Authors: Adam Begley
Oddly enough, Martha Bernhard (née Ruggles), the woman at the epicenter of the disarray, bore the stamp of Nabokov’s approval. Enrolled in the last course he taught at Cornell, she had fallen “deeply under his spell”—deeply and lastingly. She told Updike she never forgot the lessons learned from his lectures: “I felt he could teach me how to read. I believed he could give me something that would last all my life—and it has.” Updike proudly repeated a neatly polished version of the anecdote about her only one-to-one encounter with her teacher:
When our Miss Ruggles, a tender twenty, went up at the end of one class to retrieve her blue book from the mess of graded “prelims” strewn there, she could not find it, and at last had to approach the professor. Nabokov stood tall and apparently abstracted on the platform above her, fussing with his papers. She begged his pardon and said that her exam didn’t seem to be here. He bent low, eyebrows raised. “And what is your name?” She told him, and with prestidigitational suddenness he produced her blue book from behind his back. It was marked 97. “I wanted to see,” he told her, “what a genius looked like.” And coolly he looked her up and down, while she blushed; that was the extent of their exchange.
Who could resist a mistress who’d been certified a genius by Vladimir Nabokov? Updike’s evident delight in this incident suggests that falling under Martha’s spell was yet another way of falling under Nabokov’s spell.
Updike wrote a fictionalized account of the genesis of their affair, “A Constellation of Events,” a little more than a year after the fact, in March 1975. In the story, Betty and Rafe—married, but to other people—first get together thanks to a book Rafe is reading by a professor of literature Betty had studied with at college: She sees it on the seat of his car; he offers to lend it to her, and drops by her house the next morning to deliver it. She offers him a coffee and they kiss, drawn to each other, as it were, by literary affinity. We witness the action through Betty’s eyes as she realizes that she’s falling in love with Rafe, a lean, loosely knit, hatchet-faced man with a “humiliated clown’s air” and a wife who has a lover. Because Updike included in the story Betty’s husband, Rob (a lightly disguised version of Alex Bernhard), he felt he had to delay publication of the story—even though he’d gone to the trouble of changing the venue of a key scene to mask its factual basis.
The New Yorker
was eager to publish the prudently revised version in early 1979 (a full five years after the wreck of the two marriages), but Updike told the magazine that the possibility of a “legal assault” from Alex Bernhard was still too real; he couldn’t trust the efficacy of his attempts to make the story libel-proof. “A Constellation of Events” finally appeared in 1985, when the damage done was an even more distant memory.
The story gives the strong sense that the protagonists are helpless as they drift into adultery. “We’re going to be a lot of trouble,” Rafe says to Betty. “Yes,” she replies, resigned to the breakup of two families. They’re helpless and therefore somehow blameless. (There’s also the mitigating factor of Rafe’s wife’s infidelity, which Betty knows about, but perhaps not Rafe.) Inconvenient and inevitable, their romance, Updike hints, is blessed by divine sanction:
And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days . . . as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered like a constellation, but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.
That’s the last sentence of the story. Although the U-turn ends two marriages and inflicts enduring harm, it also takes the shape of a rainbow, God’s covenant promising no recurrence, no more wreckage. The flood passes, and Betty and Rafe survive the aftermath—it adds up to a happy enough ending. But life is messier than fiction, and the rainbow’s iridescent curve, harbinger of a bright future with Martha, is inverted in the author’s note to
Problems and Other Stories
(1979), where “A Constellation of Events” would have appeared if not for fear of legal assault. He begins facetiously (“Seven years since my last short-story collection? There must have been problems”) and ends on a tender, melancholy note: “[T]he collection as a whole, with the curve of sad time it subtends, is dedicated lovingly to Elizabeth, David, Michael, and Miranda.” That haunting phrase, “the curve of sad time it subtends,” is Updike’s elliptical way of saying sorry publicly for his part in a trauma he not only precipitated but also publicized.
