John Updike, a Writer Who Found Transcendence in the Ordinary
JOHN UPDIKE is one of the most gifted writers America has ever known. Few have ever written as gracefully, or if they did, they didn’t publish 62 books. In The New Yorker magazine alone, Updike published 154 poems, 170 short stories and 327 book reviews. He was calmly prolific and superb, but with a rare taste for the ordinary.
Updike was born in 1932, and raised mostly in a white house in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In his family, and in small-town Pennsylvania, Updike felt a strong sense of security and order. Towering horse-chestnut trees shaded the streets. Most of his kindergarten classmates graduated from high school with him. As an only child of two encouraging parents, he got lots of attention. The nearby city of Reading had a fine public library and the conscientious teachers of Shillington public schools hammered into their students the basics of English grammar.
John’s father, Wesley Updike, was a science and math teacher at Shillington High, a truth-seeker, who thought it a Christian duty to absorb criticism, and went out of his way to help hitchhikers get where they needed to go. By the time John was a teenager, he found Wesley Updike’s calm softness embarrassing.
John’s mother, Linda Updike, was an educated, ambitious woman, more energetic and acerbic than her husband. She published stories under her maiden name, Linda Grace Hoyer. From earliest childhood, John saw her at the typewriter, and knew that to be “a writer” was to be devoted to an important, complex craft.
Many of Updike’s short stories share the general set-up of his childhood: a mother who is loving, ambitious, and a worrier; a father honest, reticent and weak; and a watchful child, his nose pressed against the window. Being an only child gave him the sense that it was his own job to find happiness. (“We feel safe, huddled within human institutions — churches, banks, madrigal groups — but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments.”)
Looking back on the town and the time, Updike was touched that Shillington encouraged his yearnings for artistic success. His “dream fuel” included Walt Disney movies, detective novels and an artist who lived across the street. John’s piano teacher lent him books. The local department store had a lending library.
The movies of Errol Flynn and of Fred Astaire also touched him. Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood, half-smiling under his mustache, as he led his merry men through Sherwood Forest. Fred Astaire, gliding in white tie and tails, across a stage in glamorous New York City. For the rest of his life, Updike was dimly aware of trying to be as debonair as Fred Astaire.
Young Updike also loved The New Yorker, and drunk it in, the cover paintings; the advertisements hinting at glamorous, big-city life; even the distinctive type face of the articles. But he loved best the cartoons. He dreamed of being published in The New Yorker as a cartoonist, or a humorist. Only slowly did “serious” literary intentions appear.
By age 8, he was sending off poems and cartoons to magazines, hoping carefully that he might be published in National Parent-Teacher or the Florida Magazine of Verse. He adored James Thurber’s cartoons, and in 1943, when he was 11, John Updike put on his Christmas list Thurber’s cartoon collection “Men, Women and Dogs.” His parents came through with the book, and on Christmas Day John lay down and read it right near the Christmas tree while a light-blue Lionel train circled the railroad track. He didn’t fully grasp many of the cartoons, but he knew the book was sophisticated and came from New York. That was enough. When he wrote James Thurber a fan letter, Thurber wrote a note back and enclosed an original drawing.
As a shy, artistic kid, Updike’s peers were more often girls than boys. He was often a confidant of female classmates in crises, family or romantic. Unable to talk about what these girls told him, he used it as material for poems and short stories. He later wrote of this period: “I drank up women’s tears and spat/ them out/as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.”
Religion was there also in Shillington, a sturdy institution giving off an old-fashioned sense of Christian hope, and a skeptical view of glories too easily bestowed on human excellence. Updike drew from his Christianity a sense that the truest rewards in life may be very slow in coming — always a useful lesson for a writer.
Because his father was a teacher at Shillington High, John Updike knew the high school long before he attended it. His father had a homeroom in Room 204, and John often helped his father prepare for the next day. They used a supply closet which had “a fragrant trim mystery of glossy new textbooks and virgin paper.” John heard the murmur of adult voices in the after-hours world of the school. His father was the timekeeper at the Shillington High basketball games and so John saw many of those games, noted the frenzied action, and the commotion caused when one of the high school kids became a star.
