Updike Read online

  Over the course of his four years, he supplied the magazine with seven cover illustrations, more than a hundred cartoons and drawings, sixty poems, and twenty-five prose pieces—a prodigious output from someone as serious as Updike was about his studies. His mature judgment on this body of work was not entirely flattering and curiously skewed: “[T]he drawings now give me pleasure to contemplate,” he wrote in 1984, “the prose pieces pain, and the poems a guarded sensation in between.” He was in fact a moderately skilled cartoonist with some funny ideas and what looks like the beginning of a personal style, but it would be hard to argue for genius in the artwork he did for the Lampoon. He liked Chinese jokes: a birthday party where a table of little Chinese kids are singing “Happy Birthday, Tu Yu” to their little friend; or coolies, unimpressed by a union agitator, saying, “Why shouldn’t we work for coolie wages?” He also liked to draw jesters; one of his most charming is a jester in a simmering cauldron (being cooked by absent cannibals, one supposes) who obligingly reaches over his head with a salt shaker to adjust the seasoning. It’s possible that the pleasure he derived in later life from looking at his own drawings was mostly a matter of remembering “the happiness of creation, the rapture of creating something out of nothing.”

  But even as he was churning out cartoons to fill the next issue, Updike recognized that other artists on the Lampoon (especially Doug Bunce and Fred Gwynne) were more skilled and sophisticated than he was—“the budding cartoonist in me, exposed to what I thought were superior talents, suffered a blight.” It was, in effect, the first time he encountered serious competition in a creative endeavor.

  Updike’s written work is another matter: it shows a rare talent emerging. Of the light verse he published in the magazine, he liked four poems well enough to include them in his first collection.* “Mountain Impasse,” written in the spring of his junior year and inspired by a quotation lifted from Life magazine (in which Stravinsky imperiously declared, “I despise mountains, they don’t tell me anything”), is wonderfully witty, cleverly constructed, and flawlessly polished, as the first stanza promises:

  Stravinsky looks upon the mountain,

  The mountain looks on him;

  They look (the mountain and Stravinsky)

  And both their views are dim.

  That summer, he wrote his brief lyric meditation on what he later called “the mythogenetic truth of telephone wires and poles”; it ends with a flash of enchanting poetic imagination, the dip of the wires reconceived as “the flight of a marvelous crow / No one saw: / Each pole, a caw.” That surreal vision—a long leap ahead of even the most skilled undergraduate humor—depends on a gift more precious than verbal ingenuity.

  Easily the most ambitious and accomplished of his Lampoon stories is “The Peruvian in the Heart of Lake Winnipesaukee,” a broadly comical meditation on identity and self-knowledge. Conventional in structure (a straight first-person narrative), it’s nonetheless fresh and original—there can’t be many other stories about a barefoot South American’s journey of self-discovery at a New Hampshire summer camp, especially not ones that feature body paint, operatic arias, and a stolen canoe. It was included in the issue published in September 1953, for which Updike drew the cover (a chicken with a pince-nez and a Harvard sweatshirt confronted by an egg labeled “Class of ’57” and bearing the instruction “HATCH ME”). The same issue contains numerous line drawings signed JHU and a sample, too, of his light verse: a poem called “The Hypocrite,” about a dandy who wears dirty socks. He was truly a one-man band.

  When asked to reflect in later life on his Harvard experience, he often responded with nostalgic riffs about the Lampoon Castle—he’d dredge up memories of gag sessions in the Sanctum, or “the smell of wet old magazines that arose from the cellar,” or the chaotic camaraderie of the Thursday evening dinners served in the Great Hall. He also remembered the lonely bliss of doing cartoon work for the magazine in his narrow, attic-like room on the fifth floor of Lowell House. In an autobiographical essay, he offered a vivid snapshot of himself bent over his Bristol board, “my lower lip sagging in the intensity of my concentration, a cigarette smoking in an ashtray near my eyes. . . . The nervous glee of drawing is such that I sometimes laugh aloud, alone.” He labored tirelessly because he greatly enjoyed the mechanics of what he was doing, both the drawing and the writing; because he loved seeing his work in print; and because his involvement gave him a secure identity around the Yard. But even before he arrived at Harvard, he knew that the Lampoon was an effective stepping-stone, that it would get him noticed in the wider world—which it did.

