So here's where it all started. And forgive that it reads like a high school paper, complete with the obligatory quote to kick off the essay.
In His Life: Updike’s Biographically-Influenced Themes
“There are places I’ll remember/All my life, though some have changed…/All these places had their moments/With lovers and friends, I still can recall.” Musician John Lennon penned these lyrics for his song, “In My Life,” while taking an afternoon bus ride in his hometown of Liverpool, as he reflected upon the significant people and places of his youth. As demonstrated through Lennon’s inspiration for the song, lyricists, as well as authors, draw upon real-life experiences to fashion their characters, settings, and plots. Throughout the past fifty years as one of America’s most famous contemporary authors, John Updike continues to captivate readers through his biographically inspired writing. Updike’s personal experiences directly influence him to develop the main themes of middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships in his novels and short stories.
John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Until age thirteen, he led a typical, small-town American life in Shillington, Pennsylvania with his mother, Linda Grace Updike, his father, Wesley Russell Updike, and Linda’s parents. Linda pursued writing and art in her free time, and Wesley worked as a science teacher at Shillington High School, which sat in the family’s backyard.
In 1945, the family abruptly moved eleven miles away to an 80-acre farm in Plowville, Pennsylvania. Updike graduated from Shillington High School in 1950 as co-valedictorian and president of his senior class with a tuition scholarship to Harvard. In 1952, he married Mary E. Pennington, a Fine-Arts major from Radcliffe. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, he won a Knox Fellowship, and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While in England, he sold his first short story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” to the New Yorker, and upon his return to the United States, the magazine hired him.
For the next two years, Updike worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and lived in New York City, where he and Mary started a family. In 1957, he moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he continued to write for the magazine. In his new home, Updike began his career as an author with his first two major novels, Rabbit Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Updike has continued to write novels, short stories, and poetry until present day. His illustrious career has earned him multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and the status of being one of America’s greatest authors for his literary voice and universal themes.
Throughout the majority of Updike’s writing, the theme of middle class suburbia continually resurfaces. He reflects American culture through small town settings and the lives of the townspeople, as crafted from his own life experiences. Updike’s early work consists of many short stories and novels referred to as “The Olinger Stories.” Updike based the typical American town of “Olinger” on his hometown of Shillington. Additionally, the neighboring city of Reading appears as “Alton,” and the town of Plowville as “Firetown." “The Olinger Stories” capture the lifestyle of middle class suburbia, and achieve Updike’s ultimate goal in his writing: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” Updike’s short story, “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” (1964), pays homage the values upheld by middle class Americans from an “Olinger” town.
“The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” directly reflects Updike’s views regarding New York City and its inhabitants through the eyes of thirteen year-old Jay August. The boy describes his first visit to New York City, accompanied by his father. They journey into the city from their small Pennsylvania town to purchase a Vermeer book, and to meet Uncle Quin, an affluent businessman who lives in a hotel. Jay’s father claims, “I (Jay) and his brother (Uncle Quin) were the smartest people he had ever met…he felt that now was the time for us to meet.” After arriving late at the hotel, Uncle Quin proceeds to take Jay and his father on a tour of the city. Throughout the journey, Uncle Quin continually ignores Jay’s desire to search for a Vermeer book, while he conveniently plans their tour around various places to handle his business affairs. At the conclusion of the visit, Jay summarizes his disgust for the city in the last line of the story: “Years passed before I needed to go to New York again.” Updike shares these same sentiments with his young narrator.
For two years, Updike lived in New York City while working at the New Yorker. During this time, he determined that the city was “an unnutritious and interfering world …of agents and would-be’s and with it non-participants.” Living in New York brought Updike to believe that “only stupid people take an interest in money,” as reflected in the character of Uncle Quin – a man whose life is determined by dollars. Also, Updike developed a strong distaste for city itself, where “survival of the fittest is the only law.” Thus, Updike moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which he refers to as “the crucial flight of my life, the flight from Manhattan.” The move enabled Updike to return to his familiar middle class suburban roots, which he longed for in the city, as evident in the scene at the Pickernut Club in “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.”
While Uncle Quin proceeds with his business transactions, Jay orders ice cream. The waiter states that vanilla and chocolate are the only flavors available. Jay describes, “I could scarcely believe it, when the cheap drugstore at home had fifteen flavors.” Minutes before, the waiter inquires if Jay and his father live in New York City, and the father responds, “I live in a hick town in Pennsylvania you never heard of.” As demonstrated through this scene, Updike subtly conveys that “a hick town” may offer a more flavorful life than one spends in the bustling city. Fifty years after writing the short story, Updike’s opinion of New York City remains unchanged. In a 2003 interview, he stated, “I'm glad I spent those two years in New York. I like writing about it. I like being in Manhattan mentally, but I didn't much like being there physically.” Also in reflection of his life in the city, Updike wrote, “The city feels full of other writers and of cultural hassle, and the word game overrun with agents and wisenheimers. I feared the city.”
