Free Updike by Adam Begley

invalid. * Not surprisingly, Wesley was “caught in some awful undercurrent of discouragement,” and though he grew to be a tall, slim young man with a modest athletic talent—his nose was repeatedly broken playing football, as a linesman, in high school and college—he seems to have had little talent for happiness. He compensated for his gloomy disposition with gallows humor, fits of antic eccentricity, and what his son called an “inveterate, infuriating, ever-hopeful gregariousness.” Like many of Updike’s fictional fathers, he was a man of contradictions, “stoic yet quixotic, despairing yet protective.” A faithful deacon in the Lutheran church who taught Sunday school after teaching all week in the high school, he remained an outsider in Shillington, never quite “clued in,” never invited to join the local Lions Club or the Masonic Lodge. Updike recalled the “somehow wounded air he had”—but also his upright posture and striding gait. Restless and sociable, uneasy and aggrieved, forever running inscrutable errands, Wesley prowled the pavement, eager to participate and certain that he would be left out. “Life,” Updike concluded, “had given my father a beating.”
    He was, nonetheless, an enduring role model. A decade after Wesley’s death, Updike acknowledged that his anxious, care-ridden father “really did communicate to me all I know about how to be a man”—and managed, remarkably, to impart “a sense of joy.” Wesley’s paltry salary ($1,740 a year in 1947, when his son was a sophomore in high school; $6,400 by the time he retired in 1962) did nothing to assuage his abiding fear of the poorhouse; he was the family’s sole means of support. The gallows humor must have helped—Wesley was famous around town for his grim clowning, a repertory of gags that included lying down in the classroom and shouting, “Go ahead. Walk all over me. That’s what you want to do.” Or pulling out the cap gun he kept in his desk and shooting himself in the head. Or giving a Nazi salute when classroom discipline broke down. Some of this foolery made his son cringe. But Updike also remembered feeling a surge of pride at seeing his father perform in school assembly, where he could make the entire auditorium roar with laughter. John was in his father’s math class for all three years of junior high school; for eighth grade, his father was also his homeroom teacher. The enforced proximity revealed to the teenager “the agony of the working teacher”—the struggle to maintain discipline, the wearying routine, day after day—and put him, curiously, in the position of becoming his parent’s champion and protector. In Self-Consciousness , he writes about avenging with his own success the “slights and abasements” visited upon his father.
    The Centaur is a token of that success, and one of its wonders is the delicate balance Updike achieves in portraying George’s character. A tragic figure and a figure of fun, at once deeply irritating and convincingly lovable, he is, as Updike liked to say, a good man. And a maddening one. Peter Caldwell feels about him pretty much the way Allen Dow (in “His Mother Inside Him”) feels about his father: a mix of “admiration, exasperation, and pity.” Worried about his father’s health (the cancer George believes is incubating in his bowels), about the precarious family finances (George secretly borrows from the school’s athletic funds, as did Wesley Updike), about his problems with discipline in the classroom (“the kids goaded him to the point of frenzy”), Peter makes a vow to “protect” him.
    Though his love for his father just about trumps his exasperation, and though the two of them are allied in their distaste for the farm (“I hate nature,” says George. “It reminds me of death”), the stronger bond by far is between mother and son. She exerts a “magnetic pull” over him, and together they make for themselves a “little intricate world”