by Begley, Adam
A week after the hearing in Salem, Updike took possession of a red clapboard house on West Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. The town, which he described as “an unassuming population knot on the way to other places,” was twenty minutes inland from Ipswich, in a flat, featureless part of the state. He’d noticed the house with its For Sale sign from the car as he was driving through; set perpendicular to a busy street, it was a long, narrow Colonial with a big yard out back—an oasis of relative calm. The low-ceilinged front rooms were noisy, with truck traffic rattling the windows, but Updike’s large, drafty office was at the rear, so the rumble of the trucks didn’t bother him. From his window he could see the lot where the town parked its fleet of yellow school buses. When Joyce Carol Oates and her husband, Ray Smith, dropped by in mid-July to take John and Martha out to lunch at a local restaurant, Oates was perplexed to find them living in a tiny town, in a house where the traffic noise threatened to drown out conversation. She wondered in her journal, “With all Updike’s money, and his and Martha’s good sense, how has it come about that they’ve bought a house in such a location?” The answer is that Updike’s habitual thrift—his lingering fear of the poorhouse, exacerbated by the fact that he’d signed over to Mary the house on Labor-in-Vain Road and agreed to pay her a comfortable alimony—made him hungry for a bargain. And just as important, the shape of the Georgetown house, the outline he glimpsed from the car window, reminded him of the white brick house he grew up in, the haven of his Shillington boyhood. The town, too, reminded him of Shillington—“I was at home in America, all right.”
Oates’s visit was the first chance for the two writers to spend time together; it cemented their friendship and set the tone for four decades of animated correspondence. Lunch was a leisurely affair, two hours of “lightweight, amusing gossip,” according to Oates, “nothing malicious, nothing extreme.” Roth, Bellow, and Kurt Vonnegut were mentioned, along with Erica Jong, whose Fear of Flying Updike had reviewed glowingly three years earlier. Updike mocked a facial tic the critic Alfred Kazin had developed: “I couldn’t help but admire,” he said, “how Kazin’s mouth seemed to disappear under his ear.” Oates thought the tone of this last observation was “amiable.” (From this distance it sounds suspiciously like Nabokov teasing cripples.) She enjoyed Updike’s self-deprecation and listed his other likable qualities: he was gentle, sly, clever, witty, charming. She detected an element of impersonation in his character, and caught hints that his modesty was exaggerated. “[H]e’s a hillbilly from rural Pennsylvania,” she wrote, “somehow masquerading as a world-famous writer, and the role makes him uneasy and ironic.” She also spotted an undercurrent of competition with the other writers whose names came up, a tendency she recognized in herself, even in relation to her new friend. Over the years, the gossip carried on, but the spark of competition between them, which so nearly flickered to life over lunch, never ignited; perhaps it was smothered by the many professions of mutual admiration. To Oates, John was “immensely attractive,” and Martha “his equal in every way”; she could see at once why they’d fallen in love. Having read “Separating,” she spared a thought for “the various agonies they experienced, and caused, in coming together.” John had introduced Martha as an “old and ardent Oates reader,” and this surely helped make the lunch go smoothly, promoting friendly feelings all around. The two couples remained on good terms, seeing each other once or twice a year over the next decade or so. Martha occasionally added cheerful, affectionate handwritten notes at the bottom of John’s letters; to judge from the brisk confidence of those postscripts, she, too, thought she was John’s equal in every way.
Updike’s letters to Oates are not unlike his letters to Maxwell: warm and unbuttoned, full of little jokes, odd digressions, and literary insight. A treasury of snappy judgments about members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and about the stream of writers nominated for one prize or another, the correspondence is a brilliant record of the affectionate shoptalk of two authors at the top of their profession. As a friend, and as his publisher at the Ontario Review, Oates was in cahoots with him, and he liked that—they were a gang of two. Her letters to him were not entirely unlike his mother’s—his mother having been in cahoots with him since infancy. Part of what encouraged him to write so brilliantly to Oates was his faith in the brilliance of her replies. He had the same faith in Maxwell, and in his mother. “Nobody can read like a writer,” he told Oates; he might have added that nobody can write letters like a writer.
