Authors: Adam Begley
And what if
Marry Me
had found its way into readers’ hands in the mid-sixties instead of the mid-seventies? Had it appeared magically in bookstores on May 4, 1964 (the day he finished it), it would have been his first published account of suburban adultery
*
—in fact, it would have been his first extended treatment of romantic passion. It was only after he had locked the manuscript away—drawing a line, as it were, under the Harrington saga—that he allowed
The New Yorker
to begin printing some of the abstract-personal stories written two years earlier in the throes of his love for Joyce. In 1964 no one would have complained, as Maureen Howard did in
The New York Times Book Review
twelve years later, about Updike’s “obsession with adultery,” and it would never have occurred to Alfred Kazin to identify Updike’s “one big situation” as “the marital tangle.”
Marry Me
would have been seen as a fresh departure for Updike, a daring book with a risqué subject. After the Summer of Love, the trauma of Vietnam and the antiwar protests, and the long national nightmare of Watergate, Jerry’s line about living in the twilight of the old morality could only sound like quaint, cooing nostalgia. In 1964 it would have seemed brave and enlightened for Updike to try to see out of Ruth’s eyes; in 1976, on the far side of feminist consciousness-raising, it was more likely to have been held against him. The marital anguish of the Conants and Mathiases would have made sense to middle-class readers in 1964, before the sharp rise in divorce rates that began in the mid-sixties and continued through the seventies, before “no-fault” divorce made the prospect of ending a marriage less daunting, and stories about it decidedly more banal.
A great novel both illuminates its historical context and transcends it; this one, though brilliant in patches and certainly far more rewarding than its critics acknowledge, is not great. The morning after the big confrontation arranged by Richard, Jerry glances at the newspaper; all the headlines are about standoffs: between black and white (James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi and the deadly riots in Oxford); between China’s Zhou Enlai and the USSR; between the Giants and the Dodgers, tied in a pennant race; and between Kennedy and Khrushchev, caught in a spiral of rising tension over Cuba. In a different kind of novel, Updike might have made telling use of this brief, sweeping glimpse of current events, but here he lets it drop without comment. The news flash fixes the date of the Mathias-Conant showdown (September 30, 1962), and connects it for a fleeting instant with national and global crises—but only to remind us that the drama of marital meltdown has cut off the two couples from the wider world. When Updike called the novel
Marry Me: A Romance
, his idea was to sequester it from history, and he was also thinking nostalgically of the glamour of the early days of the Kennedy administration: Camelot and the elegance of the young couple in the White House. The white-knuckle trauma of the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t figure in
Marry Me
, nor does the simmering violence of the civil rights movement—nor the assassination of the president.
In fact . . . the literary scene is a kind of
Medusa
’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers.
—Updike on Cheever (July 1990)
When shots were fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas on the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963, Mary Updike was in Cambridge, in the office of her psychoanalyst. Her husband was at the dentist having new crowns fitted. There was a dance scheduled that night in Manchester, Massachusetts, a Democratic Party fund-raiser; but the president was dead, and the dance was promptly cancelled. The Updikes had also been invited by a couple in their set, owners of a big house on the edge of town, to a pre-dance dinner party. The hostess was at the hairdresser when she heard the horrible news; after the initial shock wore off, she started worrying about what to do with the ten pounds of fillet of sole she had in her refrigerator. She phoned around to the other couples, including the Updikes, to ask if they thought it would be appropriate to get together, a telephonic negotiation Updike later characterized as “much agonizing.” A consensus emerged: they would go ahead with the dinner as planned. As Updike explained it, “We didn’t know what gesture to make, so we made none.”
On Sunday, they all played touch football, as on any other autumn weekend.
In
Couples
, Updike exaggerates these bare facts with broad satiric intent. The Tarbox gang barely hesitates before deciding to attend a black-tie party on the Friday night of the president’s assassination. The food and liquor have been bought, the women have shopped for new dresses (“The fashion that fall was for deep décolletage”), the men have had their tuxedos cleaned—why stay at home and mourn? Updike devotes twenty-five pages to the party: the drinking, the dancing, the flirting, the gossip. The climax is a kind of black Mass: a baked ham is brought in ceremoniously; the host carves; laying the sliced meat on a plate, he intones, “Take, eat. . . . This is his body, given for thee.” It’s a shocking scene, even without the blasphemy, as damning as any in the novel. To cap it off, a man jumps from a bathroom window with his mouth full of his pregnant mistress’s milk. Obviously the evening’s corrupt revelry is intended to give the reader a jolt, to bring home the full meaning of this damning sentence: “the dancing couples were gliding on the polished top of Kennedy’s casket.”
