Updike

by Begley, Adam

  In his next story—“Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”—Updike was even more explicit about pitting an urban sophisticate (an upper-class New York dilettante) against a gauche provincial, a middle-class go-getter who’s succeeding in advertising but who remains socially clueless (“hopelessly offensive”) in the eyes of his snobbish friend. Sophistication takes a knock in “Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”—as it does in “Sunday Teasing,” in which a vain young husband who has bullied his wife with a display of cleverness experiences a moment of sharp regret. The title of “Sunday Teasing” announces a religious theme. The husband, Arthur, has decided to dispense with Sabbath sermons: instead of going to church, he will spend his Sunday morning in the apartment reading St. Paul and Unamuno.* His do-it-yourself religious observance smacks of pride. Later, when a friend comes to lunch, Arthur shows off in front of his wife, Macy, and their guest; he behaves obnoxiously, goading Macy and causing her pain. Though proud of his intellect (“the sacred groves of his mind”), he’s out of tune with his wife’s emotions, and is therefore baffled when, in the evening, after their guest has gone, she begins to weep. Contrite, he does penance by washing the dishes. In a sinuous final sentence, complete with italicized epiphany, awareness comes crashing in on him: “As he stood at the sink, his hands in water which, where the suds thinned and broke, showed a silvery gray, the Sunday’s events repeated themselves in his mind, bending like nacreous flakes around a central infrangible irritant, becoming the perfect and luminous thought: You don’t know anything.”

  Like “Toward Evening” and “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” “Sunday Teasing” reads like a public confession, and a warning Updike is sounding for his own benefit. Precisely autobiographical in setting and detail, these stories show a young writer maturing on the page, working out what sort of person he would like to become, and worried, too, that the sophistication he’d innocently dreamed of was corrupting his most intimate self.

  One of the weaker New York stories, “A Trillion Feet of Gas” has the virtue of broadening Updike’s sociopolitical range. The cast of characters includes a Texas billionaire, an Upper East Side grandee, and a disapproving British intellectual, as well as lightly disguised versions of John and Mary—Luke and Liz Forrest, a young newsmagazine writer and his pregnant wife whose “bohemian” taste in interior decorating “ran to bamboo and Klee.”* The expanded canvas allows Updike to make topical references to the presidential elections of 1956 (the Texan is a reluctant supporter of Eisenhower, or “Aahk,” as he calls him); this is the first time Updike introduced overtly political concerns into his fiction. He blends these with a version of Henry James’s “international theme”: Donald (the Forrests’ English houseguest) is visiting the United States “in the show-me mood of a cultural delegation.” The Texan, meanwhile, is an emblematic figure; to meet him, Luke tells Donald, is to gaze “into the heart of a great nation.”

  The story takes place in the duplex apartment of rich New Yorkers at a “high-toned address off Park Avenue.” The Forrests have been invited to dinner, and they’ve brought Donald along with them. At table, Luke takes it upon himself to amuse the assembled company, mostly by making fun of Donald (the Forrests liked him better when they met him on his home turf in Oxford). As a gag, part of an elaborate dig at the Brits, Luke mimes the familiar scene from the movies of an idol teetering: “[H]e wobbled rigidly in his chair and then with horrible slow menace fell forward, breaking off the act just as his nose touched the rim of his water glass.”

  Luke’s “act” is teasingly similar to Updike’s pratfalls on the steps of the Fogg when he was wooing Mary, and also to a stunt he pulled in an elevator at work in the presence of his friend Tony Bailey. The New Yorker elevators were fraught territory, according to Bailey, partly because the claustrophobic William Shawn was famously terrified of them, and partly because at busy times of the day they were crammed with grimly silent office workers—“there was this really intense nonspeaking atmosphere,” said Bailey.

