by Begley, Adam
His first assignment was to investigate Magi-Green, “a lawn invigorator that dyes grass green.” It was a somewhat unusual assignment in that it entailed a visit to the out-of-town headquarters of the Lockery Company, makers of Magi-Green, which was located in Southampton, New York, near the end of Long Island. Updike, on a whim, decided to drive—and to take his little family along. In an account of this adventure, written decades later, he emphasized his “country innocence”—he had no idea how long Long Island was, how heavy the traffic would be, or that having the Ford in New York was a mistake to begin with. By the time they reached their destination, Mary and Elizabeth were “so wilted as to need a rejuvenating spray themselves.” But Updike got the job done nonetheless, and the resulting journalistic trifle is mildly amusing and fairly typical of The Talk of the Town, save for the exurban expedition and a subject matter (lawn care) so quintessentially suburban. The reporter (“we,” by hallowed New Yorker convention)* gathers a comically copious amount of information about the product, allows its makers to display a comical commercial enthusiasm, and adds to the comedy by appearing (almost) to share that enthusiasm. It’s a gentle kind of wit that Updike mastered on the spot. Within a few days, William Shawn telephoned him at the Riverside Drive apartment and offered him a promotion: henceforth Updike would be a Talk writer rather than a Talk reporter, which meant that his pieces would bypass the magazine’s rewrite men—and that he’d earn two hundred dollars per piece.*
The Talk of the Town was essentially ephemera, one of the least consequential sections of the magazine; most of the items were designed to amuse, and the amusement was generally fleeting. Updike remembered three types of Talk story: “interviews, ‘fact’ pieces, and ‘visits.’ ” His Magi-Green piece was a visit piece (fortified with facts trumpeted by the Lockery Company), and visits became his specialty. He preferred them because they required “no research and little personal encounter.” He developed the knack of planting himself in a particular place—Central Park, the cocktail lounge of the Biltmore Hotel—and simply looking and listening, making himself utterly receptive to sensory impression, noticing everything. Having soaked up the ambience, he put his writing skills to work: “An hour of silent spying” was followed, as he put it, by “two hours of fanciful typing.” (The average Talk piece was seven hundred to eight hundred words.) He made the job of translating his perceptions into “New Yorker-ese” look effortless. “His success rate was a hundred percent as far as one could make out,” said Tony Bailey. It was true; every single item Updike wrote for The Talk of the Town the magazine printed. According to Brendan Gill, who was one of the Talk rewrite men, “It was perfectly obvious that he was writing better Talk stories than anyone who had ever written them.”
Which is partly why he stopped. It was both too easy for him and a waste of his talent. Although writing them was clearly good training for someone working in a realist tradition, and although he often achieved in them a slender poetic perfection, too many of his Talk pieces merely displayed “a kind of contemptuous harried virtuosity in a narrow vein indeed”—a withering phrase he used to describe a visit piece he wrote in January 1957. Feeling unwell, he toured the National Motor Boat Show at the New York Coliseum, and found that the boats resembled cars, bullets, birds, and flying saucers. “It may have been the absence of water, or the fact that we were running a fever, but nearly everything we saw at the Coliseum looked like something else.” Expertly clever and engaging, the piece playfully examines the ramifications of a sardonically posited marketing principle: “No doubt it is a law of an expanding economy that once a thing looks like its natural self, its appearance must be perverted, or people will be satisfied with the model they already have.” Updike doesn’t allow his cynicism about the designers’ commercial motivation to spoil the fun; he gives us a gee-whiz guided tour of the pleasure craft and their “perverted” appearance. The prose is breezy and sharp and tremendously self-assured. Updike once defined “New Yorker-ese” as “big-town folksy,” which is accurate enough, though it doesn’t account for his astonishing fluency, his ability to switch on a current of cheerful intelligence that sparked and fizzed without seeming precious. It was exactly what the magazine wanted—but it wasn’t enough to satisfy a young man’s ambition. “It seemed unlikely that I would ever get better at Talk than I was at twenty-four,” Updike explained. “A man who would be an artist is obliged to keep working where he might improve.” Also, Talk pieces in those days were unsigned—they did nothing to secure him a place in the public eye.
