Truths, Slightly Arranged: John Updike’s Uninhibited Fiction

In the winter of 1956, a friend of John and Mary Updike had an uncanny experience while reading the New Yorker when, upon opening the magazine, she discovered herself in a short story titled “Snowing in Greenwich Village.” It unfolds during a dinner party hosted by Richard and Joan Maple, a young married couple in Manhattan. From the moment their friend Rebecca—“a tall, always smiling girl”—sits down and lets Richard attend to her coat and drink, the story crackles with sexual tension. Gossip is shared, and the peculiar arrangement of Rebecca’s apartment is discussed: She has two roommates, one of whom is a man but not her boyfriend. When it grows late, snow gently falling, Richard offers to walk her a few short blocks home. His excuse is chivalry and to fetch cigarettes for Joan, who encourages him on the errand. Richard and Rebecca walk slowly in the dreamy downtown streets, and upon reaching Rebecca’s apartment, she invites him in. He accepts, trailing up the wooden steps behind her. “Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny,” Updike describes, caroming momentarily out of Richard’s point of view. In the cramped, slanted attic apartment, her bed a bold third presence, Richard and Rebecca stand awfully close. Sensing an opportunity, or an invitation—it’s not clear—he does something uncommon for an Updike character: He beats a hasty retreat. “Oh,” the story ends, “but they were close.”

Rebecca, Adam Begley observes in his elegant new biography, was modeled on a friend of the Updikes, “and though she accepted the story with polite good grace…her on-again, off-again boyfriend berated Updike for his callous and thoughtless behavior. The boyfriend’s harangue was ferocious enough to sink both Mary and John into a weekend-long funk.” This was certainly not the first time Updike had ferried friends and family into his fiction and experienced some grief on their appearance in print, but he was approaching the territory that would, very soon, make it necessary to keep a “shadow-bank” of stories at the New Yorker that could not run until the author gave his editor, William Maxwell, a green light—mainly because the affairs on which they were based remained too hot, too raw still. “Feeling guilty and ashamed,” Begley writes of the author in 1956, “Updike reconsidered two pet theories. The first was ‘that a writer of short stories has no duty other than writing good short stories’; the second that ‘nothing in fiction rings quite as true as truth, slightly arranged.’”

In 1956 Updike was just twenty-three yearsold, but he had already embarked on one of the longest dominant careers in American letters. The young Pennsylvanian, with his “towers of ambition” that “rose, crystalline, within me,” would rocket to success faster than even he had ever imagined. Within five years Updike had published a collection of verse (The Carpentered Hen), a novel (The Poorhouse Fair), a story collection (The Same Door), and a future American classic (Rabbit, Run)—not to mention a growing body of short stories unparalleled in their lyric intensity. By his death in 2009, the New Yorker had printed 146 pieces of his short fiction, dwarfing the tallies of writers—like John Cheever and J. D. Salinger—who were also associated with the magazine. If Begley’s biography and the newly collected stories reveal anything, it’s that Updike’s encounter in Greenwich Village did very little to shake his inherent urge to eavesdrop on his own life, his experience, his sensory and emotional memory. He went on to do so with a mercilessness so steady the author seems, in retrospect, like one of the most deft domestic spies ever to walk the Earth. Nothing, apparently, was out of bounds—from his wife’s pubic hair to his many affairs to the explosive...