Updike (22 page)
Authors: Adam Begley
An attack, in this case, launched by Maxwell Geismar, a respected literary historian and critic who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College. A year later, Updike read another Geismar essay, this time in the
Saturday Review
, which associated the
New Yorker
school with the “very shallow sophistication” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work. Geismar opined that “Fitzgerald was the J. D. Salinger of the Twenties . . . and a natural
New Yorker
writer.” The links here between Fitzgerald, Salinger, the
New Yorker
school, and very shallow sophistication are rather tenuous, but the essay nevertheless threw Updike into a funk. He was so distraught that William Maxwell felt obliged to send his “depressed” author a two-page, single-spaced letter dismissing Geismar as an “incompetent” and “undiscerning” critic. Maxwell’s defense of Updike’s fiction is more than a consoling epistolary pat on the shoulder; it’s a witty and perceptive analysis of what the young writer was up to. It begins with a reminder that Maxwell’s editorial touch was generally light (and hence that Updike was not a creature of the magazine), and ends with an ad hominem jab at the enemy:
I don’t find your work shallow, I don’t see any danger of its becoming that way, and if it does become that way, I will (in my heart) hold you, not myself responsible. There is a sentence of Turgenev’s that [Edmund] Wilson quotes in his introduction to Turgenev’s literary memoirs that is very much to the point: “. . . Believe me, no man of real talent ever serves aims other than his own, and he finds satisfaction in himself alone: the life that surrounds him provides him with the contents of his works; he is its
concentrated
reflection
. . . .” That’s what you are right now, old boy, and that’s what I hope you will continue to be, and it’s not shallow for the simple reason that life itself is not shallow. Nobody’s life is, not even Maxwell Geismar’s.
The argument is essentially that Updike is his own man and his fiction reflects his personal circumstance and is therefore also his own.
*
When it comes to the related questions—whether Updike’s fiction can be justly described as shallow or sophisticated, or both, and whether it’s fair to lump it with a so-called
New Yorker
school—Maxwell pivots deftly, evasively, and points out that Harold Ross, who stamped the magazine with his personality, was hardly a sophisticated character. Finally he asks, “Are you or aren’t you, in
your
heart, pleased and happy to see a story of yours in
The New Yorker
?” The answer could only be yes—but that didn’t stop Updike from squirming with discomfort whenever he saw criticism leveled at the fiction in the magazine. At this point his reputation as a writer rested solely on his stories, all of which had appeared in
The New Yorker
. He felt personally singed by any blast aimed at the magazine and its school.
Was there such a thing, at midcentury, as a typical
New Yorker
story? Did a
New Yorker
school of fiction exist? Certainly the magazine favored quiet, lucid, and subtle over brash, baffling, and daring. A polite, genteel tone held sway: nothing radical, nothing transgressive, nothing in bad taste. In his
Paris Review
interview, Maxwell bobbed and weaved his way to a few general remarks about the fiction in the magazine:
Irwin Shaw when he was a young man said once that in the typical
New Yorker
story everything occurs at one place in one time, and all the dialogue is beside the point. It was not, at the time, a wholly inaccurate description. . . . Something that
is
characteristic of the writers who appear in
The New Yorker
is that the sentence is the unit by which the story advances, not the paragraph, and the individual sentence therefore carries a great deal of weight and tends to be carefully constructed, with no loose ends. And style becomes very important.
There was just enough truth in the various generalizations to make the idea of a
New Yorker
school a credible target for critical dissent. It’s true, for example, that until Donald Barthelme crashed the party in 1963, innovation and experimentation usually had to be smuggled into the pages of the magazine. Updike himself complained of a certain “prudery” and an “anachronistic nice-nellyism.” Critics such as Geismar—a champion of naturalism who wanted to see harsh truths aired, who wanted readers to be shocked out of their complacency—were bound to be impatient with the standard
New Yorker
fare.
