once we had moved from it, had to be furtive.”
For a perceptive child attuned to the dynamics of a close-knit family, one of the enduring lessons of the move to Plowville would have been the efficacy of his mother’s resolve. Imposing her will on the rest of the family, Linda Updike overcame their objections because she knew exactly what she wanted and never wavered in her desire. * In Enchantment , Belle Minuit’s father protests that the move back to the farm would be a mistake, “a retreat from life itself.” He tells her, “I would rather die than go back to that place”; her response to this point-blank refusal is to ratchet up the melodrama: “We’re moving back to that farm—if it kills us all .” Whether or not Linda actually made any such drastic vows, the relocation was planned and executed entirely on her initiative. Looking back in his memoirs, Updike reckoned that from the time he was thirteen, his life, however fortunate, had “felt like not quite my idea.” Moving out of his hometown derailed him. “Shillington, its idle alleys and foursquare houses, had been my idea,” he wrote; Plowville was emphatically his mother’s idea. Unlike his mother, he never regained his lost paradise, though he did find a substitute in Ipswich. It’s worth noting that this was the last time he allowed anyone else to dictate the terms of his existence. Any future exile would be self-imposed.
Whatever the precise mix of Linda’s motivation, the relocation had immediate and enduring effects. In the short term, it meant that Updike had “extra amounts of solitude . . . to entertain,” and he filled those hours with books, most of them borrowed from the Reading public library. P. G. Wodehouse was a particular favorite; he read through all fifty of the Wodehouse volumes on the library’s shelves. He also devoured the works of a clutch of mystery writers (Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh) and humorists (James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Stephen Leacock, S. J. Perelman). “A real reader,” he explained, “reading to escape his own life thoroughly, tends to have runs on authors.” The “peace and patience” of the Reading library, its comparatively vast spaces behind the imposing granite facade, offered a welcome contrast to the crowded farmhouse; he saw it as “a temple of books” that exuded an air of glamour—“A kind of heaven opened up for me there.” * His mother, who had written her Cornell master’s thesis on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor , tried to get him to read Flaubert and a few other classics, but he persisted in reading mystery novels and humor. At age fourteen he borrowed The Waste Land and found, he later reported, “its opacity pleasingly crisp.” The following year, on a visit to his aunt’s house in Greenwich, he sampled a few pages of Ulysses —which instantly confirmed for him his preference for escapist reading. *
Stranded on the farm, Updike devoured his library books, drew, copied cartoons, listened to the radio—and started to write. In February 1945, when he was a month shy of thirteen, his first article appeared in Chatterbox , the Shillington High School newspaper, to which he would eventually contribute 285 items (poems, stories, film reviews, essays, and drawings). In the summer after he turned sixteen, still wanting to please more or less as he had been pleased, he tried to write a mystery novel.
He was also sending out cartoon “roughs” to magazines such as Collier’s , The Saturday Evening Post , and The New Yorker . Having heard that professionals used a rubber stamp to affix their name and return address, Updike acquired such an item (and remained faithful to this method for the rest of his life, always too frugal to switch to personalized stationery). He bought the 1935 anthology of New Yorker poetry so as to get a better fix on the kind of verse his favorite magazine preferred. * At age
For a perceptive child attuned to the dynamics of a close-knit family, one of the enduring lessons of the move to Plowville would have been the efficacy of his mother’s resolve. Imposing her will on the rest of the family, Linda Updike overcame their objections because she knew exactly what she wanted and never wavered in her desire. * In Enchantment , Belle Minuit’s father protests that the move back to the farm would be a mistake, “a retreat from life itself.” He tells her, “I would rather die than go back to that place”; her response to this point-blank refusal is to ratchet up the melodrama: “We’re moving back to that farm—if it kills us all .” Whether or not Linda actually made any such drastic vows, the relocation was planned and executed entirely on her initiative. Looking back in his memoirs, Updike reckoned that from the time he was thirteen, his life, however fortunate, had “felt like not quite my idea.” Moving out of his hometown derailed him. “Shillington, its idle alleys and foursquare houses, had been my idea,” he wrote; Plowville was emphatically his mother’s idea. Unlike his mother, he never regained his lost paradise, though he did find a substitute in Ipswich. It’s worth noting that this was the last time he allowed anyone else to dictate the terms of his existence. Any future exile would be self-imposed.
Whatever the precise mix of Linda’s motivation, the relocation had immediate and enduring effects. In the short term, it meant that Updike had “extra amounts of solitude . . . to entertain,” and he filled those hours with books, most of them borrowed from the Reading public library. P. G. Wodehouse was a particular favorite; he read through all fifty of the Wodehouse volumes on the library’s shelves. He also devoured the works of a clutch of mystery writers (Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh) and humorists (James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Stephen Leacock, S. J. Perelman). “A real reader,” he explained, “reading to escape his own life thoroughly, tends to have runs on authors.” The “peace and patience” of the Reading library, its comparatively vast spaces behind the imposing granite facade, offered a welcome contrast to the crowded farmhouse; he saw it as “a temple of books” that exuded an air of glamour—“A kind of heaven opened up for me there.” * His mother, who had written her Cornell master’s thesis on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor , tried to get him to read Flaubert and a few other classics, but he persisted in reading mystery novels and humor. At age fourteen he borrowed The Waste Land and found, he later reported, “its opacity pleasingly crisp.” The following year, on a visit to his aunt’s house in Greenwich, he sampled a few pages of Ulysses —which instantly confirmed for him his preference for escapist reading. *
Stranded on the farm, Updike devoured his library books, drew, copied cartoons, listened to the radio—and started to write. In February 1945, when he was a month shy of thirteen, his first article appeared in Chatterbox , the Shillington High School newspaper, to which he would eventually contribute 285 items (poems, stories, film reviews, essays, and drawings). In the summer after he turned sixteen, still wanting to please more or less as he had been pleased, he tried to write a mystery novel.
He was also sending out cartoon “roughs” to magazines such as Collier’s , The Saturday Evening Post , and The New Yorker . Having heard that professionals used a rubber stamp to affix their name and return address, Updike acquired such an item (and remained faithful to this method for the rest of his life, always too frugal to switch to personalized stationery). He bought the 1935 anthology of New Yorker poetry so as to get a better fix on the kind of verse his favorite magazine preferred. * At age
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