“Shillington was my here ”). Like his mother, he looked back on his childhood haunts as a paradise:
The Playground’s dust was richer once than loam,
And green, green as Eden, the slow path home.
Yet it’s hard to know whether this love affair wasn’t in part retroactive, the strength of the attachment a consequence of his exile—and an ongoing rebuke to his mother for insisting on dragging the family out to Plowville. * In “Shillington,” an ode written on the occasion of the town’s bicentennial, eight years after he’d left Berks County entirely, he pondered the play of recollection as the place itself changed over the years: “Returning, we find our snapshots inexact.” The powerful final lines of the poem are packed with significance, especially in the light of the move from 117 Philadelphia Avenue to the sandstone farmhouse:
We have one home, the first, and leave that one.
The having and leaving go on together.
There was never any doubt about which was his first home, and subsequent departures from other places he lived (Plowville, New York City, Ipswich) always involved a reenactment of sorts, echoes, however faint, of that early exodus—“the crucial detachment of my life.” In a story published in 1991, a year and a half after his mother’s death, Updike captured with a memorable phrase the regret of a man who, fifty years earlier, had been detached from his hometown and “saw his entire life . . . as an errant encircling of this forgotten center.” The having and leaving lasted half a century—lasted, in effect, a lifetime.
T HE FAMILY LEFT Shillington on October 31, 1945. Updike’s description of the actual moment of setting off—after the trick-or-treating and the departure of the moving van—is notably theatrical, and punctuated by bitter asides. His elderly grandparents were already out at the farm when John and his parents packed the last few items into the newly acquired secondhand Buick (“In Shillington we had never had a car, for we could walk everywhere”) and drove away down the street: “Somewhat self-consciously and cruelly dramatizing my grief, for I was thirteen and beginning to be cunning, I twisted and watched the house recede through the rear window.” If this is indeed how it happened, there can be no doubt that the cruelty of that self-dramatizing gesture was directed at his mother.
Almost as frequent as his hymns to Shillington are his complaints about the “dislocation to the country,” which “unsettled” him and left him lonesome, bored—and, come summer, choked by hay fever. He had started junior high school the year before, and now, three months into his eighth-grade year, he was forced to commute to Shillington High School every weekday with his father. He resented being turned overnight into “a rural creature, clad in muddy shoes [and] a cloak of loneliness”; he resented being made to feel like “pretty much an outsider, in a family of outsiders.” The resentment still gnawed at him decades later.
For Linda Updike to regain her childhood paradise, her son had to relinquish his. In a letter she sent him on the fifth anniversary of the move (October 31, 1950), she wrote, “If I had known then how much you hated to leave that house, I might not have had the courage to go.” My guess is that she would in fact have found the courage—after all, she rode roughshod over the resistance of her eighty-two-year-old father, who had to endure a humiliating return to the farm he thought he’d put behind him a quarter of a century earlier. And she brushed aside the complaints of her husband (a “man of the streets” who liked to say that he wanted to be buried under a sidewalk); Wesley had to surrender to what he considered rural imprisonment. Only Linda’s habitually silent mother voiced no objection to leaving Shillington. So why insist on imposing this relocation on the rest of the family? “I was returning to the Garden of Eden and taking
The Playground’s dust was richer once than loam,
And green, green as Eden, the slow path home.
Yet it’s hard to know whether this love affair wasn’t in part retroactive, the strength of the attachment a consequence of his exile—and an ongoing rebuke to his mother for insisting on dragging the family out to Plowville. * In “Shillington,” an ode written on the occasion of the town’s bicentennial, eight years after he’d left Berks County entirely, he pondered the play of recollection as the place itself changed over the years: “Returning, we find our snapshots inexact.” The powerful final lines of the poem are packed with significance, especially in the light of the move from 117 Philadelphia Avenue to the sandstone farmhouse:
We have one home, the first, and leave that one.
The having and leaving go on together.
There was never any doubt about which was his first home, and subsequent departures from other places he lived (Plowville, New York City, Ipswich) always involved a reenactment of sorts, echoes, however faint, of that early exodus—“the crucial detachment of my life.” In a story published in 1991, a year and a half after his mother’s death, Updike captured with a memorable phrase the regret of a man who, fifty years earlier, had been detached from his hometown and “saw his entire life . . . as an errant encircling of this forgotten center.” The having and leaving lasted half a century—lasted, in effect, a lifetime.
T HE FAMILY LEFT Shillington on October 31, 1945. Updike’s description of the actual moment of setting off—after the trick-or-treating and the departure of the moving van—is notably theatrical, and punctuated by bitter asides. His elderly grandparents were already out at the farm when John and his parents packed the last few items into the newly acquired secondhand Buick (“In Shillington we had never had a car, for we could walk everywhere”) and drove away down the street: “Somewhat self-consciously and cruelly dramatizing my grief, for I was thirteen and beginning to be cunning, I twisted and watched the house recede through the rear window.” If this is indeed how it happened, there can be no doubt that the cruelty of that self-dramatizing gesture was directed at his mother.
Almost as frequent as his hymns to Shillington are his complaints about the “dislocation to the country,” which “unsettled” him and left him lonesome, bored—and, come summer, choked by hay fever. He had started junior high school the year before, and now, three months into his eighth-grade year, he was forced to commute to Shillington High School every weekday with his father. He resented being turned overnight into “a rural creature, clad in muddy shoes [and] a cloak of loneliness”; he resented being made to feel like “pretty much an outsider, in a family of outsiders.” The resentment still gnawed at him decades later.
For Linda Updike to regain her childhood paradise, her son had to relinquish his. In a letter she sent him on the fifth anniversary of the move (October 31, 1950), she wrote, “If I had known then how much you hated to leave that house, I might not have had the courage to go.” My guess is that she would in fact have found the courage—after all, she rode roughshod over the resistance of her eighty-two-year-old father, who had to endure a humiliating return to the farm he thought he’d put behind him a quarter of a century earlier. And she brushed aside the complaints of her husband (a “man of the streets” who liked to say that he wanted to be buried under a sidewalk); Wesley had to surrender to what he considered rural imprisonment. Only Linda’s habitually silent mother voiced no objection to leaving Shillington. So why insist on imposing this relocation on the rest of the family? “I was returning to the Garden of Eden and taking
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