Updike

by Begley, Adam

  “Solitaire” was Updike’s attempt to imagine how he might actually bring himself to make a decision overshadowed by the stubborn fact of his four young children. From the day Liz was born and he made a tiny, darling sketch of her to send to Plowville, he was a delighted and meticulous observer of his progeny. As the first baby grew and the others were born, he continued to watch with unflagging intensity. To his mother he sent detailed reports on the children’s progress, weekly bulletins that were clearly as much for his benefit as hers. As so often with Updike, looking, seeing, and noting on paper were acts of worship: description expresses love.

  “My Children at the Dump,” a poem he sent to The New Yorker in the midst of the Harrington fiasco, hints at how the children weighed on his mind. It is, we learn in the first line, “The day before divorce.” Shedding “remnants” of “a life / no longer shared,” a father takes his three children on an excursion to the dump.* (Updike thought of the Ipswich dump as “one of the most peaceful and scenic places in the town.”) Innocently oblivious of the looming trauma, the kids are “enchanted” by the “wonderland of discard”; the girl wants to take home “a naked armless doll,” the boys covet bent toy tractors. The father’s guilty imagination transforms them into “stunted starvelings cruelly set free / at a heaped banquet of food too rich to eat.” Their poignant willingness to make do with damaged goods puts to shame the wasteful profligacy of the father who, one gathers, has thrown away his marriage, tossed it “among tummocks of junk”—“These things,” he says by way of self-justification, “were considered, and dismissed / for a reason.” Updike twists the knife at the very end of the poem; the father tells his daughter that she cannot keep the broken doll she’s scavenged: “Love it now,” he tells her. “Love it now, but we can’t take it home.” Home, the last word of the poem, resonates along with the repeated exhortation to love, sending us back to the root cause of this dismal situation. Father and children will no longer live together; the family home, having suffered like the amputated doll an irreparable loss, is now broken—ready for the scrap heap, which is where his children find themselves, wandering in a “universe of loss.”

  The New Yorker rejected “My Children at the Dump.” Howard Moss, the poetry editor who did so much to encourage Updike, gave an uncharacteristically dopey account of the reasoning behind the decision. “The general feeling,” Moss wrote, “was that a personal situation is its central point and the poem tends to avoid that point, though, at the same time, having been brought up, it’s inescapable to the reader.” Why not praise instead the poet’s calculated (and evidently effective) indirection? I suspect that the editors felt squeamish about the “personal situation” in this intensely sad poem (originally entitled, as if to ram home the personal element, “My Children at the Dump at Ipswich”); they were uncomfortably aware that Updike was, as Maxwell put it, “a conspicuously autobiographical writer” and weren’t quite ready to hear about “the day before divorce.”

  But the “personal situation” remained Updike’s obsessive concern for the next few years, causing difficulties for Maxwell as it did for Moss. “Solitaire” was accepted by The New Yorker, but Updike knew it couldn’t be published just yet. In early October, as the storm was breaking, he submitted another story about a love affair in tatters, “Leaves.” He asked that it not be put “on the bank”—that is, with the other stories ready to be printed in an upcoming issue. Dutiful and discreet, asking no awkward questions, Maxwell agreed to put it to one side until circumstances (the state of the marriage, the state of the affair) allowed its publication. Eventually Updike had more than half a dozen stories about unhappy adulterers parked on what he called “the shadow-bank,” some for longer than two years. Among them were “Solitaire,” “Leaves,” “The Stare,” “Museums and Women,” “Avec la Bébé-Sitter,” “Four Sides of One Story,” and “The Morning”; about the last of these he wrote, “though the vessel of circumstantial facts is all invented, libel-proof, etc. the liquid contained may, if spilled soon, scald somebody.” He was well aware that heaping the magazine with stories it couldn’t run was an imposition, but as he admitted, stories of the “non-troublesome” variety didn’t seem to engage his interest. Even after he’d renounced the dream of marrying Joyce, he was still thinking about her, still writing about her—or, rather, about the misery of renouncing her. The stories that did engage his interest were dense, bitter meditations on loss and longing, all short, all notably artful, not to say baroque.

