Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Otto Plath did well in his new country. An entomologist, with a particular interest in the bee, he taught at Boston University. For wholly neurotic reasons – he was convinced he had lung cancer – he neglected to have his fatal diabetes treated and died when Sylvia was eight. It was a kind of suicide by self-neglect. He left two children and a wife poorly provided for. Her father’s death devastated Sylvia. She would, she famously declared, ‘never speak to God again’. About the same time she published her first poem. Outstandingly clever, she sailed through high school and won a full scholarship to Smith College in 1950 where she continued her prize-winning way. She was determined to write – whether poetry, fiction or journalism was, at this stage, immaterial.

  While still an undergraduate, she had stories picked up by leading magazines and in her junior year (1953) she won the nationwide competition for an intern editorship with Mademoiselle magazine in New York. This would supply the kernel episode for The Bell Jar. She had, at this point, an eminently suitable boyfriend. During this summer, for reasons which have always been in dispute, things fell apart. She wrote in her journal 6 July 1953: ‘Right now you are sick in your head … Stop thinking selfishly of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You are.’ Plath took a hard knock when she was – uniquely for her – rejected by Harvard’s creative writing programme: they may have been unimpressed by the Mademoiselle connection. She suffered a full-blown mental breakdown and, as was routine at that period, was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. Suicidal episodes and intensive psychotherapy followed.

  She was patched together sufficiently well (like a ‘retread’ car tyre, she said) to finish her studies at Smith, summa cum laude, dyed her hair ash blonde, and picked up a Fulbright scholarship to study for two years at Newnham College in Cambridge. Here she met Ted Hughes, a fellow student. Their violent first encounter, at a party, is chronicled in a later published short story:

  Leonard bent to his last supper. She waited. Waited, sighting the whiteness of his cheek with its verdigris stain, moving by her mouth.

  Teeth gouged. And held. Salt, warm salt, laving the tastebuds of her tongue.

  The couple were married barely a year later, in June 1956, with only the revenue of a poet’s garret to look forward to. Things looked up with the applauded publication of Ted’s collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in 1957. She too was moving towards poetry as her principal outlet and, like him, picking up prestigious prizes. Both were evolving fast as writers – something that took a toll on their relationship.

  Their life took a fresh turn with her getting a teaching post at Smith. Hughes got an adjunct position at a nearby Boston college. Robert Lowell’s poems, later collected as Life Studies, had indicated ways in which psychic fracture could be fused into new forms. In 1959 she sat in on Lowell’s classes at Boston University: it was, she later recorded, a breakthrough.

  But Plath was again on the verge of breakdown. The return to Boston had awoken demons associated with the death of her father. By this point she was pregnant with Frieda, the first of the couple’s two children, and well on the way to completing her first poetry collection, The Colossus (1960). In 1960 they moved back to London, where both their reputations were steadily growing. But just as steadily, they were growing apart. They moved to a spacious house in Devon for the birth of their second child. Like her father, Plath could now keep bees (the subject of some of her finest poems). She was, at this point, starting work on The Bell Jar – principally, she later said, to ‘exorcise’ her painful past. The theme, she wrote in her journal, was that the ‘modern woman demands as much experience as the man’.

  The marriage was being subjected to intolerable pressures as Hughes was involved in an intense affair. Sylvia and Ted separated in mid-1962 and the crisis of this period feeds into the remarkable poems written over the last few months of her life, later collected as Ariel (1965). She was at the same time completing The Bell Jar. In December 1962 she moved back to London with her children to endure what would be a historically bitter winter. The Bell Jar was published in the last week of January 1963. Two weeks later she committed suicide by gassing herself – making sure, before she did so, that her children were tucked up and safe.

