Updike (20 page)

The poems he was publishing in
The New Yorker
were mostly delicious froth, ingenious, well-crafted silliness. He’d been writing light verse—he defined it as verse that takes its spark from “the man-made world of information,” from “language and stylized signifiers”—for more than a decade, beginning with his many contributions to
Chatterbox
and the
Lampoon
, but at Harvard and Oxford he’d also written poems in a more serious vein, poems derived, as he put it, “from the real (the given, the substantial) world.” The serious poetry stopped while he was in New York. About half of the fifty-five poems in his first book, the slim, cheerful volume called
The Carpentered Hen
, were written while he was living in the city; all but one of those he classed as light verse
*
—which was what the magazine wanted at the time, though Howard Moss, the poetry editor, never said so explicitly. In the 1950s it was still a relatively common, marketable genre that enjoined a certain amount of prestige. Harper and Brothers, which published
The Carpentered Hen
, also published the work of a number of other
New Yorker
writers, including E. B. White and James Thurber; the house was willing to print a young writer’s collection of verse, but the idea was that more substantial work would be coming along soon.

A couple of months after he started at the magazine, he produced a poem making fun of a flag-waving, chest-beating editorial in
Life
, “Wanted: An American Novel.” The gist of the editorial was that our anguished “hothouse literature” must perk up; instead of agony and gloom, the editorialist asserted, what was needed was more vigorous and manly writing reflecting the power and prosperity of our great nation.
Life
was calling for “a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life.” Updike responded with “An Ode”:

I’m going to write a novel, hey,

I’ll write it as per
Life
:

I’m going to say, “What a splendid day!”

And “How I love my wife!”

The poem, classically divided into strophe and antistrophe (mock pretension that adds an amusing absurdist touch), concludes with a pun silly enough to deflate an army of jingoistic editorialists:

For
Life
is joy and
Time
is gay

And
Fortune
smiles on those

Good books that say, at some length, “Yea,”

And thereby spite the Noes.

The gagster in him could hardly resist the opportunity to indulge in this kind of bright playfulness. Certainly he was going to write a novel (though hardly “as per
Life
”)—in the meantime, his employer encouraged his penchant for “cartooning with words,” and rewarded him for doing so.

Writing for The Talk of the Town, a plum post by any reckoning, and at the same time having his short stories, casuals, and light verse published in the magazine—this was more or less exactly the adult future he’d dreamed of since adolescence, his “sole ambition” ecstatically fulfilled. William Maxwell warned him in a letter just before he reported for duty, “If there is anything to be said against working for
The New Yorker
, it is that it makes the thought of working anywhere else too appalling.” Sure enough, this was Updike’s first and last regular employment—and his only firsthand exposure to the culture of a busy corporate office. His fellow workers, though, were mostly as intent as he on the lonely business of reading and writing, so it was not a particularly sociable environment. The exception was Brendan Gill, a lifelong staffer, “the only gregarious man on the premises,” who regularly scooped up young Updike and led him off with several colleagues—Tony Bailey and Joe Mitchell, say—to the Blue Ribbon, where the waiters were clad in white aprons and the knackwurst was famously succulent, for a bantering midday meal.

The offices at 25 West Forty-Third Street were shabby, and cluttered with stacks of old phone books. The ambience was more like a newspaper than a glossy magazine; “everything,” Updike remembered, “was slightly dusty and funky.” The grimly functional décor and the pervasive hush suited his relentless work ethic, his ability to shut out for hour after hour everything but the task at hand. The newspaper feel was a hangover from the days of Harold Ross (himself an unreconstructed newspaperman), who died in 1951; the hush had more to do with his successor, the notoriously soft-spoken William Shawn. When Updike claimed his desk on the eighteenth floor, four years after Ross’s death, Shawn was very much in charge—indeed, he was essentially the sole arbiter of what went into the magazine, a consolidation of editorial power unknown in Ross’s day. It was Shawn who “handled” Updike’s Talk pieces, and the two quickly established an amicable if distant rapport—distant mostly because Shawn was shy and Updike was in awe.

Nowadays Shawn is nearly as famous for his oddities as for his editorial prowess. The catalogue of his phobias and behavioral tics, the intrigue (especially his decades-long office romance with Lillian Ross, which was meant to be a deep, deep secret and became, with the passage of time, merely the obvious but unmentionable status quo), the passive-aggressive manipulation of colleagues and contributors, the velvet tenacity of his grip on power (Maxwell once observed that in Shawn were combined the best features of Napoleon and St. Francis of Assisi)—it’s all almost enough to make us forget the astonishing success with which he steered the magazine.

After Shawn died in 1992, Updike wrote a tribute for the pages of
The New Yorker
, a curiously equivocal document that ends with the disturbing image of Shawn “pinkly crouched behind his proof-piled desk.” From the very first sentence, in which he remarks on Shawn’s “unfailing courtesy and rather determined conversational blandness,” Updike’s praise is undercut by less flattering observations. All told, the image conveyed is of a quiet, shy, morbidly polite, deceptively passive character with a peculiar and powerful intelligence, a magician who weekly managed heroic editorial feats “without moving a muscle.” An admiring portrait, perhaps, but not an affectionate one. Eight years later, after the publication of a spate of books about Shawn’s tenure at the magazine, Updike restated his views, adding richer praise and darker hints of censure:

His sense of honor, his sometimes venturesome taste, his wish to make every issue a thing of beauty permeated the magazine; if he did . . . stay at the helm too long, and did employ deception in his personal and editorial life, he remains, for me, a model of acumen and kindness, with something truly otherworldly in his dedication to exalted, disinterested standards within the easily sullied, and increasingly crass, world of the printed word.

Updike’s private feelings about Shawn were more sharply ambivalent, but in his public utterances he remained loyally deferential to the man who had done so much to determine his literary fate.

That public loyalty was richly earned. Shawn recognized right away the value Updike’s work, and foresaw that this particular “dazzled farm-boy” would quickly become a key contributor. When in the summer of 1961 Updike volunteered to begin writing book reviews, Shawn agreed immediately; later that same year, Shawn approached him about becoming the magazine’s television critic. Updike sensibly declined on the grounds that, in Ipswich, he couldn’t watch any of the local channels available in the metropolitan area; he admitted, however, that he was tempted by the security of a critic’s regular salary. Though Shawn occasionally made known (through White or Maxwell) his appreciation of Updike’s fiction, he was more likely to praise the nonfiction. For example, along with the check sent to Updike for his celebrated Our Far-Flung Correspondents piece about Ted Williams’s last at-bat, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” was a note from Shawn expressing, in so many words, his “gratitude and admiration.” There’s no record of his opinion of Updike’s verse, but we can deduce that he approved from the sheer number of poems accepted by the magazine over the years. In 1965, when Updike published his first collection of essays,
Assorted Prose
, he dedicated it to William Shawn, an appropriate choice for at least two reasons: a nod from Shawn had allowed about three quarters of the material in the collection to run in his magazine; and it was Shawn (even more, perhaps, than Katharine White) who saw in Updike an all-purpose writer of “assorted prose”—who recognized, in short, a budding man of letters.

However well disposed, Shawn was an enigmatic benefactor, an “ineffable eminence,” a secretive wizard whose verdict (“the message was commonly expressed, ‘Shawn says yes’ or ‘Shawn says no’ ”) was inscrutable and beyond appeal. The maternal Katharine White, who guided Updike with gentle patrician firmness to a settled place in the stable of
New Yorker
writers, and who set a rigorous precedent for all his subsequent editorial dealings, was a friendly, admired mentor. William Maxwell, who began his career as White’s assistant, played an entirely different role from those two Olympian figures. Maxwell was involved in a more intimate way both with Updike’s writing and in his personal life, and became a close, trusted friend; the friendship, abiding and sincere, was a product of a long, unusually fruitful, and nearly frictionless professional collaboration.

