Updike

by Begley, Adam

  The children, they felt, needed more space; their bedrooms in the Polly Dole House were tiny, as was the backyard, where there was scarcely room to kick a soccer ball. The noisy, busy corner was a hazard for the family dog, and for the younger children, too. But it was the first house the family had owned and the only home Michael and Miranda had ever known, so there were mixed feelings about the move, regrets about leaving the place that had sheltered them for so long. A pack of kids roamed the East Street neighborhood from yard to yard, the Updike children among them. From the new house at the end of Labor-in-Vain Road, it was a twenty-minute walk to the center of town; the children could bicycle, but their playmates were no longer on the doorstep. According to Mary, the idea behind the move was not to put distance between the young Updikes and downtown Ipswich, and yet at the back of John’s mind may have been a protective impulse similar to the one that prompted Linda to lead her thirteen-year-old son out of Shillington and into his rural Plowville exile.

  Liz was fifteen when the family moved out of East Street, David thirteen. Not exactly rebellious, the oldest Updike child held herself aloof from her siblings. “I sort of ignored them,” Liz remembered. “I led a separate life, a little bit.” During the last year in the Polly Dole House, she began to make life somewhat difficult for her parents, developing relationships that they may have thought of as inappropriate but couldn’t bring themselves to criticize. They had always been very relaxed about discipline, allowing their children wonderful freedom to roam. Although Liz remained ignorant of her parents’ extramarital affairs, she was dimly aware that they were “racy”; she noted, for instance, that they played Twister at their cocktail parties. “They had a friend’s painting of a naked man on a beach hanging in the dining room—very muted colors, more suggestive than graphic—but I couldn’t handle it; it was just so weird for me.” When she was ten and her Girl Scout troop came to dinner, she asked her parents to take the painting down. This prudish streak was later offset by typical adolescent defiance: “I remember saying I wanted anarchy in the house. My father was angry—that ruffled his feathers.” As for David, he was a sensitive child, bright and athletic, but he was prone to unexplained headaches and fits of bad temper. Distracted by work, by his gang of friends, by his many flings, Updike was only fitfully aware of his children’s problems.

  And yet the first story he wrote on his return to Ipswich suggests that he may have been a little worried about his children blending too seamlessly with the local kids, and newly ambivalent about the town itself. A Tarbox sketch in which the narrator speaks with a collective voice (imagine the town elders acting as a chorus), “The Hillies” offers an ironic assessment of the interaction between “the town” and a flock of young people (“the hillies”) squatting on the slope between the main street and the hilltop green. As usual, Updike was writing about actual events. In the summer of 1969, two years after Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love, bands of disaffected youths were making their presence felt in town centers all over the country; Ipswich was no exception. When some local kids were evicted from their hangout in the corner drugstore, they took up residence on the slope of the hill overlooking the downtown. The town fretted about this obtrusive local manifestation of the counterculture. Updike, who walked past them on the way to and from his office, saw this motley crowd up close every day—but took a wider view.

  His sketch is political and literary; the antiwar protests and race riots of the late sixties hover in the background, as does the shade of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would haunt Updike for the next three decades, supplying material for a trio of novels. The hillies, we’re told, aren’t exactly hippies or flower children; less exotically, they’re the town’s own offspring, some of them from prominent local families. A disturbance but not a danger, they “make no threatening moves” and yet exude “the hostile strangeness of marauders.” Though they take drugs and drink alcohol and doubtless engage in carnal activity (“it was supposed that their congregation was sexual in motive,” the narrator primly pronounces), what really rankles is their refusal to embrace the American way: “The town discovers itself scorned by . . . an implacable ‘no’ spoken here between its two traditional centers”—that is, between the main street (commerce) at the bottom of the hill and the church and meetinghouse (civic society) at the top.

