Authors: Adam Begley
Updike undoubtedly intended the playfully risqué double entendre in the last sentence. And yet, confronted with it over lunch (and realizing at once that Quinn would milk it, so to speak), he blushed. Quinn then extracted Martha’s first name, and pressed him on the difference between being married and living together. “There’s a delicate but kind of fragrant difference,” he said. “There’s just a touch of the voluntary that lingers, that would be a pity to lose. The lady I live with is very scared of changing it. She was married for 17 years. She felt very captive then.” According to Quinn, Updike began to relax. Or perhaps he knew he couldn’t win and was adjusting to the inevitability of mild public humiliation. In any case, he continued to spout semiconfessional musings: “The older I get I’d say I’m more monogamous. After all I’m conserving energy enabling me to get on with my life’s work. Monogamy is very energy-conserving. To be unmonogamous is a great energy consumer.” In the article, Quinn capped this ill-considered quote with a description guaranteed to make her subject cringe: “He takes a prideful puff from his cigarillo and laughs at his own philosophy.” He got up from the table—having consumed mushroom soup, a chicken salad sandwich, and potato chips—knowing that Quinn’s profile would portray him in an unflattering light, and loathing her for it already. With his help, she had maneuvered him into exactly the pose feminist critics expected of him in the wake of
Couples
and
A Month of Sundays
: priapic narcissism.
Many women (and some men, too) were now reading Updike with a skeptical squint. A full-blown feminist critique, Mary Allen’s “John Updike’s Love of ‘Dull Bovine Beauty,’ ” had recently been published. Like many of the complaints lodged against him in the decades to come, Allen’s polemic suffers from a slippery tendency to conflate the author’s attitudes with those of his characters (especially Rabbit), and swerves dangerously close to ad hominem attack. Yet her essay piles up so many instances of casual male chauvinism (Rabbit again, but also Tom Marshfield) that it threatens to tip the scales and make even an otherwise favorably disposed reader wonder whether Updike might indeed be a chauvinist. Why, in the fiction of the sixties and early seventies, are so many of the girlfriends and wives of his characters described as dumb or stupid? Is the profusion of lovingly described sexual activity, and the Updikean man-child’s avid focus on female anatomy, indicative of an obsession that blinkers his attitude toward women? Are these symptoms of misogyny?
Updike was sufficiently troubled by this kind of question to issue a protest: “I can’t think of any male American writer who takes women more seriously or has attempted more earnestly to show them as heroines.” But just to be safe, he also issued a blanket apology—“Whatever I don’t know about women I apologize for”—and reaffirmed his writerly intention to encompass as much of humanity as he could. Faced with direct questions about sexism, he mostly avoided combative or defensive answers; he mentioned the influence of his mother, who first stimulated his interest in writing, and the crucial role that women editors, Katharine White and Judith Jones chief among them, had played in his career. And on the page he pushed deeper into the minds of his female characters, gave them better jobs and greater psychic independence. (Janice Angstrom would soon become a prime beneficiary of these efforts.)
In January 1978, a month after the Quinn debacle, as if submitting to classroom penance, he signed his name more than twenty-five thousand times for a Franklin Library “Signature Edition” of
Rabbit, Run
. He did the deed over a two-week stay at the Pineapple Beach Resort on St. Thomas, a mind-numbing junket exactly like the one he inflicted on Henry Bech in “Three Illuminations in the Life of an American Author”—except that Bech was paid a little more than forty thousand dollars, Updike nearly sixty thousand. This was the most lucrative venture in what might be termed Updike’s shadow publishing career, a range of activity that included allowing fine presses to print broadsides, pamphlets, and chapbooks; selling his own manuscripts; and signing proofs and galleys and other collectible items that are part of the publishing process. The audience for this shadow career was not the reading public but collectors, assorted bibliophiles, and friends of the author; the impulse behind it was his love of the printed page (especially when the page was adorned with words he’d written), his sympathy with the collecting instinct, a very Updikean mix of avarice and generosity, and his usual reluctance to say no.