“I’d go mad in such a small town myself,” Oates confided to her journal after her necessarily brief tour of Georgetown and lunch in the empty Chanticleer restaurant in neighboring Rowley—but she added that Updike appeared to be thriving in his near seclusion. At first he didn’t sleep well in the new house, but that was before Martha moved in with her children and her furniture. The cellar was “foul,” and a scavenging rat in the kitchen caused some consternation, disrupted Martha’s cooking, and inspired a poem about the “rotten places” in a house. When Updike counted up his Georgetown friends, he stalled at four: the mailman, the milkman, the newspaper boy, and the electrician. But for the most part he was pleased with the house and delighted to be out of the city—no more waiting in line at the bank, no need to navigate an urban obstacle course just to buy a loaf of bread. Georgetown “made negligible communal demands,” he wrote; compared with Ipswich, where he had been a generous, hardworking volunteer, piling up civic obligations, it represented a blissful simplification of his life, a chance for him, he liked to say, to rededicate himself to his writing.
You can’t expect to lead a simple life when you have four children aged sixteen to twenty-one. After the summer holiday, Michael announced that he would like to live in Georgetown with his father for his senior year in high school. Mary was dismayed, and John perplexed and a little worried about preserving the serenity of his new household, but Martha was willing, and the seventeen-year-old moved into a little room at the back of the house. His siblings figured that Michael was trying to forge a closer bond with his father. He stayed only a few months before moving back to Labor-in-Vain Road. Meanwhile, Liz, who had left Bennington to study nursing, announced that she was going to marry the much older man she had spent a year with in England, a match Updike deplored but felt powerless to prevent; he thought of his future son-in-law—whose alcohol dependency was perceptible to those willing to acknowledge it—as “a patch of human quicksand down which Liz’s nursing career and a lot of my hard-earned money will be thrown.” David, who started at Harvard in the fall of 1975, had long outgrown his headaches and his temper tantrums and was proving himself, in his father’s estimation, to be competent and confident. He was trying to break into the varsity soccer team, and would soon develop an interest in creative writing. Miranda, home alone with Mary, was troubled by math tests, her fluctuating weight, and the health of Helen, the family’s aging golden retriever. Almost all these details filtered into Updike’s fiction and poetry.
A poem set in his new Georgetown surroundings, “An Oddly Lovely Day Alone,” luxuriates in the domestic peace of an empty house: “The kids went off to school, / the wife to the hairdresser.” He reads a book, receives a visit from the man from “Pest Control” (the rat problem again)—“Time went by silently.” The spare language matches the emptiness of the day and the house. A metaphor adds depth and breadth: “Each hour seemed a rubber band / the preoccupied fingers of God / were stretching at His desk,” a daring glimpse of a bored creator. And then, in the midst of postprandial torpor, distraction arrives: “More time passed, darkening. / All suddenly unbeknownst, / the afternoon had begun to snow.” The moral that wraps up this charming lyric—“If people don’t entertain you, / Nature will”—is a deft reminder of Updike’s talent for making something out of what most people would think of as nothing.
Much as he liked being home alone, and though he told himself that public speaking was “a whorish thing to do,” when asked to give a talk, he m
ore often than not said yes; time and again, the promise of an adoring audience, solicitous journalists, and a long line of readers waiting to have their books signed proved irresistible. Six months after moving to Georgetown, he flew to Washington to deliver a lecture, “The Written Word,” at the Smithsonian Institution. He agreed to do some publicity while he was in town to help promote the newly published Marry Me. Sally Quinn of The Washington Post interviewed him over lunch at a restaurant the day after the lecture and produced the kind of lunchtime interview-cum-profile often found in magazines and the arts pages of newspapers: questions and answers are lobbed back and forth between mouthfuls, and the choice of entrée, the table manners, the crumbs scattered on the placemat are all scrutinized as though the mechanics of the meal supplied clues to the author’s character and the mystery of literary inspiration. Over the next several decades, Updike submitted to dozens and dozens of these live-action interviews. The Quinn Q&A is notable only because it’s one of the few times Updike tried and failed to charm a journalist.
