Updike

by Begley, Adam

  No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them all last night, for all time. Up on the stage . . . to receive the most glamorous of the five National Book Awards, the one for fiction, came John Updike . . . in a pair of 19-month-old loafers. Halfway to the podium, the spotlight from the balcony hit him, and he could not have ducked better if there had been a man behind it with a rubber truncheon.

  First he squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eyeglasses. Then he ducked his head and his great thatchy medieval haircut toward his right shoulder. Then he threw up his left shoulder and his left elbow. Then he bent forward at the waist. And then, before the shirred draperies of the Grand Ballroom and an audience of 1,000 culturati, he went into his Sherwin-Williams blush.

  Peeping past Wolfe’s trademark hyperbole, we catch a precious glimpse of a rumpled Updike—he’d taken the train down from Boston with Mary just that morning—on the cusp of celebrity, still most comfortable with his aw-shucks pose. His short, earnest acceptance speech offered a contrast in style: slick and mellifluous, he extolled in spit-shined sentences the virtue of accuracy; invoked Proust, Joyce, and Cézanne; and left no one in doubt as to the scale of his ambition.

  Cheever had also nominated Updike for membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. These gestures of goodwill helped make their Moscow meeting, eight months after the ceremony in the Grand Ballroom, a jolly occasion. But the camaraderie masked ambivalence on Cheever’s side, a hidden animosity that flared when Updike’s back was turned. As his biographer noted, Cheever was of two minds about Updike even before meeting him. A Knopf executive had sent Cheever an advance copy of The Poorhouse Fair, hoping for a blurb; he refused to provide one, explaining that Updike was an “unusually gifted young man . . . but perhaps not a novelist. His eloquence seems to me to retard the movement of the book and to damage his control.” Having sent off this reply, he felt compelled to write again, saying that though he hadn’t changed his mind about the blurb, he wanted to stress that Updike was indeed “unusually brilliant.” In his journal he wrote, “Sometimes I like the thought of [Updike] and just as often he seems to me an oversensitive changling [sic] who allows himself to be photographed in arty poses.” Complicating matters was the fact that the pair of them were close friends with Bill Maxwell, who edited their stories and acted on occasion as mentor to both—there was in Cheever’s attitude toward Updike a hint of sibling rivalry.

  For his part, Updike felt toward Cheever, who was born in 1912, none of the competitive aggression that sometimes gripped him when he was confronted with promising youngsters. He was grateful to Cheever for having provided the “crystallizing spark” for “Friends from Philadelphia,” and he and Mary read each new Cheever story with avid pleasure (“John Cheever was a golden name to me”). The twenty-year age gap meant that for Updike, the older man belonged to a different generation of writers; as he put it, “Aspiring, we assume that those already in possession of eminence will feel no squeeze as we rise.” Cheever was possibly only dimly aware of the difference in their ages, and was in any case unsuited to an avuncular role, though for the purposes of their adventure, the diminutive Cheever was “Big John” and Updike, who was at least a head taller, “Little John.”

  Big John had arrived in Russia a few weeks before the Updikes, and so acted like a genial host, full of charm and contagious enthusiasm. The two Johns joked about being the last non-Jewish writers in America. Cheever invented stories about the glum Soviet literary officials they encountered, turning them, Updike remembered, into “a bright scuttle of somehow suburban characters”—that is, into Cheever characters. Fueled by vodka and brandy, champagne and caviar, the proceedings took on a giddy carnival air. Cheever was courtly to Mary, who was thrilled to be in such lively company; “during that excursion,” Updike wrote, she was transformed into “a kind of Russian beauty, with a friendly dimple and a sturdy capacity for vodka.”

