kit Lasch, who canvassed for Stevenson), he paid very little attention to the political issues of the day. In “Apologies to Harvard,” he wrote, “We took the world as given.” As far as he was concerned, the salient—and, in retrospect, scandalous—characteristic of his college cohort was a kind of unthinkingly conventional, atomized, unaware selfishness: “We did not know we were a generation.”

  After junior year, in any case, he was half of a newlywed couple; he had many things on his mind other than politics. The wedding in late June, at the Crothers Chapel of the First Unitarian Church in Harvard Square, attended by both sets of parents, came off nearly without a hitch—except that the dazed groom somehow forgot to kiss the bride. For the honeymoon, they borrowed a house from one of Leslie Pennington’s parishioners, a small cottage behind an apple orchard in Ipswich, Massachusetts; they stayed for a long weekend, playing croquet and bicycling in to town and out to the beach, where Mary, in a bright blue bathing suit, convinced her husband to brave the chill June waters. The sun burned his nose and planted an idea—life by the beach might keep his psoriasis in check. For ten weeks that summer they worked at a YMCA family camp in New Hampshire, on Sandy Island, in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee (where he gathered the material for “The Peruvian in the Heart of Lake Winnipesaukee”). John was the camp registrar, and ran the office, while his bride minded the store; they were paid $150 each, plus room and board. They bunked in a small, secluded cabin. He did some writing and even sent off a couple of poems to The New Yorker. Both were rejected, but gently, and he was encouraged to send in more light verse. In late August, Mary’s parents drove them down to Plowville; they arrived in the late afternoon to find that Linda’s ninety-year-old father, John Franklin Hoyer, had died a short while earlier. The happy homecoming turned into an impromptu wake, a coincidence that inspired stories by both John and Linda.

  For John’s senior year, the young couple rented the cheapest apartment they could find. For thirty-five dollars a month, they got a fairly big room that served as kitchen, dining room, living room, and music room—it contained both an upright piano and the table where they ate. There was a tiny bedroom and a tiny bathroom. At least it was a nice neighborhood, a pleasant ten-minute walk from the Yard. They had a cat, Ezra (after Ezra Pound), who came in and out of the window—inspiration for a short story, “Spring Comes to Cambridge,” which Updike submitted to The New Yorker. It was rejected on the grounds that the quota of cat stories had already been filled. (This was not the end of Ezra’s literary career. He was taken to Plowville when John graduated, and years later Linda wrote a story about him, “The Predator,” which The New Yorker did accept.) In the cover letter Updike sent in with “Spring Comes to Cambridge,” he asked if he could come to New York to discuss the possibility of finding work at the magazine. The rejection, from William Maxwell, came with a discouraging reply: “About the job—there doesn’t seem anything at this time that would be right for you, and I wouldn’t think it sensible for you to make a special trip down to talk about it.” A polite, unequivocal no.

  UPDIKE WAS TOO busy to brood. He was intent on achieving highest honors, and at the same time laying the groundwork for his future career by churning out a steady stream of drawings, light verse, and humorous prose for the Lampoon, and short stories for his writing classes. There were hurdles to clear, some trivial, some momentous. Harvard required that he pass a swimming test before graduating, which meant overcoming a history of hydrophobia (“I managed a froggy backstroke the length of the pool”). His oral examination by the English department went poorly; one of the examiners quoted Horace in Latin, and the examinee wobbled—“a babbling display of ignorance,” he judged it. Although he complained that his senior thesis on Renaissance poet Robert Herrick was dull, it won the second Bowdoin Prize for best undergraduate essay in English. (Second prize was worth $300 that year; first prize, worth $500, was snagged by Kit Lasch for an essay on the rise of American imperialism in the late nineteenth century.) Updike also won the Dana Reed Prize ($100) for distinguished writing in an undergraduate publication, for a parody of Milton in the Lampoon, and a Knox Fellowship. Worth $2,400, the Knox was for study abroad, and it determined his immediate fate: he applied to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England, and was accepted for the following academic year.

  Asked by a classmate why he chose the Ruskin, he replied, “Because it’s always been my ambition to be the next Walt Disney, but to do that I need to perfect my drawing.” This wasn’t a flip remark. Disney’s Peter Pan, which came out halfway through Updike’s junior year, went on to become the highest-grossing movie of the year. When Updike saw it a week after it opened, he was amazed by the variety of people seated around him in the theater, all evidently enjoying themselves. He was reminded of the hugely important cultural role of the animator—a “universal artist,” and
the object of Updike’s envy. Harvard had steered him away from his dream of becoming a cartoonist, but his elitist education hadn’t dimmed his enthusiasm for a medium with mass appeal. In a relaxed moment a month before graduation, he told his mother that he really shouldn’t worry so much about achieving highest honors: “If I were reasonable, I wouldn’t care at all, since the exact color of my degree will have little bearing on my ability to write and draw and sing my way into the heart of the American people.” He wanted to entertain, and he wanted to be loved—if possible, universally.