Art and money intersect repeatedly in “Three Illuminations.” In the first vignette, Bech visits his most ardent collector, a sour fellow named Marvin Federbusch who acquires (and asks Bech to sign) every edition of his work, every scrap of “Bechiana”—“What Federbusch didn’t collect deserved oblivion.” But when the collector shows the proud collectee the stacked volumes prudently stored in a closet, Bech spies (“oh, treachery!”) equally exhaustive collections of Roth, Mailer, Barth, and Capote. Mercenary calculation, not literary passion, motivates Federbusch. In the third vignette, Bech takes his mistress to the resort island of San Poco to sign 28,500 tip-in sheets for a special edition of his novel
Brother Pig
(bound, naturally, in genuine pigskin). There’s an added metatextual twist to the humor here: a year after the story appeared in
The New Yorker
, Updike authorized Targ Editions to print a 350-copy edition of it, the numbered volumes priced at forty dollars each—and signed, of course.
Mixed reviews greeted
A Month of Sundays
and
Marry Me
, but otherwise, Updike’s more conventional professional life was largely untroubled. At Knopf, Judith Jones proved a calm, steady presence;
A Month of Sundays
is dedicated to her. William Maxwell retired from
The New Yorker
in 1976 and passed Updike into the care of Roger Angell, Katharine White’s son. It was a smooth segue, though Updike complained that with Maxwell gone, another stitch had been dropped in his “once-close-woven relationship” with the magazine. He had been impatient, in Boston, to start something totally fresh and different—“a novel about penguins, perhaps, or Hottentots”—and when he was well and truly settled in the new house, that project took shape as
The Coup
. His study strewn with guidebooks to Africa, copies of
National Geographic
, and dictionaries of sub-Saharan languages, he conjured up the distant landlocked nation of Kush, overcoming his own early misgivings (after the first chapter, he stopped and thought seriously of not continuing) and every author’s hunger for mindless distraction (he undertook, while writing the novel, to paint the entire exterior of the house—in a shade of red he feared might be too bright). In July 1977, when he was about halfway through the book (but done with the paint job), Vladimir Nabokov died. Updike flew down to New York for the memorial service on a stiflingly hot summer day—the hottest in forty years. He spoke briefly to the crowd in the baking auditorium about an author whom he revered but had never met in person, then read selected passages from the great man’s work. He finished
The
Coup
, his most Nabokovian novel, nine months later—a year and a half after he’d begun.
In the meantime, he had married Martha.
*
T
HE CEREMONY TOOK
place on a sunny Friday morning, the last day of September 1977, at Clifton Lutheran Church in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The youngest of John’s children, Miranda, declined to attend. “It was a protest,” she said; “I wanted my absence felt.” She telephoned her father and told him that she wouldn’t be there, that she was worried about her mother, and that she didn’t want him to get remarried yet. “He was surprised and hurt,” Miranda remembered. Michael was absent, too (and “glad not to be there”); he was in his first year at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. David and Liz were at the ceremony, as were Martha’s sons. There were practically no guests. John’s best man, an Ipswich friend from the couples crowd, liked to say, “I was the best man; I was the only man.” There was no fanfare, no wedding reception; after lunch at a restaurant, Updike went back to work. He typed a letter to Howard Moss about changes to the galleys of his “Spanish Sonnets”; almost as an afterthought, he announced that Martha had that morning become Mrs. Updike.
They were married sixteen months after he and Mary petitioned for divorce—which was as soon as the divorce became final. In his interview with the hated Sally Quinn, he had let it be known that neither Martha nor he was keen to wed a second time; and yet they had seized the earliest opportunity to do so. Of the several reasons for him to be in a hurry, the urge to complete a gesture was foremost. As with Richard Maples, his aim was to “amalgamate and align all his betrayals.” Fifteen years earlier he had tried and failed to leave Mary so he could marry Joyce Harrington. This time, having managed actually to leave, he completed his escape by marrying his mistress. Two families had been broken apart; now he and Martha formally established a third.
His new wife was intelligent, literary, and attractive, a fresh-faced, young-looking blond with a bright smile. He often went out of his way to emphasize their compatibility as a couple—in an intimate, physical sense. In a late story, Updike’s protagonist quotes Emerson’s famous line “We boil at different degrees” and explains his second marriage in those terms: “a woman came along who had my same boiling point.” So it was with Martha.
