Updike

by Begley, Adam

  THE FAMILY LEFT Shillington on October 31, 1945. Updike’s description of the actual moment of setting off—after the trick-or-treating and the departure of the moving van—is notably theatrical, and punctuated by bitter asides. His elderly grandparents were already out at the farm when John and his parents packed the last few items into the newly acquired secondhand Buick (“In Shillington we had never had a car, for we could walk everywhere”) and drove away down the street: “Somewhat self-consciously and cruelly dramatizing my grief, for I was thirteen and beginning to be cunning, I twisted and watched the house recede through the rear window.” If this is indeed how it happened, there can be no doubt that the cruelty of that self-dramatizing gesture was directed at his mother.

  Almost as frequent as his hymns to Shillington are his complaints about the “dislocation to the country,” which “unsettled” him and left him lonesome, bored—and, come summer, choked by hay fever. He had started junior high school the year before, and now, three months into his eighth-grade year, he was forced to commute to Shillington High School every weekday with his father. He resented being turned overnight into “a rural creature, clad in muddy shoes [and] a cloak of loneliness”; he resented being made to feel like “pretty much an outsider, in a family of outsiders.” The resentment still gnawed at him decades later.

  For Linda Updike to regain her childhood paradise, her son had to relinquish his. In a letter she sent him on the fifth anniversary of the move (October 31, 1950), she wrote, “If I had known then how much you hated to leave that house, I might not have had the courage to go.” My guess is that she would in fact have found the courage—after all, she rode roughshod over the resistance of her eighty-two-year-old father, who had to endure a humiliating return to the farm he thought he’d put behind him a quarter of a century earlier. And she brushed aside the complaints of her husband (a “man of the streets” who liked to say that he wanted to be buried under a sidewalk); Wesley had to surrender to what he considered rural imprisonment. Only Linda’s habitually silent mother voiced no objection to leaving Shillington. So why insist on imposing this relocation on the rest of the family? “I was returning to the Garden of Eden and taking my family with me. I thought I was doing them a great service,” she told a television interviewer, echoing her fictional alter ego, Belle Minuit, and still looking defiant forty years after the fact.

  Updike sometimes suggested that it was a financial decision. During the war, his mother went to work in a parachute factory (“where she wore her hair up in a bandana like Rosie the Riveter”), and with more money coming into the household, they could afford to buy back the Plowville farmhouse with its eighty-three acres (for which they paid a total of $4,743.12), and tell themselves that they were saving money by living in a smaller house in the country. But in fact Linda had resolved while still a young woman, before World War II—before the Depression, even—to recapture her birthplace and make it her home. Equally unconvincing is the claim advanced by Updike in the early 1970s that the move to Plowville was inspired by E. B. White’s rustic adventures in Maine: “After reading White’s essays in Harper’s throughout World War II, my mother in 1945 bought a farm and moved her family to it.” While it’s true that Linda believed passionately, as her son put it, that “we should live as close to nature as we can,” and it’s also true that she claimed a mystic connection to those “eighty rundown acres of Pennsylvania loam,” the notion that White’s example was decisive seems far-fetched; it makes her sound frivolous, and trivializes the intensity of her determination.

  Selfishness, plain and simple, surely played a role. But there was another important factor: she was bent on getting her son out of Shillington, on keeping him apart and different from the townsfolk. A thirteen-year-old in Plowville—how the name embarrassed him!—was quarantined from pernicious, lowering influences; he would be marooned on the farm for at least a couple of years, until he learned to drive. Even when he had his license, if he wanted to escape he would have to borrow the family car. In Self-Consciousness Updike wrote, “Shillington in my mother’s vision was small-town—small minds, small concerns, small hopes. We were above all that.” To an interviewer, Linda explained bluntly why she had done her best to break up John’s attachment to his high school girlfriend: “She was of Shillington, this place I found so contemptible.” Updike sometimes claimed to have inherited from somewhere an “authority-worshipping Germanness”; it certainly wasn’t from Linda, who bristled at authority and stubbornly resisted conformity. In fact, she’s the likely source of Updike’s own intermittently inconvenient contrary streak.

