Updike

by Begley, Adam

  There was no sign, in the fall of 1968, that the well was running dry. He quickly reestablished his work routine, an anchor that helped him settle easily in strange surroundings. He bought a new typewriter and a stamp bearing the Cumberland Terrace address. (It’s possible that he remains the only resident of a snazzy Regent’s Park terrace ever to personalize his stationery with a rubber stamp.) The first story he wrote in London, “The Corner,” is firmly rooted in Ipswich—literally in his backyard—a sign that he was missing it. A minor car accident supplies the story line, but really “The Corner,” as the title suggests, is about a place; Updike explained to Maxwell that he wanted the neighborhood houses and automobiles to substitute for people. The final sentence offers a retreating perspective in the style of James Joyce or Thornton Wilder: “the corner is one among many on the map of the town, and the town is a dot on the map of the state, and the state a mere patch on the globe, and the globe invisible from any of the stars overhead.” He was clearly very conscious of being three thousand miles from home. The second story he wrote, “Cemeteries,” is also rooted in place—many places, actually. It skips here and there with a death-denying restlessness, visiting graveyards around the world, in Soviet Georgia, London, Cairo, the West Indies. This “necrotic meditation” ends close to home, first at the family burial plot in Plowville, in the company of his mother, who’s halfheartedly trying to convince him that he should be buried alongside his parents and grandparents; then he’s in Ipswich, giving his son a bicycle-riding lesson along the “ample smooth roadways of asphalt” at the top of the town cemetery. When he sent it to Maxwell, Updike was quite sure that “Cemeteries” was a short story, and he was surprised when it was rejected. Though Transatlantic Review eventually published it, he left it out of The Early Stories, having reclassified it as nonfiction.

  In early November, he and Mary voted at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square—the second successive presidential election in which he had cast his ballot abroad. In Moscow four years earlier he had voted for Lyndon Johnson; in London, he backed the losing candidate, Hubert Humphrey. The winner wasn’t to Updike’s taste; he deplored Richard Nixon’s looks and his “vapid” campaign, but consoled himself with the thought that this was a president he wouldn’t have to defend. Being away from home boosted his patriotism, and the anti–Vietnam War protests in London triggered his usual “underdog rage.” (A week before the election, some twenty-five thousand demonstrators thronged Trafalgar Square; a large and belligerent splinter group marched on the American embassy.) When Anthony Lewis, bureau chief for The New York Times, invited the Updikes to a dinner party at his house in Islington, he was surprised to hear John speaking very patriotically about the United States, even venturing to support the war. “It had been years since we heard anybody talk that way,” said Lewis, “and at first I thought he was teasing, because he spoke in an owlish, amusing way. He was droll, but he was being absolutely serious.” As if to prove it, Updike wrote a gung ho poem about America, “Minority Report,” dissenting from the bad reviews of his “beloved land”:

  They say over here you are choking to death on your cities and slaves,

  but they have never smelled dry turf,

  smoked Kools in a drugstore,

  or pronounced a flat “a,” an honest “r.”

  However appealing, England reminded him that America was “the only land.”

  Still looking back across the Atlantic, he wrote “The Day of the Dying Rabbit,” about a photographer, his wife, and their six children vacationing on an island immediately recognizable as Martha’s Vineyard. A poignant, cannily observed domestic drama set in motion by the slow death of a rabbit half-killed by a neighbor’s cat, it’s a slice of Updike’s summer vacation artfully repackaged for The New Yorker. Maxwell objected to the insistent references to photography—we’re never allowed to forget that the narrator takes pictures for a living—but Updike held his ground, arguing for a thrifty approach to fictional resources: “having made him a photographer, one has to do something with it.” He next turned to material gathered abroad, from a two-week trip he made on his own to Egypt, first to Cairo to deliver a lecture at the university, then to Luxor for a Nile cruise north to Abydos and south to Aswan. The result, “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying,” is an oddly static portrait of an opaque character, Clem, an American tourist with the same itinerary as Updike’s who deflects the sexual advances of various women aboard their “floating hotel,” and of a man onshore, a tailor in Luxor fitting him with a caftan. Fleeting and inconclusive, this homosexual encounter troubles Clem and raises questions about his own apparently conflicted desires. The story was rejected by The New Yorker; shrugging off disappointment, Updike asked Maxwell to forward it directly to Playboy, which accepted it gratefully, happy to print anything by the author of Couples, the man credited with peeling back the covers and exposing the adulterous society.

