Authors: Adam Begley
Updike cooked up this sex-and-drugs comedy with ingredients supplied by Delbanco, who told him about some LSD he’d owned and disposed of. Updike mixed that morsel with a judiciously scrambled account of an evening when two friends from Ipswich came to the Vineyard for a visit. The houseguests, both part of the couples crowd, were a divorced man and a woman, an ex-lover of John’s who was going through a rough patch in her marriage. Delbanco came to dinner and, after the meal, when the children had been tucked up in bed, offered to share some marijuana with the assembled company. Delbanco remembered John’s wooziness when he was high—and taking home with him the female friend from Ipswich.
Updike wrote “Bech Takes Pot Luck” a little more than a year after the event that inspired it, and the story wasn’t published in
The New Yorker
until the following year, whereupon Updike wrote a note to Delbanco urging him not to read himself into the “little fantasy” featuring young Wendell Morrison—“other than in the undeniable way the two of you know your way around the drug culture, and eat up aging writers of fading vitality.” In fact, Delbanco knew exactly how to read both Updike’s fiction and his teasing, self-deprecating letters; he didn’t take offense, and the two remained friends and correspondents for the next four decades.
A few weeks after the Updikes’ return from that first summer on the Vineyard,
Life
magazine came calling—not just the reporter, a young woman named Jane Howard, but also a photographer who posed the family, scrubbed up for the occasion, in the spacious living room at 26 East Street, the brick of the great fireplace just visible behind their heads. In the photo, John and his two sons are wearing button-down shirts, Mary and her two daughters summery cotton dresses. Seven-year-old Michael, an exasperated twist to his lips, leans toward his mother; five-year-old Miranda, with bangs and freckles, gazes cheerfully at her father. The two eldest stand behind their seated parents, looking straight at the camera, nine-year-old David eager and excited, Liz wise beyond her eleven years, her mouth a wary slant. She shares with her father an amused, ironic detachment, a hint of distrust. About Mary’s wide smile and bright eyes, set off by a late-summer tan, there’s nothing remotely distrustful; the easy happiness she exudes sets the tone—the image makes you want to say,
What a sweet family!
As if to reinforce that impression, the headline reads, “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” The accompanying text describes John as “oddly good-looking, with an arresting hook nose and sea-captainish crinkled eyes.”
It requires a flexible worldview to keep in mind simultaneously the wholesome domestic scene of the
Life
photo and the adulterous shenanigans detailed in Updike’s memoirs. The most shocking instance is packed into one unforgettable sentence describing the return journey of a ski trip up north:
I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irradiated with light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, beneath our blanketing parkas, and taking a brotherly pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.
That lurid anecdote should perhaps be balanced by a few words about “Your Lover Just Called,” a Maples story written in the summer of 1966 and based, as usual, on an incident in the Updikes’ marriage. Richard Maple, returning home through the backyard from a quick errand, spies through the kitchen window his wife kissing a friend of his. The friend, Mack, is the soon-to-be ex-husband of Eleanor, with whom Richard shared a torrid embrace in the previous Maples story, “The Taste of Metal.” Joan and Mack protest their innocence (“A mere fraternal kiss. A brotherly hug”), but infidelity is by now a tacitly accepted feature of the Maples’ marriage; they both have lovers they conceal with varying degrees of success. The kiss Updike actually saw through the kitchen window of the Polly Dole House
was
innocent (according to the man who was kissing her), but at the time, both John and Mary were embroiled in affairs and flirtations—which is the premise of yet another Maples story, “The Red Herring Theory.” Joan explains,
The properly equipped suburban man . . . has a wife, a mistress and a red herring. The red herring may have been his mistress once, or she may become one in the future, but he’s not sleeping with her now. You can tell, because in public they act as though they do.
This brief sociological treatise is delivered in the immediate aftermath of a typical party at their house; their friends had come and gone and, in between, had “shuffled themselves” or had “been reshuffled.” Joan complains, “What messy people . . . Grinding Fritos into a shag rug. They’re so
sloppy
.” A faint echo of this complaint can be heard in Updike’s memoirs, where he looks back at the Ipswich parties of the late sixties: “At moments of suburban relaxation, in our circle of semi-bohemian homes, we smoked pot, wore dashikis and love beads, and frugged ourselves into a lather while the Beatles and Janis Joplin sang away on the hi-fi set.” The frugging ground many a Frito into the shag rug, and Updike, never a heavy drinker and only an occasional smoker of marijuana and hashish, was always in the thick of the reshuffle.
