by Begley, Adam
It would be neat and tidy to say that the shock of the killing marked the beginning of an outward turn, that on the morning of November 23, Updike woke from his sybaritic suburban slumber, looked hard at the world around him, and resolved to broaden his perspective and re-create in his fiction a “dense reality” through thick description charged with cultural and political energy—daily data with a kick. He did write the “Comment” in the first New Yorker after the assassination, a curiously pallid piece that begins, “It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream,” and ends, “We pray not to fall into such a sleep again.” In fact, he slumbered on for another few years. It was the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War—along with his travels behind the Iron Curtain late in 1964—that did the most to open his eyes. When the president was assassinated, Updike and his fellow suburbanites were still complacently self-involved. “We had become detached from the national life,” he remembered. “Our private lives had become the real concern. There was a monstrous inflation of the private life as against the merged life of the society.” As in Tarbox, the party in Ipswich carried on regardless.
Updike, having pretty much exhausted Tristanism, embarked on Don Juanism, cutting a swath through the ranks of the town’s young matrons. He embarked on a string of affairs with his friends’ wives, some of which were merely flings, some more extended, though none of the women engaged his emotions as deeply as Joyce had done. He did get one of them pregnant (his paradise wasn’t wholly post-pill); the woman in question, thanks to a timely case of German measles, was able to obtain a legal abortion. Updike was greatly relieved, and the affair ended—by mutual agreement.* More flings followed. A friend from the couples group who managed to resist his charms told me, “At a certain point I thought, ‘Am I the only woman in our crowd who hasn’t slept with John?’ ” She was not, in fact, unique—but nearly. Another friend told me, “It was a matter of a certain pride to be sleeping with John.”
He was a lusty man, and after Joyce, he had no scruples about adultery, yet he needed to dress up garden-variety infidelity as the inescapable consequence of some grand passion. Like Tristan, he was in love with love—and at the same time, he made no attempt to disguise his eagerness to hop straight into bed. One of his lovers reported that he felt compelled to cast their affair in romantic terms; “he needed a woman to adore,” she said. She was crazy about him, too—but she was also flattered: here was this brilliant and charming friend bombarding her with amorous attention, always desperate to get her clothes off. “I would’ve preferred,” she added, “to talk and tease.”
In his memoirs, celebrating the healing effects of sunshine on his psoriasis, he gives us this glimpse of himself as all-conquering Casanova:
[W]hat concupiscent vanity it used to be, playing volleyball bare-chested, leaping high to spike the ball down into a pretty housewife’s upturned face, and wearing tomato-red bicycle shorts that as if casually slid down to expose an inch or more of tanned, normal-appearing derrière, even to the sexy dent where the cleavage of the buttocks begins.
This preening display puts the emphasis on his physique. Like many men who succeed thanks to their brains, he would have liked to be worshipped for his body. He wanted us to believe (and perhaps believed himself) that the pretty housewife playing beach volleyball was enthralled by a bare-chested hunk. Many of his friends and acquaintances remarked that he grew handsomer, less gawky, as he aged, yet it seems obvious that his wit, his intelligence, and his growing fame seduced more women than his buttocks. Charm is composed of curious elements, and in his case something undefinable went into the mix—it could have been the flirting twinkle in his eye, the hint of malice in his teasing, or perhaps his willingness to telegraph lust frankly and fearlessly to the women he desired.