His artistic aspirations were pinned on the work he was doing outside office hours. The bouts of furious morning typing in the spartan eighteenth-floor cubicle eventually resulted in a six-hundred-page manuscript—an autobiographical novel, never published, called Home—and a run of eight short stories: “Toward Evening,” “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” “Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?” “Sunday Teasing,” “His Finest Hour,” “A Trillion Feet of Gas,” “A Gift from the City,” and “Incest.” These stories, written between November 1955 and April 1957, are a remarkably homogeneous New York City series: all are set in Manhattan; all but one feature a married couple modeled more or less exactly on Mary and John; and all are about young people adjusting to urban life and expressing, directly or indirectly, their aspirations and anxieties. Broadly speaking, the stories explore the treacherous allure of big-city sophistication, its potentially corrupting influence—weighed against the danger of clinging to country innocence, to a provincial youth’s naïveté.
This, for as long as he was living in the city, was a constant preoccupation. Despite his brilliant career at Harvard, his year in Europe, and his instant, seemingly effortless mastery of the “big-town folksy” New Yorker idiom, the young Talk writer was still uncomfortable about becoming cosmopolitan. He still thought of himself as a dazzled farm boy, an “inlander” (hence an outsider), a hick with an “innocent longing for sophistication,” a rube lured by the promise of “urban romance.” And yet to shed that identity and embrace New York unreservedly was to betray, again, his beloved Shillington; to adopt a seamless urbanity was to deny, in a sense, his parents, both of whom embodied a kind of antiurbanity; to become a city slicker was to turn his back on the awkward, scabby kid who’d been the object of his family’s adoring attention. At this age, his ambition still wasn’t social; it was professional. He craved success, yet was wary of its trappings.
The first of his New York stories, “Toward Evening,” makes significant use of the glorious view from the Riverside Drive apartment. It begins by tracing with documentary accuracy the bus journey up Broadway from his midtown office of a young man named Rafe; it continues at home, an intimate domestic scene with Rafe, his wife, and their baby daughter (like the Updikes, this little family lives on Eighty-Fifth Street, overlooking the river); and it ends, after dinner, with Rafe gazing out the window across the expanse of the Hudson, smoking a cigarette and meditating, elaborately, on the origins of the neon Spry sign flashing red and white below the dark Palisades. His postprandial musings are exaggeratedly worldly-wise, a mini Talk piece that exposes, with a mild cynical edge, how the wheels turn in a modern corporate setting. (Spry was a national brand of vegetable shortening manufactured by Lever Brothers.) The reverie comes to a close with this Kiplingesque coda: “Thus the Spry sign (thus the river, thus the trees, thus babies and sleep) came to be.” Balanced against Rafe’s knowing, up-to-the-minute New York riff is the timeless mystery of creation. Stepping back—out of Rafe’s point of view—Updike ends the story with a reminder of cosmic inscrutability:
The black of the river was as wide as that of the sky. Reflections sunk in it existed dimly, minutely wrinkled, below the surface. The Spry sign occupied the night with no company beyond the also uncreated but illegible stars.
The “uncreated but illegible stars” and the vast, unknowable, godless universe they suggest mark the limit of Rafe’s understanding—and ours. This acknowledgment of human ignorance—a kind of ant
i-epiphany—conjures, in turn, the possibility of divine knowledge; anyone with a religious disposition (Updike, say) is bound to read in the “illegible” stars the possibility of a divine plan.
