Updike

by Begley, Adam

  In some later accounts of his “defection” from The New Yorker, the pressure of having a toddler and an infant at home weighs as heavily as concern for his career—“the city itself,” he wrote, “was no place to raise a family or hatch novels.” But it was the unhatched novels rather than the children that tipped the scales. Although he’d written a sequence of stories set in the city, he felt that New York was not his fictional turf—it was “too trafficked, too well cherished by others.” He had the impression, moreover, that in Manhattan he was exposing himself to only a thin slice of the American scene. He later complained that “immense as the city is, your path in it tends to be very narrow. I only knew people I went to college with and other writers.” And the metropolitan magic was wearing thin; he called it “a vast conspiracy of bother.” He wrote, “When New York ceased to support my fantasies, I quit the job and the city.”

  His path in the city was narrow also because at this stage he wasn’t an especially adventurous young man. The self-declared prophet of “middleness” was squeamish about the extremes lying in wait up and down Manhattan from Harlem to the Lower East Side to Park Avenue. Blacks, Jews, aristocratic WASPs—all these were foreign to him. In a fundamental sense, he didn’t feel safe in New York. And thanks to his inherited “Depression mentality,” he balked at the cost of city living. If the magic was wearing thin, one suspects that it was partly because he’d closed his eyes to it.

  Pushed out by the crowds, and by his anxieties, and pulled along by a secret faith in his own grand literary destiny, he announced to Shawn that he would leave town and become a freelance writer. He cited his growing family as his excuse. Shawn (“sweet as a mint paddy”) promptly volunteered to find him a larger, more suitable apartment, but that generous gesture addressed only the most superficial aspect of the problem. And so, at the end of March, a week after his twenty-fifth birthday, John and Mary and their two children decamped to Ipswich. “The crucial flight of my life,” he called it, perhaps forgetting that he’d already described his exile from Shillington at age thirteen as “the crucial detachment of my life”—one difference being that that when he looked back on the flight from Manhattan, it was almost wholly without regret. In 1968 he told Time magazine that New York City was “always still where I live in my heart, somehow,” and in a documentary filmed in the early eighties, he claimed, riding in a yellow taxi from LaGuardia to Manhattan, to still feel like a citizen of New York: “My money comes out of here, and my manuscripts go towards here, and in a funny way when I come down I feel like I’m going home”—but I suspect he said these things only to please the interviewer. To Time, he owned up to a “sneaking fondness for elegance, for people whose apartments are full of money and the martini comes all dewy and chilled.” And then he launched into this remarkable riff:

  There’s a certain moment of jubilant mortality that you get on a Manhattan street—you know, all these people in the sunshine, all these nifty girls with their knees showing, these cops, these dope addicts, everybody swinging along, and they’re never going to be in the same pattern again and tomorrow a few of them will be dead and eventually we’ll all be dead. But there’s a wonderful gay defiance that you feel in New York in the daytime.

  A fabulous tribute, but it smacks of performance rather than sincerity. Another, more compact expression of his feelings—“being in New York takes so much energy as to leave none for any other kind of being”—takes into account his most pressing priority, which was to secure for himself time and space to write.

  He left New York without ever detaching himself from The New Yorker. As he was about to discover, geographical distance alone would do little or nothing to separate him from the magazine in the eyes of various prominent critics. On his last Sunday in town, a review appeared in The New York Times of John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle. The reviewer referred in the very first sentence, as though it were common knowledge, to the “many critical strictures” aimed at “the New Yorker school of fiction.” He then expressed his hope that Cheever would “break loose” from the group, and applauded the point at which the novel finally “breaks through the proper confines of ‘sensibility’ in the typical New Yorker story.” For Updike, who was by this time appearing in the magazine as often as any other short story writer (more frequently, in fact, than Cheever) and whose fiction relied less on incident than sensibility (fine perception, gestural nuance, delicately modulated tone), this amounted to a direct attack.