  I got in with John one day on the eighteenth floor—we were going for lunch or something—and John pretended to faint. It was absolute pretense. It was purely an act—to take the highly charged atmosphere out of the elevator and focus it entirely on himself. It was a gag, but he couldn’t help it somehow. It was almost as if he was fainting, but he wasn’t—he was smiling throughout, and he went right down to the floor, and everybody was horrified. It was John’s hypersensitivity to everything, which he turned into some kind of trick. He was feeling the pressure generated by nobody talking, everybody getting in there together and not wanting to be in there together. But only John would have turned this into some kind of comic demonstration.

  Updike’s fondness for gags and practical jokes, which budded in high school and blossomed at the Lampoon, was still in flower when he reached The New Yorker. Even though he was now the young patriarch of a small but growing family, and made his living by entertaining readers in the pages of a fashionable glossy magazine, he still liked the idea that with a well-timed performance he could rivet the attention of an audience; like Luke, he found it “comforting to know that he could still make people laugh.”

  And Luke, like Updike, is very aware of the effect of his clowning. He’s conscious of the tension between the Texan—his trillion feet of natural gas are a blatant symbol of America’s brash power—and Donald, the delegate from the Old World whose “maddening quiescence” so irritates the Forrests. Luke’s high jinks and his teasing diffuse the tension by bringing it out into the open; in the final sentence of the story, he aims a mocking remark squarely at his British friend: “ ‘You’re afraid,’ he said loudly, ‘of our hideous vigor.’ ” The simple dichotomy of muscular American innocence and sneering European decadence is complicated by Luke’s ironic awareness of his own role in this overdetermined transatlantic drama; he hams up his part deliberately—winking broadly, as it were, to let us in on the game.

  When Updike was first married, he cast himself as the raw provincial, the inlander; his bride, with her New England background, was by default the more cultured and refined of the couple. She was at home in Cambridge; he was not. In the New York stories, written several years later, the roles are reversed: the wife is naive and unworldly in comparison with the husband. In “His Finest Hour” and “A Gift from the City,” the two weakest and least autobiographical of the series, the wife is kind, sensitive, attractive, and ever so slightly dim. Rosalind, in “His Finest Hour,” is “optimistic and unself-conscious. Her gaps in judgment were startling.” In both stories, the wife’s naïveté, her relative lack of street smarts, is a catalyst in the narrative. In New York, where both he and Mary were outsiders, Updike no longer saw his wife as someone who would lead him to a loftier place. “He was participating in the life of the city,” Mary remembered, “and I was home with children. On special occasions I could go to a museum or go shopping at Lord and Taylor or Bonwit Teller.”

  One characteristic all the New York stories have in common is that they’re peopled with likely New Yorker readers. The young couple in “Incest,” for example—yet another version of John and Mary, this time called Lee and Jane—are college educated, living in a small, pleasant New York apartment furnished with bamboo chairs, a modernist sofa, a makeshift bed, bookshelves filled with books. They’re familiar with Proust and Freud and the pediatric pronouncements of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Manifestly bright and proud of his intellectual attainments, Lee is also enough of a baseball fan to feel “spiritually dependent on Ted Williams.” Jane sips vermouth after dinner, listening to Bach on the record player while she reads The New Republic—if the story hadn’t been intended for publication in The New Yorker, surely she would have been reading that magazine instead.

  The settled domestic scene in “Incest” is troubled by Lee’s libidinal restlessness, which is implied rather than explicitly stated. At the beginning of the story he tells Jane about one erotically charged dream, and at the end he dreams another, even more sexually suggestive, a
bout his daughter, a toddler with the same name as her mother. This was the golden age of Freud in America, and Updike would have expected his New Yorker readers to be at least vaguely familiar with popularized versions of the arguments proposed in The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. “Incest” is a Freudian playground crowded with symbols that hint at latent currents of psychic energy, sinister complexes percolating in the subconscious minds of the parents as well as the child. Lee’s erotic dreams (which were, Updike told Maxwell, “substantially” his own), his ambivalent thoughts about his wife’s appearance (though they’ve been married only three years, her face “showed age”), his frustrated attempts at flirting with her—it all adds up to an unsettling picture of a young marriage under pressure. As in “Toward Evening” and “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” we’re presented with a husband exposed to temptation, either his virtue or his integrity at risk.