Updike and his classmates were born in the worst years of the Depression, and many of them were only children. It didn’t occur to them that life should be easy or without rules. Like almost everyone he knew, John was leery of any prank that might offend the police. Rebellion against the social order was a luxury Shillington families couldn’t afford. Parents and teachers — and the Hollywood movies that played in town — told children that even minor character flaws were punished sooner or later.
But Updike’s Shillington High school years were fun. On Friday nights in 1948, you took the trolley car into Reading to see Shillington High play football in Albright Stadium. The girls wore low skirts, angora sweaters, saddle shoes, bright red lipstick and wonderfully alluring perfume. The boys had short hair, wet-combed in the lavatory, and a pack of unfiltered cigarettes in their right shirt pocket. After school, teenagers packed themselves into the luncheonette on Lancaster Avenue, the girls standing in perfumed clumps and Russ Morgan singing “So Tired” on the jukebox, while the pinball machines went rockety-ding! rockety-ding!
Updike arrived at Harvard University 6’3” with bright eyes. He was incredibly observant and seemed amused by much of what he saw. He stammered slightly and his voice was feathery soft, but he spoke in complete sentences, offering startling insights in a self-deprecating manner. He could speak memorably, without notes or preparation and reminded none of his friends at Harvard of anyone they knew.
At Harvard, Updike read a great deal, marveled at Shakespeare, wept over Dostoyevsky, and savored the interior monologues of James Joyce in Ulysses. Still regarding himself more as a humorist than a serious writer, he found the Harvard Lampoon, the humor magazine and club. In time, Updike became president of the “Poon” — yet always felt outside of it. There were Lampoon Parades, with hay wagons, beer kegs, and pretty Radcliffe girls but how these things materialized was never clear to him.
In the Lampoon Building, the attitude toward matters of legality was sharply different than in Shillington. Updike was “amazed by the élan with which my well-to-do colleagues on the Poon disdained the law.” Updike was still troubled by the memory of not having reported a boy for stealing a candy bar from the Shillington luncheonette; now his Lampoon friend Bink Young, ratty sneakers perched on a wooden desk, plotted stealing a battleship from Boston Harbor.
In 1954, as a Harvard senior, Updike married his Radcliffe girlfriend, Mary Pennington, a minister’s daughter. He graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude, and soon he and Mary had a baby daughter. 1954 was also the year The New Yorker first accepted an Updike short story and bought a poem he’d written, and for the rest of his life, that first transaction with The New Yorker seemed to Updike his “greatest triumph.”
After a year studying in England, with a wife and child to support, Updike moved to New York and a job with The New Yorker as a “Talk of the Town” reporter. He was not only employed by a magazine he’d adored as a boy, but personally recruited for the position by the sainted E.B. White. Still, being a “Talk” reporter was confining. Talk reporters were given ideas, on pink slips, from The New Yorker editor, William Shawn. You looked through your pink slips, chose one, and wrote a piece. It might be killed as insufficiently droll, or unpardonably boring. If it was good, it might be coaxed into the magazine but might, even then, need a rewrite.
In 1957, Updike quit The New Yorker staff. In his 19 months on the magazine, he had published 80 items in it, but he felt “squeezed” and wanted to write novels, not churn out “Talk” pieces. The literary atmosphere in New York seemed to him poisonous — not at all what Fred Astaire had promised when he danced in all those movies set in Manhattan. Updike knew he needed to leave New York.
He chose not to return to Pennsylvania; the hypersensitive boy had been stung a little too often by the small-town snobberies of Shillington. Instead, he moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, whose sunny beach would help treat his psoriasis. He’d had a secure day job at The New Yorker, and admirers on the staff. But, as he wrote in 1965: “The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance. Perversity is the soul’s very life.”
In Ipswich, Updike vowed to write a book a year. He found his head was clearer outside New York, and he was proud of taking this risk, but he was betting on a larger talent he wasn’t fully sure he had. Also, freelancing was lonely; he missed Mr. Shawn’s pink slips with the ideas on them.
