John Updike’s Archive: A Great Writer at Work
By SAM TANENHAUS
Published: June 20, 2010
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009, at 76, there seemed little left to learn about him. Not only was he among the most prolific writers of his time, but he was also among the most autobiographical, recasting the details of his life in an outpouring of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism that appeared with metronomic regularity in the pages of The New Yorker and in books published at a rate of almost one a year for more than half a century.
Dennis Stock/Knopf
A Knopf publicity photo of John Updike, used in conjunction with the release of Updike’s “Telephone Poles and Other Poems” in 1963.
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Times Topic: John Updike
Yet Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front.
Updike cultivated his embowered solitude early. At 25, with no books yet published, he fled New York (and a writing job at The New Yorker) and moved to the Massachusetts shore, an hour north of Boston, where he remained for the next five decades, perching eventually on an 11-acre estate he shared with his second wife, Martha Updike, in Beverly Farms. There he assumed the remote aspect of a literary squire, ensconced in a nest of second-floor offices overlooking the Atlantic and descending twice a week for rounds of golf at the exclusive Myopia Hunt Club. He surfaced intermittently for interviews or readings, invariably presenting a mask of debonair geniality, only to retreat once more.
But all the while he was fending off the public, Updike was also leaving a trail of clues to his works and days: an enormous archive fashioned as meticulously as one of his lathe-turned sentences. The archive was vitally important to him,” Mrs. Updike said in a telephone interview, especially in his last days. “He saw it not just as a collection of his working materials, but as also a record of the time he lived in.” Today the material crowds an aisle and a half of metal shelving in the basement of Houghton Library, Harvard University’s rare book and manuscript repository that sits atop stone stairs in Harvard Yard, a short walk from Hollis Hall, the redbrick dormitory where Updike lived as a freshman 60 years ago.
“Updike’s archive may be the last great paper trail,” Adam Begley, a critic and literary journalist now at work on a biography of Updike, said in an e-mail message. “Anyone interested in how a great writer works will find here as full an explanation as we’re likely to get.”
But Mr. Begley and others will have to wait two years, the time archivists estimate they will need to catalog the contents of almost 170 boxes.
I was recently allowed an advance look, conducted over three days in Houghton’s reading room, long enough to sample a range of the holdings (among them typescripts of early short stories rejected by The Atlantic and Harper’s) and to confirm that they hold the keys to Updike’s literary universe. The papers also suggest that Updike was a more complex artist — and person — than he chose to admit.
Though he was known and envied for writing rapidly and easily and revising very little — a reputation he encouraged — the archive demonstrates the painstaking care he took to establish the tone and atmosphere of his novels.
Cartons deposited in the early 1990s offer a synoptic map of “Rabbit at Rest,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that concludes the earthly transit of Harry Rabbit Angstrom, the former Pennsylvania high school basketball king who remains Updike’s most famous creation.
Rabbit in Flux
An Eagle Typing box contains a handwritten draft, completed in January 1989. Hurried on to the page (in pencil on the back of the typescript of a previous book), the flowing sentences are constellated with crossings out, insertions and circled text as Updike honed, phrase by phrase, the middle-American idiom and the hurtling present-tense that are signatures of the Rabbit cycle.
So numerous were the emendations to the opening scene, set in a Florida airport, that Updike stapled a typed page to the handwritten draft, in which the initial paragraphs are thoroughly resequenced to create an effect less linear and more interior. Further reworking the opening paragraph, to draw out its theme of impending death, Updike made subtly significant improvements.
“The sensation chills and oppresses him, above and beyond the air-conditioning,” he had first typed. Retouching by pen, he tightened the phrasing and also inserted an inspired pun: “The sensation chills him, above and beyond the terminal air-conditioning.”
In addition to glimpses of the artist solving technical problems are materials that lay bare a sturdy foundation of background research. There are half-century-old snapshots of storefronts in Reading, Pa., the model for Rabbit’s hometown of Brewer, along with 1980s clippings from The Reading Eagle. There are also photocopied pages from medical books on heart disease as well as correspondence from a boyhood friend, a surgeon, who offered to arrange for Updike to observe an angioplasty procedure. (Rabbit undergoes one, described with clinical precision.)
And there is a memo from a researcher catching Updike up on current sales and commissions at Toyota franchises of the kind owned by the Angstrom family, along with photocopied pages from a handbook on car salesmanship, with Updike’s marginal notes, and several pages (obtained through the Federal Highway Administration) showing sample Florida license plates. Other folders include a jotted list of basketball moves (“double-pump lane jumper”) and a letter from Bob Ryan, a sportswriter for The Boston Globe, summarizing the career of the 1980s N.B.A. dunk-shot specialist Darryl Dawkins.
There is even a wrapper from a Planters Peanut Bar, as lovingly preserved as a pressed autumn leaf, evidently used by Updike to describe the moment when Rabbit, addicted to high-cholesterol junk food, greedily devours the candy and then, still unsatisfied, “dumps the sweet crumbs out of the wrapper into his palm and with his tongue licks them all up like an anteater” — an early warning that he’s headed for a heart attack.
Letters to Plowville
But the most revealing documents in the archive may well be the ones Updike guarded most vigilantly during his lifetime: his voluminous correspondence, including hundreds of letters to his parents, Wesley Updike, a high school math teacher, and Linda Hoyer Updike, an aspiring writer whose ambitions awoke similar ones in her son, an only child. She bound many of the letters in a matching pair of red morocco leather volumes embossed with the words “Letters to Plowville,” commemorating the name of the family farm near Shillington, Pa.
Covering the period from 1950, the beginning of Updike’s freshman year at college, to 1967, when he was a prizewinning and best-selling novelist, this correspondence, almost always typed, provides a vivid journal of Updike’s progress from farm boy to worldly sophisticate and from apprentice writer to serious artist.