In her
Life
profile, Jane Howard noted how “enmeshed” Updike was in the town, both his civic engagement (the church committees, the town Democratic committee) and the avid socializing with the Ipswich gang—the parties, the sports, the poker, the recorder group. (In another
Life
photo, Mary and John soberly play their instruments, alto and tenor, respectively.) Updike meant something similar when he remarked that in Ipswich he felt “enlisted in actual life.”
Enlisted, enmeshed, entangled . . . and yet he claimed still to feel, in his “innermost self,” like an outsider—which is consistent with his belief that a writer should remain to some degree estranged. The
Life
photographer caught him in the act, snug in his own living room, posing for a magazine portrait: the celebrated young author in the bosom of his family. Part of him is conspicuously detached, eyeing the photo shoot charade from a distance. Impersonating the author as wholesome family man, he couldn’t stop
being
a writer, his “inner remove” apparent in the backward tilt of the head, the slight squint, the half-smile. He was relaxed in front of the lens, unfazed by the rapid click of the shutter, but he wasn’t an actor; he couldn’t control what the camera revealed.
He was hard at work on
Couples
at the time, putting his friends and neighbors under the microscope, scrutinizing them with merciless sociological precision. Hailed as an exposé of “the adulterous society,”
Couples
is both a celebration and a satire, a hymn to the joy he experienced in the company of the Ipswich set—especially the women he slept with—and a denunciation of a faithless, sexually promiscuous community, derelict in its most essential duty (the care of its children), and willfully, culpably detached from the outside world. Updike liked to say that the dinner he and Mary attended on the night of the assassination of President Kennedy—a dinner neither the Updikes nor their friends had “the patriotic grace to cancel or not attend”—was the “core” of
Couples
.
*
In the novel, the party on November 22 is one of the few scenes where the satire is so blatant as to be unmistakable, where the action is designed to elicit contempt (“the dancing couples were gliding on the polished top of Kennedy’s casket”). In other words, Updike believed that the spark that gave
Couples
life was essentially satiric: an urge to cry foul and point the finger at “monstrous” self-absorption and disregard for the civic life of the nation. He knew, perhaps even in the midst of the party on that tragic night, that soon he would be exposing in his fiction the moral failings of his fellow guests—and his own, too.
In an elaborately patterned novel, the chain of significance that links sex, children, the Kennedys, adultery, divorce, and abortion is just one strand of meaning among many, but it’s worth teasing it out to show the scale of Updike’s ambition in
Couples
and to illustrate an important shift in his method.
In the novel’s first scene, the Hanemas, Piet and Angela, are getting ready for bed after a party. In an attempt to seduce his wife, Piet does a handstand in the bedroom; Angela, who’s seen this stunt before, tells him, “Shh. You’ll wake the children.” This rebuke only eggs him on; he toddles toward the bed on his knees, imitating their younger daughter: “Dadda, Dadda, wake up-up, Dadda. The Sunnay paper’s here, guess what? Jackie Kenneny’s having a
ba
by!” His antics (which Angela calls “cruel”) remind her of what one of their friends told her, that their children, the children of the Tarbox couples, are “suffering” as a result of the adults’ hyperactive social life, which (as we are about to learn at great length and in gorgeous detail) is accompanied by hyperactive adulterous coupling. Here, in a nutshell, is all of
Couples
—the marital stress, the tight-knit circle of friends, and the individual and social cost of the new sexual freedom.