When White retired to her husband’s farmhouse in Maine, which she did in stutter steps beginning in 1955, Maxwell took charge of editing Updike’s stories, a duty he embraced like a labor of love and relinquished only when he in turn retired. Because Maxwell (born in 1908) was old enough to be Updike’s father, you might have expected his relationship with the younger man to be paternal or avuncular; and because Maxwell was himself an accomplished novelist (acclaimed by critics and revered by his fans, but never reaching as broad an audience as he would have liked), one might have expected him to present himself as a mentor. In fact, he had a talent for nimbly avoiding the appearance of exerting authority of any kind (which is not to say that he was passive-aggressive like Shawn); his idea of editing was to hover like a good angel over Updike’s shoulder, giving him the occasional nudge.
Caretaker
is the word Updike used to describe him: “He was, in effect, the caretaker of my livelihood”; as usual, it’s exactly the right word. Updike sensed the older man’s “intensity of care and even affection” for the stories they worked on together, and this solicitude made him feel “cherished.” Maxwell was forty-six when they met (twice Updike’s age), and the younger man admired his gentle, serious demeanor, his air of mild urbanity, his soft-spoken reverence for writing. Updike later remarked that on first impression he “conveyed a murmurous, restrained nervous energy and an infallible grace”—Fred Astaire came to mind.

Their friendship—as opposed to their friendly professional dealings—didn’t fully blossom until after Updike moved to Ipswich. In fact, he didn’t even meet Maxwell’s wife and daughters until September 1957, when he stopped by their apartment during a brief stay in the city. A month later, just before Thanksgiving, the Updikes visited the Maxwells at their country house in Yorktown Heights, New York—the first time the two families came together. The visit went well; it was the highlight, Updike claimed, of his family’s Thanksgiving vacation, which included a stop in Greenwich at his aunt Mary’s house and a longer stay in Plowville. From that point on, Updike’s correspondence with Maxwell is warmer, more relaxed and rambling, peppered with jokes, family news, and curious trivia. His editor brought out the best not just in his stories but also in
him
: the letters are affectionate and generous, serious when the topic calls for it, but otherwise lightly playful; they seem genuine, unforced, and unmediated—with Maxwell he clearly no longer felt the need, as he had when they first met, to adopt a pose or strike an attitude. He surely sensed that the older man admired him sincerely and expected great things of him. In fact, when he recommended Updike for a Guggenheim in the fall of 1958, Maxwell told the fellowship committee, “If he doesn’t get the Nobel Prize, it will be the Swedes’ fault, not his.”

In his own fiction, Maxwell returned again and again to his boyhood haunts in Lincoln, Illinois. It’s no surprise, therefore, that unlike Katharine White, he was receptive to Updike’s penchant for nostalgia. Not long after the cheery Thanksgiving visit, during a tête-à-tête lunch at the Century, he encouraged Updike to revisit Shillington in the pages of
The New Yorker
. Updike had been telling him about his school days, remembering an unrequited crush on a sixth-grade girl—whereupon Maxwell said, “That’s a short story.” Updike went home to Ipswich and, in the first week of the new year, wrote it down more or less the way he’d spoken it; the result, “The Alligators” (the first story in which the name Olinger is given to the hero’s hometown), was published in the magazine several weeks later. Maxwell thought the finished product read like one long poem—praise that thrilled Updike and made him itch to write more about his Berks County childhood. That kind of helpful intervention occurred with surprising regularity over the next two decades.

There are of course difficulties involved in having a friend for an editor. “The relationship,” as Updike acknowledged, “is to some extent adversarial.” He admitted to having been vexed by the rejection of certain stories; and when he complained about the “meddlesome perfectionism” of
New Yorker
editors, Maxwell, though unnamed, was one of the guilty parties. Updike knew that Maxwell enjoyed “a good verbal tussle” when he edited a piece, but Updike did, too, so there was never any rupture, nor even lingering annoyance. He recognized that Maxwell, as Mary reminded him, was “part of a machine for getting out a certain kind of magazine”; behind his editorial decisions loomed the omnipotent Shawn and the increasingly ponderous
New Yorker
tradition. Also, Maxwell was preternaturally tactful, and Updike, thanks to his mother, adept at avoiding confrontation. There was never a chance that Maxwell, by nature cautious, would push the young Updike in a daring or different direction. If he ever put a foot wrong, if he ever hampered his writer or sold him on poor advice, there’s no record of it. At the end of their twenty-year collaboration, Maxwell wrote, “Could there have been an easier or happier association I ask myself, who perhaps shouldn’t be the one to do it. But when I look back at the long line of stories that passed between us, I can only smile with pleasure.” For his part, when he stumbled on a trove of old
New Yorker
letters full of his editor’s attentive, affectionate, encouraging advice, Updike waxed ecstatic, remembering with sentimental fondness the delicate ministrations of his “caretaker.”