Updike

by Begley, Adam

  Updike was worried about his father’s health and also about his own. A routine medical examination undertaken to secure a life insurance policy revealed that his lungs were “slightly emphysematous,” a condition he regarded as fatal; “young as I was,” he wrote prophetically, “I had death in my lungs.” He renewed his efforts to quit smoking and consulted his own doctor, who pooh-poohed the idea that emphysema might kill him—but did note that he had the spread rib cage of a chronic asthmatic. Updike took to heart this distant glimpse of the grave; echoing The Centaur, he wrote, “I was mortal. I carried within me fatal wounds.”

  In Self-Consciousness, Updike describes this period—during which he produced some of his finest fiction—as a time of “desperation”; he felt smothered by “an oppressive blanket of funk,” a “grayness” he associated with death and decay. In these “gray moments,” he reported, his “spirit could scarcely breathe”; he was in the grip of a chronic low-level spiritual crisis. Seeking a cure, or at least temporary relief, he self-medicated; his idea of how to treat his complaint was nothing like David Kern’s—in fact, it was pretty much the opposite. “[T]o give myself brightness and air,” he wrote, “I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men’s wives.” He battled death with God and romance.

  Barth was possibly the less efficacious of the two remedies. A bracingly stringent Calvinist, he did supply Updike with one of the enduring tenets of his personal creed (the idea that God is “Wholly Other”: “We cannot reach Him, only He can reach us”), and he did become, in the sixties, Updike’s favorite theologian (“Ipswich belonged to Barth”)—but as Barth himself insisted, theology cannot protect faith from doubt. For Updike, it was one buttress in a system of reinforcements necessary to sustain belief. Like his father, he found comfort in the sense of belonging to a particular congregation. After several unpromising trips to a nearby Lutheran church, Updike joined the First Congregational Church in Ipswich, became an usher, and served conscientiously on church committees. Every week, he shepherded his children to Sunday school, where Mary, though she rarely if ever attended services, accompanied hymns on the battered piano; at night in their bedrooms, he recited prayers with the children. His peace of mind depended on conventional religious observance, regular doses of theology administered by those authors who helped him believe (especially Barth and Kierkegaard), and a dose also of his own, internally generated faith. This last, wavering item required periodic renewal. It began with an act of will; as an adolescent in Plowville, he had made a conscious effort to preserve his faith, a commodity he reluctantly recognized as rare and getting rarer. Surrounded by disbelief more or less politely concealed, he refused to play along—“I decided . . . I would believe.” Though he disapproved of pragmatic faith, he was well aware of the utility of his own special brand of piety: “Religion enables us to ignore nothingness,” he wrote, “and get on with the jobs of life.” He explained the tenacity of his faith by pointing to the part played by fear: “The choice seemed to come down to: believe or be frightened and depressed all the time.” On a good day, faith in God gave him confirmation that he mattered—“that one’s sense of oneself as being of infinite value is somewhere in the universe answered, that indeed one is of infinite value.” Religion eased his existential terror, allowing him to do his work, and to engage in the various kinds of play that best amused him—among them the hazardous sport of falling for his friends’ wives. He was caught in a vicious circle: he fell in love, and his adulterous passion made him feel alive, but also sparked a religious crisis that renewed his fear of death—so he fell in love some more and read some more theology. Not surprisingly, his wife found that she couldn’t tell, when he exhibited signs of angst, whether he was suffering from religious doubt or romantic torment.

  David Kern’s terror strikes at night; he lies next to his sleeping wife, breathing the dust of his grave. Updike’s own version of the crisis could come at any time. Once, while he was in the basement building a dollhouse for Liz, he suddenly felt “that I was hanging on with my fingernails to the side of a cliff.”* A gray moment might descend on him during Sunday sports, with the entire couples crowd on hand: “[A]s I waited, on a raw rainy fall day, for the opposing touch-football team to kick off, there would come sailing through the air instead the sullen realization that in a few decades we would all be dead.” If there’s a frenetic, compulsive edge to his engagement with the Ipswich scene—what he himself called his “incessant sociability”—it’s partly because his instinct was to drown out doubts and fears with the clamor of a party. He writes in Self-Consciousness,

  Egoistic dread faded within the shared life. We celebrated each other’s birthdays and break-ups in a boozy, jaunty muddle of mutually invaded privacies. . . . The weekend get-togethers supplied courage to last the week.

