Updike

by Begley, Adam

  At Christmas they went to Paris for a week. Directly across the Seine from Notre Dame they found a large but shabby room with a flaking ceiling and a bidet (which John thought “blandly obscene”) next to the bed; the floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the cathedral. Despite the cold, they wandered on foot through the city, climbing to the top of Notre Dame, though Mary was by now six months pregnant. Like good art students, they explored the Louvre. They spoke so little French, as John remembered it, that in restaurants they could order only “omelette aux champignons”:

  Mary, in need of a bathroom, asked, as Radcliffe French 101 had told her to . . . for the salle de bain.* “Salle de bain!? Ut, ut, alors”—all the waitresses, cooks, etc. rushed forward to examine this charming (and by now fiercely blushing) young American lady to discover why, at eleven o’clock in the morning, she needed, in a restaurant, such abrupt ablution. It was, of course, a toilette she needed. Ah, toilette, toilette—and everything came right at last.

  Paris is largely absent from Updike’s fiction, but that particular scene came back to him, years later, with “almost unbearable affection.”

  In the week before their trip to Paris, he’d written “March: A Birthday Poem,” which The New Yorker bought in January and published in mid-February. A celebration of the month in which his first child would be born, it’s the best verse Updike wrote in Oxford, playful but essentially serious, keenly observed, wide-ranging, and imbued with a kind of folk wisdom, as though the young poet were eager to claim a degree of maturity before becoming a parent:

  The color of March is the one that lies

  On the shadow side of young tree trunks.

  Despite the long, bouncy bus rides the couple took through the countryside hoping the jolts would bring on labor, the baby was late. As the last days of March trickled away, Updike saw the joke coming—sure enough, Elizabeth Pennington Updike was born on April Fools’ Day. Updike’s only consolation was that at the early morning hour when Elizabeth came into the world, it was still March in the United States—just barely.

  John’s parents had to content themselves with drawings of Elizabeth sent in the mail, accompanied by a burst of rapturous emotion; later there were photos, and humorous, baffled descriptions of the neonate’s endearing habits. Mary’s parents, however, had an early chance to see their granddaughter in the flesh. The Penningtons arrived in England shortly after Easter, for a three-month exchange: Leslie was to serve as minister at the Unitarian Church of Liverpool, while his English counterpart took up duties in Chicago. The Penningtons and the young Updikes, baby Elizabeth included, spent a week together in the Lake District, walking and admiring the scenery.

  It was on this otherwise happy excursion—the weather was excellent—that John and Leslie had their first long religious discussion, which was fraught, according to Mary: “I think John really disapproved of Unitarian theology, and was trying to hold on to his own faith. They were quite quarrelsome and I was shocked. He was insulting my father, who took it pretty calmly.” Updike confessed in Self-Consciousness that he and his “gentle” father-in-law had “tense” arguments in which John “insisted that the object of faith must have some concrete attributes”—that is, that God must be actual, Christ divine, and the human soul immortal. He was, essentially, attacking Unitarianism—and hence Leslie’s ministry. The mild Unitarian outlook, exemplified by Leslie’s notion that the “human need for transcendence should be met with minimal embarrassments to reason,” was an insidious threat to the tenets of John’s sometimes wobbly faith: the Lutheran doctrine of sacramental union, for instance, is meaningless if one isn’t prepared to believe in the “concrete attributes” of the Eucharist. That kind of belief, which John grew up with, puts reason under pressure. Though the dispute was awkward for Mary, her father, however gentle, was resolute in his beliefs; he stood his ground (as John’s own father would probably not have done), and John, unused to contending with a strong male figure, refused to drop it, even for Mary’s sake. In fact, Mary’s presence probably made John more stubbornly argumentative.

  He went to church a few times during the year in England, but not regularly. He told his mother he was trying hard to be a Christian. To ward off doubt, he turned to theology: G. K. Chesterton, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, C. S. Lewis. He remembered with particular fondness a pamphlet by Ian T. Ramsey, an Oxford don who later became bishop of Durham, called “Miracles: An Exercise in Logical Map-Work.” Although clearly uneasy about his faith, John did not share his worries with Mary.