Updike’s deep desire to escape New York City – a place where he felt trapped by the environment and its inhabitants – appears in his other novels and short stories through the theme of male angst. Male angst encompasses the fervent male desire to achieve satisfaction through power and freedom in marital and familial relationships, the workplace, sexual means, and religion. Many of Updike’s most highly acclaimed pieces, including the short story, “A&P,” and The Rabbit Tetralogy, focus on the restless, dissatisfied male protagonist, and the struggles encountered in attempting to attain an elusive state of fulfillment.
“A&P” tells the story of three teenage girls who enter an A&P store in Massachusetts “in nothing but bathing suits.” A nineteen year-old cashier, Sammy, along with the other cashiers and shoppers, watch the girls as they wander throughout the store. When the trio enters Sammy’s check-out line, the manager approaches them, and requests that they return to the store when they are properly dressed. After the confrontation, Sammy decides to quit, as he feels that the manager treated the girls unjustly. The manager warns Sammy that his parents will be disappointed in him, but Sammy still chooses to walk out the door. Like Sammy, Updike gained a reputation early in his career for abandoning authority to blaze new trails.
Updike drew upon his own nature and the work of J.D. Salinger to write “A&P,” in respect to the theme of male angst. Since his teen years, Updike developed a liking for watching his surroundings and the actions of people, particularly women, as reflected in the detailed characters in the story. In an interview, he stated, “The male eye is attuned to the hunt, and the girl-watching is part of the general hunting way of relating to the world.” Like Updike’s own observations, Sammy possesses a keen awareness of the girls and their presence in the store, described as “a pinball machine…I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of.” The first person voice of Sammy builds the tension he feels while lustfully watching the girls. Vivid descriptions also enable the reader to sense the heady atmosphere of the store.
J.D. Salinger mastered this style in his novel, The Catcher in the Rye through the tormented character of sixteen year-old Holden Caulfield. Updike worked alongside Salinger at the New Yorker, who was one of the best writers at the magazine during the mid-1950s. “A&P” and The Catcher in the Rye share multiple similarities in regards to the theme of male angst, including the similar ages of Sammy and Holden, the boys’ tendency to disregard authority figures, the boys’ rash actions which spur their entry to adulthood, and the overwhelming influence of the boys’ raging hormones, which overtakes their logic. Sammy describes his sudden feeling of bewilderment and insecurity as he walks out of the store, as he states, “my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” Updike felt similar to Sammy when he left his staff job at the New Yorker. He described, “It took a little imagination to leave and quit the staff job at The New Yorker. I went to a party, and it was full of these people I revered…they struck me as very sad; I'm not sure why…I came home from that party and I said to my wife, 'Let's get out of here.” Sammy exists as only one of many characters that Updike created to express the feeling of displacement.
However, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom remains the chief representative of Updike’s theme of male angst. The Rabbit Tetralogy details Rabbit’s disturbing lifetime as he continually searches for his purpose in life, after his illustrious high school career as a small town basketball star. Updike published one book each decade, beginning in 1960 with Rabbit, Run. In this first novel, Rabbit suddenly quits his job as a MagiPeel Peeler demonstrator, and abandons his alcoholic pregnant wife, his infant son, and his dysfunctional family to have an affair in a nearby town. Despite this situation, Rabbit’s journey reveals that he longs for spiritual fulfillment, as he befriends a minister. Eventually, the minister persuades Rabbit to come to his wife’s bedside when she gives birth to their daughter. Rabbit’s return from his two-month sojourn forces him to face reality, which quickly grows more depressing when his wife accidentally drowns their baby. The novel concludes with Rabbit blindly running down the street, attempting to once again abandon his troubles. Updike faced many of the same issues as Rabbit, such as spiritual emptiness and solitude, but he never reached the same level of extreme disillusionment.