Rafe is exactly Updike’s age, and what we learn of his family history matches Updike’s. Educated, cultured, clever, and observant, he’s also lustful, somewhat spoiled, a touch self-satisfied. In the version published in The New Yorker, we’re told a little about his job in a midtown office: “The strange thing about the place where he worked was not that the work didn’t matter but that everyone engaged at it knew it.”* It’s not much of a stretch to think of Rafe as a writer for The Talk of the Town engaged in producing charming ephemera. As his bus lumbers up Broadway, he amuses himself by playing a game with the numbers on the east side of the avenue: “1832, 1836, 1846, 1850 (Wordsworth dies), 1880 (great Nihilist trial in St. Petersburg), 1900 (Rafe’s father born in Trenton), 1902 (Braque leaves Le Havre to study painting in Paris), 1914 (Joyce begins Ulysses, war begins in Europe).” It’s another mini-Talk piece, an idea Updike might have hatched for his day job and then decided to use in his fiction instead.*
On the bus, when he’s not playing clever games, Rafe eyes the female passengers. First he admires a “beautiful girl” who’s reading the second volume of Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs;* then he becomes conscious of a “young Negress” who briefly excites his sexual desire. Rafe’s interest in these women is bracketed by reminders of religious stricture: he got on the bus at St. Patrick’s Cathedral (in those days, buses on Fifth Avenue ran north as well as south); and he thinks to himself, just as he’s about to get off, “Dress women in sea and sand or pencil lines, they were chapters on the same subject, no more unlike than St. Paul and Paul Tillich.” Theology and adultery are twinned subjects in both Updike’s work and his life. In the context of this story, we see a young man whose wandering eye makes him feel reflexively guilty—he is, after all, on the way home to his wife and baby.
The scene inside Rafe’s apartment is, as usual, conspicuously autobiographical. The baby is called Liz, like John’s daughter, and she’s not interested in the mobile her father has brought home for her—though Updike himself was moved to write a poem about the item (“Mobile of Birds”) a couple of years later. The wife (Alice in The Same Door, unnamed in The Early Stories) is bored at home, no surprise given her “confined existence.” Though she’s briefly irritated by Rafe’s dreamy, absentminded habit of ignoring her questions about his work, she’s a conscientious housewife who cooks her husband’s favorite food, prepared with his allergies in mind and served on “the eccentric tilting plates in which, newly married, they had sailed the clean seas of sophistication.”* (Even this tiny detail is drawn from life: the Updikes owned a pair of brown, tilting plates they’d bought in a Cambridge hardware store for their first apartment.)
Rafe is well launched on the clean seas of sophistication. His daydream about the Spry sign is an obvious indication that he thinks of himself as suavely in the know. He effortlessly imagines, in precise detail, how the sign came to be, a chain of human events that stretches from an executive’s whim as he drives his secretary home to Riverdale to the exact moment (3:30 on a windy Tuesday afternoon in November) when eighteen men finally finish the job of fixing the neon beacon in place. But Updike undercuts Rafe in the last sentence of the story with his reference to the “also uncreated but illegible stars”—which tips off the careful reader to the fact that Rafe’s urbanity is tinged with vanity and hubris. Brilliantly fashioned out of mundane autobiographical material, the story is a sociologically precise slice of a bright young New Yorker’s very ordinary day. But it can also be read as a kind of cautionary tale: the savvy Talk of the Town writer reminding himself not to lose his humility (or succumb to temptation) as he makes his way in the brave new world of the big city.*
Kit Lasch, who was now a graduate student in history at Columbia, came to dinner a few times at the Updikes’, and fired off his impressions to various correspondents. On his second visit, he was invited to dinner with an “eligible young lady.” According to Lasch, John and Mary “stood by with the air of elderly chaperones. When it was time for the young folks to go, Updike, in a very grandfatherly way, proposed to walk us to the subway, but at the door he evidently thought better of it, relented, and allowed us to walk the two blocks unescorted. It was quite an adventure.” He takes up the same theme in his next letter, complaining that the Updikes “have become very ceremonial”—the implication being that John’s success has gone to his head. Lasch saw signs of pomposity in every gesture: “They invite you to dinner weeks in advance, and if you had a hat in hand they would relieve you of it at the door, and make a big point of doing so.” It seems obvious that Lasch was still struggling with his envy, and that the friendship was in serious disrepair. But he was nonetheless quite right about Updike’s preoccupation with how to greet guests and how to say good-bye to them. Hospitality was very important to him; he felt the need to master its rituals and ceremonies. Part of him wanted to appear elegantly nonchalant, and yet he was still at this point something of a novice.