  The Updikes assumed that Cheever was enjoying himself as much as they were. Perhaps he was—but an unfortunate and somewhat bewildering antagonism toward Little John creeps into Big John’s journal entries. After one of their events at the University of Leningrad, he groused about how Updike “hogged the lecture platform.” A high school dropout, Cheever may have been intimidated by Updike’s intellect, but that doesn’t quite explain why he chose to remember their interaction as continual “back-biting.” In a sequence of letters to Frederick Exley in June 1965, he launched into a rant about Updike—“I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart”—then dramatized his complaints with a born storyteller’s flair:

  Our troubles began at the Embassy in Moscow when he came on exclaiming:

  “What are you looking so great about? I thought you’d be dead.” He then began distributing paper-back copies of the Centaur while I distributed hard-cover copies of The Brigadier. The score was eight to six, my favor. When we went to Spasso [sic] House [the U.S. ambassador’s residence] the next day he forgot to bring any books and I dumped six. On the train up to Leningrad he tried to throw my books out of the window but his lovely wife Mary intervened. She not only saved the books; she read one. She had to hide it under her bedpillow and claim to be sick. She said he would kill her if he knew. At the University of Leningrad he tried to upstage me by reciting some of his nonsense verse but I set fire to the contents of an ashtray and upset the water carafe.

  This fantasy, obviously concocted for Exley’s amusement, came to light only in 1988 with the publication of Cheever’s letters. Updike didn’t deign to deny the story (though Mary did, strenuously); the malice behind it surprised and saddened him, and opened his eyes to the ubiquity of the competitive reflex in writers. “[T]he literary scene,” he wrote by way of explanation, “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.” Cheever died in 1982, six years before the correspondence was published. If Updike was tempted to retaliate by speaking ill of the dead, he showed no sign of it. He did tell the dismal story of Cheever’s last bender, but with sympathy rather than rancor.

  THE LITERARY SCENE, with its minute calibration of rising and falling reputations, was taking up more and more of Updike’s time. His election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (as secure a purchase on Medusa’s raft as one is likely to achieve) meant that he was mingling with such eminent American authors as John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, Ogden Nash, and Thornton Wilder. His former English professor Harry Levin was a member, as was Archibald MacLeish. Cheever had been elected in 1957, Saul Bellow in 1958, and William Maxwell in 1963, and Bernard Malamud (one of the models for Henry Bech) came in with Updike in 1964. Of all these, Updike was by far the youngest—in fact, at the tender age of thirty-two, he was the youngest writer elected to the institute for nearly half a century. Newly inducted and called upon to speak at a dinner meeting in the library of the splendid Beaux Arts headquarters on West 155th Street, a grand landmark building designed by McKim, Mead and White, he prefaced his remarks with a charming acknowledgment of the yawning generation gap: “I feel in this company like hiding behind the dictum that children should be seen and not heard.”

  A year after his election, and nine months after his Foggy Bottom briefing, Updike was back in Washington for an occasion that testified to his rising stature: he had been invited to dine at Lyndon Johnson’s White House and entertain National Honor Students with a reading. He and Mary flew down and checked into the Hay-Adams. In the hotel lobby he spied a fellow Pennsylvanian—and fellow member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters—John O’Hara. Famous for a considerable oeuvre stretching back three decades to his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (and notorious for his social insecurities and his obsession with the Ivy League—hence Hemingway’s well-known quip about starting a fund to send O’Hara to Yale), the sixty-year-old author was r
eaching the end of his career, a millionaire celebrity with a prickly temper and a flagging literary reputation, despite the popularity of the film versions of two prewar triumphs, Pal Joey and BUtterfield 8. Updike, an avid reader of the older man’s New Yorker stories, approached him with a deferential, “Mr. O’Hara?” After a “laconic and characteristic dialogue,” it was established that they would both be attending the same function. Because Updike was providing entertainment, the White House was sending a limousine for him. He asked O’Hara if he’d like a ride—which seemed a good idea until it became obvious that the celebrated author would have to sit in the front with the driver (“the Negro chauffeur”), while the Updikes “settled regally” in the backseat, a social irony Updike found mortifying, conscious as he was of O’Hara’s “acute nerves.” The anecdote, which Updike served up in an essay a few years later, when he himself was basking in the klieg-light publicity surrounding Couples, captures the moment when a writer on the way up bumps awkwardly into a writer on the way down.

