Authors: Adam Begley
Hoping to find a job in advertising, twenty-five-year-old Fred Platt arranges a lunch with his pal Clayton Thomas Clayton, who’s been scooting up the corporate ladder via the publicity department of a giant chemical company. Fred, who is from a rich and distinguished New York family, had helped Clayton get onto the
Quaff
(“Sans
Quaff
,” Fred thinks, “where would Clayton be?”). Now, with a genial sense of entitlement, Fred feels he ought to be offered employment, especially since getting Clayton elected to the magazine had been an awkward task. A scholarship student from a provincial public high school, Clayton had turned up as a freshman at the
Quaff
Candidates’ Night with an armful of framed cartoons (exactly as Updike had). The tweedy set dismissed him as “wonky” and “right out of the funny papers”; they thought it “pathetic” that his drawings were framed; they sneered at his “cocoa-colored slacks and sport shirts.” But Fred, recognizing that the nervous kid with the ridiculous name had talent (“The point was he could draw”), sensing that he could be helpful to the magazine, and wishing also to be kind, insisted that Clayton Thomas Clayton be elected. And it seemed at first a fine thing: “His
Quaff
career had been all success, all adaptation and good sense, so that in his senior year Clayton was president, and everybody said he alone was keeping silly old
Quaff
alive.” (Thus far, Clayton is Updike’s double, step for step.) Later, with the benefit of hindsight, Fred saw that instead of keeping the
Quaff
alive, Clayton had caused “the club, with its delicate ethic of frivolity,” to wither: “The right sort had stopped showing up.”
By the “right sort,” Fred means people like him—elegant, privileged sophisticates. Clayton, by contrast, is all vulgar business. He says things like “People are always slamming advertising, but I’ve found it’s a pretty damn essential thing in our economy.” We’re told that Clayton loves work; Fred thinks it’s all Clayton knows how to do: “His type saw competition as the spine of the universe.” Here, too, Clayton resembles Updike: in the words of his Lampoon friend Michael Arlen, “John was always a striver. He took pleasure and satisfaction from being a striver. He could outwork anyone.” But Updike and Clayton differ in that Clayton, who has neither charm nor wit, is still (three years out of college) stubbornly gauche; and he still seethes with resentment against the “tin gods” who snubbed him at college.
Who did Updike think was the “right sort”? Did he favor feckless Fred, the upper-class dilettante, or industrious Clayton, the middle-class go-getter? On the whole, Clayton comes off worse, but only because Updike plays on the reader’s own snobbery by making Fred charming and Clayton crass. Though Fred gets the last word, his triumph is hollow. Frustrated in his quest for a job, having decided that Clayton is “helplessly offensive,” Fred mocks him when they’re saying good-bye—gratuitous cruelty that leaves a sour taste. Updike’s evenhanded treatment of the whole encounter suggests that by 1956 he had achieved a detached and mature understanding of the Lampoon social dynamic. But that doesn’t mean he had found it easy to be a Clayton-like character in the midst of the tin god contingent. In his sophomore year a campus rumor circulated about a drunken dinner at the Castle punctuated by an outburst from a bleary Updike who climbed onto the table to denounce his fellow Poonsters as goddamn shitty snobs. Years later he described himself as an angry young man during his college career, but if so, there’s no indication that he acted on his anger; more likely, he looked back and thought he
ought
to have been angry.
I
NNOCENTLY OBLIVIOUS TO
these pressures and resentments, Updike’s parents were thrilled by his success at the Lampoon—“one of the most exclusive of all exclusive societies,” as Linda called it. She added, in oracle mode: “Once in a while, perusing the dictionary, I meet Icarus and remember that certain very real and special dangers are prepared for all men who leave the muddy routine that seems to be the usual lot of God’s creatures. And yet a moment free in the air is probably worth a lifetime in the mud.” Whenever a new issue of the magazine was in the offing, her letters were full of proud anticipation. And soon enough his parents had other reasons to be pleased. Though his grades weren’t at first uniformly excellent (Latin dragged down his freshman year average), and though he claimed to have “peaked” as a scholar in his junior year, his academic record was remarkable enough for him qualify as one of Phi Beta Kappa’s “Junior Eight,” which meant that he was among the top ten scholars in a class of more than a thousand. He eventually graduated summa cum laude—a fitting tribute to his intelligence and diligence.