By the time “Toward Evening” was published in The New Yorker, the Updikes were no longer living on the Upper West Side. Early in 1956, the family moved downtown to 153 West Thirteenth Street, to a slightly larger, floor-through apartment with two fireplaces and a tiny kitchen. Because the living room, dining room, and kitchen were at the front of the apartment, there were three windows looking out over West Thirteenth Street. In the back were a big bedroom and bathroom. This pleasant spot was the setting for “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the first of eighteen stories that track the marital dramas of Richard and Joan Maple. Seen in the light of the Maples’ long domestic saga, this story, set on the day after they’ve moved into a new apartment in the Village, seems a harbinger of things to come: Richard’s “close” call with the Maples’ friend (now neighbor) Rebecca Cune marks the inception of a damaging adulterous impulse; the various affairs that will undermine the marriage are foreshadowed in the tense moments of the story’s ending (the kiss that Rebecca perhaps invites but that Richard refrains from bestowing), and in the exquisite final sentence, mixing relief, regret, desire, and release: “Oh but they were close.”
The few minutes Richard and Rebecca spend alone together—he walks her home at Joan’s urging after their evening drink, then accepts an invitation to come up and see where she lives—tilt the story so that it seems to be mostly about the possibility of an extramarital dalliance. But the first two thirds are only very subtly infused with sexual tension, if at all. The overt concern is with the modern manners of a young couple entertaining a more polished and experienced friend. We’re told in the very first paragraph about Richard’s difficulties with “hostly duties” such as the taking of coats from newly arrived guests; the emphasis is on his youth and inexperience. This particular guest, Rebecca, has evidently been living in the city longer than the Maples; she tells them about her previous apartments, spinning yarns in a distinctive patter, thrilling her hosts with her somewhat louche adventures. “Rebecca’s gift, Richard realized, was not that of having odd things happen to her but that of representing, through the implicit contrast with her own sane calm, all things touching her as odd.” Rebecca is possessed of what William Maxwell detected in Updike during their first lunch together: a style.
The Maples are not so far advanced; “they did not regard themselves . . . as raconteurs.” (And yet that’s what Updike had necessarily become, in his professional life, a good Talk piece being essentially a cleverly elaborated anecdote.) The couple’s new apartment is larger than anywhere they’ve lived in the two years since they were married; at last they have room to unpack their wedding presents. They have, for the first time, a mantel. They offer Rebecca expensive sherry, and cashews served in one of the newly unpacked wedding presents, a silver porringer (a detail plucked straight from the Updikes’ cupboard, though in fact it was a baby present, not a wedding p
resent). This is a young couple with aspirations, both material and cultural—though the Maples have retained, thus far, their country innocence. They exclaim in wonder at the mounted policemen who gallop noisily down Thirteenth Street; and when they see that it’s snowing, they exclaim again—or at least Joan does. Richard, who works in advertising, is already a little farther along the path of studied cool. Like Rebecca, he poses, parading attitudes for effect. But he’s not particularly good at it. Young-looking and faintly awkward (he stutters at the crucial moment), he’s charmingly inept—working, like Updike, on a stylized aw-shucks act.
Richard (like Rafe in “Toward Evening”) has a wandering eye; he’s aware that by accepting an invitation to tour Rebecca’s apartment, he’s “trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy.” Following her up the stairs, he feels guilty, but his guilt-inflected self-consciousness is a sign of virtue, of innocence threatened by corruption. He has yet to achieve the sophistication of a man capable of casual adultery.
Updike was as innocent as Richard, as the fallout from the story made clear. Rebecca was very obviously modeled on a friend of the Updikes, and though she accepted the story with polite good grace, saying only how “spooky” it was to be reading a New Yorker and find oneself in it, her on-again, off-again boyfriend berated Updike for his callous and thoughtless behavior. The boyfriend’s harangue was ferocious enough to sink both Mary and John into a weekend-long funk. Feeling guilty and ashamed, Updike reconsidered two pet theories. The first was “that a writer of short stories has no duty other than writing good short stories”; the second, that “nothing in fiction rings quite as true as truth, slightly arranged.” He knew that the second theory was still valid, but now realized how harmful it could be. His remorse, though genuine, lasted no time at all; “the truth, slightly arranged” remained the foundation of his fiction.