When he arrived at Harvard, Updike was a bony-shouldered scholarship boy from a public high school, afflicted with a stutter and a severe case of psoriasis. Accustomed to excelling, he was determined to do so again, but his competition included polished products of Exeter and Groton.
Fearful of losing his scholarship, he fretted before every exam and duly recorded the results, even on quizzes, in his letters home. “I seem to be somewhat of a grind,” he wrote in an early letter, adding, “This surprises no one more than it does me.” Since he planned to be a writer, he majored in English to force himself to read classic literature. (His own taste ran to James Thurber.) And though he wanted to master French, he dropped it when he discovered he had little aptitude for languages. He finished ninth in his class but was chagrined when two of his oral examiners, noting his weak grasp of classical literature, hesitated before awarding him summa cum laude distinction.
The classroom was only one field of potential conquest. From the outset Updike, at work on his first novel, hoped to study with the novelist Albert Guerard and the poet Archibald MacLeish, both on the Harvard English faculty. Neither was impressed by Updike’s submissions.
“I gave Mr. Guerard segments of my book to read,” Updike informed his parents in his freshman year, “and when he held his little conference with me to determine my admittance into the course, he said ‘I may be giving you much the same treatment Thomas Wolfe got here at Harvard.’ Evidently Wolfe was not admired by the English Department at Harvard at that time when he was a student. Mr. Guerard went on to say, rather kindly and apologetic, ‘You may be a fine writer, Updike, but at present I do not think it would be a good idea to have two people with such different notions of prose as you and I in the same course.’ In short, I was firmly booted out.” Updike conceded that it wasn’t simply a matter of clashing sensibilities: “He called what I had written uneven and uncontrolled.”
These rejections steeled Updike in his growing belief that American writers had grown infatuated with European modernists and should instead pay closer attention to their own time and place.
“We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled,” Updike wrote to his parents in 1951, when he was 19. “This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic” — a prescient formulation of what he would later achieve in the Rabbit novels and his Pennsylvania short stories. “Whatever the many failings of my work,” he concluded, “let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”
A Paragon of Industry
At the time Updike’s work consisted mainly of cartoons and lighthearted prose and poetry he poured into The Harvard Lampoon, the campus humor magazine, “that snobbiest of snob organizations,” as he wrote once he became its president, or top editor, in 1953. A paragon of industry, he almost single-handedly filled entire issues, even as he was submitting cartoons and light verse to The New Yorker. These were rejected but with encouraging comments from William Maxwell, the novelist and editor who would become Updike’s mentor when the magazine hired him in 1955.
Productive though he was, Updike suffered spasms of self-doubt. Might he be a glib entertainer and not a serious artist? “I am not a mental superman a la Blake,” he confessed to his parents, referring to William Blake, the late 18th-century visionary poet who worked in obscurity and poverty. “There is no danger of my eking out an existence in a garret,” he added. “If all I have is talent, industry and intelligence, I should be able to please enough people to make money at it.”
The “Letters to Plowville” also reflect a time when a privileged college student like Updike could plot his future while many thousands his age were serving and dying in the Korean War, an event he scarcely mentions. He has equally little to say about McCarthyism, even as the anti-Communist investigations of the day caused an uproar at Harvard and its administrators and faculty came under attack.
But politics, for Updike, as for so many others who came of age in the 1950s, formed the background to the more absorbing concerns of career, marriage and family.
The “Letters to Plowville” describe his courtship of Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe student he met in an art history class and married the summer after his junior year, and their brief period in Manhattan, when he worked at The New Yorker, his dream job, writing Talk of the Town items, short stories and poems.
But success brought compromises. A crisis came in 1959, when his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, urged him to expurgate the explicit sex scenes in “Rabbit, Run,” his first major novel. A story of adultery, it was daring at a time when American courts were still deciding if “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence’s long-suppressed novel, should be considered obscene.
Even after the government abandoned that case, in spring 1960, Mr. Knopf and his legal advisers pressed for revisions. “The issue seems to me to amount to whether I am really going to write in my life, or just be an elegant hack,” a distraught Updike wrote to his parents in June 1960. But when Mr. Knopf, equally adamant, said, “he was unwilling to undergo the risk of printing the book as it stands,” Updike relented.
Within a few years obscenity standards relaxed, and Updike restored the original language, carefully pasting typed insertions in the margins of an early printed edition preserved in the Houghton archive.
Eventually sexual adventure, often rendered with graphic directness, would become a staple of Updike’s fiction, as his mission to record the Protestant ethic met the upheavals of the sexual revolution. This was a conflict he explored in “Couples” (1968), with its ritual spouse swapping, and in the Maples short stories, with their intimate picture of a dissolving first marriage. Some of Updike’s last letters, written when his two sons and two daughters were grown, weigh the painful cost those closest to him paid for his high ambition and remorseless work habits.
But he had chosen his course early and at the end had few regrets. At 75, in a reply to questions sent to him by the novelist Nicholas Delbanco, Updike summed up his journey: “I set out to make a living with my pen, in privacy, in the commercial literary world as it then existed, and am grateful that I managed. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure; and it goes without saying that I’ve been lucky. No impairing disease. No war I was asked to help fight. No stupefying poverty yet no family wealth or business to limit my freedom.”
For all his self-sufficiency, Updike acknowledged, he had received much help, above all from “The New Yorker when it still published many pages of fiction and Alfred A. Knopf Inc. when publishing was still a gambit for sensible gentlemen who trusted their own taste.” These advantages reflected “a world where books were a common currency of an enlightened citizenry,” he wrote. “Who wouldn’t, thus conditioned, want to keep writing forever, and try to make books that deserve to last?”
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