Updike

by Begley, Adam

With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing squirms in the sudden opacity. She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted oblongs that she can’t seize the solid of; it is only a moment, but a moment dragged out in a thicker time. Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.

  Of course it’s not all right; baby Becky, dead, is now just “the space between her arms,” a space that can be filled only by sorrow. The whole catastrophic scene (seventeen manuscript pages) poured out of Updike in one sitting during a week in mid-August that he and the family spent with Mary’s parents in their Vermont farmhouse. At the end of his very long day, he came downstairs and announced, “Well, I just drowned the baby.”

  Michael Updike was three months old at the time, and his father later acknowledged that he’d dreaded writing the scene: “Obviously, there was no real baby involved; only a few sentences and adjectives on some pieces of paper. But I had babies of my own at the time, and I found the prospect of writing about infanticide unsettling.” He steeled himself and got it done. Tempering his ruthlessness, he managed, in the midst of horror, to keep alive a spark of tenderness for Janice. We pity her, knowing that what she tells herself is true, that “the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.”

  It’s happened to Harry, too; his baby daughter’s death resonates not just in Rabbit, Run but also in the other volumes of the tetralogy. Janice evolves, recovering, growing in stature and importance (without ever losing her taste for tipple); their son, Nelson, eventually plays an important role as his father’s antagonist; and the pregnant Ruth, though she threatens to have an abortion, gives birth to a baby girl (note the symmetry) who decades later will become the object of Rabbit’s fitful attention—but Rabbit Angstrom, as Updike called the completed work, is nonetheless all about Harry. It gives us the measure of the man in all dimensions over the course of three decades. When Updike defined his “aesthetic and moral aim” as a “non-judgmental immersion,” he meant immersion in the particulars of Harry’s existence. That’s especially true of the first volume. Critics have praised the style of Rabbit, Run, and scholars have tracked with great ingenuity complex patterns of imagery, but the novel ultimately succeeds or fails as a portrait of its central character. From the beginning there were readers who found Rabbit reprehensible and rejected the novel along with its protagonist; others, including the influential Granville Hicks, managed to admire it in spite of their distaste for the “irresponsible and troubled young man” whose agitated movements it tracks. But Updike, it seems clear to me, wanted us to root for Rabbit even at his most abysmally selfish, to sympathize when he tells Eccles, “I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball, I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, it kind of takes the kick out of being second rate.” We’re meant to respect his ideal of excellence, to treasure the signs of goodness in this manifestly fallible individual.

  In a sense, and only in partnership with Updike, Rabbit does do something right, something first-rate. Never a great success in the workplace, and a serial failure as a family man, he became an excellent conduit, an obliging medium channeling the spirit of the times, the spirit of the nation. Harry Angstrom was a “ticket,” Updike wrote, “to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit’s eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own.” There’s just enough in Rabbit, Run of Harry scoping out his surroundings—listening to the car radio and observing the lay of the land—to set a precedent; it’s a role he grew into, seeing more and more over time with an ever-keener eye, so that Rabbit Redux becomes a nightmare reflection of late-sixties social turmoil, and Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest bring us a running commentary on the headline news of subsequent decades. Updike’s nonjudgmental immersion began with Harry and his local orbit and moved on to America as a whole.

  V.

