Authors: Adam Begley
His public pronouncements on Vietnam were mild and restrained—“apologetic” is how he describes his letter to the
Times
. But in private (especially after being outed, as it were, by the
Times
), he was gripped by what he called a “strange underdog rage about the whole sorry thing.” His Ipswich friends were all antiwar, one or two of them passionately so. Confronted with what seemed to him a safe and smug consensus, he would argue. Like his obnoxious blackface routine, it was a kind of compulsion: “I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.” His memory of these occasions is distressingly visceral: “My face would become hot, my voice high and tense and wildly stuttery; I could feel my heart race in a kind of panic whenever the subject came up, and my excitement threatened to suffocate me.”
Mary had a theory about it: Lyndon Johnson, she pointed out, was a former schoolteacher, and John, she thought, identified him with his father, whose struggles with classroom discipline had been a “central trauma” in John’s childhood, a source of “fear and pity.” Defending the president against the misbehavior of the antiwar protesters was a way of defending his father—and, by extension, himself. John found this theory interesting enough to mention it in his memoirs. And in revenge, as it were, he set out a counter-theory:
[T]he possibility exists that, along with my . . . delusional filial attachment to Lyndon Baines Johnson, my wife’s reflexive liberalism helped form my unfortunate undovish views—that I assumed these views out of a certain hostility to her, and was protesting against our marriage.
Whatever the precise mix of motives, the result was a kind of feedback loop. The dovish consensus irritated him, and the visible signs of his own irritation embarrassed him, and fueled his “underdog rage”; he became obsessive about it: “I was, perhaps, the most Vietnam-minded person I knew.” And this, in the end, is what angered him most: Vietnam “made it impossible to ignore politics, to cultivate serenely my garden of private life and printed artifact.”
An encounter with Philip Roth on Martha’s Vineyard shows the process at work. The two writers were dinner guests in the summer of 1967 at the tiny house in West Tisbury rented by Bernard Taper, a
New Yorker
colleague of John’s. The conversation turned to Vietnam, with predictable results; Updike recalled the “puzzled expression” on the faces of the two men as he mounted a spirited defense of Johnson and the American military.
In my mind I was beset, defending an underdog, my back to the wall in a world of rabid anti-establishment militants. At one point Roth, in the calm and courteous tone of one who had been through many psychiatric sessions, pointed out to me that I was the most aggressive person in the room. It gave me pause. On reflection, it seemed possibly true. Why
was
I so vehement and agitated an undove? I did not just have a few cool reservations about the antiwar movement; I felt hot. I was emotionally involved. “Defending Vietnam”—the vernacular opposite of being “antiwar”—I was defending myself.
The anecdote is especially revealing because it’s so rare to see Updike losing control of his public persona; hot and bothered was never the image he wanted to project, especially in the company of other writers.
He had first met Roth in 1959, at the house of Jack Leggett, a Houghton Mifflin editor who lived near Ipswich. Roth’s initial impression was favorable (“I found him lively, funny, and mischievous, a kind of engaging, elongated leprechaun”), and Updike, according to Mary, was fascinated. The argument at Bernie Taper’s little summerhouse (“a good row,” according to Roth, “gifted debaters on both sides”) did no harm; Roth’s high opinion of John was unchanged, and from the very first, he found Mary “utterly charming and a wonderful looking woman.” Subsequent encounters were always “genial,” according to Roth.
The two writers were very nearly the same age (Updike was a year and a day older) and equally precocious; both were conspicuously intelligent, intellectually adventurous, and brimming with literary ambition. Roth won the National Book Award for
Goodbye, Columbus
in 1960, at age twenty-seven, and
Portnoy’s Complaint
(1969) was a succès de scandale on the order of
Couples
. From that point on, Roth and Updike remained neck and neck in the American author sweepstakes, both repeatedly hailed by critics as the leading talent of their generation. Whatever rivalry they felt, they buried it under mounds of cleverness; for instance, Updike asked his publisher to send Roth a copy of his book of poems,
Midpoint
, retitled
Poor Goy’s Complaint.
