The Early Stories
Authors: John Updike
The Early Stories
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2012 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2003 by John Updike
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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ANDOM
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OUSE
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RADE
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APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2003.
The quotations from St. Augustine's
Confessions
in “Believers” and “Augustine's Concubine” are as translated by Edward B. Pusey; in “Believers,” the quotation from the Venerable Bede is from
The Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, ed. T. Miller.
Eighty of these stories were first published in
The New Yorker
. The other twenty-three appeared in the following magazines thus:
The Atlantic Monthly:
“Augustine's Concubine,” “Nakedness.”
Audience:
“Minutes of the Last Meeting,” “When Everyone Was Pregnant.”
Big Table:
“Archangel.”
Esquire:
“The Slump,” “The Tarbox Police.”
Harper's Magazine:
“Believers,” “Eros Rampant,” “Sublimating,” “Your Lover Just Called.”
New World Writing:
“The Sea's Green Sameness.”
Oui:
“Transaction.”
Playboy:
“Gesturing,” “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying,” “Killing,” “Nevada.”
The Saturday Evening Post:
“Eclipse,” “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.”
The Transatlantic Review:
“The Crow in the Woods,” “During the Jurassic,” “The Invention of the Horse Collar,” “Under the Microscope.”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Updike, John.
[Short stories. Selections]
The early stories, 1953â1975 / John Updike.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-41702-2
1. United StatesâSocial life and customsâ20th centuryâFiction. I. Title.
PS3571.P4A6 2003
813â².54âdc21Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 2002044824
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Dave Bradley/Getty Images
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v3.1
ContentsForewordThis is a collection. A selection, surely, is best left to others, when the writer is no longer alive to obstruct the process. Any story that makes it from the initial hurried scribbles into the haven of print possesses, in this writer's eyes, a certain valor, and my instinct, even forty years later, is not to ditch it but to polish and mount it anew. However, I did omit two stories, “Intercession” and “The Pro,” which were already safely reprinted in
Golf Dreams
(1996), and two more, “One of My Generation” and “God Speaks,” which, both of them first-person reminiscences based on college memories, trembled insecurely on the edge of topical humor, and felt dated.
These grudging omissions left one hundred and three stories, composed between 1953 and 1975. The oldest is “Ace in the Hole,” submitted toward the end of 1953 by a married Harvard senior to Albert Guerard's creative-writing course. Guerard, the very model of a cigarette-addicted Gallic intellectual, who nonetheless faithfully attended the Crimson's home basketball games, liked the storyâhe said it frightened him, an existential complimentâand suggested I send it to
The New Yorker
, which turned it down. The next year, though, after “Friends from Philadelphia” and some poems had been accepted by the magazine in my first post-collegiate summer, I resubmitted the story and it was accepted. With modifications to the coarse exchange with which it begins, it was run in April of 1955, toward the back of the magazine; such was the reading public's appetite for fiction then that “casuals” (a curious in-house term lumping fiction and humor) appeared in “the back of the book” as well as up front. The story is entangled, in my memory of those heady days of the dawning literary life, with the sudden looming, in the lobby of the Algonquin, of J. D. Salinger, a glowingly handsome tall presence not yet notoriously reclusive; he shook my hand before we were taken in to
lunch with our respective editors, William Shawn and Katharine White. He said, or somebody later said he said, that he had noticed and liked “Ace in the Hole.” His own stories, encountered in another writing course (taught by Kenneth Kempton), had been revelations to me of how the form, terse and tough in the Thirties and Forties, could accommodate a more expansive post-war sense of American reality; the bottle of wine that ends “Friends from Philadelphia” owes something to the Easter chick found in the bottom of the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” But my main debt, which may not be evident, was to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates. Other eye-openers for me were Franz Kafka and John O'Hara, Mary McCarthy and John Cheever, Donald Barthelme and Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce and James Thurber and Anton Chekhov.