by Begley, Adam
With John suffering from a slight case of mumps, the family moved into Little Violet at the end of March, camping out in the semifurnished house until the first week of April, when movers brought the furniture from the apartment on West Thirteenth Street. There were only two bedrooms, both upstairs, but there were two bathrooms, and a marble-floored room at the back that became John’s study. From his desk he could look out over the meadow—“a writer’s paradise,” he told his mother. To his New Yorker colleagues he said that the whole family loved the house, even ten-week-old David. Perhaps it was the fresh air, or the excitement of a new house, but Elizabeth, just two, took to waking at dawn, an exhausting routine for her parents.
One of John’s first projects at Little Violet was to erect a mailbox at the end of the driveway on Essex Road (and thereby establish a Rural Free Delivery address); he then wrote a poem about it. In Plowville, the mailbox had been the place where he and his mother would “reap” rejection slips; “Planting a Mailbox,” with its cheerful mock-horticultural instructions (“Don’t harrow, weed, or water; just apply / A little gravel. Sun and motor fumes / Perform the miracle; in late July, / There a post office blooms”), suggests that he was hoping for better results in his new home, a bountiful crop of mail. As if conjured by this two-part ritual, the postman delivered good news less than a fortnight after their arrival, news that could be seen as a validation of the move to Ipswich. Updike had wanted to break out of The New Yorker and establish an independent career as a freelancer, and here was Cass Canfield writing to announce that Harper and Brothers was prepared to publish a collection of his light verse. In the same letter, Canfield inquired pointedly after the progress of the novel: “We are all looking forward greatly to seeing the manuscript,” he wrote, a reminder that publishing a budding author’s light verse, however entertaining, was not Harper’s main objective. Updike needed no encouragement on that score: he wanted to be a freelance writer, but more specifically he wanted to be a novelist.
In early May, Updike met in Boston with his Harper editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, who traveled up from New York to discuss the terms of the contract for the volume of poetry, which he planned to call Biscuits for Cerberus. This first encounter went smoothly; Updike charmed his editor, who followed up with a long, swooning letter: “Didn’t we have a pleasant meeting last Monday? I came away feeling well rewarded. It was really great fun.” She also gave her initial reaction to the six-hundred-page manuscript, typed out on yellow New Yorker scratch paper, of the novel Home, which Updike had handed over in Boston. Having read only the first half, she gave a guarded response, but on the whole her impression was positive: “It gathers power as it goes. There are lovely things in it. And, best, it is written with the muscles and perceptions of a novelist.” She made it clear that she wouldn’t be offering any further opinion until the manuscript had been read by Canfield and Simon Michael Bessie, another high-ranking Harper editor. In the meantime, she appended a list of sixteen poems that she and “several readers” judged “not up to the best of the collection.” The list includes “Ex-Basketball Player” (now his most frequently anthologized poem), “Shipbored,” “Youth’s Progress,” and “Lament for Cocoa”; many of the flagged poems are delightful, and most had already appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. In the end Updike dropped only three of the sixteen.
