Updike (4 page)

Cemented by the birth of the promised child, the marriage lasted forty-seven years, ending only with Wesley’s death—but no one would have called it a particularly happy union. According to her son, Linda always spoke of their long entanglement as something they were both powerless to change. Even the first year was tumultuous: The young couple settled briefly in Ohio, where Wesley worked as a field superintendent for a small oil and natural gas field—but Linda left abruptly, returning to her parents’ house in Shillington. Wesley followed soon after. He worked as a hotel clerk in Reading for the next year until landing a job, in February 1927, as a lineman with AT&T.

The promised son, John Hoyer Updike, was born at a low point in the family’s fortunes, the year in which Linda’s father, still reeling from the stock market crash, saw the last of his investments shrink to nothing. In June, after five relatively happy years on the road as a cable splicer with the telephone company, Wesley lost his job. “Possibly the household that nurtured me was a distracted and needy one,” Updike speculated; certainly it was a household “in severe Depression-shock.” The only tangible reminders of their “pretensions to quality” were the white brick house itself and some of the furnishings, such as the upright piano in the parlor, the Tiffany lampshade over the dining room table, the good china.

The first year of Updike’s life was—for the nation—one of unrelieved economic misery. The banking crisis was spreading panic, and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. The Hoyers and Updikes suffered along with their fellow citizens. According to her son, Linda Updike had been “a belle of sorts, flashily dressed by her father in his palmy period”; now, in straitened circumstances, she decided to put her education to some use by teaching at the Shillington elementary school, an experiment that lasted less than a day. She found herself unable to control the students, and simply walked out of the classroom. Instead she went to work at a department store in Reading, selling drapery for a salary of fourteen dollars a week and leaving her baby boy in her mother’s care. Her father and her husband both joined WPA work crews surfacing the roads in and around Shillington, “spreading oil and shovelling crushed stone.” Her mother, in addition to looking after Johnny, sold asparagus and pansies from the garden and eggs from the chicken house at the bottom of the backyard. At Albright College in Reading, Wesley began taking education courses, which allowed him to start in the fall of 1934 as a mathematics teacher at Shillington High School, a job he kept until his retirement nearly thirty years later. Throughout the Depression, he worked summer construction jobs for extra cash. As his son put it, he was “running scared financially for much of his life.”

To commemorate the first birthday of her baby boy, Linda insisted that the family plant a pink dogwood tree by the side of the house. The tree cost $5.25—a large sum in hard times—but it still bloomed eighty years later.

Little changed between 1932 and 1945. Linda quit her job in 1935, declaring that she would become a writer, and the baby grew into a boy and then an adolescent. If not quite the messiah Belle Minuit bargained for, he was at least a notably bright, good-natured child. Looking back on those thirteen years, Updike was struck by the “immutability” and “steadfastness” of his surroundings. The relative stasis, he wrote, was “an exceptional effect, purchased for me at unimaginable cost by the paralyzing calamity of the Depression and the heroic external effort of the Second World War.” Shillington barely grew, barely changed. “I grew up in a town that was abnormally still.” The essential feature of this “immutability,” as far as young John was concerned, was the unaltered configuration of his family: mother, father, and maternal grandparents—no additions, no subtractions. Still channeling the unabashed egoism of early childhood, he declared that the five of them were “locked into a star that would have shattered like crystal at the admission of a sixth”—no room for a sibling, or “competitor,” as he put it. In “Midpoint,” his most ambitious and most explicitly autobiographical poem, he makes use of the same astral image:

The fifth point of a star, I warmed

to my onliness, threw tantrums,

and, for my elders’ benison, performed.

And here, too, he celebrated the absence of any “competitor”:

The brothers pressing to be born

Were kept, despite their screams, offstage.

Alone in the spotlight, he accepted the applause of his adoring audience.