Half the stories in
Problems
were written after he separated from Mary, and in all but one of those we read about the guilt and regret of a man whose first marriage has failed or is failing. His guilt is aggravated by the pain and confusion his “dereliction” has inflicted on various children. “Guilt Gems,” the title of one of the stories, could easily serve as the title for all the others. Sometimes the poor man is torn between wife and mistress; sometimes he’s adjusting uneasily to a rather brittle and demanding second wife, who’s guilt-racked, too. Alone or with the other woman, he’s almost always lashed by remorse. Updike in this period could be as single-minded as he had been in the months and years following the near-miss with Joyce Harrington. Divorce and its discontents had replaced adultery as his simplex theme. He worried about a glut in the market for suburban guilt.
To compound the sense of déjà vu, Denis de Rougemont and the legend of Tristan and Iseult make a return appearance. In the title story of
Problems
, charmingly configured as a six-part math test, Updike invokes Tristan’s Law: “appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.” Here’s the premise: “During the night,
A
, though sleeping with
B
, dreams of
C
.” And here’s the question: “Which has he more profoundly betrayed,
B
or
C
?” Translated out of fictional terms, this is the gist of Updike’s own problem: as soon as separation made her seem unattainable, Mary grew more appealing to him—he dreamed of his wife, even though he was now free to sleep with his mistress. In the story, he appends a “helpful hint” in the guise of Midas’s Law: “Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.” Anything but helpful in his actual situation, this second law twists the knife: he had left Mary for Martha, and now Martha’s value was diminished—not hugely, but just enough to fog his emotional landscape and add to his “life-fright.” He knew that he was making both women unhappy, straining their patience, betraying them both, but he couldn’t help himself. In a late story he described the condition as “emotional bigamy.” He began seeing a psychiatrist again, every other week. All this anguish and uncertainty provided rich material for fiction. As before, it made him miserable, but not too miserable to write.
Perhaps the oddest feature of his Boston limbo is that it loosely resembled the situation he had mapped out in
A Month of Sundays
, which is about a philandering husband banished in disgrace from his community as a direct result of his adulterous shenanigans. He wrote the novel in a rush, beginning in early November 1973 and finishing just sixteen weeks later—well before the breakup and more than half a year before he left Ipswich. The whiff of prophecy adds to the impression, already strong after
Of the Farm
, of a man who steeled himself for action or braced himself to endure an event by writing it out. Having somehow understood, consciously or not, that exile from Ipswich was inevitable, he devised a way to explore the experience on paper.
The novel consists of a journal kept by the Reverend Tom Marshfield, who has been relieved of his clerical duties for a month by his bishop. Shipped out to a desert retreat in an unnamed western state, he’s required to add a new entry to the journal every morning of his stay, the daily stint at the typewriter being a form of therapy or penance. In the afternoon he plays golf with his fellow exiles, also clergymen in disgrace. Married and the father of two young sons, Marshfield had embarked on an affair with the church organist, his first infidelity, and then with several other “seducing” parishioners (“by way of being helpful”), before his indiscretions were exposed. The premise might lead you to expect a somber, regretful tone. But contrite he is not. His reaction to the scandal and his punishment is a kind of manic clowning. He indulges in an orgy of glib wordplay. His diary, complete with typos and footnotes (and even a transcribed comment said to have been scrawled in pencil, in a reader’s hand), is a mixture of confession, reminiscence, clever disquisition, polemic, and sermon—with plenty of sex for spice. After his long struggle with the recalcitrant Buchanan material, Updike had reason to rejoice in a hyperfluent torrent of language; the tone of the novel is exuberant in part because of the author’s relief at the ease with which he was writing.
Adultery is one of the many topics Marshfield playfully juggles (he drafts a sermon in praise of it); divorce is another. He asks, “When is it right for a man to leave his wife?”—and supplies an answer that gives a good idea of both his state of mind and the texture of his prose: “When the sum of his denied life overtops the calculated loss of the children, the grandparents if surviving, the dog, and the dogged
ux
., known as Fido, residual in himself.” The style might be described as excitable Humbert Humbert: a virtuoso performance, but somewhat off-putting in its razzle-dazzle and stiff-arm irony. A sentence from Updike’s review of
Ada
—“His prose has never . . . menaced a cowering reader with more bristling erudition, garlicky puns, bearish parentheses, and ogreish winks”—applies perfectly well here. But Nabokov is not the novel’s only godparent;
A Month of Sundays
tips its hat repeatedly to Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet
Letter
, the earliest and perhaps greatest American contribution to the literature of adultery. Thomas Marshfield, whose wife’s maiden name is Chillingworth and who tries, while exiled, to seduce a Ms. Prynne, is a militantly unrepentant descendant of Hawthorne’s wayward minister, Arthur Dimmesdale.
