by Begley, Adam
In later life he remembered Elizabeth Lawrence, indistinctly, as lanky and prissy, professionally capable but rather humorless. He liked her crisp voice over the telephone. When he wrote to her, his tone was businesslike but not unfriendly, occasionally sarcastic and jokey, but not flirtatious (as he was now and then in his letters to Katharine White); they certainly never settled into the kind of freewheeling good fellowship he enjoyed with Maxwell. When Updike waxed ironic, Lawrence was sometimes puzzled (“Is the young man joking?” she scrawled at the top of one of his letters; “I can’t decide”). She liked him, and wanted to hold on to him as a Harper author, but despite her good intentions and a flurry of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, she was too cautious and insufficiently deft to secure his loyalty.
The endgame played out as a two-month, slow-motion crack-up that would have shaken the confidence of a less sturdy writer. Shortly after he delivered the manuscript of The Poorhouse Fair in mid-December, he heard positive noises from Harper—Lawrence professed to be interested and admiring. Then, in a letter she sent off on the last day of 1957, she reversed field, telling him that she was “troubled about the impact of the story as a whole”; the second half, and in particular the ending, seemed weak to her, but as with Home, she was withholding final judgment until she could provide “a round-up of opinions” from other readers.
In addition to those other readers, Harper sought advice and assistance from Victor Gollancz, who had already bought the U.K. rights to The Carpentered Hen. Canfield was hoping that his British counterpart would offer to publish The Poorhouse Fair—subject to certain stipulated changes. The idea was to present a unified front; as Canfield put it in a letter, if Harper and Brothers and Victor Gollancz Ltd. took a “joint approach,” asking for roughly the same revisions, Updike would be more likely to comply. The plan collapsed, partly because Gollancz liked the book more than Canfield and Lawrence (on the evidence of the novel, the Englishman thought the budding author “too good to lose”) and partly because, as Lawrence recognized early on, Updike had a precocious sense of the sanctity of his own artistic aims: he was never inclined to compromise on what he considered essential matters, even when faced with concerted pressure. She declared that it would be “a mistake to publish [the novel] as it stands” and recommended that he cut it by a third and turn it into a “novelette,” a term that surely rankled. His response was to ask, politely, with expressions of regret, for a more precise accounting of the book’s defects—and to request the return of the manuscript. “I think we knew already,” Lawrence wrote to Canfield in a scribbled note at the top of Updike’s letter, “that this is a young man you take or leave, as is.” She nonetheless elaborated on her concerns, in a two-page letter that for Updike closed out the possibility that he would ever come to terms with Harper. She argued that the central thematic conflict (identified by Updike as “humanism vs. supernaturalism”) is “not carried to a satisfactory or satisfying conclusion.” (What she refrained from telling him was that she believed the novel’s fate in the marketplace “could be dismal.”*) Updike responded to her letter by saying he had always intended to leave the thematic conflict unresolved; “You went to the heart of its unacceptability to Harper,” he wrote, “which is also the heart of the book.” In subsequent letters, Lawrence tried to reassure Updike that “the doors at Harper’s are wide open,” not just to him but to the novel; he remained convinced, however, that they were shut tight. He complained to Maxwell about the difficulty of convincing Harper that it had in fact turned the novel down.
Indeed unwilling to let go, Canfield wrote to Katharine White to ask whether she thought Updike might be cajoled into making revisions. She replied with a long, exceptionally frank letter that failed to answer the question—she was in Maine; she no longer “handled” Updike, was less frequently in touch with him, and therefore couldn’t know how he was likely to react—but she did deliver an opinion on the state of his career. She was not surprised that Canfield didn’t like the novel—“I always felt that he was starting to write one too soon.” She continued in the same vein:
It is still a moot question whether fiction is his best vein, though please never say this to him. He is, perhaps, too versatile for his own good and my personal feeling is that he is at his best when writing satire and humor and perhaps even essays. But I doubt that he thinks so at the moment, and every so often he writes a really brilliant short story that is novelistic in treatment, so I could well be wrong.
