by Begley, Adam
After Shawn died in 1992, Updike wrote a tribute for the pages of The New Yorker, a curiously equivocal document that ends with the disturbing image of Shawn “pinkly crouched behind his proof-piled desk.” From the very first sentence, in which he remarks on Shawn’s “unfailing courtesy and rather determined conversational blandness,” Updike’s praise is undercut by less flattering observations. All told, the image conveyed is of a quiet, shy, morbidly polite, deceptively passive character with a peculiar and powerful intelligence, a magician who weekly managed heroic editorial feats “without moving a muscle.” An admiring portrait, perhaps, but not an affectionate one. Eight years later, after the publication of a spate of books about Shawn’s tenure at the magazine, Updike restated his views, adding richer praise and darker hints of censure:
His sense of honor, his sometimes venturesome taste, his wish to make every issue a thing of beauty permeated the magazine; if he did . . . stay at the helm too long, and did employ deception in his personal and editorial life, he remains, for me, a model of acumen and kindness, with something truly otherworldly in his dedication to exalted, disinterested standards within the easily sullied, and increasingly crass, world of the printed word.
Updike’s private feelings about Shawn were more sharply ambivalent, but in his public utterances he remained loyally deferential to the man who had done so much to determine his literary fate.
That public loyalty was richly earned. Shawn recognized right away the value Updike’s work, and foresaw that this particular “dazzled farm-boy” would quickly become a key contributor. When in the summer of 1961 Updike volunteered to begin writing book reviews, Shawn agreed immediately; later that same year, Shawn approached him about becoming the magazine’s television critic. Updike sensibly declined on the grounds that, in Ipswich, he couldn’t watch any of the local channels available in the metropolitan area; he admitted, however, that he was tempted by the security of a critic’s regular salary. Though Shawn occasionally made known (through White or Maxwell) his appreciation of Updike’s fiction, he was more likely to praise the nonfiction. For example, along with the check sent to Updike for his celebrated Our Far-Flung Correspondents piece about Ted Williams’s last at-bat, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” was a note from Shawn expressing, in so many words, his “gratitude and admiration.” There’s no record of his opinion of Updike’s verse, but we can deduce that he approved from the sheer number of poems accepted by the magazine over the years. In 1965, when Updike published his first collection of essays, Assorted Prose, he dedicated it to William Shawn, an appropriate choice for at least two reasons: a nod from Shawn had allowed about three quarters of the material in the collection to run in his magazine; and it was Shawn (even more, perhaps, than Katharine White) who saw in Updike an all-purpose writer of “assorted prose”—who recognized, in short, a budding man of letters.
However well disposed, Shawn was an enigmatic benefactor, an “ineffable eminence,” a secretive wizard whose verdict (“the message was commonly expressed, ‘Shawn says yes’ or ‘Shawn says no’ ”) was inscrutable and beyond appeal. The maternal Katharine White, who guided Updike with gentle patrician firmness to a settled place in the stable of New Yorker writers, and who set a rigorous precedent for all his subsequent editorial dealings, was a friendly, admired mentor. William Maxwell, who began his career as White’s assistant, played an entirely different role from those two Olympian figures. Maxwell was involved in a more intimate way both with Updike’s writing and in his personal life, and became a close, trusted friend; the friendship, abiding and sincere, was a product of a long, unusually fruitful, and nearly frictionless professional collaboration.
When White retired to her husband’s farmhouse in Maine, which she did in stutter steps beginning in 1955, Maxwell took charge of editing Updike’s stories, a duty he embraced like a labor of love and relinquished only when he in turn retired. Because Maxwell (born in 1908) was old enough to be Updike’s father, you might have expected his relationship with the younger man to be paternal or avuncular; and because Maxwell was himself an accomplished novelist (acclaimed by critics and revered by his fans, but never reaching as broad an audience as he would have liked), one might have expected him to present himself as a mentor. In fact, he had a talent for nimbly avoiding the appearance of exerting authority of any kind (which is not to say that he was passive-aggressive like Shawn); his idea of editing was to hover like a good angel over Updike’s shoulder, giving him the occasional nudge. Caretaker is the word Updike used to describe him: “He was, in effect, the caretaker of my livelihood”; as usual, it’s exactly the right word. Updike sensed the older man’s “intensity of care and even affection” for the stories they worked on together, and this solicitude made him feel “cherished.” Maxwell was forty-six when they met (twice Updike’s age), and the younger man admired his gentle, serious demeanor, his air of mild urbanity, his soft-spoken reverence for writing. Updike later remarked that on first impression he “conveyed a murmurous, restrained nervous energy and an infallible grace”—Fred Astaire came to mind.
