Updike (68 page)
Authors: Adam Begley
71 “Stravinsky looks upon the mountain”:
CP
, 257.
71 “the mythogenetic truth”: Ibid., xxiv.
71 “the flight of a marvelous crow”: Ibid., 3.
72 “the smell of wet old magazines”:
CJU
, 23.
72 He also remembered the lonely bliss:
MM
, 795.
72 “about the Peruvian”: CC to JU, April 22, 1954, Harper.
72 Updike replied with a long letter: JU to CC, April 26, 1954, Harper.
73 Canfield made vague, encouraging noises: CC to JU, May 10, 1954, Harper.
73 Updike eventually promised: JU to CC, March 17, 1955, Harper.
73 As she wrote in the letter: KSW to JU, July 17, 1954, NYPL.
73 He didn’t want to give any more interviews: JU to Eric Rayman, June 30, 2008. The letter is in Rayman’s possession.
75 “John was always a striver”: Author interview, MA, April 1, 2009.
75 “one of the most exclusive”: LGH to JU, February 15, 1951, Ursinus.
76 he claimed to have “peaked” as a scholar:
OJ
, 841.
76 “As I settled into the first lecture”:
SC
, 254.
76 “delivered with a slightly tremulous elegance”:
OJ
, 840.
76 “That a literary work could have a double life”: Ibid., 843.
77 “staid, tweedy” poet:
MM
, 764.
77 “the least tweedy of writing instructors”: Ibid.
77 “the very model of a cigarette-addicted Gallic intellectual”:
ES
, ix.
78 “None of his courses”: Lasch, October 9, 1951, Rochester.
78 “Updike keeps plowing ahead”: Lasch, October 14, 1951, Rochester.
78 “a kind of younger
Couples
”:
T
d.
78 “eighty-five percent bent upon becoming a writer”:
MM
, 789.
78 “the trouble was”: Edward Hoagland, “A Novelist’s Novelist,”
The New York Times
, October 17, 1982.
79 “art was a job you did on your own”:
DC
, 627.
79 “losing sight of his initial purpose”: Lasch, February 2, 1952, Rochester.
79 when Kit finally met the “lady love”: Lasch, February 24, 1952, Rochester.
79 “She sounds alright to me”; LGH to JU, February 2, 1952, Ursinus.
80 “I am no longer amused by her flutterings”: LGH to JU, December 1, 1950, Ursinus.
80 “an air of slight unrest”: Lasch, April 8, 1952, Rochester.
80 unpublished version of “Homage to Paul Klee”: Houghton.
81 “I courted her essentially by falling down”: “View from the Catacombs,” 73.
82 “We need a writer”: LP, November 3, 1951, Houghton.
82 “I feel I am on the lip”: LP, March 10, 1953, Houghton.
84 One of his Lampoon colleagues: E-mail, John Hubbard to author, September 28, 2009.
84 “If only he would write”: Lasch, September 22, 1952, Rochester.
84 “The financial aspect”: Lasch, February 22, 1953, Rochester.
85 “Updike was elected”: Lasch, April 12, 1953, Rochester.
87 He arrived in Cambridge a “cultural bumpkin”:
SC
, 110.
87 “first and . . . most vivid glimpse”:
HS
, 196.
87 “a yen to read great literature”: LP, May 28, 1951, Houghton.
87 “worshipped, and gossiped about, Eliot and Pound”:
OJ
, 840.
87 “like an encompassing gray cloud”:
PP
, 256.
87 “The only thing that has sustained me”: JU to Joan George Zug, quoted in
T
d.
88 literature “was revered as it would not be again”:
MM
, 27.
88 “‘You know,’ he told his old friend”:
DC
, 538.
89 “Joe McCarthy (against)”:
OJ
, 840.
89 “Not one class I took”: Ibid., 839.
89 The sun burned his nose: LP, June 30, 1953, Houghton.
90 “About the job—”: WM to JU, March 18, 1954, Houghton,
91 “I managed a froggy backstroke”:
DC
, 83.
91 “a babbling display of ignorance”:
OJ
, 841.
91 Asked by a classmate: E-mail, Benjamin La Farge to author, January 30, 2010.
91 When Updike saw it: LP, February 16, 1953, Houghton.
92 “If I were reasonable”: LP, May 17, 1955, Houghton.
92 “That long face with the nose accentuated”: E-mail, Peter Judd to author, March 24, 2010.
92 “He never liked intellectuals”:
T
d.
92 “I was kind of a loner”: Ibid.