  Writing about provincials in the big city, young folk testing out degrees of urban sophistication and flirting with corrupting influences, Updike was part of a feedback loop: borrowing from the stuff of his own life, he was showing subscribers images of themselves, city-dwellers and aspiring city-dwellers working to achieve an easy urbanity, a modern, cultured, upscale way of living—and not entirely comfortable with the results. The self-portraits in these stories reveal a young man at once craving and resisting assimilation to a powerfully attractive, occasionally frightening milieu. That milieu was the city, of course—and it was also, more urgently, The New Yorker as a place of employment, as a venue for his work, and as a badge of writerly identity. The question of whether he would be a New York writer was swamped by the question of whether he would be a New Yorker writer.

  Curiously enough, in light of his close and enduring identification with the magazine, the answer was not an unqualified yes. He needed The New Yorker, if only because he needed to make a living; and despite his new familiarity with its inner workings, he revered it—and continued to do so. Even after the tenacious William Shawn was pushed aside in 1987 and replaced by Robert Gottlieb, even after the shock of Tina Brown’s tenure (1992–1998) and the advent of David Remnick, Updike continued to think of it as “not only the best general magazine in America, but perhaps the best that America has ever produced.” Being a valued contributor; working alongside his fellow staff writers, some of them legendary; forming an integral part of a corporate entity, the most excellent of its kind—all this certainly appealed to him, but not with the same force as his personal aspirations. Always in some corner of his mind he was the cherished only child, and he would eventually have to insist on being a one-man show; his aim was to achieve individual rather than collective excellence. Although The New Yorker would never have discouraged that ambition, his presence in the office, once he proved himself to be versatile, eager to please, and infallibly competent, was a sore temptation: how could editors, faced with the pressing weekly task of finding material to fill the pages, resist the urge to make use of him, to co-opt him? Even before he was installed at his metal desk on the eighteenth floor, Katharine White regularly asked him for humor and light verse: she wanted him to be funny, timely, and above all prolific.*

  In England, he had found topical subjects hard to come by. The American newsmagazines he used to rely on for inspiration when he churned out copy for the Lampoon were out of date by the time they reached Oxford, and he felt uncertain and out of touch. But once settled in Manhattan, he began to contribute casuals (the magazine’s catchall term for humorous prose): a parody of Life magazine; of Kerouac’s On the Road (“On the Sidewalk”); of a T. S. Eliot lecture; of Harry Truman’s memoirs. In the issue of January 26, 1957, is a piece entitled “Notes,” which was never included in any of Updike’s omnium-gatherums, possibly because it’s hard to classify: “Notes” isn’t a parody, exactly, and it’s certainly not a book review. Prompted by newly published volumes of verse by John Berryman and Marianne Moore, both footnoted, it gently mocks the “self-exegesis” of the poets’ Waste Land–like explanatory footnotes, an apparatus criticus alternately pretentious and condescending. In making fun of densely allusive highbrow poetry and the enthusiasts who champion it, Updike was making fun of himself and his passion for textual titans.* Despite his burgeoning artistic ambitions and his educated taste for high culture, he was still leery of exhibiting the telltale signs of literary sophistication. Aware of his own ambivalence, he made the clash of high and low culture a feature of both his casuals and his poetry.

  The poems he was publishing in The New Yorker were mostly delicious froth, ingenious, well-crafted silliness. He’d been writing light verse—he defined it as verse that takes its spark from “the man-made world of information,” from “language and stylized signifiers”—for more than a decade, beginning with his many contributions to Chatterbox and the Lampoon, but at Harvard and Oxford he’d also written poems in a more serious vein, poems derived, as he put it, “from the real (the given, the substantial) world.” The serious poetry stopped while he was in New York. About half of the fifty-five poems in his first book, the slim, cheerful volume called The Carpentered Hen, were written while he was living in the city; all but one of those he classed as light verse*—which was what the magazine wanted at the time, though Howard Moss, the poetry editor, never said so explicitly. In the 1950s it was still a relatively common, marketable genre that enjoined a certain amount of prestige. Harper and Brothers, which published The Carpentered Hen, also published the work of a number of other New Yorker writers, including E. B. White and James Thurber; the house was willing to print a young writer’s collection of verse, but the idea was that more substantial work would be coming along soon.

