by Begley, Adam
What is clearest in the documentary is that Mr. Updike is blessed with easy charm and possessed by quiet conviction. . . . If Mr. Updike has demons he does not show them; if he has Angst he keeps it to himself. In a culture where self-exposure knows no bounds, he places his psyche under wraps.
It was perfectly obvious to Corry, as it was to any Updike reader watching the film, that the casual, seemingly reflexive modesty (“I feel in most respects that I am a pretty average person”) was undisguised self-fashioning. The lack of guile was in itself appealing; it was as though he were saying, with a wink, As long as they’re filming me, I might as well put my best foot forward. Offered a chance to present himself to posterity in a flattering light, he cheerfully grabbed it, bequeathing to us the dutiful son, the genial colleague, the bashful public speaker, the loyal, frolicsome husband.
This polished new persona pushed back into the dim reaches of the past all previous incarnations, so that earlier selves, even relatively recent ones, became the stuff of legend. The humble origins of the hick from rural Pennsylvania were now ancient history; traces could still be unearthed—he could be spotted putting the storm windows up on his mother’s isolated farmhouse—but there was something comical in thinking that this distinguished gent once actually lived there, back in the days when the house lacked indoor plumbing. Gone were the ragged sweaters and shaggy haircuts of the bohemian interlude in Ipswich. Updike did his best to quash rumors of bad behavior: Couples was reinvented as a novel about “friendship” rather than adultery; the autobiographical basis of the Maples stories was called into question—he claimed he had lost track of what was real and what was invented, and that there was more fiction in the stories than met the eye. As for the guilty disarray of the Boston days—the vulnerability of the emotional bigamist dithering between wife and mistress—those ugly cracks had been papered over. The psyche may have been under wraps, decorously out of sight, but the “sedimentary layers” remained accessible; he could still excavate them for fictional purposes, a process he referred to as “personal archeology.”
Also out of sight were his children, who felt less than entirely welcome at the grand mansion on the hill. Back in Georgetown, they had dropped in when they liked; Beverly Farms was another matter. According to Michael, “That was when you really got the impression that a casual stop-by was not something that could happen. You needed to announce your intention to come by.” It was their father’s house, but it certainly was not their family home.
There’s no question that Updike loved his children. Over the years, his letters to his mother were punctuated with acutely observed reports of their comings and goings. He watched them with a full heart. And they never doubted his affection, even though they recognized that in the Martha era, the hours he spent with them were strictly rationed. As Michael put it, “It felt like we’re his mistress and he’s sneaking away from Martha to see us.” But he was also sneaking away from his work, the realm Martha fiercely guarded. She took responsibility for limiting intrusions and was blamed by friends and family for cutting off access. Filter out the children’s resentment of a stepmother and the old friends’ resentment of a second wife, and all that’s left of this complaint is the bedrock fact of the last three decades of Updike’s life: his professional activities—not just the writing but the single-handed management of a vast, ever-expanding backlist of work published all over the globe—took up a huge amount of time. Merely keeping up with his business correspondence would have been a full-time job for anyone less fluent and less focused. And he needed time not only to write but also to let his imaginings percolate, time to spend on routine, relatively mindless chores such as spreading mulch, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, shoveling snow. A certain ruthlessness was required to divest the day of unwanted distractions, to keep business matters and family matters and the daily press of niggling demands at bay. Martha wanted to teach him to say no. Failing that, she was happy to say no for him. Her unyielding rigor in this respect could hardly escape notice, but it was her husband’s will to work that invited her to take up the role of gatekeeper—the ruthlessness was as much his as hers.* It was during his very brief appearance in What Makes Rabbit Run? that David, looking pained, stated the case with unhappy precision: his father decided early on that his writing would “take precedence over his relations with real people.”
The first novel Updike wrote in Beverly Farms, The Witches of Eastwick, begins with a mysterious bachelor arriving in the seaside town of Eastwick. Darryl Van Horne, our devilish hero, buys a house with a “chasteningly grand” silhouette; his property is cut off from the mainland whenever high tides flood the causeway connecting it with the town beach. Van Horne’s mansion may resemble Haven Hill, but Darryl is not Updike, nor even a satanic alter ego—and yet a dose of fantasy and wish fulfillment spices up the Witches brew. It’s useless to try to pick out real-life models for the novel’s three weird sisters; Alexandra Spofford, Sukie Rougemont, and Jane Smart are composite characters, jumbled like the circle of friends in Couples. But when Van Horne seduces all three simultaneously after soaking with them in his scalding hot tub, Updike is compressing into one orgiastic Halloween night the highlights of his erotic history: Mary, Joyce Harrington, and Martha, the three most important romantic attachments of his life, were undoubtedly on his mind.
