by Begley, Adam
Balliett’s verdict—“Mr. Updike is a writer’s writer”—must have pleased a young man who had set up as his idols Green, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce, and perhaps The Poorhouse Fair is best read today as a statement of writerly intent and a demonstration of precocious talent, as though the young author were presenting his credentials as an aspiring textual titan. There are passages where the writing seems a pure expression of joy, of intense pleasure taken in the act of composition. When, for example, an elderly inmate passing through the poorhouse infirmary frets about hospitalization and surgery, the subject is grim, the prose incongruously ecstatic:
Even more than black death he dreaded the gaudy gate: the mask of sweet red rubber, the violet overhead lights, the rattling ride through washed corridors, the steaming, breathing, percolating apparatus, basins of pink sterilizer, the firm straps binding every limb, the sacred pure garb of the surgeons, their eyes alone showing, the cute knives and angled scissors, the beat of your own heart pounding through the burnished machinery, the green color of the surgeon’s enormous compassionate eyes, framed, his quick breath sucking and billowing the gauze of his mask as he carved.
In an essay about fictional houses, Updike recalled “the thrill of power with which, in my first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, I set characters roaming the corridors of an immense imaginary mansion”—that is, the corridors of the poorhouse. The power to imagine, to invent, to play, gave him a kick more powerful than the craftsman’s quiet satisfaction in a job well done. Echoes of that thrill are clearly audible in the sentences just quoted; one can readily imagine his excitement, imagine him sitting alone at his desk in the back room of Little Violet, his head teeming with bright descriptive phrases and freshly minted characters. He was happy, even jubilant—and this explains, in part, how he came to be so prolific an author: he wanted to recapture that feeling, to enjoy again and again the rush of euphoria.
This particular novel also served deeper needs. The struggle between Hook, armed with unshakeable religious convictions, and the radically secular prefect, Connor—a well-intentioned humanist who’s not just areligious but also someone who’s “lost all sense of omen”—is an imaginative projection of his own ongoing spiritual crisis. The clash of these characters is unresolved because the author’s internal conflict was, too. Fear of death is endemic in the poorhouse, if only because the aged inmates are inescapably conscious of the grave—but again, their anxiety reflects Updike’s own. He was anxious about the future as well (“What will become of us . . . ?”), perfectly understandably in the circumstances: he’d recently quit his job and moved with his young wife to a new town, infant and toddler in tow; the book he’d worked on for more than a year, Home, his novel about the past—his own and his family’s—had been spurned; he had no fixed salary to depend on. Only recently settled in Ipswich, and not yet entirely settled professionally, he wrote about what happens next in a book whose title alludes to one possible outcome: the poverty attendant on failure. As he candidly acknowledged, he inherited a Depression mentality: “My father was always afraid he’d have to go to the poorhouse any minute . . . and I guess I work hard because I have the same fear.” Unfounded and outdated, that worry was still intermittently potent.
It could be that he was also writing about his recurring urge to escape. In the early 1990s he gave the keynote speech at a Chicago Humanities Festival on the large topic of freedom and equality; in it he mentioned the major action of The Poorhouse Fair: “My first novel . . . showed the rebellion of the inmates of a charitable institution against their nobly intentioned, even saintly administrator; with an ineffectual hail of rocks, they voted against his benevolent order. . . . Is not such a rebellion against a benevolent but confining order a deeply human protest?” It’s perhaps too far-fetched to think of the poorhouse as in some way analogous to the benevolent but confining order of The New Yorker, with Connor a transfigured version of the “saintly” Mr. Shawn. But Updike did begin The Poorhouse Fair in the immediate aftermath of his “defection” from the magazine; and a year later, when Knopf accepted the novel (on virtually the same day that Harper published The Carpentered Hen), Updike’s liberation was complete. He told Richardson that he wanted the book “disentangled” from the Forty-Third Street nexus: “I love the magazine like a parent, but I wrote the book as a distinct activity.” The New Yorker would remain a steady source of “whale-sized checks,” but now, with a novel sold and a book of verse already printed and on its way to bookstores, he could claim the status of a bona fide freelance author. His flight from New York was precisely the escape he’d hoped for: he was now a solo act.
