Authors: Adam Begley
Meanwhile, the scales have fallen from his eyes. David believes that he was, “among the six couples, the last innocent” (which accounts for the glacial pace of the early stages of his affair with Peggy) and that when his innocence was corrupted, “all our furtive woes and suppressed miseries were free to swarm across the social field.” He now sees signs of adultery and marital dysfunction everywhere. What he had assumed were untroubled friendships were plagued, he belatedly understands, by “frantic . . . emotional storms.” He had thought, for example, that the previous winter his wife had been suffering from a “mysteriously prolonged bout of intestinal flu”; in fact it was a “violent mental crisis” triggered when she broke off her own affair. The closeness of the couples has turned toxic. One friend has a loud and public nervous breakdown and becomes the first of the group to enter psychoanalysis; Peggy and others soon follow. It is all, as Ann says, “a fantastic mess.”
But is it, as David claims, somehow
his
fault? “We need a sacrifice,” he declares. “We’re so full of infection we must bleed.” Because he blames himself, he forces a crisis; as he tells it, “dazed with fear and numb with resolution, I went to Morton Williams and asked him for his wife.” This unconvincing moment of odd, greedy self-sacrifice has the desired result: “Under Morton’s guidance, the four of us became . . . expertly coöperative at obtaining divorces.” Which brings us to the grim, solitary present: David adrift, living “without illusions,” fingering like worry beads memories of friendships that have melted away.
There’s more incident in these few pages than one would expect to find in a half-dozen Updike stories. He tried to cram all of Tarbox into one tale, a project, he later realized, that required the scope of a novel. Though overstuffed, “Couples” is exhilaratingly engaged with the world; after the claustrophobia and solipsism of the abstract-personal mode, it feels like a window thrown open. The story ends, however, on a violently misanthropic note. Living alone, David comes to the conclusion that solitude is man’s natural state. (Having never yet lived on his own, Updike had a somewhat theoretical concept of solitude.) He envisions a constant battle being waged against the existential threat of isolation; deploying an elaborate metaphor, he equates a community of married couples with a “bewitched armaments factory whose workers, in their frenzy to forge armor for themselves, hammer, burn, and lacerate one another.” Updike noted, in a foreword to the limited edition, the “clangor” of the last two paragraphs, and let slip, pointedly, that they were first scrawled on the “blank insides of an eviscerated envelope from the Mental Health Association of the North Shore.” It’s always hard to think of Updike unhinged; his cool professionalism discourages it. The image of his ripping apart an envelope that reminded him of psychiatry and scribbling a furious screed against the self-inflicted wounds of coupledom owes more than a little to romantic stereotype; it seems barely plausible—yet that’s clearly the image he was hoping to plant in the reader’s mind. (The Mental Health Association of the North Shore actually did exist; it occasionally solicited funds to provide counseling for the families of psychiatric patients in state care.)
Its grim ending notwithstanding, “Couples,” like the Olinger stories, celebrates a time and place. The “bucolic pleasures” of Tarbox are fondly recalled, as is the warmhearted camaraderie of friends in the first blush of their acquaintance. David’s affair is also celebrated; as he explains in his foreword, Updike wanted to say “something good” for the “sad magic” of suburban adultery.
That same “sad magic” is the obsessive subject of
Marry Me
, a flawed novel that nevertheless seems to me Updike’s most underrated. Begun in the spring of 1962 and completed two years later, it was not published until 1976, just after the Updikes were divorced, when the Harrington fiasco—which it chronicles in excruciating, barely fictionalized detail—was a fading memory. Updike wrote
Marry Me
, in other words, alongside the sequence of stories consigned to the limbo of the
New Yorker
shadow-bank; in the true chronology of his novels, it follows
The Centaur
and precedes
Of the Farm
; more significantly, he finished it two full years before he began work on
Couples
, the bestselling novel that planted in the public imagination the idea that the adulterous society was territory belonging to him by right of discovery. It’s likely that if
Marry Me
and
Couples
had been published in the order in which they were written, the critical reception and popular appeal of each would have been quite different.
