(10 of 11)
Though he was raised a Unitarian amid the Lutherans and Amish of southeastern Pennsylvania, Updike joined the more middle-road Congregationalist Church in 1959. Then, a year later, as he was writing Rabbit, Run, the awareness of time passing pressed so closely on him that he felt a constant "sense of horror that beneath this skin of bright and exquisitely sculpted phenomena, death waits." It was a full-dress religious crisis lasting several months, and Updike says now that he got through it only by clinging to the stern, neo-orthodox theology of Switzerland's Karl Earth. In Earth's uncompromising view, reason can prove only that the nonexistence of God is absurd; the positive assertion, that God does exist, can come only by means of revelation.
Ten Points. The crisis has passed, or, more precisely, evolved, into a concern over the complexities of family life. "There's been a lot of sin committed in the name of the family," he says. "Sins on the children, sins of husband and wife to each other. I feel about the family as I do about the middle class, that it's somehow fiercer in there than has been assumed."
It has been fierce at times for John and Mary Updike. She is a strong, self-contained woman with the "firm ankles" of Updike heroines, and many of their friends believe that he could not survive without her. Do Updike's many stories of tension in marriage suggest experiences of his own? Says he: "My marriage, like many others, has had its intervals of deaths and renewals."
In the classic cliche, she is her husband's severest critic. "I can't think of one of my novels she's really liked," says Updike. "When she read The Poorhouse Fair, she said, 'Why do you want to write about all those old people? After The Centaur, she said, 'You can't understand all the mythology.' After Of the Farm, she said, 'Nothing happens.' And with Couples, she said she felt that she was being smothered in pubic hair. Actually I did take some of it out."
Updike devotes three hours a day to writing, occupying a cluttered room above a restaurant off the Ipswich green. At home, wearing tattered white sneakers, baggy pants, a turtleneck jersey and a shaggy haircut, he romps with his four children—Elizabeth, Michael, David and Miranda—or plays in a recorder group with Mary. On a winter morning, he might emerge from his 13-room white saltbox house, scoop up an armful of snow and heave ten decimal points against the stop sign on the corner. On a summer morning, he can go out to his small garden and properly cultivate a nice crop of lettuce. Almost any day he can get into his dented 1963 Corvair, drive down to Crane's Beach and walk in solitude or, at low tide, drive golf balls along the beach.
Clearly, Couples was not drawn entirely from his imagination. Tarbox, says Updike, is purely fictional, "with only a touch of the Ipswich marshes peeking through." Still, it is worth