Updike (31 page)

Though hesitant (hedged by that tentative “I suppose”), David’s formulation is straightforward, a prescription for troubled times: when in crisis or assailed by doubt, cleave to well-established social rituals, follow the rules. David’s mother tells him that his father, a stalwart of the local Lutheran church, has lost his faith; she adds that he “never was much one for faith. . . . He was strictly a works man.” When David affirms that we need ceremonies, he’s aligning himself with his father; but Updike allows room for a more equivocal reading of the cautionary advice that caps the story. So abrupt is David’s metamorphosis from incipient adulterer to straitlaced champion of family values that one wonders whether his flight from temptation will do any good. Is it really ceremonies we need? Perhaps, as the narrator of “Blessed Man” would say, we should take it on faith. Or perhaps it’s faith itself we in America need. That we need
something
can’t be denied; the need is woven into the fabric of this story and its predecessor, both written, as Updike acknowledged, “under a great pressure of sadness.”

W
ESLEY
U
PDIKE’S MEDICAL
emergency—in the story, he’s given an apt and poetically suggestive diagnosis: an enlarged heart—was a shock to his son. The ripple of alarm that prompted Updike to make his marathon road trip inspired not only the central incident in “Packed Dirt” but also the novel begun just weeks later. Though he claimed to have conceived of
Rabbit, Run
and
The Centaur
at the same time (as “a biune study of complementary moral types: the rabbit and the horse, the zigzagging creature of impulse and the plodding beast of stoic duty”), the profoundly affecting portrait of George Caldwell in the new novel was clearly informed by more recent concerns. “The main motive force behind
The Centaur
,” he told an interviewer, was “some wish to make a record of my father”—Wesley’s hospitalization and the real possibility of his death made the need for such a record seem suddenly urgent.

In
The Centaur
, George Caldwell has convinced himself that he’s dying of cancer (“I’m carrying death in my bowels”), a worry that infects his wife and son (and figures, in the mythical dimension, as Chiron’s intention to sacrifice himself for Prometheus’s sake). His hypochondria has its humorous aspect, but alongside the comedy—Updike thought of the novel as his “gayest” book—there’s an elegiac strain. The gloomiest passage comes in chapter 5, which is simply Caldwell’s obituary as it might have appeared in the local newspaper. In fact George’s Olinger doctor pronounces him cancer-free, good news that does nothing to relieve his comically lugubrious sense of encroaching doom. At the very end, he embraces his fate. In mythic terms, this means giving up his immortality: “Chiron accepted death.” The centaur’s sacrifice earns him a place in the firmament as the constellation Sagittarius. In everyday terms, it means that George Caldwell’s martyrdom continues; the plodding beast will carry on with his duty, teaching school so his clever son, Peter, can make an escape.

Updike was worried about his father’s health and also about his own. A routine medical examination undertaken to secure a life insurance policy revealed that his lungs were “slightly emphysematous,” a condition he regarded as fatal; “young as I was,” he wrote prophetically, “I had death in my lungs.” He renewed his efforts to quit smoking and consulted his own doctor, who pooh-poohed the idea that emphysema might kill him—but did note that he had the spread rib cage of a chronic asthmatic. Updike took to heart this distant glimpse of the grave; echoing
The Centaur
, he wrote, “I was mortal. I carried within me fatal wounds.”

In
Self-Consciousness
, Updike describes this period—during which he produced some of his finest fiction—as a time of “desperation”; he felt smothered by “an oppressive blanket of funk,” a “grayness” he associated with death and decay. In these “gray moments,” he reported, his “spirit could scarcely breathe”; he was in the grip of a chronic low-level spiritual crisis. Seeking a cure, or at least temporary relief, he self-medicated; his idea of how to treat his complaint was nothing like David Kern’s—in fact, it was pretty much the opposite. “[T]o give myself brightness and air,” he wrote, “I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men’s wives.” He battled death with God and romance.

