my family with me. I thought I was doing them a great service,” she told a television interviewer, echoing her fictional alter ego, Belle Minuit, and still looking defiant forty years after the fact.
Updike sometimes suggested that it was a financial decision. During the war, his mother went to work in a parachute factory (“where she wore her hair up in a bandana like Rosie the Riveter”), and with more money coming into the household, they could afford to buy back the Plowville farmhouse with its eighty-three acres (for which they paid a total of $4,743.12), and tell themselves that they were saving money by living in a smaller house in the country. But in fact Linda had resolved while still a young woman, before World War II—before the Depression, even—to recapture her birthplace and make it her home. Equally unconvincing is the claim advanced by Updike in the early 1970s that the move to Plowville was inspired by E. B. White’s rustic adventures in Maine: “After reading White’s essays in Harper’s throughout World War II, my mother in 1945 bought a farm and moved her family to it.” While it’s true that Linda believed passionately, as her son put it, that “we should live as close to nature as we can,” and it’s also true that she claimed a mystic connection to those “eighty rundown acres of Pennsylvania loam,” the notion that White’s example was decisive seems far-fetched; it makes her sound frivolous, and trivializes the intensity of her determination.
Selfishness, plain and simple, surely played a role. But there was another important factor: she was bent on getting her son out of Shillington, on keeping him apart and different from the townsfolk. A thirteen-year-old in Plowville—how the name embarrassed him!—was quarantined from pernicious, lowering influences; he would be marooned on the farm for at least a couple of years, until he learned to drive. Even when he had his license, if he wanted to escape he would have to borrow the family car. In Self-Consciousness Updike wrote, “Shillington in my mother’s vision was small-town—small minds, small concerns, small hopes. We were above all that.” To an interviewer, Linda explained bluntly why she had done her best to break up John’s attachment to his high school girlfriend: “She was of Shillington, this place I found so contemptible.” Updike sometimes claimed to have inherited from somewhere an “authority-worshipping Germanness”; it certainly wasn’t from Linda, who bristled at authority and stubbornly resisted conformity. In fact, she’s the likely source of Updike’s own intermittently inconvenient contrary streak.
As far as Linda was concerned, Plowville’s virtues were amplified by its distance from town. Set in a lush, rolling landscape, the house, built in 1812, consisted of a combined kitchen, dining room, and living room downstairs, and two bedrooms and a sleeping alcove upstairs. It was barely big enough for four adults and a teenager. * For the first year or so there was no indoor plumbing, no central heating, no electricity, no telephone. “My reaction to this state of deprivation,” Updike once said, “was to get sick. I was quite sick that year with colds and things, and huddled by this kerosene stove that was the only heat we had in the house.” His mother may have thought that her family was somehow too good for Shillington—“above all that”—but in his eyes, the move to Plowville was a step down, a sign that they’d somehow lost the middle-class status proclaimed by the white brick house in town. It was a step down and a step back, too: while the rest of America was abandoning rural areas for town and cities, the Updikes were doing the reverse, rolling back the clock and implicitly rejecting the accepted model for socioeconomic progress. * And John couldn’t even complain. If he expressed his preference for Shillington, he risked wounding or angering his mother: “My love for the town,
Updike sometimes suggested that it was a financial decision. During the war, his mother went to work in a parachute factory (“where she wore her hair up in a bandana like Rosie the Riveter”), and with more money coming into the household, they could afford to buy back the Plowville farmhouse with its eighty-three acres (for which they paid a total of $4,743.12), and tell themselves that they were saving money by living in a smaller house in the country. But in fact Linda had resolved while still a young woman, before World War II—before the Depression, even—to recapture her birthplace and make it her home. Equally unconvincing is the claim advanced by Updike in the early 1970s that the move to Plowville was inspired by E. B. White’s rustic adventures in Maine: “After reading White’s essays in Harper’s throughout World War II, my mother in 1945 bought a farm and moved her family to it.” While it’s true that Linda believed passionately, as her son put it, that “we should live as close to nature as we can,” and it’s also true that she claimed a mystic connection to those “eighty rundown acres of Pennsylvania loam,” the notion that White’s example was decisive seems far-fetched; it makes her sound frivolous, and trivializes the intensity of her determination.
Selfishness, plain and simple, surely played a role. But there was another important factor: she was bent on getting her son out of Shillington, on keeping him apart and different from the townsfolk. A thirteen-year-old in Plowville—how the name embarrassed him!—was quarantined from pernicious, lowering influences; he would be marooned on the farm for at least a couple of years, until he learned to drive. Even when he had his license, if he wanted to escape he would have to borrow the family car. In Self-Consciousness Updike wrote, “Shillington in my mother’s vision was small-town—small minds, small concerns, small hopes. We were above all that.” To an interviewer, Linda explained bluntly why she had done her best to break up John’s attachment to his high school girlfriend: “She was of Shillington, this place I found so contemptible.” Updike sometimes claimed to have inherited from somewhere an “authority-worshipping Germanness”; it certainly wasn’t from Linda, who bristled at authority and stubbornly resisted conformity. In fact, she’s the likely source of Updike’s own intermittently inconvenient contrary streak.
As far as Linda was concerned, Plowville’s virtues were amplified by its distance from town. Set in a lush, rolling landscape, the house, built in 1812, consisted of a combined kitchen, dining room, and living room downstairs, and two bedrooms and a sleeping alcove upstairs. It was barely big enough for four adults and a teenager. * For the first year or so there was no indoor plumbing, no central heating, no electricity, no telephone. “My reaction to this state of deprivation,” Updike once said, “was to get sick. I was quite sick that year with colds and things, and huddled by this kerosene stove that was the only heat we had in the house.” His mother may have thought that her family was somehow too good for Shillington—“above all that”—but in his eyes, the move to Plowville was a step down, a sign that they’d somehow lost the middle-class status proclaimed by the white brick house in town. It was a step down and a step back, too: while the rest of America was abandoning rural areas for town and cities, the Updikes were doing the reverse, rolling back the clock and implicitly rejecting the accepted model for socioeconomic progress. * And John couldn’t even complain. If he expressed his preference for Shillington, he risked wounding or angering his mother: “My love for the town,
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