  The Two Iseults

  There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

  —Updike to a Time reporter in March 1968

  Had he run as far as Ipswich, Rabbit would have seen some familiar sights, among them a loosening of the social weave. An impulse not entirely unlike the one that led him to walk out on Janice and move in with another woman was taking root in the town Updike had learned to call home. It’s obvious that if Updike himself wasn’t yet having extramarital affairs, he was feeling the urge and thinking hard about it. Rabbit’s dash for freedom and his dalliance with Ruth are in some measure an expression of displaced desire, a symptom of restlessness and anxiety in a twenty-seven-year-old freelance author tied down by his responsibility for a young family—hence Updike’s remark about the “heavy, intoxicating dose of fantasy and wish-fulfillment” that went into the writing of Rabbit, Run. By the time the novel reached bookstore shelves in early November, the fantasy was, by his own account, becoming a reality: he was “falling in love, away from marriage.” The woman in question was living in Boston, on Beacon Hill. She was not at home when Updike knocked hopefully on her door on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28, 1960—so he went instead to Fenway Park and watched his great hero Ted Williams hit a home run in his last ever at-bat. Updike tells us next to nothing about this woman he was falling in love with, just a teasing hint slipped into a preface to a special reprinting of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” his celebrated essay about the historic baseball game he saw that afternoon. We learn that on the woman’s door a bright brown mail basket was hanging—and that’s about it. We don’t know how he met her or when or whether the affair or fling was ever consummated, though at the end of the preface, he refers to “love forestalled,” which may imply a romance that came to nothing. In any case, if Updike hadn’t volunteered the information, we would know nothing at all of this anonymous woman’s existence. (It’s also possible that he invented the whole episode to add spice to the story of how he came to be at the ball game, or that he adjusted the time and venue of the assignation-that-wasn’t to preserve dramatic unities.)

  The preface is dated August 1, 1977, about a year and a half after he and Mary petitioned for divorce, and just two months before he married his second wife, Martha Ruggles Bernhard. I believe that the deliberate, unprompted mention of a failed tryst was a formal gesture of farewell to a chapter in his life that began or nearly began on the day of Williams’s last at-bat, a chapter that would be coming to a close with his new marriage. He was saying good-bye to years of philandering, retiring as a womanizer, and choosing to mark the occasion in a preface to an essay about his hero’s swan song.

  Updike wasn’t the first in his Ipswich crowd to commit adultery, and it’s possible that he wasn’t even the first in his marriage. Mary had blossomed as a young matron; surrounded by four lively and demanding children, she remained serene and graceful. With her wide, encouraging smile and calm, appraising eyes, she reminded many of her friends and neighbors of a kind of earth mother. She had a quiet, shy, passive side—and also a propensity to flirt at parties. It would be hard to be married to John without enjoying the back-and-forth of teasing banter. In the early sixties she took a lover; asked whether her affair, which lasted several years, began before or after John’s first fling, she said she didn’t know. Although she couldn’t be sure when his infidelity began, or with whom, she thought it might have been more or less simultaneous with hers. This lack of certainty isn’t surprising; she had children to look after, and her own secrets to hide, and couldn’t keep track of his comings and goings.

  For one thing, he was no longer around the house in the mornings. Immediately after the family’s monthlong vacation in Anguilla, in late March 1960, Updike rented a one-room office in a “scabby tenement” in the center of Ipswich. This was another step in the process of becoming a professional author; it chimed with his childhood conception of an a
rtist as someone “who, equipped with pencils and paper, practiced his solitary trade as methodically as a dentist practiced his.” And Updike’s trade was going well. His target, when he left Manhattan to become a freelancer, was to sell six stories a year to The New Yorker. In 1959 he managed seven; in 1960, four; in 1961, seven. He was right on target, selling eighteen stories in three years—as methodical as a dentist, but with the satisfactions of public recognition: two months after setting up the office he received the Rosenthal Award for The Poorhouse Fair. His first significant literary prize, it was bestowed at a ceremony at the National Institute of Arts and Letters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  His office was in the center of town, just four blocks from the house: a dingy second-floor room looking out over the Ipswich River, minimally furnished with a large dull green metal army desk bought for thirty dollars, a chair, a leather sofa, a bureau in which to store his manuscripts and working drafts (“everything artistic is kept down here,” he told Maxwell), a crowded bookcase, and yellowing newspaper photographs of Proust and Joyce. The initial rent was eight dollars per week. For the next fourteen years, this is where he wrote, between a lawyer’s office and a beautician, upstairs from the Dolphin Restaurant, where he often went for lunch when his writing day was done. To Victor Gollancz he explained, facetiously, “I’ve rented a little room . . . so that I can devote more time to my literary troubles and less to my children.” He might have added that leaving the house every day would give him more opportunity to have an affair.

