Authors: Adam Begley
The thought of telling Dickie shatters Richard’s “cozy” complacency and sets before him a “black mountain,” a vast weight of guilt. “Of the four children,” we’re told, “his elder son was most nearly his conscience,” an arrangement consonant with the character of a man who has trouble—to borrow the phrase from “Plumbing”—with trespass versus debts. The contours of his trespass are revealed almost as soon as he’s made the announcement to Dickie, who’s clearly stunned by the news. Richard lets him know that he’s finding it difficult, too, that the hour he’s spent waiting for the boy’s train has been “about the worst” of his life. He says, “I hate this.
Hate
it. My father would have died before doing it to me.” Richard’s father has never figured in the Maples stories, so the remark, though striking, lacks resonance—it gestures vaguely at deterioration in moral standards from one generation to the next. Richard’s son is “nearly his conscience,” and so, it seems, is the memory of his father; as soon as Richard has mentioned his father, he feels “immensely lighter.” He has passed on the burden of conscience—“dumped the mountain onto the boy.”
For Updike, writing the sentence “My father would have died before doing it to me” must have felt like entering a guilty plea. It’s a terrible admission—terrible and true: Wesley would indeed have died before breaking up John’s childhood home.
*
And John would probably have found it exponentially more difficult to separate from Mary had his father still been alive. As Mary put it, “I think the fact that all of our parents had died—except Linda—gave John some sort of extra permission to start a new life, to do something different. Psychologically, that’s part of what happened.” Updike himself came close to giving an explanation during a filmed interview. Discussing the adulterous shenanigans of the
Couples
gang, he remarked, “One’s continued need to be loved, to be glamorous, is basically very disruptive.” He added, “In our attempt to be beautiful, we often break a lot of innocent bystanders’ bones.” Even as he cautiously maintained the illusion of authorial distance, he was admitting to the vanity and self-indulgence of the motive behind his affairs, and the painful cost of the consequence.
As for poor Richard Maple, he’s not destined to have an easy night. Just before he goes out to pick up Dickie, he tells his wife, “Joan, if I could undo it all, I would.” He’s referring to the affair he’s having, to the woman we know only as a “white face” he yearns to “shield from tears.” (Note the ironic asymmetry of that chivalrous sentiment.) Of course, before this latest affair there were the others; the idea that he could “undo it all” is preposterous. And it also hints at rich reserves of ambivalence. Joan’s brilliant reply—“Where would you begin?”—is the first of two unanswerable questions that begin to expose the scale of his blunder:
The second question—“
Why?
”—is asked by a passionate and tearful Dickie, and instead of an answer, it’s met with a heartbreaking passage that ends the story:
Why
. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness. The white face was gone, the darkness was featureless. Richard had forgotten why.
T
HINGS FELL APART.
How did it happen? A couple of years earlier, Updike had made the following philosophical pronouncement to a visiting journalist: “There’s something irredeemably perverse and self-destructive about us,” he said. “The basic human condition of being a social animal is hard on the animal and hard on society.” The phrasing pleased him, but blaming the human condition is a bit like blaming a nut and bolt fastened to a beam on the ceiling of your living room—in both cases, personal agency is removed from the equation. If the antique hardware on an old beam is what binds a family, and if a perversity common to us all is what unscrews the nut from the bolt, then nobody in particular is to blame when the house comes tumbling down.
Updike’s whimsical fable about the big nut and bolt holding the family together has the unintended effect of redirecting our gaze toward the new owners of the Polly Dole House. The Updikes sold their home to Alexander and Martha Bernhard, a young couple who were moving to Ipswich from Wellesley with their three boys. Martha, a very pretty blond woman five years younger than John, had a captivating smile, intense blue eyes, and a tantalizing anecdote about one of his literary heroes, Nabokov, whose lecture course on European literature she had taken at Cornell in the late fifties. Having moved into 26 East Street, Martha joined the Updikes’ recorder group and made friends with them; soon the Bernhards were part of the gang, and several years later John and Martha launched into an affair that broke up both marriages.