Their friendship—as opposed to their friendly professional dealings—didn’t fully blossom until after Updike moved to Ipswich. In fact, he didn’t even meet Maxwell’s wife and daughters until September 1957, when he stopped by their apartment during a brief stay in the city. A month later, just before Thanksgiving, the Updikes visited the Maxwells at their country house in Yorktown Heights, New York—the first time the two families came together. The visit went well; it was the highlight, Updike claimed, of his family’s Thanksgiving vacation, which included a stop in Greenwich at his aunt Mary’s house and a longer stay in Plowville. From that point on, Updike’s correspondence with Maxwell is warmer, more relaxed and rambling, peppered with jokes, family news, and curious trivia. His editor brought out the best not just in his stories but also in him: the letters are affectionate and generous, serious when the topic calls for it, but otherwise lightly playful; they seem genuine, unforced, and unmediated—with Maxwell he clearly no longer felt the need, as he had when they first met, to adopt a pose or strike an attitude. He surely sensed that the older man admired him sincerely and expected great things of him. In fact, when he recommended Updike for a Guggenheim in the fall of 1958, Maxwell told the fellowship committee, “If he doesn’t get the Nobel Prize, it will be the Swedes’ fault, not his.”
In his own fiction, Maxwell returned again and again to his boyhood haunts in Lincoln, Illinois. It’s no surprise, therefore, that unlike Katharine White, he was receptive to Updike’s penchant for nostalgia. Not long after the cheery Thanksgiving visit, during a tête-à-tête lunch at the Century, he encouraged Updike to revisit Shillington in the pages of The New Yorker. Updike had been telling him about his school days, remembering an unrequited crush on a sixth-grade girl—whereupon Maxwell said, “That’s a short story.” Updike went home to Ipswich and, in the first week of the new year, wrote it down more or less the way he’d spoken it; the result, “The Alligators” (the first story in which the name Olinger is given to the hero’s hometown), was published in the magazine several weeks later. Maxwell thought the finished product read like one long poem—praise that thrilled Updike and made him itch to write more about his Berks County childhood. That kind of helpful intervention occurred with surprising regularity over the next two decades.
There are of course difficulties involved in having a friend for an editor. “The relationship,” as Updike acknowledged, “is to some extent adversarial.” He admitted to having been vexed by the rejection of certain stories; and when he complained about the “meddlesome perfectionism” of New Yorker editors, Maxwell, though unnamed, was one of the guilty parties. Updike knew that Maxwell enjoyed “a good verbal tussle” when he edited a piece, but Updike did, too, so there was never any rupture, nor even lingering annoyance. He recognized that Maxwell, as Mary reminded him, was “part of a machine for getting out a certain kind of magazine”; behind his editorial decisions loomed the omnipotent
Shawn and the increasingly ponderous New Yorker tradition. Also, Maxwell was preternaturally tactful, and Updike, thanks to his mother, adept at avoiding confrontation. There was never a chance that Maxwell, by nature cautious, would push the young Updike in a daring or different direction. If he ever put a foot wrong, if he ever hampered his writer or sold him on poor advice, there’s no record of it. At the end of their twenty-year collaboration, Maxwell wrote, “Could there have been an easier or happier association I ask myself, who perhaps shouldn’t be the one to do it. But when I look back at the long line of stories that passed between us, I can only smile with pleasure.” For his part, when he stumbled on a trove of old New Yorker letters full of his editor’s attentive, affectionate, encouraging advice, Updike waxed ecstatic, remembering with sentimental fondness the delicate ministrations of his “caretaker.”
