Thursday - October 1, 2020 - Five authors of Greenwich Village, as told by Kate Alsbury: John Updike.
JOHN UPDIKE IN NEW YORK
Quietly unassuming, John Updike was not what is always thought of as a modern literary icon. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, he penned an enormous body of work during his career: fiction, reviews, poetry, essays, and drama. As a self-described “solemn thinker” who “writes with precision,” he expressed admiration for those living a “less bourgeois” life than himself. Stories often detail everyday situations we can relate to, offering windowed insight into lives not our own.
His time in Greenwich was brief, but fruitful, taking up residence on West 13th Street. He landed a position as staff writer for the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column, remaining there for two years: “I was a Talk of the Town writer, which means that I both did the legwork and the finished product. An exalted position! It was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations.”
His first story “Ace In The Hole” was published by the New Yorker in 1955. Looking back on his early work, he saw what he called a “vanished world” without electronics, embodying a fresh, wet paint quality. He was attempting to “bottle some small portion of the truth” and “give the mundane its beautiful dew.”
Updike loved the city but ended up spending less time here than other places. At the 2005 New Yorker Festival he said, “I loved the idea of being in New York, and having an office that looked out on skyscrapers, and living in the West Village, and riding the subway every day and always going in the right direction. All this meant a lot to me.” Later, he would elaborate on why he began to feel it wasn’t the right place for him, “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
Questioning whether he was getting everything he could out of metropolitan life, Updike moved his family to a more rural setting along the Massachusetts coast. He continued as a New Yorker contributor long after leaving the hustle of big city life behind.
At the very least, his time here must have provided some inspiration for “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the first in a series of stories following a newly married couple, the Maples, throughout their life. Appearing in the New Yorker in 1956, the story begins on West 13th, the street he lived on at the time. It chronicles an ordinary conversation between the couple and their friend, Rebecca, shadowing them out onto the misty, snow-dusted streets of a wintery downtown.
Revisiting characters over time was a technique Updike mastered and wielded similarly in the Rabbit novels, and to a lesser extent, with Bech. At times, his writing took on a sensibility not unlike the works of John Cheever, setting stories in Manhattan and the suburban northeast.
Updike frequently returned to New York, coming back for public appearances, business meetings, and casual visits. As Robert Silvers put it in an interview with the Observer, “He saw it as a kind of adventure.”
Updike’s residence on West Thirteenth Street, image by Kate Alsbury
Kate Alsbury is a writer and marketing consultant. Her creative work has appeared in journals like Frogpond and Modern Haiku, along with several anthologies.