Though brilliantly equipped for hands-on research into the adulterous society, and rapidly acquiring expertise in the field, he was not yet ready to present his preliminary findings to the general public. In April 1964, even before he’d quite finished Marry Me, he explained to Alfred Knopf that “complicating factors” might force him to sit on the book—but he offered to try to write another, shorter novel by the end of the year. In late summer Updike went to work on a novella provisionally titled The Farm; he finished a penciled draft in the autumn, just before his State Department junket to the Soviet Union and beyond. The novella was a return to Berks County, to the epicenter of his past—but at the same time, as Updike once acknowledged, it “takes place in the future.” He was imagining the farm in Plowville as it would be a decade hence, with his father dead (The Centaur after the centaur has died, as he put it) and his mother living alone, a recent widow with a rapacious hunger for her only son’s attention and affection. And in an even bolder prophetic inspiration, he was imagining making a weekend visit to his mother after having divorced and remarried. (One wonders whether this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to extinguish the last embers of his romantic longing for Joyce by imagining how she would cope with Linda as a mother-in-law.) Along with his bride comes her precocious son, an eager-to-please eleven-year-old, who rounds out the cast of characters: two mothers, two sons, together in the old sandstone farmhouse. Like Marry Me, Of the Farm—he added the preposition to the title six months prior to publication—is an intricately choreographed dance in which four characters engage and disengage, grappling in a slippery push-and-pull that sometimes gives comfort but more often does damage.
The outside world is rigorously excluded from Of the Farm; we’re allowed off the farm only for a quick trip to a shopping mall and a Sunday morning church service. There are only four voices—a quartet.* The voices belong to Joey Robinson, a public relations consultant who once dreamed of being a poet; his garrulous mother, Mary; his second wife, Peggy, a long-legged redhead with a bony face; and her young son, Richard. The selective focus pays off; it’s one of Updike’s best books, a small, quiet triumph. It was the first time he used a first-person narrator in a novel, and the intimacy of Joey’s voice telling his story (“a kind of chamber music” is how he described it to Alfred Knopf) adds to the sense of events and characters isolated from the hurly-burly of daily life—a quartet in a spotlight, performing flawlessly for our benefit.
“It’s a book people mention to me,” Updike said more than forty-five years after it was published, “and I feel kind of embarrassed about it, like I was somehow too naked when I wrote it.” Inasmuch as he was exploring his unusually close bond with his mother in a cruelly honest, minimally fictionalized piece of writing, it’s no surprise that he felt exposed and ill at ease when called upon to discuss it. He was certainly nervous about what his mother would think of what he told her was “a little flight among imaginary moments that I hope won’t annoy anyone”; in the months before publication, he repeatedly advised her not to bother reading it. He may have found it painful, also, to see himself in Joey, a thirty-five-year-old mama’s boy easily manipulated by his mother into agreeing that his second wife is vulgar and stupid, and that divorcing his first wife was a mistake. But what Joey’s mother knows about Joey, Linda could not have known about Updike—for the simple reason that Updike had not yet left his wife and children, and wouldn’t do so for nearly a decade. Updike was testing out in fiction his mother’s reaction to what might have been had he followed through and left Mary for Joyce. He was reopening the old wound—this time to gauge the degree of his guilt and the price of expiation.
Updike once wrote that the novel’s “underlying thematic transaction . . . was the mutual forgiveness of mother and son”—but that makes the novel seem kinder and gentler than it is. Before we get to forgiveness, blame must be apportioned—not, in this case, a pretty process. Joey’s guilt and his mother’s emerge from an emotional melee worthy of Edward Albee; the three adults hammer, burn, and lacerate one another, to borrow the startling phrase from “Couples.” Mrs. Robinson’s crime is the familiar one central to the Hoyer/Updike saga: she for
ced her husband and son out of their beloved Olinger and onto the farm. In this version, the move had fatal consequences: it hastened her husband’s death. Joey’s crime, his divorce, cost him four thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees alone—the same amount, he realizes, that the farm had cost his mother.* By this strict accounting, Joey and his mother are even—both took what they wanted and paid for it. But the true price can’t be counted in dollars and cents. To get the farm, Joey’s mother sacrificed her husband; to get Peggy, Joey sacrificed his first wife and his children. Not exactly victimless crimes.
When all the mother-son skirmishes are done, when all the wounds are neatly bandaged by forgiveness and the visitors are ready to leave, Joey’s mother engages in a bit of pointed banter about selling the farm after she’s dead. She refers to it as “my farm,” and before he replies, Joey reflects, “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed. I must answer in our old language, our only language, allusive and teasing, that with conspiratorial tact declared nothing and left the past apparently unrevised.” His answer (“ ‘Your farm?’ I said. ‘I’ve always thought of it as our farm’ ”) is meant to reassure her that their conspiracy is intact.