Updike loved the early drafts of his novels — but not too much. He expected each piece to generate its own music, and if he heard no music, he abandoned the piece rather than try to impose music on a silent first draft. He didn’t agonize as he wrote. He expected to feel “a kind of tautness” inside him as he wrote, and when the writing was working, the tautness remained as he sped up or slowed down.
Updike’s second novel, “Rabbit, Run” made his reputation. He wrote “Rabbit, Run” thinking of those basketball stars he’d watched as a kid in Shillington, when his father was the timekeeper. What happened, he wondered, to those high school hot-shots when the high school games and the wildly cheering crowds were gone? Updike created Harry “Rabbit’ Angstrom, plunked him down in post-high school malaise, and watched him run from it all, from his wife and every single one of his duties. Many readers asked: “Why is Rabbit running?” Updike was thinking of the tension between bursts of self-gratification, runs toward pleasure, and dutiful self-sacrifice. Updike once described Rabbit as “wild and timid, harmful and loving, hard-hearted and open to the motions of Grace.”
“Rabbit, Run” was beautifully written, and Updike put it in the present tense, which gives it a brave and nervous vitality. The book sold well, and is still probably Updike’s best-known book, though it was not his favorite. He wrote three more “Rabbit” novels, following Rabbit Angstrom through life.
Updike often wrote about father and sons, and the ways in which fathers are both rivals and protectors. Around 1964, Updike published “The Centaur,” a sad novel about a schoolmaster father and his ambitious son. The father tries to discipline the son, but hesitates, lacking the cruelty or guts to make it stick. The father teaches school, full of duty and obligation — but his life dwindles, sapped by self-sacrifice. You can call it a “symbolic” or “mythological” novel, but it’s also pretty clearly a shot at Wesley Updike.
Once when Updike was home in Shillington, shortly after “The Centaur” appeared, a family friend who’d taken Sunday School classes with Wesley Updike went after John for “The Centaur,” saying it was an unflattering, unfair portrait of a good man. Wesley was there in the room and, kind-hearted as ever, turned to the guest and said, “No, it’s the truth. The kid got me right.”
In the 1960’s, Updike watched the social and sexual mores of America changing. He later called the late 60’s ”kind of a dark carnival.” He was not as politically liberal as most writers, and had no eagerness to wreck “the establishment.” He once said: “It is my general sense of human institutions that they are outcroppings of human nature, that human nature is slow to change, that in general when you destroy one set of institutions you get something worse.”
He was surprised that sexual themes had begun to concern him, and to emerge in his writing. But, determined not to be a prude, he gamely wrote about sex, accepting the fact that certain conservatives among his readers — including some people he revered in Shillington, Pennsylvania — would deeply disapprove. Since the words in Updike’s books came to his readers silently and intimately, he saw no reason for those words to be “proper.”
“Couples” was Updike’s first novel set outside Pennsylvania. It was set in “Tarbox, Massachusetts,” a beach town a lot like Ipswich, and in the book there’s a lot of casual adultery. Updike was unsure of his own marriage. He wrote once about learning to dance: “Lacking brothers and sisters, I was shy and clumsy in the give-and-take and push and pull of human interchange. That slight roughness, that certainty of contact we ask for from others, was hard for me to administer; I either fled, or was cruel.”
When people told him that writing about sex was in poor taste, Updike replied that “good taste” and “poor taste” are social concepts, not artistic ones. He felt that criticizing any honest work of art on grounds of “taste” marked the critic as tacky and superficial. He DID feel sympathy for his wife Mary, a quiet, rather private woman who would have preferred her genius-writer husband to explore areas other than sex in his fiction. She once said gamely: “I’ve gotten used to being written about.”
But Updike felt his interest in sex came from an honest and important question: ‘What do Americans have, if they no longer have religious faith?’ Where and how do they find transcendent moments if they don’t set foot in church? How do they experience sin if they don’t believe in Hell? (In the ‘Rabbit’ books, white sand beaches seem to stand in for Heaven and crowded airports for Hell.) Well, there were always movies and sports events and cars, and strong, turbulent, feelings of family duty. But it seemed to John Updike that, for many Americans, sex was the closest they came to transcendence.