Updike’s circumstances changed markedly during the time he spent writing
Marry Me
. When he began it, age thirty, with a pair of novels, three short story collections, and a slim book of light verse to his credit, he could contemplate his career with a justified sense of satisfaction—but as yet it was his promise rather than his accomplishment that drew the attention of others. He was someone whom older writers were keeping an eye on; he was on the cusp. Mary McCarthy told her
Paris Review
interviewer in the winter of 1961, without feeling the need to preface the remark or identify the subject, “I was talking to someone about John Updike . . .”; she went on to praise
The Poorhouse Fair
and say that
Rabbit, Run
was the most interesting American novel she’d read in quite a long time.
Pigeon Feathers
was published in March 1962 and was a finalist, along with Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
, for the National Book Award. After
The Centaur
was published in February 1963 (a week after the Updikes came home from their exile in Antibes), accolades, prizes, honors, and riches piled up in rapid succession. The novel was widely reviewed, for the most part ecstatically. The usually ferocious Renata Adler, writing in
The New Yorker
, admired its “delicate symmetry and balance”; it seemed to her “a fragile and colorful mobile suspended in slow rotation.” Even critics who expressed irritation at the pretentiousness of the mythological parallels, among them the daily reviewer at
The New York Times
, Orville Prescott, felt compelled to praise the author; “brilliantly talented and versatile” was Prescott’s line.
Time
magazine, though similarly irritated, announced that “Updike finds his way more accurately than almost anyone else now writing to the small touchstones of mind and memory.”
The New York Times Book Review
judged him to be “the most significant young novelist in America.”
The Centaur
went on to win the National Book Award. Just a year later, Updike was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and invited by the State Department to make a goodwill tour of the USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries, part of a cultural exchange program in which John Cheever also participated. In other words, when he finished
Marry Me
, the thirty-two-year-old Updike was all at once a leading American novelist, embraced by both the literary establishment and a significant portion of the reading public. This darling of the literati was also a commercial success; he earned more than fifty thousand dollars in 1963, and for the first time felt the need to hire a tax accountant.
Marry Me
began as a short story, “Warm Wine,” about a tryst in the dunes of a beach in the late spring, two lovers sharing an idyllic moment, their bliss shadowed by the havoc they know their affair will unleash. Updike was a private citizen at the time, writing about a part of his life only he and Joyce knew anything about. Because the affair was still secret, actually
publishing
“Warm Wine” was out of the question. But John was beginning to dream of escaping from his marriage, and the story was an expression of that dream, a silent hymn to an illicit love. By the time he finished
Marry Me
(feeling “wobbly,” he told Maxwell—and convinced his book would never see print), he was a public figure, and the affair with Joyce, well known to his crowd of Ipswich friends, was last year’s gossip. Cruelly tested, the bond between John and Mary had survived, but the terms of the relationship were inevitably altered. Neither one now expected the other to be faithful, yet both expected the marriage to last. John told Maxwell in September 1964 that his wife, unlike her fictional avatar, was “strongly on the scene.” But even a flexible arrangement toughened by time and bitter blows can withstand only so much. Though she had been costarring in her husband’s fiction since 1956,
Marry Me
would have been too brutal an invasion of Mary’s privacy. John didn’t even show her the manuscript; “I was not privy to
Marry Me
,” she said. He claimed to have aesthetic reservations about the novel (he even put quotation marks around the word when discussing it: the “novel”), but prudence and pity must have played a large part in his decision to stow it away in a safe-deposit box at the First National Bank in Ipswich.
The book that spent twelve years under lock and key tells the by now familiar story. This time around, John and Mary figure as Jerry and Ruth Conant, Herbert and Joyce as Richard and Sally Mathias. Though Updike later confessed to “unease about the book’s lack of . . . sociology,” he did give them a specific time and place to inhabit: the seaside suburb of Greenwood, Connecticut, in 1962. The two couples are, alas, the only citizens of Greenwood, or at least the only ones Updike breathes any life into—their friends and neighbors, babysitters and housekeepers are all minimally sketched. The focus is exclusively, obsessively on the four principals, with their small children (three on each side) occasionally intruding. The plot is a seesaw psychodrama; like so many other Updike stand-ins, Jerry is hanging between wife and mistress, unwilling to let go with either hand, and the suspense, such as it is, consists of will-he, won’t-he. One new twist is symmetry in the couples’ adulterous liaisons: Ruth and Richard were also once lovers, a rare fictional component in a novel that otherwise hews closely to the facts.