  To Updike, Ipswich scorned was Shillington scorned. The hillies were saying no to the steadfast, beneficent world order young Johnny had basked in as a boy; they were saying no to his patriotism, no to the America he cherished. If his instinctive response to the “vague mockery” of this ragtag gathering was to condemn it, his second thoughts complicated the issue. Most of the sketch is about the different reactions the hillies provoke, and the range is wide enough to undermine any consensus on the significance of their very visible presence. Even our collective narrator’s contribution is suspect: “We need our self-respect,” he announces. “That is what is eroding on the hill—the foundations of our lives, the identities our industry and acquisitiveness have heaped up behind the flag’s blessing.” Is identity compounded of industry and acquisitiveness? Is the flag’s blessing, earlier identified as the pursuit of happiness, merely a license to earn and consume? Are these the foundations of self-respect? The hillie who declares that he was driven from his own home by “the stench of ego” may have a point.

  The somber final paragraph does nothing to answer the questions raised by the hillies’ implicit rebuke. In the town, we’re told, “Fear reigns, and impatience.” Updike makes fun of the panic of the Tarbox bourgeoisie, many of them busy erecting fences and adding locks to their doors and shutters to their windows. This defensive reaction harks back to the first sentence of the sketch, which describes the town’s origins (and by extension, the nation’s): “Tarbox was founded, in 1634, as an agricultural outpost of the Boston colony, by men fearful of attack.” The Pilgrim fathers’ fear is with us still; only the source is new: the threat now comes from within. The hillies are also afraid, worried that the establishment will strike back: “They are getting ready for our attack.”*

  That’s the last line of the story. The gloom of the ending, with its fresh threat of violence, comes as a surprise after the amusing vacillations of the earlier passages, the air of measured, historical exposition comically scrambled by the clamor of competing perspectives. Both the lighter and the darker strands smack of Hawthorne. But the tip-off, in case the reader missed it, is the hillies’ “implacable ‘no,’ ” which recalls the “grand truth” Melville famously pronounced about Hawthorne: “He says No! in thunder.” (Hawthorne, whose “no” is that of a solitary individual refusing any compromise with conventional wisdom and the status quo, is emphatically not a proto-hillie; he mistrusted crowds of any kind.) The congregation of quasi-hippies gathered on the hill in Ipswich, in close proximity to sites associated with the town’s Puritan heritage, set off a train of historical association that led back to the author of The Scarlet Letter—which Updike liked to call “the first American masterpiece.” Like Hawthorne, he was measuring present-day America against a more robust past. Neither the hillies nor the town’s bourgeoisie were made of the same stern stuff as the Pilgrim fathers.

  When Updike made fun of the paranoia stirred up by the hillies, he was caricaturing his own discomfort; his description of the young people’s pale faces smeared with dirt raises the suspicion that he felt viscerally offended by them. As he often remarked, he was alarmed and disturbed by the sixties rhetoric of social protest and revolt; he found the whole concept of civil disobedience “antithetical” to his fifties education. In one of the more startling passages from “The Hillies,” the narrator reminds us that the young people causing all the ruckus “came from our own homes”; he then asks, “And in honesty do we want them back?” Whatever the answer—the question is layered with irony, the narrator’s attitude dubious at best—it’s safe to say that Updike would have been dismayed to see his own children mingling with the hillies.

  When they left
East Street, the Updikes’ “genteel bohemian” lifestyle didn’t change much. And yet the move to Labor-in-Vain Road was a step up, a conspicuous sign of affluence. Updike was by now a millionaire, and was making as much money every year as any of the leading American writers, with the possible exception of Norman Mailer. Updike’s wealth was in itself a reason for leaving the Polly Dole House and the busy small-town corner on which it stood. If he could easily afford a more substantial property, shouldn’t he then buy one? Upward mobility is the cornerstone of the American dream; to opt out would be to echo the hillies’ scorn.

