Authors: Adam Begley
Updike was at least somewhat constrained by the offstage presence of Nancy Wolf (“Nora” in Updike’s memoirs, the “so-called girlfriend,” as Lasch dubbed her), who was back in Shillington, a senior at the high school. In the run-up to Christmas vacation, following an argument with his mother (sparked when she discovered that he’d put in a telephone call to Nancy but not to his parents), Updike vowed not to see Nancy while he was home. His resolve failed him: on January 11, Lasch wrote to his parents that Updike had “spent a good deal of time with his high-school flame, the infamous Nancy, who seems to have made her move and got her talons even more firmly fastened in him.” Agreeing with Linda (and, so it seemed to Updike, with nearly everyone in Shillington) that this long-distance affair was a poor idea, Lasch expressed regret that the inevitable end of the romance had been delayed: “It is too bad; he just seemed to be getting loose.” But even if he’d succeeded in shaking free from Nancy, Updike’s work habits and his various ailments would probably have kept other girls out of the picture.
He wrote relatively little about his college years (“Harvard has enough panegyrists without me”), but “The Christian Roommates,” written in 1963, is set in a Harvard dorm exactly like Hollis. Interestingly—unusually—he put himself and his roommate off to one side, as foils to the central characters, Orson Ziegler and Henry (“Hub”) Palamountain, a comically mismatched duo whose fraught relations are the story’s main concern. Straight-arrow Orson professes to hate Hub (who’s as bizarre as Orson is normal), but Updike hints broadly that what he feels is something closer to love; the roomies’ “marriage,” though more fractious, is as teasingly homoerotic as Ishmael and Queequeg’s cozy first night at the Spouter-Inn.
Updike calls his alter ego Kern (as he does in several other stories, including “Pigeon Feathers”); Lasch’s stand-in is called Dawson. The caustic description of the pair—both of them ace students and aspiring writers—is a faithful likeness of the Harvard freshmen who lived in Room 11. “Dawson had a sulky, slouching bearing, a certain puppyish eagerness, and a terrible temper. He was a disciple of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway and himself wrote in a stern, plain style.
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He had been raised as an atheist.” Kern, a churchgoer who “smoked and talked incessantly,” is sketched with economy and ruthless detachment: he’s a Pennsylvania farm boy “bent on urban sophistication,
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riddled with nervous ailments ranging from conjunctivitis to hemorrhoids”; Orson, the story’s protagonist, likes Kern but also detects in him something “subtly vicious.” The dynamic between Kern and his roommate Dawson is delicate, even though they’re pals. Kern feels he has to placate the sulky Dawson, to tiptoe around his temper; between them they deploy “a battery of running jokes.” (Thanks to his mother, Updike was adept at coping with the hazards of sharing close quarters with someone short-tempered and unpredictable.)
“The Christian Roommates” offers a sobering look at how challenging Harvard could be, socially as well as academically, for the incoming freshmen. In the dorm are two “Negroes” (“Carter was from Detroit and very black, very clipped in speech, very well dressed. . . . Young was a lean, malt-colored boy from North Carolina, here on a national scholarship, out of his depth, homesick and cold”); neither of them graduates. Another casualty, Petersen, an “amiable Swede” from Minnesota, also drops out, whereas his roommate, Fitch, “a child prodigy from Maine,” hangs on—after suffering through a full-blown nervous breakdown at the end of his first year. More resilient are the two Jews, Silverstein and Koshland, both from New York, tough and savvy kids who “treated Cambridge as if it were another borough.” Taking his cue from the relatively preppy-free Hollis, Updike deliberately populates the dorm with public school graduates; he’s not interested in the many freshmen who had the advantage of being “launched by little Harvards like Andover and Groton”—though he insists, melodramatically, that even the preppies will eventually have their difficulties: “the institution demands of each man, before it releases him, a wrenching sacrifice of ballast.” That sacrifice comes soonest for those students who have neither an East Coast pedigree nor the prep-school background that is usually part of the package.