  He didn’t have to look far to find a lover. Several of the couples had already had affairs before moving to Ipswich, and once they were all settled and best friends, romantic intrigue was very much in the air. It’s safe to say that the group’s unusual closeness (and a large part of the pain that followed) had something to do with the collective willingness to indulge in extramarital sex. This “weave of promiscuous friendship” wasn’t a purely local phenomenon. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise” is perhaps the most famous line from Couples, which Updike set in 1963, three years after he claimed to have first fallen “in love, away from marriage”—and three years after the first birth-control pill was approved for use in the United States. Did the advent of oral contraception unleash a frenzy of adulterous coupling in suburban communities all over the country? That theory seems a little pat, yet there’s a measure of truth to it. There’s no doubt that by the time of JFK’s assassination, the junior jet set of Ipswich were already hopping in and out of one another’s beds with impressive frequency. Whatever moral qualms Updike might have had were long since banished, and any lingering shyness had dissipated. He threw himself with reckless enthusiasm into the tangle of Ipswich infidelities. It’s worth stressing, however, that it wasn’t his idea; he wasn’t the instigator. He made suburban sex famous, but he didn’t invent it.

  For the first few years, the proliferating affairs caused little trouble; any upset was kept tactfully out of sight. They were a promiscuous group but not blatant. The adultery was clandestine, discreet if not invisible. With one or two exceptions, there was no actual wife-swapping; there were never any key parties or orgies. And in the beginning, at least, no homes were wrecked; appearances were preserved, separation and divorce avoided. The taboo against casual or semi-casual sex may have been breached, but the integrity of the family (for the sake of the children) was still considered of paramount importance. The possibility that serial adultery would gradually undermine most marriages and put the welfare of the progeny at risk seems to have been overlooked—until it was too late and the town was dotted with broken homes.*

  Updike slept around in Ipswich, “a stag of sorts,” as he wrote in his memoirs, “in our herd of housewife-does.” And when his success as an author meant that he began to travel around the country and abroad, he permitted himself sexual adventures away from home. Without explicitly admitting that for most of the Ipswich years he enjoyed an active and varied extramarital sex life, he made clear in Self-Consciousness his disdain for this promiscuous period of his life, describing his behavior with a chain of derogatory adjectives: “malicious, greedy . . . obnoxious . . . rapacious and sneaky . . . remorseless.” The fact of his promiscuity is important; a hyperactive libido is a component of his character that can’t be ignored. And it explains in part the sheer volume of verbiage he devoted to sex over the next half century: he was writing about what he knew. But however infatuated he may have been with some of the women he hooked up with—and however useful, from a writer’s perspective, his observation of their most intimate gestures—these casual arrangements are of interest only in a cumulative sense. Where the incidents are fleeting, the individuals will remain, for our purposes, nameless, as anonymous as the mystery woman who wasn’t home on the day of Ted Williams’s last at-bat.*

  There are only two extramarital affairs of real significance in Updike’s life. The first was with Joyce Harrington; she and her husband, Herbert, were core members of the couples crowd. The second was with Martha Bernhard; she and her husband, Alex, were late additions. The first affair came within a whisker of ending the Updikes’ marriage in the fall of 1962; the second did end the marriage: John separated from Mary in 1974, and they were divorced two years later. John and Martha married soon afterward. And then, as if to demonstrate what a snarled web it was, Alex Bernhard, Martha’s ex-husband, married Joyce Harrington, John’s ex-mistress.

