Updike

by Begley, Adam

  Channeling Tristan and Iseult, archetypes of illicit passion, was another one of Updike’s distancing devices. Tristan, writing to his beloved from the comfort of a well-appointed ocean liner, issues a long, torturous lament. Desperate and histrionic (“I am bleeding to death”), he’s also blatantly, comically self-absorbed, intent on his own pain and aware of the pain of others only when he makes a conscious effort to consider it. Knowing this (“I had never, in my heart,” he tells his lover, “taken your suffering as seriously as my own”), he twists himself into logical knots to justify his egotism. Cerebral in the midst of passion, he acknowledges the possibility that what he wishes to “possess forever” is not Iseult’s presence but her “good opinion.” He explains that marriage is the enemy of love: “We are in love,” he tells Iseult. “The only way out of it is marriage, or some sufficiently pungent piece of overexposure equivalent to marriage”—cohabitation, in his view, would extinguish their passion. His love thrives on separation: the greater the distance from his beloved, the better. Self-imposed banishment is an expression of his purest devotion. (Skeptics might argue that he’s simply a coward putting a fancy spin on a bad case of cold feet. As Mark puts it, “Confronted with the actuality of marriage, the young man bolted.”)

  Despite tantalizing autobiographical echoes, “Four Sides of One Story” isn’t particularly compelling. The courtly love conceit is ingenious but limiting, the characters diminished rather than enhanced by their role in a medieval tragedy reconfigured as contemporary farce. The story is burdened, moreover, with a surplus of incompletely digested theory about romantic love—theory gleaned from Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont’s wildly ambitious Love in the Western World, a book famous at midcentury (and now nearly forgotten) that exerted a strong and enduring influence on Updike.

  In the early summer of 1963, Updike wrote a review for The New Yorker of Love Declared, a collection of essays in which de Rougemont expanded on the “mythanalysis of culture” begun in Love in the Western World. The review, as Updike later remarked, was mostly an excuse to write an essay about romantic love, the topic monopolizing his preoccupied heart. He couldn’t have chosen a more apt book for the occasion. Cutting across disciplines with manic swagger to provide “an etymology of the passions,” Love in the Western World is certainly thought provoking; it seeks to explain everything about our culture from the “inescapable conflict” between passionate love and marriage to the rise of nationalism and the barbarity of twentieth-century warfare. For Updike the appeal lay mostly in de Rougemont’s exhaustive analysis of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, the representative myth of romantic love—an analysis Updike quibbled with yet couldn’t resist.

  “Tristan and Iseult do not love one another,” de Rougemont declared. “What they love is love and being in love.” They are in the grip of passion, which he describes in Love Declared as a “form of love which refuses the immediate, avoids dealing with what is near, and if necessary invents distance in order to realize and exalt itself more completely.” His remarks on the twelfth-century prototype could as easily be applied to the modern lovers in “Four Sides of One Story”:

  Tristan loves the awareness that he is loving far more than he loves Iseult the Fair. And Iseult does nothing to hold Tristan. All she needs is her passionate dream. . . . What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence.

  Passion feeds on denial, on obstacles such as the famous “sword of chastity” placed between the lovers. Pushing his analysis in a darkly Freudian direction, de Rougemont insists that this kind of unappeasable passion “disguises a twin narcissism,” and that the suffering it entails betrays a “longing for what sears us and annihilates us”—a longing for death itself. (Poor Tristan! Poor Iseult! As Time magazine quipped when the book first appeared, de Rougemont “hangs on their necks more weight than Freud ever hung on Oedipus.”)