She lamented the trend of publishers pushing their authors to produce novels rather than books of short stories or humor or satire—“so in the minds of young writers like John . . . the novel is it—is ‘a must.’ ” Having vented her general frustration, she returned to the case of the young writer in question:
Well, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for John. Anything could happen to him—good or bad. We all worry about him, and he is so very self-doubting, though putting up a front of being just the opposite, that he is probably sunk by Harper’s decision on his novel.
White’s worry is a reminder of how precarious his situation was, and of how difficult it was to interpret behavior that veered from youthful bravado (John in amiable jester mode) to uneasy, awkward, and apologetic (John’s aw-shucks pose, which could easily be mistaken for a lack of confidence). Two novels in a row had been turned down—or at least that’s the way he saw it. Although he had a book of light verse on the way, and an enviably smooth working relationship with The New Yorker, his only source of income was his writing (he estimated in late 1958 that he was making ten thousand dollars a year), and he had a wife and two tiny children to support. White believed he was self-doubting, but there’s actually no sign that he was “sunk” by the rejection; it did no apparent damage to his self-esteem. On the contrary, only four days after hearing the bad news from Harper, he felt self-assured enough to buy his first house.
The lease on Little Violet was due to run out at the end of March, and the Updikes, thoroughly settled after just ten months in Ipswich, took the plunge. They bought a classic saltbox, a large seventeenth-century house complete with a massive central chimney and a plaque beside the front door with the name and date: the Polly Dole House, 1686. Squeezed onto a small plot on the corner of East and County Streets, it was just a few blocks from the center of the town. The upstairs was a warren of small rooms, more than a family of four would normally need, but John wasn’t in the mood for caution or restraint. The big downstairs living room, with its foot-wide floorboards and walk-in Colonial fireplace, perfectly expressed his expansive sense of well-being. Just when Katharine White expected him to be rattled, he made a grand gesture of faith in his future prospects, taking out a mortgage to finance the $18,500 purchase. “I am now deeply in debt and quite panicked,” he told Maxwell, comically exaggerating his anxiety with a description of the house as a fourteen-room tumbledown pile teetering on a corner plot shared with the neighborhood dump. One reason for his high spirits was a lift given him by The New Yorker: Maxwell had just accepted “The Alligators” (the story in which Olinger was given its name), and Updike felt, as he told his editor, a tremendous sense of excitement; he declared himself “ready to disgorge the whole mass of Pennsylvania.” That is what he then did over the next half-dozen years, spinning out a dazzling sequence of stories—including “The Happiest I’ve Been” (written just three weeks after “The Alligators”), “Flight,” “Pigeon Feathers,” and a run of others, all collected in Olinger Stories (1964)—as well as Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; and Of the Farm. Tapping into the rich vein of Berks County material, buying real estate in Ipswich, and weathering the rejection of The Poorhouse Fair—all in the space of a few days in late January 1958—Updike (still shy of his twenty-sixth birthday) was indeed at a juncture where, as White put it, anything could happen to him. But he knew what he’d accomplished so far, and he knew what he still had inside him (“I was full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say”), so he pushed ahead, trusting in his talent.*
His
optimism and his faith in his writing were rewarded almost instantly. Tony Bailey, his New Yorker pal, visiting Ipswich at the end of February with his new bride, listened sympathetically to the story of Harper’s obtuse hesitation and suggested that Updike send a carbon copy of the manuscript of The Poorhouse Fair to Stewart (“Sandy”) Richardson, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Updike took Bailey’s advice. Less than two weeks later, a “wildly enthusiastic” Richardson bought the novel, accepting it without reservation. By the end of March, Updike was under contract with Knopf; he would stay with the publisher for the rest of his life.
For an author with literary ambitions and a passion for attractive, well-made books, Alfred A. Knopf was the ideal place to be. By the time Updike appeared, it had been for several decades the premier literary publisher in America, well known for beautiful bindings and brilliantly designed dust jackets. Run by its eponymous founder and his wife, Blanche, a flamboyant, globetrotting couple who were in their mid-sixties (and often at each other’s throats) when Updike signed his first contract, the company specialized in novels and poetry; D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, H. L Mencken, Robert Graves, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and John Hersey were among the American and English stars on the list. The house also published in translation a great many distinguished authors, including Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Jorge Amado, André Gide, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yukio Mishima, and Yasunari Kawabata. Far and away its greatest commercial success was the publication in 1923 of a slender book of prose poems by a Lebanese-born writer, Khalil Gibran; The Prophet went on to become one of the bestselling books of all time, and a constant stream of revenue for the publisher.