  As far as Linda was concerned, Plowville’s virtues were amplified by its distance from town. Set in a lush, rolling landscape, the house, built in 1812, consisted of a combined kitchen, dining room, and living room downstairs, and two bedrooms and a sleeping alcove upstairs. It was barely big enough for four adults and a teenager.* For the first year or so there was no indoor plumbing, no central heating, no electricity, no telephone. “My reaction to this state of deprivation,” Updike once said, “was to get sick. I was quite sick that year with colds and things, and huddled by this kerosene stove that was the only heat we had in the house.” His mother may have thought that her family was somehow too good for Shillington—“above all that”—but in his eyes, the move to Plowville was a step down, a sign that they’d somehow lost the middle-class status proclaimed by the white brick house in town. It was a step down and a step back, too: while the rest of America was abandoning rural areas for town and cities, the Updikes were doing the reverse, rolling back the clock and implicitly rejecting the accepted model for socioeconomic progress.* And John couldn’t even complain. If he expressed his preference for Shillington, he risked wounding or angering his mother: “My love for the town, once we had moved from it, had to be furtive.”

  For a perceptive child attuned to the dynamics of a close-knit family, one of the enduring lessons of the move to Plowville would have been the efficacy of his mother’s resolve. Imposing her will on the rest of the family, Linda Updike overcame their objections because she knew exactly what she wanted and never wavered in her desire.* In Enchantment, Belle Minuit’s father protests that the move back to the farm would be a mistake, “a retreat from life itself.” He tells her, “I would rather die than go back to that place”; her response to this point-blank refusal is to ratchet up the melodrama: “We’re moving back to that farm—if it kills us all.” Whether or not Linda actually made any such drastic vows, the relocation was planned and executed entirely on her initiative. Looking back in his memoirs, Updike reckoned that from the time he was thirteen, his life, however fortunate, had “felt like not quite my idea.” Moving out of his hometown derailed him. “Shillington, its idle alleys and foursquare houses, had been my idea,” he wrote; Plowville was emphatically his mother’s idea. Unlike his mother, he never regained his lost paradise, though he did find a substitute in Ipswich. It’s worth noting that this was the last time he allowed anyone else to dictate the terms of his existence. Any future exile would be self-imposed.

  Whatever the precise mix of Linda’s motivation, the relocation had immediate and enduring effects. In the short term, it meant that Updike had “extra amounts of solitude . . . to entertain,” and he filled those hours with books, most of them borrowed from the Reading public library. P. G. Wodehouse was a particular favorite; he read through all fifty of the Wodehouse volumes on the library’s shelves. He also devoured the works of a clutch of mystery writers (Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh) and humorists (James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Stephen Leacock, S. J. Perelman). “A real reader,” he explained, “reading to escape his own life thoroughly, tends to have runs on authors.” The “peace and patience” of the Reading library, its comparatively vast spaces behind the imposing granite facade, offered a welcome contrast to the crowded farmhouse; he saw it as “a temple of books” that exuded an air of glamour—“A kind of heaven opened up for me
there.”* His mother, who had written her Cornell master’s thesis on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, tried to get him to read Flaubert and a few other classics, but he persisted in reading mystery novels and humor. At age fourteen he borrowed The Waste Land and found, he later reported, “its opacity pleasingly crisp.” The following year, on a visit to his aunt’s house in Greenwich, he sampled a few pages of Ulysses—which instantly confirmed for him his preference for escapist reading.*

  Stranded on the farm, Updike devoured his library books, drew, copied cartoons, listened to the radio—and started to write. In February 1945, when he was a month shy of thirteen, his first article appeared in Chatterbox, the Shillington High School newspaper, to which he would eventually contribute 285 items (poems, stories, film reviews, essays, and drawings). In the summer after he turned sixteen, still wanting to please more or less as he had been pleased, he tried to write a mystery novel.

