16 - “The Dogwood Tree,” “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” and “On Being a Self Forever”

Summary

IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT Updike continues his interest in the intersection of memory and imagination in his memoirs; autobiography would seem to be the natural place for such ideas. His earliest biographical statement of note is “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” composed for Martin Levin's Five Boyhoods (1962). Updike attempts to draw a picture of Shillington, Pennsylvania, in the 1940s and notes near the outset both the success and failure of such a project: “Though I cannot ask you to see it more clearly than I myself saw it, yet mentioning it seems to open the possibility of my boyhood home coming again to life. With a sweet damp rush the grass of our yard seems to breathe again on me.” The disclaimer that makes up the initial clause suggests both the impossibility of retrieving the material reality of his childhood and the difficulty of communicating even a subjectively remembered version of that reality to his readers. The rest of the sentence, however, suggests that through the union of memory and imagination he can resurrect a version of his childhood, if only temporarily and imperfectly and if primarily only for himself. (For the reader, of course, his childhood remains purely in the realm of the imagination.) Here, too, his imagination must fill in the gaps left by his memory. He tells us about his grandmother's chickens, which she “beheaded … with an archaic efficiency that I don't recall ever witnessing” (122). And yet he feels confident in referring to the “archaic efficiency” of these beheadings, a clear indication that the memories in this memoir are deeply connected to imagination.

In some ways, “The Dogwood Tree” is as much a reflection on imagination as it is an exercise of it. Updike's boyhood was, as we might expect from a future author, filled with acts of the imagination—acts that he increasingly came to see as fragile as he aged. He speaks, for example, about the poorhouse at the end of his street, which was surrounded by a wall with “a drop of twenty or thirty feet.” As an adult, Updike cannot understand this dangerous drop, “but at the time it seemed perfectly natural, a dreadful pit of space congruent with the pit of time into which the old people … had been plunged by some mystery that would never touch me.”