Updike

by Begley, Adam

  To commemorate the first birthday of her baby boy, Linda insisted that the family plant a pink dogwood tree by the side of the house. The tree cost $5.25—a large sum in hard times—but it still bloomed eighty years later.

  Little changed between 1932 and 1945. Linda quit her job in 1935, declaring that she would become a writer, and the baby grew into a boy and then an adolescent. If not quite the messiah Belle Minuit bargained for, he was at least a notably bright, good-natured child. Looking back on those thirteen years, Updike was struck by the “immutability” and “steadfastness” of his surroundings. The relative stasis, he wrote, was “an exceptional effect, purchased for me at unimaginable cost by the paralyzing calamity of the Depression and the heroic external effort of the Second World War.” Shillington barely grew, barely changed. “I grew up in a town that was abnormally still.” The essential feature of this “immutability,” as far as young John was concerned, was the unaltered configuration of his family: mother, father, and maternal grandparents—no additions, no subtractions. Still channeling the unabashed egoism of early childhood, he declared that the five of them were “locked into a star that would have shattered like crystal at the admission of a sixth”—no room for a sibling, or “competitor,” as he put it. In “Midpoint,” his most ambitious and most explicitly autobiographical poem, he makes use of the same astral image:

  The fifth point of a star, I warmed

  to my onliness, threw tantrums,

  and, for my elders’ benison, performed.

  And here, too, he celebrated the absence of any “competitor”:

  The brothers pressing to be born

  Were kept, despite their screams, offstage.

  Alone in the spotlight, he accepted the applause of his adoring audience.

  Half the household was elderly. His grandfather was nearly seventy when John was born, his grandmother perhaps a dozen years younger. John Hoyer is remembered in Updike’s writing as a “lovely talker” who was “in his way a distinguished man,” fond of quoting from the Bible in his wheezy voice and dispensing political opinions. (He was a staunch Democrat.) He had, according to his grandson, “that old-fashioned way of talking as a kind of performance.” With the exception of his grandmother, everyone in the house was a talker, and the favorite topic was the family:

  I was raised among quite witty people who talked about themselves and each other all the time so that there was generated in the household a kind of running mythology which I’ve drawn upon. It was no invention of mine; I’ve been the witness who’s tried to write a little of it down. All four adults in that house where I grew up charged their very quiet lives with drama and suspense. They were Bible readers, especially my grandfather and my mother, and there was something of viewing their lives as an unfolding book, as a scroll that was being rolled out, and constantly examining it for significance . . . for God’s fingerprints. Well, it just was somehow very exciting.

  Early on, in other words, he learned the importance—the mythic importance—of daily doings.

  Updike’s grandmother, in memory, is silent or monosyllabic, a small, slight, dark woman with a sharp face, “always serving, serving others.” Katie Hoyer contracted Parkinson’s while the family was still living at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, and her husband’s eyesight deteriorated, so that young John would have to read his newspaper to him, but otherwise the status quo remained undisturbed: the five of them close—perhaps, Updike later wondered, too close.

  In “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” he offers a glimpse of the family in action:

  My mother is pushing the mower, to which a canvas catch is attached. My grandmother is raking up the loose grass in thick heaps, small green haystacks impregnated with dew, and my grandfather stands off to one side, smoking a cigar, elegantly holding the elbow of his right arm in the palm of his left hand while the blue smoke twists from under his moustache and dissolves in the heavy evening air—that misted, too-rich Pennsylvania air. My father is off, doing some duty in town; he is a conscientious man, a schoolteacher and deacon, and also, somehow, a man of the streets.

  Also absent from this picture is the cherished boy, “dear Chonny,” sheltered by his family’s solicitous care, blissfully unaware of financial pressures: “However pinched my guardians felt, they did not pinch me.” He was protected, in fact, from any serious trauma; he “soaked up strength and love.” Though he admitted in later life to torturing his toys (pleading guilty to abusing his teddy bear, Bruno, and mutilating a rubber Donald Duck), he was well-behaved, cautious—“squeamish,” even—but cheerful and obliging, eager to play box hockey and roofball at the playground (his local heaven) in shorts and sneakers, a freckled boy well liked by the neighbors on Philadelphia Avenue and the teachers at the Shillington elementary school.

  There were accidents and disappointments. At age five he was struck by a car on his way to Sunday school and spent a week in bed with a bandaged head. He liked girls in general (he “strained for glimpses of [their] underpants as they swung on the swings and skinned the cat on the jungle gym”), but all through elementary school, he loved one classmate in particular, a freckled girl with pigtails and green eyes. This love went unrequited. He also suffered from hay fever, and a nervous tension that made his stomach ache at mealtimes and caused, at one point, his hair to begin falling out. At a tender age (ten or eleven), he was already spooked by the idea of death, his morbid brooding brought on by reading science fiction and contemplating a vast future so frighteningly evoked—he couldn’t bear the thought of the “cosmic party” going on without him. Thanks to his superstitious grandmother, he developed a fear of ghosts. Those various complaints were mild, however, compared with his stutter, which embarrassed him acutely when he was still young. The speech impediment first tripped him up in high school; he never banished it entirely, but in later life it was more of a hesitation—a barely noticeable catch in an otherwise fluent stream of words—than an outright stammer.* Worse still was the scourge of “red spots, ripening into silvery scabs” that erupted on his skin: psoriasis, inherited from his mother, first attacked when he was six (Linda wrote to relatives that it was the worst case she had seen outside of a book on skin diseases); it plagued him, with occasional surcease, for the rest of his life. Though not quite a sickly child, he was delicate, accustomed to having others worry about his health.