Another new element is a serious effort to see the events from the wife’s perspective. Updike had made earlier attempts to illustrate the workings of a female mind (most memorably when the drunken Janice accidentally drowns the baby in
Rabbit, Run
), but never before had he engaged as closely and at such length with a lucid, educated, intelligent woman; nearly half of
Marry Me
is told from Ruth’s point of view, an intimate third-person narration that allows us to see her, and the others, as she herself does.
A credible, sympathetic character, Ruth shares Mary’s background and family history (she’s the elder daughter of a civic-minded Unitarian minister), but not necessarily her mind-set; indeed, when Mary finally read
Marry Me
in the mid-seventies, she was dismissive of Updike’s female psychology. Possibly she noticed that Ruth spends a disproportionate amount of her time brooding about her errant husband. A failed cartoonist who now works as an animator making television commercials, Jerry is in many ways less interesting than Ruth (mostly because he’s entirely preoccupied with his romantic longing), yet he dominates the book. His vacillations draw attention, whereas Ruth’s passivity deflects it. The “other woman,” Sally, is beautiful—or so we’re repeatedly told; the words
greedy
,
silly
, and
shrill
stick to her as well. Updike never gives a convincing explanation (other than potent sexual attraction) for Jerry’s infatuation with her. The fact that when we first meet her she’s reading a novel by Alberto Moravia (highbrow Italian literature!) seems a transparent attempt to give her some depth. Her husband, Richard, is bullying, needy, pretentious—a wise guy with a blind eye (literally) and a vulgar streak; he’s a grotesque rather than a fully rounded character. When Richard learns of Jerry and Sally’s affair (by examining the phone bill, of course), Updike brings all four of his characters together for a dramatic showdown at the Mathiases’ house—a replay of the events at the Harringtons’ in October 1962. Relying heavily on dialogue, he presents an agonizing scene that’s harrowing for the characters (and the reader), though leavened by flashes of panicky humor. Richard’s histrionics are both maudlin and amusing, more amusing, even, than Jerry’s frantic witticisms and weaselly evasions.
Complex religious motifs thread themselves through the novel. Jerry, naturally, is a Lutheran who dreads death and reads neo-orthodox theologians (Barth, Berdyaev); Ruth is a Unitarian, a “pale faith” Jerry despises; Sally is a lapsed Catholic, superstitious and susceptible to pangs of guilt; and Richard is an atheist, a devotee of Freud and Dr. Spock.
*
The first chapter, the tryst in the dunes, represents a kind of Edenic, prelapsarian moment, with foreshadowings of the Fall and a sacrament of sorts (the warm wine the lovers drink). The second chapter, “The Wait,” takes place mostly in the limbo of an airport lounge, the modern traveler’s Purgatory. The four-way confrontation at the Mathiases’ house offers a glimpse of existential damnation (“Hell is other people”). And at the very end, Jerry discovers an island paradise, heaven on earth, proof that there was a “dimension” in which he could say to Sally, “
Marry me
”—another sacrament holding out hope of redemption.
Denis de Rougemont hovers over the action like a heavy, dark cloud, never more oppressively than when Jerry spouts theories about his “ideal love” for Sally, “ideal because it can’t be realized.” Jerry also waxes sociological about the state of contemporary marriage: “Maybe our trouble,” he muses, “is that we live in the twilight of the old morality, and there’s just enough to torment us, and not enough to hold us in.” (One is tempted to respond with Ruth’s observation about the economic underpinnings of this particular brand of immorality: “If we all had to sweat for our food we wouldn’t have time for this—this folly. We’re all so spoiled we stink.”) But it’s neither the big ideas nor the complex themes that make the novel worth hauling up from the bottom rungs of Updike’s oeuvre. Its virtues are the familiar ones: keen observation, stylistic brilliance, and painful emotional honesty (in this case, about the turmoil of a disintegrating marriage).