As long as I can remember, I have loved boats and words.
When I was about two years old, I was with my parents and three
siblings in an eatery in Essex, Massachusetts. It was named “The Village
Restaurant,” but by my mother still called it “Wimpy’s,” its previous
name. I once was told that the restaurant was started by a woman who had
sometimes cooked for my politician grandfather’s dinner parties, and
partly with money he lent her. I still remember her mashed potatoes,
which in retrospect must have had a very large quotient of butter and
cream.
At the restaurant I looked out the big window at the Essex River
boatyard across the road and down a slope. It is now a museum of
shipbuilding. I pointed and, for the first time in my life, spoke. It
was sometime in 1957, about the time that John Updike was moving into a
small house a few miles to the north of Essex. “Boat,” I announced. It
was my first word.
Essex was part of Boston’s north shore that the new Rte. 128, the
nation’s first “beltway,” had six years earlier put in easy commuting
distance of Boston. These new and unsettled suburbs, layered over old
Puritan towns, provided the setting of Updike’s novel Couples. There are just a few books I have read three times (Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That comes to mind, along with Shakespeare’s tragedies, but not much else), but Couples
is one of them. Updike has been criticized as a stylish miniaturist,
but I think that in that novel about a group of young married couples in
the early 1960s he captured the feel of the transition from the
Eisenhower era into the Kennedy years and the cusp of the 1960s. The
adults think they are so suave yet are painfully innocent about life and
its costs.
It was only recently, when reading Adam
Begley’s biography of Updike, that I realized how much Updike and I
breathed the same disconcerted air in those years. My father, the son of
a Wyoming cowhand, had been catapulted upward by the GI Bill, and had
begun teaching at Harvard about the time Updike was an undergraduate
there. Updike began work at the New Yorker a few weeks before I
was born. When I was two years old, he moved with his wife to Ipswich,
the town just north of Essex —and indeed his first house there was on
Essex Road. Today the Cape Ann peninsula is just the fringe of Boston,
but back then it was a new land. It was to me a lovely, rich mix of
beaches, salt marshes, pine groves, polo and golf clubs, and occasional
rocky headlands.
Updike’s beaches were my beaches—Crane and Wingaersheek, both located
between Gloucester’s rocks and Ipswich’s marshes. As newlyweds, Updike
and his first wife had worked at the YMCA Family Camp on Lake
Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, while my family around that time spent a
week of the summer at Squam Lake, the next body of water to the west. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/growing-up-in-a-john-updike-novel/
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