Updike (3 page)

The more Updike one reads, and the more one learns about his life, the more glaringly obvious it becomes that he was enthralled by the details of his own experience. Does it make him a lesser artist that he so often relied on self-portraits and transcriptions of actual events and circumstances? Perhaps it would if the portraits were documentary photorealism and the action unedited chronology: the prose equivalent of a live webcam. Though he announced his desire to “imitate reality with increasing closeness,” he knew full well that there is no way of translating raw experience into words without altering it. And that was never his intention. He selected, he edited, sensing acutely the drift and propensity of seemingly unimportant actions, sharpening the blur of daily life so that meaning began to emerge; the altered, fictionalized story, now freighted with significance, displaced the less dramatically compelling reality. The particular brilliance with which he made his autobiographical material come alive on the page is part of the reward of reading him. In a curious way, the autobiographical elements deepen and complicate the reader’s enjoyment: The informed reader learns to distinguish between the subtle magic of transcribed experience and the different, bolder magic of less securely tethered imaginative gestures.

P
ART OF WHAT
allowed Updike the freedom to indulge his autobiographical impulse was his relationship with his mother, the elderly woman who tugged at Ecenbarger’s sleeve in the Shillington public library, eager to talk about her son, the famous writer. To say that Linda Hoyer Updike encouraged her only child and nurtured his precocious talent is to understate and simplify an unusually close and complicated relationship. She helped him to become a writer (and he, when the time came, helped her); she offered him yards of advice and unstinting praise from the moment he set pen to paper. She was, as he put it, “an ideally permissive writer’s mother,” meaning that he was free to write exactly what he pleased, no matter how painful to his family. He explained that his parents shared an “un-middleclass appetite for the jubilant horrible truth,” and that they were “never other than encouraging, even when old wounds were my topic.” And a lucky thing, too, for he pinned his artistic courage on the notion that “only truth is useful. Only truth can be built upon.”

His mother’s respect for her son’s unflinching honesty was noted by the biographer Ron Chernow, who went to see Linda Updike in Plowville in the early seventies when he was a young journalist eager to write something—anything—about John Updike. Chernow remembers asking her how it felt to pop up as a character in her son’s fiction, specifically in
Of the Farm
.
*
According to Chernow, “She paused and said, ‘When I came upon the characterization of myself as a large, coarse country woman I was very hurt.’ She said she walked around for several days, brooding—and then she realized she
was
a large, coarse country woman.” (Chernow hastened to add that although her personality wasn’t at all coarse, the description accurately captured her look—the stocky build, the husky voice, the pleasantly plain face, the utterly unglamorous clothing.)

Although he habitually referred to her as a “would-be writer,” Updike’s mother was in fact, under her maiden name, Linda Grace Hoyer, a
published
writer—with what in any other family would seem an enviable track record. Between 1961 and 1983,
The New Yorker
published ten of her short stories.
*
In 1971, Houghton Mifflin published her novel,
Enchantment
(actually a series of linked stories, four of which had appeared in
The New Yorker
); and a few months after her death in late 1989,
The Predator
, a collection of stories, six of them from
The New Yorker
, was published by Ticknor and Fields.
*
Updike, once he’d gone to work at
The New Yorker
, was active in helping to get his mother’s stories into the magazine; in fact, it’s very likely that without his help she would never have succeeded. As she told Bill Ecenbarger, with clear-eyed modesty, “I had only a little gift, but it was the only one I got.” She also told him, proudly, “Johnny knew it was possible to be a writer because he saw me trying.”
*

