Updike

by Begley, Adam

  Securing the headstone: Photograph by David Silcox. Courtesy of David Silcox.

  The back of the headstone: Photograph by David Silcox. Courtesy of David Silcox.

  Copyright

  UPDIKE. Copyright © 2014 by Adam Begley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Begley, Adam.

  Updike / Adam Begley.—First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-06-189645-3 (hardcover)

  1. Updike, John. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3571.P4Z556 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  [B]

  2013039246

  EPub Edition APRIL 2014 ISBN 9780062109668

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  * Nine months after Updike’s death, Harvard bought the archive from his estate for three million dollars; until then the university had merely been storing the material, hoping one day to own it.

  * Updike changed her name to Nora in his memoir, presumably to protect her privacy. She died in 2009, just a few weeks after Updike.

  * A trivial example, from “One More Interview,” of a recycled “scrap”: As the memories begin to flow, the actor suddenly recalls the exact pattern of the linoleum floor in his hometown barbershop, and how Jake, the barber, “could tap-dance or a least do a nimble shuffle-and-slide . . . performing with his broom for his audience of regulars.” That detail (which pops quite naturally into the head of a thespian, a man who’s spent his life on the stage) first surfaced in Updike’s description of the Shillington barber in “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” an autobiographical essay written twenty-three years earlier: “Nimble and bald, he used to execute little tap-dance figures on the linoleum floor of his shop.” In “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” Updike divulged the real name of this multitalented fellow and described the routine one more time: “Artie for a joke would do a shuffle-one, shuffle-two, tap-tap-tap on the hairy linoleum floor.”

  * “Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions,” he once remarked, “taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer.”

  * Though John Hoyer lived to be ninety and died only when Updike was a twenty-one-year-old senior in college, at Allen Dow’s age, Updike was much distressed by his beloved grandfather’s “heart-tearing” cough. In “Flight,” the cough sounds “like a dry membrane tearing.”

  * This same sentence is quoted on the back of the book, modified so as to make the case more emphatically: “Composition, in crystallizing memory, replaces it.”

  * In the Paris Review interview, Updike remarked, “Once I’ve coined a [character’s] name . . . I feel totally hidden behind that mask, and what I remember and what I imagine become indistinguishable.”

  * When Bill Ecenbarger asked her the same question, she replied, “He portrayed me as he saw me, and I respect his vision.” To Steve Neal, she gave a more ironic, media-savvy answer, saying that she was eager to become more like the character in Of the Farm: “I don’t think I’m as witty, and I’m certainly not as tough, but I’m trying hard.”

  * To put this number into perspective, The New Yorker published no fewer than 146 of her son’s short stories—and just 13 by J. D. Salinger, another writer whose name was closely associated with the magazine.

  * She lived to see the bound galleys of The Predator but not the finished book.

  * He told an interviewer, “It probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to be a writer if she hadn’t been there doing it.”

  * The title is another blatant sign of Linda’s preoccupation with her son: years later, when he had left for Harvard, she would sometimes begin her letters to him, “Dear Juan.”

  * For him, the relationship improved dramatically. In 1986, addressing the Forty-Eighth International PEN Congress in New York City, after decades of mailing off manuscripts and receiving money and critical acclaim in return, Updike spoke in praise of the U.S. Postal Service: “I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit.”

  * “The paralysis of stuttering,” he later theorized, “stems from the dead center of one’s being, a deep doubt there.”

  * In “The Black Room,” a widowed mother who “finagled” her family’s retreat to “an unimproved farmhouse” in the country complains to her grown son that his continuing devotion to their old house in town is a form of reproach: “I don’t know why you always spite me by loving that house so.”

  * “The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of The Centaur and Of the Farm. I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.”

  * The father in “Pigeon Feathers” declares, “In this day and age only the misfits stay on the farm.”

  * According to her son, one of Linda’s favorite sayings was, “Take what you want and pay the price for it.” When she bought back the farm, part payment was adherence to the terms of an “inner bargain”: she began going to church every Sunday morning—and kept it up for the next forty-five years. Downbeat by comparison, one of Wesley’s favorite saying was “You don’t get something for nothing.”

  * In a late story, “My Father’s Tears,” the narrator remembers the Alton library, the fictional counterpart of the Reading library (both situated, with Updike’s usual precision, on Franklin Street, two blocks from the train station), as “a place you felt safe inside”; it was a place, in other words, that combined the key elements of an Updike paradise: safety and escape.

  * It wasn’t until the very end of 1966 that he finally finished Ulysses.

  * One of the poems in the anthology, “Metropolitan Nightmare,” by Stephen Vincent Benét, left a “deep dent” in him, he later confided to an editor.

  * Updike wrote: “[T]he stain of unsuccess ate away at my grandfather’s life as if in some tale by Hawthorne.”

  * Implausibly, Updike has made Peter and Penny a full two years younger than he and Nancy were: Penny is supposed to be in the ninth grade, a fourteen-year-old; Peter in the grade above. Following the precedent set in “Flight,” the boy gives little; the girl will nevertheless “sacrifice” for him.

  * Curiously, Princeton, to which he had also applied, turned him down. It’s often stated that he went to Harvard on a full scholarship; in fact, the annual Harvard College tuition in 1950 was six hundred dollars, and he was offered only four hund
red dollars in financial aid for freshman year. His aid package increased over the years, and by the time he graduated, tuition was fully covered.

  * Updike’s high school Latin wasn’t good enough to exempt him from the English department honors requirement—hence his arduous year of Latin 1.

  * The prose style Updike attributes to Dawson is a wickedly accurate description of the gruff, humorless writing in Lasch’s letters home.

  * In the New Yorker version, Kern is “driven by an unnatural sophistication.” When Updike revised the story, nearly forty years after he’d written it (and fifty-odd years after the events described), he chose to emphasize Kern’s aspirations rather than his accomplishments.

  * Hub is closely modeled on the late Edward A. French, a notoriously eccentric character in the Harvard class of ’54, an ardent pacifist and vegetarian who became a minister, then a missionary in Africa. By coincidence, French later spent twenty-nine years (from 1967 to 1996) as the rector of Ascension Memorial Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the town in which Updike lived for seventeen years.

  * More than half a century later, Updike told a fellow Lampoon alumnus that the initiation fee of one hundred dollars (substantially more than he could afford) was waived in his case. Other alumni, interviewed about Updike’s election to the Lampoon, said it seemed likely that the fee was indeed waived—despite the “snobbish opposition” of the “social” members.

  * The title narthex is bestowed on a promising young Poonster.

  * After Bunce left Harvard, he changed his name to Douglas Fairbairn. He told the story of his Harvard years in his autobiography, Down and Out in Cambridge.

  * “Poetess,” “The Population of Argentina,” “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked,” and “Mountain Impasse.”

  * At the very end of his life he declined to participate in an oral history of the Lampoon. He didn’t want to give any more interviews, he said, “about foolery that has pretty much faded from my memory.”

  * He gave the name Willow to the hero’s hometown in Villages (2004), his last and most nakedly nostalgic account of a Shillington boyhood.

  * Edward Hoagland, who was accepted into MacLeish’s seminar in the fall of 1953, notes that Updike’s rejection had long-term consequences. A Boston publishing house, Houghton Mifflin, traditionally snapped up the first books of promising young Harvard writers—but according to Hoagland, “the trouble was that Harvard’s writing teachers had not recognized Updike’s talent . . . and so the wider Harvard-Boston establishment . . . missed him too.” Boston’s loss was New York’s gain.

  * Updike chose not to include “Homage to Paul Klee” in The Early Stories; it was only ever published in an obscure Unitarian journal called The Liberal Context.

  * Hannaford was the model for Fitch in “The Christian Roommates”—but in the story, Updike rearranged the chronology, sending him away with a nervous breakdown at the end of freshman rather than sophomore year.

  * Like “Homage to Paul Klee,” “One of My Generation” was left out of The Early Stories.

  * Actually, Mary never studied French at Radcliffe; she was relying on the classes she took in high school.

  * “While he had been abroad, his mother’s letters—graceful, witty, informative, cheerful—had been his main link with home” (from “Home,” a story Updike wrote in March 1960).

  * Updike’s Form 1099 shows that The New Yorker paid him a total of $1,003 in 1954. Considering that he had graduated from college only in June, and that from October he was enrolled at the Ruskin, it was a handsomely remunerative first year as a writer.

  * “Have a Good Life” is set in Willow, as was the eponymous novel Updike began in his sophomore year at Harvard and abandoned about two thirds of the way through.

  * A few months later, Updike read his first Nabokov, “Pnin’s Day,” in the April 23, 1955, issue of The New Yorker.

  * Updike had perhaps already noticed, when he wrote “Dentistry and Doubt,” that Green was particularly interested in birds: “[T]hey play flitting, cooing chorus to book after book,” he wrote in a review of Green’s first novel, Blindness, when it was reissued in 1978.

  * The car radio figures prominently in Rabbit, Run.

  * Updike praised Yagoda’s book as an “excellent, equable, thorough history of the magazine.”

  * Updike wrote a Talk of the Town piece about loafing in Bryant Park, near the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street; he called it “the bull’s-eye of our city”: “As surely as if we were in the Forum of 169, on the Ile de la Cité in 1260, or in Piccadilly Circus in 1860, we sat now, in 1960, in the center of Western civilization.”

  * In the foreword to Assorted Prose, Updike writes, “Who, after all, could that indefatigably fascinated, perpetually peripatetic ‘we’ be but a collection of dazzled farm-boys?”

  * There are few topics murkier than The New Yorker’s arrangements for paying its staff writers. Each had a different deal. It seems that during his time with The Talk of the Town, Updike was given a $100 weekly “drawing account”—essentially an advance against his actual earnings. By writing two Talk pieces a month, he could “offset” the sum deposited into his account. The idea behind this arcane system was to make life more secure for freelancers who had a mortgage or school tuition to pay; of course it had the corollary effect of tying the writers to the magazine.

  * In the version published in The Same Door and then collected in The Early Stories, Updike radically trimmed the opening paragraph of “Toward Evening,” eliminating almost all mention of Rafe’s job; we eventually learn, in passing, that he works in an office—the rest is left to the imagination.

  * Six months later another bus, this one with a sign reading “Capacity 26 Passengers,” inspired a charming bit of light verse, “Capacity,” in which every passenger is catalogued from A to Z—“affable” to “zebuesque”—except U, presumably the poet himself.

  * Updike later noted, “I began to read Proust in the first months I lived in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. I was twenty-three, newly a father, newly employed.”

  * The phrase about sailing the “clean seas of sophistication” is a late addition; it underscores the idea that the couple’s urban polish is freshly acquired.

  * It’s possible that Updike, gazing on the Spry sign and imagining the workings of the corporation responsible for erecting it, may have found his thoughts turning to The New Yorker and how the magazine itself came to be. As he knew, it was bankrolled in the early years by Raoul Fleischmann, an heir to the General Baking Company whose family had made a fortune with Fleischmann’s Yeast, a baking ingredient, like Spry, and just as heavily advertised. Updike grew up thinking of The New Yorker as a bright, shiny cultural artifact; it was a beacon of sophistication for a wide-eyed country boy. Now he knew it from the inside, as company with a product for sale, launched as a business venture and profitably managed by employees of Raoul Fleischmann.

  * During the early months of his stay in New York, Updike was himself engaged in anxious theological investigations. This was when he first read Kierkegaard: an Anchor edition of Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death bound together.

  * Mary Updike, who liked Klee (but preferred Cézanne), was pregnant with their second child when her husband was writing “A Trillion Feet of Gas”; David Updike was born eight weeks later.

  * The magazine was considerably fatter in the late fifties. For example, the issue in which “Sunday Teasing” appeared (October 13, 1956) ran to 204 pages. During the fall season, the magazine often hit the upper limit set by Shawn: 248 pages.

  * Decades later, he provided generous notes for his Collected Poems, 1953–1993, most of them autobiographical (and therefore a kind of self-exegesis), but neither condescending nor pretentious.

  * The exception is “Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers,” which he wrote having taken Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China to the ballpark and peeked at it between innings. Perha
ps not light verse, but not exactly heavy, either.

  * This line of thought evidently struck a chord. In his mid-seventies manifesto (“Why Write?”), he declared, “We must write where we stand; wherever we do stand, there is life; and an imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.”

  * The letter is handwritten (somewhat unusually for Updike) on all four sides of a folded sheet of notepaper; the cramped writing space suggests that perhaps Updike was uncertain about the message he was sending. If he’d typed out his rant on a full-size sheet, perhaps he would have thought better of mailing it.