If the Updikes’ Ipswich friends were asked to identify fingerprints on the loosened nut, they would all point to Martha, who was, after all, living right there. A chorus of neighbors, some of them plausibly professing fondness for the alleged culprit, testified that Martha “went after” John with a single-minded resolve readily apparent to all. They told the same story in interview after interview: “It was all Martha. Martha set out to do it. It’s just as simple as that. She had set her sights on John.” Or: “Martha was as determined as any woman I’ve ever seen to have her way.” Or: “She was very overt in her running after John—and he fell for it.” Or: “Martha knew what she wanted and used everything in her charm bag to get it.” The unanimity raises the suspicion that forty-year-old gossip has congealed into dogma. John’s role in the breakup of his marriage barely gets a mention. That Mary might have had a hand in it seemed to occur to no one. It’s as though John and Mary were both bystanders—part of the audience at Martha’s one-woman show.
Her unswerving determination played its part in breaking up the marriage, but so did Mary’s affairs and John’s. Mary already had a lover when she found out about John and Martha—as far as she knew, her affair, which began early in 1973, predated his. John knew about her latest affair but didn’t let on, and eventually cited it as a reason for wanting to separate. Marriages wear out, and in this case husband and wife had both been having affairs on and off for more than half of their twenty-one years together; the strain of those infidelities eventually weakened the bond. Given the complexity of the overlapping adulteries, and the affection that endured on both sides, it seems clear that if there’s blame to be apportioned, it should be divided equally between the principals. After all, the Updikes sought and were granted a no-fault divorce (among the first in Massachusetts). Why should we waste our time pointing the finger when they reasonably chose not to? There were no villains, and in the end no victims, just an acutely painful family mess.
Had there been victims, had the Updike children, say, suffered any more than children inevitably suffer when their parents split, I would be tempted to describe the breakup by inverting Marx’s formula: history repeats itself the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy. First came Joyce Harrington and the comic melodrama of John’s abortive attempt to escape his marriage, the spectacular showdown at the Harringtons’ house, the banishment to Antibes, the slow, pouty return to the status quo ante. A decade later, along came Martha Bernhard (Joyce redux), and we get an extended replay of John’s indecision, hanging once again between Mary and another woman, unwilling to let go with either hand. When Mary found out about the affair, there were public scenes of jealous bad behavior and vicious private scraps before the heartbreaking endgame captured indelibly in “Separating”—which, though not a tragedy, is hard to read without a lump in the throat.
In June, Updike moved out of the house on Labor-in-Vain Road and rented a dingy apartment in a housing development in Ipswich. The family vacation (August on Martha’s Vineyard) was split into shifts, Mary and John staggering their time on the island. He left town in September, and though he couldn’t have known it because he was still wavering and nothing was settled, the Ipswich years were over.
What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower and racy under Kennedy had become, under Ford, almost compulsory.
—
Memories of the Ford Administration
(1992)
Updike was alone, living by himself for the first time in his life, without parents, roommates, a spouse, children. In September 1974 he moved into a small apartment on Beacon Street in Boston, a few blocks from the recently erected though still unoccupied John Hancock Tower, a mirrored slab famous for shedding panes of its reflective glass; he had a “gorgeous” view of this expensive fiasco, the tallest building in the city, and in several stories wrote hymns to its “huge blueness” and the disastrous blemish of its falling panes. In the wake of the separation from Mary, he felt like damaged goods, and the Hancock Tower became his secret sharer, a companion in his loneliness. In “Gesturing,” the Maples story that follows “Separating,” Richard rents a Boston apartment because it has a view of the tower; the building “spoke to him . . . of beauty and suffering.” In “From the Journal of a Leper,” the narrator associates his psoriasis with the vexed skyscraper (“the building had shed windows as I shed scales”), but the association is not unhappy; as the “leper” writes in his journal, “I reflect that all art, all beauty, is reflection.” The mirrored immensity of the building reminded Updike, inevitably, of Stendhal’s epigram “A novel is a mirror, taking a walk down a big road.” At the time, alas, his own fiction reflected the wreckage of a marriage in its death throes.