Her published stories are all frankly autobiographical, and almost all set in a farmhouse identical to the one where she was born in Plowville in 1904, the only child of John and Katie Hoyer. Her first book,
Enchantment
, tells her life story in fifteen overlapping first-person installments: her own birth and childhood, her schooling, her marriage, the birth of her only child (who becomes a famous writer), and so on. It’s the Updike-Hoyer household with a few minor alterations and embellishments and a great deal of spiritual reverb. In some of the earlier stories, when they were published in
The New Yorker
, the narrator’s name is Linda; the stories were presented, in other words, as the author’s memoirs. When she collected these stories in book form, Linda gave her alter ego the fanciful name of Belle Minuit, which matches her preoccupation with spells and omens, with various forms of “enchantment.” Her second book is about an aging widow with the more plausible name of Ada Gibson; Ada lives alone in an isolated farmhouse in Pennsylvania, visited occasionally by her only son, a celebrated illustrator who draws covers for
The New Yorker
. You might expect that the various family portraits executed by mother and son would cause some confusion, but actually they tend to corroborate rather than contradict one another. The fictional elements are almost always easy to spot, and the emotional currents (especially between mother and son) ebb and flow in synchronized patterns.

Did John Updike learn the habit of writing autobiographically at his mother’s knee? She certainly set an example. Her sister-in-law, Mary Updike, who had been Edmund Wilson’s secretary at
The New Republic
, advised her as early as 1931 (a year before John’s birth) to write “straight fiction” (as opposed to essays) and to use “material from your life on the farm.” Linda took the advice; in fact, she didn’t even bother to change Plowville’s name. Both mother and son reproduced in intimate detail the family’s domestic arrangements. Two years after her death, at a reading in Pennsylvania, Updike noted in a wry tone that “one of the disadvantages of two people writing out of the same household is that you tend to overlap material.” He also revealed that his mother made a habit of showing him her stories. “I was really an editor before I was a writer,” he said, milking the situation for laughs. “From quite young I was asked to read her things and comment on them, a sort of wearisome but awesome responsibility for a child of ten.” He grew up, in other words, with the idea that it was perfectly natural to write stories about one’s family and one’s immediate neighborhood.

And yet most of his mother’s energies did not go into writing autobiographical fiction. Her magnum opus (“frequently revised and never published,” as her son repeatedly pointed out) was a historical novel about Ponce de Léon. “There was a novel,” Updike recalled, “that slept in a ream box that had been emptied of blankness, and like a strange baby in the house, a difficult papery sibling, the manuscript was now and then roused out of its little rectangular crib and rewritten and freshly swaddled in hope.” The comic hint of sibling rivalry in that fanciful description is echoed in his account (also oft-repeated) of the shock he experienced as a young child when his mother rebuked him, asking him to be quiet because she was busy writing: “I had not hitherto realized that I had . . . any competitors whatsoever.” The novel, called
Dear Juan
,
*
was submitted to publishers again and again over the course of a quarter of a century and more. The image Updike frequently conjures to evoke the persistent futility of her efforts is of brown envelopes mailed off to New York—whence they were mailed straight back. Updike joined in this boomerang exercise at age eleven (though, in his case, he was sending off cartoons and drawings and, when he reached high school, light verse). Mother and son spent their time “plodding out to the mailbox to reap . . . rejection slips.”
*

Linda’s rejection slips came with numbing regularity: she left behind multiple drafts of
Dear Juan
, two other unpublished novels, and dozens and dozens of unpublished short stories. Perhaps it’s understandable, in view of that heap of spurned manuscripts, that Updike habitually referred to her as his “long-aspiring mother,” that he relegated her, in a memorable and patently inaccurate phrase, to “the slave shack of the unpublished.” If she was unpublished, then he had no need to address the quality of her fiction—which he almost never did in public. Here’s a man who was never, it can safely be said, at a loss for words, but he had virtually nothing to say about the experience of reading his own mother’s work—unless you count the last words of “My Mother at Her Desk,” a late poem: “Mother typed birdsong.” (The poem begins, “My mother knew non-publication’s shame.”) With that exception, he never used in his fiction the predicament of a hugely successful and prolific writer whose mother, also a writer, struggles to get her stories into print. His silence on the subject may have something to do with his private reservations about her work, as well as his reluctance to draw attention to the boost he’d given her career (though as we know, he didn’t usually shy away from exposing embarrassments, his own or others’). Most likely his silence demonstrates that in his mind, despite tangible evidence to the contrary, his mother simply wasn’t a writer—she remained for him always an
aspiring
writer. Or, as he put it bluntly, brutally, in a poem composed after her death, “I took off from her failure.” Another satisfying self-dramatization.

