3 - The Centaur

Summary

WE SEE THE WORKING OF THE parental imagination in Updike's 1963 novel, The Centaur, in which Cassie Caldwell—the name given this time to the Mrs. Dow character—features, more or less, as a distant threat. The Centaur is primarily a novel about fathers and sons, after all, not about mothers and sons, but the relationship between George and Peter Caldwell is scarcely imaginable without Cassie's spectral presence. Her most important role in the novel is as the force that made George give up his dreams of city living; before the action of the novel, she has followed her own dreams of moving to a farmhouse a few miles away from Olinger. This detail parallels Updike's own life. His mother, Linda Hoyer Updike, moved her entire family, by sheer force of will, to her childhood farmhouse in Plowville, a few miles outside of Shillington, when her son was thirteen. She would later write John Updike a letter suggesting that she would not have been courageous enough to make such a move if she had known how disruptive it would be for him, but Adam Begley is skeptical:

My guess is that she would in fact have found the courage—after all, she rode roughshod over the resistance of her eighty-two-yearold father, who had to endure a humiliating return to the farm he thought he'd put behind him a quarter of a century earlier. And she brushed aside the complaints of her husband (a “man of the streets” who liked to say that he wanted to be buried under a sidewalk); Wesley had to surrender to what he considered rural imprisonment. Only Linda's habitually silent mother voiced no objection to leaving Shillington. So why insist on imposing this relocation on the rest of the family? “I was returning to the Garden of Eden and taking my family with me. I thought I was doing them a great service,” she told a television interviewer.

The force of Linda Updike's imagination clearly exerted itself powerfully on her son. “Why is it,” he wonders in “Cemeteries,” “that nothing that happens to me is as real as these dramas that my mother arranges around herself, like Titania calling Peaseblossom and Mustardseed from the air?”