*
She also played an active part in his professional life in a way Mary never had. Of course Mary had read all his early work and made helpful suggestions, but she stood back, her tact shading into reticence; he felt that over time they became “artistically estranged.” (
Couples
can’t have helped in that regard.)
Mary met John when he was a sophomore in college. Although she recognized his talent from the beginning, she knew him too well to be awestruck when that talent propelled him to literary stardom. Two decades of domestic life—diapers and dishes and dirty ashtrays—are the perfect antidote to hero worship. Martha met John when he was already a world-famous author; she looked at him and saw a great man, admiration welling up like tears in her startling blue eyes.
Never inclined to stand back, Martha marched straight into the role of gatekeeper and protector. When her husband wanted room to write, she held the world at bay, gradually assuming the management of his time, doing her best to make sure that nothing and no one encroached on the hours devoted to his work. And in their early years together she gave him unconditional support, rivaling his mother in her enthusiasm for every scrap of prose and poetry. He showed Martha whatever he wrote; as he put it, “I was very confiding and she was very interested.” All this was motive and more for making her his wife. Nobody would have said, as Joyce Carol Oates said of Martha, that Mary was John’s “equal in every way”—they were so very different, their respective spheres of competence so distinct. Compared with Martha, Mary was shy, passive, serene. The tough and fearless Martha was conspicuously purposeful, unhesitatingly vocal, and perfectly willing to bully John for his own good.
A month after they married, Updike took his new spouse down to Plowville—this was her first sight of her husband in his native habitat. (On their next visit, Martha brought along her youngest son, an eerie reenactment of the visit Joey Robinson makes to his widowed mother’s farmhouse with second wife and stepson in tow.) In the five years since Wesley’s death, Linda had mellowed somewhat, but her energy, determination, and ambition were unflagging. At first she was wary of Martha, noting in a diary signs of her new daughter-in-law’s snobbery. Martha, in turn, flattered her, and tried to ingratiate herself.
As always, Linda’s fiction is the best gauge of her temperament. After Wesley’s death, she had invented for herself a new alter ego: Belle Minuit was replaced by the widowed Ada Gibson, who lives alone on an isolated farm with a profusion of cats. Ada’s son is Christopher, a world-famous illustrator (who draws covers for
The New Yorker
); she and her son have been carrying on a form of teasing banter since he was a child. Now middle-aged, Christopher is married to Joan and has four lively children of his own, two boys and two girls. In a story about Ada’s seventieth birthday, Christopher announces that he’s leaving Joan and taking an apartment in Boston. Ada asks him why he’s “abandoning” his children; he answers, “It’s not easy to say. I’d rather not talk about it.” Ada’s displeasure at her son’s evasiveness doesn’t need to be spelled out; unspoken, it emanates in waves, like one of Linda’s famous “atmospheres.” This was the fourth of five Ada Gibson stories to appear in
The New Yorker
; it was published a little less than two years after John and Martha were married—perhaps Linda thought of it as a delayed wedding present.
Updike was used to seeing himself refracted in his mother’s fiction, but suddenly, in the late seventies, his image came back to him from another source. His son David had a girlfriend with literary aspirations who suggested that he try to write; having shown no previous inclination to pick up a pen, David made an attempt in the summer after his junior year. Back at Harvard, he enrolled in a fiction writing course offered by Ann Beattie, whose first novel,
Chilly Scenes of Winter
, John had reviewed glowingly in
The New Yorker
a couple of years earlier. David got an A in the class, which encouraged him to show his work to his father.
Like his father and his grandmother, David was an autobiographical writer. He wrote about his family, the facts disguised only lightly, if at all—the siblings and the separated parents all easily recognizable. Updike read what his son showed him with a complicated mix of emotions, among them pleasure, pride, and protectiveness—“they were,” he told Maxwell, “very
tender
stories.” He was curious to see how his son saw him, deeply moved by the mere fact that David would want to write, and frankly threatened by this new encroachment on his established literary territory. With Linda writing about Plowville and David writing about Ipswich (native turf in each case), Updike felt hemmed in—an absurd reaction, given his eminence and their obscurity, but as usual he couldn’t help himself, especially after David had a story accepted by
The New Yorker
. John’s competitive instinct kicked in at once: David had cracked the magazine only a year after first trying his hand at writing, with the first story he submitted—and at a younger age than his father.