Boyishly thrilled to be publishing his first book and keen to establish good relations with Harper, he turned a blind eye to unmistakable signs of mixed feelings on the part of Lawrence, Canfield, et al. When in mid-June Home was formally rejected, Updike made not a peep of protest. The rejection letter, nominally from Canfield but citing the opinion of his colleagues, praises Updike’s writing and the “acuteness” of his observation; it reaffirms the publisher’s confidence in him “as a writer and as a novelist.” The verdict, however, was unanimous: “[N]one of us feels that the book would attract a substantial audience, primarily because in its present form the action does not compel the reader’s attention.” The advice was that he should “put the manuscript aside for awhile,” advice that clearly made an impression: he put it aside permanently. Writing to William Maxwell in the late seventies, Updike implied that he and Lawrence had together agreed on this course of action; in a 1969 interview, however, he made it sound as though shelving the manuscript of Home had been his own idea: “It had been a good exercise to write it, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many traits of a first novel.”*
Home is largely composed of the kind of nostalgic Berks County material that Katharine White had advised him against submitting to The New Yorker. It’s the Olinger chronicles presented as a continuous narrative stretching from his mother’s teenage years to his own, retracing the familiar Hoyer/Updike saga—the same constellation of only child, unhappy parents, elderly grandparents, the same to-and-fro between a small Pennsylvania town and an isolated farmhouse. Canfield referred to it as “the family novel.” It contains characters and situations Updike later recycled in various stories, notably “Flight” and “Pigeon Feathers,” and two novels, The Centaur and Of the Farm. It was his story, his material—and also his mother’s: Linda would retell her part (roughly the first half of Home) in her two books. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that by following Harper’s advice and suppressing this autobiographical bildungsroman, Updike did himself a big favor. The decision allowed him to make more considered and economical use of the material; as he later admitted, “every incident with any pith turned up later somewhere else.”
He put the manuscript in a drawer and went straight to work on a new novel, which was only glancingly autobiographical—which had, in fact, none of the traits of a first novel (“wretched genre,” he exclaimed in an early interview, still bitter about his struggle with Home). Set two decades into a not-quite-Orwellian future, The Poorhouse Fair imagines life inside the Diamond County Home for the Aged, where John F. Hook, a ninety-four-year-old former teacher with strong religious views (a character closely modeled on John F. Hoyer, Updike’s maternal grandfather), opposes the secular and progressive views of Stephen Connor, the “prefect” in charge. Updike had mentioned to Lawrence when they met in Boston that he was already at work on another novel, and it became a kind of fig leaf to cover the embarrassment of Home’s sad fate: Harper now pinned its hopes on the new manuscript.
Having finished off two final New York stories in early April—“A Gift from the City” and “Incest”—he wrote “Walter Briggs,” his first story set in Ipswich. It has a comically tortured publishing history: it suffered through repeated title changes, and didn’t run until nearly two years after it was submitted. The wrangles over “Walter Briggs” were lighthearted (in part because the stakes weren’t especially high), but it’s clear from the exchanges with Maxwell and White that Updike was learning to hold his ground in editorial disputes. He sent the story off in late June under the title “Walter Palm,” telling Maxwell that Mary found it insubstantial and that it should perhaps be published under a pseudonym. When it became clear that The New Yorker was in fact going to accept it, an alarmed Updike explained that Walter Palm was an actual person’s name and that the story was therefore libelous. Updike had once again lifted a character wholesale from life and pinned him to the page—in this case a retired man the Updikes had encountered at the YMCA family camp on Sandy Island the summer they were married. The character is peripheral to the story; the only important things about him are his name and the fact that the young husband and wife at the heart of the story both remember him as a background figure, a passing acquaintance in the first, romantically charged months of their marriage.
Walter Palm was a retiree who spent the entire summer at the camp playing cards and shuffleboard and fishing in Lake Winnipesaukee. He’s described in the story as a fat man with a sly smile, lazy and complacent; although there’s nothing more offensive than that, it’s hardly surprising that Updike would want to chang
e the name. And yet the name is integral to the story, part of an improvised memory game the young couple play on their way back home from Boston in their car: Clare tests her husband, Jack, on his knowledge of the names of the staff and residents of the camp. When she asks for the name of the fat man with the floppy fisherman’s hat, Jack can come up with only the first name, Walter. Later, lying in bed after Clare has fallen asleep, replaying scenes from their honeymoon idyll, the rustic, candlelit cabin at the summer camp, redolent of romance, Jack suddenly remembers—the surname pops into his head. He whispers it to his wife, knowing he won’t wake her, a bittersweet moment that reveals both the fissures in their marriage and his helpless nostalgia for those early days.
