by Begley, Adam
But is it, as David claims, somehow his fault? “We need a sacrifice,” he declares. “We’re so full of infection we must bleed.” Because he blames himself, he forces a crisis; as he tells it, “dazed with fear and numb with resolution, I went to Morton Williams and asked him for his wife.” This unconvincing moment of odd, greedy self-sacrifice has the desired result: “Under Morton’s guidance, the four of us became . . . expertly coöperative at obtaining divorces.” Which brings us to the grim, solitary present: David adrift, living “without illusions,” fingering like worry beads memories of friendships that have melted away.
There’s more incident in these few pages than one would expect to find in a half-dozen Updike stories. He tried to cram all of Tarbox into one tale, a project, he later realized, that required the scope of a novel. Though overstuffed, “Couples” is exhilaratingly engaged with the world; after the claustrophobia and solipsism of the abstract-personal mode, it feels like a window thrown open. The story ends, however, on a violently misanthropic note. Living alone, David comes to the conclusion that solitude is man’s natural state. (Having never yet lived on his own, Updike had a somewhat theoretical concept of solitude.) He envisions a constant battle being waged against the existential threat of isolation; deploying an elaborate metaphor, he equates a community of married couples with a “bewitched armaments factory whose workers, in their frenzy to forge armor for themselves, hammer, burn, and lacerate one another.” Updike noted, in a foreword to the limited edition, the “clangor” of the last two paragraphs, and let slip, pointedly, that they were first scrawled on the “blank insides of an eviscerated envelope from the Mental Health Association of the North Shore.” It’s always hard to think of Updike unhinged; his cool professionalism discourages it. The image of his ripping apart an envelope that reminded him of psychiatry and scribbling a furious screed against the self-inflicted wounds of coupledom owes more than a little to romantic stereotype; it seems barely plausible—yet that’s clearly the image he was hoping to plant in the reader’s mind. (The Mental Health Association of the North Shore actually did exist; it occasionally solicited funds to provide counseling for the families of psychiatric patients in state care.)
Its grim ending notwithstanding, “Couples,” like the Olinger stories, celebrates a time and place. The “bucolic pleasures” of Tarbox are fondly recalled, as is the warmhearted camaraderie of friends in the first blush of their acquaintance. David’s affair is also celebrated; as he explains in his foreword, Updike wanted to say “something good” for the “sad magic” of suburban adultery.
That same “sad magic” is the obsessive subject of Marry Me, a flawed novel that nevertheless seems to me Updike’s most underrated. Begun in the spring of 1962 and completed two years later, it was not published until 1976, just after the Updikes were divorced, when the Harrington fiasco—which it chronicles in excruciating, barely fictionalized detail—was a fading memory. Updike wrote Marry Me, in other words, alongside the sequence of stories consigned to the limbo of the New Yorker shadow-bank; in the true chronology of his novels, it follows The Centaur and precedes Of the Farm; more significantly, he finished it two full years before he began work on Couples, the bestselling novel that planted in the public imagination the idea that the adulterous society was territory belonging to him by right of discovery. It’s likely that if Marry Me and Couples had been published in the order in which they were written, the critical reception and popular appeal of each would have been quite different.
