John Updike moved with his wife, Mary, and their two children from New York City to Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1957. He had just turned twenty-five. He’d spent most of the previous two years working as a staff writer at The New Yorker, but he didn’t enjoy city living—“The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect,” as he put it—and he remained in Ipswich until 1974, when he and Mary separated.
The Updikes liked to attend summer concerts at Castle Hill, a nineteenth-century mansion outside town, overlooking Crane Beach. A friend had bought a local newspaper, the Ipswich Chronicle, and Updike offered, as a favor to him and for the fun of it, to write reviews of the concerts. Over five summers, he published twenty-two reviews in the Chronicle under the nom de plume H.H. (“H” was his middle initial, for Hoyer.)
Long after he left Ipswich, he collected these ephemera and had them published as a book: “Concerts at Castle Hill: John Updike’s Middle Initial Reviews Local Music in Ipswich, Massachusetts, from 1961 to 1965” (Northridge, California: Lord John Press, 1993). David Foster Wallace once asked, quoting, he said, a friend, “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” Not, apparently, if he could help it.
Updike transformed much of his life into prose or verse, which he then tried to get into print somewhere, ultimately in a book. He believed in the creative-writing-class imperative to write what you know. “An imitation of the life we know, however narrow, is our only ground,” he said. But he also, early in his career, simply had trouble describing people and things that he had never seen. One of the few projects that failed to pan out for him was a novel about James Buchanan, our fifteenth and arguably worst President, for whom Updike nourished a perverse respect. He found that he couldn’t manage what he called the “vigorous fakery” of historical fiction. Having never used a spittoon, he said, he was unable to write about one.
But in the world around him and inside his own head there was very little that he couldn’t spin into a rich and intricate verbal fabric. And he believed from the beginning that the proper end of writing is publication. His first submission, a collage, appeared in a children’s magazine when he was five. He wrote his first story at the age of eight and, not long afterward, began regularly mailing his poems and cartoons, accompanied by polite letters to the editors, off to magazines. He wasn’t picky. One of his first poems appeared in National Parent-Teacher: The PTA Magazine (“The Boy Who Made the Blackboard Squeak”). Another, “Move Over, Dodo,” was accepted by the Florida Magazine of Verse.
Updike saved virtually everything. His papers, deposited at Harvard, include his golf scorecards (awaiting, possibly, the emergence of academic golf-crit). The archive also holds his many rejections, most of them form letters, from the magazines he submitted to when he was a schoolboy—places like The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, The Atlantic, Poetry, and The New Yorker. After he became a successful novelist, he regularly brought out collections of his stories, his poems, and, in increasingly hefty omnibuses, his nonfiction prose. He was known for supervising every detail of his books’ production.
He published twenty-six novels in forty-nine years, a rate of publication that he later claimed had been a deliberate choice. “Back when I started,” he told an interviewer in 2008, the last year of his life, “our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop, on the English model, you might say, with a much more regular output. I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.”
He dreamed of a uniform edition of his entire œuvre, which came, in the end, to more than sixty books, not counting chapbooks and small-press limited editions like “Concerts at Castle Hill”—a long list including such titles as “On Meeting Authors” (Newburyport, Massachusetts: Wickford Press, 1968), “Warm Wine, an Idyll” (New York: Albondocani Press, 1973), and “Cunts” (New York: Frank Hallman, 1974).
Updike’s longtime friend Joyce Carol Oates has published more books than he did. His admirer Philip Roth has won more prizes and awards. (Roth has accumulated something like fifty-five to date; Updike racked up more than thirty, including the Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2008, an honor that has thus far eluded Roth.) But Updike acquired, early on, a singular reputation for effortless virtuosity and steady professional recognition.
He began as a prodigy—in his nineteen months as a staff writer, The New Yorker published eighty items by him—and he somehow remained one. His style never chastened or mellowed or became grand with age. He was forever the wise boy. Even after he had published all those books and won all those prizes, he still radiated precocity.
All of which makes him a challenge for a biographer. Updike spent almost his entire life writing; he had very few professional tribulations; and whatever personal adventures he had, no matter how private, he turned into fiction. Adam Begley decided to meet the difficulty head on by treating Updike’s life and Updike’s writing as mutually informing. His “Updike” (Harper) is essentially an extended essay in biographical criticism, an insight into the man through the work and the work through the man.