  Updike balks at the charge of narcissism, arguing that in all forms of love the “selfish and altruistic threads” are inseparable. He also points out that a symbol such as the “sword of chastity,” which de Rougemont interprets as a telltale sign of our obsession with obstructed love, should be thought of as a narrative device—a troubadour’s nifty trick for dragging out his tale. Yet Updike is nevertheless persuaded that de Rougemont is “dreadfully right” to assert that “love in the Western world has by some means acquired a force far out of proportion to its presumed procreative aim.” Updike illustrates the power of “Tristanism” with a rhetorical question that can only be described as heartfelt: “But what of that thunderous congestion in the chest, that suffusion of emotion as harsh as a blow, which Tristan endures at the sight of the Unattainable Lady, or even the mention of her name?” One could be forgiven for reading the end of Updike’s essay as a series of covert confessions. “Only in being loved,” he writes, “do we find external corroboration of the supremely high valuation each ego secretly assigns itself.” And again: “The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life. Therefore the enforced and approved bonds of marriage, restricting freedom, weaken love.” De Rougemont served up a high-flying theoretical explanation for adulterous longing, and Updike devoured it.

  FOR AT LEAST half a year, at home and in Europe, the marriage verged on collapse—and yet proved sturdier than either John or Mary would have guessed. They had been together nearly ten years and would remain together for another twelve. In 2003, when he published The Early Stories, Updike grouped most of the stories written at the time of his affair with Joyce Harrington (including all those in the abstract-personal mode) in a section called “The Two Iseults.” He was obviously thinking of Iseult the Fair and Iseult of the White Hands, and of the choice he had to make between Joyce and Mary (“[H]anging between us,” says Iseult of the White Hands, “he won’t let go with either hand”). But I suspect that with four decades’ worth of hindsight, he had come around to the idea that Mary, too, was an Unattainable Lady. There are hints of it in the Maples stories, even those written in 1963. In “Giving Blood,” Joan twice presents Richard with a face that is a “porcelain shell of uncanny composure,” effectively removing herself from all emotional engagement; and in “Twin Beds in Rome” Richard recognizes that Joan is a “secret woman he could never reach and had at last wearied of trying to reach.” My guess is that Updike’s self-diagnosed case of “Tristanism” extended, paradoxically, to conjugal love, and that Mary’s knack of keeping her husband at a distance, her studiously unruffled passivity—leavened by dry humor, bolstered by tenacious dignity, and sealed with maturing beauty—helped to hold the marriage together. Like many of his damaged fictional couples, they “hunkered down in embattled, recriminatory renewal of their vows, mixed with spells of humorous weariness.”

  In his essay on de Rougemont, Updike maintains that a man in love “ceases to fear death”; Updike, having forced himself to renounce his love, saw death everywhere. After Antibes, still mooning over Joyce, still writing his way all around the topic of romantic love, he endured an “angst-besmogged period” in which his panic manifested itself as breathlessness. Maxwell, listening over the telephone to his author’s labored wheezing, urged him to come to New York to see a doctor (Maxwell’s own), who diagnosed the problem as bronchial asthma and prescribed a Medihaler to treat the symptoms. As for Updike, he wondered whether his breathlessness wasn’t “an ingenious psychosomatic mechanism to make my wife feel guilty about being still married to me.”

  After all the tumult of the affair, the workings of his unconscious were open to new angles of interpretation. Denis de Rougemont held up one mirror, Freud another. “When we got back from Antibes,” said Mary, “it was pretty clear that we both needed to go see shrinks, which we hadn’t done before. We both started going twice a week.” Updike never discussed in public his brush with psychotherapy, which Mary remembered lasting a year or two (“he may have dropped it and then picked it up again”), and there’s no mention of it in his memoirs. He told
a journalist in 1966 that therapy (“which in Boston means sitting up, as opposed to analysis, which means lying down”) had made him “more relaxed”—but then stipulated that his remarks remain off the record.

  He believed therapy did more for Mary, who was by nature more reserved, than it did for him, but he admitted to learning that he was “wrapped up in the idea of families,” that he made a habit of trying to turn the people closest to him into a family—which he accomplished in Ipswich as in Shillington. He also learned that he was at once “invulnerably detached” and “quite vulnerable to the facts of separation and death.”