Actually, many of the writers who appeared in the magazine (Nabokov, for one), and even some who were dubbed “
New Yorker
school,” such as Cheever and Salinger,
were
subversive, but in the quiet, lucid, subtle way that suited the editors. If Updike had considered the matter calmly and rationally, he would have ignored the passing gibes, or told himself that they were, as Maxwell insisted, examples of incompetent criticism; instead he fretted and stewed, concerned that his relationship with the magazine would distort perception of his work and prejudice critics against the novel he would shortly be publishing.
Soon his sensitivity extended to any disparaging remark about
New Yorker
contributors. In June 1960 he read a short article in
Time
magazine reporting on the dim view taken by Alfred Kazin, a distinguished literary critic, of recent Broadway theater. Dismissing what he called “Westport comedy,” Kazin ridiculed the kind of character featured in those dramas: well-heeled Freud-spouting intellectuals, exurban and adulterous, among them “the artist for
The New Yorker
, that safe citizen of our times” who works “in a slightly Bohemian reconverted barn.” It was clearly a throwaway line—Kazin was himself an intellectual and a sometime contributor to the magazine—but Updike took umbrage and dashed off a long, sour note to Kazin accusing him of spouting “smug humbug.”
*
It’s an ill-judged, unintentionally revealing document:
I notice in
Time
a reference to “the artist for
The New Yorker
, that safe citizen of our times.” I don’t know why this kind of thing, so regularly emitted by Leslie Fiedler, Maxwell Geismar, etc. invariably causes me pain, nor why I am driven to the indiscretion of writing to you. Perhaps because I expect better of you, since your criticism is so good when it is directed at real subjects. I submit that the
NYer
is not a real object of criticism; that remarks should be directed toward individual contributors. Unlike contributors to
Time
, the magazine’s contributors do sign their names and therefore should not be saddled with the sins, real and imagined, of other contributors.
Updike’s argument about the magazine not being “a real object of criticism” is far less compelling than the bizarre spectacle of an author trying his best to shield himself from a blow directed at someone else entirely. The fact that the blow is glancing and possibly even inadvertent makes no difference—he can’t stop himself:
I honestly believe that . . . no attempt is made to get a
New Yorker
kind of story; that, in the minds of the editors, no such kind exists. And that I have never seen in print any kind of case made out for the corporate identity of
New Yorker
fiction; and that the clearest notions of such a corporate identity exist in the minds of those who read the magazine least.
It’s possible that he convinced himself of the honesty of these beliefs, but it seems more likely that he was in the grip of a desire that distorted his judgment: He was desperate to imagine that his stories could be read in
The New Yorker
and yet stand apart. He wanted to benefit from the magazine’s corporate identity and yet be seen as a solo act; he wanted
New Yorker
cachet to rub off on him without being tagged with a label.
Part of his aversion to the idea of a
New Yorker
school was a reflexive denial of a truth he elsewhere happily acknowledged: that he was indebted to fiction he’d first read in the magazine, including stories by Cheever and Salinger. Though he admired both writers and was influenced by both, any remark from a critic that lumped him with them made him prickly and defensive, symptoms of what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence.
*
When he was more securely established, Updike mastered a more decorous response to remarks about typical
New Yorker
stories, but in the late 1950s, while he was still finding his voice, it was a topic almost guaranteed to trigger a show of petulance.
When he left New York, fleeing the crowds and also the corrupting influence of a certain kind of big-city sophistication, he was—in a halfhearted, conflicted way—trying to escape from
The New Yorker
as well. Needless to say, he failed utterly.
[M]y conception of an artist . . . was someone who lived in a town like Shillington, and who, equipped with pencils and paper, practiced his solitary trade as methodically as a dentist practiced his. And indeed, that is how it is at present with me.