The approach has obvious risks—reading the fiction too literally, stretching for the biographical bases for characters or events—but Begley is an intelligent writer and he avoids most of the traps. His book is therefore much more than a file cabinet of facts and dates. He saw that the day-by-day, who-the-subject-met-for-drinks approach was, in Updike’s case, a waste of time. So, he thought, was an attempt to probe beneath the mask. “He cultivated none of the professional deformations that habitually plague American writers,” Begley says. “Even his neuroses were tame.”
Writing was what the man was about, and the writing is what Begley focusses on. “Updike” is a highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being. Despite a public manner of gracious nonchalance, Updike did not lack vanity; his skin was as thin as anyone else’s, maybe a millimetre or two thinner. He would not have been more than usually unhappy with this book.
Updike’s life sorts itself into three phases, with a few short interruptions. He came from Shillington, Pennsylvania, which is in Berks County, about sixty miles from Philadelphia. He was born in 1932—a Depression-era child. His father had lost his job and his maternal grandfather had lost his savings in the Crash. The father, Wesley, had been a cable splicer, and was forced to do roadwork under the Works Project Administration until, in 1934, he got a job as a math teacher at Shillington High School, where he spent the rest of his career.
During the Second World War, Updike’s mother, Linda, worked in a parachute factory, and she managed to save enough money to buy back her father’s eighty-three-acre farm, in Plowville, eleven miles out of town. She moved the family to the farm in 1945, when Updike was thirteen. At first, they had no indoor plumbing; Updike and his father used to bathe at the school, in Shillington.
Updike was very close to his mother (she was a writer, too, with a master’s degree from Cornell), but he never completely forgave her. Linda hated Shillington; she said she found it “contemptible.” Yet Shillington became Updike’s lost garden, a way of life against which every other way of living would be measured. Updike formed few lasting friendships in college, and he dropped almost all of his Ipswich friends after he moved away. But Begley says that he kept up with his Shillington High School classmates all his life.
A fictionalized Berks County is the setting for Updike’s best-known fiction: “The Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur” (which is about his father), “Of the Farm” (about his mother), “Olinger Stories” (about himself), and the four Rabbit novels. The upbringing left a few traces in the man, too. Like many people who grew up in straitened circumstances in the nineteen-thirties and became financially comfortable in the decades after the war, Updike had a slightly superstitious relationship to money. He never used an agent. He didn’t put his books out for bid, and, after his first book, a collection of poems published by Harper, came out, he moved to Knopf, and stayed there all his life. He rarely took an advance, and he capped the amount Knopf paid out to him every year, so that he wouldn’t have an earnings spike and the resulting tax burden.
He used a rubber stamp to affix his return address to correspondence in order not to waste money on stationery that might, if he moved, never be used. The practice began as ordinary prudence and became an affectation. Even after he had become a wealthy man living in a mansion in the upscale Boston suburb of Beverly Farms, he stamped his return address.
This caution about money got cleverly incorporated into a slightly exaggerated fastidiousness that was part of Updike’s charm arsenal. Years ago, I was an editor of a magazine piece by Updike that had required him to travel to New York for a day. He expensed the hot dog he bought, from a sidewalk vender, for ninety cents. As he undoubtedly anticipated, we thought that this was extremely droll, and, in keeping with the spirit of the joke, reimbursed him.
Updike’s identification with Berks County and its un-cosmopolitan ways—even after he graduated, summa cum laude, from Harvard, with a senior thesis on “Non-Horatian Elements in Herrick’s Echoes of Horace,” married a Radcliffe fine-arts major who was the daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister, spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, in Oxford, lived in New York City working as a Talk of the Town reporter, and moved to a Boston suburb, where he joined a crowd of prosperous contemporaries who formed recorder ensembles and played volleyball on the beach—was crucial to a deeply defended and fundamentally spurious conception of himself as an ordinary middle-American guy. This imaginary persona, which he more or less flaunted, fooled many people, and led to a lot of critical misunderstanding.
