Updike (53 page)

David, however, was not prolific; he never even matched his grandmother’s
New Yorker
tally. He published seven short stories in the magazine in his father’s lifetime, along with several Talk pieces, all from the late seventies to the mid-eighties. But he could rightly claim to be a
New Yorker
writer, just like his father and his father’s mother. John had founded a dynasty of sorts: three generations published in the magazine, a unique accomplishment. Although sincerely pleased for them—the acceptance of David’s first story was “a soul-stirring event”—he couldn’t always suppress the irrational idea that he was being squeezed. His anxious pangs surfaced as humor; he joked to André Deutsch, who was publishing a British edition of Linda’s first book, that he might as well bring out a collection of David’s stories and “box it with his grandmother’s.”

Feeling crowded was an unwelcome, jarring sensation in the tranquil seclusion of Georgetown, where his domestic life was tailored to give him plenty of space to write. On the whole, the town suited him nicely. He and Martha made little or no effort to find new friends. A manically crammed social calendar had once seemed to him essential; now he preferred it blank. Though he occasionally drove over to see his children when they gathered at Labor-in-Vain Road, his contact with his gang of Ipswich friends was virtually nil. Sunday sports were a thing of the past; so, too, the weekly parties—all that frantic commingling had ground to a halt when he left Mary. His intimate association with the crowd he’d been so close to for so long was abruptly severed. He saw one or two of the men on the golf course, and every other week for poker night, but otherwise he disappeared from view, as if abducted. The couples (nearly all by now divorced, many still living in Ipswich) blamed Martha for his sudden absence. How else to explain the fact that he was living nearby and yet remained entirely out of touch? A few acknowledged that Updike must have acquiesced in the decision to cut off contact, but most heaped the blame squarely on the shoulders of his new wife. His old friends, many of them also his old lovers, decided that she’d snatched him away in a fit of jealousy and possessiveness.

As if to compensate for the loss of the Ipswich gang and the busy Ipswich community life, he turned to New York City, to the less ardent but still satisfying embrace of the literary establishment. Having been elected in 1964 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he was “elevated” in 1976 to the Academy of Arts and Letters, a club within the club, so to speak. There were 250 members of the Institute, only 50 in the Academy, each with his or her own carved Italian walnut chair and a special boutonniere.
*
Soon after marrying Martha, he told a journalist that the writing of the Bech stories, and the kindly welcome they received, had made him more comfortable with the New York literary scene. Election to the Academy had a similar effect. Being honored in this way was of course agreeable, but having accepted the honor, he could have kept his distance. Some members of the Academy rarely set foot in the grand mansion on West 155th Street. Updike, however, plunged into the fray. He signed up, along with Joyce Carol Oates, to serve on one of the numerous prize committees, a duty that entailed heaps of compulsory reading and long meetings not always briskly chaired. In the spring of 1978 he gave a talk at a conference of Soviet and American writers held at the Academy-Institute; a year later he delivered an address on “Hawthorne’s Religious Language.” He became a regular on prize committees and began to chair them himself. He served as secretary of the Academy from 1979 to 1982, and as chancellor from 1987 to 1990—he joked that he ascended to the latter position because he was the only member who could make it to the podium without a walking frame. In the centennial year, 1998, he edited a hefty historical tome called
A Century of Arts & Letters
, to which he contributed a foreword and a chapter. Though he liked to complain about the absurdities of the place and the burdens of his committee work—he and Oates exchanged many an exasperated missive on this topic—the Academy gave him a sense of community and a social life of sorts: members’ dinners and lunches, where tributes to the recently deceased were read out. He and Martha regularly attended the May “Ceremonial,” where in a marquee crowded with three hundred–odd guests they might see friends such as Oates and Kurt Vonnegut and his second wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, and rub shoulders with other luminaries: Aaron Copland, Saul Steinberg, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, Allen Ginsberg, Stephen Sondheim. Although it also provided material, notably “Bech Enters Heaven” (about his election to the Institute) and “Bech Presides” (about the vicissitudes of running an honorary organization composed of cranky, eccentric, and comically competitive geriatrics), Updike’s commitment was at heart disinterested. He believed sincerely, if not quite passionately, in the overarching aim of the Academy, which is to honor artistic achievement.