  Even if we can’t name the day when Updike fell in love with Joyce Harrington, we do know that by the spring of 1961 he was already writing about a husband whose unconsummated but entirely reciprocated lust for “a woman not [his] wife” leaves him literally panting: in “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” David Kern’s highly charged flirtation with another woman sparks a religious crisis not dissimilar to the one he suffered the first time he appeared as Updike’s alter ego, as a teenager in “Pigeon Feathers.” In the summer of the following year, Updike began drafting stories about a passionate extramarital affair, stories so transparently autobiographical that he couldn’t publish them—to do so would have been to broadcast the parlous state of his marriage and the naked fact of his adultery to the entire readership of The New Yorker, including his parents, his wife’s parents, and every one of his Ipswich pals.

  Ever since Rabbit, Run, the sexual element in his writing—principally the ache of a male’s physical desire—had become more and more pronounced. “Wife-Wooing,” an intimate portrait of the Updike marriage completed soon after he’d sent off the manuscript of the novel, is brimming with carnal energy, the narrator lusting after his wife in a kind of hymn to domestic eroticism.* Written like Rabbit, Run in the present tense, “Wife-Wooing” is elaborately, self-consciously literary; James Joyce, invoked in the first paragraph, supplies a coinage, “smackwarm,” which is playfully appropriated, so that we get in the second paragraph this comic pastiche: “your thigh’s inner side is lazily laid bare, and the eternally elastic garter snaps smackwarm against my hidden heart.” The wife, understandably distracted and fatigued by three young children, rebuffs the husband’s semisurreptitious attempts to seduce her, then surprises him the next night by making her own gratefully accepted advances. But before that happy ending, while the disappointment of sexual rejection still rankles, the hymn of praise turns into something more like a curse, one of the cruelest paragraphs in Updike’s oeuvre:

  In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman.

  The sudden vindictive bitterness comes as a shock—but it works, effectively dramatizing the intensity of the husband’s unsatisfied connubial lust.

  Updike was surprised when Maxwell let h
im know that The New Yorker had accepted “Wife-Wooing.” However lifelike the detail, however deep the current of feeling, it still has the feel of an experiment, a finger-exercise monologue that grew into a narrative. The much-anthologized “A&P,” written six months later, also first person, also present tense, achieves much greater dramatic power and has the feel of a completed action. The lust, here, is comparatively lighthearted. The three girls who walk into the A&P in their bathing suits, especially Queenie, the one with the gloriously naked shoulders, trigger a visceral response in nineteen-year-old Sammy (“it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron”); when the store manager lectures the girls, Sammy quits in protest, a quixotic, self-defeating gesture that nonetheless wins the reader’s admiration. Sammy’s voice may indeed, as Mary Updike complained, sound too much like J. D. Salinger, but his tributes to Queenie’s sex appeal have the ring of genuine adolescent yearning. “Lifeguard,” written a month after “A&P,” is another present-tense monologue, this one delivered by a divinity student who spends the summer months working as a lifeguard. “Lust stuns me like the sun,” he says, and zeroes in on its source: “the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks.” He adds, “It is here that Grace sits and rides a woman’s body.”

  Updike had sex on his mind—and death, too. In “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island,” a remarkable story he finished on September 27, 1960 (the day before Ted Williams’s last at-bat, the day before Updike’s failed tryst with the mystery woman of Boston), he pauses to reflect on an old Chinese man he once glimpsed in the stands of a baseball stadium; tells the story of his grandfather’s death; attempts the resurrection of his dead grandmother; and imagines the inexorable, serial extinction of a band of castaways, all male, on an uninhabited but inhabitable Polynesian island. As that summary and the story’s comically long-winded title suggest, Updike is stitching together disparate elements, a collage construction he thought of as an innovation. He told Time magazine that the “conversation” between the different parts of the story creates “a new kind of fictional space.” He may have been exaggerating the novelty of the technique—it’s not very different from the effect achieved, say, by the inter-chapters in Hemingway’s In Our Time—but it’s true that the story adds up to more than the sum of its parts.