Updike

by Begley, Adam

  A libel-proof Couples was loosed upon the world in tandem with the Time cover story, with its “grim” portrait of a “fretful,” squinting author posed in a green turtleneck against an expanse of Ipswich marsh. To the magazine’s reporter, Updike protested halfheartedly that his “real life experience has been quite mild compared to that of Piet”; Tarbox, he declared in the article itself, “is purely fictional.” A few months later, with Couples already a bestseller, he told The Paris Review, “I disavow any essential connection between my life and whatever I write.” No one was fooled. Tarbox was Ipswich, and the couples were his circle of close friends. When a columnist said as much in the Ipswich Chronicle, Updike flatly denied the allegations in a letter to the editor:

  The Tarboxians are not real people but conglomerations of glimpses and guesses and thefts and slips of the pen into which I, in the author’s usual desperate endeavor, have tried to breathe life. They seemed alive to me, and in that sense became my friends; but I never confused them with reality, and think no one else should.

  Of course one can recognize the difference between characters in a novel and real people and yet still maintain that Updike was offering up to the reading public a group portrait of his Ipswich gang. But his friends were used to his habit of pilfering bits and pieces from their lives; if they were annoyed, they kept it to themselves. Other locals on the periphery of the crowd—casual friends and acquaintances who weren’t part of the inner circle—complained that the novel made the town sound like the adultery capital of America, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Updike had known all along that it would stir up trouble—he mentioned to Maxwell the possibility that it would create a “furor”—and this adds a further twist to his dedication; he was throwing a bomb into the main street of Ipswich with Mary’s name printed on it in bold letters.

  Did anyone notice the irony when Updike wrote the pageant for Seventeenth-Century Day? The occasion was the town’s celebration of its Puritan past. There he was—the celebrity author who had trained a spotlight on suburban sex—dressed up in antique garb, a Pilgrim father for a day. That was in early August, and the resentment stirred up by Couples was a fading memory obscured by the novel’s handsome commercial success. But Updike’s literary reputation had been permanently skewed. The luscious prurience of the sex scenes made the author’s name a byword for “cerebral raunch,” the tag applied to Updike’s oeuvre by a New York Times critic more than fifty years later. The headline of Wirt Williams’s review of Couples in the Los Angeles Times, “America’s Most Explicitly Sexual Novel Ever,” summed up the sentiment of countless scandalized critics. (Williams himself was actually delighted that the author was so candid in his erotic descriptions.) Diana Trilling, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, expressed her distaste with prim remarks about how “wearying” she found the “sexual redundancies” of his “fancied-up pornography.” Updike dismissed her review as “a banshee cry of indignation,” but his publishers found it useful to quote her on the jacket of the mass-market paperback: “I can think of no other novel, even in these years of our sexual freedom, as sexually explicit in its language . . . as direct in its sexual reporting, and abundant in its sexual activities.”* Sex, as they say, sells; Updike later acknowledged that the book earned him a million dollars.

  Couples made him rich and famous—and, in a sense, notorious. But his notoriety—the winking acknowledgment of his dizzy ride on the merry-go-round of Ipswich adultery—is misleading. The novel was made possible not because he made a habit of bedding down with the wives of his friends but rather because he remained detached, because his “inner remove” freed him from the moral and social constraints most adulterers surrender to. Updike professed to believe that “artistic creation is at best a sublimation of the sexual instinct,” a Freudian formulation he fleshed out in the person of Henry Bech, about whom he once remarked, “Art is his pastime, but love is his work.” If that makes Bech a representative writer (and human being), then Updike is an anomaly: what mattered most profoundly to him wasn’t sex or even love; what mattered was writing.

  VII.

  Updike Abroad

  In the era of jet planes and electronic communication, a writer in gathering truth should set foot on as much of the globe as he can.

  —Self-Selected Stories of John Updike (1996)

  In a rented house near Chilmark Pond on Martha’s Vineyard, in August 1968, just a month before he and his family embarked on a year abroad in London, Updike finished the longest, most ambitious poem of his career. “Midpoint” is a searching look back over his thirty-six years, a summing-up after a prolific decade as a professional author, and an excavation of his identity as a son, a lover, a husband, a father. Capping this wide-ranging retrospective, and reinforcing the blithely optimistic notion that after this “midpoint” a second act would unfold, the poet makes a startling resolution: “henceforth, if I can, / I must impersonate a serious man.” The very last line of a difficult, five-canto, forty-page poem replete with formal tricks, far-flung allusion, incidental pornography, and typographical high jinks, it’s both a tease and a blunt declaration of intent. The hint of paradox—would a serious man embrace impersonation?—shouldn’t deter us from taking him, well, seriously. He’s proposing that he become what his career has made him: a public figure—as Yeats would say, a “smiling public man”—a literary celebrity. (He considered capitalizing “Serious Man” to emphasize the theatrical aspect, the role-playing.) That particular kind of impersonation was much on his mind. One reason he hatched the plan to spend a year in England was to dodge the publicity Couples was sure to generate; he and Mary started thinking about leaving town immediately after he’d finished the novel. (The publicity, however, proved hard to avoid; he permitted himself to be fêted by literary London and, with the novel lodged comfortably atop British bestseller lists, freely granted interviews to Fleet Street hacks.) Also on his mind was the kind of impersonation he did on the page: the making of fictional characters in general, and Henry Bech in particular.