—“The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” (1962)
Ipswich was Shillington redux, paradise regained, a home to rival his first home, a place where he could plunge in fearlessly, without reservation, no longer needing to pose as an outsider. This is where he reached his prime: “If Shillington gave me life,” he wrote in
Self-Consciousness
, “Ipswich was where I took possession of it.” A small Colonial town two miles from the seashore and about thirty miles north of Boston, it was the scene of some of his sweetest triumphs: his first eight published novels were written in Ipswich, along with a majority of his best short stories and his most ambitious poetry. He arrived a promising young magazine writer without a single book to his credit and departed, seventeen years later, a consummately professional author—a bestselling, prizewinning novelist with a burgeoning reputation as a leading man of letters. By 1974, the year he left, he was not only a critically acclaimed, paid-up member of the literary establishment, but also rich (thanks to steady
New Yorker
earnings and a swelling stream of book royalties) and famous (thanks to the notoriety of
Couples
). His younger son and daughter were born in Ipswich, and all four of his children thrived there—“Children are what welds a family to a town,” he once noted. But it was also in Ipswich that the family imploded, his marriage to Mary wrecked by a daisy chain of adulterous affairs. The peaks and troughs of Updike’s Ipswich life were extreme, and the turbulence shook up his poetry and prose, real-life drama reenacted on the page.
Why Ipswich? They both knew it—Mary from childhood, John from their honeymoon weekend—and they both liked it. John remembered “something comfortingly raggle-taggle” about the center of town. “It felt,” he wrote, “like a town with space, where you could make your own space.” They thought briefly of returning to Cambridge after New York; they knew they could be happy there, but ruled it out after deciding that it would be too much like going back to college. Updike once claimed that he’d moved to New England to be closer to his Red Sox hero, Ted Williams. More plausibly, he maintained that he chose Ipswich for its coastline, the famously beautiful, unspoiled Crane Beach, where he hoped on sunny days to bake away his psoriasis. That practical consideration, however, counted for less than the tug of nostalgia. Ipswich and Shillington are different in many respects; the Colonial history of Ipswich, its unusually large number of pre-1725 houses, and its proximity to the shore give it a distinctive flavor, whereas Shillington was always blandly typical—ordinariness part of its enduring appeal. Shillington was already a suburb when Updike was a child, the few miles to Reading shortened by a trolley line. Ipswich in 1957 was safely distant from Boston’s urban sprawl, though connected by commuter rail. The drive to the city was about an hour’s journey, part of it through cultivated farmland. All the same, both Ipswich and Shillington were unmistakably small-town, and that was the key element as far as he was concerned. “A small-town boy,” he wrote, “I had craved small-town space.” He was looking for a little pond with room enough for a big fish. He also needed, after New York, to reestablish his connection with “the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America.”
Ipswich changed and grew during his time there, but its essential character remained the same. It was a town of fewer than seven thousand in 1957, and more than eleven thousand when he left. Part of what John and Mary liked about it was the crazy-quilt ethnic makeup of the population, with large Greek, Polish, French Canadian, and Irish contingents mixing with the old Yankees, all contributing to what Updike called “mini-city perkiness.” Despite the natural beauty of the coastal setting and the rich history—Ipswich bills itself as “The Birthplace of American Independence,” a claim based on a 1687 tax protest—the town’s style is markedly casual. Updike thought of it as “a maverick kind of place.” Many streets are dotted with seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century houses, but there was no historical district when he arrived, nothing precious or preening about it; as he remarked, “Ipswich is traditionally careless of itself.”
Decision made, destination chosen, he quickly put the plan into action. He took an early morning train to Boston, and from there Mary’s former roommate, Ann Karnovsky (née Rosenblum), drove him out to Ipswich to look for a place to rent. The idea was to take a twelve-month lease and consider it a trial period. They looked at an apartment for $200 a month, and the real estate agent also showed them some properties for sale. The house John and Ann settled on was a small wood-frame cottage called Little Violet. (It was painted lavender.) Because the agent didn’t have a key, they saw it only from the outside, peeking in through the windows at the downstairs rooms. There was a barn, a carport for the Ford, and two acres of land. The house was a couple of miles south of the town center on Essex Road, with no immediate neighbors. The view out the back, over a meadow fringed by woods, gave the property an idyllic country feel. The rent was $150 a month.