The reference to Jackie Kennedy’s pregnancy turns out to be a memento mori; the baby boy she gave birth to prematurely on August 7, 1963 (the year in which the novel is set), lived only two days. Several months (and two hundred-odd pages) after the opening scene, the Hanemas’ younger daughter bursts into their bedroom and echoes Piet’s parody, with a grim twist: “Daddy, wake up! Jackie Kenneny’s baby died because it was born too tiny.” This pathetic announcement foreshadows the death of the baby’s father just a few months later, and also the disturbing consequence of Piet’s affair with Foxy Whitman. Foxy and her husband are the new couple in town. When we meet her, she’s two months pregnant (by her husband). Not long after giving birth to a healthy baby boy, she gets pregnant again—by Piet this time—and decides to have an abortion (which was of course illegal in Massachusetts in 1963, and indeed in the rest of the nation). The abortion is arranged by Freddy Thorne, the sinister ringleader of the couples set, who is a dentist. It’s while she’s having a cavity filled in Freddy’s chair that Foxy hears news of Kennedy’s assassination (and thinks of the dead president, already notorious for his philandering, as “a young man almost of her generation, with whom she could have slept”), and it’s at Freddy’s house that same night that the couples assemble for their black-tie dinner. Just to make this unwholesome set of circumstances undeniably repulsive, Freddy insists that as payment for facilitating the abortion, he be allowed to sleep with Angela, just once—an arrangement Piet, Foxy, and Angela all agree to, however reluctantly. One last detail brings it all full circle: Piet’s “Kenneny”-obsessed younger daughter is listening at the door of Freddy’s office while he and Piet hammer out their shameful agreement: “Her lips were pursed around the stem of a lollypop, and her eyes, though she had no words, knew everything.”
There is a price to pay for the couples’ feckless carousing. “All these goings on would be purely lyrical, like nymphs and satyrs in a grove,” Updike told
Time
magazine, “except for the group of distressed and neglected children.” The damage caused by promiscuity and collective self-absorption was much on Updike’s mind as the novel was going to press. The fourteen-year-old daughter of a couple at the heart of the set, suffering from anorexia, died of an overdose of sleeping pills in January 1968. Though the overdose was presumed to be accidental, her death shocked the group and prompted some short-lived talk of restraint—perhaps, it was said, there should be fewer parties. But the manic socializing carried on as before.
Angela calls Tarbox a “sexpot”—to which Piet replies, “A sexpot is a person, not a place.” But Angela knows she’s right: “This one’s a place.”
Couples
exaggerates only slightly the closeness of the Ipswich couples and the frequency and complexity of their extramarital entanglements. What Updike liberally exaggerates, in order to keep his readers amused, is the cleverness of the repartee and innuendo when the couples get together for their dinners, their tennis parties, their parlor games, or when two of them (any two, every two) are trysting. Some of their banter weaves in topical references, information gleaned from the television news or a cursory glance at the newspaper; these scraps serve to situate us, to fix the precise date of the action, and to help us get our bearings. The fluid morality of the couples, their daisy chain of betrayals, is dizzying for the reader. When a news event intrudes—the sinking of the nuclear-powered submarine
Thresher
, say, or the toppling of a government in Southeast Asia, or the assassination of the American president—we can gauge the Tarbox reaction against our own. Talking about the Kennedys to her mother who lives in Washington, Foxy asks if there’s truth to the rumor that Jack’s promiscuity might lead the First Couple to divorce; listening to her mother’s answer (“Of course, with his back, he’s
not
as active as apparently he was”), Foxy happens to glance at the headline of her husband’s neatly folded newspaper: “Diem Overthrown.” (The U.S.-sanctioned coup against Ngo Dinh Diem occurred on November 1, 1963; the deposed Vietnamese president was assassinated the next day.) News of turmoil in a war-torn country where more than sixteen thousand American military personnel are already stationed means nothing to Foxy. She thinks to herself, “Diem.
Dies, diei, diei, diem
.” Declining the Latin noun for “day,” as in
carpe diem
(seize the day), she does just that; she confesses to her mother that she’s thinking of divorcing her husband. As with the Kennedys, the proximate cause is infidelity (Foxy’s engrossing affair with Piet).
Strip away the layers of elaborate patterning, and
Couples
is reduced to a simple love triangle, Piet and Foxy and Angela, with Angela cast in the role of the wronged wife. Piet and Foxy’s affair has a spiritual element—they are the only two regular churchgoers among the ten couples—but there’s clearly something wrong with their romance; a moral boundary has been crossed. Foxy’s abortion, linked in myriad ways to the successive Kennedy tragedies, alerts us to the gravity of the crime—that and the thunderbolt that strikes the steeple of the Tarbox Congregational Church. But I would argue that the apocalyptic thunderbolt (“God’s own lightning”) is primarily a literary joke, a spoof on divine judgment. The burning of the church is a “great event” in town, a spectacle—the crowd that gathers to watch the blaze is in a carnival mood, festive rather than contrite. And there’s a postmodern twist; this implausible, heavy-handed literary symbol of God’s wrath is based on an actual event: the Ipswich Congregational Church, struck by lightning on a June Sunday in 1965, burned to the ground.