  In mid-July 1963, he sent Maxwell a story that begins with a woman walking into a man’s office, ends with her walking out, and in between records the lopsided conversation of their “session.” The word session hints at the nature of the transaction, but the word analysis never appears in “My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails,” nor patient, nor doctor. And yet the ritual performed in the office—the flow of the woman’s words interrupted by heavy pauses, the man’s terse questions and prodding comments—is instantly recognizable. Updike is playing on our familiarity with the therapeutic techniques of Freudian analysis, which by the early sixties had become the stuff of cliché. The woman has picked up the jargon and shows it off self-consciously; she says twice that she’s “suppressing” something, offers at one point to “free-associate,” and at the end concedes, “I am neurotic.” The climax of the story is a complaint based on her expectation of how analysis should proceed: “I’d got the idea from somewhere that by this time something would have happened between us, that I in some sort of way, perfectly controlled and safe, would have . . . fallen in love with you.” She’s expecting to experience transference, and hasn’t. She tells her analyst that she thinks the opposite has happened, that he has fallen in love with her. Her “outburst,” however, is taken by the doctor (and the reader) as a sign that he’s “winning,” that transference is indeed occurring. Whether that’s a good thing is another question. At the heart of the story is the contrast between the passion of the lovers and the “perfectly controlled and safe” emotion fostered by analysis, which is intended to restore her to the tame safety of marital contentment.

  “My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails” takes to an extreme the narrow focus of many of the stories from this period; it’s as though Updike could think of nothing except his sorry predicament. Inside the doctor’s bland, air-conditioned office, with its venetian blinds and “black slab sofa,” the sole topic is the love affair recently ended. Everything the patient says, every detail she supplies, relates back to her lover, including the remark that gives the story its title: “I’d sometimes notice—is this too terrible, shall I stop?—I’d notice that his fingernails were dirty.” The frame of the story, the psychoanalytic session, necessarily constricts the action, and yet in a sense it suggests a whole wide world in which marriages are foundering, and anxious wives and husbands look to psychiatry for answers. (“I need help,” says the woman. “I’m ridiculously unhappy, and I want to know why.”) Updike chooses not to label the scene, not to identify the man as a doctor and the woman as a patient, because he wants to underscore how immediately familiar it all seems, and how unsurprising it is for a bourgeois housewife from the suburbs (impeccably dressed in a gray linen suit with white shoes and a white pocketbook) to drive to the city on a weekly basis to consult a Freudian analyst about her affair with a married man. Any New Yorker reader would have recognized her in a flash.

  As would Updike’s Ipswich gang. Mary and John were neither the first nor the last among their friends to see a shrink. It became an accepted next step, after adultery. Alfred Schweigen, the narrator of “The Music School,” sees a psychiatrist, as does his wife (“She visits a psychiatrist because I am unfaithful to her. I do not understand the connection but there seems to be one”). A remarkable story written at the end of 1963 and sent off to Maxwell under the title “Take, Eat,” it includes a sad, helpless overview of suburban marital woes:

  My friends are like me. We are all pilgrims, faltering towards divorce. Some get no further than mutual confession, which becomes an addiction and exhausts them. Some move on, into violent quarrels and physical blows; and succumb to sexual excitement. A few make it to psychiatrists. A very few get as far as the lawyers.

  This is an atypical passage; a difficult story, intricately, rhythmically patterned, “The Music School” is unmistakably in the abstract-personal mode, as its daring first line foretells: “My name is Alfred Schweigen and I exist in time.” Schweigen’s remarks about his friends, a burst of sociology in the midst of an introspective meditation on religion, adultery, and death, are a radical distillation of a very different kind of story written a few months earlier, “Couples.”