  Meanwhile, his reputation as a brilliant English student and the engine behind the Lampoon was spreading rapidly. Peter Judd, who was then president of the Signet, a venerable literary society with a handsome clubhouse on the corner of Dunster Street and Mount Auburn, took the unusual step of inviting Updike to join in his senior year—bypassing the usual selection process (most members are elected sophomore or junior year) and waiving the membership dues. “I seem to remember John accepting in a somewhat embarrassed way,” said Judd. “I can’t remember him in the clubhouse.” He joined, but stayed away—until several years later when he was living in nearby Ipswich.

  Judd, who roomed in Lowell House, had vivid memories of Updike:

  That long face with the nose accentuated in profile caught the attention. No one else in the dining hall looked like this rangy fellow who had none of the panache that many Harvard boys assumed in those days, who dressed simply and didn’t seem to mix.

  Lowell was known in the mid-fifties as the intellectuals’ house; the dining room discussions were raucous, opinionated, and sometimes pretentious. There was much dropping of literary names, especially of twentieth-century modernists. Updike did not participate. “He never liked intellectuals,” said one college classmate; he avoided anyone who could outthink him, anyone who might represent competition. He also avoided the Advocate crowd and the writing class enthusiasts: “I was kind of a loner there too in a way,” he told Time magazine in 1968. “I never was really with any literary group, and I felt that I was slightly an oddball.” He and Mary often ate by themselves in the Lowell dining room, or with a roommate or two—the couple were a fixture there on Friday and Saturday nights. He was considered cool by some, aloof.

  There are notably few references to Updike in Lasch’s letters home during senior year. Late in the fall he makes a cameo appearance, helping out when Kit and his girlfriend need a place to sleep somewhere near New Haven on the night before the Yale game: John suggested they stay in Greenwich with his aunt Mary, recently widowed and happy to have some company. Otherwise, it’s as though John had dropped out of college. It’s tempting to read into Lasch’s silence a brooding jealousy; there’s no mention in his letters of any of the writing John was publishing in the Lampoon, no mention of his summa, no mention even of his second place in the Bowdoin competition. But the more likely explanation for the cooling of their friendship is that Updike was living off campus with his wife, studying hard and writing when he wasn’t studying, and therefore somewhat disconnected from undergraduate life. No longer roommates, he and Kit rarely saw each other. Their correspondence after college, though perfectly friendly, was infrequent—they exchanged fewer than two dozen letters over the course of four decades—and, after seeing each other a few times in New York in the mid-fifties, met up only once or twice more before Lasch’s death in 1994. A friendship that was for a brief while as close as any Updike ever had simply petered out.

  Updike’s “dull” thesis on Herrick has a forbidding title: “Non-Horatian Elements in Herrick’s Echoes of Horace.” Though it suffers in places from a plodding tone, it’s a nearly flawless academic exercise, dutifully demonstrating the author’s mastery of his subject as well as his ability to marshal evidence and draw plausible critical conclusions. His confidence is striking (he spars with T. S. Eliot in his introduction), as is his willingness to deploy ostentatiously unscholarly metaphors (“Horatian echoes . . . are sprinkled throughout the poem like flavoring in a smooth broth, quite unlike the rough stew of ‘A Country Life,’ where chunks of Horace float in an alien gravy”). More important, he seems to have found in Herrick’s poetry a congenial model for his own writing. Consider this appreciation of Herrick’s humility, which stems, according to Updike, from a “Christian awareness of the smallness of earthly things”:

  His poems are short, his subjects are trivial, his effects are delicate. Yet at the same time he is willing to describe tiny phenomena with the full attention and sympathy due to a “major” theme.

  That could serve as an accurate description of Updike’s early fiction. At least one scholar has suggested that the conclusion of the thesis “sounds a programmatic note for Updike’s later career.” Humility is again the essential feature:

  Compared with Catullus and Donne, Horace and Herrick do not feel deeply. Compared with Vergil and Milton, they possess little dramatic power. But by writing with care and by writing about things, however trivial or fanciful, which excited their imaginations, Horace and Herrick have created some of the world’s most graceful poetry.

