Authors: Adam Begley
24 a “lovely talker”:
CJU
, 167.
24 “I was raised among quite witty people”: “John Updike Comments on His Work and the Role of the Novelist Today” (New York: National Education Television, September 1966), produced by Jack Sommers for his “USA Writers” series.
25 “always serving, serving others”:
OJ
, 64.
25 “My mother is pushing the mower”:
AP
, 119.
25 “dear Chonny” . . . “However pinched”:
SC
, 151 and 29.
25 “soaked up strength and love”: Ibid., 25.
26 “squeamish”: Ibid., 151.
26 he “strained for glimpses”: Ibid., 172.
26 nervous tension that made his stomach ache: Ibid., 151.
26 the “cosmic party” going on without him: Ibid., 217.
26 “The paralysis of stuttering”: Ibid., 87.
26 “red spots, ripening into silvery scabs”: Ibid., 42.
27 “fits of anger”: Ibid., 151.
27 “smoldering remarks”:
CP
, 69.
27 “As I remember the Shillington house”:
SC
, 84.
27 Her “stinging discipline”:
MM
, 799.
27 “I still carry intact within me”:
SC
, 104.
27 “The tribe of Bum-Bums”: “View from the Catacombs,”
Time
, April 26, 1968, 73. (Hereafter cited as “View from the Catacombs.”)
27 “Have I ever loved a human being”:
SC
, 256.
27 “What I really wanted to be”:
MM
, 642.
28 “one of my favorite places”: Ibid., 672.
28 “chunky little volumes”: Ibid., 673.
28 Even at the age of five: Hiller.
28 the creative imagination “wants to please”:
OJ
, 233.
28 “Even as a very small child”:
A
, 131.
28 “Only in Pennsylvania”:
PP
, 73.
28 “My geography went like this”:
AP
, 128.
29 “Cars traveling through see nothing here”:
OS
, viii.
29 “transcribe middleness with all its grits”:
AP
, 146.
29 “I was a small-town child”: Ibid., 125.
29 “hopelessly mired in farmerishness”:
SC
, 166.
29 “consumer culture, Forties style”:
MM
, 804.
30 “a flapper’s boyish”:
SC
, 169.
30 “stirring, puzzling” first glimpse:
JL
, 7.
30 “the best of possible magazines”:
CJU
, 24.
30 “I loved that magazine so much”:
PP
, 52–53.
30 “[P]eople assume”: JU to SR, April 14, 1958, Ransom.
31 “The mystery that . . . puzzled me”:
AP
, 143.
31 his “beloved” hometown:
SC
, 110.
31 “Time . . . spent anywhere in Shillington”: Ibid., 8.
31 “My deepest sense of self has to do with Shillington”: Ibid., 220.
31 “If there was a meaning to existence”: Ibid., 30.
31 “Shillington was my
here
”: Ibid., 6.
31 “The Playground’s dust”:
CP
, 100.
31 “I don’t know why you always spite me”:
A
, 265.
32 “We have one home, the first”:
CP
, 15.
32 “the crucial detachment of my life”:
OS
, ix.
32 “saw his entire life”:
A
, 146.
32 “In Shillington we had never had a car”:
AP
, 147.
32 “Somewhat self-consciously and cruelly”: Ibid.
32 “dislocation to the country,” which “unsettled”:
DC
, 34.
33 “a rural creature”:
PP
, 421.
33 “pretty much an outsider”:
T
d.
33 “If I had known then”: LP, October 31, 1950.
33 “man of the streets”:
PP
, 74.
33 “I was returning to the Garden of Eden”:
WMRR
.
33 “where she wore her hair up in a bandana”:
MM
, 802.
33 a total of $4,743.12: LGH diary entry dated January 23, 1948, Ursinus.
33 “After reading White’s essays”:
PP
, 421.
34 “we should live as close to nature”:
OJ
, 69.
34 “eighty rundown acres”:
PP
, 421.
34 “Shillington in my mother’s vision”:
SC
, 37.
34 “She was of Shillington”:
T
d.
34 “authority-worshipping Germanness”:
SC
, 134.
34 “The firmest house in my fiction”:
OJ
, 48.
34 “My reaction to this state of deprivation”:
BookTV
.
35 “In this day and age”:
ES
, 21.
