Stiff Martinis and Bitter Marriages

I was an innocent when I first read Updike, and I can still remember those late teenage afternoons when, in an agony of tedium, I haunted the aisles of second-hand bookshops and Manchester Central Library, reading feverishly, hunting for sex. Moll Flanders promised much but remained, finally, coy. A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, bought furtively from a basement bookshop in Charlotte Street, proved a great disappointment. No sooner had a glance been exchanged than the scene faded away into modest ellipses . . . it was only embarrass­ingly late that I realized it was a pre-1960 edition. But John Updike’s Couples (1968) was very definitely a product of the Swinging Sixties. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ Georgene Thorne tells the main character, Piet Hanema, as we embark on the first of very many couplings in a novel where the sex is mostly adulterous, sometimes loving, always luxuriantly described. Wide-eyed, I fell into the featherbed of Updike’s post-lapsarian prose.

The couples of the title are ten pairs of spouses in small-town Massachusetts, and the affairs of the novel are both personal and political. Although the town, Tarbox, is fictional, the setting is very precisely 1963–4, punctuated by the Profumo scandal, the assassination of Kennedy, whispers of change and freedom colliding with the conventions of an earlier era. The couples party on Saturday nights; on Sunday mornings, they still trail into the Congregational church, with its gilded weathercock, salvaged from colonial times. ‘Much bent and welded’, this symbol of a past America endures, its eye – ‘a copper English penny’ – watchfully turned on the tinderbox of flir­tation below. Couples is a perfect time capsule of America at a moment of change, registering each shifting detail of interior decoration, fash­ion, hairstyles, dry vermouth. But underlying this are deeper concerns – the place of religion, the search for purpose, the loss of innocence. It proved an irresistible combination for readers. Couples, Updike’s fifth novel, helped him towards fame, putting his face on the cover of Time, and selling over 4 million hardback copies. He seemed to speak for a (slightly scandalized) generation, a bestseller who was also a writer’s writer – a poet, a critic, a prolific reader and reviewer. When he died in 2009, Ian McEwan saw the golden age of the American novel sinking over the horizon, and he paid tribute to him as a mas­ter ‘whose literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean’. But at that point, Updike’s star was already on the wane. Riding high in the boom years, his output, for some read­ers, has come to seem as outmoded as one of those gas-guzzling automobiles his characters drunkenly drive to their extramarital liaisons. Now the breathless scandal of the explicit has faded away, what does Couples have to offer the reader? We open the book with Piet and his wife Angela, just returned from one of their endless round of parties, discussing the newest arrivals in town, Ken and Foxy Whitman:

‘What did you make of the new couple?’ The Hanemas, Piet and Angela, were undressing. Their bed­room was a low-ceilinged colonial room whose woodwork was painted the shade of off-white commercially called eggshell. A spring midnight pressed on the cold windows. ‘Oh,’ Angela answered vaguely, ‘they seemed young.’ She was a fair soft brown-haired woman, thirty-four, going heavy in her haunches and waist yet with a girl’s fine hard ankles and a girl’s tentative question way of moving, as if the pure air were loosely packed with obstructing cloths. Age had touched only the softened line of her jaw and her hands, their stringy backs and reddened fingertips.