  The subsequent history of The Bell Jar was fraught. Published in Britain by Heinemann under the bland pseudonym ‘Victoria Lucas’, it would not appear in America until 1967, where it was suppressed on the grounds of its manifest libels and, nearer home, its cruel representation of Aurelia Plath and Sylvia’s 1953 boyfriend. It was judged too close to the bone. In the intervening four years, the Woman’s Movement took off with the formation of the National Organisation of Women and Betty Friedan’s trail-blazing The Feminine Mystique (1963). The Bell Jar was custom-made for its moment. In a peculiarly misjudged review in the TLS, the anonymous reviewer had pronounced it ‘promising’, but instructed that the writer must learn to ‘control’ her material. As well say that ‘Daddy’ would be better written in heroic couplets. The novel opens with some of the most gripping prose Plath ever wrote:

  It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers – goggle- eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

  Apparently casual, it is prophetic: Esther too will be electrocuted. After her ECT she wonders, forlornly, ‘what terrible thing it was that I had done’.

  The novel opens with a public event. As the pages turn, what strikes one is the claustrophobic indifference to the outside world. Ethel Rosenberg, dubiously convicted with her husband Julius, should not have been executed: the injustice passes Greenwood/Plath totally by. America is at war: although Esther sleeps with a translator at the UN (under whose auspices America was fighting), Korea gets not a mention. Nothing is visible outside the glass walls of Esther’s bell jar. The other striking feature is the downright spitefulness of the depictions in the novel, which is a close transcript of Plath’s deadly summer, 1953, when she won her Mademoiselle internship and fell apart. To take one example, ‘Philomena Guinea’ is transparently based on Plath’s well-meaning patron, Olive Higgins Prouty, who had funded the scholarship (‘for promising young writers’) which enabled her to study at Smith College. Prouty’s depiction in The Bell Jar is as malicious as the fictional name is absurd. To rub it in, the novel’s opening paragraph is a mocking parody of Prouty’s opening paragraph in her most famous novel, Now, Voyager (1941), nowadays more famous for the Bette Davis film, the story of a heroine ‘reborn’ to love and full womanhood by psychotherapy. Prouty lived to read The Bell Jar. It may not have persuaded her that her money had been well spent on this ‘promising young writer’.

  Feminists have debated the sexual politics of The Bell Jar without any consensus other than that the novel is important. Equally important is the point it makes about fiction – niceness must sometimes be abandoned in the interest of art. That realisation may perhaps be one of the many things that tore Plath apart.

  FN

  Sylvia Plath (later Hughes)

  MRT

  The Bell Jar

  Biog

  J. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991)

  260. John Updike 1932–2009

  What a threadbare thing we make of life! Rabbit is Rich

  Updike was born in semi-rural Pennsylvania, of deep-rooted Dutch-German stock, and grew up in Shillington – the kind of town his fiction would make, in its quiet way, familiar to a mass readership. He was the only child of a high-school maths teacher and a mother with a family background in farming and a fondness for writing, something, he claimed, that had a formative effect on him. His childhood after the age of thirteen was spent, much of it, on a
farm ten miles out of town, recollected as the setting of his novella, Of the Farm (1965). Everything in his background, he once said, was ‘middling’. In an age of celebrity novelists he was chronically self-deprecating: he never got into fights, like Mailer; never turned his back on the world, like Salinger; never cursed God, like (the later) Roth; never saw the horrors of war like Vonnegut.

  A precociously clever boy, his first observed cleverness was with the artist’s pencil. He might, he dreamed, become famous in that line. The dream lasted well into his twenties and it was a great moment in his later life when the New Yorker (with whom he would publish over a hundred short stories) took one of his cartoons. Working on a local paper over his summer holidays as a ‘copyboy’, he also cultivated a lifelong reverence for the printed word. He particularly admired the skills of the linotype operators (the Angstrom family trade in the ‘Rabbit’ tetralogy). ‘The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts,’ he said, ‘and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.’ A prize-winner at school, Updike won a full scholarship to Harvard where he continued to shine. He chose – as a devotional nod to his mother – to study English, although he retained a lingering affiliation towards his father’s harder subject. Ostentatiously, knowledgeable riffs on science, technology and astronomy embellish his later fiction; one could learn all the average person needs to know about quantum mechanics from Roger’s Version (1986) and more than one needs to know about computer assembly language from Villages (2004).

