Updike Read Online Free PDF Page B

its little rectangular crib and rewritten and freshly swaddled in hope.” The comic hint of sibling rivalry in that fanciful description is echoed in his account (also oft-repeated) of the shock he experienced as a young child when his mother rebuked him, asking him to be quiet because she was busy writing: “I had not hitherto realized that I had . . . any competitors whatsoever.” The novel, called Dear Juan , * was submitted to publishers again and again over the course of a quarter of a century and more. The image Updike frequently conjures to evoke the persistent futility of her efforts is of brown envelopes mailed off to New York—whence they were mailed straight back. Updike joined in this boomerang exercise at age eleven (though, in his case, he was sending off cartoons and drawings and, when he reached high school, light verse). Mother and son spent their time “plodding out to the mailbox to reap . . . rejection slips.” *
    Linda’s rejection slips came with numbing regularity: she left behind multiple drafts of Dear Juan , two other unpublished novels, and dozens and dozens of unpublished short stories. Perhaps it’s understandable, in view of that heap of spurned manuscripts, that Updike habitually referred to her as his “long-aspiring mother,” that he relegated her, in a memorable and patently inaccurate phrase, to “the slave shack of the unpublished.” If she was unpublished, then he had no need to address the quality of her fiction—which he almost never did in public. Here’s a man who was never, it can safely be said, at a loss for words, but he had virtually nothing to say about the experience of reading his own mother’s work—unless you count the last words of “My Mother at Her Desk,” a late poem: “Mother typed birdsong.” (The poem begins, “My mother knew non-publication’s shame.”) With that exception, he never used in his fiction the predicament of a hugely successful and prolific writer whose mother, also a writer, struggles to get her stories into print. His silence on the subject may have something to do with his private reservations about her work, as well as his reluctance to draw attention to the boost he’d given her career (though as we know, he didn’t usually shy away from exposing embarrassments, his own or others’). Most likely his silence demonstrates that in his mind, despite tangible evidence to the contrary, his mother simply wasn’t a writer—she remained for him always an aspiring writer. Or, as he put it bluntly, brutally, in a poem composed after her death, “I took off from her failure.” Another satisfying self-dramatization.
    During her son’s formative years, in any case, Linda easily generated more than enough aspiration for two. This was a woman who made lists of the university alma maters of anthologized short story writers (an exercise that eventually helped steer her son to Harvard College). Frank, forceful, exceptionally tenacious, and early on persuaded that her son would do great things, she infused John with confidence, determination, and a sense of security. She was his first audience, and gave him his first sense of himself as a performer. Like Allen Dow’s mother, she convinced him he could fly. “I always did think he could fly without a machine,” she told Time magazine, “but I don’t know whether I was right in sharing that thought or not.” He certainly got the message. “I was made to feel that I could do things,” he told an interviewer. “If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend never to lose it.” By making “the great leap of imagination up, out of the rural Pennsylvania countryside . . . into the ethereal realm of art,” his mother showed him how to set his sights somewhere beyond Shillington. Her own ambition, it should be noted, had no geographical dimension: she showed no inclination to leave Berks County. Though she seemed to her son to be “trying to reach beyond