Updike’s circumstances changed markedly during the time he spent writing Marry Me. When he began it, age thirty, with a pair of novels, three short story collections, and a slim book of light verse to his credit, he could contemplate his career with a justified sense of satisfaction—but as yet it was his promise rather than his accomplishment that drew the attention of others. He was someone whom older writers were keeping an eye on; he was on the cusp. Mary McCarthy told her Paris Review interviewer in the winter of 1961, without feeling the need to preface the remark or identify the subject, “I was talking to someone about John Updike . . .”; she went on to praise The Poorhouse Fair and say that Rabbit, Run was the most interesting American novel she’d read in quite a long time. Pigeon Feathers was published in March 1962 and was a finalist, along with Nabokov’s Pale Fire, for the National Book Award. After The Centaur was published in February 1963 (a week after the Updikes came home from their exile in Antibes), accolades, prizes, honors, and riches piled up in rapid succession. The novel was widely reviewed, for the most part ecstatically. The usually ferocious Renata Adler, writing in The New Yorker, admired its “delicate symmetry and balance”; it seemed to her “a fragile and colorful mobile suspended in slow rotation.” Even critics who expressed irritation at the pretentiousness of the mythological parallels, among them the daily reviewer at The New York Times, Orville Prescott, felt compelled to praise the author; “brilliantly talented and versatile” was Prescott’s line. Time magazine, though similarly irritated, announced that “Updike finds his way more accurately than almost anyone else now writing to the small touchstones of mind and memory.” The New York Times Book Review judged him to be “the most significant young novelist in America.” The Centaur went on to win the National Book Award. Just a year later, Updike was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the State Department to make a goodwill tour of the USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries, part of a cultural exchange program in which John Cheever also participated. In other words, when he finished Marry Me, the thirty-two-year-old Updike was all at once a leading American novelist, embraced by both the literary establishment and a significant portion of the reading public. This darling of the literati was also a commercial success; he earned more than fifty thousand dollars in 1963, and for the first time felt the need to hire a tax accountant.
Marry Me began as a short story, “Warm Wine,” about a tryst in the dunes of a beach in the late spring, two lovers sharing an idyllic moment, their bliss shadowed by the havoc they know their affair will unleash. Updike was a private citizen at the time, writing about a part of his life only he and Joyce knew anything about. Because the affair was still secret, actually publishing “Warm Wine” was out of the question. But John was beginning to dream of escaping from his marriage, and the story was an expression of that dream, a silent hymn to an illicit love. By the time he finished Marry Me (feeling “wobbly,” he told Maxwell—and convinced his book would never see print), he was a public figure, and the affair with Joyce, well known to his crowd of Ipswich friends, was last year’s gossip. Cruelly tested, the bond between John and Mary had survived, but the terms of the relationship were inevitably altered. Neither one now expected the other to be faithful, yet both expected the marriage to last. John told Maxwell in September 1964 that his wife, unlike her fictional avatar, was “strongly on the scene.” But even a flexible arrangement toughened by time and bitter blows can withstand only so much. Though she had been costarring in her husband’s fiction since 1956, Marry Me would have been too brutal an invasion of Mary’s privacy. John didn’t even show her the manuscript; “I was not privy to Marry Me,” she said. He claimed to have aesthetic reservations about the novel (he even put quotation marks around the word when discussing it: the “novel”), but prudence and pity must have played a large part in his decision to stow it away in a safe-deposit box at the First National Bank in Ipswich.
The book that spent twelve years under lock and key tells the by now familiar story. This time around, John and Mary figure as Jerry and Ruth Conant, Herbert and Joyce as Richard and Sally Mathias. Though Updike later confessed to “unease about the book’s lack of . . . sociology,” he did give them a specific time and place to inhabit: the seaside suburb of Greenwood, Connecticut, in 1962. The two couples are, alas, the only citizens of Greenwood, or at least the only ones Updike breathes any life into—their friends and neighbors, babysitters and housekeepers are all minimally sketched. The focus is exclusively, obsessivel
y on the four principals, with their small children (three on each side) occasionally intruding. The plot is a seesaw psychodrama; like so many other Updike stand-ins, Jerry is hanging between wife and mistress, unwilling to let go with either hand, and the suspense, such as it is, consists of will-he, won’t-he. One new twist is symmetry in the couples’ adulterous liaisons: Ruth and Richard were also once lovers, a rare fictional component in a novel that otherwise hews closely to the facts.
Another new element is a serious effort to see the events from the wife’s perspective. Updike had made earlier attempts to illustrate the workings of a female mind (most memorably when the drunken Janice accidentally drowns the baby in Rabbit, Run), but never before had he engaged as closely and at such length with a lucid, educated, intelligent woman; nearly half of Marry Me is told from Ruth’s point of view, an intimate third-person narration that allows us to see her, and the others, as she herself does.