  Harvard was formative on the young Updike – but unsettling: ‘I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly.’ Oddly he never wrote anything that could be labelled a campus novel, though the refined aura of the Ivy League hangs over much of his work – notably Couples (1968), his only major work to be set near the city of Boston. He generally preferred what he called ‘villages’ – small, newly thrown together, exurban communities of the upwardly mobile. At Harvard he edited and was a star contributor to the college paper, the Lampoon. It was, he said, ‘very kind to me. I was given, beside the snug pleasures of club solidarity, carte blanche as far as the magazine went – I began as a cartoonist, did a lot of light verse, and more and more prose. There was always lots of space to fill.’ Such extracurricular activity usually means an undistinguished degree – but not for John Updike. He graduated in 1954 summa cum laude. The previous year he had married a Radcliffe student, Mary Pennington, and soon had a child on the way. A pipe-smoking, leather-elbowed academic career looked in prospect. Towards that end he took up a year’s fellowship at Oxford and while in England placed a short story and poem in the New Yorker. It was, he said, ‘the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life’ – an annunciation. Hereafter he would be a writer: the academy lost its Professor Updike.

  The ‘best of possible magazines’ consolidated his early success by giving him a staff job. He gave it up after a couple of years not because he disliked the New Yorker but because he was uncomfortable in New York. He cited Hemingway’s jaundiced crack that the city’s literary world was ‘a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other’. His natural habitat was the small towns of New England where he retired with his wife and growing family. It was also, he felt, the right locus for his writing. As he put it, ‘once you have in your bones the fundamental feasibilities of a place, you can imagine there freely’.

  At this period Updike is reported as having undergone a spiritual crisis and a religious conversion. Particularly influential were Kierkegaard and Karl Barth – thinkers frequently encountered in his fiction. The clearest exposition of his religious dilemmas and conclusions are found in Roger’s Version. A work rarely ranked among his best, on account of its wordiness, the narrative centres on a long quarrel about God between a computer whizz, Dale Kohler, and Roger Lambert, a professor of divinity. The exchange is complicated by adultery between the whizz kid and the professor’s wife. Both protagonists are ‘believers’, but the younger man, with all the resources of modern physics, astronomy and technology, believes he can prove the existence of a deity. Such a God, Roger believes, would not be worth believing in. He agrees with Barth on the subject: ‘There is no way from us to God – not even a via negativa – not even a via dialectica or paradoxica. The god who stood at the end of some human way would not be God.’ Omnipresent, too, in Updike’s fiction (as in Kafka’s later work) is the Kierkegaardian imperative to maintain faith in God, despite everything that most convincingly seems to deny his existence.

  Not yet thirty, Updike, from his literary base on the New Yorker, had established a formidable reputation as a writer of short fiction and was tentatively moving into longer narratives. A notable moment in this shift was the first of the ‘Angstrom agonistes’ novels, Rabbit, Run (1960). All three successors would arrive calendrically at the end of a decade – as a kind of summing up of where America had just been and where it was heading. Initially Updike did not have a ‘mega novel’ in mind, but a ‘biune’ work partnering The Centaur (1963). The heroes of the twinned novels would, in Aesopian fashion, embody two complementary types in America, the rabbit and the horse. One plods dutifully through life, the other sprints away from responsibility. Rabbit, Run also began with a censorious impulse. Updike had been irritated by the ‘irresponsibility’ of Jack Kerouac’s ‘Beatnik Bible’, On the Road (1957) and intended to offer, by way of moral contrast, ‘a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road … There [is] no painless dropping out.’ The ‘sloppiness’ of Kerouac’s writing also offended the stylist in him: the American novel deserved something better. By now Updike had settled down with his wife and children (there would be four, eventually) and had bought his first house in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Whatever else, he was not on the run.