Orson Ziegler, a doctor’s son from South Dakota, is a case in point. Though he arrives on registration day confident and decisive about his future (he, too, will be a doctor), the shock of Harvard nearly derails him. Part of his problem is the irritation of living with the exasperatingly smug and militantly eccentric Hub (who tears up notices from the draft board without opening them and scatters them out the window), but he’s also overwhelmed by his studies: “Orson perceived how little he knew, how stupid he was, how unnatural all learning is, and how futile.” The fact that he earns three As and a B in his first semester is neither a consolation nor a cushion against the strain of the second semester, when his anguish takes on a frightening aspect: “As spring slowly broke, he lost the ability to sleep. Figures and facts churned sluggishly in an insomniac mire. His courses became four parallel puzzles. . . . Sleepless, stuffed with information he could neither forget nor manipulate, he became prey to obsessive delusions.” Balanced on a “high wire of sanity,” and nearly tipped into the abyss by his hysterical reaction to Hub’s loopy antics, Orson finishes his exams and escapes home. The last three paragraphs of the story take a synoptic view of the roommates’ respective fates. Hub becomes an Episcopalian priest and eventually a missionary in South Africa;
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Orson fulfills his ambition and leads an “honorable” life as a physician in his hometown in South Dakota. “In one particular only—a kind of scar he carries without pain and without any clear memory of the amputation—does the man he is differ from the man he assumed he would become. He never prays.” This ominously announced apostasy is the “sacrifice” Harvard has demanded of him. As the portentousness of those last lines suggests, “The Christian Roommates” is not one of Updike’s best stories.
Updike’s achievements at Harvard were more spectacular than Orson’s, and he emerged with his faith effectively intact. And yet it would be a mistake to think that his academic success came easily. He worked for it with the driving energy and keen concentration that he would later bring to his writing. At the same time, he had to develop a self-protective disregard for the demands and strictures of the social hierarchy, a “feigned haughtiness,” as one classmate described it. Almost everyone who knew Updike at the time stresses that he was
different
—a little odd, and certainly not a mainstream Harvard type. He looked different and he dressed differently. Knowing this—as any self-conscious young man necessarily would—can’t have been comfortable. But adversity has its rewards. Just as the boredom and isolation of Plowville pushed him to develop his creative talent, so the social pressure at Harvard hardened him and reinforced his desire to put his talent to use.
A
FTER THE EXCITEMENT
of shopping for his courses (in addition to Latin, math, and freshman English, he chose Social Science 1, a history course grandly entitled Introduction to the Development of Western Civilization), there was the equally serious business of the
Lampoon
tryouts. Updike was keenly aware of the magazine and its illustrious alumni (including Robert Sherwood, William Randolph Hearst, and Robert Benchley, one of his idols); the opportunity to join its editorial staff had been an important factor in his choice of Harvard over Cornell. The summer after high school, while he was rubbing elbows with the journalists at the
Reading
Eagle
, he’d seen an article about the
Lampoon
in a magazine called
Flair
, complete with a photograph of the undergraduate editors and samples of their cartoons and verses. He was still dreaming of becoming a cartoonist, and he knew that the
Lampoon
, if he could make the cut, would be an auspicious beginning. Needless to say, his mother was cheering him on.
But the Lampoon is not just a magazine; it’s also an exclusive undergraduate club housed in a curious flatiron building that sits parallel to Mount Auburn Street, crouched like a friendly, slightly goofy sphinx with a jolly face staring out of a tower topped by a copper ibis. The interior, equally eccentric and ostentatious, well worn, comfy, dimly lit, is unmistakably that of a clubhouse. Though he claimed to have been blissfully ignorant as a freshman of the social dimension of the organization he was so eager to join, Updike did write to his mother, after his first visit, about the “soft-spoken aristocrats” he met there. Twenty years later, in an introduction to a
Lampoon
anthology, he described the place as “an outcropping . . . of that awful seismic force . . . Wasp Power.” His jocular tone partly obscures the seriousness of his point: “The Lampoon is a club and, as do all clubs, feeds off the delicious immensity of the excluded.” The Castle, as the Lampoon building is known, was an elitist stronghold well defended by a cohort of young Boston Brahmins, in the midst of an unabashedly elitist university. And yet Updike prospered there, proving that he could be at once clubbable—this was only the first of several exclusive institutions he would join over the course of a lifetime—and blessedly immune to ambient snobbery. He held his own among the Boston blue bloods and the New York sophisticates. If the well-to-do social members of the Lampoon bothered him, he gave little sign at the time; and he didn’t become a snob himself. He could enjoy the pranks and the alcohol-fueled fun without inquiring into the pedigrees of his fellow revelers or indeed what he called the “social engineering” that went into all the merrymaking. With hindsight, he judged that the Lampoon was “saved from mere sociable fatuity by being also
The Lampoon
, a magazine.” (By the same token, one could say that Updike himself was saved from snobbery by his devotion to work—he was too busy, too driven, to give himself airs.) And as it happened, the magazine was ideally suited to Updike’s tastes, talents, and prodigious energy: when it started in 1876, it had been modeled on
Punch
, the British humor magazine, but it had recently begun to ape
The New Yorker
, the object of Updike’s ambition from the age of twelve.
