Updike

by Begley, Adam

  The same can be said for “Friends from Philadelphia,” a story he wrote immediately after graduation, at the Penningtons’ summer place, in South Duxbury, Vermont, near Montpelier. He and Mary took the train north, and a neighbor picked them up and drove them out to the farmhouse, a rustic spot three miles off the main road, up the side of a mountain. Leslie Pennington had bought the property for two hundred dollars during the Depression, and the family used it only during the summer months. John and Mary had volunteered to open it up and get it ready for her parents’ arrival. John didn’t really like the house—it was too much like Plowville, and even more isolated—but once they’d done their chores, there was certainly plenty of time to write.

  He typed out “Friends from Philadelphia” on his father-in-law’s typewriter and sent it off to The New Yorker. By the time he received a letter from William Maxwell (dated August 5) announcing that the magazine was “delighted” with the story, and inviting him to the city to discuss over lunch his future as a New Yorker writer, Updike and his wife had migrated south to Plowville, trading one set of parents for the other. He never forgot the moment when he retrieved the envelope from the mailbox at the end of the drive, the same mailbox that had yielded so many rejection slips, both his and his mother’s: “I felt, standing and reading the good news in the midsummer pink dusk of the stony road beside a field of waving weeds, born as a professional writer.” To extend the metaphor, though the gestation period that led to this gratifying birth had been quite long (he’d fallen in love with the magazine a full decade earlier), the actual labor was brief and painless: he passed from unpublished college student to valued contributor in less than two months—“the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life,” he later called it.

  His very first New Yorker short story (following the acceptance of two poems “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums” and “Ex-Basketball Player”), “Friends from Philadelphia” also marks the first appearance of John Nordholm, Updike’s original Olinger alter ego, one of a succession of fictional teenage boys blessed and burdened with the author’s character traits and family situation. Like “Ace in the Hole,” the story appears at first to be a modest affair. There are only four characters, and the action, which amounts to a trivial errand, is complete in little more than half an hour: fifteen-year-old John Nordholm, trying to buy a bottle of wine at his mother’s behest for the eponymous friends from Philadelphia, enlists the help of the Lutz family—Thelma Lutz, his classmate, and her parents. Again, the heart of the story is the revelation of character through dialogue, detail, and gesture. John is too young—too young to buy wine and too young for Thelma (just barely). The first line of the story (“In the moment before the door was opened to him, he glimpsed her thigh below the half-drawn shade”) suggests that John is on the brink of new experiences; the door will be opened, the shade will be raised, and the mystery obscurely typified by that glimpse of thigh will be laid bare. But not yet. “Friends from Philadelphia” is cheerful and sly; it winks broadly at sexuality (“When she looks like that, John thought, I could bite her lip until it bleeds”) without allowing the clamor of adolescent urges to take center stage. John and Thelma play somewhat larger roles than Thelma’s mother and father, but each of the four characters is complex enough to excite the reader’s curiosity. As a result, the story never feels slight—a faint air of mystery gives it depth and poignancy, and balances the gentle comedy.

  In the introduction to Olinger Stories, Updike felt obliged to respond to the charge that the story has no point: “The point, to me, is plain, and is the point, more or less, of all these Olinger stories. We are rewarded unexpectedly.” The reward, in this case, takes the form of a twist at the very end of the story: the bottle of wine Thelma’s father buys (and pays for), a Château Mouton Rothschild 1937, is much finer than anything John or his parents would have thought to ask for, an act of random generosity that lifts the ending like an exclamation point.

  Updike gave competing versions of the genesis of the story (which not only launched his professional career but remained, despite his prodigious output, his mother’s favorite). At one point he claimed he was reacting against the sardonic tone of a John Cheever story, “O Youth and Beauty!” (which was published in The New Yorker a full year earlier, in the summer of 1953): “Cheever’s story involved drunkenness and a sudden death by pistol shot, and to my innocent palate it tasted as rasping and sour as a belt of straight bourbon. I thought to myself, ‘There must be more to American life than this,’ and wrote an upbeat little story, with an epiphanic benefaction at the end, to prove it.” It’s true that in his senior year Updike had taken against Cheever, calling him “one of my greatest enemies” and deploring his cocky writing and his anger at his miserable characters. But in the introduction to The Early Stories (written nearly half a century after the fact), he gave credit to J. D. Salinger. Leaving Cheever out of it entirely, Updike confided that the unexpectedly excellent bottle of wine (the “epiphanic benefaction”) “owes something” to the dead Easter chick in the bottom of the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” Neither account is wholly persuasive. More important than either Cheever or Salinger was the inspiration Updike drew from setting the story in Shillington—or Olinger, as he decided to call it several years later.

  Though he never gives the name of the place where Thelma lives, he was picturing his hometown, inhabiting the location with a ferocious intensity, creating Olinger with the force of his Shillington memories. In a letter to his editor, he specified that the Lutzes’ house is at 17 Spruce Street and the liquor store at the corner of Lancaster Avenue and Sterley Street. He had in mind both an exact address and real people. The characters were immediately recognizable to any Shillington reader as John himself and the family of his classmate Joan Venne.