  Beginning in the new year, he spent many hours in the Reading Room of the British Library researching the life and times of James Buchanan, fifteenth president of the United States and the only one born in Pennsylvania, about whom he planned to write a novel. He conceived of it as a return to his native soil after the detour to Tarbox in Couples. Updike’s obsession with Buchanan—an underrated president, in his opinion—had been brewing since the mid-sixties and would endure until the early nineties. But his habitual fluency failed him when he sat down to write historical fiction, and soon he was referring in exasperation to “the futile Buchanan project.” He plugged away at it all the same; in London, especially, Buchanan was his personal link, via Pennsylvania, to America as a whole.

  In February he wrote “The Deacon,” about a man who can’t resist involving himself in church affairs, and “Rich in Russia,” his fourth Bech story and the most successful of the impersonations attempted at 59 Cumberland Terrace. Leavened perhaps by the frothy atmosphere of swinging London, Bech’s report from the other side of the Iron Curtain is conspicuously devoid of Cold War angst (“There seemed no overweening reason why Russia and America, those loveable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globe so big and blue”); Bech is in an antic mood, even ready to descend into slapstick, as when he tosses his royalty rubles into the air. Newly rich Updike, writing about newly rich Bech, is having fun, supplying his stand-in with a stream of witticisms, among them this bon mot worthy of a seasoned expat: Russia, says Bech, “must be the only country in the world you can be homesick for while you’re still in it.” In early May, turning his attention back to Ipswich and suburban adultery, he finished “I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me,” in which an unfaithful husband who’s moving out of town (a Connecticut iteration of Tarbox) enacts a farewell scene with the woman who was once his mistress, the John and Joyce roles played out all over again with a kind of weary resignation.

  Only when he had returned home did he write a story about London. “Bech Swings?” illustrates the usefulness of the lustful, irrepressibly bookish Bech—and opens another window on Updike’s expatriate experience. Bech allowed the carefully compartmentalized Updike to integrate various inclinations: to unleash his libido (on the page, anyway) and to put his expanding erudition to playful use, all in the same story. Bech suffers the genteel condescension of his British publisher, J. J. Goldschmidt (André Deutsch with bits of Victor Gollancz mixed in), who says he wants to lionize him. (“I’d rather be lambified,” Bech replies.) He fences with an egregious American journalist, parrying deftly but also speaking seriously about the aims of art, a good deed swiftly punished. He makes small talk with the chattering classes, appears on both BBC radio and television, gives a reading at the London School of Economics, submits to a cocktail party in his honor at the U.S. embassy—all this à clef, with Updike’s own professional activities compressed and tweaked for dramatic effect. Updike had told Deutsch that he hated being on display, that he didn’t want to become “a huckster for myself,” that his book should sell itself or not at all, but he somehow ended up giving half a doz
en full-dress interviews and making a succession of “appearances,” live and on television. Bech’s unease with his public role is a facsimile of his creator’s:

  It was his fault; he had wanted to be noticed, to be praised. He had wanted to be a man in the world, a “writer.” For his punishment, they had made from the sticks and mud of his words a coarse large doll to question and torment, which would not have mattered except that he was trapped inside the doll, shared a name and bank account with it.

  Luckily, there are perks to compensate for the “punishment” he endures as a celebrity, among them the adoration of pretty young things.

  Precedent demanded that Bech have a love interest; in “Bech Swings?” Updike gives him Merissa, a diminutive twenty-seven-year-old gossip columnist who exudes an elfin femininity as treacherous as it is arousing. She takes him home from Goldschmidt’s dinner party and serves up the kind of no-strings-attached sex that reeks of wish-fulfillment fantasy. Merissa is no figment of Bech’s imagination; she’s perfectly real: “her hand was as small as a child’s, with close-cut fingernails and endearing shadows around the knuckles.” And yet Bech searches reflexively for a literary source: “He felt he had seen the hand before. In a novel. Lolita? Magic Mountain?” When they make love, the sex is literally words on the page:

  He did all this in ten-point type, upon the warm white paper of her sliding skin. Poor child, under this old ogre . . . whose every experience was harassed by a fictional version of itself, whose waking life was a weary dream of echoes and erased pencil lines.