  In “Leaves,” grief comes crashing down: “It does not stop coming. The pain does not stop coming.” The narrator has given up his lover (“My heart shied back”), and is now in despair. Updike inserts an accurate thumbnail version of Mary’s trip to the lawyer and the phone call that granted his marriage a last-minute stay of execution. The wife drives off to Boston “to get her divorce,” dressed in a black sheath dress (as Mary often was); while she’s conferring with the lawyer, the husband changes his mind: “By telephone I plucked my wife back; I clasped the black of her dress to me and braced for the pain.” In “The Stare,” another piece of the drama is played out. The adulterous husband faces the fury of his lover when she realizes that he won’t be leaving his wife. “Don’t you love me?” she asks. “Not enough,” he replies. He states his answer “simply, as a fact, as something that had already been made plain.” Updike emphasizes the shameful weakness of a character whose courage has failed him: “Two households were in turmoil and the rich instinct that had driven him to her had been transformed to a thin need to hide and beg.” In “Museums and Women,” after a half-dozen gorgeous pages based on reminiscence (memories of his mother taking him to the Reading Museum as a child, memories of meeting Mary outside the Fogg Museum as an undergraduate), Updike once again presents us with the forsaken lover. The woman, still distraught though the breakup occurred some time ago, asks what went wrong; the Updike alter ego shrugs: “Cowardice,” he tells her. “A sense of duty.” The story ends with a melancholy reflection on the steady diet of disenchantment that awaits him.

  Compounded misery is the keynote of these stories; for the first time in his career, Updike’s writing was unrelentingly dour, drastically short on hope and humor. Instead of celebrating the mundane, he brooded; introspection usurped the place of lively observation—“abstract-personal” was the label he affixed to this mode of writing. Though this somber mood cast its pall for a couple of years, the most intense phase (mid-August to mid-December 1962) was relatively brief. It was characterized by a kind of self-inflicted punishment. The protagonist of “The Stare” is dismayed to find the pain of his breakup receding: “[H]e discovered himself so healed that his wound ached to be reopened.” Reopening the wound is what Updike did in story after story, a masochistic aggravation of the initial trauma. He felt guilty and ashamed and bereft. Still, however unhappy, he was essentially undamaged. He carried on churning out his daily pages, correcting proofs, keeping up his end of a voluminous, chatty, cheerful correspondence. His writing was as fluent as ever; “The Leaves,” a virtuoso display of exquisitely controlled prose, was written “swiftly, unerringly.” He boasted, “No memory of any revision mars my backwards impression of it.” In other words, his torments weren’t such that he ceased to function professionally—and his awareness of that fact triggered further remorse. At the same time, knowing that he had emerged from the ordeal more or less unscathed—and raring to write about it—could only bolster his already sturdy confidence in his career prospects. Decades later, when he wrote in his memoirs about the “distress and emotional violence” of this failed attempt to break out of his marriage, he claimed to feel proud of his bravery: “I had at last ventured into harm’s way. I had not only been daring but had inspired daring in another.” And yet his daring deserted him: “A door had opened, and shut. My timidity and conscience had slammed it shut.” There are many contradictions at work in this passage, not least the jarring juxtaposition of bravado and cowardice, infidelity and conscience. It’s a sad m
uddle, a classic case of mixed feelings.

  Though he had made a mess of things, he was an inherently disciplined and tidy writer. He didn’t bleed onto the page; there was no wailing, no gnashing of teeth. He bottled up his pain, labeled it with scrupulous accuracy, then spooned it out in neatly measured doses. Moreover, he was cheerful by nature. In time, therefore, as he organized domestic disarray into the ornate designs of his “abstract-personal” meditations —“taut and symmetrical” is how he described “Leaves”—he recovered his sense of humor. He also began to examine his circumstances with detached, dispassionate curiosity. Thwarted love, doomed love, love for the unattainable woman became for him a subject of intellectual and artistic inquiry.