35 “My love for the town”:
SC
, 38.
35 “Take what you want”: Ibid., 209.
35 She began going to church:
DC
, 35.
35 “You don’t get something for nothing”:
SC
, 77.
35 “a retreat from life itself”: LGH,
Enchantment
, 6.
35 “felt like not quite my idea”:
SC
, 41.
36 “extra amounts of solitude”:
HS
, 840.
36 “A real reader”:
OJ
, 837.
36 “a temple of books”:
MM
, 855.
36 “A kind of heaven opened up for me there”:
OJ
, 838.
36 “a place you felt safe inside”:
MT
, 194.
36
The Bride of Lammermoor
:
BookTV
.
36 “its opacity pleasingly crisp”:
DC
, 659.
36 he finally finished
Ulysses
: LP, December 21, 1966.
37 he tried to write a mystery novel:
DC
, 666.
37 One of the poems in the anthology: JU to KSW, October 4, 1954, NYPL.
37 At age sixteen he had his first poem accepted:
MM
, 812–13.
37 “a kind of cartooning with words”:
CP
, xxiii.
37 “O, is it true”: Quoted in “View from the Catacombs,” 73.
38 “I knew what this scene was”:
C
, 293.
38 “developed out of sheer boredom”:
CJU
, 167.
38 “[I]t is as if one were suddenly flayed”:
DC
, 40.
39 He was impressed by the idea:
OJ
, 239.
39 “painful theological doubts”:
SC
, 223.
39 “1. If God does not exist”: Ibid., 230.
39 “Having accepted that old Shillington blessing”: Ibid., 231.
40 In the summer of 1946:
DC
, 667.
41 “Towers of ambition rose”:
ES
, 134.
41 “the saga of my mother and father”:
OJ
, 835.
41 “[O]nce, returning to Plowville”:
CJU
, 26.
41 Updike thought of
The Centaur
: Ibid., 106.
41 “make a record” of his father: Ibid., 49.
41 “It had been my mother’s idea”:
C
, 52.
41 “The poor kid. . . .”: Ibid., 81.
42 As Updike pointed out:
PP
, 33.
42 “an ambivalence that seemed to make him”:
CJU
, 51.
43 “[T]he stain of unsuccess”:
SC
, 183.
43 “caught in some awful undercurrent”: Ibid., 173.
43 “inveterate, infuriating, ever-hopeful”: Ibid., 177.
43 “stoic yet quixotic, despairing yet protective”:
P
, 233.
43 never quite “clued in”:
CJU
, 51.
43 “Life,” Updike concluded:
SC
, 33.
43 “really did communicate to me”:
WMRR
.
43 Wesley’s paltry salary:
T
d.
44 “the agony of the working teacher”:
CJU
, 214.
44 “slights and abasements”:
SC
, 33.
44 “admiration, exasperation, and pity”:
A
, 235.
44 “the kids goaded him”:
C
, 100.
44 “I hate nature”: Ibid., 291.
44 She exerts a “magnetic pull”: Ibid., 211.
44 “little intricate world”: Ibid., 289.
44 “that sad silly man”: Ibid., 63.
44 the “romance” of mother and son: Ibid.
44 “I thought guiltily of my mother”: Ibid., 138.
45 “Why is it that nothing that happens”:
PP
, 74.
46 “gaudy and momentous” gesture:
C
, 117.
46 “performed exquisitely”: Ibid., 122.
46 the girl will nevertheless “sacrifice” for him: Ibid., 51.
46 “small and not unusual”: Ibid., 117.
46 his “poor little dumb girl”: Ibid., 118.
46 “delicate irresolution of feature”: Ibid., 117.
46 he is, after all, an “atrocious ego”: Ibid., 201.
46 “other people as an arena for self-assertion”: Ibid., 241.
46 his own “obnoxious” teenage self:
SC
, 221.
46 Updike could never resist leapfrogging: Ecenbarger, “Updike Is Home,” 24.
47 “Himself a jangle of wit and nerves”: Draft of “Homage to Paul Klee,” Houghton.
47 “I did not, at heart”:
SC
, 80.
47 “In Shillington, to win attention”: Ibid., 153.
47 “some pretty hairy rides”: Ecenbarger, “Updike Is Home,” 24.