  Looking back ten years later, he had the impression that “Friends from Philadelphia” was written by someone to whom “everything outside Olinger—Harvard, marriage, Vermont—seemed relatively unreal.” He entered completely into the world of his story, the recollected world of a tall, awkward, eager small-town teenager named John; in the grip of this creative fervor, he lost sight of his current surroundings—his wife, her parents’ lonely farmhouse, the chill of the early summer evenings—and saw only the Shillington of his boyhood.

  He paid his hometown another virtual visit in a poem written in midsummer called “Ex-Basketball Player,” which The New Yorker accepted three days before “Friends from Philadelphia.” Updike’s most popular poem, widely anthologized and often taught in school, it’s a portrait of Flick Webb, a sadder, more remote sibling of Ace Anderson (whose name was Flick in the first draft of the story). Here, too, the geography is exact, and cleverly blended into the narrative, the mise-en-scène being an abortive sprint up the court:

  Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

  Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

  Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

  At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

  Is on the corner facing west, and there,

  Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

  The garage itself, with its anthropomorphic gas pumps, is pure Olinger, and so is the luncheonette where Flick spends his time when he’s not working, the details lovingly observed and ingeniously shaped to fit the requirements of a lyric poem.

  Even as he was meditating on postgraduation failure, Updike was achieving exactly the opposite. “I had given myself five years to become a ‘writer,’ and my becoming one immediately has left me with an uneasy, apologetic sense of having blundered through the wrong door.” The proximate result of his rapid launch was twofold: a redoubling of his ambition (he peppered The New Yorker with submissions in the weeks after his breakthrough) and, perversely, a simmering, low-key grudge against his alma mater.

  In “The Christian Roommates,” Updike wrote that Harvard “demands of each man, before it releases him, a wrenching sacrifice
of ballast.” To judge from other equivocal remarks about a college career that changed his life in many ways, he obviously felt that he himself had made some such sacrifice. What kind of ballast had he felt obliged to jettison? And was the loss truly wrenching? Harvard made him an outsider in Shillington—a blow, to be sure, though the distance this estrangement opened up allowed him to use the town for his fiction. Harvard took away Shillington, but it gave him Olinger—or, at the very least, sharpened the tools he would need for the excavation of his home turf. And yet instead of feeling grateful to the institution, he felt grateful to the town. It was Shillington he thanked in the poems collected in Endpoint, when he knew he was dying (“ . . . Perhaps / we meet our heaven at the start and not / at the end of life”). For having finished off the project begun by his mother when she insisted on moving him out of Shillington to the Plowville farmhouse, the college received no thanks at all. If anything, he associated it with his betrayal of the town he’d loved as a child and still cherished in memory.

  “Four years was enough Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.” His formal education was at an end; his education as a writer was under way. He was, for now, an arrow aimed at the bull’s-eye of The New Yorker.

  The day before he sailed for England to take up his place at Oxford’s Ruskin School, he stopped by the magazine’s offices at the invitation of William Maxwell, the editor who’d sent the momentous letter accepting “Friends from Philadelphia.” The New Yorker waiting room was blandly anonymous, and the linoleum corridors a drab maze, but the young college graduate was nonetheless dazzled by the visit. Maxwell showed off his sunny office, then ferried him a short distance along Forty-Third Street for lunch at his club, the Century Association, a venerable establishment housed in an elegant and imposing Beaux Arts building designed by McKim, Mead and White. Updike himself would become a member of the Century in 1972—the membership is composed of “authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts”—but on the day of that first lunch, September 3, 1954, he was being vetted by an even more exclusive organization.

  That afternoon, Maxwell sent a memo to his colleague Katharine White; it offers a shrewd portrait of the twenty-two-year-old writer:

  Just a note to tell you that Updike turned up and I took him to lunch. Had you met him? Very modest, shy, intelligent humorous youngster, slightly gawky in his manner and already beginning, being an artist, to turn it into a kind of style, by way of self-defense.

  In later years, Maxwell emphasized the idea that Updike was putting on an act. “The first time I took him to lunch,” he told a journalist in 1972, “John was amusing and charming—and pretended to an awkwardness he clearly didn’t feel. I knew that he couldn’t be that talented and perceptive and still be a country boy.” Maxwell wasn’t alone in identifying Updike’s manner as a kind of self-defense. Others noted that he paraded his mix of teasing humor and gawkiness (the uneasy, apologetic, blundered-through-the-wrong-door routine) in order to keep the world at arm’s length. One old friend called it his “passive-aggressive aw-shucks pose.” Another friend who met Updike in the early days at The New Yorker disagreed with Maxwell’s suggestion that the “youngster” was “very modest.” This friend believed that “despite the veneer of shyness, John was confident in his way of being.” In any case, Maxwell liked the youngster very much; with the blessing of William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, he offered Updike a job, telling him that when he got back from his year in England there would be a place waiting at The New Yorker, a message repeated by Katharine White nine months later when she and her husband visited Oxford. The door was now open to the most successful and prestigious magazine of the day—“the object,” as Updike put it, “of my fantasies and aspirations since I was thirteen.”