Sunstruck and overheated, his apartment anchored him only loosely for the twenty months he rented it. His living “derangements,” he wrote, entailed “a lot of driving from point to point in the scattered map of my emotional involvements.” Like the protagonist of another story from this period, he “lived rather shapelessly,” ricocheting from the isolation of his bachelor pad to his wife, to his mistress, to his children. (Liz was at Bennington College in Vermont; David in his last year of prep school at Phillips Academy, Andover; the younger two at home with their mother.) Also separated from her husband, Martha was still living in the Polly Dole House with her three boys, John, Jason, and Ted.
*
At first Updike zipped around in a lime-green convertible Mustang; after it was totaled by David’s girlfriend, he bought a “rakish” Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, also convertible, handy for tight parking spaces in Back Bay but otherwise thoroughly impractical—a “guiltily self-destructive” purchase, he called it. The rattletrap Karmann Ghia shed nuts and bolts and even, once, a front wheel; he could watch the road fly by under his feet thanks to the rust holes in the floor; it felt, he wrote, like driving a bird’s nest—another apt metaphor for the precarious limbo of his “furtive semi-bachelorhood.”
“Domestic Life in America” is not a Maples story, but it might as well be; it bears, in any case, a similar proximity to the facts of Updike’s domestic life during his self-imposed Boston exile. The names are new, but the family is the same (four children, recently separated parents), and the emotional currents crisscross in a familiar pattern. Fraser, the story’s torn protagonist, bounces back and forth between wife and mistress, who live in the same town. As a result, we get a good look at both households. Greta, the other woman, is the mother of three young boys, the youngest of whom, Billy, is only five, and not adjusting well to his parents’ separation. Nor, to be fair, is Greta; “Because of me,” she says with neurotic hyperbole, “Billy has no father.” Billy does in fact have a father, and that father has a lawyer (as many wronged husbands do); the two of them are playing hardball—or, as Greta puts it, “the bastard and his lawyer are making me feed his own children cat food.” Whether or not Martha recognized herself in the histrionic Greta, Alex Bernhard, the husband Martha left behind, had no trouble spotting his children when the story appeared in
The New Yorker
; a partner in a high-powered Boston law firm, Bernhard made it perfectly clear that he would sue Updike if he used them again in his fiction. Who knows? If he hadn’t lodged that threat, we might have had a sequence of stories about Fraser’s gradual adjustment to life with a trio of boys and their high-strung mother. As it is, the boys all but disappeared from Updike’s oeuvre for the next several decades. (Second wives continued to feature prominently.)
Alone in Boston, he took German lessons and tried out a new cure for his psoriasis. Whether or not, as he suspected, his sense of guilt “triggered a metabolic riot,” the condition of the skin on his face, shoulders, and neck deteriorated alarmingly. He flew down to St. Thomas hoping the Caribbean sun would once again work its wonders; he came home tanned but still scabby. Then Martha heard from her psychiatrist about an experimental program at Massachusetts General Hospital, just a few blocks from his apartment, where dermatologists were developing PUVA therapy, a treatment that combines ultraviolet light with a dose of psoralen. After only a few sessions in the “magic box,” his complexion improved; within months he was “clear.” For the first time since the age of six, he was no longer at war with his skin. Cured, like Updike, by the high-tech ministrations of an Australian dermatologist, the narrator of “From the Journal of a Leper” exults, “I am free, as other men. I am whole.”