47 “smoked and posed and daydreamed”:
SC
, 7.
47 “high-school sexiness”: Ibid., 10.
47 “how to inhale, to double-inhale”: Ibid., 225.
47 “the original flower child”: Ecenbarger, “Updike Is Home,” 24.
47 “cigarette smoke and adolescent intrigue”:
SC
, 7.
47 the pinball’s “rockety-
ding
”:
HS
, 842.
48 “I developed the technique”: “View from the Catacombs,” 73.
48 “clamorous and hormone-laden haze”:
EP
, 35.
48 “an Olinger know-nothing”:
OF
, 29–30.
48 “central image of flight or escape”:
CJU
, 28.
49 “hothouse world / Of complicating”:
CP
, 122.
49 “under some terrible pressure”:
SC
, 103.
49 “The trauma or message”:
CJU
, 28.
49 “If there’s anything
I
hate”:
C
, 69.
49 “I suppose there probably are”: James Kaplan, “Requiem for Rabbit,”
Vanity Fair
, October 1990, 116.
49 “The old place was alive”:
OJ
, 838.
50 “a method of riding a thin pencil line”:
AP
, 146.
50 “gnawing panic to excel”:
CP
, 85.
50 “What did I wish to transcend?”:
SC
, 110.
50 “Some falsity of impersonation”: Ibid., 82–83.
50 “my dastardly plot”:
CP
, 13.
50 “Leaving Pennsylvania”:
SC
, 33.
II. The Harvard Years
53 “What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness”:
ES
, 660.
54 “ready for posterity”: LP, December 1, 1950.
55 “Goodnight—Is it Mamma?”: LGH to JU, September 21, 1950, Ursinus.
55 “Harvard took me”:
CJU
, 204–5.
55 “To take me in, raw as I was”:
CP
, 121.
55 he felt “little gratitude”: Ibid., 122.
55 “in some obscure way ashamed”:
T
d.
55 “obscurely hoodwinked” and “pacified”:
CJU
, 23.
55 “I felt toward those years”: Ibid.
56 a “palace of print”:
SC
, 225.
56 “the shock of Harvard”:
ES
, 168.
56 “freshman melancholy”:
CP
, 122.
58 “prickly,” as Updike put it:
Am
, 38.
58 “rubbing two tomcats together”: LP, September 25, 1950.
58 the “compression bends” of freshman year:
CJU
, 23.
58 “My roommate has stood the test of time”: Lasch, September 26, 1950, Rochester.
59 the “unexpressible friction” between them:
Am
, 38.
60 a “haven from Latin and Calculus”:
HG
, 377.
60 “It is too bad; he just seemed to be getting loose”: Lasch, January 11, 1951.
60 “Harvard has enough panegyrists without me”:
CJU
, 23.
63 “feigned haughtiness”:
T
d.
64 “soft-spoken aristocrats”: LP, September 26, 1950.
64 “an outcropping . . . of that awful seismic force”:
PP
, 94.
65 “saved from mere sociable fatuity”: Ibid., 94.
65 “It was a rainy night”: Author interview, MA, April 1, 2009.
66
wonky
is the term Updike preferred:
SC
, 223.
66 “John seemed a cut above”: Author interview, MA, April 1, 2009.
66 More than half a century later: E-mail, Charles Bracelen Flood to author, September 15, 2009.
66 despite the “snobbish opposition”: E-mail, John Hubbard to author, November 19, 2009.
66 “An undergraduate magazine”:
PP
, 95.
67 “he was much fonder of his cartoons”: Author interview, MA, April 1, 2009.
67 “The main problem with the gag sessions”: Douglas Fairbairn,
Down and Out in Cambridge
(New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1982), 134.
67 “romantic weakness for gags”:
CJU
, 23.
67 orchestrated “social frivolity”:
OJ
, 842.
67 his “one successful impersonation”:
HS
, 844.
68 “At the end”: E-mail, Charles Bracelen Flood to author, September 15, 2009.
68 According to Ted Gleason: E-mail, Ted Gleason to author, September 15, 2009.
70 “[T]he drawings now give me pleasure”:
OJ
, 842.
70 “the happiness of creation”:
MM
, 796.
70 “the budding cartoonist in me”: Ibid., 795.