by Begley, Adam
The dual portrait of father and son is enriched and complicated by mythological parallels elaborated in alternate chapters. As James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Updike borrows from the Greeks to endow his characters with archetypal significance, reimagining Olinger High School as Mount Olympus (a glorification that also works, conversely, as ironic diminishment: the school’s faculty is hardly godlike). Updike gives George the role of Chiron, the noble centaur (half human, half horse) who sacrifices himself for the sake of Prometheus (Peter) and suffers in his stead. (Prometheus, who had the audacity to steal fire from the gods and give it to mankind, was chained to a rock in punishment and left there to languish. Think of the rock as the farmhouse in Firetown, and the analogy becomes clearer. There is, mercifully, no liver-eating eagle in the picture.) The nonmythic reality is that George endures a daily martyrdom to support his family, suffering so that Peter won’t have to—so that he can, eventually, escape from captivity. George’s travails are compounded by hypochondria; he’s convinced himself that he’s dying of cancer.
As Updike pointed out when he accepted the 1963 National Book Award for The Centaur, both the book and the hero are centaurs, divided entities. The novel is a daring mix of remembrance and myth, of visually precise detail and fantastic allegory; George combines a drudging, plow-horse devotion to duty with a subversive, almost anarchic streak that tempts him—nearly, but not quite—to kick over the traces. In his acceptance speech, Updike made an eloquent case for accuracy as the writer’s necessary virtue—and indeed, one of the most impressive features of the novel is the vivid realism of the chapters narrated by Peter, who observes himself and his father with brutal clarity. But even when the narrative is cloaked in myth, even when he appears in the guise of Chiron, George Caldwell is a dead ringer for Wesley Updike (about whom, his son later explained, there was “an ambivalence that seemed to make him very centaur-like”).
Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900, Wesley Russell Updike grew up precariously in a once-prosperous family, youngest child of a clergyman, Hartley, who failed in the ministry, failed in business, and died an invalid.* Not surprisingly, Wesley was “caught in some awful undercurrent of discouragement,” and though he grew to be a tall, slim young man with a modest athletic talent—his nose was repeatedly broken playing football, as a linesman, in high school and college—he seems to have had little talent for happiness. He compensated for his gloomy disposition with gallows humor, fits of antic eccentricity, and what his son called an “inveterate, infuriating, ever-hopeful gregariousness.” Like many of Updike’s fictional fathers, he was a man of contradictions, “stoic yet quixotic, despairing yet protective.” A faithful deacon in the Lutheran church who taught Sunday school after teaching all week in the high school, he remained an outsider in Shillington, never quite “clued in,” never invited to join the local Lions Club or the Masonic Lodge. Updike recalled the “somehow wounded air he had”—but also his upright posture and striding gait. Restless and sociable, uneasy and aggrieved, forever running inscrutable errands, Wesley prowled the pavement, eager to participate and certain that he would be left out. “Life,” Updike concluded, “had given my father a beating.”
He was, nonetheless, an enduring role model. A decade after Wesley’s death, Updike acknowledged that his anxious, care-ridden father “really did communicate to me all I know about how to be a man”—and managed, remarkably, to impart “a sense of joy.” Wesley’s paltry salary ($1,740 a year in 1947, when his son was a sophomore in high school; $6,400 by the time he retired in 1962) did nothing to assuage his abiding fear of the poorhouse; he was the family’s sole means of support. The gallows humor must have helped—Wesley was famous around town for his grim clowning, a repertory of gags that included lying down in the classroom and shouting, “Go ahead. Walk all over me. That’s what you want to do.” Or pulling out the cap gun he kept in his desk and shooting himself in the head. Or giving a Nazi salute when classroom discipline broke down. Some of this foolery made his son cringe. But Updike also remembered feeling a surge of pride at seeing his father perform in school assembly, where he could make the entire auditorium roar with laughter. John was in his father’s math class for all three years of junior high school; for eighth grade, his father was also his homeroom teacher. The enforced proximity revealed to the teenager “the agony of the working teacher”—the struggle to maintain discipline, the wearying routine, day after day—and put him, curiously, in the position of becoming his parent’s champion and protector. In Self-Consciousness, he writes about avenging with his own success the “slights and abasements” visited upon his father.
The Centaur is a token of that success, and one of its wonders is the delicate balance Updike achieves in portraying George’s character. A tragic figure and a figure of fun, at once deeply irritating and convincingly lovable, he is, as Updike liked to say, a good man. And a maddening one. Peter Caldwell feels about him pretty much the way Allen Dow (in “His Mother Inside Him”) feels about his father: a mix of “admiration, exasperation, and pity.” Worried about his father’s health (the cancer George believes is incubating in his bowels), about the precarious family finances (George secretly borrows from the school’s athletic funds, as did Wesley Updike), about his problems with discipline in the classroom (“the kids goaded him to the point of frenzy”), Peter makes a vow to “protect” him.
