Updike
Authors: Adam Begley
To Anne
Contents
In addition to the relevant facts, winnowed from heaps of raw information, a biography ought to give a sense of what its subject was like to shake hands with or stand next to or drink coffee with. So here, before we burrow into the life and work, is a little vignette I hope will give a taste of John Updike, the flavor of the man as he appeared to me in the late fall of 1993, when I trailed behind him, playing Boswell for a day and a half. We were in Appleton, Wisconsin, at Lawrence University, where Updike’s younger son had studied in the eighties. Updike had been invited to give the convocation address, dine at the home of the university president, and talk with students in a writing seminar. It was the sort of well-paid trip Updike made over and over again. He was on display as America’s preeminent man of letters, showing off what he called his “public, marketable self”—a wonderfully controlled and pleasing performance that revealed, it seemed to me, a good deal about his private, hidden self.
He had barely sat down (we were at a buffet supper at the president’s house, plates balanced on knees, guests in armchairs or perched on footstools) when a well-dressed woman sitting near him asked in a sweet midwestern voice, “Mr. Updike—did you write the wonderful story about the man who swims from pool to pool?”
“I wish I had,” he answered at once, his voice honeyed like his interlocutor’s; “that was John Cheever, ‘The Swimmer.’ ” He grinned, and contained in that wolfish grin—his small mouth a sharp
V
in his long, narrow face—was a mixture of pure amusement, malice, and forbearance. “Perhaps now that John is dead I could lay claim to some of his stories.” The assembled company exhaled with a long, relieved laugh. They were relaxing, surrendering to his charm.
Encouraged, the same woman spoke up again, asking if Mr. Updike, so famously prolific, was slowing down, thinking of retirement. Again, the response was instant: “Do you think I should? At sixty-one?” His tousled hair was nearly white, his eyebrows scruffy like an old man’s. A network of fine wrinkles surrounded his eyes—but the eyes themselves were bright and lively (“he had a bona fide twinkle in his eye,” said Jane Smiley, “maybe the only person I’ve ever known to really have such a thing”). He was tall and lanky but not remotely feeble or doddery. On the contrary, he exuded a vigorous self-confidence, an almost palpable centeredness. His voice, still sweet, had taken on a flirty, comically submissive edge, as if the advice of this midwestern Cheever fan could hasten his retirement and shape the end of an illustrious literary career. “I
have
been tidying up,” he offered, along with another friendly, wickedly acute grin.
That moment of teasing social agility sparked my suspicion that the playfully mischievous, dazzlingly clever John Updike was a potentially dangerous individual, and that a gamut of conflicting emotions, not all of them kindly, were hidden behind the screen of his public persona. I think it was the hint of danger, subliminally communicated to the clutch of listeners in the president’s blandly elegant living room, that made his performance in the role of celebrated author so appealing. Yes, he was a professional writer being professionally engaging, but he was also signaling—how? with that clichéd twinkle?—that his good behavior, his forbearance, had its limits.
At the time, I’d read only a few dozen Updike stories and a couple of the novels; when I finally read his memoirs, I found this apposite passage about an earlier trip to a midwestern university:
I read and talked into the microphone and was gracious to the local rich, the English faculty and the college president, and the students with their clear skin and shining eyes and inviting innocence, like a blank surface one wishes to scribble obscenities on.
Suspicion confirmed. Of course there was an undercurrent of aggression in all that expertly deployed charm, a razor edge to his ostensibly gentle wit. In one of the dazzling self-interviews with his alter ego Henry Bech, he lamented his own eagerness to please and ridiculed the whole notion that a writer should be “nice”: “[A]s Norman Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long afterwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is like the
pfft
of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain’s delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization.” A nice, happy author? No, thanks. I found I liked him all the more.
It’s possible, I suppose, that I was programmed to like him. My father and he were classmates in college, both of them majoring in English, and for a while after graduation, when my parents were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Updike and his first wife had moved to Ipswich, less than an hour away, the two couples were friendly. Fifty years later, when Updike died unexpectedly (very few people knew that he was ill, let alone dying), my father sent me an e-mail version of an anecdote I’d heard before:
One day for some reason John came to see us alone, in the early afternoon. We were in our living room, which was flooded by the afternoon sun. You were in your Easy Chair, a contraption in universal use then among advanced couples, which allowed the pre-toddler to recline rather as though he were in a barber’s chair having his hair shampooed. One of John’s less known talents was his skill as a juggler. He took three oranges from a bowl on the coffee table and began to juggle for you, and you began to laugh. Astonishing belly laughter.
According to this family legend, Updike was the first person to make me laugh. Part of me believed it, and believed it was a natural consequence of this early imprint that I found him congenial when I met him as an adult, the baby in the Easy Chair having grown up to be a literary journalist. Whenever we spoke (which wasn’t often—all told perhaps a dozen phone calls and two extended face-to-face interviews), I was amazed and delighted by his gracious, professional manner, and by the sly undercutting of his public, marketable self. He wanted to let you know that he was perfectly aware of the falsity of the situation, and perfectly prepared to be amused by it, for the moment. He wanted to let you know that his real self was elsewhere.
This wasn’t just a targeted trick, like juggling for a baby, deployed for the benefit of an admiring journalist; old friends and colleagues noticed it, too. “John could be funny and very friendly,” said his Harvard friend Michael Arlen, “but you always felt that this was just a parallel universe we were occupying for the moment—the real universe was back at his desk.” Roger Angell, Updike’s
New Yorker
fiction editor for more than thirty years, observed how, near the end of each visit to the magazine’s offices, he “somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away.” Angell called it the “fadeaway” and thought it had to do with being temporarily exiled from writing: “the spacious writing part of him was held to one side when not engaged, kept ready for its engrossing daily stint back home.” He was there but not there—just as he was kind but subversive, and charming but dangerous.
Another confusion: Updike thought of himself, or
wanted
to think of himself, as “a pretty average person.” So he said at age forty-nine. But since childhood he’d been assured that he was exceptional, brighter and more talented than the rest. And surely he was. A drumroll of honors, prizes, and awards accompanies the very long list of his published books—sixty-odd in fifty-one years! The list and the accolades confirm that he was indeed extraordinary. His most obsessive fan, Nicholson Baker, whose
U and I
is easily the strangest homage he ever received, declared “unreservedly” that Updike was a genius (but rightly conceded that the word has no useful meaning). My ideas about this question are borrowed from Lionel Trilling, who wrote about George Orwell, “He was not a genius, and this is one of the remarkable things about him.” Trilling thought Orwell stood for “the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.” Updike once declared that his epitaph should be “Here lies a small-town boy who tried to make the most out of what he had, who made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.”
Hard work, talent, “undeceived” intelligence—those three essential ingredients require a binding agent, which is ambition. The small-town boy aimed high, with posterity’s judgment never absent from his thoughts. As a college student he dreamed of becoming a “universal artist,” by which he meant someone both great and popular, lodged in the heart of the American people not just today but tomorrow. In the mid-sixties, he began to deposit his papers at the Houghton Library, where Harvard University stores its rare books and manuscripts, where scholars go to examine the literary remains of giants such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot. For the next forty years Updike dutifully boxed up and delivered to the library first drafts and false starts and galley proofs—“the refuse of my profession”—as well as personal correspondence. Today the Updike archive, a vast paper trail, possibly the last of its kind, is irrefutable evidence of faith—his own and others’—in the enduring significance of his achievement.
*
Predicting his eventual place in the pantheon of American literature is an amusing pastime, but no more useful than playing pin-the-tail with the genius label. In September 2013, the Library of America published two volumes of his collected stories; if that proves to be the first installment of a uniform edition of his work, one of Updike’s fondest wishes will have come true. It’s one of my fondest wishes that those books will mark the beginning of a surge in his posthumous reputation.
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
—Sigmund Freud
In the late spring of 1983, when John Updike’s reputation as a writer had reached a pinnacle—having swept all three major literary awards for
Rabbit Is Rich
in 1982, he made his second appearance on the cover of
Time
, the headline on this occasion boasting, “Going Great at 50”—a freelance journalist named William Ecenbarger pitched an idea for a story to the editor of the
Philadelphia
Inquirer
Magazine
. The reporter wanted to write about the relationship between Updike’s fiction and the geography of Berks County, Pennsylvania, what Updike called, with possessive emphasis, “
my
home turf.” Ecenbarger planned to visit the city of Reading, where Updike was born; Shillington, the small town on the outskirts of Reading where he lived until he was thirteen; and Plowville, eleven miles into the countryside where he languished in frustrated rural isolation until he left for college. From these three places Updike drew the material that launched his career, the earliest novels (
The Poorhouse Fair
;
Rabbit, Run
;
The Centaur
; and
Of the Farm
) and dozens of short stories, some of them among his best. Plowville became Firetown; Reading, a middle-size industrial city in decline for all of Updike’s adult life, became Alton (or Brewer in the Rabbit tetralogy); and beloved, small-town Shillington, sandwiched between the retreating countryside and the encroaching suburbs, was reborn as Olinger (with a long
O
and a hard
g
, as in “Oh, linger”). Together, they are the heart of Updike’s America, its landscape and its history.
In short, Bill Ecenbarger had chosen a promising topic.
Given a green light by his editor, he dutifully sent an interview request to Alfred A. Knopf, Updike’s publisher. No reply was forthcoming, but then, Ecenbarger hadn’t expected one. (Thanks to a series of uncompromising pronouncements on the subject—“I really think being interviewed a great waste of time and energy, with results that generally leave you feeling embarrassed, or at least that you should clean your fingernails”—Updike had gained an unwarranted reputation for being media shy.) Unfazed, the journalist drove down to Shillington to have a poke around and do some research in the town’s public library. No sooner had he begun quizzing the reference librarian about the famous local author than he felt an insistent tug at his sleeve. An elderly woman was at his elbow, peering at him through large tortoiseshell glasses.
“I know all about him,” she said simply. “He’s my son.”
As any good reporter would, Ecenbarger took Linda Updike to lunch at a nearby restaurant. She, in turn, took him out to Plowville and showed him around the small sandstone farmhouse familiar to all devoted Updike readers. The key sights in the cramped interior were young John’s narrow bedroom at the top of the stairs and, downstairs, long white shelves devoted to the books he’d written. “He told me when he left for Harvard,” she said, “that he was going to fill those shelves. There’s only room for one or two more.” (By 1983, Updike had published twenty-three volumes; there were forty more yet to come in his lifetime.) She showed him the big, well-built barn made famous by “Pigeon Feathers.” Ecenbarger remembers his guide as a soft-spoken, intelligent woman. A widow who had lived on her own for more than a decade, she was a little garrulous, manifestly proud of her son, and happy to claim some credit for having nurtured his talent.
Delighted by his stroke of luck, the journalist went home and began to write the article. Four days later, he received a phone call from Mrs. Updike. “Chonny will be here tomorrow,” she said. “He’s coming to put in my screens. He does it every year. Why don’t you stop by?”
Needing no further encouragement, the next morning Ecenbarger presented himself at the farmhouse, where he was greeted by Mrs. Updike. She warned him that her son, still upstairs, was a bit grumpy. “He often gets that way when he visits,” she confided.
Ecenbarger waited inside while Mrs. Updike went out to fill a bird feeder. He was examining the long bookcase crammed with the Updike oeuvre when the author himself appeared, wearing a navy wool watch cap, which he removed after poking his head out the kitchen door to test the morning temperature. “Let’s go,” he said. “I have a lot of other things to do today.” Ecenbarger had the distinct impression that the celebrated author was doing his best not to vent his irritation at having an impromptu interview thrust upon him by his mother.
“I’ll drive so you can take notes,” Updike suggested as they left the house, “but I want to drive your car.” Opening the door of Ecenbarger’s Volkswagen, he added, “I’ve never driven a Rabbit before.” That glint of humor set the tone for things to come: reluctant at first, Updike soon warmed up, teased by nostalgia into what became a marathon round of autobiographical tourism. All day long the two men drove around the county. In West Reading they passed the municipal hospital where Updike was born on March 18, 1932; in Shillington they parked in front of 117 Philadelphia Avenue, the white brick house where he grew up, an only child coddled by his parents and maternal grandparents; and finally they returned to Plowville, to the eighty-acre farm where he endured his lonely adolescence.
Bill Ecenbarger made the most of his scoop. He had every reason to be grateful to Updike and his mother: with their help (and a good deal of attentive reading) he produced an entertaining and informative piece of feature journalism. “Updike Is Home” appeared on June 12, 1983, illustrated with a photograph of a smiling Updike in front of the farmhouse, one hand in the pocket of his tan corduroys, the other cupped on the back of his neck. It’s a coy, boyish pose, almost elfin; the fifty-one-year-old author looks like a sly kid. His mother hovers in the background, a ghostly gray presence in the doorway of the house.
What Ecenbarger failed to realize—until several weeks after the publication of his article—was that the transaction had been mutually beneficial. The reporter filed one version of the story, and the fiction writer filed another: an Updike short story, “One More Interview,” appeared in
The New Yorker
on July 4; it’s about an unnamed actor who agrees, reluctantly, to drive around his hometown in the company of a journalist (“It would provide, you know . . . an angle”). Gradually the actor’s resistance (“I can’t stand interviews”) melts away as the trickle of memories swells to a flood. Even as the reporter’s interest wanes (“I think maybe I’ve seen enough. This is only for a sidebar, you know”), the actor finds he can’t let go of this opportunity to revisit his small-town boyhood, to dream of his first love and his vanished, teenage self (“He wanted to cruise forever through this half of town”).
Reading his
New Yorker
, Ecenbarger was astonished to find that he’d become muse to a great American writer. Updike had transcribed, verbatim, their exchanges, beginning with the helpful suggestion that the interviewee drive while the interviewer take notes, and extending to trivial back-and-forth unrelated to the matter at hand, such as the actor’s surmise that the “wiry” reporter (whose “exceptionally tight mouth” Updike lifted, as it were, straight from Ecenbarger’s face) had been a high school athlete:
“Don’t be modest. You played second base, didn’t you?”
“Center field, usually.”
“Same idea . . .”
The reporter’s preferred position on the diamond was thus immortalized in Updike’s fiction.
Other borrowed details: Just as Updike initially had trouble with the Rabbit’s manual transmission, so the actor, driving the interviewer’s car (not a Rabbit but rather “a Japanese model”), shifts “from first straight into fourth, with a fearful laboring of the engine.” Ecenbarger told Updike that the article he was writing was more about the place than the author; the actor receives the same warning, phrased the same way. Describing the midcentury sartorial flair of the town’s richer kids, the actor spells out for the interviewer the precise word he has in mind: “there was a word then, ‘snazzy,’ s-n-a-z-z-y”; Updike remarked on an unchanged aspect of Shillington and said he found it “cheery”—whereupon he helpfully spelled out the word, “c-h-e-e-r-y.”
Updike chose to include in his tour the local lovers’ lane—“where we used to neck,” he explained to Ecenbarger. The actor steers the interviewer to the “necking place” and is amazed to find it still there. His thoughts turn to Ermajean Willis, the girl he’d “acquired” at age seventeen, and he drives the few blocks to her house.
“My girlfriend used to live here,” he confessed to his interviewer.
“You had only one?”
“Well, yes.”
Parked in front of her house, the actor feels “swamped by love.”
From the scant but sharply focused information divulged about Ermajean, it’s obvious that she’s one of many fictional incarnations of Nancy Wolf (“my only girlfriend”), a girl Updike wrote about as Nora in his 1989 memoir,
Self-Consciousness
.
*
We know she’s the same girl because of a conspicuous architectural detail (a detail he mentions twice in
Self-Consciousness
as a feature typical of Shillington): the concrete balls decorating the retaining wall in front of both Ermajean’s house and Nora’s. Though he once insisted (unconvincingly) that the Shillington he used in his fiction was more a stage in his “pilgrim’s progress” than an actual spot on the map, his instinct was always to borrow the signature detail from the bricks and mortar of the town.