93 John suggested they stay: Lasch, November 22, 1953, Rochester.
94 “sounds a programmatic note”: Ward W. Briggs Jr., “One Writer’s Classics: John Updike’s Harvard,”
Amphora
(Fall 2002): 14.
97 “to give the mundane its beautiful due”:
ES
, xv.
97 the magazine was “delighted”: WM to JU, August 5, 1954, NYPL.
97 “I felt, standing and reading”:
MM
, 763.
97 “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life”:
CJU
, 25.
98 “The point, to me, is plain”:
OS
, vii.
99 “Cheever’s story involved drunkenness”:
MM
, 764.
99 “one of my greatest enemies”; LP, January 31, 1954, Houghton.
99 “owes something” to the dead Easter chick:
ES
, x.
99 In a letter to his editor: JU to WM, October 4, 1954, NYPL.
99 “everything outside Olinger”:
OS
, vii.
100 “I had given myself five years”: Ibid.
101 “ . . . Perhaps / we meet our heaven”:
EP
, 27.
101 “Four years was enough Harvard”:
OJ
, 841.
102 “Just a note to tell you”: Quoted in Ben Yagoda,
About Town: The
New Yorker
and the World It Made
(New York: Scribner, 2000), 18. (Hereafter cited as Yagoda,
About Town
.)
102 “The first time I took him to lunch”: Hiller.
102 “passive-aggressive aw-shucks pose”: Letter, MA to author, May 8, 2010.
102 “the object,” as Updike put it:
MM
, 780.
III. The Talk of the Town
105 “Nothing like a sneering nude”: JU to KL, November 10, 1954, Rochester.
105 “the sooty, leonine sprawl of the Ashmolean”:
ES
, 193.
106 “I’ve never done anything harder”:
CJU
, 105.
106 “Mary, in need of a bathroom”: JU to WM, February 2, 1962, Illinois.
107 “The color of March”:
CP
, 7.
107 “I think John really disapproved”: Author interview, MW, April 7, 2011.
107 Updike confessed in
Self-Consciousness
:
SC
, 132.
108 “The English climate”: JU to KL, September 23, 1954, Rochester.
108 “Englishmen are astoundingly ignorant”: JU to KL, November 10, 1954, Rochester.
109 “He typed automatically”: Author interview, MW, April 7, 2011.
109 A letter from Katharine White: KSW to JU, September 15, 1954, NYPL.
110 “We price every manuscript separately”: Ibid.
110 “In many ways,” he bravely claimed: JU to KSW, November 26, 1954, NYPL.
111 “More than any other editor”: William Shawn, “Katharine Sergeant White,”
The New Yorker
, August 1, 1977, 72.
111 “aristocratic sureness of taste”:
OJ
, 771–75.
112 “A colon is compact, firm, and balanced”: JU to KSW, November 26, 1954, NYPL.
112 “try to feel more kindly toward the dash”: KSW to JU, December 1, 1954, NYPL.
112 in March, she suggested: KSW to JU, March 21, 1955, NYPL.
113 White suggested that he should avoid: KSW to JU, February 14, 1955, NYPL.
114 “the domestic scene”: KSW to JU, March 23, 1957, NYPL.
114 “an entirely different locale”: KSW to JU, February 14, 1955, NYPL.
114 “We think it is the best written prose”: KSW to JU, April 5, 1955, NYPL.
114 Updike read his first Nabokov:
PP
, 220.
115 “[T]hey play flitting, cooing chorus”:
HS
, 326.
115 “He is a saint of the mundane”: Ibid., 312.
115 the “intensity of witnessing”: Ibid., 311.
115 Green’s “limpid realism”: Ibid., 328.
115 Green’s “formal ambitiousness”: Ibid.
116 “Both quite bowled me over”:
DC
, 660.
116 “full of a tender excitement”:
PP
, 21.
116 Updike “rose to no bait”: E-mail, Judd to author, March 24, 2010.
118 Updike remembered driving:
DC
, 102.
118 “[He] would make
this
trip alone”: LGH,
Enchantment
, 114.
118 “meet the man who was going to be”: Ibid., 112.
118 “seemed saddened, as if she had laid an egg”:
SC
, 48.
119 “It was all pretty monastic”: Author interview, TB, September 13, 2009.
119 “He struck
The New Yorke
r
”:
WMRR
.
120 “John was the star”: Author interview, TB, September 13, 2009.
120 “If ever a writer, a magazine”: Yagoda,
About Town
, 302.
120 Updike praised Yagoda’s book:
DC
, 102.