The gentle, affectionate satire and
à clef
playfulness of the later Bech stories were as much fiction as Updike could wring from the highbrow doings of his fellow academicians. “One of the problems of being a fiction writer,” he remarked nine months into his second marriage, “is that of gathering experience. The need for seclusion, and the respectability that goes with some success, both are very sheltering—they cut you off from painful experience. We all want to avoid painful experience, and yet painful experience is your chief resource as a writer.” In Georgetown, as at the Academy, he was settled and safe—out of harm’s way—and free from the time- and energy-consuming entanglements of the riotously unmonogamous Ipswich lifestyle. But he worried that he was putting too much distance between himself and the sources of his inspiration.

The household he shared with Martha inspired him in many ways, but it wasn’t the best spot to trawl for material, and not just because of the danger of legal assault from Alex Bernhard. Unlike Mary, Martha resisted the idea that successive portraits of her should appear in his work. Several of Updike’s friends reported that she chided him publicly for revealing intimate autobiographical details. Philip Roth, for one, remembered a dinner at the Updikes’ when the conversation somehow came around to that notorious moment in
Self-Consciousness
: the return journey of a ski trip up north, Mary sitting in the front seat of the car, Updike sitting in the back, patiently masturbating his neighbor through her ski pants. According to Roth, “Martha was very upset that John had included the scene in the book. John was boyishly silent while she spoke.” Roth did his best to smooth the waters by quoting Poe: John, he suggested, was indulging “the imp of the perverse”—both in the car and in the memoir. Martha was possibly not mollified.

There was of course no chance that she would succeed in weaning Updike from the habit of lifting situations and characters from his daily life. He made use of her, but with caution; in many of his later novels she appears as the brisk, busy, slightly younger, sometimes impatient and peevish wife number two. There are glimpses of her in Bech’s wife, Bea, especially when the couple are traveling abroad, as in “The Holy Land” and “Macbech,” both written during the Georgetown years. But for the first twenty-odd years of their marriage, anyway, Martha’s fictional disguise, the weave of invented particulars that offered her a measure of privacy, was never as flimsy as Mary’s. The second wife wasn’t exposed the way the first wife was.

Having left Ipswich, he could still revisit it in the manner he so often revisited Plowville and Shillington: with a backward glance. The difference is that he looked back at Ipswich with a more frankly ambivalent brand of nostalgia. Even before he left town, he was lamenting the good old days in ironic fictions that mixed celebration of the past with ominous hints of moral peril. The narrator of “When Everyone Was Pregnant,” written while Updike was still at Labor-in-Vain Road, puts his past on a pedestal; the fifties, he proclaims, were “not only kind but beautiful years.” He’s fascinated with the memory of the swollen bellies of young matrons; a “curl of pubic hair” on the thigh of a woman whose maternity skirt is flipped up by the breeze fills him with a “sickening sensation of love.” The erotic component casts his nostalgia in an unsettling light, so that when he bemoans the passing of a golden era “when everyone was pregnant guiltlessly,” we suspect guilt willy-nilly. Even as he extols the innocence and glamour of bygone days, the reader scans for signs of a darker side—memories, for instance, of the gang’s summer parties, the children “wandering in and out with complaints their mothers brushed away like cigarette smoke.” Or this fondly remembered infidelity: while his wife was in the hospital with varicose veins, he slept in their bed with his lover, who got up in the night to comfort a crying baby, the youngest of his four children. He doesn’t directly acknowledge that there’s anything wrong with this episode, but his jotted notes hint at an uneasy conscience: “Too much love. Too many babies, breathing all over the dark house like searchlights that might switch on.” And what would we see if those searchlights did switch on? Not guiltlessness. Despite the foreshadowing, the punch line of the story comes as a shock: “Our babies accuse us.”