Critics have spotted the prophetic strain in Of the Farm. One goes so far as to cite Eliot’s dictum that the test of a true poet is that he writes of experiences before they have happened to him. Updike’s vision of his mother’s widowhood (after Wesley died in 1972, Linda lived alone on the farm for seventeen years, until her own death in 1989) is indeed eerily clairvoyant. Equally eerie is the “transaction” in which one crime is forgiven in exchange for a kind of immunity from prosecution for another crime that hasn’t yet been committed—or not quite. A few years after Linda’s death, Updike described the book as an attempt “to show an aging mother and her adult son negotiating acceptance of what seems to each the sins of the other.” I suspect that when he wrote Of the Farm, he was negotiating acceptance of his sins—sins of the past (Joyce) as well of the future—by confessing them in fiction, a language in which his mother was fluent.
And what of his father? John evidently had to remove Wesley from the picture before he could imagine himself divorcing and remarrying. My guess is that Wesley would have known without knowing that the message in Of the Farm—delivered with “conspiratorial tact”—was not for his ears. He was accustomed to the sotto voce murmurings of Linda conversing with John in their “old language,” and besides, a man who could embrace The Centaur and declare George Caldwell a true likeness of himself was unlikely to object to being killed off in his son’s next novel—or to being left out of the loop. Wesley wouldn’t have wanted to hear about the near-miss of John’s marital crisis (the infidelity, the romantic passion, the threat of divorce), and John wasn’t prepared to confess to him, even in code—that much had been made clear several years earlier, in “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” when the mere mention of his father’s illness cuts off David Kern’s thoughts of adultery and turns him into a model husband, a champion of family life. Like David, John was unwilling to puncture the illusions of a bighearted man; one of Wesley’s cherished beliefs was that John was a good son and a good father.
The first draft of Of the Farm was finished less than a month before Updike set off on his six-week trip to Russia and other Communist Bloc countries. The State Department invitation to act as an ambassador of the arts was flattering but also unsettling. Unnerved by the prospect of a journey behind the Iron Curtain, he wrote to Maxwell, declaring his intention to draw up his last will and testament—and to name Maxwell as his literary executor (proof, if any were needed, of the unshakeable trust he placed in his editor). Updike promised to do his best not to inconvenience anyone by actually dying. On the eve of his departure, clearly more nervous than his giddy tone implied, he reminded Maxwell that he’d named him executor and mused with mock horror on the “puniness” of his legacy: “Maybe in Russia,” he wrote, “I’ll learn to think big.” He mentioned the two unpublished novels in safe-deposit boxes at the local bank (Home and Marry Me). They were, he declared, “unreadable”—he had no idea what could be done with them in the “unthinkable” event that something were to happen to him. He instructed Maxwell to release all the stories on the shadow-bank—but again, only if the unthinkable were to occur.
He flew down to Washington in mid-October to receive his marching orders from Foggy Bottom; by the end of the month he and Mary were in Moscow. (Mary eagerly accepted the invitation to accompany her husband, even though the Updikes had to pay for her plane ticket.) William Luers, second secretary at the American embassy, was waiting at the airport to greet them. Luers looked after Updike for most of the trip, offering a corrective counterweight to the omnipresent Soviet “interpreters” assigned to Western visitors. Having done the same for John Steinbeck and Edward Albee, Luers was struck by the conscientious effort Updike made to establish meaningful contact with his Communist hosts. “He was so good about it,” said Luers, “so intent on giving what he thought at the moment was the answer to the question. He felt duty-bound to do the best job he could. He was a patriot, a believer in America and its role in the world.” But his patriotism was only half of the equation; he also felt obliged “to be a good guest of the Soviet state.”