What are we to make of this whole incident? Ecenbarger was at first mildly disturbed to find that in Updike’s version, the actor doesn’t enjoy playing tour guide. He slips from wary impatience and annoyance into a bittersweet reverie that triggers a powerful romantic longing for a place and a time and a self forever gone. At the very end of the story, the spell broken (in part because the interviewer is plainly bored, blind to the “glory” of vivid private memories), the actor reverts to a brusque, comic annoyance: “Keep your pencil out. You son of a bitch, I’m going to tell you the names of every family that used to live on this block.” Ecenbarger had been under the impression that the courteous, even genial, Updike had quickly forgotten his irritation, that their nostalgic excursion had given the author pleasure. (It very likely had: “I become exhilarated in Shillington,” he once wrote, “as if my self is being given a bath in its own essence.”)
Leaving aside the reporter’s momentary distress, there was no harm done. Updike took the incident, reshaped it slightly to accentuate the dramatic arc, and gave it the twist of the actor’s final petulant outburst. Retaining intact the details that suited his purpose, he adjusted others strategically—and so turned a day’s drive into a perfectly adequate
New Yorker
story, a slick comic vignette with a moment or two of poignant depth. That was his job, Updike might have said with a shrug, a profitable trick of alchemy.
Or digestion. In a story he wrote in 1960 about his maternal grandmother (a story closely based on the facts of Katherine Hoyer’s life), he described with a startling simile the writer’s creative process: “We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves.” Twenty-five years later, addressing an appreciative crowd in a packed theater in downtown Albany, New York, Updike elaborated on his scatological theory of the creative imagination: “Freud somewhere claims that a child’s first gifts, to its parents, are its feces, whose presentation (in the appropriate receptacle) is roundly praised. And as in this primal benefaction, the writer extrudes his daily product while sitting down, on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain. The artist who works in words and anecdotes, images and facts wants to share with us nothing less than his digested life.” The audience laughed, as Updike surely hoped they would, but he was also making a serious point. The joke depends on the scabrous suggestion that all writing, including his own, is crap. We can dismiss that notion with a smile and still see in it a speck of truth: the writer who feeds off his raw experience, walking through volumes of the unexpressed and then excreting or extruding fiction, is engaged in a magical transaction that produces wonders, a fabulous gift presented to the reader—but isn’t there something ever so slightly repellent about this offering? Isn’t there the hint of a foul odor? Fiction is a “dirty business,” he once confessed; his art had “a shabby side.”
A year or so after his encounter with Bill Ecenbarger, Updike wrote an autobiographical essay about yet another tour of his old neighborhood, a solo walk he took through streets he’d described in story after story—“a deliberate indulgence of a nostalgia long since made formal in many words.” In “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” (which ran in
The New Yorker
in late 1984 and eventually became the first chapter of
Self-Consciousness
), Updike voices his regret at plundering his memories of Shillington, “scraps” that have been “used more than once, used to the point of vanishing . . . in the self-serving corruptions of fiction.”
*
His regret, his suspicion that in his writing he’s betraying a place he loves (“a town that was also somewhat my body”), is balanced against the stubborn fact that he depends for his livelihood on the sale of his fiction—“scribbling for my life,” he calls it. In his speech on creativity, he mentioned the “simultaneous sense of loss and recapture” he experienced when his memory seized upon a scene from his past he knew he could use in his fiction. This ambivalence stayed with him throughout his career, but he never gave up the habit of reusing the scraps that came his way; even the writing that isn’t nakedly autobiographical is flecked with incidents and characters drawn from life with disconcerting accuracy—a host of Ecenbargers opportunistically fictionalized.
It’s not too great a stretch to say that John Updike’s entire career was an extended tour of his native turf, or that the later adventures in far-off places were made possible by the intensity of his preoccupation with his small-town beginnings. In one of his last poems, written just a month and a half before his death, when he already knew he was terminally ill, he thanks his childhood friends and high school classmates