Harvard and New York City were two of the interruptions in Updike’s life. Even though some of his favorite themes, such as wounded innocence and sexual exploration, are, for many people, practically synonymous with going to college, very little of Updike’s fiction is based on his Harvard experience. Updike was not unfriendly to Harvard in later life, but he mostly disparaged its influence. Harvard de-provincialized him, he thought, but at a price. He called it “a betrayal of my high school years.” At Harvard, he told an interviewer, “I lost something very essentially me.”
Classmates remembered Updike as an oddball, amusingly un-preppie—“wonky” was his self-description. He joined the Lampoon, even though, as Begley says, for most of its members the Lampoon is basically a social club. At first, therefore, Updike seemed to be a misfit. Once people realized, though, that he had the capacity to put out the magazine practically single-handed, he was happily accepted. “He could outwork anyone,” his fellow Lampoon writer Michael Arlen told Begley. By the time he graduated, he had contributed seven covers, more than a hundred drawings and cartoons, sixty poems, and twenty-five prose pieces.
Updike’s work for the Lampoon got the attention of the fiction editor at The New Yorker, the redoubtable Katharine White. This led to an introduction to William Maxwell, another editor at the magazine, and, not long after that, to a meeting with William Shawn, and the offer of a job as a staff writer at a place that he had long ago set his heart on publishing in. (“It’s worth pausing here to marvel,” Begley pauses to marvel, “at the unrelieved smoothness of his professional path.”)
Shortly after Updike arrived at the magazine, Katharine White moved to Maine with her husband, the even more redoubtable E. B. White, leaving Maxwell as Updike’s in-house editor. As it turned out, this was yet another lucky break. White had no patience with stories about Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood. She thought that he was at his best with satire and humor pieces. She advised him to avoid stories in which “a young man looks back nostalgically at his basketball-playing days.”
Maxwell thought otherwise. He saw that what White disdainfully called “wistful reminiscence” was one of Updike’s gifts. And, with Maxwell’s encouragement, Updike began producing what became the Olinger stories—which, along with the first of the Rabbit novels, are among his finest achievements.
Updike wrote almost all of his Berks County fiction, except for the last two Rabbit books, in Ipswich. (The Rabbit novels are set in a city called Brewer, a fictionalized Reading, which is not far from Shillington.) But Ipswich gave him the subject with which he was to become both personally preoccupied and publicly identified: adultery.
This is the great theme of Updike’s middle period: “Couples,” which came out in 1968 and sold an astonishing 4.2 million hardcover copies; the eighteen Maples stories, eventually collected as “Too Far to Go,” based on his marriage with Mary; “Marry Me”; and what is sometimes referred to as the “Scarlet Letter” trilogy—“A Month of Sundays,” “S.,” and “Roger’s Version.” (Following a Cold War cultural-diplomacy junket in Moscow and Eastern Europe in 1964, Updike also began, in Ipswich, the Henry Bech stories, which feature a fictional Jewish-American quasi-doppelgänger.)
Begley is more discreet in reporting on this period of Updike’s life than less scrupulous biographers (which is to say, most biographers) might be. The discovery of adultery was personal before it was literary, of course. It seems that Mary and John began having affairs not long after settling in Ipswich, and that almost all of the young concert-going, beach-volleyball-playing couples they socialized with were also carrying on extramaritally in various permutations. Begley says that only two marriages in the Updikes’ circle survived that time, and both of those couples had refrained from participating in the sexual roundelay that was (to use the phrase from “Couples”) the “post-pill paradise” of nineteen-sixties Ipswich.
Updike did not refrain. He slept around at home, and, as a successful novelist invited to perform, he slept around on the road. There were two major crises. The first came in the early nineteen-sixties, when Updike fell in love with Joyce Harrington, one half of a local couple who had three children. Joyce’s husband discovered the affair and demanded a meeting between the two couples. The Updikes obeyed this unusual summons, and the upshot of the ensuing negotiation was that John and Mary took their family—they now had four children—to Europe to let things cool down. Updike was miserable, but he felt that he had finally introduced some uncertainty into what had been a freakishly serene adulthood—“I had at last ventured into harm’s way,” as he put it in his memoir, “Self-Consciousness”—and the marriage survived.