  The new house, for which he paid $85,000, was visible proof that, at least in worldly terms, the labors of John Updike were not in vain. One can tell at a glance that it is a splendidly situated property: the house is perched on a gentle rise above a tidal inlet known as Gould’s Creek. At the back, a long, deep screened-in porch, L-shaped, looks out over a wide expanse of saltwater marsh, with no other house in sight. Owned in the thirties by a playwright named George Brewer Jr. (who cowrote Dark Victory, on which the Bette Davis film is based), it’s the kind of house bound to appeal to an author. Though only a mile from town and in plain sight of Labor-in-Vain Road, it’s secluded, calm, and peaceful, with marshes and the ebb and flow of the tidal creek providing ever-changing scenery. While still in the midst of moving in, Updike was already writing to Maxwell about the play of light on the water outside his windows; a couple of months later, he was boasting about the utter tranquillity of his surroundings, turning his delight into a complaint: “It is so quiet in my new house a cat mewing wakes me right up, just in time for the sun to blast through the window at 5:30.”

  Proud of the new property, he took on responsibility for upkeep of the house and outbuildings; for the mowing, pruning, and trimming; the putting up and taking down of storm windows and window screens. He liked to be useful around the house, a Mr. Fixit; practical carpentry skills mattered to him. “Enemies of a House,” a poem written in the late eighties, demonstrates considerable expertise about the consequences of shoddy home maintenance. On Labor-in-Vain Road, he built a wooden pier to improve access to the creek. When a new stove was delivered for the kitchen, he constructed the base for it and extended the existing counters. When Liz decided she wanted to keep chickens, he built the coop; when Miranda decided she wanted to keep sheep, he built the pen. (There were two sheep, Madeline and Medea.)

  It’s hard to believe that someone as prolific as Updike, who guided his writing through the editing and production process with such meticulous care and without the assistance of an agent; who read voraciously, as though cramming constantly for a final exam in universal knowledge; who carried on voluminous correspondence with a wide array of professional colleagues, played golf twice a week, volunteered for numerous civic duties, and enjoyed an agitated social and romantic life, also found time to wrestle the vines off the roof of the barn or to fit a new door in the living room, taking extra care to make sure the latch worked properly. Even so, there was work that he simply couldn’t do, such as replacing leaky, antiquated pipes. For that he hired a plumber, who not only fixed the pipes but also supplied the impetus for “Plumbing,” a story written a month after they moved into the new house. If “The Hillies” gives us a glimpse of public Ipswich, a scene played out in an open, communal space, “Plumbing” shows us what’s happening indoors, out of sight, in the privacy of the family home.

  About a decade after he’d written it, Updike decided, based on “internal evidence,” that “Plumbing” was a Maples story, that the unnamed narrator’s voice belongs to Richard Maple.* The old plumber doing work on the Maples’ new house marvels at the workmanship of an “antique joint” and warns about the seam on a carelessly mounted soil pipe: “Don’t touch it. It’ll start to bleed.” This is no ordinary plumber: “He is a poet. Where I see only a flaw, a vexing imperfection that will cost me money, he gazes fondly, musing upon the eternal presences of corrosion and flow.” His fondness for “tender meditations” seems to be catching; soon Richard, too, is waxing philosophical: “We think we have bought living space and a view when in truth we have bought a maze, a history, an archeology of pipes and cut-ins and traps and valves.” When Updike revised the story in the late seventies, he added a parallel sentence to make explicit the connection between domestic plumbing and human anatomy: “We think we are what we think and see but in truth we are upright bags of tripe.” Mortality and the transience of the material world are the overarching theme, but another concern is the state of Richard and Joan Maple’s marriage, a joint less well crafted than the one that caught the plumber’s eye; it’s a pipe with a bleeding seam.

  The Maples’ old house is a mile away. Emptied of the family’s belongings, it holds only the “ghosts” of their past selves; Richard imagines these ghosts arranged in a series of tableaux that together sum up the dozen years they lived there. First there’s the husband and wife at two o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday; drunk, still dressed for the formal dinner party they’ve evidently just left, they are hiding chocolate eggs in the backyard for the children’s Easter egg hunt. Another scene shows the husband saying prayers with his children; a younger child prays with him, an older child refuses. In the next tableau the husband and wife quarrel bitterly in the large living room, weeping, exchanging blows, scaring the children and the family dog. Contemplating this distressing dumbshow, Richard asks, “What are they saying, what are these violent, frightened people discussing?” Knowing the Maples, we can be certain that the fight is about infidelity; we can imagine the back-and-forth of accusation and denial, confession and ultimatum. Richard, however, wants us to see the bigger picture, and tells us that the couple are in truth discussing the human condition: “change, natural process, the passage of time, death.” He’s suggesting that at the root of their unhappiness, of the violence and the fear, is transience, the appalling brevity of our existence.*