Because most of his courses were in literature, the bulk of his work consisted of reading. It was during these four years—a period when the Harvard English department was particularly strong—that he laid the groundwork for what became, in time, a monumental erudition. In his memoirs, he recalled a moment of special happiness on the day he attended the introductory meeting of Hyder Rollins’s course in late Romantic poetry:
As I settled into the first lecture, in my one-armed chair, my heart was beating like that of a boy with a pocket of heavy nickels as he walks through the door . . . of a candy shop. It would be bliss . . . I thought, to go on forever like this, filling in one’s ignorance of English literature slot by slot, poet by poet, under the guidance of tenured wizards, in classrooms dating from the colonial era, while the down-drooping golden-leaved elm branches shivered in the sunlight outside in the Yard.
Chief among the tenured wizards was Harry Levin, whose lectures on Shakespeare, “delivered with a slightly tremulous elegance” to a capacity crowd in Emerson Hall, stressed the idea of “dominant metaphor.” To Updike, Levin’s resolutely textual approach, orthodox New Criticism with the emphasis on explication, was a revelation: “That a literary work could have a double life, in its imagery as well as its plot and characters, had not occurred to me.” It’s a lesson he never forgot, and one he put to use even in his earliest fiction, where patterns of imagery and metaphor complement and complicate the narrative. Even if the subject and tone of his first stories (“Friends from Philadelphia,” say, or “Ace in the Hole,” which he wrote in the fall of his senior year) are decidedly nonliterary, they were designed to repay with interest the kind of close textual analysis favored by Levin.
Though he concentrated on the poetry of the English Renaissance, Updike also took courses on Anglo-Saxon poetry, on the metaphysical poets, on Spenser and Milton, on Samuel Johnson and his times (a celebrated course taught by Walter Jackson Bate), on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and on George Bernard Shaw. He enrolled in a series of writing courses. In sophomore year he was taught by a “staid, tweedy” poet and Chaucer scholar named Theodore Morrison, who favored modern masters, read aloud from Hemingway, and allowed Updike to submit chapters of a novel. The next year, there was Kenneth Kempton (“the least tweedy of writing instructors”), who read aloud to his class the J. D. Salinger stories then appearing in
The New Yorker
, another revelation for Updike. Listening with rapt attention, he discovered fresh possibilities for the short story, among them the idea that religious concerns could be smuggled into an urban setting populated by young people not unlike him. “It’s in Salinger,” he later acknowledged, “that I first heard . . . the tone that spoke to my condition.” He was especially wowed by “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” which taught him that a “good story could be ambiguous, the better to contain the ambiguity of the world”—a notion he put to work in a number of early stories (including “Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”). In his senior year, his writing course was taught by Albert Guérard (“the very model of a cigarette-addicted Gallic intellectual”), who turned Updike away when he first applied as a sophomore but now recognized his talent—and even urged him to send a story to
The New Yorker
. (Though it was rejected at the time, a year later Updike submitted a lightly revised version, which was accepted.)
Little by little he was rethinking his ambitions, largely because he now recognized that he was a better writer than a cartoonist. The novel he was writing in installments for Morrison’s class, three thousand words every two weeks, was called
Willow
; it was set in a small town not unlike Shillington.
*
In a letter to his parents, Kit grumbled about John’s easy schedule—“None of his courses seem to demand any work. And all he does is write his novel.” The next letter provided detail, delivered in Lasch’s typically wry tone: “Updike keeps plowing ahead on his novel. He has written about ninety pages. Some of it is very good. The book . . . is about high school. He is well qualified to write that book.” Updike disagreed with that last judgment. Although Morrison was kind and encouraging (as well as shrewd), his encouragement wasn’t enough to prevent Updike from abandoning
Willow
. Years later he described it as “a kind of younger
Couples
” (a gang of teenagers’ tangled love affairs) and “terribly amateurish.”
By the time he graduated, he later estimated, he was “eighty-five percent bent upon becoming a writer.” His Smith Corona had displaced Bristol board. Perhaps he would have been a hundred percent committed to the writing life had he earned a spot in the most prestigious Harvard creative writing course, Archibald MacLeish’s English S, a yearlong seminar limited to twelve students. Updike twice applied and was twice rejected, a rare setback in an otherwise monotonously triumphant career.