A credible, sympathetic character, Ruth shares Mary’s background and family history (she’s the elder daughter of a civic-minded Unitarian minister), but not necessarily her mind-set; indeed, when Mary finally read Marry Me in the mid-seventies, she was dismissive of Updike’s female psychology. Possibly she noticed that Ruth spends a disproportionate amount of her time brooding about her errant husband. A failed cartoonist who now works as an animator making television commercials, Jerry is in many ways less interesting than Ruth (mostly because he’s entirely preoccupied with his romantic longing), yet he dominates the book. His vacillations draw attention, whereas Ruth’s passivity deflects it. The “other woman,” Sally, is beautiful—or so we’re repeatedly told; the words greedy, silly, and shrill stick to her as well. Updike never gives a convincing explanation (other than potent sexual attraction) for Jerry’s infatuation with her. The fact that when we first meet her she’s reading a novel by Alberto Moravia (highbrow Italian literature!) seems a transparent attempt to give her some depth. Her husband, Richard, is bullying, needy, pretentious—a wise guy with a blind eye (literally) and a vulgar streak; he’s a grotesque rather than a fully rounded character. When Richard learns of Jerry and Sally’s affair (by examining the phone bill, of course), Updike brings all four of his characters together for a dramatic showdown at the Mathiases’ house—a replay of the events at the Harringtons’ in October 1962. Relying heavily on dialogue, he presents an agonizing scene that’s harrowing for the characters (and the reader), though leavened by flashes of panicky humor. Richard’s histrionics are both maudlin and amusing, more amusing, even, than Jerry’s frantic witticisms and weaselly evasions.
Complex religious motifs thread themselves through the novel. Jerry, naturally, is a Lutheran who dreads death and reads neo-orthodox theologians (Barth, Berdyaev); Ruth is a Unitarian, a “pale faith” Jerry despises; Sally is a lapsed Catholic, superstitious and susceptible to pangs of guilt; and Richard is an atheist, a devotee of Freud and Dr. Spock.* The first chapter, the tryst in the dunes, represents a kind of Edenic, prelapsarian moment, with foreshadowings of the Fall and a sacrament of sorts (the warm wine the lovers drink). The second chapter, “The Wait,” takes place mostly in the limbo of an airport lounge, the modern traveler’s Purgatory. The four-way confrontation at the Mathiases’ house offers a glimpse of existential damnation (“Hell is other people”). And at the very end, Jerry discovers an island paradise, heaven on earth, proof that there was a “dimension” in which he could say to Sally, “Marry me”—another sacrament holding out hope of redemption.
Denis de Rougemont hovers over the action like a heavy, dark cloud, never more oppressively than when Jerry spouts theories about his “ideal love” for Sally, “ideal because it can’t be realized.” Jerry also waxes sociological about the state of contemporary marriage: “Maybe our trouble,” he muses, “is that we live in the twilight of the old morality, and there’s just enough to torment us, and not enough to hold us in.” (One is tempted to respond with Ruth’s observation about the economic underpinnings of this particular brand of immorality: “If we all had to sweat for our food we wouldn’t have time for this—this folly. We’re all so spoiled we stink.”) But it’s neither the big ideas nor the complex themes that make the novel worth hauling up from the bottom rungs of Updike’s oeuvre. Its virtues are the familiar ones: keen observation, stylistic brilliance, and painful emotional honesty (in this case, about the turmoil of a disintegrating marriage).