  In letters to Harvard classmates he complained of the damp and the cold (“The English climate doesn’t seem suited to anything but trying to build fires and going to sleep”) and the natives (“Englishmen are astoundingly ignorant about the U.S. . . . and proud of it. A bad lot. Easy to see why the 19th century, author of all our woes, was so mismanaged—the British were in charge”). He asked for baseball news and despaired of ever understanding cricket. The infrequent gripes are either lighthearted or tongue-in-cheek. He might as easily have complained of his homesickness or the disorientation of being a stranger in a strange land. The aim of the letters was at least in part to solicit replies. Linda helped in that regard, showering the young couple with the news from Plowville, along with her bracing brand of encouragement. Coming from across the Atlantic, these maternal missives were suddenly very welcome.*

  On the whole, isolation and foreignness seemed to work in Updike’s favor: he kept up the furious rate of production he’d achieved the previous summer. “He typed automatically, whenever he could,” according to Mary, often at a little table by the bay window. The New Yorker bought three new stories, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth,” “Dentistry and Doubt,” and “The Kid’s Whistling,” along with a dozen poems, so that by April he’d triggered a “quantity bonus” in his agreement with the magazine; for the rest of the year his work commanded a higher rate. He was already, in other words, a frequent contributor.

  Relations with the magazine were formalized even before the Updikes had settled in at Iffley Road. A letter from Katharine White dated September 15, 1954, and addressed to “John H. Updike, General Delivery, Oxford,” proposed that he sign a “first-reading agreement,” a scheme devised for the “most valued and most constant contributors.” Up to this point, he had had only one story accepted, along with some light verse. White acknowledged that it was “rather unusual” for the magazine to make this kind of offer to a contributor “of such short standing,” but she and Maxwell and Shawn took into consideration the volume of his submissions (including the stories and poems that had been rejected), and their overall quality and suitability, and decided that this clever, hardworking young man showed exceptional promise. In return for a first look at his “verse, fiction, humor, reminiscence, casuals, etc.,” The New Yorker agreed to pay him 25 percent “extra” for any work it did buy, plus a quarterly “cost of living adjustment” (known in-house as a COLA), which usually amounted to a bonus of about another 25 percent. To further sweeten the deal, White included a check for one hundred dollars—“a symbol of our good faith,” she said, “to bind the bargain.”

  It sounded like a generous deal—Updike signed without hesitation—and he made a considerable amount of money from his New Yorker fiction right from the start. But White’s phrase—“bind the bargain”—is a reminder that the purpose of the deal was in fact to bind the young writer to the magazine. The truth of the matter is that The New Yorker paid what it liked (above a certain minimum). “We price every manuscript separately according to what we think its value is to us,” White frankly acknowledged, “and this pricing may, I suppose, often seem whimsical to a contributor. It is.” Some of Updike’s contemporaries (notably John Cheever) were consistently underpaid by the magazine—but this shabby treatment seemed curiously arbitrary, or as White put it, whimsical. Updike himself was never underpaid; on the contrary, he reaped immediate benefit from the first-reading agreement: for “Friends from Philadelphia,” the s
tory he sold before signing the agreement, he was paid $490; for his next, “Ace in the Hole,” he was paid $612.50; and for his third, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth,” $826. For Updike, at the time, these were staggeringly large sums. His father’s yearly salary was $1,200; the idea that he could earn more than his father with just a few stories made a lasting impression.*

  Of course, there were also many, many rejections; over the course of the year, The New Yorker turned down roughly half the work he submitted. He weathered each verdict without protest. (“In many ways,” he bravely claimed, “a rejection is more bracing than an acceptance.”) Early on, he tried submitting rejected poems to other magazines, Punch, say, or The Atlantic Monthly, but he met with scant success, and soon enough he was writing with only The New Yorker in mind. The magazine with the first-reading agreement was thus the only one doing any reading at all; in the early years, a story or poem that was turned down was almost always abandoned rather than revised.