And what name, exactly, does Jack whisper? “Walter Palm” in the unpublished first draft; “Vergil Moss” in the version printed in The New Yorker; and “Walter Briggs” in the version printed in Pigeon Feathers, Updike’s second collection of stories. Along the way, Updike floated a handful of alternatives, including Edgar Sell, Edgar Moss, Edgar Neebe, Walter Bey, and, enjoying the joke, William Shawn.*
In all its various incarnations, “Walter Briggs” borrows freely and with unguarded precision from Updike’s own experience. Clare and Jack have been married five years and have two children, a girl of two and an infant boy. Clare resembles Mary down to the cadence of her speech and her habit of going around barefoot. Jack, meanwhile, driven by competitive urges and prone to mildly malicious teasing, is glib and funny, hypersensitive and obscurely dissatisfied; he yearns for intimacy but is in fact himself somewhat withdrawn and self-absorbed. He worries that the excitement has faded from his marriage, and he reflexively blames his wife. He is more fully characterized than she is: whereas the reader is privy to some of his thoughts, none of hers are revealed. The couple closely resemble Jane and Lee from “Incest,” and also Joan and Richard Maple from “Snowing in Greenwich Village”—in all three stories, Updike mines a domestic vein, exploring, as Katharine White urged him to, “the subtleties and affectionate and agonizing complexities” of how husband and wife get along.
Though he pilfered details from life to dramatize the young couples’ marital relations—looks and gestures and quips that speak of stresses and strains—it would be wrong to assume that the stories accurately reflect the state of his own marriage at the time. The stories highlight difficulties, submerged or half-submerged family tensions that animate ordinary domestic scenes. Like many of her fictional avatars, Mary had learned to maintain “a self-preserving detachment.” He clamored for attention; she occasionally withheld it. Acutely sensitive from childhood to the shifting moods of those around him (and to his own state of mind), John registered every twitch of annoyance, heard the echo of every private disappointment—but that’s not what filled his day, or Mary’s. The mood at Little Violet was cheerful; family life was busy, sometimes noisy and chaotic, as in any household where there are two children under three. Despite the burden of parenting, the relationship between John and Mary was warm and collaborative. She read his stories, poems, and casuals as soon as he had finished them, and again when editorial suggestions had been made, and sometimes even when they returned as author’s proofs. She was forthright in her opinions, and her husband regularly quoted her in his letters to Maxwell. When he was working on “A Gift from the City,” for example, Mary was disturbed that the “young Negro” who’s the catalyst for the action of the story is never given a name but repeatedly referred to as “the Negro.” John wrote to Maxwell a short letter in which Mary’s judgment is cited on three separate issues including the problem of “the Negro”; Maxwell, when he received this missive, circled Mary’s name and scribbled at the top, “one wife, one editor is all a man should have.” In fact, she never edited her husband’s work, strictly speaking, and her comments carried no special weight with The New Yorker—“the Negro” remained nameless after all—but it’s clear that Updike relied on her as a first reader and respected her views. He called her a “pricelessly sensitive reader” and acknowledged that she advanced her shrewd opinions with gentle tact. When he mentioned Mary in his letters to Maxwell and White, there was no doubting his affection or the strength of their bond.
For his part, John was a conscientious father, a help to his wife and loving with the children. “He was good with the first baby,” according to Mary, “and then he got better and better. He was willing to give baths and feed babies and bring me a baby to nurse in the middle of the night, to burp them. But he didn’t wash diapers, which I had to do by hand until I could find a Laundromat or a diaper service.” Although he was of some help with domestic chores, most of the housework and child care fell to Mary, if only because in Ipswich he soon established a regular routine that ate up most of the daylight hours. From breakfast until late lunch, he wrote. In that summer of 1957, when he was working on The Poorhouse Fair, he made up his mind to produce a minimum of three pages every morning (and many mornings, he did better). In the afternoon, he attended to other business—resolving editorial issues on stories and poems that had been bought by The New Yorker; checking and correcting galleys and proofs; and reading, for himself and also for the magazine, which was perpetually clamoring for casuals and light verse. His reading time often extended into the evening; his family reports that he always had a book in his hand. (The only place he didn’t read was in bed.) His schedule remained essentially the same for the next fifty years. He never seems to have had any difficulty in getting himself to start work, or to sit still and concentrate for the number of hours necessary to meet his three-page quota. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but he was effortlessly industrious.