And what if Marry Me had found its way into readers’ hands in the mid-sixties instead of the mid-seventies? Had it appeared magically in bookstores on May 4, 1964 (the day he finished it), it would have been his first published account of suburban adultery*—in fact, it would have been his first extended treatment of romantic passion. It was only after he had locked the manuscript away—drawing a line, as it were, under the Harrington saga—that he allowed The New Yorker to begin printing some of the abstract-personal stories written two years earlier in the throes of his love for Joyce. In 1964 no one would have complained, as Maureen Howard did in The New York Times Book Review twelve years later, about Updike’s “obsession with adultery,” and it would never have occurred to Alfred Kazin to identify Updike’s “one big situation” as “the marital tangle.” Marry Me would have been seen as a fresh departure for Updike, a daring book with a risqué subject. After the Summer of Love, the trauma of Vietnam and the antiwar protests, and the long national nightmare of Watergate, Jerry’s line about living in the twilight of the old morality could only sound like quaint, cooing nostalgia. In 1964 it would have seemed brave and enlightened for Updike to try to see out of Ruth’s eyes; in 1976, on the far side of feminist consciousness-raising, it was more likely to have been held against him. The marital anguish of the Conants and Mathiases would have made sense to middle-class readers in 1964, before the sharp rise in divorce rates that began in the mid-sixties and continued through the seventies, before “no-fault” divorce made the prospect of ending a marriage less daunting, and stories about it decidedly more banal.
A great novel both illuminates its historical context and transcends it; this one, though brilliant in patches and certainly far more rewarding than its critics acknowledge, is not great. The morning after the big confrontation arranged by Richard, Jerry glances at the newspaper; all the headlines are about standoffs: between black and white (James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi and the deadly riots in Oxford); between China’s Zhou Enlai and the USSR; between the Giants and the Dodgers, tied in a pennant race; and between Kennedy and Khrushchev, caught in a spiral of rising tension over Cuba. In a different kind of novel, Updike might have made telling use of this brief, sweeping glimpse of current events, but here he lets it drop without comment. The news flash fixes the date of the Mathias-Conant showdown (September 30, 1962), and connects it for a fleeting instant with national and global crises—but only to remind us that the drama of marital meltdown has cut off the two couples from the wider world. When Updike called the novel Marry Me: A Romance, his idea was to sequester it from history, and he was also thinking nostalgically of the glamour of the early days of the Kennedy administration: Camelot and the elegance of the young couple in the White House. The white-knuckle trauma of the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t figure in Marry Me, nor does the simmering violence of the civil rights movement—nor the assassination of the president.
VI.
Couples
In fact . . . the literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers.
—Updike on Cheever (July 1990)
When shots were fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas on the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963, Mary Updike was in Cambridge, in the office of her psychoanalyst. Her husband was at the dentist having new crowns fitted. There was a dance scheduled that night in Manchester, Massachusetts, a Democratic Party fund-raiser; but the president was dead, and the dance was promptly cancelled. The Updikes had also been invited by a couple
in their set, owners of a big house on the edge of town, to a pre-dance dinner party. The hostess was at the hairdresser when she heard the horrible news; after the initial shock wore off, she started worrying about what to do with the ten pounds of fillet of sole she had in her refrigerator. She phoned around to the other couples, including the Updikes, to ask if they thought it would be appropriate to get together, a telephonic negotiation Updike later characterized as “much agonizing.” A consensus emerged: they would go ahead with the dinner as planned. As Updike explained it, “We didn’t know what gesture to make, so we made none.”
On Sunday, they all played touch football, as on any other autumn weekend.
In Couples, Updike exaggerates these bare facts with broad satiric intent. The Tarbox gang barely hesitates before deciding to attend a black-tie party on the Friday night of the president’s assassination. The food and liquor have been bought, the women have shopped for new dresses (“The fashion that fall was for deep décolletage”), the men have had their tuxedos cleaned—why stay at home and mourn? Updike devotes twenty-five pages to the party: the drinking, the dancing, the flirting, the gossip. The climax is a kind of black Mass: a baked ham is brought in ceremoniously; the host carves; laying the sliced meat on a plate, he intones, “Take, eat. . . . This is his body, given for thee.” It’s a shocking scene, even without the blasphemy, as damning as any in the novel. To cap it off, a man jumps from a bathroom window with his mouth full of his pregnant mistress’s milk. Obviously the evening’s corrupt revelry is intended to give the reader a jolt, to bring home the full meaning of this damning sentence: “the dancing couples were gliding on the polished top of Kennedy’s casket.”