  Once given life on the page, Angstrom outgrew the original conception. Updike discovered he could be extraordinarily articulate through a character wholly unlike himself, even one who was, by his standards, inarticulate. Pentecostalism has its place in Updike’s theology – the ability to speak in tongues not one’s own. The most virtuosic of his ventriloquisms is the insertion of his writing self into the gloomy Jewish novelist, Henry Bech. An unhappy, unmarried, Nobel Prize-winner (which Updike never was) and New York man of letters who could not breathe the air outside Manhattan, Bech – in one hilarious episode – interviews John Updike for the New York Times. There would be three Bech books.

  Rabbit Angstrom is very different. Blue-eyed, of Swedish stock, he is ‘a high-school athletic hero in the wake of his glory days’. His home town, Shillington, Updike recalled, ‘was littered with the wrecks of former basketball stars’. There is no more delectable fame in America than that of the sporting hero, but Rabbit’s heroism has lasted a mere two seasons. He has some fifty unheroic leftover years to live in the shadow of his brief glory. ‘After you’re first-rate at something,’ he discovers, ‘no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.’ In fact, as we first encounter him, Rabbit is not even second-rate. A minimum wage salesman selling a new-fangled (and useless) vegetable peeler on commission, Harry is a ‘regular working guy’, like most American males. This, as it emerged, was not a limitation, but the opposite for the kind of novel Updike had in mind. As he put it, ‘Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me’. Below him, he might more frankly have said.

  As the saga opens, it is not yet the 1960s when the term ‘dropping out’ would become one of life’s platitudes. Unhappily married, with a child and another on the way, Harry decides he can’t take it any more and ‘goes on the run’. He takes up with another woman, a part-time prostitute, whom he impregnates. His alcoholic wife, in her marital abandonment, accidentally drowns their daughter while hopelessly drunk. It is ‘the worst thing’. And he – not she – is the guiltier party. Harry remorsefully returns – abandoning
his mistress and his child (a daughter, as it turns out). One of the technical innovations in Rabbit, Run was the use of the present rather than the past tense in the narrative. It added to the cursive feel. The novel’s publication coincided with, and took advantage of, the new freedoms brought in with the 1959/1960 Lady Chatterley trials. Brilliant as Updike’s narrative is, this liberation was not entirely beneficial. His extendedly detailed descriptions of sex can be wearing – and occasionally creepy (the description of flies hovering interestedly over the groin of the menstruating heroine in Of the Farm comes to mind). There are worthier longueurs. The Angstrom tetralogy, Updike notes, ‘is deeply immersed in the Lutheran creed of my childhood’. It is, as he puts it in the novel, ‘scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription’. The heart referred to is Angstrom’s, but it could as well be Updike’s, who often, as he records, plotted his novels sitting in church. Rabbit, Run spends many of its pages on long dialogues between the hero and the local minister, Jack Eccles (a closet gay, we apprehend, and spiritually unsettled). Hovering over the whole book is the question: can a man be good and yet do bad things? It is a dilemma Harry will never solve but which his life, regarded in its entirety, poses.

  The novel was well received but at this stage Updike did not contemplate going further with it. His breakthrough into the first rank of novelists came in 1968 with Couples. Set in ‘Tarbox’ (identifiably the author’s home town, Ipswich), the novel ponders the formation of American suburban, young, sexually adventurous communities. The two pillars of such communities are married couples and extramarital copulation. Couples shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and put its author’s face (‘snaggle-toothed’, he complained) on the cover of Time magazine. Now rich and esteemed, Updike moved to England for a year in 1969, to read up in the British Museum on American history. It was not, as with many of his compatriots, to escape the Vietnam imbroglio. Surprisingly to some, he approved of that war.