An author on exhibit—“wearing abroad,” as he put it, “my country’s colors”—he met with writers and artists and students, gave speeches, and signed books. Whisked from here to there in black ZiL limousines, he toured literary monuments; attended readings and operas and ballets; endured formal, two-hour banquets; and consumed quantities of vodka. “There I was everything I’m not here,” he told Life magazine, “a public figure toasting this and that.” The role-playing left its mark. Overcoming an aversion (instilled by The New Yorker) to “the artistic indecency of writing about a writer,” he conceived of a character who was a successful author, a paid-up member of the literary establishment—“a vehicle,” as he put it, “for impressions that only a writer could have collected.” He returned to Ipswich in the first week of December outwardly intact but harboring within this new identity—which he unburdened in a story, “The Bulgarian Poetess,” about an American novelist touring Communist countries at the behest of the State Department. Thus was born Henry Bech. A Lutheran family man from Pennsylvania had given birth to a Jewish bachelor from New York—it proved in time a wonderfully fruitful reconfiguration of Updike’s essential self. Bech is a comic character—sometimes merely a figure of fun, sometimes an excuse to make fun of others—but he also represents a crucial part of his creator’s personality and experience. Harry Angstrom is Updike’s middle American, his Everyman; Bech is a more rarefied, less wholesome creature, his natural habitat the literary world centered in Manhattan, a landscape utterly alien to Rabbit. Harry is a version of what Updike might have been had he never left Pennsylvania; Bech is a version of what Updike might have been had he started out in New York and stubbornly stood his ground.
The first Bech story catches up with our hero in Sofia, after a stint in Moscow and briefer visits to Prague, Bucharest, Kiev, and other more remote capitals. (“I am transported around here like a brittle curio,” writes Bech in his Russian journal; “plug me into the nearest socket and I spout red, white, and blue.”) Just days before his scheduled return to America, he meets and instantly falls in love with Vera Glavanakova, a blond Bulgarian poetess modeled on Blaga Dimitrova (1922–2003), whom Updike met in Sofia. Knowing it will be his last glimpse of Vera, Bech inscribes for her a copy of one of his novels: “It is a matter of earnest regret for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world.” Updike inscribed a copy of The Centaur for Blaga: “It is a great sadness for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world. You have been lovely.” He emended the last sentence to “You are lovely.” Dimitrova was a strikingly good-looking woman, and Updike’s expression of romantic yearning clearly heartfelt—Bech’s, too. Updike and Dimitrova corresponded briefly; her tender, wistful letters suggest th
at his inscription struck a chord.*
“The Bulgarian Poetess” offers only a glimmer of Bech’s comic potential. In fact, the exotic setting (as Updike noted, Bulgaria in 1964 was, for Americans, “almost the dark side of the moon”) and the snippets of serious literary discussion are almost more conspicuous than the personality of the protagonist, “this fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and his melancholy Jewish nose.” Like Rabbit, Bech evolved; his versatility as an alter ego dawned on Updike only gradually.
In “The Bulgarian Poetess,” Bech is a solitary ambassador of the arts passed from one embassy secretary to the next as he makes his way around Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia. As for Updike, he started out on his excursion with plenty of company: Mary was with him for the first two weeks, and for the first ten days the Updikes saw a good deal of John Cheever, who was also staying at Moscow’s Hotel Ukraine. In Moscow and Leningrad the two authors appeared at official functions as a double bill. Cheever flew home in early November, and Mary followed several days later; Updike stayed on for another month, spending two weeks in Russia, then flying south for a whirlwind tour of Eastern Bloc countries: four days each in Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.
Updike and Cheever had met fleetingly at literary events, such as the National Book Award ceremony on March 10, 1964, at the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton, where Updike accepted the prize for The Centaur. Cheever served on the panel of judges, and boasted of having steered the award toward Updike’s novel (at the expense of Thomas Pynchon’s V). This was a larger, more glittery crowd than any Updike had ever faced. A lively record of the occasion survives in paragraphs penned by Tom Wolfe, then a young reporter for the New York Herald Tribune: