Updike (10 page)

According to one Lampoon colleague, the magazine’s chronic shortage of material could be blamed on the feckless high spirits of the majority of the Poonsters:

The main problem with the gag sessions was that most of the members . . . didn’t really give much of a damn about the quality of the material that went into the magazine. But then it was a very old tradition of the
Lampoon
that a serenely blasé attitude toward the subscribers, as well as to the public at large, was the only possibly correct attitude. . . . What [most members] honestly wanted to do when they came to the building, to put it very simply, was just horse around and have a good time. As a result of this, the gag sessions in the Sanctum, during which we were all supposed to submit our ideas for the approval of the board, always deteriorated very quickly into scenes of hilarity out of which, more often than not, nothing whatsoever that could actually be used in the magazine emerged.

With his “romantic weakness for gags”—inherited from his father, along with his talent for pratfalls—Updike was a willing participant in the Lampoon’s elaborately orchestrated “social frivolity.” During his Fools’ Week in February 1951, he starred in a stunt he remembered with what seems today somewhat misplaced pride; he called it his “one successful impersonation.” Disguised as a blind cripple selling pencils, he stationed himself in front of Widener Library; a couple of his fellow fools, dressed as priests, bought some pencils and then began to argue with him, claiming to have been shortchanged. The quarrel drew a crowd—whereupon the two “priests” pulled large codfish from under their cassocks and pelted him, in his blind cripple disguise, with the day’s catch.

He was happy to play the clown, but not necessarily at ease. Months after his election and the high jinks of Fools’ Week—and despite a rapid start as a contributor to the magazine—he remained anxious about his status. Charles Bracelen Flood, a senior who was ibis (vice president) of the Lampoon during Updike’s freshman year, and who’d recently been given a contract by Houghton Mifflin to publish a novel he was writing in Archibald MacLeish’s creative writing seminar, remembered his surprise at having to bolster Updike’s confidence with a verbal pat on the back:

At the end of one of the last-of-the-spring-term informal dinners, John asked if he could speak to me. The two of us stood by ourselves just inside the Lampoon’s side door on Bow Street, and he began to talk. I think he wanted reassurance that he fitted in, and I was able to provide that. I assured him that everyone liked him, and I think I added that we all thought that he had a lot of ability. He nodded and seemed satisfied with our brief conversation, and we parted.

Updike’s steady march up the masthead could only have been encouraging. He was elected narthex at the end of freshman year; ibis the next year; and finally, at the end of junior year, president.
*
According to Ted Gleason, who was in the class behind Updike, “John did everything, absolutely everything for the
Lampoon
: wrote, drew, ran the entire effort. . . . The
Lampoon
was Updike.” When Gleason joined in the spring of 1952, Updike happened to be “curator” of Fools’ Week, which meant he was responsible for devising the stunts Gleason and the rest of the fools would be required to perform. One fool had to measure Harvard Square with a codfish at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. (Cod seem to figure prominently in the repertory of Lampoon pranks.) Gleason and two others were told to go to the Boston Garden, where Barnum and Bailey’s circus was performing, acquire twenty pounds of elephant dung, and ride back to Harvard Square on the T with the dung wrapped in a baby’s blanket, cradling this odorous infant in their arms and feeding it from a bottle. The entire group was made to hire a horse and wagon and drive down Massachusetts Avenue (dressed in ridiculous fool costumes), dispensing grapefruit juice and vodka from a trash barrel. And, most ambitiously, Updike dreamed up an absurdist spectacle (not unlike the drama of the blind cripple and the priests) that drew a large and appreciative lunchtime crowd to a street adjacent to the Yard: a fool disguised as an old man driving an ancient jalopy was hit from behind by a car packed with fellow fools; the old man jumped out and swore at the others in Italian, whereupon they poured from their car carrying sledgehammers and crowbars and proceeded to utterly demolish the jalopy—then drove off lickety-split, leaving the ruined vehicle in the road.

In addition to the pranks and the motley parades, there were parties held in the Castle, in the upstairs room known as the Great Hall, dances complete with Radcliffe girls and even, on one occasion, the music of a three-piece combo. Among the more impressive Lampoon members was the multitalented Fred Gwynne, later famous on television as Herman Munster, patriarch of the Munster household, who was a class ahead of Updike. Doug Bunce, a curious character, also multitalented and often in trouble with the university, actually took up residence in the Castle. An outsider, like Updike, Bunce burrowed deep into the Lampoon and became a de facto insider.
*
Even more remarkable was Updike’s classmate Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, son of the hereditary imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, who roomed sophomore year in Eliot House with Paul Matisse and Stephen Joyce. According to Harvard legend, this constellation of roommates prompted the master of Eliot to brag, “Where else would you find, in one room, the grandson of Matisse, the grandson of Joyce, and the great-great-great-great-grandson of God?” Updike made use of Sadri Kahn’s fabulously exotic background in a flimsy short story set at Harvard, “God Speaks,” about Gish Imra of Nuristan, a fabulously wealthy undergraduate princeling, putatively divine, who drives around Cambridge in a red MG. Gish plays tennis with the narrator (who learned his tennis on “pitted public courts in Pennsylvania”), and they strike up a brief, casual friendship. Updike took these flashes of eccentric Lampoon glamour in stride, knowing that he himself was in a sense exotic; he learned to bask in the pleasure of club solidarity, and even acquired a brace of nicknames (Upchurch and Upsurge), a reassuring sign of acceptance.

Over the course of his four years, he supplied the magazine with seven cover illustrations, more than a hundred cartoons and drawings, sixty poems, and twenty-five prose pieces—a prodigious output from someone as serious as Updike was about his studies. His mature judgment on this body of work was not entirely flattering and curiously skewed: “[T]he drawings now give me pleasure to contemplate,” he wrote in 1984, “the prose pieces pain, and the poems a guarded sensation in between.” He was in fact a moderately skilled cartoonist with some funny ideas and what looks like the beginning of a personal style, but it would be hard to argue for genius in the artwork he did for the
Lampoon
. He liked Chinese jokes: a birthday party where a table of little Chinese kids are singing “Happy Birthday, Tu Yu” to their little friend; or coolies, unimpressed by a union agitator, saying, “Why
shouldn’t
we work for coolie wages?” He also liked to draw jesters; one of his most charming is a jester in a simmering cauldron (being cooked by absent cannibals, one supposes) who obligingly reaches over his head with a salt shaker to adjust the seasoning. It’s possible that the pleasure he derived in later life from looking at his own drawings was mostly a matter of remembering “the happiness of creation, the rapture of creating something out of nothing.”

But even as he was churning out cartoons to fill the next issue, Updike recognized that other artists on the Lampoon (especially Doug Bunce and Fred Gwynne) were more skilled and sophisticated than he was—“the budding cartoonist in me, exposed to what I thought were superior talents, suffered a blight.” It was, in effect, the first time he encountered serious competition in a creative endeavor.

Updike’s written work is another matter: it shows a rare talent emerging. Of the light verse he published in the magazine, he liked four poems well enough to include them in his first collection.
*
“Mountain Impasse,” written in the spring of his junior year and inspired by a quotation lifted from
Life
magazine (in which Stravinsky imperiously declared, “I despise mountains, they don’t tell me anything”), is wonderfully witty, cleverly constructed, and flawlessly polished, as the first stanza promises:

Stravinsky looks upon the mountain,

The mountain looks on him;

They look (the mountain and Stravinsky)

And both their views are dim.

That summer, he wrote his brief lyric meditation on what he later called “the mythogenetic truth of telephone wires and poles”; it ends with a flash of enchanting poetic imagination, the dip of the wires reconceived as “the flight of a marvelous crow / No one saw: / Each pole, a caw.” That surreal vision—a long leap ahead of even the most skilled undergraduate humor—depends on a gift more precious than verbal ingenuity.

Easily the most ambitious and accomplished of his
Lampoon
stories is “The Peruvian in the Heart of Lake Winnipesaukee,” a broadly comical meditation on identity and self-knowledge. Conventional in structure (a straight first-person narrative), it’s nonetheless fresh and original—there can’t be many other stories about a barefoot South American’s journey of self-discovery at a New Hampshire summer camp, especially not ones that feature body paint, operatic arias, and a stolen canoe. It was included in the issue published in September 1953, for which Updike drew the cover (a chicken with a pince-nez and a Harvard sweatshirt confronted by an egg labeled “Class of ’57” and bearing the instruction “HATCH ME”). The same issue contains numerous line drawings signed JHU and a sample, too, of his light verse: a poem called “The Hypocrite,” about a dandy who wears dirty socks. He was truly a one-man band.

When asked to reflect in later life on his Harvard experience, he often responded with nostalgic riffs about the Lampoon Castle—he’d dredge up memories of gag sessions in the Sanctum, or “the smell of wet old magazines that arose from the cellar,” or the chaotic camaraderie of the Thursday evening dinners served in the Great Hall. He also remembered the lonely bliss of doing cartoon work for the magazine in his narrow, attic-like room on the fifth floor of Lowell House. In an autobiographical essay, he offered a vivid snapshot of himself bent over his Bristol board, “my lower lip sagging in the intensity of my concentration, a cigarette smoking in an ashtray near my eyes. . . . The nervous glee of drawing is such that I sometimes laugh aloud, alone.” He labored tirelessly because he greatly enjoyed the mechanics of what he was doing, both the drawing and the writing; because he loved seeing his work in print; and because his involvement gave him a secure identity around the Yard. But even before he arrived at Harvard, he knew that the Lampoon was an effective stepping-stone, that it would get him noticed in the wider world—which it did.

It was through the Lampoon old boy network that Updike made his first promising connection with the New York publishing world. Edward Streeter, a Lampoon alumnus who graduated in the class of 1914, was a banker who wrote popular novels in his spare time, among them
Father of the Bride
and
Mr. Hobbs’ Vacation
, both of which were made into successful Hollywood movies. Impressed with Updike’s work in the
Lampoon
, Streeter tipped off his good friend Cass Canfield, who was chairman of Harper and Brothers. In April of his senior year, Updike received a letter from Canfield—care of the Lampoon—asking to see some of the young man’s writing (including the piece “about the Peruvian”), and suggesting that he would welcome the submission of a novel about undergraduate life. Updike replied with a long letter explaining that a novel of undergraduate life was “not my meat” (“Somehow, the people I knew in high school still seem much larger and worthier than my friends at college”); he offered instead a description of two different novels he had in mind, one a satire, the other a tragedy. The satire was to be about a woman named Supermama who is perfect in every way—beautiful, brilliant, superbly capable—and therefore insufferable in the eyes of the opposite sex. (It’s not hard to see Linda looming in the background of that one.) The tragedy was to be about a man who’s determined to be pure and virtuous—and therefore sows havoc around him. Updike admitted that perhaps both of these conceptions were “thin.” Canfield made vague, encouraging noises about Updike’s rather unlikely projects, and sagely suggested that he “choose the one which upon reflection shapes up as the best narrative.” The publisher stayed in touch, faithfully reminding Updike of his interest. Persistence pays: Updike eventually promised that Canfield would get first look at anything he wrote for “book publication.” He kept that promise, with the result that in March 1958, his first book, a collection of poems called
The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures
, was published by Harper and Brothers.

His undergraduate writing also attracted the attention of a powerful
New Yorker
editor, Katharine White. Although she made no effort to contact him, she kept an eye out for his submissions. As she wrote in the letter that contained his first-ever
New Yorker
paycheck (fifty-five dollars for “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums”), the quality of Updike’s light verse in the
Lampoon
had given her hope that one day he might become a contributor.

It’s no wonder, then, that once he was a comfortably established man of letters, Updike looked back at the Castle with warm feelings of unclouded affection. His strenuous undergraduate efforts not only smoothed his path to
The New Yorker
but also led to the publication of his first book: Lampy had in effect launched his professional career. But in 1956, when his student days were fresh in his memory, his feelings were mixed at best.
*
Less than two years out of Harvard, not long after he’d started to work at
The New Yorker
, he wrote a story with a Salingeresque title—“Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”—that casts a less flattering light on the Lampoon. The brief reunion of two college friends gives Updike a chance to explore the snobbery and resentment bubbling away beneath the show of camaraderie at the
Quaff
, a clubby campus humor magazine, an obvious stand-in for the
Lampoon
.