Yet Updike still had to contend, in the words of one of his divorcé narrators, with “clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion.” Suspended between Mary and Martha, he wavered, and opted for the consolation of literature. Escaping into other writers’ work, he accepted book review assignments from
The New Yorker
at a rate that would have been unsustainable if he hadn’t been holed up on his own. Solitude gave him time for reading; as he admitted in a frightening aside, “I read slower than I write.” He was also, during the first several months in Boston, collecting his reviews and other miscellaneous writings for a sequel to
Assorted Prose
called
Picked-Up Pieces
, a collection that revealed him as the best novelist-critic of his day. The introduction to
Picked-Up Pieces
makes it clear that Updike was giving the art of the book review serious thought. This is where he set out his “code of reviewing,” guidelines that remain essential reading for critics starting out in the profession. The impetus for drawing up the code was, as he put it, “youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion”—John Aldridge’s review of
Of the Farm
, among others that stuck in his craw. Operating under the critical equivalent of the golden rule, and hoping to maintain “a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser,” he urged critics to stay honest by not accepting for review books they are “predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like.” Along with some pithy uplift (“Review the book, not the reputation” and “Better to praise and share than blame and ban”), he provided five concrete rules, all of which extend the benefit of the doubt to the book in question. His basic assumption was that criticism should be written not for its own sake but for the sake of the book under review, never forgetting the intelligent lay reader who might be encouraged to buy it, or avoid it. In short, he hoped to add to the joy of reading.
Although he feared that on occasion he failed to live up to his own high standards, he almost always practiced what he preached. The hallmarks of his criticism are catholic taste; a refreshingly friendly, casual, and pragmatic approach to the task; and of course sheer volume: he was not only the best novelist-critic of his day but also among the most prolific.
*
With a mixture of bravado and chagrin, he confessed the obvious: “Evidently I can read anything in English and muster up an opinion about it.” Gathered together and grouped by subject, as they are in
Picked-Up Pieces
, his reviews remain stubbornly separate from each other, a collection of discrete entities. That may sound like a vice, but actually it’s a virtue: he pushed no larger agenda, espoused no grand theory of literature. Nor was he concerned to have the last word on an author or a topic; he had no qualms about admitting ignorance, or even bewilderment. In these respects, he was very different from Edmund Wilson,
The New Yorker
’s regular reviewer from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties; and from George Steiner, who succeeded Wilson. A distinguished academic, Steiner was unabashedly erudite, a fearless champion of the highbrow. Wilson immersed himself unreservedly, sometimes pedantically, in topics that appealed to him; having mastered a topic, he surveyed it in toto, delivering with uncompromising high purpose a complete package pegged to an all-encompassing narrative. Updike was more modest than either of these critics, more versatile, and more practical; he approached his task with unheroic professionalism, with the tacit acknowledgment, hinted at in the title of
Picked-Up Pieces
, that this was piecework—well-remunerated piecework: as he later remarked, “the payment for a monthly review roughly balanced out the monthly alimony payment that was mine to make.” His subjects were very often chosen for him, mostly by Shawn in consultation with the gruff, sharp-tongued Rogers Whitaker, a jack-of-all-trades
New Yorker
editor who joined the staff of the magazine the year it was founded, helped shape its famous fact-checking department, and eventually did much of his work in the books department (when he wasn’t writing about trains as the pseudonymous E. M. Frimbo, or about college football as “J.W.L.”). Whitaker edited Updike’s reviews from the mid-sixties until his retirement in 1975;
Picked-Up Pieces
is dedicated to him, in gratitude.
A collection of reviews assigned by magazine editors will usually have a random feel to it, and this one is no exception. Certain preoccupations are nonetheless apparent, chief among them Updike’s abiding interest in Nabokov. Updike had been reading him with avid pleasure ever since the Pnin stories began appearing in
The New Yorker
in the mid-fifties; a decade later he began writing about him. In the seventies, a pattern of influence began to emerge: the two novels written after
Rabbit Redux—A Month of Sundays
and
The Coup—
are blessed or cursed, depending on your taste, with the trickiest, flashiest Updike prose, a sure sign that the author of
Pale Fire
was casting a long shadow.
