Authors: Adam Begley
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.
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.