Even before he’d signed his Knopf contract, Updike sent Sandy Richardson a long letter about the dust jacket (with sketches enclosed) and the design of the “inner aspect of the book,” down to the tiniest detail of typography. He was jumping right in, as he had with Elizabeth Lawrence, eager to master the ins and outs of the printing process and hoping to influence every aspect of production. Richardson greeted his three-page missive with alarm and amusement, calling it “fine and helpful”—then asking, “Do I sense here a universal man?” They established from the beginning a bantering rapport, trading witticisms with competitive fervor, and might have become fast friends had Richardson not been fired in mid-November 1958, just weeks before the publication of The Poorhouse Fair.
In the normal course of events, Updike might have had fairly limited contact with Alfred Knopf himself, but because of Richardson’s sudden dismissal, and because Updike never had an agent and was always obsessively attentive to design and production—an obsession Knopf shared—for several years publisher and author exchanged letters on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. The tone of Updike’s letters was amiable, even friendly, but not playful, and not affectionate or conspiratorial as it was with Maxwell. A brilliant publisher with a genuine enthusiasm for literature, Knopf was a vibrant character: portly, with Burnside whiskers, and proud of his sartorial flair—he favored brightly colored shirts and vivid neckties. Updike described him as a cross between a Viennese emperor and a Barbary pirate. In the office, he was prone to bullying; he permitted himself to harangue his employees, to batter them with barbed memos, and to fire them summarily, as in the case of poor Richardson. The friction with his wife was the stuff of company legend. To Updike he was unfailingly polite and occasionally avuncular; he was thorough, businesslike, and decisive, which suited Updike just fine—he didn’t want to be any friendlier with the Knopfs than professional courtesy required. In the beginning, anyway, he was content to have found another publisher so quickly and easily. In early November 1958, when he finally held in his hands a finished copy of his first novel, he was dizzy with delight.
“I WROTE THE Poorhouse Fair as an anti-novel,” he once told an interviewer, underscoring an affinity with what came to be called the “nouveau roman.” Elsewhere he claimed that he wrote it as “a deliberate anti–Nineteen Eighty-Four.” While it’s true that The Poorhouse Fair has an unconventional form (a “queer shape,” he called it), not entirely unlike that of certain avant-garde French novels of the 1950s, and that it presents a future nowhere near as scary as the one Orwell imagined, Updike’s novel is perhaps better described as an anti–first novel. The great majority of first novels dote on the author’s younger days, offering a backward glance masquerading more or less successfully as fiction; but Updike’s first novel looks forward twenty years, peering uncertainly at a mildly dystopian tomorrow, and the characters (none of whom even remotely resembles the author) are mostly geriatric. More than half a century after its publication, The Poorhouse Fair remains, at first glance, a very odd debut—why was this very young man writing about the very old? And why was he fooling around with prognostications?
Trying to explain himself with the awkward self-consciousness of an author obliged to defend his work, he told Elizabeth Lawrence that the novel was about the future—“what will become of us, having lost our faith?” It begins and ends with more questions (“What’s this?” and “What was it?”). As the story wends its way to a nonconclusion, after the anticlimactic stoning of the prefect Connor, the narrative is overwhelmed by a babble of disembodied voices, some familiar but none explicitly identified. Questions go unanswered; strands of other stories intrude, and those stories, too, are left hanging—as Updike conceded, his novel is radically indeterminate, a celebration of life’s inconclusiveness. One could argue that there’s a kind of modesty in presenting to the world a first novel that simply shrugs and stops, unwilling to propose any solution to the thematic conflict or a satisfying sense of closure to the plot. On the other hand, it’s hard to be humble about a tour de force. To pull off this open-ended novel, he needed a healthy measure of artistic hubris, confidence in the naked power of his writing.