While working at the New Yorker, Updike felt spiritually unrest in the bustle of city. Updike reflects this religious crisis through Rabbit, as demonstrated in the scene when the minister shakes Harry’s hand at their initial meeting. Harry “feels caught, foresees explanations, embarrassments, prayers, reconciliations rising up like dank walls; his skin prickles in desperation.” Like Harry, Updike felt intimidated by the presence of religion, which led Updike to examine the works of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierdegaard and the German Christian theologian, Karl Berth. Updike sought to determine the purpose of existence through religious study, and by continually pondering the topic in his writing. In Rabbit Run, Updike portrays a gas attendant as a symbolic religious figure that Rabbit meets during his flight. The attendant says, “The only way to get somewhere is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.” Such a statement verifies Updike’s realized religious views on finding the purpose of one’s life, which Rabbit certainly lacks. Updike once wrote, "My books are all meant to be moral debates with the reader in which the fundamental concern is to get the reader to ask the question, ‘What is goodness?’” Ultimately, Updike attempts to answer this question through his own writing, which reflects his internal religious debates and revelations.
In addition to pondering religion in Rabbit, Run, Updike also expresses feelings of loneliness and lack of direction, which he experienced during his youth. At age thirteen, his family unexpectedly moved to Plowville. This event caused Updike to begin his teenage years feeling isolated and displaced on the large farm. Similarly, Rabbit commenced adulthood with these same sentiments, as “he senses he is in a trap,” even within his own home. Rabbit’s solitude mainly occurs due to lack of stable relationships. He possesses no sense of belonging among family and friends, which leaves him feeling unloved and misunderstood.
As demonstrated by the marital and familial relationships in Rabbit, Run, Updike establishes the importance of the relationships between his characters. Updike’s experiences as a son, a father, a husband, and a lover, along to his keen observation skills, enable Updike to realistically develop the perspectives and interactions of his characters. “Flight,” an “Olinger Story” published in 1962, exhibit Updike’s capability to draw upon his own relationships and masterfully weave them into a story.
Seventeen year-old Allen narrates the story, which entails how he finally breaks free of his mother’s ambitions for him to “fly.” Since Allen’s childhood, Lillian continually states her goal for him to pursue scholarly greatness to ensure that he achieves a greater status than that of a typical middle class American. Lillian expresses great dissatisfaction in her family’s social standing, as she works in a department store, and her husband teaches math at Olinger High School. Also, Lillian takes care of her father, who lives with the family. During Allen’s senior year, he goes on a field trip with the Debate Team, and falls in love with “a plump small junior named Molly Bingaman” from his school. Upon returning home, Lillian discovers the budding relationship, and sees Molly as an unworthy distraction for her son. Even her husband attempts to persuade Lillian otherwise, but she refuses to allow Molly to stand in the way of Allen’s future. At the conclusion of the story, the relationship between Allen and Molly dies due to Lillian’s strong influence over her son. Updike depicts the relationships in “Flight” almost exactly as they existed in his real home during his teenage years.
After moving to the Plowville farm, Updike vividly recalls the increased tension within his family. Updike’s parents, Linda and Wesley, frequently argued over his future, in addition to Linda’s frustration at her husband’s lack of interest in living on the new farm. Linda felt heavily burdened and suffocated by sharing the house with her parents, in addition to caring for them as their health declined. Each of these relationships bears remarkable resemblance to those described by Updike in “Flight.”
However, the most important and biographical relationship in story exists between Allen and his mother. The opening scene describes mother and son standing atop a hill that overlooks Olinger. Allen’s mother says, “There we all are, and there we’ll be forever. Except you, Allen. You’re going to fly.” During Updike’s teenage years, his teachers and parents recognized him as a gifted young man. Linda saw John’s talents as a way for her to vicariously reach her goals of having her art and writing published. She convinced John that he was destined to achieve greatness, in the exact same way Lillian instilled this same belief in Allen. Linda also introduced John to the New Yorker, and as a young teenager, he set his goal of working at the magazine. “Flight” may be one of Updike’s most biographical stories, as it accurately illustrates the personal relationships of his youth.
Though Updike’s life experiences directly influence him to develop his most prominent themes of middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships, these life experiences hold another significance in his occupation. The very themes which Updike chooses to develop in his short stories and novels served as the most important influences that led him to pursue a career as a writer in the first place. Updike’s upbringing in the middle class town of Shillington and the relationship with his mother – similar to the mother and son relationship in “Flight” – drove him to pursue excellence, in hopes of reaching his goal to work at the New Yorker. The goal blossomed and came to fruition as a result of Updike’s deep desire to achieve satisfaction through freedom and power, much like Sammy in “A&P” and Harry in The Rabbit Tetraology. Despite his success over the past five decades, Updike remains humble, unlike Uncle Quin in “The Lucid Eye of Silver Town.” Clearly, Updike’s life experiences that relate to middle class suburbia, male angst, and relationships hold a special place in his life, as he has devoted the past fifty years to crafting stories and novels based on these themes. He would certainly agree with John Lennon’s lyrics, “I know I'll never lose affection/For people and things that went before/I know I'll often stop and think about them.”
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