The competition to become a Lampoon member began near the start of each semester, and the candidates were elected (or not) several months later. The successful candidates were then subjected to “Fools’ Week,” a prank-filled initiation. Always in a hurry to get ahead, Updike decided against waiting until spring, so on the appointed evening at the end of September, only a week or so after he’d arrived in Cambridge, he turned up at the Castle to try his luck. One of the upperclassmen on hand to inspect the new crop of prospective fools was Michael Arlen, son and namesake of the author of
The Green Hat
. Arlen père had been a literary celebrity in London in the 1920s, and his son grew up in the south of France, went to boarding school in England, and then came to America just before the war. Two years ahead of Updike, young Michael Arlen was possessed of all the panache the kid from Pennsylvania was so eager to acquire. Arlen’s account of that evening gives an indication of the distance Updike still had to travel:
It was a rainy night—improbable to remember across those many years, but there’s the objective correlative: so many of the freshmen, including John, were wearing galoshes. (Upperclassmen were far too cool, too in league with the devil, to do that.) There was John—a little taller than most, a shock of hair, prominent nose. He had a book bag in which he was carrying
framed
cartoons from the Shillington high-school newspaper.
Though he may have been aware that his clothes were wrong—
wonky
is the term Updike preferred—he was still too green to know that framing one’s own cartoons was a blatant faux pas.
A surprising number of Updike’s classmates vividly remember his freshman year clothes and distinctly nonpreppy appearance. He wore a green corduroy jacket and wide, knitted ties, and his hair looked like he’d just dragged himself out of bed; with his long limbs, thin face, and angular features, he resembled his own cartoons of a court jester. Later, once he’d settled in (and began to jettison the clothes his mother had bought him in Reading), he dressed in the English major’s de facto uniform—a gray coat and narrow necktie—but he was never, as an undergraduate, slick or polished. He bounced up and down—vaulting over parking meters as he’d done in Shillington—so excited was he by the Cambridge scene. He sometimes whinnied when he laughed, and cackled in an endearing way at his own corny jokes; his smile, a deep
V
, was crooked; and he stammered, of course—not for show, as some effete Poonsters did, but because at times he genuinely couldn’t get the words out.
If not for his evident talent and enthusiasm, the Lampoon’s contingent of tweedy, soft-spoken aristocrats would have blackballed him. Luckily, it was immediately apparent to a few of the more perceptive members that he would be an asset to the magazine, and on that basis he was elected. Arlen remembers that “John seemed a cut above even the talented people there. Everyone thought he was unusually gifted.” There was no mistaking his eagerness; once he’d joined,
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he became an avid participant in the brainstorming “gag sessions,” and a relentlessly prolific contributor to the magazine—in some of the issues, over half of the artwork (signed “JHU,” for John Hoyer Updike) was his. “An undergraduate magazine,” he later explained, “creates a wonderfully ongoing vacuum for those who want to fill it.” Although Updike was elected as a cartoonist (“he was much fonder of his cartoons than anyone else,” according to Arlen), what his fellow Poonsters came to prize most was his light verse. “It was a disappearing craft, like harpsichord tuning,” said Arlen, “but John was writing, even in freshman year, almost
New Yorker
–level light verse. He could turn it out effortlessly, and we were always short of material.”