A solo act with a new, adoring audience. By the time the family moved into the new house at 26 East Street, just a few days after John’s twenty-sixth birthday, he and Mary were already part of a clearly defined social set, a group of Ipswich residents who had coalesced the previous autumn, when “Sunday sports”—a vigorous afternoon game of touch football (or basketball, or volleyball) followed by drinks—suddenly became a weekend ritual, sacrosanct in the Updike household.
“My wife and I found ourselves in a kind of ‘swim’ of equally young married couples,” he reported in Self-Consciousness. “There was a surge of belonging.” The first stirrings of their social life actually came thanks to music, not sport: soon after they moved into Little Violet, the Updikes received a phone call from a couple who were planning to form a recorder group. Three couples were involved at first; they met to play chamber music on alternate Wednesdays. Mary played the alto recorder, John the tenor. By the end of May, John could report to Bill Maxwell that Mary played very well; in June, on a trip to New York, he bought himself a new instrument. Despite his devotion to the jukebox tunes of his youth, he had never thought of himself as particularly musical. (When he was a boy, his Shillington piano lessons came to nothing.) Now, however, he diligently set about learning to read music.
With the warmer weather, the young families of Ipswich began to spend sunny days at Crane Beach, and the Updikes’ circle of friends expanded—the children mingling, then the mothers, then the fathers. The fathers began playing touch football together, and within a year or so the contours of the group—roughly a dozen couples, with half that number as the nucleus—were more or less fixed. The “surge of belonging” included cultural and community activities. In addition to the Sunday sports and the recorder group, there was a foreign policy discussion group, a singing group, and a life-drawing club. John joined the Ipswich Historical Commission and various church committees; Mary joined the garden club. They both attended town meetings about schools, sewage, and other civic matters. Some weeks there was a group activity nearly every night. And with their new friends they engaged in a whirl of cocktail soirées and clambakes, dinner parties and dancing, with some kind of get-together, planned or impromptu, almost every weekend.
But it was Sunday afternoon, perhaps even more than Saturday night, that bound the group together. The games began at about two o’clock, with some stragglers arriving late. They played for at most a couple of hours, after which they went off to one house or another, the venue chosen at the last minute, to drink a beer or a glass of wine or perhaps a gin and tonic. Sunday sports was a family occasion, though the wives played only if the game was volleyball or tennis. If the weather was particularly good, there would be a few spectators watching the game; often the numbers swelled toward evening when those who’d skipped the sports arrived for drinks. The children ran around in a pack, absentmindedly supervised, and the party broke up in time for their supper, tired families piling into station wagons and driving the short distance home. The Updikes attended faithfully. For John, it was a sequel to morning church. The sport itself was important to him; he played with enthusiasm and moderate skill, competition, as always, rousing him. Yet he also craved the human contact, the proximity of his new band of friends.
John and Mary had other friends in town, some of them of their parents’ generation, and they had friends in Cambridge, Boston, an
d New York. They drove to Boston for concerts and to visit the museums. Their life, in other words, did not revolve exclusively around the Sunday sports crowd—but these new friends captured Updike’s imagination, and soon enough they began popping up in his fiction.
WHO WERE THEY? The couples—his novel of that name makes it impossible to call them anything else—were white, mostly Protestant, college-educated,* and worldly in a way one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in a somewhat scruffy small town like Ipswich, with a sizable ethnic and blue-collar population (left over from the heyday of the hosiery mills). They were not natives (not “locals” or “townies”); they had moved to the area as a matter of choice—what a later generation would call a lifestyle choice. They had not, as a rule, come to Ipswich to take a job; the men were professionals, many of them commuting to Boston on the B&M line. There were two doctors, one of them a pediatrician; the owner of the town’s newspaper; a pathologist; a lawyer who didn’t practice law; a building contractor; a minister; an administrator in the careers office at MIT and another at Harvard; a salesman for Wedgewood; and a couple of stockbrokers. All the women were pregnant, or recently pregnant, or about to be pregnant, and almost all were full-time housewives; some were active in community affairs, members of the League of Women Voters, and otherwise politically engaged, especially as the sixties wore on.* Several of the couples were wealthy; none were poor. For the first few years, the Updikes were the least financially secure of their friends.
