sixteen he had his first poem accepted—by a magazine called Reflections ; a dozen or so followed during his years in Plowville. The publications were obscure, shoestring titles ( The American Courier , Florida Magazine of Verse ), and the poems were almost all light verse—“a kind of cartooning with words,” he called it. “Child’s Question,” a poem he published in Chatterbox , is representative of the precocious wit of the Updike juvenilia:
O, is it true
A word with a Q
The usual U
Does lack?
I grunt and strain
But, no, in vain
My weary brain
Iraq.
Clever wordplay is the most conspicuous feature of his adolescent output, along with an insistent eagerness to please. He was fearless and energetic as well, qualities his mother worked hard to protect and promote.
He was, at around this time, learning to see with an artist’s eye. This process is described in rather grandiose terms at the end of The Centaur , when teenage Peter, lying ill in bed on a bright, snowy morning, watches through an upstairs window as his father trudges off to work:
I knew what this scene was—a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947—and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
Whether or not he was stretching himself like a canvas, Updike was certainly noticing intensely, taking the imprint of his patch of Pennsylvania, gathering the material that would launch his career. His earliest writings confirm that his talent for careful observation—and a verbal facility that allowed him to express what he saw—came naturally to him, a built-in feature of his intelligence.
If his mother’s aim was to encourage artistic endeavor, moving him out to Plowville was an inspired tactic. He later suggested that his creative talents “developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver’s license.”
It was after the move to Plowville that he stumbled into his first religious crisis, a sudden access of doubt, accompanied by—and largely caused by—a debilitating fear of death. (His description of a similar episode in his early thirties gives a visceral sense of his abject terror: “[I]t is as if one were suddenly flayed of the skin of habit and herd feeling that customarily enwraps and muffles our deep predicament.” In Shillington, he had attended Sunday school at Grace Lutheran Church, and enjoyed a comfortable, untroubled faith. He accepted the blessing of a sometimes puzzling but generally benign deity. He was impressed by the idea that lusting after a woman in one’s heart is as bad as actual adultery—which suggested that “a motion of the mind, of the soul, was an actual deed, as important as a physical act”; he registered the concept that God watches a sparrow’s fall; and he took to heart the lesson of the parable of the talents: “Live your life. Live it as if there is a blessing on it. Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.” After the move to Plowville, he attended Sunday school at Robeson Lutheran Evangelical Church and found himself beset by “painful theological doubts.” He eased his fears with a tottery syllogism:
1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore God exists.
Ignoring the weakness of the second premise (even in safe, sleepy Shillington some sign of the horror show must have been visible), he willed himself to believe. In his memoirs, he explains that his faith gave him his artistic courage: “Having accepted that old Shillington blessing, I have felt free to describe life as accurately as I could, with especial attention to human erosions and
O, is it true
A word with a Q
The usual U
Does lack?
I grunt and strain
But, no, in vain
My weary brain
Iraq.
Clever wordplay is the most conspicuous feature of his adolescent output, along with an insistent eagerness to please. He was fearless and energetic as well, qualities his mother worked hard to protect and promote.
He was, at around this time, learning to see with an artist’s eye. This process is described in rather grandiose terms at the end of The Centaur , when teenage Peter, lying ill in bed on a bright, snowy morning, watches through an upstairs window as his father trudges off to work:
I knew what this scene was—a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947—and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
Whether or not he was stretching himself like a canvas, Updike was certainly noticing intensely, taking the imprint of his patch of Pennsylvania, gathering the material that would launch his career. His earliest writings confirm that his talent for careful observation—and a verbal facility that allowed him to express what he saw—came naturally to him, a built-in feature of his intelligence.
If his mother’s aim was to encourage artistic endeavor, moving him out to Plowville was an inspired tactic. He later suggested that his creative talents “developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver’s license.”
It was after the move to Plowville that he stumbled into his first religious crisis, a sudden access of doubt, accompanied by—and largely caused by—a debilitating fear of death. (His description of a similar episode in his early thirties gives a visceral sense of his abject terror: “[I]t is as if one were suddenly flayed of the skin of habit and herd feeling that customarily enwraps and muffles our deep predicament.” In Shillington, he had attended Sunday school at Grace Lutheran Church, and enjoyed a comfortable, untroubled faith. He accepted the blessing of a sometimes puzzling but generally benign deity. He was impressed by the idea that lusting after a woman in one’s heart is as bad as actual adultery—which suggested that “a motion of the mind, of the soul, was an actual deed, as important as a physical act”; he registered the concept that God watches a sparrow’s fall; and he took to heart the lesson of the parable of the talents: “Live your life. Live it as if there is a blessing on it. Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.” After the move to Plowville, he attended Sunday school at Robeson Lutheran Evangelical Church and found himself beset by “painful theological doubts.” He eased his fears with a tottery syllogism:
1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore God exists.
Ignoring the weakness of the second premise (even in safe, sleepy Shillington some sign of the horror show must have been visible), he willed himself to believe. In his memoirs, he explains that his faith gave him his artistic courage: “Having accepted that old Shillington blessing, I have felt free to describe life as accurately as I could, with especial attention to human erosions and
Similar Books