“Replete but airy” is the phrase Updike used to describe The Coup, Rabbit Is Rich, and Bech at Bay—all products of the Georgetown years; it suits Witches just as well. Charmingly wicked, mischievous like the Bech books, it’s pointed and provocative, balancing playful cleverness with a sustained meditation on women, power, nature, and evil. Harold Bloom described the novel as “engagingly half-mad with a storyteller’s exuberance.” And it does seem that Updike was enjoying himself; his sheer delight in the comic spectacle of suburban witches casting spells in a ranch house kitchen is plain to see. Although the witchcraft turns deadly, with violent death and fatal disease crashing into the narrative, the comedy never palls—a testament to his nimble artistry. He again did extensive research, poring over volumes on demonology and sorcery, but didn’t allow the scrupulous authenticity of the coven’s grotesque spells to spoil the fun. To his scholarly investigations he added distant memories of Berks County “witch doctors” and more recent experience closer to home. The novel is set in Rhode Island, but “semi-depressed and semi-fashionable” Eastwick is quite clearly another of his many portraits of Ipswich.* In fact, the novel contains some of his best writing about place; he tracks the New England seasons with his unerring eye and instinct for metaphor: “Bald November reigned outside. Lawn chairs had been taken in, the lawns were as dead and flat as floors, the outdoors was bare as a house after the movers had come.”
But it’s the three women who make the novel, especially Alexandra, the eldest and earthiest, whose impressively complex inner life is opened up for the reader. Our experience of her private thoughts and feelings is tender and intimate, as well as raw, strange, and scary. Depressed, she mopes in the bedroom of her untidy mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse:
[T]he world poured through her, wasted, down the drain. A woman is a hole, Alexandra had once read in the memoirs of a prostitute. In truth it felt less like being a hole than a sponge, a heavy squishy thing on this bed soaking out of the air all the futility and misery there is: wars nobody wins, diseases conquered so we can all die of cancer.
By the end, we know her inside out; her sensations are vivid and precise: “[S]unlight pressed on Alexandra’s face and she could feel the hair of her single thick braid heat up like an electric coil.” The novelist Diane Johnson, reviewing the book, cited this description as evidence that Updike “had a very good spy in the female camp to tell him things.” Bloom, similarly impressed by the imaginative sympathy on display, declared that Updike “loves Alexandra better even than Rabbit Angstrom.”
Updike made a deliberate decision to put the women at the center of the novel. He freely acknowledged that he did so in answer to accusati
ons of sexism and misogyny leveled at his earlier work: “I’ve been criticized for making the women in my books subsidiary to the men,” he told The New York Times, and conceded that there could be some truth in the charge. “Perhaps my female characters have been too domestic, too adorable and too much what men wished them to be.” The witches’ powers come to them in the absence of men, and although they eventually leave Eastwick and take refuge in marriage, what matters to them (and to us) is the interval when they are scandalously single, “gorgeous and doing evil.” Updike was paying tribute to the power of women, acknowledging the inferiority of magical powers in the face of entrenched patriarchal power, and amusing himself by conflating “sinister old myths” with the “modern female experiences of liberation and raised consciousness.” Unable, as always, to join any chorus chanting liberal pieties, he made fun of feminism even as he embraced it—naturally incensing his more dogmatic critics.
His book was twice transmogrified, first by Hollywood, into a jazzy battle-of-the-sexes horror-comedy hybrid starring Jack Nicholson as Van Horne, and Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie; and then by the impresario Cameron Mackintosh into a musical comedy on the London stage. John and Martha saw the film, sneaking into an afternoon showing at a local mall. She loathed it; he was less bothered, especially as the screenplay veered away from the book and the whiz-bang special effects took over, leaving him free to enjoy the three witches, each lovable in her own way. In the book he had been careful to keep Van Horne from stealing the show, as the devil tends to do, but Nicholson, who had no such scruple, gave an outrageously exuberant performance; Updike was pleased that the filmmakers had nonetheless managed to convey that the story was about women.