Here’s everything both maddening and enchanting about Updike as a writer. He is a beautiful observer of the domestic, with a poet’s ear for plosive evocation. Nothing is too trivial for inclusion, includ­ing that woodwork paint, ‘commercially called eggshell’, because Piet is a builder, and it is his mind and way of seeing the world that we usually inhabit in the novel. But that delicate ‘eggshell’ also neatly links to the ‘spring midnight’ which is pressing on the cold windows, reminding us that this space of intimacy is a fragile one. Piet and Angela are deeply of their time, but they’re also meant to be eternal. My paperback cover drives the point home, with its image, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, of William Blake’s illustration to Paradise Lost: ‘Adam and Eve Sleeping’. Watching the naked couple is the frog-figure of Satan: darkness presses in. Rereading this passage, I realize with a pang that I’m on the other side of his protagonists. I first met Piet and Angela when they were twice my age, and their mid-thirties’ territory of martinis and bitter marriages seemed impossibly far away. But now I come back to them ten years older than they are, and the novel seems at once more inno­cent, and wiser, than I had realized. I notice now the children around the edges, rapping at closed bedroom doors, often appearing solely as impediments, yet sometimes coming into sharp focus as the only innocents in town. And the death of Piet’s parents now seems to me to be the most tenderly and acutely observed aspect of his story: how often his dreaming thoughts go back to the greenhouse his Dutch mother and father ran, its dirt floor flecked with clover, ‘steeped in an odour incomparably quiet and settled and profound’. As he slides towards sleep, Piet enters the impossible paradise of childhood mem­ory, back through the ‘icy dewy doors where cut roses and carnations being dyed and lovely iris and gladioli leaned, refrigerated, dead’. But set against these moments of recaptured pleasure, there are other aspects of Updike which make me, like Angela in the opening chapter, flinch with dislike. Just take that description of her, at the advanced age of thirty-four. I can’t help but feel a touch of resent­ment that the first thing we learn about her is that her haunches are going heavy, and the backs of her hands are stringy. It’s one symptom of something more broadly awry in Updike’s world. Most of Updike’s women, sad to say, have barely any character at all: they’re simply brown or fair. And breasted, of course: small, large, ‘livid and delicate as wounds’, ‘pendulous, with a tulip sheen’. Breasts, melting, bobbling, wobbly; breasts that ‘are saggy and want to be touched’. That isn’t to say, of course, that other body parts are ignored . . . There’s something eternally adolescent about Updike’s unctuous, meticulous attention to the female body. He won a lifetime achieve­ment award, after all, in the 2008 Literary Review ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ prize. David Foster Wallace famously called Updike ‘a penis with a thesaurus’, and at times, one has to admit he has a point. Piet spends far more time in bed than on the building site and there’s the sus-picion that his energies, like those of his creator, are being expended on the wrong thing. Could all that carefully crafted, beautifully poised prose not be put to better use? It’s with a shock that I remember, too, how often the women of this novel are struck, slapped, pushed around. There are other dark aspects I come upon with distress. Updike so aptly captures the mood of America in the 1960s, and that includes not only misogyny but also engrained racism, casual and otherwise. The prejudices of his time are as faithfully reproduced as its home décor. And yet – and yet – it is not unthinkingly done. Piet, like that other American everyman, Rabbit, is not Updike; Updike’s prose itself floats free, translucent, holding a mirror to the reader’s own preoccupations. Like those midnight windows of Piet and Angela’s bedroom, we can’t quite gauge how far we might be able to see through it. Besides, Updike’s writing also always has an eye to its own short­comings. Early on, we see Piet breaking off from an extra-marital liaison to oversee the construction of some new-builds on Indian Hill, high above Tarbox, looking toward the ‘town with its pricking steeple and flashing cock’. He stoops, picks up a bone from the churned ground. ‘Don’t they say there was an Indian burying ground somewhere on this south side?’ he asks his young employee Leon. The exposed earth of the excavation shows ‘a veined logic of stratifi­cation. Pages of an unread book.’ Piet knows very well what he is choosing to ignore; Updike’s writing uneasily, self-consciously, regis­ters the stories of America that he doesn’t choose to tell. But as Piet broods over the past, he sees on Leon’s face ‘the smudge of a sneer’ and feels the ‘cool pressure’ of the younger man’s judgement. He leaves Indian Hill to hurry along his other workers, two ‘venerable carpenters’ who obey the rhythms of an earlier, handmade era:

Piet, inspecting, paused at a detail of the framing. A two-by-four diagonal brace intersected a vertical stud and, though the angle was not an easy one, and this was rough work, the stud had been fitted as precisely as a piece of veneer. Waste. Piet felt as if he had been handed a flower; but had to say, ‘Leon needs you on the hill to knock together the basement forms.’

Piet stands in for his author here, voicing those anxieties about how we will be viewed by those who crowd in to replace us, who look at our lives and our efforts from the patronizing vantage point of the next generation. It’s no coincidence that one of Updike’s favourite metaphors for his writing craft was that of carpentry: he thought in detail about how best to fit prose to the world, even in the full know-ledge that it might be wasted energy. His work, at its best, asks us to weigh up what we value in the world, and whether that matches up with what the world values. And Updike’s place on that scale of values may shift once again. It’s the knowing, carefully planed precision of his descriptions which will, I think, keep readers returning to Updike. Anne Fadiman, for instance, lovingly evokes her ‘genital-pink paperback of Couples’, ‘read so often in my late teens (when Updike’s explorations of the complexities of marriage seemed unimaginably exotic) that it had sundered into a triptych held together with a rubber band’. While Nicholson Baker, that irrepressibly onanistic chronicler of everyday pleasures, spends a whole book detailing his obsessive admiration for Updike’s work, U&I (see SF no. 79). I close my copy of Couples, almost as worn as Fadiman’s, its paper scored with the creases of decades, its pages as rumpled as Piet’s sheets. The years have rubbed off the shine, but nevertheless I feel for it a battered, lasting affection. Two decades on, Updike’s writing still makes me pause, catch my breath. The post-Pill paradise of the characters proved ephemeral; the prose endures.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Felicity James 2024