  A couple of months after he started at the magazine, he produced a poem making fun of a flag-waving, chest-beating editorial in Life, “Wanted: An American Novel.” The gist of the editorial was that our anguished “hothouse literature” must perk up; instead of agony and gloom, the editorialist asserted, what was needed was more vigorous and manly writing reflecting the power and prosperity of our great nation. Life was calling for “a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life.” Updike responded with “An Ode”:

  I’m going to write a novel, hey,

  I’ll write it as per Life:

  I’m going to say, “What a splendid day!”

  And “How I love my wife!”

  The poem, classically divided into strophe and antistrophe (mock pretension that adds an amusing absurdist touch), concludes with a pun silly enough to deflate an army of jingoistic editorialists:

  For Life is joy and Time is gay

  And Fortune smiles on those

  Good books that say, at some length, “Yea,”

  And thereby spite the Noes.

  The gagster in him could hardly resist the opportunity to indulge in this kind of bright playfulness. Certainly he was going to write a novel (though hardly “as per Life”)—in the meantime, his employer encouraged his penchant for “cartooning with words,” and rewarded him for doing so.

  Writing for The Talk of the Town, a plum post by any reckoning, and at the same time having his short stories, casuals, and light verse published in the magazine—this was more or less exactly the adult future he’d dreamed of since adolescence, his “sole ambition” ecstatically fulfilled. William Maxwell warned him in a letter just before he reported for duty, “If there is anything to be said against working for The New Yorker, it is that it makes the thought of working anywhere else too appalling.” Sure enough, this was Updike’s first and last regular employment—and his only firsthand exposure to the culture of a busy corporate office. His fellow workers, though, were mostly as intent as he on the lonely business of reading and writing, so it was not a particularly sociable environment. The exception was Brendan Gill, a lifelong staffer, “the only gregarious man on the premises,” who regularly scooped up young Updike and led him off with several colleagues—Tony Bailey and Joe Mitchell, say—to the Blue Ribbon, where the waiters
were clad in white aprons and the knackwurst was famously succulent, for a bantering midday meal.

  The offices at 25 West Forty-Third Street were shabby, and cluttered with stacks of old phone books. The ambience was more like a newspaper than a glossy magazine; “everything,” Updike remembered, “was slightly dusty and funky.” The grimly functional décor and the pervasive hush suited his relentless work ethic, his ability to shut out for hour after hour everything but the task at hand. The newspaper feel was a hangover from the days of Harold Ross (himself an unreconstructed newspaperman), who died in 1951; the hush had more to do with his successor, the notoriously soft-spoken William Shawn. When Updike claimed his desk on the eighteenth floor, four years after Ross’s death, Shawn was very much in charge—indeed, he was essentially the sole arbiter of what went into the magazine, a consolidation of editorial power unknown in Ross’s day. It was Shawn who “handled” Updike’s Talk pieces, and the two quickly established an amicable if distant rapport—distant mostly because Shawn was shy and Updike was in awe.

  Nowadays Shawn is nearly as famous for his oddities as for his editorial prowess. The catalogue of his phobias and behavioral tics, the intrigue (especially his decades-long office romance with Lillian Ross, which was meant to be a deep, deep secret and became, with the passage of time, merely the obvious but unmentionable status quo), the passive-aggressive manipulation of colleagues and contributors, the velvet tenacity of his grip on power (Maxwell once observed that in Shawn were combined the best features of Napoleon and St. Francis of Assisi)—it’s all almost enough to make us forget the astonishing success with which he steered the magazine.