  The tranquillity of his childhood was troubled by Linda Updike’s unpredictable moods—her “fits of anger,” mostly aimed at her husband and her parents rather than her son. There was quarreling, “smoldering remarks,” and the slamming of doors, an atmosphere of barely repressed rage:

  As I remember the Shillington house, I was usually down on the floor, drawing or reading, or even under the dining-room table trying to stay out of harm’s way—to disassociate myself from the patterns of conflict, emanating from my mother, that filled the air above my head. Darts of anger rayed from her head like that crown of spikes on the Statue of Liberty; a red “V,” during those war years, would appear, with eerie appositeness, in the middle of her forehead.

  Her “stinging discipline,” when John was late coming home, consisted of whipping his calves with a switch, “her face red with fury.” But he also remembered the quiet of his mother’s intense concentration when she was writing, and the companionable sound of her typewriter.

  Her portable Remington features in a childhood memory of unalloyed delight: “I still carry intact within me my happiness when, elevated by the thickness of some books to the level of my mother’s typewriter, I began to tap at the keyboard and saw the perfect letter-forms leap up on the paper rolled around the platen.” He wrote his first story at the age of eight, typing it out on his mother’s typewriter. The first sentence read, “The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cozy cave fire.” He also wrote a long poem about an egg that was published in the grade school newspaper, Little Shilling. But despite this early flirtation with the writer’s trade, his first love was cartoons—Mickey
Mouse, to be precise. “Have I ever loved a human being,” he asked himself, “as purely as I loved Mickey Mouse . . . ?” A passion for blank paper, for drawing, for tracing and comics, and for the movies merged eventually into a crystallized ambition: “What I really wanted to be when I grew up was an animator.” He remembered the bliss of copying comics—Mickey, Donald Duck, Barney Google—as he lay prone on the carpet. Starting in kindergarten, he was given drawing lessons by a neighbor, Clint Shilling. A photograph taken by his mother of nine-year-old John sitting on the steps of the side porch of the Shillington house (“one of my favorite places in the world”) shows him dressed for church, intently studying a Big Little Book featuring Mickey Mouse. Contemplating this photo in his late sixties, he wondered whether Big Little Books (“chunky little volumes sold for ten cents, made of single panels from a comic strip opposite a short page of narrative text”) eased his transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer.

  The image that recurs again and again in his writing is of that young boy lying on the floor, busily drawing or tracing or coloring, or doing the same at the dining room table under the stained-glass lampshade, reproducing the comics and cartoon characters that he so loved, already certain that his efforts would meet with the unstinting approbation of his parents and grandparents. Here was the beginning of Updike the industrious artist. Even at the age of five, his mother told a journalist, “he worked.” As he explained in his 1985 speech, the creative imagination “wants to please. It wants to please more or less as it has been pleased, by the art that touched it in its formative years.” Part of the aim of those early artistic endeavors was surely to entertain—to placate—his mother. In a story called “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” a sequel to Of the Farm written in 1990, less than a year after Linda Updike’s death, there’s an intriguing glimpse of a son coping with a mother patterned on Updike’s own: “Even as a very small child he had been aware of a weight of anger his mother carried; he had quickly evolved—first word, first crawl—an adroitness at staying out of her way when she was heavy with it, and a wish to amuse her, to keep her light.” As a grown man, remembering a visit with his mother to Plow Cemetery, he remarked, “Only in Pennsylvania, among my kin, am I pressed into such difficult dance-steps of evasion and placation.” Those two words, evasion and placation, could be said to sum up Updike’s nascent artistic impulse.

  His childish worldview was innocently solipsistic: “My geography went like this: in the center of the world lay our neighborhood of Shillington. Around it there was greater Shillington, and around that, Berks County. . . . [N]ot all children could be born, like me, at the center of the nation. But that some children chose to be born in other countries and even continents seemed sad and fantastic. There was only one possible nation: mine.” Though his street, Philadelphia Avenue, has been widened, and the chestnut trees that lined it have been chopped down, and though shopping malls have replaced the fields on the edge of town, his Shillington neighborhood remains largely unchanged. The town today is profoundly unremarkable—as it was then. As Updike wrote, “Cars traveling through see nothing here to make them stop; the town is neither young nor old, poor nor rich, backward nor forward.” The ordinariness appealed to the boy, and it appealed also to the writer looking back on it, the writer who made it his business to “transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”

  For young John, the neighborhood was a magical realm oozing nurture and encouragement. In later life he traced his political orientation—especially his strong attachment to the idea of national solidarity—back to the stability and security of his environment during the war years. To leave Shillington even temporarily seemed to him a wanton waste. He disliked the Sunday country walks his parents took him on; they were too rural for his tastes: “I was a small-town child. Cracked pavements and packed dirt were my ground.” Visits to country cousins (his mother’s relatives), who were “hopelessly mired in farmerishness,” confirmed his distaste; to him, “people who kept pigs, and owned mules, and grew corn, seemed unbearably sad.”

  The city proved more alluring. It was a twenty-minute trolley ride from Shillington to the heart of downtown Reading (still relatively vibrant in those early years), where he acquired a taste for urban atmosphere. Even before he reached adolescence, he was allowed to spend Saturday mornings in Reading, sampling “consumer culture, Forties style”; he bought comic books and art supplies and browsed the aisles of five-and-tens (McCrory’s, Woolworth, Kresge’s), making sure to save seven cents for the trolley home. Later, beginning with the summer after high school graduation, he worked as a copyboy at the Reading Eagle.

  Other worlds beyond the town limits proved equally seductive. The Shillington movie theater, just two blocks from the house on Philadelphia Avenue, brought images of faraway places, in the newsreel and the travelogue that preceded the feature; and the feature itself might fizz with the glamour and escapist excitement of Hollywood. His parents began taking him to the movies when he was just three; starting at age six, he was allowed to go by himself, which he did almost fanatically—as many as three times a week—running all the way to the theater with a dime and a penny clutched in his hand.

  At age twelve, he went to stay with his sophisticated aunt Mary (his father’s older sister, who had worked at The New Republic). Mary made a big impression; as he remembered it, she had “a flapper’s boyish figure and a dry tough way of talking—she made ‘wisecracks’—and long flaxen hair wrapped in a big braid around her head.” She had married her cousin, also called Updike, and was known in the family as MEUU, for Mary Ella Updike Updike. These other, more worldly Updikes lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and seemed, to young John, to be rich—they lived, he thought, “the way people should live.”

  Mary took her nephew into Manhattan, to the Museum of Modern Art. Forty years later, recalling that “stirring, puzzling” first glimpse of the modernist aesthetic—Georges Braque and Jean Arp were the artists he remembered most clearly—he wrote, “I felt myself, in my aunt’s shadow, moving through a kind of toy store, where the toys could not be bought or touched, only admired.” His aunt boasted that she’d never seen a child so interested in a museum.

  It was MEUU who gave the family a subscription to The New Yorker, for Christmas in 1944. Updike was bewitched; it was “the best of possible magazines.” The cartoons delighted him, especially the draftsmanship of Alain (Daniel Brustlein), Robert Day, Garrett Price, George Price, and Peter Arno; he devoured James Thurber and E. B. White. Not yet thirteen, he was instantly desperate to become a contributor: “I loved that magazine so much I concentrated all my wishing into an effort to make myself small and inky and intense enough to be received into its pages.” The urge persisted; as he told his first Knopf editor, “[P]eople assume I fell into the NYer right from Harvard’s lap, but I had been trying for eight years.” The magazine spoke to him, as it did to a large and rapidly increasing readership (the subscription base doubled between 1939 and 1949), of a glamorous urban world, graced with wit and sophistication, and a glittering, cultured lifestyle like that of the Greenwich Updikes—a way of living that could one day be his.

  Although fervent, his desire to translate himself into the pages of the magazine did nothing to undermine his evident satisfaction with his lot in life—which he later claimed to have pondered with a precocious philosophical detachment: “The mystery that . . . puzzled me as a child was the incarnation of my ego—that omnivorous and somehow preëxistent ‘I’—in a speck so specifically situated amid the billions of history. Why was I I?” And why was this speck so comfortably situated? Almost every word he wrote about his “beloved” hometown was a hymn of praise (“Time . . . spent anywhere in Shillington—was delicious”) or a declaration of irrevocable citizenship (“My deepest sense of self has to do with Shillington”; “If there was a meaning to existence, I was closest to it here”; “Shillington was my here”). Like his mother, he looked back on his childhood haunts as a paradise:


  The Playground’s dust was richer once than loam,

  And green, green as Eden, the slow path home.

  Yet it’s hard to know whether this love affair wasn’t in part retroactive, the strength of the attachment a consequence of his exile—and an ongoing rebuke to his mother for insisting on dragging the family out to Plowville.* In “Shillington,” an ode written on the occasion of the town’s bicentennial, eight years after he’d left Berks County entirely, he pondered the play of recollection as the place itself changed over the years: “Returning, we find our snapshots inexact.” The powerful final lines of the poem are packed with significance, especially in the light of the move from 117 Philadelphia Avenue to the sandstone farmhouse:

  We have one home, the first, and leave that one.

  The having and leaving go on together.

  There was never any doubt about which was his first home, and subsequent departures from other places he lived (Plowville, New York City, Ipswich) always involved a reenactment of sorts, echoes, however faint, of that early exodus—“the crucial detachment of my life.” In a story published in 1991, a year and a half after his mother’s death, Updike captured with a memorable phrase the regret of a man who, fifty years earlier, had been detached from his hometown and “saw his entire life . . . as an errant encircling of this forgotten center.” The having and leaving lasted half a century—lasted, in effect, a lifetime.