  It was through the Lampoon old boy network that Updike made his first promising connection with the New York publishing world. Edward Streeter, a Lampoon alumnus who graduated in the class of 1914, was a banker who wrote popular novels in his spare time, among them Father of the Bride and Mr. Hobbs’ Vacation, both of which were made into successful Hollywood movies. Impressed with Updike’s work in the Lampoon, Streeter tipped off his good friend Cass Canfield, who was chairman of Harper and Brothers. In April of his senior year, Updike received a letter from Canfield—care of the Lampoon—asking to see some of the young man’s writing (including the piece “about the Peruvian”), and suggesting that he would welcome the submission of a novel about undergraduate life. Updike replied with a long letter explaining that a novel of undergraduate life was “not my meat” (“Somehow, the people I knew in high school still seem much larger and worthier than my friends at college”); he offered instead a description of two different novels he had in mind, one a satire, the other a tragedy. The satire was to be about a woman named Supermama who is perfect in every way—beautiful, brilliant, superbly capable—and therefore insufferable in the eyes of the opposite sex. (It’s not hard to see Linda looming in the background of that one.) The tragedy was to be about a man who’s determined to be pure and virtuous—and therefore sows havoc around him. Updike admitted that perhaps both of these conceptions were “thin.” Canfield made vague, encouraging noises about Updike’s rather unlikely projects, and sagely suggested that he “choose the one which upon reflection shapes up as the best narrative.” The publisher stayed in touch, faithfully reminding Updike of his interest. Persistence pays: Updike eventually promised that Canfield would get first look at anything he wrote for “book publication.” He kept that promise, with the result that in March 1958, his first book, a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, was published by Harper and Brothers.

  His undergraduate writing also attracted the attention of a powerful New Yorker editor, Katharine White. Although she made no effort to contact him, she kept an eye out for his submissions. As she wrote in the letter that contained his first-ever New Yorker paycheck (fifty-five dollars for “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums”), the quality of Updike’s light verse in the Lampoon had given her hope that one day he might become a contributor.

  It’s no wonder, then, that once he was a comfortably established man of letters, Updike looked back at the Castle with warm feelings of unclouded affection. His strenuous undergraduate efforts not only smoothed his path to The New Yorker but also led to the publication of his first book: Lampy had in effect launched his professional career. But in 1956, when his student days were fresh in his memory, his feelings were mixed at best.* Less than two years out of Harvard, not long after he’d started to work at The New Yorker, he wrote a story with a Salingeresque title—“Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”—that casts a less flattering light on the Lampoon. The brief reunion of two college friends gives Updike a chance to explore the snobbery and resentment bubbling away beneath the show of camaraderie at the Quaff, a clubby campus humor magazine, an obvious stand-in for the Lampoon.

  Hoping to find a job in advertising, twenty-five-year-old Fred Platt arranges a lunch with his pal Clayton Thomas Clayton, who’s been scooting up the corporate ladder via the publicity department of a giant chemical company. Fred, who is from a rich and distinguished New York famil
y, had helped Clayton get onto the Quaff (“Sans Quaff,” Fred thinks, “where would Clayton be?”). Now, with a genial sense of entitlement, Fred feels he ought to be offered employment, especially since getting Clayton elected to the magazine had been an awkward task. A scholarship student from a provincial public high school, Clayton had turned up as a freshman at the Quaff Candidates’ Night with an armful of framed cartoons (exactly as Updike had). The tweedy set dismissed him as “wonky” and “right out of the funny papers”; they thought it “pathetic” that his drawings were framed; they sneered at his “cocoa-colored slacks and sport shirts.” But Fred, recognizing that the nervous kid with the ridiculous name had talent (“The point was he could draw”), sensing that he could be helpful to the magazine, and wishing also to be kind, insisted that Clayton Thomas Clayton be elected. And it seemed at first a fine thing: “His Quaff career had been all success, all adaptation and good sense, so that in his senior year Clayton was president, and everybody said he alone was keeping silly old Quaff alive.” (Thus far, Clayton is Updike’s double, step for step.) Later, with the benefit of hindsight, Fred saw that instead of keeping the Quaff alive, Clayton had caused “the club, with its delicate ethic of frivolity,” to wither: “The right sort had stopped showing up.”