Barth was possibly the less efficacious of the two remedies. A bracingly stringent Calvinist, he did supply Updike with one of the enduring tenets of his personal creed (the idea that God is “Wholly Other”: “We cannot reach Him, only He can reach us”), and he did become, in the sixties, Updike’s favorite theologian (“Ipswich belonged to Barth”)—but as Barth himself insisted, theology cannot protect faith from doubt. For Updike, it was one buttress in a system of reinforcements necessary to sustain belief. Like his father, he found comfort in the sense of
belonging
to a particular congregation. After several unpromising trips to a nearby Lutheran church, Updike joined the First Congregational Church in Ipswich, became an usher, and served conscientiously on church committees. Every week, he shepherded his children to Sunday school, where Mary, though she rarely if ever attended services, accompanied hymns on the battered piano; at night in their bedrooms, he recited prayers with the children. His peace of mind depended on conventional religious observance, regular doses of theology administered by those authors who helped him believe (especially Barth and Kierkegaard), and a dose also of his own, internally generated faith. This last, wavering item required periodic renewal. It began with an act of will; as an adolescent in Plowville, he had made a conscious effort to preserve his faith, a commodity he reluctantly recognized as rare and getting rarer. Surrounded by disbelief more or less politely concealed, he refused to play along—“I decided . . . I
would
believe.” Though he disapproved of pragmatic faith, he was well aware of the utility of his own special brand of piety: “Religion enables us to ignore nothingness,” he wrote, “and get on with the jobs of life.” He explained the tenacity of his faith by pointing to the part played by fear: “The choice seemed to come down to: believe or be frightened and depressed all the time.” On a good day, faith in God gave him confirmation that he
mattered
—“that one’s sense of oneself as being of infinite value is somewhere in the universe answered, that indeed one is of infinite value.” Religion eased his existential terror, allowing him to do his work, and to engage in the various kinds of play that best amused him—among them the hazardous sport of falling for his friends’ wives. He was caught in a vicious circle: he fell in love, and his adulterous passion made him feel alive, but also sparked a religious crisis that renewed his fear of death—so he fell in love some more and read some more theology. Not surprisingly, his wife found that she couldn’t tell, when he exhibited signs of angst, whether he was suffering from religious doubt or romantic torment.

David Kern’s terror strikes at night; he lies next to his sleeping wife, breathing the dust of his grave. Updike’s own version of the crisis could come at any time. Once, while he was in the basement building a dollhouse for Liz, he suddenly felt “that I was hanging on with my fingernails to the side of a cliff.”
*
A gray moment might descend on him during Sunday sports, with the entire couples crowd on hand: “[A]s I waited, on a raw rainy fall day, for the opposing touch-football team to kick off, there would come sailing through the air instead the sullen realization that in a few decades we would all be dead.” If there’s a frenetic, compulsive edge to his engagement with the Ipswich scene—what he himself called his “incessant sociability”—it’s partly because his instinct was to drown out doubts and fears with the clamor of a party. He writes in
Self-Consciousness
,

Egoistic dread faded within the shared life. We celebrated each other’s birthdays and break-ups in a boozy, jaunty muddle of mutually invaded privacies. . . . The weekend get-togethers supplied courage to last the week.

Boozy weekend get-togethers also supplied the chance to clown, to dance, to flirt—to attract attention, amorous and otherwise.

Another way to mask terror was to keep constantly busy. When a friend bought the
Ipswich Chronicle
in early 1961, Updike volunteered “as a favor and a lark” to write reviews of the summer concert series held at Castle Hill, a grand nineteenth-century mansion near Crane Beach. John and Mary had been going to the concerts since their first year in Ipswich; these days, they went with their crowd, the women in their summer dresses, the men in seersucker jackets. Before the music there was a picnic washed down with white wine; during the concert, Updike kept his plastic glass upright between his feet and scribbled notes on his program. He liked the sense that he was surrounded by his friends, and yet in “an elevated position,” the critic poised to pass judgment. His reviews, signed H.H. (his middle initial doubled), were banged out on the typewriter on the Monday morning after the weekend concert and handed in at lunchtime; the
Chronicle
offices were just up the street from his office. He wrote twenty-two of them over the course of five summers. Breezy and brash, they were written, in essence, for his pals—an attenuated form of flirtation.

