Imitation of Life (original) (raw)

Updike published some sixty books and won more than thirty prizes. But even after all that production and all that fame, he still radiated precocity.Photograph by Irving Penn / © Condé Nast

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 David Foster Wallace once asked, quoting, he said, a friend, “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”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.