His courage came from two very different sources: Henry Green’s example (acknowledged handsomely, albeit belatedly, in an introduction to a 1977 edition of Green’s Concluding); and the power of Updike’s own boyhood memories. He traced the inspiration for the novel to a visit made to his parents in March 1957, just days before the move to Ipswich. He had seen that the County Home that used to stand at the end of his street in Shillington, an immense poorhouse set in acres of grounds, a looming feature of his early years, was being razed. (“Out of the hole where it had been came the desire to write a futuristic novel in commemoration of the fairs that I had attended [there] as a child.”) He also wanted to commemorate his maternal grandfather, John Franklin Hoyer, who had died in September 1953, shortly after John and Mary were married. Because his grandfather (and grandmother) featured vividly in his earliest memories, Updike “had no fear,” as he told an interviewer, “of writing about old people.”
John Hoyer—“in his way a distinguished man”—was a looming presence in a household where young John was the only child. Although there was tension between Linda and her father (tension often dramatized in her fiction, and which in real life caused her temper to flare), between the old man and his grandson, who was named after him, there was a strong bond of affection. “He loved me, and I loved him,” Updike remembered a half century later. “His creaking high-buttoned shoes, the eloquence of his slightly wheezy voice, the stoic set of his mouth beneath his grizzled mustache, the afterscent of his cigars were present to me, day after day, throughout my growing up.” John F. Hook, one of the two central characters in The Poorhouse Fair, is an “oblique monument” to John F. Hoyer, an affectionate, clear-eyed portrait that speaks with the voice of the original. When at the end of the novel, a tired Hook says, “The time is ap-proaching when us old fellas should be climbing the wooden hill,” Updike is not only mimicking the characteristic cadence of his grandfather’s speech (the hint of performance, and the exaggerated separation of syllables in “ap-proaching”) but also borrowing one of his pet expressions (calling a flight of stairs “the wooden hill”). Hook and the other inmates of the poorhouse are entirely convincing—in itself a remarkable accom
plishment—but what’s even more remarkable is the sympathy with which they’re drawn; Updike evidently transferred to these old people his openhearted reverence for his grandfather.
The inventory of items Updike borrowed from Henry Green’s Concluding (1948) is ample and accurate:
[A]n old estate housing a vague State-run institution (a girls’ school, in Green’s case), a not-too-distant time-to-come (fifty-five years hence, Concluding’s jacket flap stated in 1948), an elderly monosyllabic hero (Mr. Rock), a multileveled action drifting through one day’s time, a holiday (Green’s fête, Founder’s Day, even falls like the poorhouse fair, on a Wednesday), heraldic animals, much meteorological detail, and a willful impressionist style.
Of course an impressionist style can’t be imitated without the talent to do so, and in general the borrowing doesn’t diminish Updike’s achievement, which was to combine two traits he admired in Green: an “offhand-and-backwards-feeling verbal and psychological accuracy” and “absolute empathy.” The result was exquisite writing and a wonderfully sensitive portrait of characters who might have remained foreign and remote.
As Whitney Balliett noted in The New Yorker’s review of The Poorhouse Fair, it’s a “classic, if not flawless” example of a poetic novel.* The events at the Diamond County Home for the Aged were meant to take place some two decades in the future, but even when the novel was published, its setting seemed more dreamlike (surreal and unsettling) than futuristic; Balliett thought it less a novel than a “poetic vision.” Though extravagant in his praise of the young author’s prose (a “poet’s care and sensitivity lie lightly on every word, on each hand-turned sentence, in each surprising and exact metaphor and simile”), Balliett complained about a lack of “emotional content” and worried that the reader might come away from the book “untouched.” He added a parenthetical comment that rings especially true from the distance of more than half a century: “curiously, one never thinks of liking or disliking it.” The skill on display makes it an easy novel to admire, even if a perceptible degree of emotional restraint does muffle its impact. It’s not a book that appeals to the heart, but it would be unfair to call it heartless; the fully realized humanity of the characters, especially the elderly poorhouse inmates, is proof of the author’s compassion, a capacity for fellow feeling somehow missing from the narrative itself.