  An attack, in this case, launched by Maxwell Geismar, a respected literary historian and critic who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College. A year later, Updike read another Geismar essay, this time in the Saturday Review, which associated the New Yorker school with the “very shallow sophistication” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work. Geismar opined that “Fitzgerald was the J. D. Salinger of the Twenties . . . and a natural New Yorker writer.” The links here between Fitzgerald, Salinger, the New Yorker school, and very shallow sophistication are rather tenuous, but the essay nevertheless threw Updike into a funk. He was so distraught that William Maxwell felt obliged to send his “depressed” author a two-page, single-spaced letter dismissing Geismar as an “incompetent” and “undiscerning” critic. Maxwell’s defense of Updike’s fiction is more than a consoling epistolary pat on the shoulder; it’s a witty and perceptive analysis of what the young writer was up to. It begins with a reminder that Maxwell’s editorial touch was generally light (and hence that Updike was not a creature of the magazine), and ends with an ad hominem jab at the enemy:

  I don’t find your work shallow, I don’t see any danger of its becoming that way, and if it does become that way, I will (in my heart) hold you, not myself responsible. There is a sentence of Turgenev’s that [Edmund] Wilson quotes in his introduction to Turgenev’s literary memoirs that is very much to the point: “. . . Believe me, no man of real talent ever serves aims other than his own, and he finds satisfaction in himself alone: the life that surrounds him provides him with the contents of his works; he is its concentrated reflection. . . .” That’s what you are right now, old boy, and that’s what I hope you will continue to be, and it’s not shallow for the simple reason that life itself is not shallow. Nobody’s life is, not even Maxwell Geismar’s.

  The argument is essentially that Updike is his own man and his fiction reflects his personal circumstance and is therefore also his own.* When it comes to the related questions—whether Updike’s fiction can be justly described as shallow or sophisticated, or both, and whether it’s fair to lump it with a so-called New Yorker school—Maxwell pivots deftly, evasively, and points out that Harold Ross, who stamped the magazine with his personality, was hardly a sophisticated character. Finally he asks, “Are you or aren’t you, in your heart, pleased and happy to see a story of yours in The New Yorker?” The answer could only be yes—but that didn’t stop Updike from squirming with discomfort whenever he saw criticism leveled at the fiction in the magazine. At this point his reputation as a writer rested solely on his stories, all of which had appeared in The New Yorker. He felt personally singed by any blast aimed at the magazine and its school.

  Was there such a thing, at midcentury, as a typical New Yorker story? Did a New Yorker school of fiction exist? Certainly the magazine favored quiet, lucid, and subtle over brash, baffling, and daring. A polite, genteel tone held sway: nothing radical, nothing transgressive, nothing in bad taste. In his Paris Review interview, Maxwell bobbed and weaved his way to a few general remarks about the fiction in the magazine:

  Irwin Shaw when he was a young man said once that in the typical New Yorker story everything occurs at one place in one time, and all the dialogue is beside the point. It was not, at the time, a wholly inaccurate description. . . . Something that is characteristic of the writers who appear in The New Yorker is that the sentence is the unit by which the story advances, not the paragraph, and the individual sentence therefore carries a great deal of weight and tends to be carefully constructed, with no loose ends. An
d style becomes very important.

  There was just enough truth in the various generalizations to make the idea of a New Yorker school a credible target for critical dissent. It’s true, for example, that until Donald Barthelme crashed the party in 1963, innovation and experimentation usually had to be smuggled into the pages of the magazine. Updike himself complained of a certain “prudery” and an “anachronistic nice-nellyism.” Critics such as Geismar—a champion of naturalism who wanted to see harsh truths aired, who wanted readers to be shocked out of their complacency—were bound to be impatient with the standard New Yorker fare.