  Boozy weekend get-togethers also supplied the chance to clown, to dance, to flirt—to attract attention, amorous and otherwise.

  Another way to mask terror was to keep constantly busy. When a friend bought the Ipswich Chronicle in early 1961, Updike volunteered “as a favor and a lark” to write reviews of the summer concert series held at Castle Hill, a grand nineteenth-century mansion near Crane Beach. John and Mary had been going to the concerts since their first year in Ipswich; these days, they went with their crowd, the women in their summer dresses, the men in seersucker jackets. Before the music there was a picnic washed down with white wine; during the concert, Updike kept his plastic glass upright between his feet and scribbled notes on his program. He liked the sense that he was surrounded by his friends, and yet in “an elevated position,” the critic poised to pass judgment. His reviews, signed H.H. (his middle initial doubled), were banged out on the typewriter on the Monday morning after the weekend concert and handed in at lunchtime; the Chronicle offices were just up the street from his office. He wrote twenty-two of them over the course of five summers. Breezy and brash, they were written, in essence, for his pals—an attenuated form of flirtation.

  More time-consuming than the Castle Hill distraction, and more perplexing, was his two-month stint in the classroom. On July 3, 1962, shortly after he sent off the typed manuscript of The Centaur, he found himself teaching a creative writing course at the Harvard Summer School. His father had announced his retirement in April, on doctor’s orders, after nearly thirty years at Shillington High. There is of course a big difference between slaving away for decades at a public school and taking charge for eight weeks of an advanced composition class at an Ivy League college, but the irony is nonetheless remarkable: Updike had agreed to the Harvard job nine months earlier, while he was still at work on a novel about the travails of a teacher (the spitting image of his father) who refers to the classroom as the “slaughterhouse” and the “hate-factory,” who thinks teaching is killing him. Money can’t have been a motive. (At this point Updike would have earned more by selling a single story to The New Yorker than by teaching a term of summer school.) Perhaps he felt compelled to try his hand at the profession his mother had failed at, the profession his father had both thrived and suffered in—the profession, as The Centaur elaborately demonstrates, that allowed the teacher’s son to make his famous escape. He knew it was the kind of invitation he should refuse, but somehow he couldn’t say no to Harvard.

  Admission to his class was restricted; he chose his students on the basis of writing samples submitted in advance. Once accepted, they were required to produce, each week, at least a dozen pages of writing, which he marked with conspicuous care. Guided by the example of his father’s dedication, he treated his class with kindness and respect, a conscientious approach that earned the students’ gratitude but demanded a great deal of time and effort. Though he was a rising star in literary circles—just two weeks after the end of the course, Life magazine named him one of its “Red Hot Hundred,” leaders of a new generation—and though on the first day he had to turn away a small crowd of eager students who hadn’t been admitted to the class but hoped to be allowed to sit quietly in
the back and listen, he declined to act the part of a virtuoso condescending to a roomful of impressionable novices. He was friendly but serious, with flashes of charm and humor; he stuttered, but only a bit. He read his students’ work promptly and handed it back with a typed comment (generally half a page, single-spaced) and scrawled notes in the margins. He remained tactful, even when faced with inferior work. Next to a notably lame passage in one student’s story, he wrote in gentle rebuke, “Your literary energy has failed you here.”

  Two of his students, Nicholas Delbanco and Jonathan Penner, went on to have successful literary careers; both became university professors and taught creative writing for decades. Delbanco applied for Updike’s class on a whim; he’d barely heard of the young author. It was the summer between his junior and senior years at Harvard, he was nineteen years old, and he’d wanted to stay in Cambridge only to be near his girlfriend—but Updike, he said, turned him into a novelist: “The first word I wrote for him was the first word of my first novel.” Updike praised his first chapter (“For a beginner, you seem remarkably knowing in the trade of the novelist”), and Delbanco, having finished a second chapter, realized he was hooked. By the time he was twenty, he had a contract with a publisher—the book was the novel he started writing for Updike. Delbanco sat next to Updike in class and watched him doodle while his students read from their work. He remembered with pleasure Updike’s high, braying laugh. “What was unforgettable,” Delbanco said, “was how smart he was.”