  The weighing of reputations had become for Updike a new sideline. A month before his encounter with O’Hara he had published Assorted Prose, the final section of which reprints seventeen book reviews that originally appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The American Scholar, and The New Yorker. Collecting them was a statement of intent; he wanted to be known as a critic as well as an artist. One of the earliest reviews is of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey—a brilliant example of how to gently pan a writer one admires, neatly balancing praise and blame:

  As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its privacy, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life. It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static.

  Having placed Salinger on a pedestal as proud as Hemingway’s, he topples him with a tender, regretful shove, accusing him of a grave writerly sin, a self-indulgent obsession with certain of his characters, namely the Glass family.

  Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. . . . He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. “Zooey” is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddamns, too much verbal ado about not quite enough. The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding.

  The review ran on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and despite Updike’s evident respect, it outraged some ardent Salinger fans. Damning but not malicious, it set a precedent that distinguished Updike among reviewers; even when he disparaged a book, he never adopted a hostile tone. His jabs were cushioned by kindness—or at the very least a show of forbearance.

  On a few occasions he tumbled unresisting into parody, as in his review of Samuel Beckett’s novel How It Is, which concludes, memorably, after a few pages of punctuationless meandering in the style of the text, “the end of review the END of meditating upon this mud and subprimate sadism NO MORE no more thinking upon it few books have I read I will not reread sooner SORRY but that is how it is.” The attraction of unkind, ungentle reviewing is immediately apparent, but unlike many critics, Updike preferred to write about books he liked. Assorted Prose, for instance, contains valentines to Nabokov and Muriel Spark. Nabokov was one of Maxwell’s writers, and he and Spark both wrote for The New Yorker, but there’s no doubt that Updike’s enthusiasm was genuine and disinterested.

  He was also on the receiving end. Mixed reviews of his work were not uncommon, but outright attacks were rare, at least until the mid-sixties, when his fame made him a target (and Assorted Prose had established him as a critic, and therefore fair game, on the theory that if you dish it out, you have to learn to take it). On November 21, 1965, Book Week, the book section of the New York Herald Tribune, ran an astonishingly spiteful review of Of the Farm by a University of Michigan professor, John Aldridge, who considered himself a specialist in American literature. (He was a stalwart champion of Norman Mailer’s work.) The overt aim of Aldridge’s essay was to demote Updike to “the second or just possibly the third rank of serious American novelists.” He begins by acknowledging “Mr. Updike’s charming but limited gifts” and later allows that he “does on occasion write well,” but these gestures in the direction of civility are buried by an overload of ad hominem reproach. Even the compliment to Updike’s writing turns into an insult: writing well is revealed as the author’s “private vice,” a phrase that captures the insidiously personal drift of Aldridge’s argument. Consider this unrelenting barrage:

  He does not have an interesting mind. He does not possess remarkable narrative gifts or a distinguished style. He does not create dynamic or colorful or deeply meaningful characters. He does not confront the reader with dramatic situations that bear the mark of an original or unique manner of seeing and responding to experience. He does not challenge the imagination or stimulate, shock, or educate it.

  There’s no attempt to disguise the animus at work here—on the contrary, the repetition of the personal pronoun at the beginning of each sentence makes the intent refreshingly clear: he (Aldridge) wanted to inflict pain.