With John suffering from a slight case of mumps, the family moved into Little Violet at the end of March, camping out in the semifurnished house until the first week of April, when movers brought the furniture from the apartment on West Thirteenth Street. There were only two bedrooms, both upstairs, but there were two bathrooms, and a marble-floored room at the back that became John’s study. From his desk he could look out over the meadow—“a writer’s paradise,” he told his mother. To his
New Yorker
colleagues he said that the whole family loved the house, even ten-week-old David. Perhaps it was the fresh air, or the excitement of a new house, but Elizabeth, just two, took to waking at dawn, an exhausting routine for her parents.
One of John’s first projects at Little Violet was to erect a mailbox at the end of the driveway on Essex Road (and thereby establish a Rural Free Delivery address); he then wrote a poem about it. In Plowville, the mailbox had been the place where he and his mother would “reap” rejection slips; “Planting a Mailbox,” with its cheerful mock-horticultural instructions (“Don’t harrow, weed, or water; just apply / A little gravel. Sun and motor fumes / Perform the miracle; in late July, / There a post office blooms”), suggests that he was hoping for better results in his new home, a bountiful crop of mail. As if conjured by this two-part ritual, the postman delivered good news less than a fortnight after their arrival, news that could be seen as a validation of the move to Ipswich. Updike had wanted to break out of
The New Yorker
and establish an independent career as a freelancer, and here was Cass Canfield writing to announce that Harper and Brothers was prepared to publish a collection of his light verse. In the same letter, Canfield inquired pointedly after the progress of the novel: “We are all looking forward greatly to seeing the manuscript,” he wrote, a reminder that publishing a budding author’s light verse, however entertaining, was not Harper’s main objective. Updike needed no encouragement on that score: he wanted to be a freelance writer, but more specifically he wanted to be a novelist.
In early May, Updike met in Boston with his Harper editor, Elizabeth Lawrence, who traveled up from New York to discuss the terms of the contract for the volume of poetry, which he planned to call
Biscuits for Cerberus
. This first encounter went smoothly; Updike charmed his editor, who followed up with a long, swooning letter: “Didn’t we have a pleasant meeting last Monday? I came away feeling well rewarded. It was really great fun.” She also gave her initial reaction to the six-hundred-page manuscript, typed out on yellow
New Yorker
scratch paper, of the novel
Home
, which Updike had handed over in Boston. Having read only the first half, she gave a guarded response, but on the whole her impression was positive: “It gathers power as it goes. There are lovely things in it. And, best, it is written with the muscles and perceptions of a novelist.” She made it clear that she wouldn’t be offering any further opinion until the manuscript had been read by Canfield and Simon Michael Bessie, another high-ranking Harper editor. In the meantime, she appended a list of sixteen poems that she and “several readers” judged “not up to the best of the collection.” The list includes “Ex-Basketball Player” (now his most frequently anthologized poem), “Shipbored,” “Youth’s Progress,” and “Lament for Cocoa”; many of the flagged poems are delightful, and most had already appeared in the pages of
The New Yorker
. In the end Updike dropped only three of the sixteen.
Boyishly thrilled to be publishing his first book and keen to establish good relations with Harper, he turned a blind eye to unmistakable signs of mixed feelings on the part of Lawrence, Canfield, et al. When in mid-June
Home
was formally rejected, Updike made not a peep of protest. The rejection letter, nominally from Canfield but citing the opinion of his colleagues, praises Updike’s writing and the “acuteness” of his observation; it reaffirms the publisher’s confidence in him “as a writer and as a novelist.” The verdict, however, was unanimous: “[N]one of us feels that the book would attract a substantial audience, primarily because in its present form the action does not compel the reader’s attention.” The advice was that he should “put the manuscript aside for awhile,” advice that clearly made an impression: he put it aside permanently. Writing to William Maxwell in the late seventies, Updike implied that he and Lawrence had together agreed on this course of action; in a 1969 interview, however, he made it sound as though shelving the manuscript of
Home
had been his own idea: “It had been a good exercise to write it, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many traits of a first novel.”