  Actually, many of the writers who appeared in the magazine (Nabokov, for one), and even some who were dubbed “New Yorker school,” such as Cheever and Salinger, were subversive, but in the quiet, lucid, subtle way that suited the editors. If Updike had considered the matter calmly and rationally, he would have ignored the passing gibes, or told himself that they were, as Maxwell insisted, examples of incompetent criticism; instead he fretted and stewed, concerned that his relationship with the magazine would distort perception of his work and prejudice critics against the novel he would shortly be publishing.

  Soon his sensitivity extended to any disparaging remark about New Yorker contributors. In June 1960 he read a short article in Time magazine reporting on the dim view taken by Alfred Kazin, a distinguished literary critic, of recent Broadway theater. Dismissing what he called “Westport comedy,” Kazin ridiculed the kind of character featured in those dramas: well-heeled Freud-spouting intellectuals, exurban and adulterous, among them “the artist for The New Yorker, that safe citizen of our times” who works “in a slightly Bohemian reconverted barn.” It was clearly a throwaway line—Kazin was himself an intellectual and a sometime contributor to the magazine—but Updike took umbrage and dashed off a long, sour note to Kazin accusing him of spouting “smug humbug.”* It’s an ill-judged, unintentionally revealing document:

  I notice in Time a reference to “the artist for The New Yorker, that safe citizen of our times.” I don’t know why this kind of thing, so regularly emitted by Leslie Fiedler, Maxwell Geismar, etc. invariably causes me pain, nor why I am driven to the indiscretion of writing to you. Perhaps because I expect better of you, since your criticism is so good when it is directed at real subjects. I submit that the NYer is not a real object of criticism; that remarks should be directed toward individual contributors. Unlike contributors to Time, the magazine’s contributors do sign their names and therefore should not be saddled with the sins, real and imagined, of other contributors.

  Updike’s argument about the magazine not being “a real object of criticism” is far less compelling than the bizarre spectacle of an author trying his best to shield himself from a blow directed at someone else entirely. The fact that the blow is glancing and possibly even inadvertent makes no difference—he can’t stop himself:

  I honestly believe that . . . no attempt is made to get a New Yorker kind of story; that, in the minds of the editors, no such kind exists. And that I have never seen in print any kind of case made out for the corporate identity of New Yorker fiction; and that the clearest notions of such a corporate identity exist in the minds of those who read the magazine least.

  It’s possible that he convinced himself of the honesty of these beliefs, but it seems more likely that he was in the grip of a desire that distorted his judgment: He was desperate to imagine that his stories could be read in The New Yorker and yet stand apart. He wanted to benefit from the magazine’s corporate identity and yet be seen as a solo act; he wanted New Yorker cachet to rub off on him without being tagged with a label.

  Part of his aversion to the idea of a New Yorker school was a reflexive denial of a truth he elsewhere happily acknowledged: that he was indebted to fiction he’d first read in the magazine, including stories by Cheever and Salinger. Though he admired both writers and was influenced by both, any remark from a critic that lumped him with them made him prickly and defensive, symptoms of what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence.* When he was more securely established, Updike mastered a more decorous response to remarks about typical New Yorker stories, but in the late 1950s, while he was still finding his voice, it was a topic almost guaranteed to trigger a show of petulance.

  When he left New York, fleeing the crowds and also the corrupting influence of a certain kind of big-city sophistication, he was—in a halfhearted, conflicted way—trying to escape from The New Yorker as well. Needless to say, he failed utterly.

  IV.

  Welcome to Tarbox

  [M]y conception of an artist . . . was someone who lived in a town like Shillington, and who, equipped with pencils and paper, practiced his solitary trade as methodically as a dentist practiced his. And indeed, that is how it is at present with me.