  And “Couples” is itself the germ of Couples; or, rather, the novel is a vast extension of the territory sketched out in the story, which Updike finished on May 16, 1963, and sent to Maxwell—who promptly turned it down, probably because it was too nakedly autobiographical and too “crowded,” as Updike himself put it. “Couples” was finally published thirteen years later, when Updike was no longer living in Ipswich, and then only in a limited edition of 250 numbered copies produced by a small Cambridge press; it has not been reprinted, which is a pity, because it’s the original Tarbox tale, Updike’s first attempt to think about what had happened to him in terms of the community where it happened—his first attempt to paint a panoramic portrait of the seaside town in which suburban adultery thrived.*

  “Couples” is indeed crowded, packed with people and their frenetic interaction—which is part of what makes it so engaging. David, the narrator, looks back on six years of married life in the thick of an exceptionally tight-knit group of friends, all of them residents of Tarbox. Now separated from his wife, David intends to marry his lover, who was part of his gang of friends; he’s in a kind of limbo between marriages, and hence temporarily excluded from the world of couples. Updike is imagining what might have been had he gone a step further with Joyce—but if it’s wish fulfillment, it’s wish fulfillment of a dark and unhappy kind: “The leap that had wrenched every joint in my skeleton had landed me in the same place, only torn from my home and robbed of my children.” From the vantage point of no-man’s-land (“I am a parenthesis—a boat adrift between two continents”), David has realized that his future will be very much like his past—except that by swapping wives, he has destroyed his family.

  David and his wife, Ann (their last name isn’t given, but it might well be Kern), came to Tarbox from New York City six years ago. They made the acquaintance of other young couples in town, and this at first seemed a wholly good thing; their new pals “looked like safeguards, echoes, reinforcements of our happiness.” Six of the couples, including David and Ann, quickly formed a cozy bond—“We were folded in.” For three years they enjoyed enviable harmony:

  In memory it seems we were playing at being adults, at being fathers and mothers and homeowners. We had all, it chanced, come to it new together, this incredible America where we managed, and controlled, and mattered; we paid taxes and mowed lawns and poured ourselves a deserved drink in the evenings.

  Suburban bliss, circa 1960. Several scenes evoke with appealing tenderness the “simple party pleasures of the youngly married.” But a subtle shift occurs, the core friendships reconfigure, other couples join in. Somewhere along the line, David falls in love with Peggy Williams. The Williamses, Peggy and Morton, arrived in Tarbox at the same time as Ann and David. A tall woman with “the brittle figure of a tomboy” (until she fills out over the years with “womanly weight”), Peggy is a snappy dresser: “Her clothes were the essence of my love. She had a way of wearing anything so that the cloth seemed glad and independently animated.” She also has a “tireless touch with furnishings.” Her husband, though pretentious, has “moments of great charm.” Early on, before their friendship was fully formed, the Williamses asked (as the Harringtons had done) if they could leave their infant with D
avid and Ann while they went to Boston for the evening. At the time, David’s impression of Peggy was of someone “shrill” and “silly”; he thought she had “the demeanor of a secretary.” And yet he falls in love, almost without realizing it. He and Peggy don’t even kiss until a full year after he has at last admitted to himself that he’s in love; six months after that, they make love for the first time. Several months after the affair has finally blossomed, he confesses to Ann—who stuns him by confessing in turn that for two years she has been sleeping “now and then” with another one of their married friends (not Peggy’s husband, Morton, for whom she has “no use whatsoever”). David asks Ann for a divorce, but she convinces him to “hold off everything until the end of summer.”

  Meanwhile, the scales have fallen from his eyes. David believes that he was, “among the six couples, the last innocent” (which accounts for the glacial pace of the early stages of his affair with Peggy) and that when his innocence was corrupted, “all our furtive woes and suppressed miseries were free to swarm across the social field.” He now sees signs of adultery and marital dysfunction everywhere. What he had assumed were untroubled friendships were plagued, he belatedly understands, by “frantic . . . emotional storms.” He had thought, for example, that the previous winter his wife had been suffering from a “mysteriously prolonged bout of intestinal flu”; in fact it was a “violent mental crisis” triggered when she broke off her own affair. The closeness of the couples has turned toxic. One friend has a loud and public nervous breakdown and becomes the first of the group to enter psychoanalysis; Peggy and others soon follow. It is all, as Ann says, “a fantastic mess.”