He was by this time well practiced in the art of handling interviews. After Couples made him famous, after the critical acclaim that greeted Rabbit Redux, journalists expected to meet someone puffed up with self-importance, or anyway aware of himself as a literary celebrity. Instead they came face-to-face with an appealingly awkward character with an almost imperceptible stutter. “Gracious, self-deprecating, and casually attentive” is how a young Michiko Kakutani found him. As his Lampoon friend Michael Arlen said in the early seventies, “John is one of the few people I know who’s been literally made larger and more attractive by success.” The British novelist Ian McEwan interviewed him in London in the early nineties and was impressed by how obliging he was. Updike flew in from New York in the morning and spent most of the afternoon in the television studio filming the interview. When it was over, the producer asked him to read a long passage from his new novel for the camera, and then asked him to do it over—twice. As far as McEwan could tell, “Updike read faultlessly each time”; and yet, jet lag or no jet lag, he didn’t grumble when asked to start again. He was always careful to avoid prima donna posturing and any whiff of literary pretension. Faced with media scrutiny, he aimed to be smart and engaging, to be nice.
Sally Quinn was unwilling to settle for nice; she had her heart set on naughty.
The headline read, “Updike on Women, Marriage and Adultery.” Barely nodding in the direction of his books, she asked first about his marital status. He explained about the recent divorce hearing. His laugh, she noted, was uncomfortable, “the kind of laugh 13-year-old boys have when they are being teased.” She threw back at him lines from the lecture he’d delivered the night before:
Now I live with yet another family group . . . and the lady of the household is indeed a reader. She has told me she cannot let a day pass without its hours of reading, which makes her an ideal counterpart for me, whose chemistry must daily secrete a written page or two. Speaking economically, she consumes what I produce.
Updike undoubtedly intended the playfully risqué double entendre in the last sentence. And yet, confronted with it over lunch (and realizing at once that Quinn would milk it, so to speak), he blushed. Quinn then extracted Martha’s first name, and pressed him on the difference between being married and living together. “There’s a delicate but kind of fragrant difference,” he said. “There’s just a touch of the voluntary that lingers, that would be a pity to lose. The lady I live with is very scared of changing it. She was married for 17 years. She felt very captive then.” According to Quinn, Updike began to relax. Or perhaps he knew he couldn’t win and was adjusting to the inevitability of mild public humiliation. In any case, he continued to spout semiconfessional musings: “The older I get I’d say I’m more monogamous. After all I’m conserving energy enabling me to get on with my life’s work. Monogamy is very energy-conserving. To be unmonogamous is a great energy consumer.” In the article, Quinn capped this ill-considered quote with a description guaranteed to make her subject cringe: “He takes a prideful puff from his cigarillo and laughs at his own philosophy.” He got up from the table—having consumed mushroom soup, a chicken salad sandwich, and potato chips—knowing that Quinn’s profile would portray him in an unflattering light, and loathing her for it already. With his help, she had maneuvered him into exactly the pose feminist critics expected of him in the wake of Couples and A Month of Sundays: priapic narcissism.
Many women (and some men, too) were now reading Updike with a skeptical squint. A full-blown feminist critique, Mary Allen’s “John Updike’s Love of ‘Dull Bovine Beauty,’ ” had recently been published. Like many of the complaints lodged against him in the decades to come, Allen’s polemic suffers from a slippery tendency to conflate the author’s attitudes with those of his characters (especially Rabbit), and swerves dangerously close to ad hominem attack. Yet her essay piles up so many instances of casual male chauvinism (Rabbit again, but also Tom Marshfield) that it threatens to tip the scales and make even an otherwise favorably disposed reader wonder whether Updike might indeed be a chauvinist. Why, in the fiction of the sixties and early seventies, are so many of the girlfriends and wives of his characters described as dumb or stupid? Is the profusion of lovingly described sexual activity, and the Updikean man-child’s avid focus on female anatomy, indicative of an obsession that blinkers his attitude toward women? Are these symptoms of misogyny?