  It’s worth pausing here to marvel at the unrelieved smoothness of his professional path. Is there an American writer who so quickly and painlessly established himself with a magazine that could provide a lucrative, conspicuous, and highly respected venue for his work? F. Scott Fitzgerald made a great deal of money in his twenties writing for The Saturday Evening Post, but he later came to see the association as a blot on his literary reputation—and nobody would argue that the manic Fitzgerald had a smooth ride. Among the other twentieth-century American writers who made a splash before their thirtieth birthday (the list includes Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, William Saroyan, Norman Mailer, Flannery O’Connor, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon), none piled up accomplishments in as orderly a fashion as Updike, or with as little fuss. If he was, as he later claimed, angry, he tamped it down. He wasn’t despairing or thwarted or resentful; he wasn’t alienated or conflicted or drunk; he quarreled with no one. In short, he cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers. Even his neuroses were tame. Except for his psoriasis, his stutter, and his intermittent religious doubts, he faced no obstacle that hard work and natural talent couldn’t overcome.

  This frictionless success has sometimes been held against him. His vast oeuvre materialized with suspiciously little visible effort. Where there’s no struggle, can there be real art? The Romantic notion of the tortured poet has left us with a mild prejudice against the idea of art produced in a calm, rational, workmanlike manner (as he put it, “on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain”), but that’s precisely how Updike got his start. When he arrived at The New Yorker, he hadn’t yet written anything resembling a masterpiece (he sensibly aimed at the achievable goal of turning out stories and poems his favorite magazine would be likely to buy), but he was building for himself, plank by plank, a stable platform on which to perform more daring feats.

  III.

  The Talk of the Town

  If ever a writer, a magazine and a time were made for each other, the writer was John Updike, the magazine was the New Yorker and the time was the 1950s.

  —Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made

  The arrow took a detour en route to the target. John and Mary, who was by now two months pregnant, sailed from New York on September 4, 1954, aboard the RMS Caronia. Waving good-bye from the pier were both sets of parents, two aunts, a great-aunt, and friends from Cambridge. Although Mary was very seasick, they both found the crossing quite wonderful; luxurious, even for passengers who weren’t traveling first class; and exciting: neither of them had been to Europe before, and this was the first great adventure of their married life. They arrived in Southampton after ten days at sea, made their way by train to Oxford, and set about finding a place to live.

  Their address for the next ten months was a basement flat at 213 Iffley Road, a half-hour walk from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (housed, in those years, in a wing of the university’s Ashmolean Museum). Their comfortably furnished sitting room was three steps down from the street; looking out the bay window, they could watch the legs of passersby. A long corridor led to a bedroom heated by a metered gas fire, a bathroom with a tub and a sink, and a kitchen with a cold stone floor. Outside the kitchen door, in the small backyard, was the outhouse, a feature of midcentury English plumbing that brought back memories of Plowville.

  Though dank and gray, pinched by British postwar austerity and their own modest means, and made gloomier by bouts of homesickness, the young couple’s Oxford interlude was nonetheless an idyll of sorts. John had nearly a month to get settled before his art classes began. Mary registered with the maternity ward of Oxford’s Radcliffe Hospital, which told them to expect the baby on or about March 20, 1955. The National Health Service wanted all mothers to give birth at home if they possibly could, and declared that that was what Mary should do, but she tearfully insisted that she could not—that she had no relatives in the country and needed the reassurance of a hospital staff. She got her way, but was soon attending compulsory natural childbirth classes.

  When the Ruskin opened its d
oors in October, Updike was put to work drawing from plaster-cast copies of antique statues tucked away in far-flung corridors of the Ashmolean; he also painted still lifes of fruit and crockery. By mid-November he’d been “promoted” to the life drawing class; he complained, comically, that the model kept staring at him and sneering (“Nothing like a sneering nude to set a man’s pencil trembling”). In the winter term, calculating that she had several months before the baby was born, Mary enrolled as a part-time student and joined one of John’s still-life classes. As far as his future was concerned, the Ruskin was a dead end: by the time he left England, his dream of becoming the next Walt Disney had been definitively abandoned, largely because his writing career was flourishing. And yet his association with the school remained a source of bemused pride; in the vast majority of his books, even those published more than a half century after he’d put his paintbrushes away for good, he continued to cite on the jacket flap, in the caption beneath the photo of the gradually graying author, that year in Oxford (and occasionally the Knox Fellowship that funded it). Studying at the Ruskin did improve his draftsmanship, but even he could now clearly see where his talent lay. (A talent demonstrated in the exact and evocative prose he summoned to describe the school’s grand museum home: “the sooty, leonine sprawl of the Ashmolean.”) He said that his year of professional training in the visual arts sharpened his writing: “I’ve never done anything harder than try to paint things the way they are. The amount of concentration it takes to mix a color and put it in the right spot was really a very good lesson for me as far as accuracy in all things artistic.” Another, more concretely profitable benefit was a short story, “Still Life,” written in 1958 and promptly sold to The New Yorker, about a young American studying at the Constable, a British art school housed in a “vast university museum.”