  It would be absurd to claim that Horace and Herrick had a determining influence on Updike’s early writing (his principal debt at this point, as he later admitted, was to Hemingway), but he does pay similarly sympathetic attention to “tiny phenomena,” and he achieves similarly graceful effects. Carefully crafted, with a fine attention to the texture of provincial lives (circumscribed lives that nonetheless excited his imagination), his undergraduate stories are modest in ambition and somewhat cautious; though he evidently wasn’t yet ready to take emotional or intellectual risks, he could handle with enviable dexterity (and Herrick-like humility) “the smallness of earthly things.”

  In the fall of senior year, he submitted to Albert Guérard’s English Jb a short story called “Flick,” about a young man who’s just lost his job on a used-car lot. Flick is the nickname of the protagonist, Fred Anderson, a less savvy, more anxious version of Harry Angstrom. Like Rabbit, Flick is a high school hero whose skill with a basketball has not translated into post–high school success. He’s married to a classmate, Evey, and they have a baby girl—but Evey has to work full-time, and their third-floor apartment is small and shabby. In other words, losing his job is a serious matter, and Flick dreads breaking the news to his smart-mouthed wife (“She’ll pop her lid”).

  The echoes of Hemingway, as in this terse evocation of Flick’s anxiety, are a reminder of how pervasive Papa’s influence was at midcentury:

  His stomach was a little tight. It had been like that when he walked to the gymnasium alone in the dark and could see the people from town, kids and their parents, crowding the doors. But the locker room would be bright and hot, and the other guys would be there, laughing and towel-slapping, so the feeling went away. Now there were whole days when it didn’t go away.

  Elsewhere, what catches the eye—what caught Guérard’s eye (he praised Updike’s authentic portrait of “ordinary, ‘everyday’ damnation”)—is the telling use of minute, convincing detail. Relying strictly on dialogue, gesture, and bursts of clear-eyed description, Updike shows us (without telling us) that things won’t get any better for Flick and Evey, though Flick still tries to summon some of the old high school magic to block out the grim reality of their predicament. Here is Flick, fresh from being fired, driving home, listening to the radio:

  [H]e picked a cigaret from the pack on the sunshield, hung it from his lower lip, snapped a match across the rusty place on the dash, held it to the cigaret, dragged, and blew out the match, all in time to the music. He rolled down the window and flicked the match so it spun end over end right into the gutter. “Two points,” he said and laughed for a syllable. He cocked the cigaret toward the roof and sucked the smoke way in, letting it bounce out of his nostrils a puff at a time. He was beginning to feel like himself, Flick Anderson, for the first time that day.

  This is fast-paced, entertaining prose based on keen observation of lived life—already an
achievement for a twenty-one-year-old still in college. What makes it especially good is the rich detail: the rust on the dashboard; the hint of foreshadowing in the match’s trajectory; the unforced allusion to basketball, source of Flick’s brittle self-esteem; the way he tries to calm his nerves with rote physical gestures. It adds up to a convincing psychological and sociological snapshot of a young, distressed, working-class American circa 1953. From his father, Updike had heard many stories about how the students at Shillington High School, especially the star athletes, fared after graduation. “Flick” captures the type exactly, by showing us a quirky, undeniably real individual. Impressed, Guérard suggested to Updike that he submit the story to The New Yorker.

  “Flick” was rejected, but a year later (after several poems and another story had been accepted) he resubmitted it as “Ace in the Hole.” Though the nickname of the protagonist (now Ace) had changed along with the title (now a clever play on words), the story published in the April 9, 1955, issue of The New Yorker is otherwise almost exactly the same story Updike handed in for his Harvard writing class.

  Richly evocative of a particular time and place, the original version takes its sociology for granted; it focuses narrowly, without making any explicit judgment whatsoever, on an hour or so of Ace’s unhappy afternoon. When Updike revised the story nearly fifty years later for The Early Stories, however, he superimposed a layer of ethnic and religious tension: Evey is now a Roman Catholic, and defensive about it; Ace allows himself to call an Italian-looking kid who taunts him a “miserable wop”; Ace’s boss has a new name (Goldman instead of Friedman); and Ace, offering his opinion of his boss, who’s just fired him, reveals what looks like an anti-Semitic streak: “He just wanted too much for his money,” he says. “That kind does.” These changes are significant, if only because they underscore the clean simplicity of the earlier version, which is like a peephole on a world utterly different from the Harvard milieu in which it was written. The lively accuracy of the scene he paints is its own reward; it pleases, much in the way Herrick pleases, because it treats—to borrow Updike’s undergraduate assessment of the poet—“tiny phenomena with the full attention and sympathy due to a ‘major’ theme.” Or to put it another way, he fulfilled, age twenty-one, his writerly duty as he still saw it half a century later: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”