Although there had been grand families in the vicinity since the nineteenth century—pockets of rich and refined summer residents who came up from Boston and Cambridge and built substantial houses along the North Shore’s Gold Coast—Ipswich itself was less popular with the wealthy. The imposing houses on Argilla Road, which leads out to the beach, were mostly built in previous centuries as summer cottages, and in many cases the descendants of the original owners now lived in them year-round, and constituted the town’s upper crust. One of the “genial grandees of Argilla Road” was Lovell Thompson, a distinguished publishing executive at Houghton Mifflin. Thompson would invite the Updikes for dinner with writers on the Houghton list; he also urged John and Mary to make use of his tennis court. Homer White, who wrote articles about Spain for Harper’s Magazine, was another member of the “cultivated older generation,” as Updike put it, “that had us frisky young folks in for drinks.” Despite the presence of an established bourgeoisie, there was the perception that Ipswich had only recently been discovered as a desirable location just beyond the recognized commuter belt. The frisky young folks (known to the older generation as the “Junior Jet Set”) were in a sense pioneers, establishing a new community, integrated with the town yet fractionally aloof. They were a privileged, affluent suburban crowd in an exurban setting.
And a remarkably cohesive group. That they remained so close for so long (about fifteen years) must be at least in part the result of a dynamic specific to the group—these particular individuals wanted to be together, perhaps even needed to be together, and found a way to make it work. It seems clear that the time and place were also ripe for an unbuttoned pursuit of happiness. Ipswich was congenial; idyllic, even—“a kind of playground for adults” is how Updike once described Tarbox, his name for Ipswich in his fiction. In the summer, there was the splendid beach; in the fall (football season) the intermittently picturesque downtown was beautified by turning leaves; in the winter the ponds and rivers froze obligingly for ice-skating, and on one or two nearby hills, rope tows dragged eager skiers to the top of gentle slopes (actual ski resorts were a few hours north, in New Hampshire); in the spring the municipal golf course beckoned and the warmer weather promised another round of seaside pleasures. The marquee of the downtown movie theater, the Strand, announced a new film every week.
History, too, played its part, pausing, so to speak, to let the couples take advantage of postwar prosperity and the post-McCarthy, post-Korea, pre-Vietnam political stability, epitomized by the reliably calm and moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower. If Ike’s steady hand allowed them free and easy enjoyment of their leisure time, the election of his successor, John Kennedy, signaled a generational shift—young and glamorous, Kennedy blew in, a fresh breeze promising change. We can look back and with hindsight decide that Updike and his friends sensed in the air a new permissiveness, a loosening of the social fabric, and seized on it as a license to frolic. Also with hindsight, it’s tempting to say that, like other members of their generation in other towns and other states, they went too far, frolicked too freely. But I suspect that, at the time, they merely thought they were making the most of happy circumstances.
The women seemed “gorgeous” to Updike, the men “knowledgeable and staunch,” and he worked hard to gain their approval, mostly by making himself into a sparkling entertainer, a witty, clowning charmer. His Ipswich self, he once remarked, was a “delayed second edition” of his high school self. Bubbling over with enthusiasm, he all but begged to be acknowledged as the life of the party. And if he felt neglected, he was quick to do something about it; as one of his new friends told Time magazine, “If he’s not being paid enough attention, he’ll fall off the couch.” He made fun of his eagerness to please in a poem composed in May 1959; he considered calling it “Post-Mortem” but settled on “Thoughts While Driving Home”:
Was I clever enough? Was I charming?