It would be neat and tidy to say that the shock of the killing marked the beginning of an outward turn, that on the morning of November 23, Updike woke from his sybaritic suburban slumber, looked hard at the world around him, and resolved to broaden his perspective and re-create in his fiction a “dense reality” through thick description charged with cultural and political energy—daily data with a kick. He did write the “Comment” in the first
New Yorker
after the assassination, a curiously pallid piece that begins, “It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream,” and ends, “We pray not to fall into such a sleep again.” In fact, he slumbered on for another few years. It was the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War—along with his travels behind the Iron Curtain late in 1964—that did the most to open his eyes. When the president was assassinated, Updike and his fellow suburbanites were still complacently self-involved. “We had become detached from the national life,” he remembered. “Our private lives had become the real concern. There was a monstrous inflation of the private life as against the merged life of the society.” As in Tarbox, the party in Ipswich carried on regardless.
Updike, having pretty much exhausted Tristanism, embarked on Don Juanism, cutting a swath through the ranks of the town’s young matrons. He embarked on a string of affairs with his friends’ wives, some of which were merely flings, some more extended, though none of the women engaged his emotions as deeply as Joyce had done. He did get one of them pregnant (his paradise wasn’t wholly post-pill); the woman in question, thanks to a timely case of German measles, was able to obtain a legal abortion. Updike was greatly relieved, and the affair ended—by mutual agreement.
*
More flings followed. A friend from the couples group who managed to resist his charms told me, “At a certain point I thought, ‘Am I the only woman in our crowd who hasn’t slept with John?’ ” She was not, in fact, unique—but nearly. Another friend told me, “It was a matter of a certain pride to be sleeping with John.”
He was a lusty man, and after Joyce, he had no scruples about adultery, yet he needed to dress up garden-variety infidelity as the inescapable consequence of some grand passion. Like Tristan, he was in love with love—and at the same time, he made no attempt to disguise his eagerness to hop straight into bed. One of his lovers reported that he felt compelled to cast their affair in romantic terms; “he needed a woman to adore,” she said. She was crazy about him, too—but she was also flattered: here was this brilliant and charming friend bombarding her with amorous attention, always desperate to get her clothes off. “I would’ve preferred,” she added, “to talk and tease.”
In his memoirs, celebrating the healing effects of sunshine on his psoriasis, he gives us this glimpse of himself as all-conquering Casanova:
[W]hat concupiscent vanity it used to be, playing volleyball bare-chested, leaping high to spike the ball down into a pretty housewife’s upturned face, and wearing tomato-red bicycle shorts that as if casually slid down to expose an inch or more of tanned, normal-appearing derrière, even to the sexy dent where the cleavage of the buttocks begins.
This preening display puts the emphasis on his physique. Like many men who succeed thanks to their brains, he would have liked to be worshipped for his body. He wanted us to believe (and perhaps believed himself) that the pretty housewife playing beach volleyball was enthralled by a bare-chested hunk. Many of his friends and acquaintances remarked that he grew handsomer, less gawky, as he aged, yet it seems obvious that his wit, his intelligence, and his growing fame seduced more women than his buttocks. Charm is composed of curious elements, and in his case something undefinable went into the mix—it could have been the flirting twinkle in his eye, the hint of malice in his teasing, or perhaps his willingness to telegraph lust frankly and fearlessly to the women he desired.
Though brilliantly equipped for hands-on research into the adulterous society, and rapidly acquiring expertise in the field, he was not yet ready to present his preliminary findings to the general public. In April 1964, even before he’d quite finished
Marry Me
, he explained to Alfred Knopf that “complicating factors” might force him to sit on the book—but he offered to try to write another, shorter novel by the end of the year. In late summer Updike went to work on a novella provisionally titled
The Farm
; he finished a penciled draft in the autumn, just before his State Department junket to the Soviet Union and beyond. The novella was a return to Berks County, to the epicenter of his past—but at the same time, as Updike once acknowledged, it “takes place in the future.” He was imagining the farm in Plowville as it would be a decade hence, with his father dead (
The Centaur
after the centaur has died, as he put it) and his mother living alone, a recent widow with a rapacious hunger for her only son’s attention and affection. And in an even bolder prophetic inspiration, he was imagining making a weekend visit to his mother after having divorced and remarried. (One wonders whether this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to extinguish the last embers of his romantic longing for Joyce by imagining how she would cope with Linda as a mother-in-law.) Along with his bride comes her precocious son, an eager-to-please eleven-year-old, who rounds out the cast of characters: two mothers, two sons, together in the old sandstone farmhouse. Like
Marry Me
,
Of the Farm
—he added the preposition to the title six months prior to publication—is an intricately choreographed dance in which four characters engage and disengage, grappling in a slippery push-and-pull that sometimes gives comfort but more often does damage.
The outside world is rigorously excluded from
Of the Farm
; we’re allowed
off
the farm only for a quick trip to a shopping mall and a Sunday morning church service. There are only four voices—a quartet.