  Penner recalled the day Updike came in and read with mock gravity a letter from the Tootsie Roll company sent to him because he had mentioned the candy in Rabbit, Run. The company thanked him for choosing its product as a representative symbol of American life and begged him to accept as a token of gratitude a six-gross box of Tootsie Rolls. Updike put the letter down and addressed the class: “Such are the benefits of the literary life.”

  Toward mid-August, with four classes left to go, Updike admitted to Maxwell that agreeing to the teaching job had been “sort of foolish”; he complained that “after ten short stories I could have Chekhov in my class and give him a B plus.” At the very end of term he told one student that this would be the last class he taught. Dismayed, she asked him why. “I can’t make friends with twelve people all at once again,” he answered. If the letter to Maxwell is falsely modest, and the remark to the student a sweet bit of flattery, the prosaic explanation Updike gave to an interviewer in 1981 sums up his main objection to the profession: “Teaching takes a lot of energy. It uses somehow the very brain cells that you should be writing with.” No arrangement that interfered with his writing was ever going to last.

  HIS LOVE AFFAIR with Joyce Harrington disrupted his writing life in the short term, because he found himself compelled to write about their relationship even though he knew that what he wrote couldn’t for now be published. But the affair also cracked open the seemingly inexhaustible topic of suburban adultery. It heated up dangerously during the spring, and at the beginning of summer, just before he began teaching, he confessed to Mary, who had begun to suspect that something serious was going on. She in turn confessed to her own affair and asked him to wait before taking any drastic steps, to do nothing and keep everything secret until summer’s end. So the affair carried on—with a deadline for decision looming and both marriages in jeopardy—during the eight summer weeks when Updike was driving to Harvard Square on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Once again, his remarkable ability to compartmentalize guaranteed a smoothly functioning professional life.

  Joyce Harrington turned thirty in the summer of 1962. She was the mother of three, two boys and a baby girl. Not classically beautiful but striking and sexy, with a long narrow face, a brilliant toothy smile, and lots of auburn hair, she stood out in the couples crowd, a bright, compelling presence. A description of one of Updike’s fictional lovers captures the essence of her look: “Her eyes were the only glamorous feature of a freckled, bony, tomboyish face, remarkable chiefly for its sharp willingness to express pleasure.” (The freckles are his concession to fiction.) He had met her soon after moving to Ipswich, while he was living at Little Violet. The Harringtons and the Updikes were as yet barely more than acquaintances when Herbert and Joyce asked if John and Mary would be willing to babysit for their infant son, Gus, who was the same age as David. The Updikes were surprised to be asked, but the plan went ahead all the same; the Harringtons dropped Gus off at Little Violet, drove to Boston for the evening, stayed out late, and picked him up on the way home. The ice was broken.

  Herbert Harrington was a Harvard graduate, a building contractor and property developer who had inherited money from his father. The couple lived well, with flashes of extravagance. Joyce had a flair for clothes and furniture; glamorous, she dressed stylishly, for show, and the interior of her house was sleek and modern. They were very sociable, conspicuously outgoing even by the standards of this gregarious group. They had a motorboat and arranged trips to Plum Island and picnics on the beach. Mary thought their sophistication superficial, and was annoyed by Herbert’s habit of dispensing glib psychoanalytic insights into the behavior of others. He had a diabolical streak, a way of manipulating people into uncomfortable situations so that he could then observe the consequences. John’s early impression, at one of the Harringtons’ dinner parties, was that Herbert had “the manner of the local undertaker, and indeed does somehow embalm his guests.”