Did I make at least one good pun?
Was I disconcerting? Disarming?
Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?
The answer, inevitably, was yes—yes, he was fun, and quickly became a ringleader with the self-appointed task of organizing party games. He especially loved variants of Botticelli, in which whoever is “it” assumes a secret identity that the others must guess. Stepping back, we can see that by playing court jester to this group of affable but ordinary suburbanites, Updike was in a sense masking his identity as an artist, as someone whose true allegiance was not to his friends but to his writing. At work, during the hours he spent at his desk, he remained an outsider (a teenager with a special destiny; a hick among sophisticates; a poor boy among the rich; a churchgoer among the faithless). At play, he insinuated himself into the warm heart of things. Being a cherished member of the gang answered a deep need, and in that sense he was being true both to himself and to his friends. In his memoirs, he promotes them to the status of honorary siblings (“The sisters and brothers I had never had”); they certainly made an outsize impact on both his private life and his career. If his parents and grandparents gave him the bulk of his Olinger material, the couples gave him Tarbox. And if his mother’s unwavering love and unconditional approbation fueled his early flight, the collective adoration of the couples sustained him as he soared higher still.
It was important to him that they knew him before he was famous, that the friendship was formed, as he said, “on the basis of what I did in person rather than what I did in print.” The couples embraced him before his first novel was published. As far as they were concerned, the fact that he was a writer was incidental, at least in the first few years—unusual, somewhat intriguing, but otherwise insignificant. Books weren’t of vital importance in this milieu—it was not a literary crowd—and that suited him, up to a point. Happy though he was to segregate his professional and social life, to leave literature behind when he left his desk, he could be fairly certain that his new pals would be aware of what he “did in print.” Almost all of them had been New Yorker subscribers before he made their acquaintance, and almost all of them bought copies of The Carpentered Hen and The Poorhouse Fair as soon as they came out. As the years went by and his reputation grew, and scenes lifted from their lives began to crop up in his fiction, they of course read with sharpened interest. They were his audience, a representative sample of his readership right there on the other side of the volleyball net, demographically ideal. A new issue of The New Yorker would arrive in the mail every Friday morning, so that all of them had the opportunity to flip through in search of the la
test Updike before the start of the weekend’s entertainments. If he did have a piece in the magazine, however, it would usually go unmentioned; he wasn’t quizzed or congratulated or scolded. There was never any explicit taboo forbidding discussion of his writing, or any incident that warned his friends to refrain from comment, but somehow the topic didn’t come up, at least not in his presence, and reticence eventually became the norm, thereby preserving the illusion that his success as an author was irrelevant—not a factor in the group dynamic.
In the early days, actually, what he did during his solitary working hours—the mornings at the typewriter, the bookish afternoons—had little to do with the couples crowd and little to do with Ipswich. As a writer, up until early 1962, he was very much preoccupied with Berks County (Plowville, Shillington, Reading), both in his stories and in his novels; it’s not too much of a stretch to say that he lived there most mornings. A particularly striking example of his immersion in that beloved Pennsylvania geography is “The Happiest I’ve Been,” which is narrated by John Nordholm, the teenage protagonist of “Friends from Philadelphia” (not only the first story Updike sold to The New Yorker but also the first Olinger story and the first story in The Same Door, his debut collection). Now a college sophomore, John has been home for Christmas at his parents’ farm and is leaving again, heading to Chicago to see a girl he met in a fine arts course, hitching a ride from his friend Neil. But no sooner are the boys in the car, out of sight of the farm and presumably on their way, than Neil suggests a detour to a New Year’s Eve party in Olinger. (The fictional John is surprised to learn about the party; the real-life John knew all about it—it was the “beautifully non-intellectual brawl” he’d been pining for up in Cambridge.) After the party, they take a further detour into Alton; only at dawn do they finally set off on their long westward journey. The farm, the town, the city—when an adult John Nordholm looks fondly back on the events of that night, Updike is taking us on a pilgrimage to all three of his holy sites.