Writing reviews of Nabokov’s work, Updike often permitted himself to engage in reflexive one-upmanship. In his lengthy, ambivalent piece on
Ada
, for example, he gives a brilliant demonstration of how to review fairly, sensitively, and intelligently—all the while showing off to maximum effect his own writerly agility. Urbane and self-assured (“Rape is the sexual sin of the mob, adultery of the bourgeoisie, and incest of the aristocracy”), he declines to spend his time “unstitching the sequined embroidery of Nabokov’s five-years’ labor of love” but can’t resist sewing a few sequins of his own: “[T]he last pages of
Ada
are the best, and rank with Nabokov’s best, but to get to them we traverse too wide a waste of facetious, airy, side-slipped semi-reality.” Would he have allowed himself that alliterative glut in a review of a less glittery writer? Perhaps, but something about Nabokov seems to call forth the characteristic foibles of his critics—that was certainly the case with Updike, as it was with Wilson and Steiner.
Updike’s ideas about Nabokov spring from a root sympathy: shared delight in the aesthetic bliss of wordplay. Updike understood that they were both afflicted with “a writer’s covetousness,” a complaint he thought of as “akin to the fear of death”; the telltale symptom is a “constant state of anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle”—in other words, they suffered from a compulsive urge to translate into writing, into words printed on the page, as much of the universe as they could render. In his 1964 review of the English translation of
The Defense
, he declared with comical precision that “Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer of English prose currently holding American citizenship.” He never retreated from that opinion, though he made it clear from the start that there were limits to his enthusiasm, and that he would not be engaging in hero worship. For every bouquet (“His sentences are beautiful out of context and doubly beautiful in it. He writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically”), there’s a brickbat: mention of “aimless intricacies” and “mannered” devices, and more sinister failings, such as Nabokov’s “cruelty” to his own characters and his peculiar “teasing of cripples.” In 1977, when the great man died, Updike offered handsome tribute in
The
New Yorker
to the “resplendent oeuvre” of a Russian novelist who had achieved the remarkable feat of “inventing himself anew, as an American writer.” Yet while Nabokov was alive and working, Updike’s aim was not to sum up and codify; he simply told us what we needed to know about each successive post-
Lolita
novel, scattering praise and itemizing sadly (or, in the case of
Transparent Things
, with cheery bafflement) any failings.
An American born in a small town at the nadir of the Depression is unlikely to identify too closely with an aristocrat born in czarist Russia in the last year of the nineteenth century, and yet Updike’s descriptions of Nabokov sometimes sound like wish-fulfillment fantasies: “Rich, healthy, brilliant, physically successful, he lacks the neurasthenic infirmities that gave the modernism of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Mann its tender underside.” Was Updike auditioning for a similar role, imagining a suave suburban iteration of the textual titan, playing beach volleyball on Sunday afternoon, and the next morning bending his attention to the masterpiece in his typewriter? And when he marvels at the mental energy of Nabokov (whose “brain was so excited” he could scarcely sleep), was it his own “cerebral self-delight” he was admiring? Whether or not he daydreamed his way into some half-conscious identification, he endorsed with enthusiasm Nabokov’s artistic ambitions: “He asked . . . of his own art and the art of others a something extra—a flourish of mimetic magic or deceptive doubleness—that was supernatural and surreal in the root sense of these degraded words.” Updike was by temperament wary of pure artifice; he needed to keep a foot on hard ground and an eye on humble, well-thumbed detail. Yet during the seventies, the glories of Nabokov’s literary sleight of hand, his “deceptive doubleness,” exerted a powerful pull. With his domestic life in disarray, Updike enveloped his novels in a protective carapace of stylistic and imaginative flamboyance. The wedge of distance provided by a Nabokovian dose of the supernatural and the surreal offered a break from the stubborn fact that he had left his wife and children.