The novel was praised by many women writers, among them Johnson and Margaret Atwood, but others came to it with minds closed to the possibility that Updike could ever convincingly explore feminine awareness; to them he was “a male author notoriously unsympathetic to women,” incapable of seeing females as anything but sex objects. Academic critics blinkered by ideology denied themselves the pleasure of reading Witches as a kind of self-mocking feminist manifesto, the mischief omnidirectional; or as a Rabbit novel subverted, the domestic realism of a male-centered world bewitched by the sorcery of the Eastwick coven. (They would have made short work of poor Harry, those three.) Magic realism, the literary fashion imported from South America a decade or so earlier, is here repurposed as a release from, and a challenge to, the inherent repressive tendency of the status quo. Two games of tennis illustrate the difference. At the Springers’ cabin in the Poconos, Harry and Janice play with another couple from the lakeside community. Harry doesn’t like tennis, mostly because Janice, who’s had lessons, is better at it than he is: “The decade past has taught her more than it has taught him.” Janice has internalized conventional advice: “Harry, don’t try to steer it . . . Keep your knees bent. Point your hip toward the net.” She’s dutifully parroting the tennis pro at the Flying Eagle Tee and Racquet Club, abiding by rules and regulations the three witches riotously flout. At Van Horne’s estate in Eastwick, they play doubles with their host—and their spells turn the court into a mad circus, the ball morphing into a bat or a toad, the painted baseline snaking over a sneaker. The battle of the sexes is joined in both these games, but in Witches a shot of surrealism has reinvigorated Updike’s favorite topic, “the sexual seethe that underlies many a small town.”
HALF A YEAR after the publication of Witches, on a punishingly cold evening in January 1985, Updike found himself in the waiting room of the Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. It was the day of Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration, and because it fell on a Sunday, the oath of office was administered in a private White House ceremony; the outdoor events scheduled for the next day’s public inauguration were cancelled because of the record-setting cold forecast up and down the East Coast. On the West Coast, where Super Bowl XIX was being played between the Miami Dolphins and the San Francisco 49ers, the afternoon was mild, with clouds and fog; President Reagan, freshly sworn in for his second term, appeared at the game (via satellite) and tossed the coin. Updike followed the football on television in the hospital waiting room. He was awaiting the birth of his first grandchild.
A baby boy, John Anoff Cobblah, was born to Liz and her new husband, Tete Cobblah, an artist and art teacher from Ghana. Liz had met Tete in 1983 while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, three years after the death of her first husband. It was to Anoff and his younger brother, Kwame, that Updike addressed “A Letter to My Grandsons,” the genealogical disquisition in Self-Consciousness. The circumstances of Anoff’s birth—the cold evening in Hartford, the football game, and the news that the baby had been given his paternal grandfather’s name—are recorded in “Grandparenting,” the very last Maples story, an epilogue of sorts, with Richard and Joan both remarried. The new spouses are half the fun. Once Richard’s mistress, now his wife, Ruth has “a crisp way of seeing things; it was like living in a pop-up book, with no dimension of ambiguity.” She is “decisive and clear-headed”—so much so that Richard “rarely had to think.” No one would have any trouble recognizing Martha from that description. As for Joan’s new husband, Andy Vanderhaven, he’s a gently comic portrait of the man Mary married in 1982, Bob Weatherall—with a few details scrambled. Foppish and fussy, peering over gold half-glasses, Andy resembles a “skeptical schoolmaster.” Still obscurely tied to his ex-wife, Richard can’t help speculating about her sex life:
Richard wondered if Andy was this fastidious in bed. Perhaps that was what Joan had needed—a man to draw her out, to make her feel relatively liberated. “No matter where I go,” she had once complained to Richard, not only of their sex, “you’re there ahead of me.”
As in so many Maples stories, Joan gets the best lines. Inspired by watching her daughter in the delivery room (while her husband and ex-husband were watching the Super Bowl), she gushes about the “apparatus” that sustains an unborn child: “You think of the womb as a place for transients, but it’s a whole other life in there. It’s a lot to give up.” Later that night, shivering in the cold of his motel room bed, feeling like “a homunculus burning at the far end of God’s indifferently held telescope,” Richard typically links Joan’s remark—“It’s a lot to give up”—to his own mortality: “He was a newly hatched grandfather, and the universe wanted to crush him, to make room for newcomers.”