Though his love for his father just about trumps his exasperation, and though the two of them are allied in their distaste for the farm (“I hate nature,” says George. “It reminds me of death”), the stronger bond by far is between mother and son. She exerts a “magnetic pull” over him, and together they make for themselves a “little intricate world” from which George (“that sad silly man”) is excluded—the “romance” of mother and son is far more compelling than that of husband and wife. But here, too, there’s a breach. When Peter wanders in the city of Alton, alone and unencumbered, excited by what seem to him cosmopolitan delights, and feeling released from his everyday world and its galling inconsequence, he realizes that relishing urban freedom is a kind of betrayal:
I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her distance to control or protect me, my mother with her farm . . . her dissatisfaction, her exhausting alternations of recklessness and prudence, wit and obtuseness, transparence and opacity, my mother with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of earth and cereal. . . . [O]f her own will she had placed ten miles between us; and this rejection on her part made me vengeful, proud, and indifferent: an inner Arab.
More than a sign of solidarity with his father, Peter’s preference for Alton (and Olinger) is bound up with a defiant impulse—a rebellion against his mother.
She’s the same woman in The Centaur, in “Pigeon Feathers,” and in “Flight”—all three present an unmistakable likeness of Linda Updike. It’s always the mother’s decision to haul her family out of Olinger to the farmhouse in Firetown that underpins the action, whether it’s trying to return home (The Centaur), trying to leave home (“Flight”), or solving a crisis triggered by the “upset” of having moved home (“Pigeon Feathers”). Her act of will becomes, in a sense, his inspiration. Updike acknowledged as much, obliquely, in “Cemeteries,” an essay he wrote in 1969 and published in the Transatlantic Review. He recalls a visit to the family burial plot in Plowville with his mother, who wanted him to agree to be buried there, next to his parents. He avoided saying yes, but felt the urge to disguise the “evasion” with some banter and buffoonery. He asks himself, “Why is it that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself . . . ?” For the first decade of his writing life, it was the very real fact of Linda’s great drama (her Plowville paradise regained) that fed his fiction.
Updike poured into The Centaur not just his feelings about his parents but also all the intimate experience he had of small-town high school, both as a student and as the son of a teacher. The janitor with his broom, th
e other teachers with their quirky self-importance, the lecherous supervising principal, the basketball games, the swim meets—all are intently observed and transferred onto the page with energy and wit. Peter’s schoolmates, both en masse and in particular, are portrayed with unsentimental rigor. They’re mostly dull and ordinary kids, but as a group they’re somehow thrilling—collectively capable of a “gaudy and momentous” gesture. Part of Peter knows that he’s a cut above, college-bound, destined to achieve a worldly success beyond the grasp of his Olinger cohort, but he’s still desperate to hold his place in his chosen clique. He’s divided between his high aspirations (he wants to be a painter; he venerates Vermeer) and the wish to emulate his shiftless idol, Johnny Dedman, who “performed exquisitely all the meaningless deeds of coördination, jitterbugging and playing pinball and tossing salted peanuts into his mouth.” Peter’s relationship with his girlfriend, Penny, is typical.* He describes her as “small and not unusual,” thinks of her as his “poor little dumb girl,” and speculates that it’s a “delicate irresolution of feature” that makes her, just possibly, “worthy” of him. And yet, despite the disdain he fails occasionally to conceal—he is, after all, an “atrocious ego”—he loves her as best he can. We’re told, toward the end of the novel, that Peter sees “other people as an arena for self-assertion,” a harsh judgment but not entirely unfair.
Updike’s assessment of his own “obnoxious” teenage self is no more flattering. In his memoirs, he paints a picture of a kid whose “frantic ambition and insecurity” turned him into a pest: “skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school.” There’s a stiff measure of retrospective false modesty in that litany, his failings exaggerated for comic effect, but there’s no doubt that the young Updike craved attention and acceptance. Parking meters made their first appearance in Shillington in the late 1940s, and Updike could never resist leapfrogging over them, his exuberance and exhibitionism working hand and hand.
“Himself a jangle of wit and nerves”—that terse description, from an unpublished draft of a story written in 1960, is a faithful snapshot. He worked extensively on the class yearbook and was an associate editor of Chatterbox, co-valedictorian, and popular enough (and pushy enough) to be elected class president, though he later came to think of his election as a mistake; in his memoirs he wrote, “I did not, at heart, feel I deserved to be class president.”
He seems, in any case, to have preferred his daredevil self: “In Shillington, to win attention and approval from my classmates, I would get out on the running board of my family’s heavy old black Buick and steer the car downhill through the open window, while my thrilled passengers squealed within.” School friends remembered “some pretty hairy rides” in that car, including lunchtime games of chicken. This was the rebel who “smoked and posed and daydreamed,” soaking up “high-school sexiness” in a booth at the back of Stephen’s Luncheonette on Lancaster Avenue. That’s where he learned the art of sophisticated smoking—“how to inhale, to double-inhale, to French inhale, and (just barely) to blow smoke rings.” One friend described him as “the original flower child,” with uncombed hair and unbuttoned shirt, a Kool dangling from his lips, hunched over the pinball machine. Everyone agrees that “Uppie” was a sloppy dresser, habitually unkempt, and that he seemed to subsist on cigarettes, cookies, and baloney. At Stephen’s, where half the school would hang out after the last class let out at twenty past three, John gobbled salt-encrusted hamburgers washed down with coffee. He would linger after the other kids dispersed, waiting for his father so they could drive together back to Plowville. Again and again in his writing he revisited that luncheonette, a place thick with “cigarette smoke and adolescent intrigue,” Frankie Laine or Doris Day on the jukebox competing with the pinball’s “rockety-ding.” In The Centaur, this teenage paradise is Minor’s Luncheonette, and it’s more important to Peter than school—he thinks of it, in fact, as the center of his life apart from his mother.
