Authors: Adam Begley
Did I make at least one good pun?
Was I disconcerting? Disarming?
Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?
The answer, inevitably, was yes—yes, he was fun, and quickly became a ringleader with the self-appointed task of organizing party games. He especially loved variants of Botticelli, in which whoever is “it” assumes a secret identity that the others must guess. Stepping back, we can see that by playing court jester to this group of affable but ordinary suburbanites, Updike was in a sense masking his identity as an artist, as someone whose true allegiance was not to his friends but to his writing. At work, during the hours he spent at his desk, he remained an outsider (a teenager with a special destiny; a hick among sophisticates; a poor boy among the rich; a churchgoer among the faithless). At play, he insinuated himself into the warm heart of things. Being a cherished member of the gang answered a deep need, and in that sense he was being true both to himself and to his friends. In his memoirs, he promotes them to the status of honorary siblings (“The sisters and brothers I had never had”); they certainly made an outsize impact on both his private life and his career. If his parents and grandparents gave him the bulk of his Olinger material, the couples gave him Tarbox. And if his mother’s unwavering love and unconditional approbation fueled his early flight, the collective adoration of the couples sustained him as he soared higher still.
It was important to him that they knew him before he was famous, that the friendship was formed, as he said, “on the basis of what I did in person rather than what I did in print.” The couples embraced him before his first novel was published. As far as they were concerned, the fact that he was a writer was incidental, at least in the first few years—unusual, somewhat intriguing, but otherwise insignificant. Books weren’t of vital importance in this milieu—it was not a literary crowd—and that suited him, up to a point. Happy though he was to segregate his professional and social life, to leave literature behind when he left his desk, he could be fairly certain that his new pals would be aware of what he “did in print.” Almost all of them had been
New Yorker
subscribers before he made their acquaintance, and almost all of them bought copies of
The Carpentered Hen
and
The Poorhouse Fair
as soon as they came out. As the years went by and his reputation grew, and scenes lifted from their lives began to crop up in his fiction, they of course read with sharpened interest. They were his audience, a representative sample of his readership right there on the other side of the volleyball net, demographically ideal. A new issue of
The New Yorker
would arrive in the mail every Friday morning, so that all of them had the opportunity to flip through in search of the latest Updike before the start of the weekend’s entertainments. If he did have a piece in the magazine, however, it would usually go unmentioned; he wasn’t quizzed or congratulated or scolded. There was never any explicit taboo forbidding discussion of his writing, or any incident that warned his friends to refrain from comment, but somehow the topic didn’t come up, at least not in his presence, and reticence eventually became the norm, thereby preserving the illusion that his success as an author was irrelevant—not a factor in the group dynamic.
In the early days, actually, what he did during his solitary working hours—the mornings at the typewriter, the bookish afternoons—had little to do with the couples crowd and little to do with Ipswich. As a writer, up until early 1962, he was very much preoccupied with Berks County (Plowville, Shillington, Reading), both in his stories and in his novels; it’s not too much of a stretch to say that he lived there most mornings. A particularly striking example of his immersion in that beloved Pennsylvania geography is “The Happiest I’ve Been,” which is narrated by John Nordholm, the teenage protagonist of “Friends from Philadelphia” (not only the first story Updike sold to
The New Yorker
but also the first Olinger story and the first story in
The Same Door
, his debut collection). Now a college sophomore, John has been home for Christmas at his parents’ farm and is leaving again, heading to Chicago to see a girl he met in a fine arts course, hitching a ride from his friend Neil. But no sooner are the boys in the car, out of sight of the farm and presumably on their way, than Neil suggests a detour to a New Year’s Eve party in Olinger. (The fictional John is surprised to learn about the party; the real-life John knew all about it—it was the “beautifully non-intellectual brawl” he’d been pining for up in Cambridge.) After the party, they take a further detour into Alton; only at dawn do they finally set off on their long westward journey. The farm, the town, the city—when an adult John Nordholm looks fondly back on the events of that night, Updike is taking us on a pilgrimage to all three of his holy sites.
He began writing “The Happiest I’ve Been” in late January 1958 and sent off a draft to Maxwell on February 7;
The New Yorker
published it eleven months later, in the first issue of 1959. (In those days the magazine had a fetish about running stories so that the fictional events coincided with the date on the calendar, and this one featured a New Year’s Eve party.) A pivotal story in the evolution of his work, it marked both an ending and a beginning. Updike knew as soon as he finished it that it would round out the book of short stories he saw taking shape: placed at the end, it would provide a pleasing unity, with John Nordholm appearing first and last. (Hence the title: the reader goes in and out the same door.) To Elizabeth Lawrence he wrote that, in his mind, the story “clicked the collection shut.”
*
He also claimed to have been tremendously excited by the possibilities it seemed to open up: “While writing it,” he explained, “I had a sensation of breaking through, as if through a thin sheet of restraining glass, to material, to truth, previously locked up.” A breakthrough is more dramatically satisfying than gradual improvement—he’d actually been working with similar material on and off for about five years—but because “The Happiest I’ve Been” is indeed markedly more successful and substantial than the previous Olinger stories (“Friends from Philadelphia” and “The Alligators”), Updike’s account rings true. He had found, in John Nordholm’s tender reminiscence, in his muted, clear-eyed celebration of the mundane, an approach to his subject that was fresh and compelling. “I believed,” he later wrote, “that there was a body of my fellow Americans to whom these modest doings in Pennsylvania would be news.”
The modest doings are imagined with magical intensity. Here’s the moment at the farm when John is saying good-bye:
I embraced my mother and over her shoulder with the camera of my head tried to take a snapshot I could keep of the house, the woods behind it and the sunset behind them, the bench beneath the walnut tree where my grandfather cut apples into skinless bits and fed them to himself, and the ruts the bakery truck had made in the soft lawn that morning.
The detail grows more specific as the sentence progresses (as though the camera were zooming in), and more telling, so that we begin with the generic (house, woods, sunset), steal a glimpse of a meticulous and somewhat selfish old man, and finish with the fresh ruts in the lawn, the objective correlative for the imprint that this “snapshot” has made on John’s memory. The valedictory tone of the passage is sustained throughout the story, even in the midst of hectic comings and goings at the Olinger party. “The party was the party I had been going to all my life,” John tells us—and focuses his mental camera on his fellow revelers, his old high school crowd, his gang. He’s distressed by any hint that they have changed or are changing. They are representative of his childhood; as he puts it, they had “attended my life’s party.” He is at once eager to leave his childhood behind (to fly, as most Updike mothers promised), and to preserve the past intact, to protect and cherish it. The tension between these two impulses supplies the emotional power here, as it does in many of the Olinger stories.
In his 1985 speech on the creative imagination, Updike quoted at length a passage from “The Happiest I’ve Been” about a game of Ping-Pong played in the basement by John, another boy, and two girls, while the party carries on upstairs. Updike drew attention to two fragments of descriptive detail, a glimpse of a girl’s shaved armpit “like a bit of chicken skin” and, on the basement floor near a lawn mower, “empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles”—insignificant, almost microscopic details that provide, in Updike’s Jamesian phrase, an “abrupt purchase on lived life”: in their insignificance and irrefutable authenticity, they acquire, he claimed, “the intensity of proclamation.” But they resonate in other ways as well. While John is playing Ping-Pong, he spies the white cups of the girls’ bras as they lunge forward in their semiformal dresses; after the game, one of the girls leans on John while she slips her heels back on. As Updike later noted, there’s an undercurrent of “blurred sexuality” to this basement scene. Some of John’s friends at the party are still involved in the maudlin romantic crises of late adolescence; a few wear engagement rings; and one awkward couple is already wed. John himself is itching to make his getaway to Chicago, the sooner to see the girl waiting for him (“a girl . . . who, if I asked, would marry me”). In this context, on the threshold of adulthood, a shaved armpit gleaming like chicken skin and triangular puncture holes in empty oil cans seem somewhat less random; they suggest, among other things, innocence lost and time draining away.
This is a story about leaving home, leaving friends behind, leaving childhood behind. Even as a college sophomore, the young man is already jealously hoarding memories; as he contemplates his classmates, he feels “a warm keen dishevelment.” Looking back after the passage of an unspecified number of years, he wallows in sentiment, straining to recapture the unique sensation of an experience consigned to memory. Updike’s task is to convey both the remembered sensation and the emotion (nostalgia’s bittersweet tang) evoked by its passing. At the very end, the mood shifts: driving west across Pennsylvania in the early morning light while Neil snores beside him on the front seat, John is engulfed by a wave of happiness that lifts the story and gives it a quietly triumphant feel.
“The Happiest I’ve Been” tells us nothing about John Nordholm’s adult life; we don’t know why he feels so deeply nostalgic, though the title (nostalgia distilled) invites us to suppose that he’s never been as purely, powerfully happy as he suddenly was that morning driving west. That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s currently
un
happy or regretful. In fact, the exultant note struck at the end of the story is entirely consonant with John Updike’s own enviable situation at the time of writing: the college sophomore who drove with a friend from Plowville to Chicago, who married the fine arts major, who worked hard to become a successful freelance writer, had just bought a house of his own in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and surrounded himself with a brand-new circle of friends, a grown-up gang throwing grown-up parties. Acknowledging the autobiographical basis of the story in his speech on creativity, he told his audience,
In 1958 I was at just the right distance from the night in Shillington, Pennsylvania, when 1952 became 1953; I still remembered and cared, yet was enough distant to get a handle on the memories, to manipulate them into fiction.
What he’s measuring with the phrase “enough distant” is the gap between Ipswich and Shillington, between adulthood and adolescence, between the couples crowd and his old high school gang. Though he spent many a lonely morning getting a handle on Berks County memories, weekends he was living happily in New England, in a perfectly agreeable and abundantly sociable present tense. Any nostalgia of his own, he cultivated for literary purposes only.
His ability to parcel himself out between locations, to live as it were simultaneously in Ipswich and Olinger, is symptomatic of a talent for compartmentalization that he perfected as he grew older. Already, by the time he moved into the Polly Dole House, he had taken up two new pastimes, poker and golf, activities he established as realms separate from both his domestic and his professional life. Other compartments, church and adultery among them, leaked in awkward ways, but poker and golf were reliably watertight.
Because it fitted with a fantasy of what college life might be like, Updike had listed poker (along with chess and cartooning) as one of his “special interests” in the 1950 Harvard
Registrar
; in fact his only high school memory of the game was “a shy try at strip poker in someone’s parents’ attic.” A Harvard classmate, Austin Briggs, first met Updike during a freshman year penny-ante game in Hollis. “He was an utterly striking figure with his lean almost emaciated frame and bird-beak nose,” Briggs recalled. “He was playing big-time gambler more than poker, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and in costume with a green eyeshade and sleeve garters on his shirt.”
*
He might have been tempted to dress up in a similar style when he was invited, on a chilly afternoon in December 1957—nine months after he’d arrived in town—to the first poker night organized by the owner of an Ipswich auto parts store and the local pediatrician. It was an all-male contingent, more socially diverse than the couples crowd. (The town cobbler first took a seat at the table in the late sixties and was still playing forty-odd years later.) They convened every other Wednesday, for low stakes: nickels and dimes until they made the minimum bet a quarter in 1960. Poker night was a raucous event in the early days, drenched in beer and wreathed in smoke. The camaraderie, and the sense of belonging, was for Updike the principal attraction; he confessed, in fact, to being only a mediocre player: “I am careless, neglecting to count cards, preferring to sit there in a pleasant haze of bewilderment and anticipation.” In 2004 he noted that he’d been playing with more or less the same men for nearly half a century, and that in the meantime he’d “changed houses, church denominations, and wives. My publisher has been sold and resold. Only my children command a longer loyalty than this poker group.” Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this durable attachment is that he was far
less
passionate about poker than he was about golf.