It did not make it through the second crisis, after Updike got involved with Martha Bernhard, the wife in another Ipswich couple, this one with three sons. In 1974, Updike separated from Mary and moved into an apartment in Boston. (That is when he began writing regular book reviews for The New Yorker; they helped him cover his alimony payments.) He and Martha were married in 1977. In a twist much too neat for fiction, Martha’s ex-husband married Joyce Harrington. Updike then ended the Boston, and final, interruption in his life by moving first to Georgetown, a Shillington-like place about ten miles from Ipswich, and, ultimately, to the mansion in Beverly Farms, on the North Shore.
Begley had the coöperation of Mary Updike but not of Martha Updike, and his biography is very much a first wife’s book. The Martha in his pages is, essentially, a controlling schemer. In Begley’s account, she set out to seduce a famous man, then proceeded to isolate him from his friends and children, while he continued laying his golden eggs with the same awesome regularity. Only two of his children, and one friend, attended their wedding. After the ceremony, Updike went back to work.
According to Begley, Christmas celebrations were kept separate, since Martha did not want the children mingling, and she rationed his children’s time with him. When Updike received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, in 1998, two of her children were present, but his were not invited. After Updike moved to Beverly Farms, his old friends blamed Martha for cutting off their access to him—“The big house echoed with solitude” is the way Begley describes it—and when Updike lay dying, of lung cancer, she refused to allow Mary more than one visit.
“The ruthlessness was as much his as hers,” Begley suggests. This is credible. Self-absorption was a key ingredient of Updike’s creativity, and it’s not surprising that it could affect personal relations. He enjoyed parenthood when he was young, but in “Self-Consciousness” he names neither of his wives and only one of his four children, and in passing—though he devotes many pages to his battles with psoriasis. There’s no indication, at least that Begley has found, that Updike was unhappy in his second marriage. He and Martha were married for thirty-one years, and travelled together all over the world. Updike did avoid making Martha explicitly the basis for fictional characters, thereby denying her a form of immortality granted to Mary.
Production didn’t slacken during the Martha phase, but the projects became more unpredictable, and so did their reception. Now he did stage adventurous fictional departures from the local and the autobiographical, and produced novels about unfamiliar times and places. Among the works from those years are “Memories of the Ford Administration,” “The Coup” (about Africa), “Brazil” (what it says), “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” “Terrorist,” “Gertrude and Claudius,” and the witches books, “The Witches of Eastwick,” published in 1984, and “The Widows of Eastwick,” which came out in the last year of his life. Updike also published two more Rabbit books and two more Bechs.
It was characteristic of Updike’s relationship to the politics of his time that when, feeling criticized by feminists, he set out to show he could create strong women characters with careers he came up with witches. Updike was a reluctant liberal. When he heard civil-rights oratory, Begley says, he launched into a blackface routine. He was, notoriously, an “undove,” as he termed it, on Vietnam. Although, in the end, he opposed the war as a lost cause, he never questioned the motives for American intervention. His patriotism was rueful but sincere. “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy” was his often quoted line.
Updike’s justifications for scoffing and balking at liberal causes were weak. “I distrusted orthodoxies, especially orthodoxies of dissent,” he pleaded in “Self-Consciousness,” which is just a knee-jerk response to knee-jerkers. Elsewhere, he explained his allergy to causes as part of the marital agon, a way of putting Mary down by ridiculing her liberal enthusiasms. The children were on Mary’s side. For Christmas once, they gave their father, in exasperation, a large American flag. Updike was not, of course, a racist, a sexist, or a militarist. He was reacting to what he saw as an attitude, but he reacted with another attitude. Contrariness is not a politics.
But contrariness is a literary motivation. Updike told his mother that he abandoned New York and his staff position at The New Yorker partly because he didn’t want to become “an elegant hack.” Updike was not a mere word processor. He had a cultural project. He wanted to rescue serious fiction from what he saw as a doctrinaire rejection of middle-class life and an apocalyptic interpretation of modern history.
His antagonists in this war were writers like John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Orwell. His allies were Henry Green, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, and Roth. And his heroes were Proust and Joyce, novelists who used their own lives as the bases for almost everything they wrote. He pinned their pictures to the wall of his office in downtown Ipswich.