Half the household was elderly. His grandfather was nearly seventy when John was born, his grandmother perhaps a dozen years younger. John Hoyer is remembered in Updike’s writing as a “lovely talker” who was “in his way a distinguished man,” fond of quoting from the Bible in his wheezy voice and dispensing political opinions. (He was a staunch Democrat.) He had, according to his grandson, “that old-fashioned way of talking as a kind of performance.” With the exception of his grandmother, everyone in the house was a talker, and the favorite topic was the family:

I was raised among quite witty people who talked about themselves and each other all the time so that there was generated in the household a kind of running mythology which I’ve drawn upon. It was no invention of mine; I’ve been the witness who’s tried to write a little of it down. All four adults in that house where I grew up charged their very quiet lives with drama and suspense. They were Bible readers, especially my grandfather and my mother, and there was something of viewing their lives as an unfolding book, as a scroll that was being rolled out, and constantly examining it for significance . . . for God’s fingerprints. Well, it just was somehow very exciting.

Early on, in other words, he learned the importance—the mythic importance—of daily doings.

Updike’s grandmother, in memory, is silent or monosyllabic, a small, slight, dark woman with a sharp face, “always serving, serving others.” Katie Hoyer contracted Parkinson’s while the family was still living at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, and her husband’s eyesight deteriorated, so that young John would have to read his newspaper to him, but otherwise the status quo remained undisturbed: the five of them close—perhaps, Updike later wondered, too close.

In “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” he offers a glimpse of the family in action:

My mother is pushing the mower, to which a canvas catch is attached. My grandmother is raking up the loose grass in thick heaps, small green haystacks impregnated with dew, and my grandfather stands off to one side, smoking a cigar, elegantly holding the elbow of his right arm in the palm of his left hand while the blue smoke twists from under his moustache and dissolves in the heavy evening air—that misted, too-rich Pennsylvania air. My father is off, doing some duty in town; he is a conscientious man, a schoolteacher and deacon, and also, somehow, a man of the streets.

Also absent from this picture is the cherished boy, “dear Chonny,” sheltered by his family’s solicitous care, blissfully unaware of financial pressures: “However pinched my guardians felt, they did not pinch me.” He was protected, in fact, from any serious trauma; he “soaked up strength and love.” Though he admitted in later life to torturing his toys (pleading guilty to abusing his teddy bear, Bruno, and mutilating a rubber Donald Duck), he was well-behaved, cautious—“squeamish,” even—but cheerful and obliging, eager to play box hockey and roofball at the playground (his local heaven) in shorts and sneakers, a freckled boy well liked by the neighbors on Philadelphia Avenue and the teachers at the Shillington elementary school.

There were accidents and disappointments. At age five he was struck by a car on his way to Sunday school and spent a week in bed with a bandaged head. He liked girls in general (he “strained for glimpses of [their] underpants as they swung on the swings and skinned the cat on the jungle gym”), but all through elementary school, he loved one classmate in particular, a freckled girl with pigtails and green eyes. This love went unrequited. He also suffered from hay fever, and a nervous tension that made his stomach ache at mealtimes and caused, at one point, his hair to begin falling out. At a tender age (ten or eleven), he was already spooked by the idea of death, his morbid brooding brought on by reading science fiction and contemplating a vast future so frighteningly evoked—he couldn’t bear the thought of the “cosmic party” going on without him. Thanks to his superstitious grandmother, he developed a fear of ghosts. Those various complaints were mild, however, compared with his stutter, which embarrassed him acutely when he was still young. The speech impediment first tripped him up in high school; he never banished it entirely, but in later life it was more of a hesitation—a barely noticeable catch in an otherwise fluent stream of words—than an outright stammer.
*
Worse still was the scourge of “red spots, ripening into silvery scabs” that erupted on his skin: psoriasis, inherited from his mother, first attacked when he was six (Linda wrote to relatives that it was the worst case she had seen outside of a book on skin diseases); it plagued him, with occasional surcease, for the rest of his life. Though not quite a sickly child, he was delicate, accustomed to having others worry about his health.