  In bed, they’re both ecstatically fictive.

  Bech’s flesh-and-blood creator enjoyed being wined and dined in London; he seized the opportunity to admire the “dreamy disdainful poise” of the local beauties, who in turn admired him—he declared them “masterful flirts.” After attending a party crowded with young people, he wrote to Maxwell, “I see why they call English women birds; they chirp, and peck, and hop on one foot, leaving very precise tracks in the snow.” (Bech, trying out the native lingo, calls Merissa a “bird.”) Stimulated by novelty, Updike sparkled. Diana Athill found him to be “an extremely pleasant and intelligent man over the dinner-table”; she saw the Updikes “fairly often,” as did André Deutsch. According to Mary, “Tony Lewis and his wife Linda sort of adopted us.” The Lewises’ daughter, Eliza, who was fourteen at the time, was struck by Updike’s magnetism; she said, “There was this sense of tremendous intellectual energy and fun.” The literary critic George Steiner invited Updike to a high table dinner at Churchill College, Cambridge; Steiner remembered the author being “delightful company” but felt he had to hide his inscribed copy of Couples from the curious eyes of his own young children.

  John’s parents flew over for a two-week visit in the spring, prompting a flurry of sightseeing: Canterbury Cathedral, Stonehenge, Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, the Keats House in Hampstead. The addition of Linda and Wesley meant that the Cumberland Terrace house was teeming with Updikes. Being away from Ipswich, away from their crowd of friends, made for a more concentrated family life, a domestic intensity reflected in a sequence of five short poems Updike wrote in London. “Living with a Wife” is narrowly personal; the reader feels thrust into an intimately private zone, not a place on the map, but rather an atmosphere, an evolving state of tension that binds the poet/husband to the wife he’s contemplating. The poem’s only punctuation is two question marks squeezed at the end of one stanza:

  You slip in and out of beauty

  and imply that nothing is wrong

  Who sent you?

  What is your assignment?

  There is no answer; it’s an honestly conflicted love poem, as the final stanza of the last section, “All the While,” reveling in the casual intimacy of a shared life, suggests:

  Though years sneak by like children

  you stay as unaccountable

  as the underwear left to soak

  in the bowl where I brush my teeth

  The tight focus on the gritty details of cohabitation reads like a confession, though the nature of the transgression is unclear. If she is “unaccountable,” he is manifestly ambivalent, which may be the uncomfortable sum of what he’s saying. Mary was certainly very much on John’s mind. She’s mentioned in most of the letters he wrote to Maxwell during the year abroad, sometimes in reference to her daily activities, but more often with regard to his work; he cites her opinion, or says he’ll seek it out. She’s plainly a trusted reader, an old friend, an ally in this foreign land; he may have been ambivalent about the marriage, but his faith in her literary judgment was unwavering.

  The family flew back to America on June 14, 1969, all of them ready to come home. “I have felt like a balloon on too long a tether,” Updike wrote, repeating (as he did only very rarely) a sentence lifted from a letter to Maxwell. It’s no surprise that the whole adventure had seemed to him somehow unreal—in the nine months abroad he was almost constantly in motion. In Egypt he toured the mosques of Cairo and sailed the Nile. In Holland he saw six Vermeers that were new to him, including View of Delft. For Christmas, he took Mary and the children skiing in Austria. In Denmark they visited the haunts of John’s hero Kierkegaard. In Milan, with André Deutsch, he celebrated the Italian publication of Couples (Coppie). A two-part Easter holiday began in Morocco, where they made an exhausting five-hundred-mile dash in a rented car from Tangier to Agadir; they then flew to Paris for two days, but were too weary of living out of suitcases to enjoy it much. They went up the Eiffel Tower and strolled in the Tuileries. Updike found that the strength of the French franc made the city painfully expensive; “a meal for six,” he groused, “cost roughly the price of an English suit.”