Updike’s subject, in his major fiction, was the life of middle-class American Wasps, and his early works were deliberate responses to writers who he thought had given up on that life, or who saw the world heading toward a brutal future. He wrote the first of the Olinger stories, “Friends from Philadelphia,” in reaction to a John Cheever story that he found too sardonic and grim. He wrote “The Poorhouse Fair,” a futurist novel, in response to Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” He conceived of “Rabbit, Run” as an answer to Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
People who imagine Updike as serenely aloof from the world of his contemporaries, afloat in a bubble of New Yorker fame and public adulation, are missing the point of much of what he wrote. You might think that the Cheevers and the Pynchons had the better side of the argument about postwar American life, but you can do that only if you start by taking Updike seriously.
“Ulysses” begins with a mock celebration of the Eucharist—and so, in fact, does “In Search of Lost Time,” a cookie dipped in a cup of tea. The idea is that literary representation is an act of transubstantiation. Literature pulls the real up out of the realm of temporality and insignificance and remakes it into a form that will never decay and never die. There is nothing doctrinally religious about this conception of the literary act. It is at the heart of modernism. “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance,” Henry James wrote to H. G. Wells. That’s what Updike believed.
From early in his career, Updike was accused of being a naïve, plain-vanilla realist, uninterested in the formal experimentation that was going on in the literary world around him. But “The Poorhouse Fair” is a futurist novel; the protagonist in “The Centaur” is a schoolteacher with the head of a man and the body of a horse; “Rabbit, Run” was written in the historical present, which, in 1959, the year he finished the novel, had rarely been used in fiction. Symbolism, allegory, and myth run through all his novels, even “Couples,” a novel that looks like a soap opera (or a parody of a soap opera).
Updike’s ambitious autobiographical poem, “Midpoint,” experiments with verse form, mixed media, and typography. He wrote novels about supernatural beings; he invented stories about Africa and Brazil and sixteenth-century Denmark. He was never just a chronicler of suburban mores.
The most persistent and mindlessly recycled criticism of Updike’s work is that he was infatuated with his own style, that he over-described everything to no purpose—that, as several critics put it, he had “nothing to say.” But Updike wasn’t merely showing off with his style. He wasn’t, as all those critics were essentially implying, masturbating. He was transubstantiating.
There was nothing secret about this. He explained what he was up to many times. “The Old Testament God repeatedly says he wants praise, and I translate that to mean that the world wants describing,” he once explained to an interviewer. In the preface to the collected Rabbit novels, “Rabbit Angstrom,” he talks about “the religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission.” “The world is the host,” he has a character say in one of his short stories; “it must be chewed.” Writing for Updike was chewing. You can dismiss this conception of the literary vocation as pious or old-fashioned, but, if you do, you are dismissing Joyce and much of literary modernism.
Updike wanted to do with the world of mid-century middle-class American Wasps what Proust had done with Belle Époque Paris and Joyce had done with a single day in 1904 Dublin—and, for that matter, Jane Austen had done with the landed gentry in the Home Counties at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and James had done with idle Americans living abroad at the turn of the nineteenth century. He wanted to biopsy a minute sample of the social tissue and reproduce the results in the form of a permanent verbal artifact.
Updike believed that people in that world sought happiness, and that, contrary to the representations of novelists like Cheever and Kerouac, they often found it. But he thought that the happiness was always edged with dread, because acquiring it often meant ignoring, hurting, and damaging other people. In a lot of Updike’s fiction, those other people are children. Adultery was for him the perfect example of the moral condition of the suburban middle class: the source of a wickedly exciting kind of pleasure and a terrible kind of guilt.
It’s easy to understand why people identify Stephen Dedalus with Joyce, and why they identify the narrator of “In Search of Lost Time” with Proust. But it’s strange that people persist in identifying the protagonists of the Olinger stories and the Maples stories and the Rabbit books with Updike. Those characters are Updikean in certain limited ways—unusually sensitive, unusually death-haunted, unusually horny. But they are not unusually smart or unusually gifted. They could never have created John Updike. And only Updike could have created them. ♦