The tranquillity of his childhood was troubled by Linda Updike’s unpredictable moods—her “fits of anger,” mostly aimed at her husband and her parents rather than her son. There was quarreling, “smoldering remarks,” and the slamming of doors, an atmosphere of barely repressed rage:

As I remember the Shillington house, I was usually down on the floor, drawing or reading, or even under the dining-room table trying to stay out of harm’s way—to disassociate myself from the patterns of conflict, emanating from my mother, that filled the air above my head. Darts of anger rayed from her head like that crown of spikes on the Statue of Liberty; a red “V,” during those war years, would appear, with eerie appositeness, in the middle of her forehead.

Her “stinging discipline,” when John was late coming home, consisted of whipping his calves with a switch, “her face red with fury.” But he also remembered the quiet of his mother’s intense concentration when she was writing, and the companionable sound of her typewriter.

Her portable Remington features in a childhood memory of unalloyed delight: “I still carry intact within me my happiness when, elevated by the thickness of some books to the level of my mother’s typewriter, I began to tap at the keyboard and saw the perfect letter-forms leap up on the paper rolled around the platen.” He wrote his first story at the age of eight, typing it out on his mother’s typewriter. The first sentence read, “The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cozy cave fire.” He also wrote a long poem about an egg that was published in the grade school newspaper,
Little Shilling
. But despite this early flirtation with the writer’s trade, his first love was cartoons—Mickey Mouse, to be precise. “Have I ever loved a human being,” he asked himself, “as purely as I loved Mickey Mouse . . . ?” A passion for blank paper, for drawing, for tracing and comics, and for the movies merged eventually into a crystallized ambition: “What I really wanted to be when I grew up was an animator.” He remembered the bliss of copying comics—Mickey, Donald Duck, Barney Google—as he lay prone on the carpet. Starting in kindergarten, he was given drawing lessons by a neighbor, Clint Shilling. A photograph taken by his mother of nine-year-old John sitting on the steps of the side porch of the Shillington house (“one of my favorite places in the world”) shows him dressed for church, intently studying a Big Little Book featuring Mickey Mouse. Contemplating this photo in his late sixties, he wondered whether Big Little Books (“chunky little volumes sold for ten cents, made of single panels from a comic strip opposite a short page of narrative text”) eased his transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer.

The image that recurs again and again in his writing is of that young boy lying on the floor, busily drawing or tracing or coloring, or doing the same at the dining room table under the stained-glass lampshade, reproducing the comics and cartoon characters that he so loved, already certain that his efforts would meet with the unstinting approbation of his parents and grandparents. Here was the beginning of Updike the industrious artist. Even at the age of five, his mother told a journalist, “he worked.” As he explained in his 1985 speech, the creative imagination “wants to please. It wants to please more or less as it has been pleased, by the art that touched it in its formative years.” Part of the aim of those early artistic endeavors was surely to entertain—to placate—his mother. In a story called “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” a sequel to
Of the Farm
written in 1990, less than a year after Linda Updike’s death, there’s an intriguing glimpse of a son coping with a mother patterned on Updike’s own: “Even as a very small child he had been aware of a weight of anger his mother carried; he had quickly evolved—first word, first crawl—an adroitness at staying out of her way when she was heavy with it, and a wish to amuse her, to keep her light.” As a grown man, remembering a visit with his mother to Plow Cemetery, he remarked, “Only in Pennsylvania, among my kin, am I pressed into such difficult dance-steps of evasion and placation.” Those two words,
evasion
and
placation
, could be said to sum up Updike’s nascent artistic impulse.

His childish worldview was innocently solipsistic: “My geography went like this: in the center of the world lay our neighborhood of Shillington. Around it there was greater Shillington, and around that, Berks County. . . . [N]ot all children could be born, like me, at the center of the nation. But that some children chose to be born in other countries and even continents seemed sad and fantastic. There was only one possible nation: mine.” Though his street, Philadelphia Avenue, has been widened, and the chestnut trees that lined it have been chopped down, and though shopping malls have replaced the fields on the edge of town, his Shillington neighborhood remains largely unchanged. The town today is profoundly unremarkable—as it was then. As Updike wrote, “Cars traveling through see nothing here to make them stop; the town is neither young nor old, poor nor rich, backward nor forward.” The ordinariness appealed to the boy, and it appealed also to the writer looking back on it, the writer who made it his business to “transcribe middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”