A similarly ambivalent tone complicates post-Ipswich tales such as “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd” and “Getting into the Set.” The first of these is narrated by another self-deluded worshipper of “the best of times”—the days of parties when the young parents’ young children ran around in a flock, “creating their own world underfoot as the liquor and the sunlight soaked in and the sky filled with love.” He wonders why their daughters—girls who observed the tangle of extramarital affairs spawned by well-lubricated carousing, who suffered through the eventual epidemic of divorce—haven’t themselves married, now that they’re in their twenties. They’re hanging around town, conspicuously unattached; just the thought of them dredges up memories of old times. A rueful smile on the face of an ex-lover’s grown daughter sends our narrator spinning into the past: “Lou’s exact same smile on little Annie, and it was like being in love again, when all the world is a hunt and the sight of the woman’s car parked at a gas station or in the Stop & Shop lot makes your Saturday, makes your blood race and your palms go numb, the heart touching base.” The blend of banal suburban detail with bodice-ripper cliché is exactly what you’d expect from someone who would look at these stubbornly single girls and ask, “What are they hanging back for? What are they afraid of?” He’s blind to the irony, his senses overwhelmed by nostalgia for his own adulterous exploits.

“Getting into the Set” features an amped-up version of the impromptu cocktail parties that ritually followed Sunday sports. To an outsider, the clique in town seems exciting and alluring; the lucky few who’ve gained admittance to the in-crowd exude a “ramshackle and reckless yet well-heeled air.” But Updike exposes the ugly reality: the betrayals, the petty violence, the carelessness.

In all these stories, his longing for lost time, for the coziness of a happy circle of intimate friends (“spokes of a wheel”), for the vivifying fervor of illicit lust, is neatly balanced against dismay at the inevitable result: broken homes, neglected children.

Though the Maples saga had come to an end, he continued to track the comings and goings of a collection of young people—children of divorce who bore an unsurprising resemblance to his own progeny.
*
In “Still of Some Use,” a middle-aged divorced man’s familiar guilt is accompanied by a tardy urge to protect his broad-shouldered but “sensitive” teenage son. The boy, modeled on Michael, is upset at having to help clear out the attic of his childhood home after his parents have split up; the unwanted games and toys are to be discarded, consigned to the “universe of loss” explored a decade and a half earlier in “My Children at the Dump.” An identical teenager reappears—or at least his artwork does—in “Learn a Trade,” about a highly successful sculptor, Fegley, who has grown rich selling his art, yet finds the idea of “artsy-crafty stuff” depressing; “He was like a man who, having miraculously survived a shipwreck, wants to warn all others back at the edge of the sea.” He had hoped his four children would become scientists, or anyway do something useful, but every one of them, including his younger son, his only “practical, down-to-earth child,” has drifted into the “limbo of artistic endeavor.” Working with copper wire, pliers, and snippers, the boy has filled the basement with “unsold, unrequested” mobiles, a leafy forest stretching into dark corners.

Fegley blames his ex-wife, herself a painter. He tells her, “You’ve brought these kids up to live in never-never land.” She gently reminds him that he, too, was indulged in the years before his commercial success, that she never urged him to do the practical thing, to abandon sculpture and resign himself to secure, white-collar work; she’d left him free to follow his muse. (One hears an echo of Mary mildly noting that she made no objection when Updike quit his safe, steady job as a Talk writer.) Unwilling to argue the point, Fegley merely says that he was driven in a way their children are not. He was, he reminds her, “desperate” to escape his provincial upbringing; “Our children aren’t desperate,” he says; “they’re just kidding around.”

By the time Michael began making mobiles in the basement at Labor-in-Vain Road, Updike was well aware that all four of his children might easily end up in the “limbo of artistic endeavor.” Liz, after a year at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and a couple of years at Bennington, had enrolled in the Mass General School of Nursing and become a student nurse at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital—but couldn’t commit to the profession and dropped out after six months. There seemed, after this, little chance that any of the young Updikes would “learn a trade.” None—not even David, despite his precocious
New Yorker
success—seemed in a hurry to make a mark; they gave no sign of having inherited their father’s urgent need to outstrip the competition. Compared with the eager young man who rocketed out of Shillington High School with a single aim—a job at the magazine of his dreams—Updike’s children seemed directionless, happy to drift. If they harbored any professional ambition, they disguised it brilliantly. He could be forgiven for thinking that they, too, were “just kidding around.”