Free Updike by Adam Begley Page B

entirely unfair.
    Updike’s assessment of his own “obnoxious” teenage self is no more flattering. In his memoirs, he paints a picture of a kid whose “frantic ambition and insecurity” turned him into a pest: “skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school.” There’s a stiff measure of retrospective false modesty in that litany, his failings exaggerated for comic effect, but there’s no doubt that the young Updike craved attention and acceptance. Parking meters made their first appearance in Shillington in the late 1940s, and Updike could never resist leapfrogging over them, his exuberance and exhibitionism working hand and hand.
    “Himself a jangle of wit and nerves”—that terse description, from an unpublished draft of a story written in 1960, is a faithful snapshot. He worked extensively on the class yearbook and was an associate editor of Chatterbox , co-valedictorian, and popular enough (and pushy enough) to be elected class president, though he later came to think of his election as a mistake; in his memoirs he wrote, “I did not, at heart, feel I deserved to be class president.”
    He seems, in any case, to have preferred his daredevil self: “In Shillington, to win attention and approval from my classmates, I would get out on the running board of my family’s heavy old black Buick and steer the car downhill through the open window, while my thrilled passengers squealed within.” School friends remembered “some pretty hairy rides” in that car, including lunchtime games of chicken. This was the rebel who “smoked and posed and daydreamed,” soaking up “high-school sexiness” in a booth at the back of Stephen’s Luncheonette on Lancaster Avenue. That’s where he learned the art of sophisticated smoking—“how to inhale, to double-inhale, to French inhale, and (just barely) to blow smoke rings.” One friend described him as “the original flower child,” with uncombed hair and unbuttoned shirt, a Kool dangling from his lips, hunched over the pinball machine. Everyone agrees that “Uppie” was a sloppy dresser, habitually unkempt, and that he seemed to subsist on cigarettes, cookies, and baloney. At Stephen’s, where half the school would hang out after the last class let out at twenty past three, John gobbled salt-encrusted hamburgers washed down with coffee. He would linger after the other kids dispersed, waiting for his father so they could drive together back to Plowville. Again and again in his writing he revisited that luncheonette, a place thick with “cigarette smoke and adolescent intrigue,” Frankie Laine or Doris Day on the jukebox competing with the pinball’s “rockety- ding. ” In The Centaur , this teenage paradise is Minor’s Luncheonette, and it’s more important to Peter than school—he thinks of it, in fact, as the center of his life apart from his mother.
    Updike’s collection of high school pals—they called themselves Our Gang—congregated at Stephen’s or at the house of a classmate named Joan Venne. As he saw it, he was a sort of marginal character who had forced himself into the “jet set of Shillington High.” He wooed them with slapstick: “I developed the technique of deliberately falling, as a way of somehow exorcising evil spirits and winning approval and defying death. . . . I spent a lot of time in high school throwing myself over stair railings.” That may have gotten their attention, but what held it was his wit. He made them laugh, amusing them just as he had amused his mother. The Shillington gang was in some ways more important to him than any other. His high school friends stayed with him all his life in that he continued to see them at class reunions every five years. (By contrast, after he left Ipswich in 1974, he dropped his friends there entirely.) Inserting