Updike was sufficiently troubled by this kind of question to issue a protest: “I can’t think of any male American writer who takes women more seriously or has attempted more earnestly to show them as heroines.” But just to be safe, he also issued a blanket apology—“Whatever I don’t know about women I apologize for”—and reaffirmed his writerly intention to encompass as much of humanity as he could. Faced with direct questions about sexism, he mostly avoided combative or defensive answers; he mentioned the influence of his mother, who first stimulated his interest in writing, and the crucial role that women editors, Katharine White and Judith Jones chief among them, had played in his career. And on the page he pushed deeper into the minds of his female characters, gave them better jobs and greater psychic independence. (Janice Angstrom would soon become a prime beneficiary of these efforts.)
In January 1978, a month after the Quinn debacle, as if submitting to classroom penance, he signed his name more than twenty-five thousand times for a Franklin Library “Signature Edition” of Rabbit, Run. He did the deed over a two-week stay at the Pineapple Beach Resort on St. Thomas, a mind-numbing junket exactly like the one he inflicted on Henry Bech in “Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author”—except that Bech was paid a little more than forty thousand dollars, Updike nearly sixty thousand. This was the most lucrative venture in what might be termed Updike’s shadow publishing career, a range of activity that included allowing fine presses to print broadsides, pamphlets, and chapbooks; selling his own manuscripts; and signing proofs and galleys and other collectible items that are part of the publishing process. The audience for this shadow career was not the reading public but collectors, assorted bibliophiles, and friends of the author; the impulse behind it was his love of the printed page (especially when the page was adorned with words he’d written), his sympathy with the collecting instinct, a very Updikean mix of avarice and generosity, and his usual reluctance to say no.
Art and money intersect repeatedly in “Three Illuminations.” In the first vignette, Bech visits his most ardent collector, a sour fellow named Marvin Federbusch who acquires (and asks Bech to sign) every edition of his work, every scrap of “Bechiana”—“What Federbusch didn’t collect deserved oblivion.” But when the collector shows the proud collectee the stacked volumes prudently stored in a closet, Bech spies (“oh, treachery!”) equally exhaustive collections of Roth, Mailer, Barth, and Capote. Mercenary calculation, not literary passion, motivates Federbusch. In the third vignette, Bech takes his mistress to the resort island of San Poco to sign 28,500 tip-in sheets for a spec
ial edition of his novel Brother Pig (bound, naturally, in genuine pigskin). There’s an added metatextual twist to the humor here: a year after the story appeared in The New Yorker, Updike authorized Targ Editions to print a 350-copy edition of it, the numbered volumes priced at forty dollars each—and signed, of course.
Mixed reviews greeted A Month of Sundays and Marry Me, but otherwise, Updike’s more conventional professional life was largely untroubled. At Knopf, Judith Jones proved a calm, steady presence; A Month of Sundays is dedicated to her. William Maxwell retired from The New Yorker in 1976 and passed Updike into the care of Roger Angell, Katharine White’s son. It was a smooth segue, though Updike complained that with Maxwell gone, another stitch had been dropped in his “once-close-woven relationship” with the magazine. He had been impatient, in Boston, to start something totally fresh and different—“a novel about penguins, perhaps, or Hottentots”—and when he was well and truly settled in the new house, that project took shape as The Coup. His study strewn with guidebooks to Africa, copies of National Geographic, and dictionaries of sub-Saharan languages, he conjured up the distant landlocked nation of Kush, overcoming his own early misgivings (after the first chapter, he stopped and thought seriously of not continuing) and every author’s hunger for mindless distraction (he undertook, while writing the novel, to paint the entire exterior of the house—in a shade of red he feared might be too bright). In July 1977, when he was about halfway through the book (but done with the paint job), Vladimir Nabokov died. Updike flew down to New York for the memorial service on a stiflingly hot summer day—the hottest in forty years. He spoke briefly to the crowd in the baking auditorium about an author whom he revered but had never met in person, then read selected passages from the great man’s work. He finished The Coup, his most Nabokovian novel, nine months later—a year and a half after he’d begun.