  He was exceedingly polite in his long-distance dealings with the editors, saying thank you again and again, making it clear that he venerated The New Yorker and was grateful even to be in glancing contact with it. To both White, who edited the majority of the work he sent from England, and Maxwell, who took charge when she was away from the office, he expressed his confidence in the magazine’s judgment and admiration for its legendary attention to detail. Very quickly he added a flirty personal edge to his correspondence. His letters were professional, in that he was negotiating from across the Atlantic the business of getting his words into print in the best possible shape—but he also wanted to make friends. And he did.

  His first conquest was Katharine White. A formidable woman who went to work at The New Yorker in 1925, just six months after Harold Ross founded it, she was almost single-handedly responsible for the magazine’s emergence as a prestigious venue for serious fiction. Over the course of her career, she edited John O’Hara, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Stafford, and Mary McCarthy, to name just a few. In her obituary, William Shawn wrote, “More than any other editor except Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course.” Born Katharine Sergeant to a Brahmin family in Boston, she arrived at the magazine as Katharine Angell (her first husband was Ernest Angell, a lawyer with whom she had a son, Roger, who eventually became Updike’s editor—an unusual dynastic succession); in 1929 she married a younger New Yorker colleague, E. B. (“Andy”) White. By the time she began editing Updike, she was in her early sixties, and treated him, as she did her other authors, with a firm maternal hand, mixing encouragement with the occasional reproof. She also made evident her affection for him. Ten years after her death in 1977, he wrote about the warmth she conveyed, her “aristocratic sureness of taste,” her “instinctive courage and integrity,” her “ethical ardor”; he also stressed that her “good humor and resilience were as conspicuous as her dignity and (when provoked) her hauteur.” All these qualities (and also a meticulous, sometimes comical attention to minutiae) are on display in the letters that arrived almost daily at the Updikes’ basement flat. They provided what Updike (like any writer just starting out) needed most: critical approbation from someone who radiated commanding authority.

  White was motherly, but not like his mother. Though they were both forceful, tenacious, intelligent women with strong opinions, their styles were utterly different: Linda Updike had none of Katharine White’s polish and none of her “hauteur”; she was more impulsive, irascible, and unconventional than the New Yorker editor. Twenty-three years of coping with his mother had nonetheless been excellent training for Updike’s first important relationship of his professional career. In particular, his correspondence with his mother during the Harvard years prepared him for the challenge of coping at a distance with another demanding character who was observing him intently and doing her best to further his career.

  By taking scrupulous care with his work, by engaging sympathetically with every aspect of his writing, from subject matter to punctuation, White encouraged Updike’s equally scrupulous commitment. They bonded over dashes, colons, and commas—most amazingly in an exchange of letters in the last two months of 1954 concerning two poems, “The Sunflower” and “The Clan.” She wanted to make his punctuation consistent; he wanted to make his light verse flow in a manner pleasing to the ear and the eye. When he suggested changes to the proof of “Sunflower”—literally begging for a colon rather than a dash at the end of a particular line (“A colon is compact, firm, and balanced: a dash is sprawling, wishy-washy, and gawky. The colon suggests the Bible: the dash letters and memoirs of fashionable ladies”)—she replied with a three-page “treatise on punctuation” and a transcription of the relevant paragraph from H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (the standard reference at The New Yorker, thanks to Harold Ross, who always kept a copy handy). She urged him to “try to feel more kindly toward the dash”—and closed with characteristic graciousness: “I want to add that I am delighted to find anyone who cares as much as this about punctuation and who is as careful as you are about your verse. . . . And I thank you for a very interesting and amusing letter.”

  The back-and-forth between these two sticklers grew more and more affectionate; in March, she suggested that soon she would have to “break down” and begin her letters “Dear John.” In the same missive, she announced that she and her husband were planning a trip to England in the first weeks of June, and proposed that they visit the Updikes in Oxford. As the plans for this visit took shape, he continued to address her as “Mrs. White” (he never graduated to “Dear Katharine”), but he now launched freely into personal matters, with a charming description, for example, of the infant Elizabeth; he sent bulletins, as the baby grew, giving her precise weight.

  An intelligent, fastidious, clear-sighted editor, White did Updike far more good than harm—but her advice wasn’t always for the best. She steered him away from writing about his Pennsylvania background, and discouraged him from indulging in wistful reminiscence, which turned out to be one of his most fruitful fictional modes. In February, rejecting a story called “Have a Good Life,” about a young man from a small town very much like Shillington who plays a game of pickup basketball on his last day at home before going off to get married, White suggested that he should avoid stories in which “a young man looks back nostalgically at his basketball-playing days.”* She noted that they had two similar items by him awaiting publication (“Ace in the Hole” and “Ex-Basketball Player”), and warned of a glut of characters looking back regretfully: “[W]e get so many that we have to be extra severe in our judgment of all stories on this theme.” Eager as always to please, Updike apologized, admitting that he hadn’t noticed how often he was writing about nostalgia, and as a result of her intervention, there were no more stories about his youth for the next two years. Not until she’d retired and he’d left New York for Ipswich did he produce “The Alligators” and “The Happiest I’ve Been,” two Olinger stories dripping with nostalgia (the latter featuring John Nordholm, the boy from “Friends from Philadelphia”)—a breakthrough that allowed him to write some of his finest fiction. It’s a dirty trick of literary fate that White’s description of the kind of story Updike should avoid—a young man who looks back nostalgically at his basketball-playing days—is precisely the starting point for Rabbit, Run, his first major success.

  Very few of White’s judgments were off the mark. She encouraged him, for instance, to write about “the domestic scene and the subtleties and affectionate and agonizing complexities of husband-wife-children relationships.” Her taste was for short stories about relatively refined characters—better educated and more privileged than would ordinarily be found in Shillington. Confronted with Berks County material, she expressed the hope that he would choose “an entirely different locale”—England, for instance. She suggested he try writing about “a young married American who is doing graduate work at Oxford.” Updike obliged with a story that’s essentially ma
de to order.

  “Dentistry and Doubt,” which he sold to The New Yorker in April (shortly before his theological altercation with his father-in-law), is a slice of Updike’s English life, about a young American clergyman’s visit to an Oxford dentist’s office. The clergyman, Burton, is writing his master’s thesis on Richard Hooker, an early Anglican theologian. As he endures the dentist’s ministrations (“Now, this may hurt a little”) and the stilted small talk specifically tailored for an American patient (“What part are you from?”), Burton’s mind drifts to the religious doubts he was experiencing earlier that morning, a brief tussle with faith that gives the story some heft. But the best thing about “Dentistry and Doubt” is the intensely observed detail, Burton’s catalogue of sights and sensations, all made more vivid because they’re unfamiliar, this being his first visit to a foreign dentist.

  Katharine White gratefully expressed her approval: “We think it is the best written prose you have done yet.” And indeed, Updike’s prose is subtly different in this story—bolder and richer—a sign perhaps that his training at the Ruskin was already having an effect. But the Ruskin must share any credit with Henry Green, whose novels Updike discovered soon after he arrived in England.* Green’s influence helps to account for a new softness in Updike’s writing—a lingering, tender touch—and a new daring. The syntax is looser, more flowing, and the metaphors more striking. Updike gives us Burton’s view from the dentist’s chair with minute precision, and an audacious simile: “The dentist’s eyes were not actually gray; screwed up, they seemed more brown, and then, as they flicked toward the tool tray, rather green, like pebbles on the bed of a fast-running creek.” When the drilling is done, Burton becomes aware of the dentist’s array of tools “as things in which an unlimited excitement inhered.” Updike lists various items—tweezers, picks, drill burrs, tiny cotton balls—and tells us that they traveled to Burton’s senses “burdened with delight and power.” Here, as in the many lively descriptions of the birds at the feeding station outside the dentist’s window, one can see the early traces of Green’s enduring influence.*