  Updike had been in Antibes for about a month when he wrote “Avec la Bébé-Sitter,” his first lighthearted look at the “personal situation.” It begins with a swift scene-setting declaration: “Everybody, from their friends in Boston to the stewards on the boat, wondered why Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Harris should suddenly uproot their family of three young children and take them to the South of France in the middle of November.” The answer, of course, is that the trip is the alternative to divorce. But instead of replaying the upheaval of the affair and its sequel in Kenneth’s consciousness as he mopes around his rented villa with its “postcard view” of Antibes, Updike makes comic use of a distancing device: the language barrier between the American couple and their middle-aged French “bébé-sitter,” Marie. (The Updikes’ own bébé-sitter was named Rosette.) While his wife is visiting the museum in the center of Antibes, Kenneth suggests that Marie give him and the children a French lesson; after some cute exchanges that amuse the kids and establish a degree of complicity between the adults, the children are sent out to play in the garden. The babysitter then asks why the Harris family has come to France. Kenneth’s startling answer, which in English would have been woefully melodramatic, in French seems matter-of-fact, even when accompanied by a sentimental gesture:

  He said what he next said in part, no doubt, because it was the truth, but mainly, probably, because he happened to know the words. He put his hand over his heart and told the baby-sitter, “J’aime une autre femme.”

  His impromptu, hand-on-heart confession soothes him (“He felt the relief, the loss of constriction, of a man who has let in air”), and when Marie asks whether he doesn’t love his wife, he replies, ungrammatically but again truthfully, “Un petit peu pas.” To the accidental accuracy of this second confession (he loves his wife a little bit not) he adds an explanation universally understood and accepted: “Pour les enfants.” Thanks to this bizarre tête-à-tête, the story ends on a light, cheery note. Though Kenneth still suffers from a “preoccupied heart,” the household now runs smoothly, harmoniously: “They had become a ménage.”

  Because of the abundance of sensitive and accurate autobiographical detail, “Avec la Bébé-Sitter” had to be consigned to the shadow-bank along with the abstract-personal meditations that preceded it, but it’s clearly a different kind of story, an entertainment with a comic lilt designed to charm the reader. Though there was room in Updike’s own preoccupied heart for only one topic, he could now at last step back, take a breath, and laugh a little at the absurdity of his predicament.

  In the new year, Updike’s parents visited Antibes. Though Linda may have guessed at the reason for the family’s sudden transatlantic relocation, the topic wasn’t discussed. When John offered to pay for them to fly over, they were excited and worried in equal measure (“we could turn what should be a happy adventure for you into a grisly business”), but eventually agreed to come. John picked them up at the Nice airport in the little rented Renault the family used to explore the Côte d’Azur. Neither Linda nor Wesley spoke any French, and yet they bravely agreed to stay at La Bastide with the children while John and Mary flew to Rome for few days—a circumstance the Plowville couple also accepted without question. They were rewarded with a stopover in Paris on their homeward journey—a few days of sightseeing and a hotel on the Champs-Elysées, all paid for by their son.

  The Roman interlude was mined for a story as soon as Updike was back in Ipswich. “Twin Beds in Rome” is again about the agony of marital collapse, but the tone is wry and teasing, exposing misery to gentle ridicule. His characters, Richard and Joan Maple, were by now familiar figures, with a shared history and established traits, which helped him to maintain a modicum of ironic distance. As Updike put it in the foreword to a collection of Maples stories, “people are incorrigibly themselves”; Richard Maple had developed an identity subtly separate from Updike’s—Richard is a touch coarser, his failings minutely amplified—and the author could contemplate his character’s quandary with a healthy degree of detachment. He later claimed, “Richard and Joan Maple had become so much characters that I lost track of where they were made up.”

