Perennial Promises Kept

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of the barrel has been with me some 20 years, but I haven't quite hit the bottom." Should he ever do so, he comforts himself with the thought that he could, a la Bech, "scratch along without writing another word. The literary world is thriving. There are a lot of people out there who want to look at a writer."

That busload of tourists has not yet pulled up in front of his pillared portico and berry-blue front door with a painted American eagle plaque hanging above it. The vehicle is only momentarily stalled, though, just below the steep incline of road that rises through Updike's nine acres. It will arrive, some time soon, just as surely as scholars, journalists, graduate students and the idly curious have been tracking down Updike's past for years. They make pilgrimages to Shillington, Pa., where the author was born and spent his first 13 years. They then proceed to the old stone farmhouse outside town where he and his parents moved in 1945. They find his mother Linda, 78, still living there, cheerful, alert and willing to guide visitors through the landscape that her son transcribed in the stories of Pigeon Feathers (1962) and the novels The Centaur (1963) and Of the Farm (1965).

John was a scrawny smalltown boy troubled by asthma, psoriasis and a stammer, a trace of which persists to this day. He knew before his tenth birthday that he wanted to be a writer. He left his rural home for four years at Harvard, one at Oxford and two as a reporter for The New Yorker. Although he gave up his staff job, Updike and the magazine have remained best of friends. Fees paid for his fiction and other contributions over the years allowed Updike to keep on writing, freeing him from the need to look for teaching jobs: "I guess you could say The New Yorker has been my substitute for a university." On his own, he then began to grow up in public view. Early dust-jacket photographs and publicity stills caught the young novelist and poet as a newly fledged bird, all beak, startled eyes and unruly plumage. In his 30s, happily domesticated and the father of four children, he lived and went on working in Ipswich, Mass. He added some bulk to his frame and bibliography.

Then came the mate-swapping sex and commercial success of Couples. An autobiographical poem written shortly thereafter included the lines:

From TIME'S grim cover, my

fretful face peers out.

Ten thousand soggy mornings have

warped my lids

and minced a crafty pulp of this

my mouth*

The years that followed have been kinder than this self-portrait would suggest. He has grown comfortably into his looks. Graying hair softens features that once seemed mismatched. He is tall (a shade over 6 ft.) and broad through the shoulders and chest. His arms are longer than strictly required. He manages to appear both rawboned and delicate at the same time.

Updike embraces other contrasts. He is unfailingly receptive and fair to the works of other writers. His frequent book reviews in The New Yorker are models of critical generosity. Yet he is also fiercely competitive. He can joke about this side of his character. After moving his thousands of books into the new house last May, he found that he still had not built enough space to shelve them all. "I had to put my American contemporaries down in the cellar," he recalls.