*
Not surprisingly, Marshfield’s verbal acrobatics get in the way of feeling. The scene in which the banished minister says good-bye to his two sons is notably bereft of emotion—compared with “Separating,” it’s as dry as an old stick. Updike told an interviewer that he “wanted to make the book kind of abrasive and offensive,” and in the eyes of many reviewers, he succeeded. Anatole Broyard, who’d raved about
Rabbit Redux
, was particularly disappointed by the “virtuosity . . . too gleefully displayed.” He went so far as to throw one of Updike’s best put-downs back at him: “In a review of J. D. Salinger, Mr. Updike once remarked that sentimentality is a writer’s loving his characters more than God loves them. Something similar might be said about his own love of language.” Other critics objected to the sexual content, and to Marshfield’s unabashed sexism, which they attributed to Updike. It’s a mistake to casually conflate character and author, especially with respect to a book as sophisticated as
A Month of Sundays
, which plays clever games with narrative voice and the notion of the implied reader—and yet the critics’ complaints are understandable, a predictable reaction to the grating tone of Marshfield’s braggadocio.
By the time Knopf published the novel in February 1975, Updike may have found himself somewhat less amused by the defiantly impenitent posturing of his exiled philanderer.
*
After living away from his family for more than half a year, he was still unsure whether the break with Mary was the right idea; in any case, he was neither defiant nor impenitent. A semi-bachelor perched in his Boston pad, he was “living like a buzzard in a tree”; when he visited the house on Labor-in-Vain Road, as he did most Sundays, he was circling the cold periphery of a family life that had sustained him for two decades. One of his protagonists recalls “those embarrassing, disarrayed years when I scuttled without a shell, between houses and wives, a snake between skins, a monster of selfishness, my grotesque needs naked and pink.” If Updike still saw anything funny about being a “divorcing bachelor,” his laughter would have been wry, bitter, disgusted.
He could at least reflect that he was in better shape than John Cheever, who had come to town to teach two writing classes at Boston University and was doing his level best to drink himself to death. Early in the fall term, Updike bumped into him on Newbury Street, outside Brooks Brothers; they went in together, and Cheever bought two pairs of tasseled loafers. Then they had a drink at the Kon-Tiki bar at the Park Plaza Hotel—or rather Updike had a drink and Cheever a succession of drinks, all doubles (the dosage urgently insisted upon by the older man). They parted on Commonwealth Avenue, Cheever toddling off unsteadily. “I felt badly,” Updike remembered, “because it was as though a natural resource was being wasted.” Although Cheever complained in the months that followed that Updike never made contact, they did get together several times, and on each occasion the plan went awry. Updike tried to take him to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the revival of a Greta Garbo film, but when they got there they found it was sold out, so they went instead to dinner at the Café Budapest in Copley Square. Cheever convinced Updike to participate in a two-hour question-and-answer session at BU; after less than an hour, peeved because he felt his tongue-tied students weren’t taking full advantage of this special opportunity, Cheever suddenly cut the proceedings short. And then there was the night Updike dropped by to pick up Cheever and take him to Symphony Hall; when he arrived he found the celebrated sixty-two-year-old author drunk and stark naked on his fourth-floor landing, the door to his apartment swinging shut behind him. Luckily it didn’t lock. Updike, absent a better idea, went about getting his friend ready for the concert: “I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes.” In March, Cheever faced facts for long enough to resign from his teaching job; he persuaded Updike to stand in for the remaining six weeks of the term. Updike agreed because he thought Cheever was doomed, literally about to drop dead. But after one last epic Boston bender, the author of
The Wapshot Chronicle
woke up and found himself in Manhattan—at the Smithers Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center. Released after twenty-eight days, he remained sober. Drying out had saved his life. In midsummer, driving back from a visit to Plowville, Updike dropped in to see him at home in Ossining, New York, and thought he looked well but frail “with all the alcohol squeezed out of him.”