  After their first appearance in “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the Maples faded from view, reappearing six years later, when Updike wrote “Giving Blood” in March 1962. Having moved to a small town north of Boston, and having acquired four children of the same age and gender as the Updike children, the Maples find their marriage now visibly under threat, partly because of Richard’s infatuation with another woman and partly because his “strategy” is to encourage Joan to find a love interest of her own. Quarreling bitterly all the way (the squabble provoked by Richard’s complaints about how hard he works to support the family), they drive to Boston to give blood—a relative of Joan’s is scheduled for an operation for which multiple transfusions will be required. (As usual, this is based on a real-life incident, though in fact the blood was intended for an elderly Ipswich friend, not a relative.) Squeamish Richard has never given blood before, and he nervously seeks comfort from the helplessly maternal Joan. Their shared sacrifice begins to reknit the frayed marital bond. Richard imagines his blood merging with Joan’s; as they leave the hospital, he whispers to her, “Hey, I love you. Love, love love you.” Over lunch at a pancake house on Route 128, Richard promises “never never to do the Twist, the cha-cha or the schottische with Marlene Brossman,” the married object of his infatuation. Joan replies, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care.” The deliciously clever ending reverts to the initial quarrel. Richard offers with mock gallantry to pay for lunch; opening his wallet, he discovers that he has only a dollar on him and begins to rant again about “working like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats.” Joan says, with a prophet’s vatic calm, “We’ll both pay.”

  With “Twin Beds in Rome,” things have gotten much worse: “Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die.” Conjugal habit and mutual dependency keep them together despite their “burning” desire to split up. All this unhappiness might have made for a miserable visit to the Eternal City, but except for John’s psychosomatic complaints (his feet hurt, his stomach hurt), the Updikes enjoyed themselves. In the story, Richard’s sufferings are comically exaggerated, first the foot torture (“In the soft, damp air of Roman winter, his shoes seemed to have developed hot inward convexities that gnashed his flesh at every stride”), then the abdominal ache (“The pain, having expanded into every corner of the chamber beneath his ribs, had armed itself with a knife and now began to slash the walls in hope of escape”). The shoes that pinch, the pain that seeks to “escape”—the symptoms suit a man who feels trapped; he frankly admits that the stomach ailment is a “nervous” condition. Why is he so neurotically eager to get out? There’s no mention of another woman. The focus is entirely on the Maples themselves, on Richard’s deep-seated ambivalence (his desire to leave his wife and concomitant reluctance to do so) and Joan’s mysterious self-shielding emotional remove. They have come to Rome to “kill or cure”; the story teeters back and forth with the marriage—will it last or not?

  The extraordinary thing is that Updike, when he wrote it, had no idea. He sent the story to Maxwell a week or so after his return from Antibes. The plan had been to stay in Franc
e until the spring, but the weather was damp and chilly, and there was no social life at all. Two-year-old Miranda wasn’t well, and her parents were having difficulty communicating with the French doctors, so they seized on this excuse to cut short their stay. When they flew home in late January, John was still mired in gloom. He was not yet “over” Joyce, according to Mary, but “lost interest over the next six months, gradually.” Herbert Harrington registered no objection to the premature curtailment of the Updike exile. When the two couples met in the months after the Updikes’ return, it was usually in a crowd of friends. Though the greetings were polite all around, John apparently found these accidental reunions painful; he circled back in his fiction again and again to the scene where ex-lovers meet at a party and endure fresh agony. Eventually the Harringtons moved out of Ipswich, to nearby Manchester. They spent a year in Greece. Not quite out of sight, they were only intermittently out of mind.

  The afterimage of the unattainable beloved lingered on, as desirable as ever in her absence. Two weeks after finishing “Twin Beds in Rome,” Updike sent Maxwell “Four Sides of One Story,” in which he poured the tragic tale of John and Mary and Herbert and Joyce into the ready-made vessel of the Tristan and Iseult legend. Following in the footsteps of many a twelfth-century troubadour, he took bold liberties with the Tristan material. He cast himself as a mock-heroic Tristan aboard a luxurious Italian steamship “heading Heaven knows where,” self-banished from his impossible love; Joyce as an Iseult the Fair “distracted” by grief over her lover’s departure; Mary as a long-suffering Iseult of the White Hands, the wronged wife; and Herbert as a bullying King Mark taking practical measures to keep hold of his adulterous queen, measures that include sending her to a psychoanalyst, mobilizing his lawyer, and scaring off Tristan by insisting that if he loves Iseult, he must he marry her. Though there are passing references to the magic potion that bewitched the lovers, to the dragon of Whitehaven slain by Tristan, to King Mark’s drafty castle, this epistolary version of the courtly romance is in spirit absolutely up-to-date, a medieval tale told in letters postmarked 1963.