Self-Consciousness

269 Pages·1990·0.94 MB·English

by  John Updike

John Updike
SELF-
CONSCIOUSNESS
M E M O I R S
Alfred A. Knopf New York
1989
We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on
it, as beads: and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that
thread.
—Emerson, "Montaigne; or, The Skeptic"
I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be
oneself than anything else.
—Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"
Of all that might be omitted in thinking, the worst was to omit your own being.
—Saul Bellow, "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"
Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
—epigraph of Bishop West of Ely, in Ely Cathedral

Contents
Foreword xi
i. A Soft Spring Night in Shillington 3
ii. At War with My Skin 42
iii. Getting the Words Out 79
iv. On Not Being a Dove 112
v. A Letter to My Grandsons 164
vi. On Being a Self Forever 212

i. A Soft Spring Night
in Shillington
HAD NOT my twenty-five-year-old daughter undertipped the airline porter in
Boston, our luggage might have shown up on the carrousel in Allentown that
April afternoon in 1980, and I would not have spent an evening walking the
sidewalks of Shillington, Pennsylvania, searching for the meaning of my
existence as once I had scanned those same sidewalks for lost pennies.
The idea of lost luggage has been flavored for me with the terrible, the void, ever
since William Maxwell gently said to me on our first acquaintance, in 1954,
when I, newly a Harvard graduate and New Yorker contributor, was about to
embark for England with my slightly pregnant wife: "People think lost luggage
is just like death. It isn't." The words were meant to be comforting, perhaps in
response to some nervously expressed worry of my own; but they had an
opposite, disquiet-ing effect. From early adolescence on, I had longed to get
where now, for a brief interview, I was: inside Tbe New Yorker's offices. And
almost the first words spoken to me, with a certain stoic gaiety that made clear I
had definitely left behind 3

S E L F - C O N S C I O U S N E S S
mc the Christian precincts of Berks County, concerned death.
I was to lose my luggage a number of times in the peripatetic future ahead: in
1978 my folding suit bag vanished between Rome and Dubrovnik and I was
obliged to parade through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Israel in the rumpled denim
leisure suit meant to be my airplane pajamas, and was ridiculed for my sartorial
gaucherie in the Jerusalem Post; in 1980, my big yellow suitcase was mistakenly
grabbed by somebody from Long Island (I know because his similar suitcase
then became, uselessly and infuriatingly, mine) in Kennedy Airport and so I had
to visit the Yanomamo Indians in southern Venezuela wearing ill-fitting safari
clothes borrowed from the American Ambassador. In Allentown, our two bags
just weren't on the carrousel, though it went round and round, and at last there
seemed nothing to do but turn away, with my daughter and my widowed mother,
and drive the forty miles south to where my mother lived and, indeed, still lives,
in a rural area called—
embarrassingly, at least to me—Plowville.
How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like the individual letters, with their
spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes,
and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea. Where was my
wife?
Also on a family trip, in Florida, with her nine-year-old son by a former
marriage. Why did I leave it to my daughter by a former marriage, the matured
fruit of that slight pregnancy twenty-six years before, to check in at the airport? I
was parking the car; we were in a rush, because we were late, in turn because
since childhood I have been a late sleeper, preferring to let others get the world
in order before I descend to it—a mode of efficiency, actually, that seems the
opposite. Why (if she did) did my daughter botch this small assignment?
Because my first wife and I had raised our children to be innocents, being
innocents ourselves and thinking it a nice aristocratic thing to be. Guilt at having
left, after twenty-one years of 4

A Soft Spring Night in Shillington
marriage, this other innocent tinges my relations with my four children and
makes for a lot of bumbling, of the lost-luggage sort.
In my mother's house—an old sandstone farmhouse, the very one in which she
was born in 1904, and which had been reacquired four decades later, in 1945,
when the war had put a little money into our pockets and boldness into our
hearts—
the telephone rang, at six-thirty. A voice from Allentown, brightly female, with
that flirtatious-seeming drag of a Pennsylvania accent which after all these years
away still strikes me as exactly the right note, announced that the bags were at
the airport; they had come in on the next flight.
We were just walking out the door. We had eaten an early supper and planned to
see Being There, starring Peter Sellers as Chance, at the movie theatre in
Shillington, eleven miles away. Rather than disappoint my two female
companions and, furthermore, frustrate this third female, on whom our luggage
weighed as heavily as a bad conscience and who was offering to bring it to us
personally, I improvised this scheme: I, who had already seen Being There,
would take my mother and daughter to the movie as planned, and then I would
be there, under the movie marquee, waiting for the girl from the Allentown
airport, with the two suitcases. Her boyfriend lived in the Reading area, she said,
and would be driving her.
The plan was agreed to on all sides. The theatre location was described over the
phone. The girl thought her boyfriend knew where it was anyway. Then the
eleven miles to Shillington were navigated and my two kin were tucked into the
movie theatre, which, on this drizzly Thursday night, had attracted no line. The
last latecomer bought the last tardy ticket, and I stood alone beneath the
marquee. The thinnest of mists drifted across the sulphurous streetlights of
Lancaster Avenue and gave the passing tires an adhesive, plaintive sound.
The girl from Allentown couldn't be here for another hour at 5