They met for lunch on occasion and, as Roth put it, they entertained each other with their “distinctive brands of irony, satire, burlesque, and smartest-boy-in-the-class cultural superiority.” They sent each other teasing notes—Roth, for example, warning Updike to steer clear of New Jersey: “Have I not stayed away from the Amish in order not to tread on your toes?”—and also letters of genuine, wholehearted praise. Roth was especially flattering about the last two volumes of the Rabbit tetralogy, which he thought of as the “twin peaks” of Updike’s achievement. All in all, over the years they met perhaps a dozen times, and managed to remain friendly up until the nineties.
Updike’s review of Roth’s
Operation Shylock
, which ran in
The
New Yorker
in March 1993, wrecked any chance that the two of them would continue to cozy up in old age. The review itself wasn’t exactly negative (though Updike did assert that Roth had become “an exhausting author to be with,” mostly because of his “narrowing, magnifying fascination with himself”); it was gently mocking, which for Roth was probably worse. Three years later, Roth’s ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom, published a memoir,
Leaving a Doll’s House
(1996), in which she claimed that their marriage came unstitched shortly after the publication of
Operation Shylock
, when Roth sank into depression. According to Bloom, when Roth checked himself into the Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in the summer of 1993, he explained to his doctors that he was distressed by Updike’s “ungenerous” review of his latest novel. When Updike read the Bloom memoir (“skipping the boring parts”), he dashed off a playful postcard to his friend Michael Arlen:
A good woman wronged, that was my impression. . . . Also that they were a pretty good couple while it lasted, at least on quiet Connecticut evenings, with only the sound of the whippoorwill and the pages of the classics turning. And to think that my friendly little review broke it up. Well, you never . . .
Updike was being funny, and remarkably unsympathetic, but at least that was in private. Unfortunately for Roth, Updike then cited Bloom’s memoir in a
New York Review of Books
essay on literary biography. He classed her book as a “Judas biography” and recapped the action for the reader’s benefit:
Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.
As Roth saw it, Updike was taking Bloom’s characterization at face value, which to Roth seemed “cruelly obtuse—and I knew he wasn’t obtuse.” Roth categorically denied that Updike’s review of
Operation Shylock
had anything at all to do with his bout of depression. But that was ancient history; after the essay on literary biography, which appeared in early 1999, they never spoke again.
Another literary friendship, with Joyce Carol Oates, fared better over the years. Oates wrote Updike a fan letter about
The
Centaur
in 1964, when she was a newly published twenty-six-year-old. They didn’t actually meet until 1968, at the National Institute of Arts and Letters, when Oates received the Rosenthal Award (the same prize Updike had won in 1960). When she and her first husband, Raymond Smith, founded a literary journal, the
Ontario Review
, they asked Updike to contribute. His first poem in the magazine, “Leaving Church Early,” was published toward the end of 1977; forty years later, in the spring/summer issue of 2007, he published five poems, his final contribution. In between, he and Oates kept up a lively, gossipy literary correspondence as voluminous as you would expect from a pair of authors who were at the same time producing at least a book a year, decade after decade.
Roth, Oates, and Updike were all prolific, but compared with Updike, the other two were slow off the mark. In November 1966, when a long and loving profile of Updike appeared in
Life
magazine, he had fourteen books to his credit: four novels, four collections of short stories, two volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and
Assorted Prose
, his first miscellany. At that point, Roth and Oates had published only a couple of books apiece. So when the editors of
Life
asked Updike’s opinion of other writers, it wasn’t necessarily a slight on his part that he failed to mention either of them. The living Americans he weighed up, each in a phrase or two, were John O’Hara, Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever. Pynchon he dismissed (“like reading a very long Popeye strip, without the spinach”); the rest he gave mixed reviews, praising and panning in the same breath—until he got to Cheever, for whom his praise was unequivocal: “I’ve never met anyone quicker on his feet, both fictional and real, than Cheever.”