  The idea of giving Bech his own book first occurred to him when he wrote the second of the stories, “Bech in Rumania,” in April 1966; a couple of years later, as he was working on “Midpoint” and looking forward to the London adventure, he wrote Bech’s Russian journal and dreamed up a full bibliography, both eventually published as appendixes to Bech: A Book (1970). On the way to England he savored his latest story in The New Yorker (“Bech Takes Pot Luck,” in the September 7 issue), reporting back to Maxwell with alliterative satisfaction, “It was good to read about Bech on the boat.” Going abroad and burrowing deeper into Bech are related activities. Leaving home and living in the skin of an invented character are ways of escaping from oneself, and in both cases the distance achieved is instructive; impersonation teaches us something about who we are—as does travel, which uncovers, as Updike wrote, a “deeper, less comfortable self.”

  Bech is sometimes self-consciously aware of being a character created by John Updike (and sometimes even by Henry Bech), and being away from home often gave Updike the impression that he was posing as himself. Over the years, this hypersensitive postmodern pair collaborated extensively, and the doubling conjured up a receding infinity of mirror images—the giddy fun of Bech interviewing Updike; or giving him his blessing, as he did in the foreword to Bech: A Book; or wondering, with comic resignation or mounting panic, whether he isn’t boring his creator. There’s no academic theory weighing on these lighthearted, Nabokov-inspired displays of cleverness; the metatextual stunts never interfere with the narrative or obscure the scene. Like Updike, Bech is a sharp-eyed observer of the world around him, especially abroad. It’s perhaps not too much to say that by impersonating Bech, Updike learned how to travel; the character gave the displaced author a purpose and a point of view—gave him, you might say, a new sense of his identity.

  Updike had a stay-at-home childhood; during his first eighteen years, he hardly ever left Berks County. As a young man he was a nervous traveler. He neve
r boarded an airplane before he was twenty-four, when he flew anxiously with Mary and one-year-old Elizabeth to California to visit Mary’s sister. But by the time Bech was conceived, during the six-week tour of the Soviet Bloc in late 1964, Updike was more comfortable with foreign travel. His first trip abroad, to take up his Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School in Oxford, was also his longest, lasting a little more than ten months. In early 1960, just after he finished Rabbit, Run, he packed up the whole family and flew them to Anguilla, the cheapest Caribbean island they could find, for a five-week adventure, an extended holiday in an unknown place. Though it was excitingly exotic at first, they grew bored when the novelty wore off. Then there was the two-month banishment to the South of France at the end of 1962, with the side trip to Rome. And there were many short hops to various sunny spots in the West Indies, including a return visit, with Mary, to Anguilla. But it was only after the family arrived in London in mid-September 1968 that the trips abroad started coming fast and furious. Over the next nine months he visited seven different countries, including Egypt, Denmark, and Morocco, and in the decades that followed he circled the globe with great relish, and a lingering sense of his own incompetence as a traveler—going to Africa, Australia, South America, the Far East, the Indian subcontinent, the Mideast, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. The small-town boy became a citizen of the world.

  When he sailed for England aboard the SS Rotterdam accompanied by his wife and four children, he was Henry Bech in disguise: a peripatetic, cosmopolitan author ready and willing to perform the “basic and ancient” function of bringing news from abroad home to armchair travelers. Half of the twenty Bech stories take place in foreign countries; of the first five, only “Bech Takes Pot Luck” is set in America, and even that—about Bech’s summer escapades on a small Massachusetts island (Martha’s Vineyard)—has a travelogue feel to it. A native of the Upper West Side, Bech thinks anywhere outside Manhattan (“the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson”) is a distant land. Driving up the Eastern seaboard in his beat-up Ford, then crossing to the Vineyard on the ferry, is for him a nervous-making journey, his destination less exotic than the USSR but still distinctly foreign.

  England was both familiar and congenial. John and Mary knew it from their Oxford days, and English literature supplied a cast of characters and a panorama of backdrops to help them make sense of the national foibles. Wordsworth prepared them for the “nodding” daffodils, Eliot for “pigeons the color of exhaust fumes.” In a day’s sightseeing you could compile an anthology; “every shire,” Updike wrote, “has been the site of a poem.” Yet aspects of British life remained irreducibly strange; as he acknowledged, “there are recesses of England that exist only for the initiates.” And in the thirteen years since their first stay, the nation had been transformed. Postwar austerity was a dreary memory; London was now the swinging capital of cool, alive with youth and affluence and bright creative energy. Chic shopping streets were full of “bustling bravura” and novel sights; the women, Updike noted, “parade in everything from yak hides to cellophane.” The mod fashions and high-decibel popular culture did not entirely detract from the essentially civilized urban atmosphere, the parks and monuments, tokens of a great empire, the gracious civic life. The bobbies in their helmets were polite; even the poor were polite. “Here,” Updike wrote, “things are . . . cheap, pretty, educational, clean, green.” He declared, “An American in London . . . cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city.”

  Their lodgings were implausibly grand: 59 Cumberland Terrace—the house found for them by André Deutsch’s vivacious colleague Diana Athill—is part of a vast neoclassical edifice, completed in 1828, that stretches along the eastern side of Regent’s Park. An imposing sequence of colonnades and arches, topped in the center by a large sculptural pediment, it features fleetingly in “Bech Swings?” and is first glimpsed from a taxi at night: “They entered a region where the shaggy heads of trees seemed to be dreaming of fantastically long colonnades and of high white wedding-cake facades receding to infinity.” Moving from an Ipswich saltbox to the Regency splendor of Cumberland Terrace was disorienting for the whole family, though only the youngest, Miranda, admitted to homesickness. The children were enrolled at the American School in London. Liz and David were old enough, at thirteen and eleven, to enjoy exploring the city by riding on the tops of the double-decker buses. Michael, age nine, was proud that he could take the bus to Hamleys and Carnaby Street all on his own. Miranda got into the habit of doing imitations, and Liz, according to her father, acquired “a somewhat womanly air of expectation.” All of them, he decided, were “turning a touch cosmopolitan.” Mary picked out a trendy khaki pantsuit at Harrods; John found a pair of shoes at Russell and Bromley and was fitted for a suit at stylish Mayfair tailor Cyril A. Castle; they bought a new family car, a huge green Citroën sedan they shipped back to Ipswich at the end of their stay.

  Mary was confronted with the task of keeping house in a strange city. Shopping for six with just a basket under her arm was a challenge in a neighborhood composed almost exclusively of mansions; to fetch groceries, she walked up to Camden Town. A malfunctioning washing machine meant that she did the laundry in the bathtub. As John conceded in a letter to Maxwell, their elegant house was “full of unworkable antiques and devices.” It was the sort of property that generally housed foreign diplomats and high-flying executives who employed servants to look after the housekeeping details. The rent, moreover, was “princely”: £455 a month, which looks innocuous but translates, in today’s money, to roughly $10,000, a staggering sum, considering that they stayed in London for ten months. The payments were made by André Deutsch Ltd. out of Updike’s account, which, luckily, was well stocked with pounds sterling earned from the seven books he’d published in Great Britain since Rabbit, Run.

  Paying that kind of exorbitant rent, and knowing he could comfortably afford it, stirred up his misgivings about prosperity and sophistication. He was at times suspicious of the satisfaction he derived from having fulfilled his ambitions. Writing to Maxwell from London, from the splendor of his Regency terrace, he brooded about the fact that he was now irrefutably “successful”—“the adjective I hear since Couples.” Success, he declared, was not the proper aim of writing; he wondered whether it was promoting in him “a kind of rotundity not only in the mirror but in the spirit.” These grumblings shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value—he hadn’t actually gained any weight; there was no visible sign of the dread “rotundity,” and besides, he was feeling feverish, a condition he blamed on some chestnuts in syrup he’d eaten at supper the night before. When he was feeling ill, or after a disappointment or a perceived slight—in short, when he was feeling sorry for himself—he would feign indifference to his accomplishments and offer to give up his career. On this particular occasion, perhaps feeling a touch homesick, he allowed his musings on success to segue into a familiar refrain: “It occurs to me the world would not be significantly poorer if I stopped writing altogether. Only a bottomless capacity for envy keeps me going. That and the pleasure of reading proofs and designing book jackets.” To anyone who didn’t know him, these dramatic renunciations and self-recriminations could be somewhat alarming. After a string of New Yorker rejections in early 1958—but in the same month that The Carpentered Hen was published—he announced to Howard Moss with apparent finality, “[A]s a light verse writer I am through.” Moss didn’t panic, partly because along with his letter Updike enclosed a poem. Two decades later, Roger Angell was semi-spooked by a humorous aside from the magazine’s most prolific contributor: “I may have reached the age,” wrote the forty-seven-year-old Updike, “when I should hang up my short-story shoes along with my light-verse Keds, and turn to the slippers of the multi-volume memoir.” In time, self-deprecation became a kind of tic; his submissions, in the last decades, were more often than not accompanied by the suggestion that the well had run dry, inspiration had deserted him, his talent was worn out, only hard work was keeping him going, an
d surely this story or poem would be the end of his writing career. In the early seventies he complained of feeling “like each thing is produced on the verge of silence and like each thing is the last thing I can think of to say.” His Beckett-like tone of resignation and disappointment was a tease; he was playing it for laughs and also, oddly, sympathy.