  By the “right sort,” Fred means people like him—elegant, privileged sophisticates. Clayton, by contrast, is all vulgar business. He says things like “People are always slamming advertising, but I’ve found it’s a pretty damn essential thing in our economy.” We’re told that Clayton loves work; Fred thinks it’s all Clayton knows how to do: “His type saw competition as the spine of the universe.” Here, too, Clayton resembles Updike: in the words of his Lampoon friend Michael Arlen, “John was always a striver. He took pleasure and satisfaction from being a striver. He could outwork anyone.” But Updike and Clayton differ in that Clayton, who has neither charm nor wit, is still (three years out of college) stubbornly gauche; and he still seethes with resentment against the “tin gods” who snubbed him at college.

  Who did Updike think was the “right sort”? Did he favor feckless Fred, the upper-class dilettante, or industrious Clayton, the middle-class go-getter? On the whole, Clayton comes off worse, but only because Updike plays on the reader’s own snobbery by making Fred charming and Clayton crass. Though Fred gets the last word, his triumph is hollow. Frustrated in his quest for a job, having decided that Clayton is “helplessly offensive,” Fred mocks him when they’re saying good-bye—gratuitous cruelty that leaves a sour taste. Updike’s evenhanded treatment of the whole encounter suggests that by 1956 he had achieved a detached and mature understanding of the Lampoon social dynamic. But that doesn’t mean he had found it easy to be a Clayton-like character in the midst of the tin god contingent. In his sophomore year a campus rumor circulated about a drunken dinner at the Castle punctuated by an outburst from a bleary Updike who climbed onto the table to denounce his fellow Poonsters as goddamn shitty snobs. Years later he described himself as an angry young man during his college career, but if so, there’s no indication that he acted on his anger; more likely, he looked back and thought he ought to have been angry.

  INNOCENTLY OBLIVIOUS TO these pressures and resentments, Updike’s parents were thrilled by his success at the Lampoon—“one of the most exclusive of all exclusive societies,” as Linda called it. She added, in oracle mode: “Once in a while, perusing the dictionary, I meet Icarus and remember that certain very real and special dangers are prepared for all men who leave the muddy routine that seems to be the usual lot of God’s creatures. And yet a moment free in the air is probably worth a lifetime in the mud.” Whenever a new issue of the magazine was in the offing, her letters were full of proud anticipation. And soon enough his parents had other reasons to be pleased. Though his grades weren’t at first uniformly excellent (Latin dragged down his freshman year average), and though he claimed to have “peaked” as a scholar in his junior year, his academic record was remarkable enough for him qualify as one of Phi Beta Kappa’s “Junior Eight,” which meant that he was among the top ten scholars in a class of more than a thousand. He eventually graduated summa cum laude—a fitting tribute to his intelligence and diligence.

