Updike (67 page)

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.