*
In small part because he hadn’t entirely given up the idea of making his living as a cartoonist, he enrolled in the spring of his sophomore year in a drawing class taught by Hyman Bloom, an Abstract Expressionist painter whose reputation was just reaching its peak. Updike later remarked that Bloom’s ultralight pedagogical touch (“his utterances were few, he muttered when he emitted them, and he moved about the classroom on shoes notable for the thickness and the silence of their soles”) taught him that “art was a job you did on your own.” Actually, Updike’s other, rather more pressing reason for enrolling in Bloom’s Advanced Composition was precisely to avoid being on his own: he was pursuing Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major he’d met the previous semester—pursuing her successfully, as it turned out. John and Mary were married a year later, and for the next two decades, art was a job he did in the thick of the large and lively family they started together.
They met in Frederick B. Deknatel’s course on medieval sculpture in the fall of 1951, and got to know each other smoking cigarettes after class on the steps of the Fogg Museum, where the art history classes were held, and then over coffee. They collaborated on a term paper, and when Mary failed to appear for the final exam, Updike heard to his dismay that she was in the hospital. He rushed to Mass General, where he discovered that she was suffering from a platelet deficiency and would be released in a week; in the meantime, he visited her every afternoon. Lasch found this behavior worrying and told his parents that Updike was “losing sight of his initial purpose in being here”—but when Kit finally met the “lady love,” he conceded that she was “a charming girl.” John didn’t mention his new girlfriend to his mother until mid-December, and when he did, Linda was uncharacteristically silent on the subject. At the beginning of February she passed a tight-lipped judgment: “She sounds alright to me”; he escorted Mary to the Lowell House Dance at the end of that month, and a week later felt free to tell Linda how happy Mary made him. In April, hoping to slow things down, his mother expressed tentative misgivings, but John fought back, and in May he invited his girl home to Plowville for a June visit, after exams. By November there was open talk of marriage; and in early January 1953, Mary’s parents gave a small party to celebrate the engagement. The marriage took place five months later, in Cambridge.
That Linda didn’t disapprove, that she made no concerted effort to hinder or delay the progress of the courtship, was an unexpected blessing. John’s romance with Nancy Wolf had suffered as a result of his mother’s unwavering opposition. In December of his freshman year, he’d received a letter containing a maternal broadside against Nancy, triggered by Wesley’s report on the girl’s behavior at Shillington High School, where she flaunted tokens of her attachment to the successful Harvard man. “I am no longer amused by her flutterings,” Linda wrote. “I think I know now how much of her energy she uses up in being attractive and how easily her charm will break under pressure. Daddy adds the last straw by saying that ‘she’s got him.’ Be that as it may, don’t ever forget that she ain’t got me and I can sputter just as long as she can flutter.” Against the odds, Nancy was still part of the picture when John came home for Christmas vacation. But in February, with his second semester of college under way, Linda’s sputterings finally achieved the desired effect: John broke it off. Until Mary Pennington materialized in the fall of sophomore year, he led a monkish existence of hard work and conspicuous celibacy. And then suddenly he was eager to marry. The prospect of sealing his escape from Linda surely spurred him on.
When Kit visited Plowville during spring break of sophomore year, he found “an air of slight unrest in the house,” which he attributed to the poor health of John’s grandparents—and to John’s budding romance with Mary. “I cannot say how much this has upset the balance,” Kit wrote to his parents, “but I had foreseen that, if nothing else, Updike’s interest in home would be greatly diminished by it.”
In an early, unpublished version of “Homage to Paul Klee; or a Game of Botticelli,”
*
another short story Updike set at Harvard, the protagonist, a wide-eyed innocent named Isaac, observes the coeds from “the neighboring young ladies’ college” as they traverse the diagonal paths of the Yard, and comes to a decision: “Isaac wanted one, he was desperate to have one. . . . But who was he? An ignoramus; an inlander. Nevertheless, he would get one.” By the end of his freshman year, Isaac (like Updike) begins to feel at home on campus; seeing himself objectively, “he ticked off his baggy-elbowed tweed coat, his unpressed suntans, his button-down shirt, his striped tie, his groping-for-exactitude self-deprecatory stammer, his nicotine-scalded fingers; and realized he belonged here.” Next term, emboldened and relaxed by his sense of belonging, he meets Martha in a medieval art course and woos her—grabbing her attention and making her laugh with a succession of pratfalls. (Updike told
Time
magazine that he pulled similar stunts with Mary: “I courted her essentially by falling down the stairs of the Fogg Museum several times.” According to Mary, the pratfalls were staged on the Widener steps—a better venue for a breakneck wife-wooing.)