Updike (33 page)

Compounded misery is the keynote of these stories; for the first time in his career, Updike’s writing was unrelentingly dour, drastically short on hope and humor. Instead of celebrating the mundane, he brooded; introspection usurped the place of lively observation—“abstract-personal” was the label he affixed to this mode of writing. Though this somber mood cast its pall for a couple of years, the most intense phase (mid-August to mid-December 1962) was relatively brief. It was characterized by a kind of self-inflicted punishment. The protagonist of “The Stare” is dismayed to find the pain of his breakup receding: “[H]e discovered himself so healed that his wound ached to be reopened.” Reopening the wound is what Updike did in story after story, a masochistic aggravation of the initial trauma. He felt guilty and ashamed and bereft. Still, however unhappy, he was essentially undamaged. He carried on churning out his daily pages, correcting proofs, keeping up his end of a voluminous, chatty, cheerful correspondence. His writing was as fluent as ever; “The Leaves,” a virtuoso display of exquisitely controlled prose, was written “swiftly, unerringly.” He boasted, “No memory of any revision mars my backwards impression of it.” In other words, his torments weren’t such that he ceased to function professionally—and his awareness of that fact triggered further remorse. At the same time, knowing that he had emerged from the ordeal more or less unscathed—and raring to write about it—could only bolster his already sturdy confidence in his career prospects. Decades later, when he wrote in his memoirs about the “distress and emotional violence” of this failed attempt to break out of his marriage, he claimed to feel proud of his bravery: “I had at last ventured into harm’s way. I had not only been daring but had inspired daring in another.” And yet his daring deserted him: “A door had opened, and shut. My timidity and conscience had slammed it shut.” There are many contradictions at work in this passage, not least the jarring juxtaposition of bravado and cowardice, infidelity and conscience. It’s a sad muddle, a classic case of mixed feelings.

Though he had made a mess of things, he was an inherently disciplined and tidy writer. He didn’t bleed onto the page; there was no wailing, no gnashing of teeth. He bottled up his pain, labeled it with scrupulous accuracy, then spooned it out in neatly measured doses. Moreover, he was cheerful by nature. In time, therefore, as he organized domestic disarray into the ornate designs of his “abstract-personal” meditations —“taut and symmetrical” is how he described “Leaves”—he recovered his sense of humor. He also began to examine his circumstances with detached, dispassionate curiosity. Thwarted love, doomed love, love for the unattainable woman became for him a subject of intellectual and artistic inquiry.

Updike had been in Antibes for about a month when he wrote “Avec la Bébé-Sitter,” his first lighthearted look at the “personal situation.” It begins with a swift scene-setting declaration: “Everybody, from their friends in Boston to the stewards on the boat, wondered why Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Harris should suddenly uproot their family of three young children and take them to the South of France in the middle of November.” The answer, of course, is that the trip is the alternative to divorce. But instead of replaying the upheaval of the affair and its sequel in Kenneth’s consciousness as he mopes around his rented villa with its “postcard view” of Antibes, Updike makes comic use of a distancing device: the language barrier between the American couple and their middle-aged French “
bébé-sitter
,” Marie. (The Updikes’ own
bébé-sitter
was named Rosette.) While his wife is visiting the museum in the center of Antibes, Kenneth suggests that Marie give him and the children a French lesson; after some cute exchanges that amuse the kids and establish a degree of complicity between the adults, the children are sent out to play in the garden. The babysitter then asks why the Harris family has come to France. Kenneth’s startling answer, which in English would have been woefully melodramatic, in French seems matter-of-fact, even when accompanied by a sentimental gesture:

He said what he next said in part, no doubt, because it was the truth, but mainly, probably, because he happened to know the words. He put his hand over his heart and told the baby-sitter, “
J’aime une autre femme
.”

His impromptu, hand-on-heart confession soothes him (“He felt the relief, the loss of constriction, of a man who has let in air”), and when Marie asks whether he doesn’t love his wife, he replies, ungrammatically but again truthfully, “
Un petit peu pas
.” To the accidental accuracy of this second confession (he loves his wife a little bit not) he adds an explanation universally understood and accepted: “
Pour les enfants
.” Thanks to this bizarre tête-à-tête, the story ends on a light, cheery note. Though Kenneth still suffers from a “preoccupied heart,” the household now runs smoothly, harmoniously: “They had become a
ménage
.”

Because of the abundance of sensitive and accurate autobiographical detail, “Avec la Bébé-Sitter” had to be consigned to the shadow-bank along with the abstract-personal meditations that preceded it, but it’s clearly a different kind of story, an entertainment with a comic lilt designed to charm the reader. Though there was room in Updike’s own preoccupied heart for only one topic, he could now at last step back, take a breath, and laugh a little at the absurdity of his predicament.

In the new year, Updike’s parents visited Antibes. Though Linda may have guessed at the reason for the family’s sudden transatlantic relocation, the topic wasn’t discussed. When John offered to pay for them to fly over, they were excited and worried in equal measure (“we could turn what should be a happy adventure for you into a grisly business”), but eventually agreed to come. John picked them up at the Nice airport in the little rented Renault the family used to explore the Côte d’Azur. Neither Linda nor Wesley spoke any French, and yet they bravely agreed to stay at La Bastide with the children while John and Mary flew to Rome for few days—a circumstance the Plowville couple also accepted without question. They were rewarded with a stopover in Paris on their homeward journey—a few days of sightseeing and a hotel on the Champs-Elysées, all paid for by their son.

The Roman interlude was mined for a story as soon as Updike was back in Ipswich. “Twin Beds in Rome” is again about the agony of marital collapse, but the tone is wry and teasing, exposing misery to gentle ridicule. His characters, Richard and Joan Maple, were by now familiar figures, with a shared history and established traits, which helped him to maintain a modicum of ironic distance. As Updike put it in the foreword to a collection of Maples stories, “people are incorrigibly themselves”; Richard Maple had developed an identity subtly separate from Updike’s—Richard is a touch coarser, his failings minutely amplified—and the author could contemplate his character’s quandary with a healthy degree of detachment. He later claimed, “Richard and Joan Maple had become so much characters that I lost track of where they were made up.”

After their first appearance in “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the Maples faded from view, reappearing six years later, when Updike wrote “Giving Blood” in March 1962. Having moved to a small town north of Boston, and having acquired four children of the same age and gender as the Updike children, the Maples find their marriage now visibly under threat, partly because of Richard’s infatuation with another woman and partly because his “strategy” is to encourage Joan to find a love interest of her own. Quarreling bitterly all the way (the squabble provoked by Richard’s complaints about how hard he works to support the family), they drive to Boston to give blood—a relative of Joan’s is scheduled for an operation for which multiple transfusions will be required. (As usual, this is based on a real-life incident, though in fact the blood was intended for an elderly Ipswich friend, not a relative.) Squeamish Richard has never given blood before, and he nervously seeks comfort from the helplessly maternal Joan. Their shared sacrifice begins to reknit the frayed marital bond. Richard imagines his blood merging with Joan’s; as they leave the hospital, he whispers to her, “Hey, I love you. Love, love
love
you.” Over lunch at a pancake house on Route 128, Richard promises “never never to do the Twist, the cha-cha or the schottische with Marlene Brossman,” the married object of his infatuation. Joan replies, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care.” The deliciously clever ending reverts to the initial quarrel. Richard offers with mock gallantry to pay for lunch; opening his wallet, he discovers that he has only a dollar on him and begins to rant again about “working like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats.” Joan says, with a prophet’s vatic calm, “We’ll both pay.”

With “Twin Beds in Rome,” things have gotten much worse: “Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die.” Conjugal habit and mutual dependency keep them together despite their “burning” desire to split up. All this unhappiness might have made for a miserable visit to the Eternal City, but except for John’s psychosomatic complaints (his feet hurt, his stomach hurt), the Updikes enjoyed themselves. In the story, Richard’s sufferings are comically exaggerated, first the foot torture (“In the soft, damp air of Roman winter, his shoes seemed to have developed hot inward convexities that gnashed his flesh at every stride”), then the abdominal ache (“The pain, having expanded into every corner of the chamber beneath his ribs, had armed itself with a knife and now began to slash the walls in hope of escape”). The shoes that pinch, the pain that seeks to “escape”—the symptoms suit a man who feels trapped; he frankly admits that the stomach ailment is a “nervous” condition. Why is he so neurotically eager to get out? There’s no mention of another woman. The focus is entirely on the Maples themselves, on Richard’s deep-seated ambivalence (his desire to leave his wife and concomitant reluctance to do so) and Joan’s mysterious self-shielding emotional remove. They have come to Rome to “kill or cure”; the story teeters back and forth with the marriage—will it last or not?

The extraordinary thing is that Updike, when he wrote it, had no idea. He sent the story to Maxwell a week or so after his return from Antibes. The plan had been to stay in France until the spring, but the weather was damp and chilly, and there was no social life at all. Two-year-old Miranda wasn’t well, and her parents were having difficulty communicating with the French doctors, so they seized on this excuse to cut short their stay. When they flew home in late January, John was still mired in gloom. He was not yet “over” Joyce, according to Mary, but “lost interest over the next six months, gradually.” Herbert Harrington registered no objection to the premature curtailment of the Updike exile. When the two couples met in the months after the Updikes’ return, it was usually in a crowd of friends. Though the greetings were polite all around, John apparently found these accidental reunions painful; he circled back in his fiction again and again to the scene where ex-lovers meet at a party and endure fresh agony. Eventually the Harringtons moved out of Ipswich, to nearby Manchester. They spent a year in Greece. Not quite out of sight, they were only intermittently out of mind.

The afterimage of the unattainable beloved lingered on, as desirable as ever in her absence. Two weeks after finishing “Twin Beds in Rome,” Updike sent Maxwell “Four Sides of One Story,” in which he poured the tragic tale of John and Mary and Herbert and Joyce into the ready-made vessel of the Tristan and Iseult legend. Following in the footsteps of many a twelfth-century troubadour, he took bold liberties with the Tristan material. He cast himself as a mock-heroic Tristan aboard a luxurious Italian steamship “heading Heaven knows where,” self-banished from his impossible love; Joyce as an Iseult the Fair “distracted” by grief over her lover’s departure; Mary as a long-suffering Iseult of the White Hands, the wronged wife; and Herbert as a bullying King Mark taking practical measures to keep hold of his adulterous queen, measures that include sending her to a psychoanalyst, mobilizing his lawyer, and scaring off Tristan by insisting that if he loves Iseult, he must he marry her. Though there are passing references to the magic potion that bewitched the lovers, to the dragon of Whitehaven slain by Tristan, to King Mark’s drafty castle, this epistolary version of the courtly romance is in spirit absolutely up-to-date, a medieval tale told in letters postmarked 1963.

Channeling Tristan and Iseult, archetypes of illicit passion, was another one of Updike’s distancing devices. Tristan, writing to his beloved from the comfort of a well-appointed ocean liner, issues a long, torturous lament. Desperate and histrionic (“I am bleeding to death”), he’s also blatantly, comically self-absorbed, intent on his own pain and aware of the pain of others only when he makes a conscious effort to consider it. Knowing this (“I had never, in my heart,” he tells his lover, “taken your suffering as seriously as my own”), he twists himself into logical knots to justify his egotism. Cerebral in the midst of passion, he acknowledges the possibility that what he wishes to “possess forever” is not Iseult’s presence but her “good opinion.” He explains that marriage is the enemy of love: “We are in love,” he tells Iseult. “The only way out of it is marriage, or some sufficiently pungent piece of overexposure equivalent to marriage”—cohabitation, in his view, would extinguish their passion. His love thrives on separation: the greater the distance from his beloved, the better. Self-imposed banishment is an expression of his purest devotion. (Skeptics might argue that he’s simply a coward putting a fancy spin on a bad case of cold feet. As Mark puts it, “Confronted with the actuality of marriage, the young man bolted.”)

Despite tantalizing autobiographical echoes, “Four Sides of One Story” isn’t particularly compelling. The courtly love conceit is ingenious but limiting, the characters diminished rather than enhanced by their role in a medieval tragedy reconfigured as contemporary farce. The story is burdened, moreover, with a surplus of incompletely digested theory about romantic love—theory gleaned from Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont’s wildly ambitious
Love in the Western World
, a book famous at midcentury (and now nearly forgotten) that exerted a strong and enduring influence on Updike.