T
HE
L
IFE
PROFILE
catches Updike and his family in their Ipswich prime, basking in what he called “sixties domestic bliss.” After eight years, the Polly Dole House had become an emblem of their identity; describing it was a reporter’s easy shorthand: “a 17th century house with enough rooms for everybody to get lost, a remodeled kitchen, a piano, splashes of blue-and-green Design Research upholstery fabrics, good paintings, many plants, myriad books.” The paintings were mostly Mary’s own, semi-abstract canvases that looked good in the large living room with its wide floorboards and cavernous fireplace. The curtains were Marimekko, the furniture a mix of austere Danish modern and antiques bought at local auctions; there was a glass-and-chrome coffee table and a butterfly chair. Some of the bookshelves bearing the myriad books had been built by Updike, hammering away in the basement. The small, scruffy backyard with its ragged forsythia hedge and rope swing was well used by the children and their pack of friends. A small vegetable patch was planted with lettuce, radishes, lima beans, and kohlrabi. The family cars, a station wagon and a dove-gray convertible Corvair, both dented, were parked on the street under dying elms. He took, he admitted, “snobbish pride” in the frayed, faintly shabby look he and his family adopted. He himself dressed carelessly, with holes in his sweaters (“I wear them until they get quite big at the elbows and oblong at the necks”), rumpled khakis, worn-out canvas sneakers, a shaggy haircut.
Updike chose his own label for this brand of unbuttoned prosperity: “By my mid-thirties,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I had arrived at a lifestyle we might call genteel bohemian.” It was funded, he liked to say, by a “parasitic relationship with Steuben Glass” (a major advertiser in
The New Yorker
). But he was also earning steady money from Knopf. He didn’t take advances, partly because his
New Yorker
income meant that he didn’t need to, and partly because he wanted to avoid the pressure of being in his publisher’s debt. To avoid sudden spikes in earnings (and the consequent tax burden), for each successive book he would ask for a per-annum cap on the money Knopf would pay out from royalties and the sale of foreign rights. But even with these caps in place, he was easily making more than he was spending. He estimated, for example, that in 1967 he earned $70,000; in January 1968, sale of the film rights to
Couples
brought in a windfall of $360,000. With all four children in public school, the cost of supporting the family—frequent Caribbean jaunts and the summer rentals on the Vineyard excepted—could hardly be called extravagant.
In 1966 the Updikes spent the whole of August on Martha’s Vineyard, the first of many family vacations on the island. They rented a gray shingle house with a view of Menemsha Harbor and a little studio for John to write in. The family eased into a blissful, school’s-out distillation of their Ipswich life, with more beach, more sun, and a new cast of characters. One nearly new face was that of Nicholas Delbanco, who had been a student in Updike’s Harvard writing class four years earlier. Now twenty-three, Delbanco had just published
The Martlet’s Tale
, the novel he’d begun under Updike’s supervision. Having worked several summers at Poole’s Fish Market in Menemsha, he knew the Vineyard well, and offered to show the Updikes around the island. On his days off he cavorted with the kids in the South Beach surf, or took them kayaking on Menemsha Pond.
In “Bech Takes Pot Luck,” the third Bech story (and the first set in the United States), Updike borrowed the basics of his history with Delbanco to create a comic caricature of literary hero worship. Bech is on vacation with his mistress, Norma Latchett; her sister Bea (who’s in the midst of a divorce); and Bea’s three children. They’ve rented a cottage on an instantly recognizable Massachusetts island—
whose coves and sandy lanes were crammed with other writers, television producers, museum directors, undersecretaries of State, old
New Masses
editors possessively squatting on seaside acreage bought for a song in the Depression, movie stars whose forties films were now enjoying a camp revival, and hordes of those handsome, entertaining, professionless prosperous who fill the chinks between celebrities.
Also on the island is Wendell Morrison, Bech’s former writing student at Columbia, whose familiarity with the area and “easy intermingling with the children” make him a welcome addition to Bech’s little entourage. Wendell’s adoration of his erstwhile teacher is played for laughs. He asks Norma, “He’s beautiful, isn’t he, Ma’am?” Norma replies, “He’ll do.” The situation is complicated by Bech’s mixed feelings—about being worshipped, about Norma, about the possibility that Norma is attracted to Wendell—and further complicated by the “gram of LSD” in Wendell’s possession. Eager for new experience, Norma demands that Bech arrange for her to trip with Wendell; instead it’s agreed that all four adults will try some of the young man’s Mexican marijuana. A mild sexual farce plays out against the backdrop of Bech’s adverse reaction to the pot (nausea, vomiting). In the end, it’s Bech and Bea who wind up in bed together. As for Wendell, his undimmed veneration for his old teacher leads him to flush the LSD down the toilet—and to ask Bech to read his manuscript.