Updike’s collection of high school pals—they called themselves Our Gang—congregated at Stephen’s or at the house of a classmate named Joan Venne. As he saw it, he was a sort of marginal character who had forced himself into the “jet set of Shillington High.” He wooed them with slapstick: “I developed the technique of deliberately falling, as a way of somehow exorcising evil spirits and winning approval and defying death. . . . I spent a lot of time in high school throwing myself over stair railings.” That may have gotten their attention, but what held it was his wit. He made them laugh, amusing them just as he had amused his mother. The Shillington gang was in some ways more important to him than any other. His high school friends stayed with him all his life in that he continued to see them at class reunions every five years. (By contrast, after he left Ipswich in 1974, he dropped his friends there entirely.) Inserting himself into a gang, or gathering one around him, became his preferred mode of social engagement. He had individual friends, to be sure, but he also needed a crowd, a group in which he could both stand out and blend in, draw attention to himself and disappear from view. Shillington and Ipswich, the places where his gang was most cohesive (and most adoring), were the places where he was happiest.
Shillington (Olinger)—the world of The Centaur—was the world Linda Updike hoped her son would transcend. A part of him wanted nothing better than to kill time in the “clamorous and hormone-laden haze” of Stephen’s; his mother could think of nothing worse. In Of the Farm, Joey Robinson’s mother explains why she was so desperate to get the teenage Joey out of Olinger: she couldn’t bear the thought of him becoming “an Olinger know-nothing. . . . I didn’t want my only child to be an Olingerite; I wanted him to be a man.” She complains that the residents of Olinger “with absolute seriousness consider it the center of the universe”—a clear echo of Updike’s boyhood sense of geography.
Joey was no more likely to become a self-satisfied Olingerite than Updike was. In all these fictions, the mother predicts that her only son will fly, and so he does, though there’s a certain ambiguity about what exactly he’s escaping. When Updike drew a critic’s attention to the “central image of flight or escape” in his early work, he underscored the sense of loss and guilt that dogs the escapee: “[I]n time as well as space we leave people as if by volition and thereby incur guilt and thereby owe them, the dead, the forsaken, at least the homage of rendering them.” The ambitious young man, pushed by his mother to get out, succeeds brilliantly—and is consumed by remorse, because his success reveals to him that he was fleeing not just the trap of small-minded small-town life but also a willful, dangerously brilliant, unhappy mother and a martyred, ineffectual father. He was leaving behind difficult, unsuccessful parents who stewed in a “hothouse world / Of complicating, inward-feeding jokes,” parents who labored, as he put it in his memoirs, “under some terrible pressure of American disappointment.” To the Paris Review he explained:
The trauma or message that I acquired in Olinger had to do with suppressed pain, with the amount of sacrifice I suppose that middle-class life demands, and by that I guess I mean civilized life. The father . . . is sacrificing freedom of motion, and the mother is sacrificing in a way—oh, sexual richness, I guess; they’re all stuck.
That vague, enigmatic allusion to his mother’s sacrifice may be related to one of the more perplexing lines of dialogue in The Centaur, in which Cassie, the wife and mother, standing in the kitchen with George and Peter, declares out of the blue, “If there’s anything I hate . . . it’s a man who hates sex.” Further clues to this mystery can be found in a Vanity Fair profile in which Updike mused in studiously general terms on mother-son relations: “I suppose there probably are a fair number of mothers who never find completely satisfactory outlets for their sexual energy and inflict a certain amount of it on their male children. Without there being anything hands-on or indecent.” His mother’s frustra
tions were reason enough for him to plot his escape—and a perpetually fresh source of guilt.
Despite all the time wasted playing pinball in Stephen’s, his high school grades were impeccable, nothing but As from seventh to twelfth grade. Linda and Wesley had driven him up to see Harvard in the summer of 1949, and John never forgot his first glimpse of the college’s linked quadrangles with their arching elms (“The old place was alive”). When he received scholarship offers from both Harvard and Cornell, the choice seemed clear.* He spent the summer of 1950 working as a copyboy and Teletype operator at the Reading Eagle, and in September traded Plowville for Harvard Yard.
How long had he been dreaming of escape? Since the move out to the farm? Or was it earlier still? In “The Dogwood Tree,” he claims that even as a boy, he saw art—whether drawing or writing—as “a method of riding a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts.” Was that nascent artistic ambition a sign of his “gnawing panic to excel,” or the first stirrings of an impulse to flee? A combination of both. “What did I wish to transcend?” he asks in his memoirs, “My beloved Shillington—can it be?” The answer, though muffled by the convoluted syntax of ambivalence, was yes:
