'To Settle Upon Its Most Inspired Bit'

John Updike’s finest work of fiction, the short story “The Happiest I’ve Been,” was published in The New Yorker on this date, January 3, in 1959. I started reading Updike in the mid-sixties, following most of his work, including his novels, until his death in 2009. Today, I value him most as a poet, critic and short-story writer. Of his novels, which sustained his reputation during his lifetime, I might reread the first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), which he later acknowledged was written as a sort of response to Henry Green’s Concluding (1948). 

Updike was twenty-five when he wrote “The Happiest I’ve Been,” later collected in The Same Door. The Updike-like narrator, John Nordham, is nineteen years old, on the cusp of scary, sobering adulthood. Describing a New Year's Eve party among friends from high school, in a small Pennsylvania town in 1952, he says: “I had the impression then that people only drank to stop being unhappy, and I nearly always felt at least fairly happy” an observation that would come to characterize Updike throughout his life. Regardless of your understanding of his work, Updike remained a consistently happy man, not given to fashionable despair.

 

Of all Updike’s stories, this is my favorite, the most emotionally powerful, mingling memory, comedy, sadness and his peerless eye for American detail. It’s the best rendering I know of the retrospective character of happiness, our dawning awareness of it after it passes. For most of us, happiness is a momentary state, not perpetual. As Nordholm drives west across Pennsylvania, in the company of his friend Neil Hovey, he tells us he will never see again after they arrive in Chicago. Read the story’s conclusion with its title in mind:

 

"There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a vast trip: many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter. There was the quality of the ten a.m. sunlight as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility -- you felt you could slice forever through such a cool pure element -- and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespreading pride: Pennsylvania, your state -- as if you had made your life. And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me."

 

In the January 6, 1973 issue of The Saturday Review, Vladimir Nabokov published a brief essay, “Inspiration.” In it he mentions the glut of fiction anthologies shipped to him by publishers eager for the master’s blessing in the form of a fulsome blurb. Naturally, most of the fiction was dreck but, Nabokov says, “almost in each of them there are at least two or three first-rate stories.” He took to grading stories (“an A, or a C, or a D-minus”), much as he had the term papers of Cornell undergrads:

 

“Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage -- or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.”

 

Of “The Happiest I’ve Been,” Nabokov writes:

 

“‘The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”