Updike

by Begley, Adam

  The first sentence of Updike’s introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of three Henry Green novels, Living, Party Going, and Loving, begins, teasingly, “If I say that Henry Green taught me how to write . . . ,” and then sidesteps the issue by asserting that writing isn’t learned. Part of what appealed to Updike was that he and Green (another unusually precocious talent) shared certain writerly traits, including a fascination with seemingly unimportant quotidian detail. There was admiration, and also the shock of recognition. “He is a saint of the mundane,” Updike wrote, “embracing it with all his being.” Updike praised the “intensity of witnessing” in Green’s “limpid realism.” Green’s accomplishment reassured Updike that his own inclination was leading him along the right path. Green unlocked in him a lyrical impulse, and spurred him to make his prose style an active, expressive element in his fiction. Also important were Green’s “formal ambitiousness” and his “allegiance to the modernistic tradition.” Along with Proust, whom Updike began to read the next year, when he was living in New York, Green served as a kind of literary goad: “Both quite bowled me over,” Updike remembered, “showing me what words could do, in bringing reality up tight against the skin of the paper.” He gave the two authors credit for a “considerable expansion” of his literary ambitions. Although “Dentistry and Doubt” isn’t actually all that much more ambitious than “Ace in the Hole” (and it would be hard to claim that it’s a better story), Green had left his mark. Updike added him to the pantheon of modern “textual Titans” he’d worshipped at Harvard—the difference being that now, less than a year out of college, he began to hope that he, too, might one day be hailed as a titan.

  Not all his encounters with eminent literary figures took place between the covers of a book. At a tea party in Oxford, Updike met his first celebrated author, the Irish novelist (and New Yorker contributor) Joyce Cary, and found him to be “full of a tender excitement, the excitement of those certain they are loved.” Updike’s Lowell House classmate Peter Judd, who was studying at Magdalene College, drove him to London in his Hillman Minx convertible to meet James Thurber. The occasion had been arranged by a Radcliffe friend, Nora Sayre, whose father, Joel Sayre, was a longtime New Yorker contributor. Her idea was that the magazine’s future should come face-to-face with its past. (Though Thurber was still contributing stories and cartoons to the magazine in the 1950s, he was no longer as prolific as he’d been in previous decades.) Sayre knew, moreover, that Updike adored both Thurber’s drawings and his writing. And yet the meeting was a flop. A tall, big-boned man with an unruly thatch of white hair, Thurber was by this time completely blind. After being led into the room by his wife, he launched into a monologue that lasted all afternoon. The assembled youngsters listened with rapt attention—except for Updike, who was dismayed to discover that he was bored by the rote recitation of anecdotes he’d read with delight as a child. He later claimed to have made some fawning attempts at conversation with the great man, but, according to Judd, Updike “rose to no bait, asked no questions.” He was “diffident”—“clearly not willing either to present himself as a rising star or to sit at the feet of the master.” The experience had the unfortunate consequence of diminishing his pleasure in Thurber’s work.

  Despite the disappointment of the encounter with Thurber, Updike was eager to greet his New Yorker editor Katharine White and her husband, E. B. White, another childhood hero and a great favorite of his mother, who adored White’s essays about his Maine farmhouse. The Whites, who were stopping in Oxford on the way to the Cotswolds, pulled up outside the basement flat on Iffley Road in a black limousine driven by a liveried chauffeur, a fact the instinctively decent and unassuming Andy White remembered with considerable embarrassment. Whereas Thurber was oblivious, absorbed in his own performance, White was scrupulously attentive to those around him; when he spoke, what he said was designed to put his listeners at ease. His wife, who surprised the Updikes by being plump and short, as opposed to tall and regal, also thrilled them by reiterating over lunch William Maxwell’s promise: a job at The New Yorker would be waiting for John when he returned from Europe.

  THE UPDIKES LEFT England in early July, first traveling by train to Liverpool to stay with Mary’s parents, then sailing from there aboard the MV Britannic. They were greeted at the docks in Manhattan by John’s parents and Mary’s aunt and great-aunt, then taken by Wesley and Linda back to the farm in Plowville, a car ride revisited in “Home,” a story Updike wrote five years later. He lifted one incident from the journey—the young wife accidentally tipping a live ash from her cigarette onto the naked tummy of her baby girl—straight from life. The story also features vivid thumbnail portraits of Updike’s parents, similar to ones he’d already produced in “Flight” and “Pigeon Feathers,” miniatures that would be expanded in The Centaur and Of the Farm.

  He had written from Oxford to arrange a job interview with William Shawn. After a few days at home in Plowville, he set off for Manhattan in his brand-new car (the family’s first; his father could afford only used cars), a 1955 four-door Ford coupe, waterfall blue. Paid for with his New Yorker earnings, the Ford had been the subject of earnest transatlantic negotiations; John gave his father detailed instructions about the precise model and color he wanted, and stressed the importance of a radio.* His mother accompanied him to New York, and though the car performed flawlessly, the trip ended in failure: they never made it to the city. There are two accounts of this odd little episode, one from a memoir of Shawn that Updike composed in 2000, the other from a story Linda wrote in the sixties called “The Mantle and Other Blessed Goods.” Updike remembered driving to the interview “with my mother along for the ride.” He became “hopelessly lost in a traffic jam under the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey; it was my humiliating task to find a phone booth and call [Shawn] to say, while trucks roared overhead, that I would be hopelessly late.” Shawn politely offered to wait, but Updike insisted on turning back and rescheduling the appointment for the next day. Linda’s version makes use of the same facts but ends with the narrator’s italicized conviction that the next day her son would be driving to the city on his own: “[He] would make this trip alone.” The emphasis practically begs the reader to ask why the mother had ever even thought of tagging along with her adult son to “meet the man who was going to be [his] first employer.” In Linda’s story, as in real life, the answer is that she thought of herself as enmeshed with his career. The New Yorker, for Linda as for Updike, was Mecca; she wanted to take part in the pilgrimage. And her son clearly had difficulty opposing her wishes. He could only thwart her accidentally, by getting hopelessly lost in a traffic jam.

  No harm done: the next day, he got back into the Ford and made the journey without incident, all by himself. Shawn offered him the promised job.

  Finding a place to live in the city meant more trips to town in the new car, and there was also an unavoidable visit to a Manhattan draft board. Because of the poor condition of his skin, which had been starved of sunlight in England, he was exempted from military service; on his form the examining doctor wrote, “4-F: Psoriasis.” John felt relieved, though somewhat guilty, and Mary was delighted. Linda, according to John, “seemed saddened, as if she had laid an egg which, when candled by the government, had been pronounced rotten.”

  John, Mary, and four-month-old Elizabeth moved into a small apartment at 126 Riverside Drive, near Eighty-Fifth Street on the Upper West Side. Despite the crumbling ceiling, the odd triangular kitchen, and the carpet, to which Mary took an instant dislike, Updike thought the place was fine and admired the view across the Hudson River to New Jersey. The apartment was on the fifth floor, reached by a tiny, creaky elevator. Outside the front door of the building were steep, rounded steps down to the sidewalk, difficult to negotiate with the baby carriage, and beyond the sidewalk was the speeding traffic on Riverside Drive. Just to get out of their apartment, in other words, they had to negotiate a series of specifically urban challenges.

  John began w
ork as a reporter for The Talk of the Town on Monday, August 15, 1955. He was installed on the eighteenth floor, in a spartan cubicle equipped with a typewriter, a metal desk, a telephone, and a supply of freshly sharpened pencils. “It was all pretty monastic,” according to Anthony Bailey, an Englishman a few months younger than Updike who started work as a Talk reporter in early 1956 and became his lifelong friend. “I found myself in an office right next door to him,” said Bailey. “Ten o’clock was opening time, and I generally got there around ten-thirty. John would already be at his desk. You could hear his typewriter going—going from dawn to dusk, it seemed to me. It was very intimidating; his work rate was astonishing.” (Actually, dawn was out of the question: always a late sleeper, Updike rarely reached the office before nine-thirty.) As astonishing as his work rate were the ease and rapidity with which he settled into his new environment. He was unhappy for a couple of weeks, mostly because he couldn’t see how he would make time for his own writing, but by mid-September his misgivings had vanished. The job suited him perfectly. There was no period of adjustment, no apprenticeship; he appeared on the scene fully formed. Said Brendan Gill, who’d been at the magazine for two decades when Updike arrived, “He struck The New Yorker like an absolute bombshell.” As Bailey put it, “John was the star.” During the nineteen months he worked at the office, the magazine published more than three dozen of his Talk pieces (many of them classics of the genre), a half-dozen of his short stories, another half-dozen parodies, and a steady stream of light verse. The time he spent in the building working alongside the staff writers and getting to know the editors helped cement what would become the longest and most important professional association of his career.

  “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 made that sweeping claim in About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, and it would be hard to refute.* The American economy was ascendant, the magazine was ascendant, Updike was ascendant—and the confluence of these trends flattered all parties. Writing to Maxwell four decades later, Updike confessed that “ever since you accepted in one summer ‘Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums’ and ‘Friends from Philadelphia,’ I have been in a writerly bliss nothing could shake.” Maxwell, as early as 1958, assured Updike, “It is a slightly different magazine because you are now published in it.” (That may sound like faint praise, but The New Yorker has always been notoriously resistant to change; Updike had caused the mountain to move.) From the beginning, and sometimes to his chagrin, critics identified Updike as a typical New Yorker writer, as though he had been concocted in-house, the product of a singularly fruitful editorial meeting. Everything was going right for the magazine (from 1950 to 1964, circulation grew by 40 percent, ad pages by 70 percent, and prestige and influence by an unquantifiable yet unmistakable degree)—surely the sudden appearance of the wunderkind Updike was simply part of that fabulous chain of success.

  To leaf through The New Yorker at midcentury was to celebrate a nation and a city triumphant. In that postwar moment, New York became the center of the world—“continuously insolent and alive,” in Cyril Connolly’s memorable phrase, the mighty beating heart of the most powerful country on the globe.* “The city,” E. B. White rhapsodized in 1948, “is like poetry. . . . The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.” The New Yorker was both a gloss on that poem and a mirror reflecting its magic. Although it attracted a growing number of suburban and rural readers, not all of whom shared in the rising postwar prosperity, the message broadcast in its pages, in the advertisements as well as the short stories, casuals, columns, reported pieces, and reviews, was cosmopolitan, affluent, upwardly mobile. When Updike called to mind the typical New Yorker reader of the time, the words he used were “pampered and urban”—certainly the condition to which many aspired.

  And yet these upwardly mobile middle-class readers were sensitive enough to have qualms about avid economic and social aspirations. The ads in the magazine—the vast majority of them hawking luxury goods—mostly pandered to naked snobbery and greed. Sometimes they challenged the consumer to be more “modern,” or winked at the bad taste of others; occasionally they offered forthright instruction in the art of living. The content of the magazine inclined in somewhat different directions. The cartoons often gently mocked the conspicuous consumption of the rich, and sometimes even cast an eye over the precincts of the poor. In the writing, lowlifes came in for much scrutiny, notably in profiles by A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. The magazine had a well-developed social conscience, and played, at times, the role of crusader, exposing national and international wrongs—this was the magazine that devoted the entire editorial space of a sixty-eight-page issue, just a year after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, to John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” Seduced by ads for jewelry and perfume, liquor and furs, but braced by the probity of the editorial content, New Yorker readers could allow themselves to feel slightly superior to the grasping multitudes. They were consumers, too—but they consumed tastefully, conscientiously. They belonged, or wanted to belong, to an elite club, a meritocratic aristocracy, and liked to think of the magazine as an island of civilization, a virtual community of the bien-pensant. (All clubs, as Updike remarked of the Lampoon, feed off “the delicious immensity of the excluded.”) A 1946 New Yorker marketing pamphlet boasted that its readers were “at least all of the following: Intelligent, well-educated, discriminating, well-informed, unprejudiced, public-spirited, metropolitan-minded, broad-visioned and quietly liberal.” Who wouldn’t want to join such an enlightened crew?

  It’s important to remember that when he fell in love with it, The New Yorker, though ascendant, was hardly the only game in town, as it would be just a few decades later. An aspiring writer might more plausibly have set his or her eyes on Life or The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s or Cosmopolitan—all of which could claim a much wider circulation, and paid much higher fees to freelancers. By comparison, The New Yorker was still a small magazine. But it spoke to Updike in irresistible, seductive tones. As a thirteen-year-old, he had been ready to reshape himself radically so that he could literally merge with it: “I loved that magazine so much I concentrated all my wishing into an effort to make myself small and inky and intense enough to be received into its pages.” Reporting for work at age twenty-three, he was still desperately eager to be received into its pages—but less willing to transform himself and his writing to achieve that end. In the marketing department’s crowing checklist of New Yorker qualities, there was at least one that didn’t exactly suit the young man from Berks County: “metropolitan-minded.”

  Otherwise, yes: Updike and The New Yorker in the fifties—it was indeed a perfect fit. Yagoda wisely refrained from stretching his claim to include New York City itself. Despite his adolescent fantasies of escaping Plowville for the glittering metropolis, epicenter of sophistication, Updike and the City of New York were not, in fact, made for each other. When he arrived in town, the possibility of becoming a New York writer was still open to him. In theory, he could have chosen urban life as his great subject and embraced the bustling literary scene as a natural habitat (the way, for example, Norman Mailer and Harold Brodkey did at about the same time). Instead, less than two years after he arrived, Updike retreated to Ipswich, Massachusetts, and he made New England his home for the rest of his life. His urban stint did play an important part in shaping both his writing and his idea of himself, but mostly in a negative sense. Turning his back on the splendors of midcentury Manhattan, he elected to leave. He would not be a New York writer, and New York would not be his subject.

  The decision came after a brief but thorough immersion. The Talk of the Town was in those days more geographically focused than it is today; its purview was mostly Manhattan, with only ra
re excursions beyond the outer boroughs. As a Talk writer, Updike had to walk a local beat, to know the cityscape inside out—sometimes literally, as in the delightful piece published in early 1956 in which he reports on an ingenious feat of urban navigation: how to make one’s way from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without ever setting foot on either Fifth or Sixth Avenue. (The trick is to pass through and under city blocks, thanks to vast department stores, arcades, and conveniently located subway stations.) His work peeled open the city for him, and provided material for the short stories he wrote during and immediately after his stay. His press pass access—the reporter’s license to poke around, to eavesdrop, to stare openly—earned him a fund of expertise, urban know-how he would draw on for the rest of his life; it gave him the courage to create in the mid-sixties an alter ego, Henry Bech, who is a New Yorker through and through. His Talk job, in other words, allowed him to claim the city as his own, even after he’d left, even though a fundamental part of him had resisted it all along.