  —“The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” (1962)

  Ipswich was Shillington redux, paradise regained, a home to rival his first home, a place where he could plunge in fearlessly, without reservation, no longer needing to pose as an outsider. This is where he reached his prime: “If Shillington gave me life,” he wrote in Self-Consciousness, “Ipswich was where I took possession of it.” A small Colonial town two miles from the seashore and about thirty miles north of Boston, it was the scene of some of his sweetest triumphs: his first eight published novels were written in Ipswich, along with a majority of his best short stories and his most ambitious poetry. He arrived a promising young magazine writer without a single book to his credit and departed, seventeen years later, a consummately professional author—a bestselling, prizewinning novelist with a burgeoning reputation as a leading man of letters. By 1974, the year he left, he was not only a critically acclaimed, paid-up member of the literary establishment, but also rich (thanks to steady New Yorker earnings and a swelling stream of book royalties) and famous (thanks to the notoriety of Couples). His younger son and daughter were born in Ipswich, and all four of his children thrived there—“Children are what welds a family to a town,” he once noted. But it was also in Ipswich that the family imploded, his marriage to Mary wrecked by a daisy chain of adulterous affairs. The peaks and troughs of Updike’s Ipswich life were extreme, and the turbulence shook up his poetry and prose, real-life drama reenacted on the page.

  Why Ipswich? They both knew it—Mary from childhood, John from their honeymoon weekend—and they both liked it. John remembered “something comfortingly raggle-taggle” about the center of town. “It felt,” he wrote, “like a town with space, where you could make your own space.” They thought briefly of returning to Cambridge after New York; they knew they could be happy there, but ruled it out after deciding that it would be too much like going back to college. Updike once claimed that he’d moved to New England to be closer to his Red Sox hero, Ted Williams. More plausibly, he maintained that he chose Ipswich for its coastline, the famously beautiful, unspoiled Crane Beach, where he hoped on sunny days to bake away his psoriasis. That practical consideration, however, counted for less than the tug of nostalgia. Ipswich and Shillington are different in many respects; the Colonial history of Ipswich, its unusually large number of pre-1725 houses, and its proximity to the shore give it a distinctive flavor, whereas Shillington was always blandly typical—ordinariness part of its enduring appeal. Shillington was already a suburb when Updike was a child, the few miles to Reading shortened by a trolley line. Ipswich in 1957 was safely distant from Boston’s urban sprawl, though connected by commuter rail. The drive to the city was about an hour’s journey, part of it through cultivated farmland. All the same, both Ipswich and Shillington were unmistakably small-town, and that was the key element as far as he was concerned. “A small-town boy,” he wrote, “I had craved small-town space.” He was looking for a little pond with room enough for a big fish. He also needed, after New York, to reestablish his connection with “the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America.”

  Ipswich changed and grew during his time there, but its essential character remained the same. It was
a town of fewer than seven thousand in 1957, and more than eleven thousand when he left. Part of what John and Mary liked about it was the crazy-quilt ethnic makeup of the population, with large Greek, Polish, French Canadian, and Irish contingents mixing with the old Yankees, all contributing to what Updike called “mini-city perkiness.” Despite the natural beauty of the coastal setting and the rich history—Ipswich bills itself as “The Birthplace of American Independence,” a claim based on a 1687 tax protest—the town’s style is markedly casual. Updike thought of it as “a maverick kind of place.” Many streets are dotted with seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century houses, but there was no historical district when he arrived, nothing precious or preening about it; as he remarked, “Ipswich is traditionally careless of itself.”

  Decision made, destination chosen, he quickly put the plan into action. He took an early morning train to Boston, and from there Mary’s former roommate, Ann Karnovsky (née Rosenblum), drove him out to Ipswich to look for a place to rent. The idea was to take a twelve-month lease and consider it a trial period. They looked at an apartment for $200 a month, and the real estate agent also showed them some properties for sale. The house John and Ann settled on was a small wood-frame cottage called Little Violet. (It was painted lavender.) Because the agent didn’t have a key, they saw it only from the outside, peeking in through the windows at the downstairs rooms. There was a barn, a carport for the Ford, and two acres of land. The house was a couple of miles south of the town center on Essex Road, with no immediate neighbors. The view out the back, over a meadow fringed by woods, gave the property an idyllic country feel. The rent was $150 a month.