*
Home
is largely composed of the kind of nostalgic Berks County material that Katharine White had advised him against submitting to
The New Yorker
. It’s the Olinger chronicles presented as a continuous narrative stretching from his mother’s teenage years to his own, retracing the familiar Hoyer/Updike saga—the same constellation of only child, unhappy parents, elderly grandparents, the same to-and-fro between a small Pennsylvania town and an isolated farmhouse. Canfield referred to it as “the family novel.” It contains characters and situations Updike later recycled in various stories, notably “Flight” and “Pigeon Feathers,” and two novels,
The Centaur
and
Of the Farm
. It was his story, his material—and also his mother’s: Linda would retell her part (roughly the first half of
Home
) in her two books. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that by following Harper’s advice and suppressing this autobiographical bildungsroman, Updike did himself a big favor. The decision allowed him to make more considered and economical use of the material; as he later admitted, “every incident with any pith turned up later somewhere else.”
He put the manuscript in a drawer and went straight to work on a new novel, which was only glancingly autobiographical—which had, in fact, none of the traits of a first novel (“wretched genre,” he exclaimed in an early interview, still bitter about his struggle with
Home
). Set two decades into a not-quite-Orwellian future,
The Poorhouse Fair
imagines life inside the Diamond County Home for the Aged, where John F. Hook, a ninety-four-year-old former teacher with strong religious views (a character closely modeled on John F. Hoyer, Updike’s maternal grandfather), opposes the secular and progressive views of Stephen Connor, the “prefect” in charge. Updike had mentioned to Lawrence when they met in Boston that he was already at work on another novel, and it became a kind of fig leaf to cover the embarrassment of
Home
’s sad fate: Harper now pinned its hopes on the new manuscript.
Having finished off two final New York stories in early April—“A Gift from the City” and “Incest”—he wrote “Walter Briggs,” his first story set in Ipswich. It has a comically tortured publishing history: it suffered through repeated title changes, and didn’t run until nearly two years after it was submitted. The wrangles over “Walter Briggs” were lighthearted (in part because the stakes weren’t especially high), but it’s clear from the exchanges with Maxwell and White that Updike was learning to hold his ground in editorial disputes. He sent the story off in late June under the title “Walter Palm,” telling Maxwell that Mary found it insubstantial and that it should perhaps be published under a pseudonym. When it became clear that
The New Yorker
was in fact going to accept it, an alarmed Updike explained that Walter Palm was an actual person’s name and that the story was therefore libelous. Updike had once again lifted a character wholesale from life and pinned him to the page—in this case a retired man the Updikes had encountered at the YMCA family camp on Sandy Island the summer they were married. The character is peripheral to the story; the only important things about him are his name and the fact that the young husband and wife at the heart of the story both remember him as a background figure, a passing acquaintance in the first, romantically charged months of their marriage.
Walter Palm was a retiree who spent the entire summer at the camp playing cards and shuffleboard and fishing in Lake Winnipesaukee. He’s described in the story as a fat man with a sly smile, lazy and complacent; although there’s nothing more offensive than that, it’s hardly surprising that Updike would want to change the name. And yet the name is integral to the story, part of an improvised memory game the young couple play on their way back home from Boston in their car: Clare tests her husband, Jack, on his knowledge of the names of the staff and residents of the camp. When she asks for the name of the fat man with the floppy fisherman’s hat, Jack can come up with only the first name, Walter. Later, lying in bed after Clare has fallen asleep, replaying scenes from their honeymoon idyll, the rustic, candlelit cabin at the summer camp, redolent of romance, Jack suddenly remembers—the surname pops into his head. He whispers it to his wife, knowing he won’t wake her, a bittersweet moment that reveals both the fissures in their marriage and his helpless nostalgia for those early days.