  He was also sending out cartoon “roughs” to magazines such as Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker. Having heard that professionals used a rubber stamp to affix their name and return address, Updike acquired such an item (and remained faithful to this method for the rest of his life, always too frugal to switch to personalized stationery). He bought the 1935 anthology of New Yorker poetry so as to get a better fix on the kind of verse his favorite magazine preferred.* At age sixteen he had his first poem accepted—by a magazine called Reflections; a dozen or so followed during his years in Plowville. The publications were obscure, shoestring titles (The American Courier, Florida Magazine of Verse), and the poems were almost all light verse—“a kind of cartooning with words,” he called it. “Child’s Question,” a poem he published in Chatterbox, is representative of the precocious wit of the Updike juvenilia:

  O, is it true

  A word with a Q

  The usual U

  Does lack?

  I grunt and strain

  But, no, in vain

  My weary brain

  Iraq.

  Clever wordplay is the most conspicuous feature of his adolescent output, along with an insistent eagerness to please. He was fearless and energetic as well, qualities his mother worked hard to protect and promote.

  He was, at around this time, learning to see with an artist’s eye. This process is described in rather grandiose terms at the end of The Centaur, when teenage Peter, lying ill in bed on a bright, snowy morning, watches through an upstairs window as his father trudges off to work:

  I knew what this scene was—a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947—and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

  Whether or not he was stretching himself like a canvas, Updike was certainly noticing intensely, taking the imprint of his patch of Pennsylvania, gathering the material that would launch his career. His earliest writings confirm that his talent for careful observation—and a verbal facility that allowed him to express what he saw—came naturally to him, a built-in feature of his intelligence.

  If his mother’s aim was to encourage artistic endeavor, moving him out to Plowville was an inspired tactic. He later suggested that his creative talents “developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver’s license.”

  It was after the move to Plowville that he stumbled into his first religious crisis, a sudden access of doubt, accompanied by—and largely caused by—a debilitating fear of death. (His description of a similar episode in his early thirties gives a visceral sense of his abject terror: “[I]t is as if one were suddenly flayed of the skin of habit and herd feeling that customarily enwraps and muffles our deep predicament.” In Shillington, he had attended Sunday school at Grace Lutheran Church, and enjoyed a comfortable, untroubled faith. He accepted the blessing of a sometimes puzzling but generally benign deity. He was impressed by the idea that lusting after a woman in one’s heart is as bad as actual adultery—which suggested that “a motion of the mind, of the soul, was an actual deed, as important as a physical act”; he registered the concept that God watches a sparrow’s fall; and he took to heart the lesson of the parable of the talents: “Live your life. Live it as if there is a blessing on it. Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.” After the move to Plowville, he attended Sunday school at Robeson Lutheran Evangelical Church and found himself beset by “painful theological doubts.” He eased his fears with a tottery syllogism:

  1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.

  2. The world is not a horror-show.

  3. Therefore God exists.

  Ignoring the weakness of the second premise (even in safe, sleepy Shillington some sign of the horror show must have been visible), he willed himself to believe. In his memoirs, he explains that his faith gave him his artistic courage: “Having accepted that old Shillington blessing, I have felt free to describe life as accurately as I could, with especial attention to human erosions and betrayals.” In a sense, he’s claiming divine sanction for his autobiographical impulse.

  The trauma of his adolescent crisis of faith is brilliantly, indelibly captured in “Pigeon Feathers”—which also happens to provide a ruthlessly accurate map of the emotional terrain of Updike’s extended family (minus the grandfather, who, for the purposes of this story, is already dead). Crowded into a primitive farmhouse are David Kern, a precocious thirteen-year-old, an only child; George, his restless father, a high school teacher prone to gloomy pronouncements, who “spent his free days performing, with a kind of panic, needless errands,” anything to get away from the farm; Granmom, who hovers in the kitchen, “her hands waggling with Parkinson’s disease”; and Elsie, David’s mother, an angry, forceful, unhappy woman who’s sometimes dreamy and distracted, sometimes nurturing and perceptive. Elsie has dragged the entire family from Olinger to Firetown, back to the house where she was born. The setup, to borrow a phrase from the story, is “grim but familiar.”

  The first line of the story insists on the damage done, on the emotional cost of leaving Olinger: “When they moved to Firetown, things were upset, displaced, rearranged.” David’s world is out of joint, and the physical disruption reflects an inner, metaphysical turmoil that exposes him to religious doubt and crippling terror at the thought of his own death. The rural isolation of the farm exacerbates his sense of dread; it forces him to face his crisis alone. The minister who teaches catechetical class in the basement of the Firetown church gives him only the sort of bland reassurance intolerable to someone in search of absolutes, and his mother and father aren’t much help, either: “He had never regarded his parents as consolers of his troubles; from the beginning they had seemed to have more troubles than he. Their frailty had flattered him into an illusion of strength.” David’s religious doubts are eventually resolved to his own satisfaction (if not the reader’s—the boy deduces from the beauty of nature evidence of a caring deity). As for his parents’ “troubles” (the mother’s anger, the father’s “lively self-disgust”), the ugly bickering between them seems less a symptom of marital strain than a comforting routine; David notes that “they seemed to take their quarrels less seriously than he did.” Nobody is content in the Firetown household (though the mother returns from her walk around the farm “flushed with fresh air and happiness”), but they’ll bump along and get used to it.

  Country life sharpened Updike’s appetite for urban excursions: In the summer of 1946, he signed up for a bus trip to Philadelphia to see the Athletics host the Red Sox for a Sunday doubleheader—this was his first chance to see the great Ted Williams, who hit several home runs and earned himself a permanent place in Updike’s pantheon of heroes. With Wesley he took the train to New York City (to see his father’s brother,
who was passing through, and in the hope of acquiring a book on Vermeer). Though the trip was a disappointment, faithfully documented in one of his earliest stories, “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town,” a seed was sown: “Towers of ambition rose, crystalline, within me.”

  The eleven miles between Plowville and Shillington meant that Updike’s life, during the school year, was split in two: there was his mother’s world on the farm, and his father’s world, which revolved around Shillington High School. When he came to write what he called “the saga of my mother and father,” Updike made a similar division, offering a portrait of Wesley and Shillington (or Olinger) in The Centaur and of Linda and Plowville (or Firetown) in Of the Farm. And just as Linda acknowledged her resemblance to the mother in Of the Farm, so Wesley saw himself in George Caldwell. In an interview, after disclosing that George was “assembled from certain vivid gestures and plights” characteristic of his father, Updike shared the following anecdote: “[O]nce, returning to Plowville after The Centaur came out, I was upbraided by a Sunday-school pupil of my father’s for my outrageous portrait, and my father, with typical sanctity, interceded, saying, ‘No, it’s the truth. The kid got me right.’ ” Updike thought of The Centaur as his most autobiographical novel—especially because the motivating force behind it was the wish to “make a record” of his father.

  Set over the course of three days in January 1947, the novel tells the story of George Caldwell; his fifteen-year-old son, Peter; and their strong but at times deeply uncomfortable relationship. Cassie, the wife and mother, makes only brief appearances, but she’s a potent presence, even offstage. She engineered what Peter thinks of as his “martyrdom”: the family’s relocation to a “half-improved farmhouse,” a “primitive place” he bitterly resents. “It had been my mother’s idea,” he reports. George empathizes with his son and, characteristically, shoulders part of the blame: “The poor kid. . . . We took him out of the town where he loved to be and stuck him in the sticks.” It’s the distance between the farmhouse in Firetown and the high school in Olinger where Peter is a student and George a general science teacher that provides the drama in the novel: first a broken-down car, then a snowstorm prevent father and son from returning home from school for two successive nights. Together in adversity, Peter and George reveal themselves to the reader.