  Trading one house for another (the moving van assisting in a practical demonstration of transience) stirred Updike’s memories of the relocation to Plowville, especially as the family was leaving the center of town for a more rural spot; it triggered a wave of nostalgia for the house in Shillington. In “Plumbing,” Richard compares his memories of the recent past, of the life he shared with Joan and the children (“feeble ghosts”), with mythic memories excavated from the sacred site where he spent his early years. Drawing an explicit contrast, he goes into rhapsodies over the “potent, powerful, numinous Easter eggs of my childhood.” Potent, powerful, numinous—not just the eggs but the memories themselves; the distant past has a bonded grip on him, as though his connection with his childhood had been crafted with the same care as the plumber’s “antique joint.” The distant past has weight and dignity; the recent past is pale and trivial—“frivolous,” like that partying couple in their finery tiptoeing drunk around the yard in the small hours of the morning with a stash of chocolate eggs wrapped in tinfoil.

  Religious concerns, flagged by the heavy, repeated emphasis on Easter and prayer, were clearly weighing on Updike’s mind. In the broadest terms, the story pits time against the eternal, death against resurrection. For Richard, nostalgia involves hankering after an uncomplicated childhood faith in the “impossible-to-plumb well of mystery where the stars swam, and old photographs predating my birth were snapped, and God listened”—an unplumbed well of mystery that’s also, we’re told, the source of those potent, powerful, numinous Easter eggs. Like his nine-year-old daughter, who dreads growing older and tells him she doesn’t want a birthday, Richard is wishing not to age, not to die, not to be “outlasted.”

  Loaded, possibly overloaded, with metaphysical significance, “Plumbing” offers only hazy clues to the here and now—to the rate at which, for instance, the Maples’ battered marriage is deteriorating. Joan appears as a “feeble ghost”; she’s given no dialogue. In the quarrel tableau, Richard dramatizes his conception of himself as a prisoner (an old complaint) by sitting slumped, head bowed, ankles
together, as if shackled. Contemplating a dozen years at the old house, he’s strangely numb; mild regret is what he seems to feel about his marriage, and a twinge of guilt. The story also provides a glimpse of Richard with his offspring, an increasingly common thread in the Maples stories. Richard is a loving father—but worn out, distracted, self-involved, ashamed of his shortcomings as a parent. Despite his good intentions, he fears that he’s failing his children. With remarkable economy, Updike packs nearly all this into a brief paragraph featuring Richard and two of his progeny:

  A man bends above a child’s bed; his voice and a child’s voice murmur prayers in unison. They have trouble with “trespass” versus “debts,” having attended different Sunday schools. Weary, slightly asthmatic . . . anxious to return downstairs to a book and a drink, he passes into the next room. The child there, a bigger child, when he offers to bow his head with her, cries softly, “Daddy, no, don’t!” The round white face, dim in the dusk of the evening, seems to glow with tension, embarrassment, appeal. Embarrassed himself, too easily embarrassed, he gives her a kiss, backs off, closes her bedroom door, leaves her to the darkness.

  The phrase “trouble with ‘trespass’ versus ‘debts’ ” refers to competing versions of the Lord’s Prayer. It could also serve as a condensed description of a family being pulled apart by adultery, a home where fighting parents hit each other in front of bewildered children. The parents trespass; they default on debts owed to each other and to their sons and daughters; trouble brews. The older child’s pleading refusal to join her father in prayer, most easily explained as the rebellion of a young girl who feels she’s outgrown what she thinks of as a childish ritual, could also be seen—if, for example, you were a father with a guilty conscience—as the rebuke of a daughter who senses a hint of falsity in your rote display of piety. You might think that she’s uneasy about saying her prayers with an enervated man anxious to be elsewhere, a man who has “trouble with ‘trespass’ versus ‘debts.’ ”