Authors: Adam Begley
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.
T
HE 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.
*