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best. I had nothing to do, here at the center of my earthly being.
Dasein. The first mystery that confronts us is "Why me?"
The next is "Why here?" Shillington was my here. I had been born here, or,
rather, been brought back to it from the Reading Hospital, which was located in
West Reading. For thirteen years I had lived in the same house on Philadelphia
Avenue, number 117. After moving eleven miles away, with my family's
quixotic recapture of my mother's birthplace, I still returned to the town for
school and social life. Shillington, I can see now, is a typical town of the region,
of a piece with Kenhorst and Grille and West Reading and Mount Penn, which
had once seemed remote and wildly different places. (An oddity of the area is
that the towns call themselves boroughs; in my childhood the chief elected
official bore the ancient title of burgess, where now there seems to be both a
"mayor" and a
"borough manager.") The towns are snug, and red and green in tint. They began
as "string-towns"—a few farmhouses, with perhaps a tavern and a feed mill,
strung along the road from, in Shillington's case, Reading to Lancaster. The
houses were built first of sandstone or limestone and then of brick. The gaps
between them gradually filled in (and are still filling in) and then tracts of open
acreage back from the road succumbed to development, to rectilinear streets and
close-packed rows of semi-detached brick dwellings on thin strips of land that
back onto an alley. Garages line the alleys; porches and retaining walls line the
streets. The streets are high-crowned and drain well. My grandfather, when his
fortunes took a disagreeable turn after his moving to Shillington in the Twenties,
joined the town work crews that laid out much of the tidy section north of
Lancaster Avenue called Speedway, on the site of an old race track.
I stood facing south. Across the street from the Shillington Movie Theatre stood
a yellow brick building with square brick 6

A Soft Spring Night in Shillington
pillars, a second-story porch, and an odd double dormer on top, a kind of cupola;
the first story's left side once held Stephens' Luncheonette, where I had smoked
and posed and day-dreamed for hours after school, and the right side had been
the Shillington Post Office, where as a child I had solemnly traded pennies for
war stamps, amid a cacophony of anti-Axis posters.
Now the left half of this building was a florist's shop, the right a firm
mysteriously called Admixtures, Inc. The post office had moved to a building of
its own, on Liberty Street next to Grace Lutheran Church; the Stephenses had
moved away while I was in college. They had been kind to me and I, I felt when
they were no longer there, not kind to them. I tried to be funny at their expense,
calling Mrs. Stephens "Gert" when her nickname was "Boo" (for Beulah), and I
once stole a candy bar from the counter, or at least watched another boy do it
without crying "Thief!" Half the high school, it seemed, came there at twenty
past three, when the last class let out; but then within an hour the teen-agers who
lived in Shillington would have walked home and those who lived in
Adamstown climbed into their cars and driven home, leaving me with Walt
Stephens and the pinball machine.
I waited hours, sometimes, for my father, who taught at the high school and
never went back to the farm before he had to.
He was the only adult except Walt and Boo I ever noticed in Stephens', and he
came in only to take me away, and he never penetrated past the region of the
soda fountain, into the booth area, where the cigarette smoke and adolescent
intrigue were thickest. Walt was totally bald and had a way of doing hot dogs—
cutting them the long way and putting the butterfly shape flat-side-down on the
griddle and then serving it in a hamburger roll with the ends sticking out—that
was peculiar to him and delicious. But then to teen-age hunger many things are
delicious. Cigarettes, for example, were delicious: the sleek cellophane-wrapped
rectitude of the pack, the suave tapping 7

S E L F - C O N S C I O U S N E S S
out of a single "weed," the chalky, rasping initial inhale, the little crumbs to be
picked from the lower lip without breaking conversational stride, the airy
pluming gesturingness of it all.
Time itself—the time spent idling in Stephens', the time spent anywhere in
Shillington—was delicious.
The center of town lay a block to my right, and I walked there. The night was
drier now, and warm, with a heedless overflowing pre-summer warmth not felt
in New England until May. Where the movie house now stood there had been a
long vacant lot, strangely vacant in the center of town; here travelling fairs had
set up their stalls and rides, in the days when the Shillington Theatre, under the
proprietorship of tall, bald (like Walt Stephens, but with a different, less tapered
dome to his skull), mild-mannered Mr. Shverha, had been situated a half-block
up New Holland Avenue. Nothing was very far from the central, five-sided
corner where New Holland Avenue, Philadelphia Avenue, East Lancaster
Avenue, Liberty Street, and West Lancaster Avenue met and still meet.
On the five corners, beginning with the one where I stood, had been Kindt's
Funeral Home, the Shillington Town Hall and its prettily planted grounds, Ibach
& Bixler's Restaurant, Ibach's (no relation) Drug Store, and, across Lancaster
Avenue from Ibach's—at this crossing I had once been struck by a car on the
way to Sunday school and dragged some feet on the bumper while stubbornly