  When Herbert found out about the affair (thanks to a close examination of the household telephone bill), he forced a dramatic showdown. Late one evening in early October, he called up and demanded that the Updikes come right away to the Harringtons’ house, on Argilla Road, so that the four of them could thrash it out. Mary arranged for last-minute babysitting, and she and John dutifully drove over. Herbert sat them down with Joyce in the living room, served them all wine, and insisted that they resolve the situation there and then. His forceful attitude goaded John into taking precisely the step he knew he couldn’t take, which was to declare his intention to leave Mary for Joyce. The next day, Herbert persuaded Mary to consult a lawyer—she and John would have to divorce so that John could marry Joyce. When Mary did drive down to Boston to see a lawyer (Herbert’s own lawyer, in fact), she was sitting in the office, about to set the legal process in motion, when the telephone rang; it was John, asking to speak with his wife. “I took the phone,” Mary remembered, “and John was saying that he’d changed his mind, that he wasn’t going to leave me, that he didn’t want a divorce—so I went home.”

  Herbert’s reaction to John’s change of heart was typically peremptory; first he threatened to sue John for alienation of affections, already an antiquated concept in 1962; then he decreed that the Updikes would have to leave Ipswich for a while—a banishment they accepted. John and Mary threw themselves a farewell cocktail party, packed up the family, and on the eighth of November boarded an Italian ocean liner and set sail for Europe. Traveling the “sunny southern route,” the SS Leonardo da Vinci steered close to the Azores (hence the charming poem “Azores,” about a “rural landscape / set adrift” in the mid-Atlantic) and through the Strait of Gibraltar en route to Naples, where John joined some other passengers for a disappointing tour of Pompeii. The family eventually disembarked at Cannes, and spent several days at the Hotel Savoy before finding a villa to rent in the hills just above Antibes. The house, called La Bastide, was modern, of modest size, and not particularly charming, but the terrace was warm in the sun, with a view of the Mediterranean, the orange roofs of Antibes, and to the east the snow-covered peaks of the Maritime Alps. A brief exile on the Riviera a few miles from where Gerald and Sara Murphy had played host to the leading lights of the Lost Generation doesn’t sound especially grim, but Updike was indifferent to the glamour (except when he spotted Marlene Dietrich at the Nice airport). “He was pretty darn miserable,” according to Mary. “He needed a lot of cheering up.”

  This sudden crescendo of momentous decisions and equally momentous reversals
was the predictable result of Updike’s affair. He’d known for months that he would have to choose between Mary and Joyce. In late September he’d taken the extraordinary step of writing to Alfred Knopf and asking him to remove from the biographical note to The Centaur, which was then in production, the line stating that he lived with his wife and four children in Ipswich; by the time of the book’s publication, he confided, his circumstances might have changed. It was a likelihood, not a certainty. In fact he knew—though he needed to be pushed to the brink before admitting it—that his conscience would compel him to choose Mary. The predicament is mapped out in “Solitaire,” an anguished story written in early August, two months before Herbert issued his ultimatum. The first words (“The children were asleep . . .”) alert us to the crux of the dilemma confronting a husband who must decide between wife and mistress:

  How could he balance their claims and rights? The list was entirely one-sided. Prudence, decency, pity—not light things—all belonged to the guardian of his children and home; and these he would lose. . . . And he would as well lose his own conception of himself, for to abandon his children and a woman who with scarcely a complaint or a quarrel had given him her youth was simply not what he would do.

  Updike’s own children now numbered four. Elizabeth, the eldest, was seven; the two boys, David and Michael, were five and three; Miranda was a toddler not yet two. Abandoning them would indeed dent the self-esteem of a father with any claim to prudence, decency, and pity. The narrator of “Solitaire,” we’re told, “was the son of parents who had stayed together for his sake.” Updike felt that this was true of his parents as well; it’s a theme that recurs regularly in his fiction.

  And what of the other woman? In “Solitaire,” the rights and claims of the mistress are dismissed as “nothing, or next to nothing.” Her desire for him, her sense of him “existing purely as a man,” is gratifying. The two women are roughly sketched, certain qualities vaguely suggested (“His wife had the more delicate mind, but his mistress, having suffered more, knew more that he didn’t know”), yet the larger questions (Why does he desire his mistress? Why doesn’t he desire his wife?) are left hazy—possibly to imply that this unhappy man is himself in the dark. With duty ranged against desire, he’s stuck: “Back and forth, back and forth, like a sore fist his heart oscillated between them.”