Character and author came to the same conclusion: a couple of weeks before he hatched as a grandfather, the coming generation weighing on his mind, Updike wrote his will. He had written wills before, in 1964 and 1973, only to find that altered circumstances forced him to start over. But the only change he ever made to the will dated January 8, 1985, was a scribbled amendment bequeathing to his children Plowville acreage inherited from his mother. Such was the settled nature of his life in Beverly Farms: aside from his mother’s death, nothing in the last twenty-four years of his life caused him to him rethink the disposition of his estate.
No grandchildren were named in the will, one reason it never had to be rewritten.* Instead, he divided his estate between Martha and his four children. Through the instrument of the John H. Updike Revocable Literary Trust, the children and their stepmother inherited the rights to his literary property, so that after his death the income from all his books and the ancillary rights would be shared five ways between them. (After Martha’s death, the surviving children would be sole beneficiaries.) The children would also receive $500,000 split four ways. The rest—the house and its contents, his savings and investments—would all go to Martha. There were also smaller cash bequests: $35,000 for his mother and $15,000 each for Martha’s three boys. And there were personal items for his own children: his two-volume edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary for Liz; for David, a small gateleg table known in the family as “the Updike table”; for Michael, a cartoon Saul Steinberg had inscribed to a teenage John in 1945; and a Thurber drawing for Mira
nda.
Although the bulk of his estate would go to his new wife, he also mentioned his ex: to Mary, he left a seventeenth-century veneered bench, a two-seater with armrests and a decorative back that they had bought together from an antique dealer in Ipswich in the mid-sixties.
Stable but hardly static, life in Beverly Farms was interrupted by frequent trips to New York (to the Academy of Arts and Letters, to the offices of Knopf and The New Yorker), author appearances in scattered locations across the continent and overseas (for readings, talks, and book festivals; to give and receive awards; and to accept honorary degrees, which he found he could never turn down), and vacations abroad with Martha at least twice a year. Starting in the mid-eighties, he had another reason for traveling to Manhattan: reviewing museum exhibitions as an occasional art critic for The New Republic. He had written a number of short essays about specific artworks for the American edition of a French magazine, Réalités, the modest beginnings of a new sideline that turned to practical use a passion stretching back through art classes in Oxford and at Harvard to the hours spent as a child lying on the floor tracing cartoons and magazine illustrations. Writing about the visual arts suited him so well that it’s a wonder he hadn’t turned his hand to it earlier—for example, when he was living in Manhattan and could stroll, as he often did, from his office to MoMA (or the Modern, as it was known then) to admire the Cézannes and the Matisses or mingle in the Sculpture Garden with a bevy of bronze nudes.
His reviews of museum exhibitions displayed all the virtues of his book reviews: unpretentious, open-minded, and acutely perceptive, they are sensitive to artistic intent and immune to theoretical dogma. His great talent, as Arthur Danto argued in a review of Updike’s first collection of essays on art, Just Looking (1989), was for “ruminative ekphrasis”—poetic description of an artwork combined with a tentative movement toward aesthetic judgment. Reviewing the Renoir show at the Boston Museum of Fine Art in 1985, he wrote, “The peaceable Renoir moment is a kind of naptime; his dancing couples drowse in one another’s arms, and his outdoor cafés exist without clatter or the possibility of conflict”—the kind of inspired observation that led by soft steps to a verdict, in this case that “Renoir does not quite rank with . . . his friends Monet and Cézanne.” But even with all the hours spent in art classes, even with his modest ability as an amateur painter, Updike knew far less about art than he did about literature, and the difference ultimately showed. The accounts he gave of his museum visits were invariably compelling, sometimes dazzling, and he did his homework so he could dish out historical context and tidbits from an artist’s life story, yet he lacked the kind of expert knowledge that comes with dedicated scholarship or lifelong immersion. It was an extracurricular activity, a hobby of sorts (an enthusiasm he shared with Martha). Still, he turned out the art reviews with his usual cool professionalism—a writer doing his job.