*
The voices belong to Joey Robinson, a public relations consultant who once dreamed of being a poet; his garrulous mother, Mary; his second wife, Peggy, a long-legged redhead with a bony face; and her young son, Richard. The selective focus pays off; it’s one of Updike’s best books, a small, quiet triumph. It was the first time he used a first-person narrator in a novel, and the intimacy of Joey’s voice telling his story (“a kind of chamber music” is how he described it to Alfred Knopf) adds to the sense of events and characters isolated from the hurly-burly of daily life—a quartet in a spotlight, performing flawlessly for our benefit.
“It’s a book people mention to me,” Updike said more than forty-five years after it was published, “and I feel kind of embarrassed about it, like I was somehow too naked when I wrote it.” Inasmuch as he was exploring his unusually close bond with his mother in a cruelly honest, minimally fictionalized piece of writing, it’s no surprise that he felt exposed and ill at ease when called upon to discuss it. He was certainly nervous about what his mother would think of what he told her was “a little flight among imaginary moments that I hope won’t annoy anyone”; in the months before publication, he repeatedly advised her not to bother reading it. He may have found it painful, also, to see himself in Joey, a thirty-five-year-old mama’s boy easily manipulated by his mother into agreeing that his second wife is vulgar and stupid, and that divorcing his first wife was a mistake. But what Joey’s mother knows about Joey, Linda could not have known about Updike—for the simple reason that Updike had not yet left his wife and children, and wouldn’t do so for nearly a decade. Updike was testing out in fiction his mother’s reaction to what might have been had he followed through and left Mary for Joyce. He was reopening the old wound—this time to gauge the degree of his guilt and the price of expiation.
Updike once wrote that the novel’s “underlying thematic transaction . . . was the mutual forgiveness of mother and son”—but that makes the novel seem kinder and gentler than it is. Before we get to forgiveness, blame must be apportioned—not, in this case, a pretty process. Joey’s guilt and his mother’s emerge from an emotional melee worthy of Edward Albee; the three adults hammer, burn, and lacerate one another, to borrow the startling phrase from “Couples.” Mrs. Robinson’s crime is the familiar one central to the Hoyer/Updike saga: she forced her husband and son out of their beloved Olinger and onto the farm. In this version, the move had fatal consequences: it hastened her husband’s death. Joey’s crime, his divorce, cost him four thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees alone—the same amount, he realizes, that the farm had cost his mother.
*
By this strict accounting, Joey and his mother are even—both took what they wanted and paid for it. But the true price can’t be counted in dollars and cents. To get the farm, Joey’s mother sacrificed her husband; to get Peggy, Joey sacrificed his first wife and his children. Not exactly victimless crimes.
When all the mother-son skirmishes are done, when all the wounds are neatly bandaged by forgiveness and the visitors are ready to leave, Joey’s mother engages in a bit of pointed banter about selling the farm after she’s dead. She refers to it as “my farm,” and before he replies, Joey reflects, “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed. I must answer in our old language, our only language, allusive and teasing, that with conspiratorial tact declared nothing and left the past apparently unrevised.” His answer (“ ‘
Your
farm?’ I said. ‘I’ve always thought of it as our farm’ ”) is meant to reassure her that their conspiracy is intact.
Critics have spotted the prophetic strain in
Of the Farm
. One goes so far as to cite Eliot’s dictum that the test of a true poet is that he writes of experiences before they have happened to him. Updike’s vision of his mother’s widowhood (after Wesley died in 1972, Linda lived alone on the farm for seventeen years, until her own death in 1989) is indeed eerily clairvoyant. Equally eerie is the “transaction” in which one crime is forgiven in exchange for a kind of immunity from prosecution for another crime that hasn’t yet been committed—or not quite. A few years after Linda’s death, Updike described the book as an attempt “to show an aging mother and her adult son negotiating acceptance of what seems to each the sins of the other.” I suspect that when he wrote
Of the Farm
, he was negotiating acceptance of his sins—sins of the past (Joyce) as well of the future—by confessing them in fiction, a language in which his mother was fluent.
And what of his father? John evidently had to remove Wesley from the picture before he could imagine himself divorcing and remarrying. My guess is that Wesley would have known without knowing that the message in
Of the Farm
—delivered with “conspiratorial tact”—was not for his ears. He was accustomed to the sotto voce murmurings of Linda conversing with John in their “old language,” and besides, a man who could embrace
The Centaur
and declare George Caldwell a true likeness of himself was unlikely to object to being killed off in his son’s next novel—or to being left out of the loop. Wesley wouldn’t have wanted to hear about the near-miss of John’s marital crisis (the infidelity, the romantic passion, the threat of divorce), and John wasn’t prepared to confess to him, even in code—that much had been made clear several years earlier, in “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” when the mere mention of his father’s illness cuts off David Kern’s thoughts of adultery and turns him into a model husband, a champion of family life. Like David, John was unwilling to puncture the illusions of a bighearted man; one of Wesley’s cherished beliefs was that John was a good son and a good father.