  Because most of his courses were in literature, the bulk of his work consisted of reading. It was during these four years—a period when the Harvard English department was particularly strong—that he laid the groundwork for what became, in time, a monumental erudition. In his memoirs, he recalled a moment of special happiness on the day he attended the introductory meeting of Hyder Rollins’s course in late Romantic poetry:

  As I settled into the first lecture, in my one-armed chair, my heart was beating like that of a boy with a pocket of heavy nickels as he walks through the door . . . of a candy shop. It would be bliss . . . I thought, to go on forever like this, filling in one’s ignorance of English literature slot by slot, poet by poet, under the guidance of tenured wizards, in classrooms dating from the colonial era, while the down-drooping golden-leaved elm branches shivered in the sunlight outside in the Yard.

  Chief among the tenured wizards was Harry Levin, whose lectures on Shakespeare, “delivered with a slightly tremulous elegance” to a capacity crowd in Emerson Hall, stressed the idea of “dominant metaphor.” To Updike, Levin’s resolutely textual approach, orthodox New Criticism with the emphasis on explication, was a revelation: “That a literary work could have a double life, in its imagery as well as its plot and characters, had not occurred to me.” It’s a lesson he never forgot, and one he put to use even in his earliest fiction, where patterns of imagery and metaphor complement and complicate the narrative. Even if the subject and tone of his first stories (“Friends from Philadelphia,” say, or “Ace in the Hole,” which he wrote in the fall of his senior year) are decidedly nonliterary, they were designed to repay with interest the kind of close textual analysis favored by Levin.

  Though he concentrated on the poetry of the English Renaissance, Updike also took courses on Anglo-Saxon poetry, on the metaphysical poets, on Spenser and Milton, on Samuel Johnson and his times (a celebrated course taught by Walter Jackson Bate), on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and on George Bernard Shaw. He enrolled in a series of writing courses. In sophomore year he was taught by a “staid, tweedy” poet and Chaucer scholar named Theodore Morrison, who favored modern masters, read aloud from Hemingway, and allowed Updike to submit chapters of a novel. The next year, there was Kenneth Kempton (“the least tweedy of writing instructors”), who read aloud to his class the J. D. Salinger stories then appearing in The New Yorker, another revelation for Updike. Listening with rapt attention, he discovered fresh possibilities for the short story, among them the idea that religious concerns could be smuggled into an urban setting populated by young people not unlike him. “It’s in Salinger,” he later acknowledged, “that I first heard . . . the tone that spoke to my condition.” He was especially wowed by “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” which taught him that a “good story could be ambiguous, the better to contain the ambiguity of the world”—a notion he put to work in a number of early stories (including “Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?”). In his senior year, his writing course was taught by Albert Guérard (“the very model of a cigarette-addicted Gallic intellectual”), who turned Updike away when he first applied as a sophomore but now recognized his talent—and even urged him to send a story to The New Yorker. (Though it was rejected at the time, a year later Updike submitted a lightly revised version, which was accepted.)

  Little by little he was rethinking his ambitions, largely because he now recognized that he was a better writer than a cartoonist. The novel he was writing in installments for Morrison’s class, three thousand words every two weeks, was called Willow; it was set in a small town not unlike Shillington.* In a letter to his parents, Kit grumbled about John’s easy schedule—“None of his courses seem to demand any work. And all he does is write his novel.” The next letter provided detail, delivered in Lasch’s typically wry tone: “
Updike keeps plowing ahead on his novel. He has written about ninety pages. Some of it is very good. The book . . . is about high school. He is well qualified to write that book.” Updike disagreed with that last judgment. Although Morrison was kind and encouraging (as well as shrewd), his encouragement wasn’t enough to prevent Updike from abandoning Willow. Years later he described it as “a kind of younger Couples” (a gang of teenagers’ tangled love affairs) and “terribly amateurish.”

  By the time he graduated, he later estimated, he was “eighty-five percent bent upon becoming a writer.” His Smith Corona had displaced Bristol board. Perhaps he would have been a hundred percent committed to the writing life had he earned a spot in the most prestigious Harvard creative writing course, Archibald MacLeish’s English S, a yearlong seminar limited to twelve students. Updike twice applied and was twice rejected, a rare setback in an otherwise monotonously triumphant career.*