Some of his afternoon reading was a way of courting inspiration for humorous writing. He’d flip through magazines and newspapers on the lookout for an item worth spoofing, some germ that might grow into a full-blown satire.* To Katharine White, who wrote in midsummer asking for casuals, he replied, “I came up here to get into a novel-writing groove. And have succeeded to the extent that I haven’t an idea in my head.” In September, when he’d nearly finished revising the draft of The Poorhouse Fair, she repeated her request, begging for “something funny and reasonably short”; he came up with “And Whose Little Generation Are You? Or, Astrology Refined,” a quirky riff on the folly of classifying people according to their generation (as in the “Lost Generation” and the “Silent Generation”). The idea came to him when he picked up an article by literary critic Leslie Fiedler in the May issue of The New Leader, a bloated essay ripe for parody, full of dubious, would-be-clever classifications. The specific irritant was a self-serving assertion about Updike’s age group: “The young, who should be fatuously but profitably attacking us, instead discreetly expand, analyze, and dissect us. How dull they are!” Updike actually quotes this pompous expostulation at the end of his casual, adding a clever kicker: “Anyone found discreetly expanding Leslie Fiedler may be assumed to be Silent.” Most of the casual is taken up with “The Roll of Generations,” Updike’s tongue-in-cheek description of the cohort born each year from 1925 to 1934 (the Silent Generation). For the year of his own birth, he veers surreally into field guide jargon:
b. 1932 The Cooler Generation. Much smaller and decidedly thinner than a song sparrow. Mostly blue-gray above, white beneath; white eye-ring, white-sided black tail. Voice: sharp speeng; high wiry chee zee zee. Prefers woodlands. Breeds north to southern parts of New Jersey, Michigan, Iowa. Winters along coast north to South Carolina.
Although amusingly absurd, this is hackwork, what he hoped to avoid by leaving New York—he would have called it an “afternoon labor.” The morning writing slot was reserved for higher purposes.
Many afternoons were filled, starting in the late summer of that first year, with long-distance fiddling with the contents, design, and title of his book of poems, which Harper had scheduled for publication in March 1958. The name of the book changed even more frequently than that of “Walter Briggs”; after Biscuits for Cerberus came Celery Hearts, G
ingerly, Enough Poems, Noble Numbers, Round Numbers, Verse, Wellmeant Verse, Whatnot, Hoping for a Hoopoe (which became the title of the English edition), and The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, the title Harper finally agreed to at the beginning of October. Finding the perfect title was a team effort, husband and wife (and mother) mulling over the possibilities. Each time he came up with a new idea, he tried it out on Mary; if it won her stamp of approval, he put it forward to Harper with a surge of confidence. Other matters he wrestled with on his own. He was as deeply involved in the making of this first book as he was in the making of the scores that followed. From the beginning, he was passionate about the physical object, the item you held in your hand—the feel of it, the look of it, even the smell of it. Early on he insisted to Lawrence that he had to have the last word on any editorial changes, however small; in the months that followed he sent off long, precise letters concerning typography and layout, the weight and color of the paper, the jacket illustration, and the design of the title page. No detail was too tiny for him to consider, and his focused attention summoned a corresponding attentiveness at Harper. When the book finally appeared he was delighted. Relieved not to find a single typo, he exclaimed, “The poetry book is a lovely job”—though he noted changes he would like to make to the layout of a couple of poems if ever there was a second printing. He told Lawrence how pleased he was that on the shelf the spine of the book was just as tall as the last section of Pound’s Cantos.
