View from the Catacombs

(9 of 11)
graceful and superbly controlled, reveal an informed intelligence that can plunge unafraid into the rip currents of Vladimir Nabokov or write a better analysis of the nature of parody than the very good one that appeared as preface to the anthology he was reviewing. And it is somehow endearing to know that the same hand that wrote The New Yorker's sane, knowledgeable review of James Joyce's recently discovered fragment Giacomo Joyce, also turned out the epic 1960 farewell to Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.

Swinger & Bum. After the Updikes moved to Ipswich in 1957, John found himself more than ever in thrall to his homeward-looking vision. So many short stories flowed from his reservoir of nostalgia that he collected eleven of the best in a volume called Olinger Stories—Olinger being "audibly a shadow of Shillington," Updike wrote, and yet something other. "The surrounding land is loamy, and Olinger is haunted—hexed, perhaps—by rural memories, accents and superstitions. It is beyond the western edge of Megalopolis, and hangs between its shallow hills enchanted, nowhere, anywhere; there is no place like it. Olinger is a state of mind, of my mind, and it belongs entirely to me."

Updike's novels, though very much distinct from each other, were each rooted in the past. The Poorhouse Fair, though ostensibly set in New Jersey, was really drawn from the old folks' home near the Updike house in Shillington, and told a slight, whispered story of the accumulating sense of pointlessness among the inmates. From there, Updike leaped two generations to Rabbit, Run, a quietly savage novel about a former high school basketball star who simply runs away from wife, child, job and the suffocating box of senseless moral obligations. It was a flawlessly turned portrait of a social cripple who understood somehow that, running, he was more alive than he would be standing still. It was also, says an old friend of Updike's, "a picture of John, if he had been a better basketball player and had married a home-town girl."

The Centaur was a loving tribute to his father, an endearing old-style eccentric in whom Updike sees "the Protestant kind of goodness going down with all the guns firing—antic, frantic, comic, but goodness nonetheless." Though the novel is obscured by unnecessary buttresses of Greek mythology, the portrait of Wesley Updike, in all its wonderful mania, sparkles with life. Wesley Updike is still mentioned in hushed tones in Shillington for his unpredictable teaching methods. One winter day, he suddenly dashed out of, his classroom in the middle of a lesson on decimals. Moments later, he reappeared with a handful of snow, raced to the blackboard, and triumphantly slammed the snowball against the spot decreed for the decimal point.

The Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts of his own.

"I wouldn't want to pose as a religious thinker," he says. "I'm more or less a shady type improvising his way from book to book and trying to get up in the morning without a toothache. At one time I held very