120 “ever since you accepted”: JU to WM, May 19, 1995, Illinois.
120 “It is a slightly different”: WM to JU, May 7, 1958, NYPL.
120 “continuously insolent and alive”: Quoted in Yagoda,
About Town
, 214.
121 “the bull’s-eye of our city”:
PP
, 78.
121 “The city,” E. B. White rhapsodized: E. B. White,
Here Is New York
(New York: The Little Bookroom, 1999), 29.
121 “pampered and urban”:
OJ
, 135.
122 “the delicious immensity of the excluded”:
PP
, 94.
122 “at least all of the following”: Quoted in Mary F. Corey,
The World Through a Monocle:
The New Yorker
at Midcentury
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.
122 “I loved that magazine so much”:
PP
, 52–53.
125 “two hours of fanciful typing”:
HS
, 847.
125 “It was perfectly obvious”: Quoted in Yagoda,
About Town
, 306.
125 “a kind of contemptuous harried virtuosity”:
HS
, 849.
126 Updike once defined “
New Yorker
-ese”: JU interviewed by David Remnick,
New Yorker
Festival, 2005.
126 “It seemed unlikely that I would ever get better”:
HS
, 849.
126 “innocent longing for sophistication”:
PP
, 421.
128 “I began to read Proust”: Ibid., 165.
130 On his second visit, he was invited to dinner: KL to Paula Budlong, October 19, 1955, Rochester.
130 “They invite you to dinner”: KL to Paula Budlong, October 23, 1955, Rochester.
133 anxious theological investigations:
OJ
, 844.
135 “there was this really intense nonspeaking atmosphere”: Author interview, TB, September 13, 2009.
135 Updike’s fondness for gags: JU to TB, May 25, 1989, Houghton.
136 “He was participating in the life of the city”: Author interview, MW, April 7, 2011.
137 “substantially” his own: JU to WM, April 16, 1957, NYPL.
138 “not only the best general magazine in America”:
DC
, 100–101.
139 “from the real (the given, the substantial) world”:
CP
, xxiii.
141 “sole ambition”:
CJU
, 12.
141 “If there is anything to be”: WM to JU, August 3, 1955, NYPL.
141 “the only gregarious man on the premises”:
MM
, 785.
141 “everything,” Updike remembered: Remnick interview, 2005.
142 Napoleon and St. Francis of Assisi: William Maxwell, “The Art of Fiction No. 71,”
The Paris Review
85 (Fall 1982). (Hereafter cited as Maxwell, “The Art of Fiction No. 71.”)
142 “pinkly crouched behind his proof-piled desk”:
MM
, 780.
142 “unfailing courtesy and rather determined conversational blandness”: Ibid., 779.
142 “without moving a muscle”: Ibid., 780.
142 “His sense of honor”:
DC
, 103.
143 his “gratitude and admiration”: William Shawn to JU, October 18, 1960, NYPL.
143 an “ineffable eminence”:
DC
, 102.
143 “the message was commonly expressed”:
MM
, 783.
144 “He was, in effect, the caretaker of my livelihood”: Ibid., 783.
144 he “conveyed a murmurous, restrained nervous energy”: Ibid., 780.
145 “If he doesn’t get the Nobel Prize”: WM, “Confidential Report on Candidate,” 1959 Guggenheim Fellowship competition, received by the Guggenheim Foundation on December 18, 1958.
145 Maxwell said, “That’s a short story”:
MM
, 781.
145 Maxwell thought the finished product: JU to WM, January 21, 1958, NYPL.
145 “The relationship,” as Updike acknowledged:
MM
, 783.
145 “meddlesome perfectionism” of
New Yorker
editors:
OJ
, 116.
145 “a good verbal tussle”: JU to WM, January 12, 1961, NYPL.
145 “part of a machine”:
MM
, 783.
146 “Could there have been an easier”: WM to JU, undated [1975?], NYPL.
146 Updike waxed ecstatic: JU to WM, January 23, 1992, Illinois.
147 Updike wrote to Bailey: JU to TB, April 15, 2005, Anthony Bailey Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
147 “a large, semi-ruinous mock-Tudor mansion”: Brendan Gill,
Here at the New Yorker
(New York: Da Capo, 1997), 226.
148 He felt “crowded, physically and spiritually”:
MM
, 806.
148 the city’s “ghastly plentitude”:
OJ
, 56.
148 “whatever you might do or achieve in New York”: Letter, MA to author, November 29, 2010.
148 “Not quite right for me, as the rejection slips say”: LP, May 21, 1956, Houghton.