Updike

by Begley, Adam

  He began writing “The Happiest I’ve Been” in late January 1958 and sent off a draft to Maxwell on February 7; The New Yorker published it eleven months later, in the first issue of 1959. (In those days the magazine had a fetish about running stories so that the fictional events coincided with the date on the calendar, and this one featured a New Year’s Eve party.) A pivotal story in the evolution of his work, it marked both an ending and a beginning. Updike knew as soon as he finished it that it would round out the book of short stories he saw taking shape: placed at the end, it would provide a pleasing unity, with John Nordholm appearing first and last. (Hence the title: the reader goes in and out the same door.) To Elizabeth Lawrence he wrote that, in his mind, the story “clicked the collection shut.”* He also claimed to have been tremendously excited by the possibilities it seemed to open up: “While writing it,” he explained, “I had a sensation of breaking through, as if through a thin sheet of restraining glass, to material, to truth, previously locked up.” A breakthrough is more dramatically satisfying than gradual improvement—he’d actually been working with similar material on and off for about five years—but because “The Happiest I’ve Been” is indeed markedly more successful and substantial than the previous Olinger stories (“Friends from Philadelphia” and “The Alligators”), Updike’s account rings true. He had found, in John Nordholm’s tender reminiscence, in his muted, clear-eyed celebration of the mundane, an approach to his subject that was fresh and compelling. “I believed,” he later wrote, “that there was a body of my fellow Americans to whom these modest doings in Pennsylvania would be news.”

  The modest doings are imagined with magical intensity. Here’s the moment at the farm when John is saying good-bye:

  I embraced my mother and over her shoulder with the camera of my head tried to take a snapshot I could keep of the house, the woods behind it and the sunset behind them, the bench beneath the walnut tree where my grandfather cut apples into skinless bits and fed them to himself, and the ruts the bakery truck had made in the soft lawn that morning.

  The detail grows more specific as the sentence progresses (as though the camera were zooming in), and more telling, so that we begin with the generic (house, woods, sunset), steal a glimpse of a meticulous and somewhat selfish old man, and finish with the fresh ruts in the lawn, the objective correlative for the imprint that this “snapshot” has made on John’s memory. The valedictory tone of the passage is sustained throughout the story, even in the midst of hectic comings and goings at the Olinger party. “The party was the party I had been going to all my life,” John tells us—and focuses his mental camera on his fellow revelers, his old high school crowd, his gang. He’s distressed by any hint that they have changed or are changing. They are representative of his childhood; as he puts it, they had “attended my life’s party.” He is at once eager to leave his childhood behind (to fly, as most Updike mothers promised), and to preserve the past intact, to protect and cherish it. The tension between these two impulses supplies the emotional power here, as it does in many of the Olinger stories.

  In his 1985 speech on the creative imagination, Updike quoted at length a passage from “The Happiest I’ve Been” about a game of Ping-Pong played in the basement by John, another boy, and two girls, while the party carries on upstairs. Updike drew attention to two fragments of descriptive detail, a glimpse of a girl’s shaved armpit “like a bit of chicken skin” and, on the basement floor near a lawn mower, “empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles”—insignificant, almost microscopic details that provide, in Updike’s Jamesian phrase, an “abrupt purchase on lived life”: in their insignificance and irrefutable authenticity, they acquire, he claimed, “the intensity of proclamation.” But they resonate in other ways as well. While John is playing Ping-Pong, he spies the white cups of the girls’ bras as they lunge forward in their semiformal dresses; after the game, one of the girls leans on John while she slips her heels back on. As Updike later noted, there’s an undercurrent of “blurred sexuality” to this basement scene. Some of John’s friends at the party are still involved in the maudlin romantic crises of late adolescence; a few wear engagement rings; and one awkward couple is already wed. John himself is itching to make his getaway to Chicago, the sooner to see the girl waiting for him (“a girl . . . who, if I asked, would marry me”). In this context, on the threshold of adulthood, a shaved armpit gleaming like chicken skin and triangular puncture holes in empty oil cans seem somewhat less random; they suggest, among other things, innocence lost and time draining away.

  This is a story about leaving home, leaving friends behind, leaving childhood behind. Even as a college sophomore, the young man is already jealously hoarding memories; as he contemplates his classmates, he feels “a warm keen dishevelment.” Looking back after the passage of an unspecified number of years, he wallows in sentiment, straining to recapture the unique sensation of an experience consigned to memory. Updike’s task is to convey both the remembered sensation and the emotion (nostalgia’s bittersweet tang) evoked by its passing. At the very end, the mood shifts: driving west across Pennsylvania in the early morning light while Neil snores beside him on the front seat, John is engulfed by a wave of happiness that lifts the story and gives it a quietly triumphant feel.

  “The Happiest I’ve Been” tells us nothing about John Nordholm’s adult life; we don’t know why he feels so deeply nostalgic, though the title (nostalgia distilled) invites us to suppose that he’s never been as purely, powerfully happy as he suddenly was that morning driving west. That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s currently unhappy or regretful. In fact, the exultant note struck at the end of the story is entirely consonant with John Updike’s own enviable situation at the time of writing: the college sophomore who drove with a friend from Plowville to Chicago, who married the fine arts major, who worked hard to become a successful freelance writer, had just bought a house of his own in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and surrounded himself with a brand-new circle of friends, a grown-up gang throwing grown-up parties. Acknowledging the autobiographical basis of the story in his speech on creativity, he told his audience,

  In 1958 I was at just the right distance from the night in Shillington, Pennsylvania, when 1952 became 1953; I still remembered and cared, yet was enough distant to get a handle on the memories, to manipulate them into fiction.

  What he’s measuring with the phrase “enough distant” is the gap between Ipswich and Shillington, between adulthood and adolescence, between the couples crowd and his old high school gang. Though he spent many a lonely morning getting a handle on Berks County memories, weekends he was living happily in New England, in a perfectly agreeable and abundantly sociable present tense. Any nostalgia of his own, he cultivated for literary purposes only.

  His ability to parcel himself out between locations, to live as it were simultaneously in Ipswich and Olinger, is symptomatic of a talent for compartmentalization that he perfected as he grew older. Already, by the time he moved into the Polly Dole House, he had taken up two new pastimes, poker and golf, activities he established as realms separate from both his domestic and his professional life. Other compartments, church and adultery among them, leaked in awkward ways, but poker and golf were reliably watertight.

  Because it fitted with a fantasy of what college life might be like, Updike had listed poker (along with chess and cartooning) as one of his “special interests” in the 1950 Harvard Registrar; in fact his only high school memory of the game was “a shy try at strip poker in someone’s parents’ attic.” A Harvard classmate, Austin Briggs, first met Updike during a freshman year penny-ante game in Hollis. “He was an utterly striking figure with his lean almost emaciated frame and bird-beak nose,” Briggs recalled. “He was playing big-time gambler more than poker, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and in costume with a green eyeshade and sleeve garters on his shirt.”* He might have been tempted to dress up in a similar style when he was invited, on a chilly afternoon in December 1957—nine mo
nths after he’d arrived in town—to the first poker night organized by the owner of an Ipswich auto parts store and the local pediatrician. It was an all-male contingent, more socially diverse than the couples crowd. (The town cobbler first took a seat at the table in the late sixties and was still playing forty-odd years later.) They convened every other Wednesday, for low stakes: nickels and dimes until they made the minimum bet a quarter in 1960. Poker night was a raucous event in the early days, drenched in beer and wreathed in smoke. The camaraderie, and the sense of belonging, was for Updike the principal attraction; he confessed, in fact, to being only a mediocre player: “I am careless, neglecting to count cards, preferring to sit there in a pleasant haze of bewilderment and anticipation.” In 2004 he noted that he’d been playing with more or less the same men for nearly half a century, and that in the meantime he’d “changed houses, church denominations, and wives. My publisher has been sold and resold. Only my children command a longer loyalty than this poker group.” Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this durable attachment is that he was far less passionate about poker than he was about golf.

  His first swing of a golf club came just a few months after the move to Ipswich. A relative of Mary’s—she was actually her mother’s cousin, but Mary called her aunt—lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts; she was a keen golfer, and in her shady backyard showed Updike how to grip a driver, then told him he had a “wonderful natural swing.” She took him to her local club to get him started. “The average golfer,” he later wrote, “is hooked when he hits his first good shot.” In his case, the addiction was immediate and enduring. In the fall of that year, he wrote his first golf story, “Intercession,” in which Paul, a young man who resembles Updike—he writes the plot for a syndicated cartoon strip—has recently been “initiated” into the game by his wife’s uncle. Out on a golf course on his own for the first time, on a drought-stricken summer’s day, he feels guilty—guilty about leaving his wife alone in the house with their little girl, “about not working all day long like other men, about having grown up at all and married and left his parents alone together in Ohio, about being all by himself in this great kingdom of withered turf” (all sentiments Updike might have shared). The day goes badly; the story ends with a curse (“Damned game”), and it’s entirely possible that Paul’s first outing will be his last. For Updike, things went very differently: he shrugged off any twinges of guilt and continued to play golf, to think about it, to dream about it, to write about it, for the rest of his life—“the hours adding up,” he admitted, “to years of temps perdu.” The easiest explanation for his long love affair with this “narcotic pastime” is that the game gave him huge amounts of pleasure: “I am curiously, disproportionately, undeservedly happy on a golf course.” Rounds of golf, he wrote, were “islands of bliss.”

  Bliss and frustration—with his “modest” eighteen handicap, he described himself as a “poor golfer, who came to the game late, with frazzled eye-hand connections.” He practiced and practiced, dutifully studying the reams of advice aimed at his fellow duffers—advice he gently mocked in a succession of satiric essays. Golf is a cruel and exasperating sport for anyone with a perfectionist streak as pronounced as Updike’s; it dangles hope—the tantalizing prospect of self-improvement—then yanks that hope out of sight with the next errant shot. He described, in a burst of colorful prose, the torments of this humbling cycle:

  The fluctuations of golfing success were charted on a graph craggier than those of other endeavors, with peaks of pure poetry leaping up from abysses of sheer humiliation—the fat shot that sputters forward under the shadow of its divot, the thin shot that skims across the green like a maimed bird, the smothered hook which finds the raspberry patch, the soaring slice that crosses the highway, the chunked chip, the shanked approach, the water ball, the swamp ball, the deeper-into-the-woods ricochet, the trap-to-trap blast, the total whiff on the first tee, the double-hit putt from two feet out.

  It’s a sign of his sturdy self-confidence that he was able to endure these trials on a weekly or twice-weekly basis. One wonders whether the game didn’t satisfy some masochistic need on his part for mild chastening punishment, whether the pain wasn’t part of the pleasure.

  Like every golfer, he had to endure the famous insults the game attracts, and parry oft-repeated accusations about its being the chosen pastime of wealthy philistines—“the idle and idiot well-to-do,” in Osbert Sitwell’s acid phrase. In his Pennsylvania youth, Updike remembered, “golf was a rumored something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.” But in Ipswich, once hooked, he conveniently discovered that it was a pleasure “democratically exploited”—by working-class golfers, say, flocking to the municipal course at the end of a long shift. (Wishful thinking contradicted by the sinister line from his poem “Golfers,” in which those who play the game “take an open stance on the backs of the poor.”)

  It’s true that he played with all kinds of people in all kinds of settings. “Golf,” he wrote, “is a great social bridge.” For many years, he was joined in a foursome by a local druggist, the same pediatrician who played in the poker group, and the owner of an automatic car wash; they played weekly from April to October on public courses in Ipswich and neighboring towns such as Essex, Topsfield, Wenham, and Newburyport. Although Updike was content with humble layouts, he gladly accepted invitations to enjoy the “spongy turf of private fairways.” Eventually, in his early fifties, when the sport’s expanding popularity meant that his favorite public courses were more and more crowded, he joined the exclusive and expensive Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, Massachusetts, which boasts a famously beautiful course designed in the late nineteenth century by Herbert Corey Leeds.

  A round of golf, for Updike, was no more an occasion for literary chatter than a poker game; what he “did in print” was not a topic his regular foursome would be apt to broach. Although in later years he played frequently with a psychiatrist turned writer who claimed that he and Updike would ritually discuss, when they reached the eighth fairway, what they were reading and writing, this brief bout of book banter was an exception. The novelist Tim O’Brien had a very different experience playing with Updike; he said he found himself consciously suppressing literary questions: “I sensed that for John, at least in part, golf was a way of getting away from artistic and professional pressures.” Updike repeatedly remarked that he cherished the game’s “relative hush,” the “worshipful silence” on the green; “Golf,” he explained, “is a constant struggle with one’s self, productive of a few grunts and expletives but no extended discourse.” As if in warning to garrulous companions, he wrote, “Basically, I want to be alone with my golf.” Too polite to play a round in silence, he was also too fond of verbal display. O’Brien remembered having conversations about “ludicrously insignificant stuff”; even then, “John spoke very much as he wrote, with grace and precision and irony and impish humor and striking miracles of expression. I was never unaware that I was strolling down the fairway with John Updike.”

  He worked at his golf, struggled with it, the way a less naturally talented writer might struggle with a tricky passage, revising, honing, maybe tearing it up in frustration; his emphasis on the mental effort the sport demanded, the intense concentration, the need for each player to act as his own coach, invites the comparison. But of course Updike’s good days at the typewriter, days when polished prose poured out of him, were more frequent than his good days on the links, where he was nagged by the sense that the basics of golf had to be relearned every week. “He seemed delighted when he won a hole or when he scored well,” said O’Brien, “and he concentrated fiercely over his shots, but for the most part he struck me as wistfully (sometimes wryly) resigned to the inconsistencies and imperfections of his swing.” When he did hit a sweet shot, however, his sense of exultation was dramatic. He wrote, “In those instants of whizz, ascent, hover, and fall, an ideal self seems mirrored.” The urge to recapture that golden moment contributed to the power and pe
rsistence of his obsession.

  He reveled also in the range of competition the game affords. Thanks to handicap strokes, players of widely different ability can compete on terms of equality; this was the “inexhaustible competitive charm” that turned a struggle with oneself into the excitement of a contest with others. The presence of partners and opponents meant that when he wasn’t engrossed in his own shot, he had his eye on his companions, absorbing every last detail, registering not just the outline of a golf persona but the inner life as well. “Golf,” he explained, “is . . . a great tunnel into the essences of others, for people are naked when they swing—their patience or impatience, their optimism or pessimism, their grace or awkwardness, their life’s motifs are all bared.” What he saw of their essence seems not to have dismayed him; on the contrary, he felt joined to his regular foursomes by a powerful bond: “My golfing companions . . . are more dear to me than I can unembarrassedly say.”

  When I interviewed him in 2003, more than forty-five years after his first swing, he humorously suggested that his continued devotion to the game (by now he was playing twice weekly) was perhaps hampering his career: “If I thought as hard about writing as I do about golf,” he told me, “I might be a better writer—maybe win the Nobel prize.” In fact, his obsession brought him good material right from the start; as he acknowledged, “Golf converts oddly well into words.” “Intercession” and “Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy (After Reading Too Many Books on How to Play Golf),” a parody he wrote for The New Yorker in 1959 lampooning the inexhaustible genre of golf instruction, were the earliest fruits of his passion. Late in life he wrote “Elegy for a Real Golfer,” a lament in verse on the bizarre and tragic airplane accident that killed Payne Stewart in 1999. In between came several poems and short stories; notable golfing interludes in three of the Rabbit novels and in A Month of Sundays (which features a foursome composed exclusively of disgraced clergymen); and “The First Lunar Invitational”—a jeu d’esprit inspired by astronaut Alan Shepard’s famous antics with an improvised six iron—about a tournament on the moon under the joint sponsorship of NASA, ALCOA, MIT, and Bob Hope.