  The assault had long-term repercussions. The final thrust of the blade was the revelation that “behind the rich, beautiful scenery of [Updike’s] descriptive prose” lay a hidden secret: “Mr. Updike has nothing to say.” That this was merely an echo of a Norman Podhoretz slur (“To me he seems a writer who has very little to say”) did nothing to ease the pain. Aldridge’s essay not only left a lasting scar on Updike’s admittedly sturdy ego, but also formed the basis of many subsequent attacks. It lies behind Harold Bloom’s oft-quoted quip about Updike being “a minor novelist with a major style”; Dorothy Rabinowitz’s discovery of a “vacuity” at the heart of his stories; and Gore Vidal’s conviction that Updike “describes to no purpose.” No matter how many prizes he won, no matter how many reviewers confirmed his position at the forefront of the first rank, Aldridge’s dissent continued to rankle; that short, scathing put-down—“nothing to say”—never lost its sting.*

  I believe it hurried him along a path he had just begun to explore. He started to allow a wider spectrum of his immediate experience into his fiction. Little by little, he embraced the notion that the personal is political—a phrase coined later in the decade, after civil rights marches, antiwar protests, and the women’s liberation movement had crowded into the consciousness of even the most solipsistic citizen, when the interpenetration of private life and public policy had become obvious, a truism. Updike had always assigned unusually high value to his personal experience; he seemed to cherish whatever happened to him. Now he was beginning to place that experience in a national and international context.

  Mary was a catalyst in this regard. Like her father, she had a strong commitment to the civil rights movement. After attending lectures on the theory and practice of nonviolence with a view to participating in the voting rights protests in the South, she flew down to Montgomery, Alabama, with another woman, a close friend from Ipswich; spent the night; then joined the last two days of the third and largest march from Selma, a protest that eventually attracted some twenty-five thousand supporters. Mary and her friend flew back from Montgomery late at night, landing in Boston in the small hours of the morning, exhausted and exultant.

  A month later she persuaded John to come along on a protest march from Roxbury to the Boston Common. The object of the march, led like the Birmingham marches by Martin Luther King Jr., was to denounce segregation in schools, jobs, and housing. The experience is described, with only a few fictional flourishes (and a capsule version of Mary’s adventures in the South), in a Maples story, “Marching Through Boston.” After a dozen years of feeding voraciously on private moments, Updike for the first time chose a public event—an event destined to become an item in the newspapers, part of the historical record—as the basis for a short story. Needless to say, this d
idn’t mark the end of his investigations into domestic life, but from now on, headlines were to play an increasingly prominent role, especially in his novels.

  A reluctant and comically self-involved protester, Richard Maple is more inclined to mockery than indignation. Feverish on the day of the march, he struggles to turn his attention outward. Though he registers with uncanny precision the effects of the timed-release medicine he’s taken for his cold (“Within him, the fever had become a small glassy scratching on the walls of the pit hollowed by detonating pills”), he seems barely capable of focusing on the purpose of the protest. Chilly at first, then drenched as they listen on the Common to speeches by King and Ralph Abernathy, he starts parodying, on the drive home, the revival meeting oratory of the speakers, then slips into a minstrel show accent and an Uncle Tom persona: “Ah’ze all raht, missy, jes; a tetch o’ double pneumonia, don’t you fret none, we’ll get the cotton in.” Joan asks him to please stop, but he finds he can’t. It’s a peculiar, unsettling performance only partly redeemed by the fact that he really is ill, and that at some level he identifies with the people he’s mocking: “He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him . . . as if he had indeed given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for attention from the depths of oppression.” Richard is crying for attention, and he’s also goading Joan, needling her because he’s trapped (shackled) by his marriage. And yet any identification between Richard Maple and slaves and their descendants is grotesque. To call his behavior politically incorrect is of course an anachronism; it’s nonetheless willfully contrarian and intentionally offensive. When Joan tells him he’s embarrassing the children with his Uncle Tom act, she might as well be saying that he’s embarrassing the reader. Even in 1965, an author who put into the mouth of a white character the words, “Ef Ah could jes’ res’ hyah foh a spell in de shade o’ de watermelon patch, res’ dese ol’ bones . . .” could count on making a sizable portion of his audience (his enlightened New Yorker audience) cringe.