More time-consuming than the Castle Hill distraction, and more perplexing, was his two-month stint in the classroom. On July 3, 1962, shortly after he sent off the typed manuscript of
The Centaur
, he found himself teaching a creative writing course at the Harvard Summer School. His father had announced his retirement in April, on doctor’s orders, after nearly thirty years at Shillington High. There is of course a big difference between slaving away for decades at a public school and taking charge for eight weeks of an advanced composition class at an Ivy League college, but the irony is nonetheless remarkable: Updike had agreed to the Harvard job nine months earlier, while he was still at work on a novel about the travails of a teacher (the spitting image of his father) who refers to the classroom as the “slaughterhouse” and the “hate-factory,” who thinks teaching is killing him. Money can’t have been a motive. (At this point Updike would have earned more by selling a single story to
The New Yorker
than by teaching a term of summer school.) Perhaps he felt compelled to try his hand at the profession his mother had failed at, the profession his father had both thrived and suffered in—the profession, as
The Centaur
elaborately demonstrates, that allowed the teacher’s son to make his famous escape. He knew it was the kind of invitation he should refuse, but somehow he couldn’t say no to Harvard.

Admission to his class was restricted; he chose his students on the basis of writing samples submitted in advance. Once accepted, they were required to produce, each week, at least a dozen pages of writing, which he marked with conspicuous care. Guided by the example of his father’s dedication, he treated his class with kindness and respect, a conscientious approach that earned the students’ gratitude but demanded a great deal of time and effort. Though he was a rising star in literary circles—just two weeks after the end of the course,
Life
magazine named him one of its “Red Hot Hundred,” leaders of a new generation—and though on the first day he had to turn away a small crowd of eager students who hadn’t been admitted to the class but hoped to be allowed to sit quietly in the back and listen, he declined to act the part of a virtuoso condescending to a roomful of impressionable novices. He was friendly but serious, with flashes of charm and humor; he stuttered, but only a bit. He read his students’ work promptly and handed it back with a typed comment (generally half a page, single-spaced) and scrawled notes in the margins. He remained tactful, even when faced with inferior work. Next to a notably lame passage in one student’s story, he wrote in gentle rebuke, “Your literary energy has failed you here.”

Two of his students, Nicholas Delbanco and Jonathan Penner, went on to have successful literary careers; both became university professors and taught creative writing for decades. Delbanco applied for Updike’s class on a whim; he’d barely heard of the young author. It was the summer between his junior and senior years at Harvard, he was nineteen years old, and he’d wanted to stay in Cambridge only to be near his girlfriend—but Updike, he said, turned him into a novelist: “The first word I wrote for him was the first word of my first novel.” Updike praised his first chapter (“For a beginner, you seem remarkably knowing in the trade of the novelist”), and Delbanco, having finished a second chapter, realized he was hooked. By the time he was twenty, he had a contract with a publisher—the book was the novel he started writing for Updike. Delbanco sat next to Updike in class and watched him doodle while his students read from their work. He remembered with pleasure Updike’s high, braying laugh. “What was unforgettable,” Delbanco said, “was how smart he was.”

Penner recalled the day Updike came in and read with mock gravity a letter from the Tootsie Roll company sent to him because he had mentioned the candy in
Rabbit, Run
. The company thanked him for choosing its product as a representative symbol of American life and begged him to accept as a token of gratitude a six-gross box of Tootsie Rolls. Updike put the letter down and addressed the class: “Such are the benefits of the literary life.”

Toward mid-August, with four classes left to go, Updike admitted to Maxwell that agreeing to the teaching job had been “sort of foolish”; he complained that “after ten short stories I could have Chekhov in my class and give him a B plus.” At the very end of term he told one student that this would be the last class he taught. Dismayed, she asked him why. “I can’t make friends with twelve people all at once again,” he answered. If the letter to Maxwell is falsely modest, and the remark to the student a sweet bit of flattery, the prosaic explanation Updike gave to an interviewer in 1981 sums up his main objection to the profession: “Teaching takes a lot of energy. It uses somehow the very brain cells that you should be writing with.” No arrangement that interfered with his writing was ever going to last.