  This traveling frenzy is a compact version of the next four decades. Not a year went by without several trips abroad, some of them purely vacations, many tied to work. Eight months after their return to Ipswich, the whole family flew to Tortola for some winter sun; four months later John took Liz with him to Japan and Korea to attend the PEN International Congress in Seoul, the first of a long series of conferences and symposia in distant lands. As he once remarked about the business of author appearances, media events, and other marketing ploys, “What frightens me really is not how much I dislike it but how much I kind of like it. It’s kind of fun.” The topic in Seoul was “Humor in Fiction.” The next year, in addition to a holiday in Florence (with Mary and André Deutsch and Deutsch’s girlfriend), he traveled to Venezuela to give a talk on Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara and the American Western. In early 1973, funded by a Fulbright grant and accompanied by Mary, he traversed central Africa from Ghana to Ethiopia, delivering at intervals along the way a lecture on the American writer’s cultural situation. (The African lecture proved awkward; he found himself “shedding large chunks of it” as it dawned on him that the one thing audiences in sub-Saharan nations did not want to hear about was “parallelisms with the United States.”) In March 1974 he flew alone to Australia for the weeklong Adelaide Festival of Arts and gave a speech entitled “Why Write?”

  Bech followed in his footsteps.* Two stories, “Bech Third-Worlds It” and “Australia and Canada,” track the movements across five continents of an author promoting his work (and his country) in a jet-lagged blur. Updike cuts back and forth between locations (and hemispheres), giving the stories the kaleidoscopic feel of scenery partially glimpsed in a haze of fatigue and disorientation. However tired, however far from home, Bech is always Bech. Embattled, sensitive to slights against his work and his nation, he fights back with displays of teasing wit, allowing on occasion a flare-up of the “ugly patriotism” he shares with his creator. He is charming—women love him; children, too. He marvels at the out-of-body sensation media attention provokes in him, and nevertheless performs flawlessly. He pays minute attention to any female (even when the female pays no attention to him). He bristles at any hint of male competition. He suffers sharp pangs of existential dread. Looking back at the end of his career, after being awarded a Nob
el Prize nobody seems to believe he deserves, he thinks, “A few countries, a few women.”

  To Maxwell, Updike expressed the hope that each country he visited would yield a short story. Not quite, but nearly. Less immediately rewarding, but useful in the long run, was the authority that extensive travel bestowed on him. Thanks to a decade of cultural mission work and literary hobnobbing, by the mid-seventies he’d been practically everywhere; if he happened to go somewhere new, he could assimilate the novelty with dizzying speed and assurance. When he first saw Helsinki in 1987, for instance, he confidently compared it with Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo, hatching opinions with the unhesitating conviction of a seasoned traveler. It was with the same easy confidence that he turned a slight acquaintance with a country or region into a novel, a feat he accomplished with both The Coup (1978) and Brazil (1994).

  In January 1973, a month before journeying to Africa, he drew up a new will, just as he had done before setting out for Russia. (This time he named Judith Jones as his literary executor.) Despite the usual jitters—a sense of insecurity sharpened in Nairobi—the trip went smoothly, with Kenya providing both urban unease and the wildlife bonanza of a brief photo safari. Mary remembered that she and John weren’t getting along well—certainly not as well as they had been on the Russia trip. On their return, Updike flew down to Washington, tanned and long-haired, to deliver a public debriefing at the State Department, where he explained that he was never happy with the lecture he’d planned to deliver in each of five countries visited, and that eventually he’d substituted remarks about himself—which seemed to be what his audience wanted. He looked back with some satisfaction on an experience that, he later said, “slightly enlarged my sense of human possibilities.”

  It also helped expand his literary range. He waited three years before mining his African expedition for material he could use in a novel; the four weeks spent traveling eastward across the continent were essential to the invention of Kush, the landlocked sub-Saharan nation, not unlike Chad or Ethiopia, at the heart of The Coup. Updike supplemented memories of his journey with copious research—this is the first of his novels to include an acknowledgments page listing source materials. He also let his fancy roam more freely than ever before—The Coup is his first novel set abroad, but more important, it’s his most radically experimental novel; the many critics who seemed incapable of resisting the urge to call it a “departure” weren’t just pointing to the exotic setting. Updike was deliberately turning his back on the domestic realism readers and critics expected from him. For the first time in more than a decade, he produced a novel in which adultery played no significant part.