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Above and behind his reverence which extends to oral encounters between Piet and Foxy—looms Updike's central metaphor. He finds in sex an expression of his own Piet-like quest to recapture the past. Nostalgia suffuses him, goads him, at times frightens him. At home, in Ipswich, Mass., Updike spends hours leafing through boyhood photograph albums. "I find old photographs powerful," he says. "There's a funny thing about the way the flux of time was halted at this particular spot. You just can't get back to it."
Not for want of trying. The whole corpus of Updike's fiction before Couples amounts to a memoir of his boyhood. His mother has called those writings "valentines" to the friends and family back home in the small (pop. 5,639) Pennsylvania Dutch farm town of Shillington, three miles from Reading, where John was born. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, is a cosmopolitan, well-educated writer herself (four stories in The New Yorker since John blazed the way), and she has always loathed everything about Shillington. She admits now to having broken up a high-school romance of John's because the girl was "of Shillington, this place I found so contemptible."
His mother's sense of desolation in the small town was further chaffed by the Updikes' poverty. When John was 13, his family had to move to his grandparents' 90-acre farm ten miles away where John's father, Wesley, now 68 supported the five of them on his junior-high-school math teacher's pay of $1,740 a year. That sum did not provide for indoor plumbing, and John and his father bathed at school. It was not until twelve years ago that water was brought into the two-bedroom farmhouse. "Every time I take a bath I can't believe it " says Wesley Updike.
Haunted Halls. With nudging from his mother, John's writing career began at the age of eight, when he sat down at her typewriter and pecked out his first story, beginning: "The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cosy cave fire." Even with this early start, his writing career lagged three years behind his parallel interest in cartooning and painting: he had had a collage published in a children's magazine when he was five.
The Updikes were so poor and isolated, John recalls, that "in a way I've always felt estranged from the middle class—locked out of it." In one of the dozens of stories that he wrote about his boyhood, he describes how "the air of that house crystallizes: our neglected teeth, our poor and starchy diet, our worn floors, our musty and haunted halls." The "genius" of his mother he wrote elsewhere, "was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity," and under her companionship, "consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant and shy."
In his teens, Updike threw himself into the life at Shillington High School with a kind of desperado love, writing like a fiend, drawing like a dervish, wooing his classmates with methods that have remained standard to this day Whenever he felt neglected or unappreciated, he took a pratfall. "I developed the technique," he explains, "as a way of somehow exorcising theevil spirits and winning approval and defying