During her son’s formative years, in any case, Linda easily generated more than enough aspiration for two. This was a woman who made lists of the university alma maters of anthologized short story writers (an exercise that eventually helped steer her son to Harvard College). Frank, forceful, exceptionally tenacious, and early on persuaded that her son would do great things, she infused John with confidence, determination, and a sense of security. She was his first audience, and gave him his first sense of himself as a performer. Like Allen Dow’s mother, she convinced him he could fly. “I always did think he could fly without a machine,” she told
Time
magazine, “but I don’t know whether I was right in sharing that thought or not.” He certainly got the message. “I was made to feel that I could do things,” he told an interviewer. “If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend never to lose it.” By making “the great leap of imagination up, out of the rural Pennsylvania countryside . . . into the ethereal realm of art,” his mother showed him how to set his sights somewhere beyond Shillington. Her own ambition, it should be noted, had no geographical dimension: she showed no inclination to leave Berks County. Though she seemed to her son to be “trying to reach beyond the street outside . . . toward a world we couldn’t see,” at the same time she seemed to be “hiding from the town, in our house and yard.” Like Allen Dow, Updike had to cope with the complicated business of having a powerful, fiercely possessive mother who was simultaneously tightening her grip and pushing him up and out into the world—even as she herself was retreating from it.

The push-and-pull was aggravated by the unusually strong sense of place she passed on to her only child. Both mother and son believed that their identity was inextricably rooted in a specific location, but what’s peculiar—in the dynamic of a parent and child who never spent more than a few days apart until he turned eighteen and left home for good—is that they were attached to different places: she to the farm in Plowville, he to his boyhood home in Shillington, the small town “synonymous” with his being.

It’s no surprise, then, that in the Updike family mythology, the move in 1945 from Shillington to Plowville (which occurred on Halloween, as if for atmosphere’s sake) is a momentous event. Told and retold in Linda Updike’s
Enchantment
, her son’s
The Centaur
and
Of the
Farm
, and a good number of his short stories and autobiographical essays, the eleven-mile journey from one home to the next is the crisis to which Updike’s childhood builds—and the ideal lens through which to examine the tangle of familial loyalties and tensions that shaped him and fed his early fiction.

The family saga begins, all accounts agree, with Linda Updike’s own childhood, which, as she points out in
Enchantment
, set the pattern for her son’s. Linda Grace Hoyer was an only child born into a household that consisted of two parents and two grandparents. The Hoyers’ farm was for young Linda a paradise: “I began my life,” says Belle Minuit, “with a sense of having visited the Garden of Eden.” But where there’s paradise, the threat of expulsion looms. In 1922, flush with tobacco money, John Hoyer sold the farm and moved with his wife into a white brick house in Shillington, at 117 Philadelphia Avenue. Hoyer, who’d done some teaching in his youth, never liked farming; now he planned to live off his stock market investments. The new house was on a half-acre corner plot; proudly middle-class, it was set back from the street and surrounded by an elaborate, neatly tended privet hedge.

The Hoyers moved into Shillington while their daughter was away at college—at Ursinus, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. It was there that Linda Hoyer met Wesley Updike. They graduated in 1923 and were married two years later, after Linda had earned her master’s degree in English at Cornell University. In
Enchantment
, Belle presents her decision to wed one of her Ursinus classmates, George (the name both mother and son preferred for their fictional portraits of Wesley Updike), as the result of a “revelation” that left her with “no choice”: In a scene disconcertingly reminiscent of the Annunciation, Belle hears a voice telling her she will bear a son, a special son who will be “truly representative of the clan” and fulfill her thwarted ambitions. She asks, “But what must I do to have this son?” The voice tells her, “Marry George.” Just to make sure we get the picture, Belle repeats, “So . . . I had married George, because a son had been promised to me.” Stranger than fiction is the fact that Linda repeated a watered-down version of this fable to a journalist: “I had this foresight,” she said, explaining at once her marriage and her son’s talent, “that if I married his father the results would be amazing.”