However easy and mutually beneficial his relations with the magazine, he knew that he should be expanding his professional horizons—in other words, that he should start publishing books. Like many of The New Yorker’s star contributors, including E. B. White and James Thurber, he turned to Harper and Brothers, a venerable publishing house established in the early nineteenth century. Updike’s choice was made easy by the fact that he’d already promised the head of the house, Cass Canfield, a first look at anything he wrote for “book publication.” Early in 1957, in response to Canfield’s yearly reminder, Updike indicated that he had very nearly finished work on a novel, and was also eager to publish a collection of light verse and a collection of stories.
By then, however, he’d already made the decision to quit The New Yorker and leave Manhattan.
THE UPDIKES’ SECOND child, David, was born on January 19, 1957. It was immediately apparent, when mother and baby came home from the hospital, that they would have to move out of the apartment on West Thirteenth Street; a family of four needed more space. They planned to look for a new place near a park, with an elevator, if possible. One week after the baby was born, on Mary’s twenty-seventh birthday, as it happened, the Updikes were invited to a party at Brendan Gill’s house in Bronxville. Mary couldn’t go because she was nursing her newborn, but John decided that he would go anyway. Though she was unhappy about being left behind on her birthday, Mary kept her feelings to herself—her mother was staying with them, helping out with Elizabeth, now a toddler of nearly two, and she didn’t want her disappointment to show. John set off in his Ford coupe, taking with him Tony Bailey and Faith McNulty, another Talk reporter. He returned several hours later with his mind made up: he told Mary that night that they should leave New York entirely. It was obvious that something had upset him, but he wouldn’t say what it was, except that he had the feeling, an overwhelming feeling, that he had to get out of the city—or else he would become like everybody at the Gills’ party, the writers and hangers-on all competing with one another.
Half a century later, after seeing McNulty’s obituary in the newspaper, Updike wrote to Bailey saying that the obit had summoned up a “dreamlike” recollection of the party—“the great and the near-great looking tired and tiddly”—and of the drive back from Bronxville: Bailey and McNulty quarreling about something, a distracted Updike ending up on the wrong side of the East River, and Bailey pointing out the view of the Manhattan skyline “shimmering across the water.” Looking back on that evening and his impulsive decision to leave New York, he wrote, “A major turning point in my life, I see now.”
The Gill residence in Bronxville, described by its owner as “a large, semi-ruinous mock-Tudor mansion,” was an imposing pile. The guests would have included a sizable New Yorker cohort—the art editor, James Geraghty; cartoonists Charles Addams and Peter Arno; and writers Wolcott Gibbs, A. J. Liebling, Geoffrey Hellman, St. Clair McKelway, Philip Hamburger, E. J. Kahn Jr., Niccolò Tucci, and Robert Coates, among others. Despite the size of Gill’s house, the noise of the booze-fueled chatter and the prodigious volume of cigarette smoke may have produced a claustrophobic effect—too many old tweed jackets and gray flannels, too much understated wit. Updike’s brief description of the festivities—“the great and the near-great looking tired and tiddly”—is of course based on a fifty-year-old memory, as is his account of the drive home with quarrelling colleagues and the picture-postcard view of the skyline. But even taking into account the vagaries of memory and the seventy-three-year-old’s lifelong habit of massaging his past into pleasing dramatic shapes, it seems safe to say that at that particular moment in early 1957, any large gathering of New Yorker staff—sober or not, illustrious or less so—was bound to stir up his competitive instinct. And if they were indeed looking “tired and tiddly,” that dispiriting aspect would have reminded him, like a nagging sore, of his own unfulfilled ambitions.
The excitement and glamour of living in New York had always, for Updike, come bundled with less agreeable sensations. He felt “crowded, physically and spiritually” by the city’s “ghastly plentitude, its inexhaustible and endlessly repeated urban muchness.” He groused about a literary scene “overrun with agents and wisenheimers” all too willing to give a twenty-four-year-old helpful hints about how he should live his life. This barrage of advice, some of it from fellow writers (the competition), some of it from editors and publishers, compounded his discomfort. According to Michael Arlen, his Lampoon friend who was at the time working at Life magazine and would later join The New Yorker, this kind of complaint was a regular lunchtime refrain as early as 1955. Updike, Arlen said, worried that “whatever you might do or achieve in New York, you could never feel important because there was always greater or at least noisier stuff going on all around you.” Arlen was under the impression that Updike had been plotting an exit for some time, that his ambition required him to be a big fish in a little pond. In his letters home, Updike first mentions, in May 1956, his desire to escape both The New Yorker and the city: “Not quite right for me, as the rejection slips say.” The Bronxville party, in other words, should be thought of as accelerating a process already under way.
The genial host offered a prime example of the kind of career Updike had no intention of pursuing. At age forty-two, Gill had been at The New Yorker for twenty-one years—half his life. Charming, talented, ebullient, relentlessly energetic—it’s hard to imagine him looking tired, however tiddly—he was also a graceful, engaging writer admired for his commitment to the magazine. But divide the room into the great and the near-great and he would without a doubt fall into the latter category. As Updike observed in a memorial tribute, Gill “came to The New Yorker young, as a writer of short stories, and stayed as a jack of all trades”; he failed to “take his own artistic gifts quite seriously enough.” Updike wasn’t going to make that same mistake. He wanted to be an artist, not an “elegant hack,” as he put it in a letter to his mother, who would have agreed wholeheartedly. After a year and a half at the magazine, his immediate professional ambitions had been met. New and lofty cultural ambitions had meanwhile sprung up in the breast of the young man who had once hoped to be the next Walt Disney—and to those ambitions, the magazine itself was an obstacle.
The guest of honor at the Gills’ was Victor Gollancz, a British publisher with nearly two dozen New Yorker writers in his stable, who was visiting on his yearly American tour. Gill had written to Gollancz a few months earlier to tell him about Updike, calling him “easily the finest writing talent that has shown up on this magazine in the twenty years that I’ve been here.” Gollancz was understandably eager to meet this young phenomenon. In the thick of the crowded party, they had a lively chat about Updike’s work-in-progress, Home, which Gollancz offered to buy sight unseen; about book printing, always a topic dear to Updike’s heart; and about the philosopher A. J. Ayer—because Gollancz thought Updike resembled Ayer: each had a thin face and a long nose. Updike, for his part, found in Gollancz (also a striking individual, bald, bespectacled, and mustachioed, with dramatically dark, bushy eyebrows) exactly his idea of what a publisher should be: “gallant, wise, and willing to lose
money on a book.” This encounter was the beginning of a complicated relationship built on mutual admiration that nonetheless ended badly—and it was also a reminder that writing Talk pieces and casuals for The New Yorker, filling his quota so as to achieve his “quantity bonus,” was not going to be Updike’s lifework. It was time to publish a book.
A nostalgic thumbnail self-portrait he contributed to Horizon magazine offers a glimpse of the earliest stirrings of his new ambitions. It was the autumn of 1955, when he was freshly arrived in New York and already making a splash at the magazine. Everything was falling into place for the young author, and it was in this “atmosphere . . . of dreams come true” that he succumbed to the influence of yet another textual titan.
While our baby cooed in her white, screened crib, and the evening traffic swished north on the West Side Highway, and Manhattan at my back cooled like a stone, and my young wife fussed softly in our triangular kitchen at one of the meals that, by the undeservable grace of marriage, regularly appeared, I would read.
He was reading the first volume of Proust, and his very Proustian remembrance of that “paradisiacal” moment continues with a description of the powerful effect Swann’s Way had on him:
It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes . . . that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.
Proust—together with Henry Green—upped the ante; as Updike put it, “Those two woke me up.” They encouraged his belief that the dream of high artistic achievement could also come true—just at the moment when his new employer expected from him something decidedly more ordinary. In those first busy months in New York, he fretted that his career as a freelancer might be over, that he would never be able to write serious fiction in the evening after writing Talk pieces during the day. His solution to that problem—writing for himself in the office before the workday began, a stolen morning hour alone in his bare eighteenth-floor cubicle—didn’t solve the larger problem. Caught up in the excitement of his success at The New Yorker, he ignored the stark choice his aspirations would eventually force on him: stay at the magazine and risk becoming an elegant hack, or gamble on a freelancer’s precarious life and commit to the dream awakened in him by Proust and Green.
