Frantically looking ...

This one's a little X-rated for some language that John Updike used ... certainly not a word I would ever use!

Some years ago--working on a memoir (Turning Pages, Kindle Direct, 2012), a book about, among other things, the rise and fall of the Carnegie Library back in Enid, Okla., where I grew up: The city razed the building in 1972--I was trying to remember a scene I'd once read in a novel.

Well, to be more precise, I remembered the scene, but I couldn't remember where I'd read it. It was about someone in a school, who, seeing the word fuck on the boys' restroom wall, had altered it to book.

I thought that was cool. But was it in Catcher in the Rye? No ... I looked. Then I remembered John Updike's The Centaur, his 1963 novel about a teacher. I paged through the novel--and found the moment! And here it is, word for word ...

     In the lavatory Caldwell is puzzled by the word BOOK gouged in square capitals in the wall above the urinal. Close examination reveals that this word has been laid over another; the F had been extended and closed to make a B, the U and C closed into O's, the K left as it was. Willing to learn, even before the last flash of light before annihilation, he absorbs the fact, totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a BOOK. But who would do such a thing? ... (247).

The paragraph goes on a little, but you get the idea.

And I think about all the men's room graffiti that I've seen over the years--much of it edited by subsequent wags, altered to become something more silly, funny, damning. (I'll not repeat any of them: I've already damaged my pristine reputation!)

In Turning Pages, I allude to this near the end when I am riffing on the destruction of the building. I'm imagining the old walls--imagining what graffiti might have been there as the wrecking ball arrived. And I allude to Updike ...

I first read John Updike back in college--an American Thought class with Dr. Abe C. Ravitz, a great teacher who has had a lifelong effect on me (a good effect!). And as the years went on, when an Updike book came out--fiction, poetry, nonfiction--I bought it, consumed it quickly.

And The Centaur was about a teacher--and I would become a teacher for 45 years. But not by 1963 when the novel arrived. Still, I knew a little: Both my parents were teachers--my mom, at the time, in a local high school. So ... a bit of second-hand knowledge ...

Later, I would read The Centaur again and would feel in its pages some haunting knowledge about school life, about a life I'd come to know very well.

Even later, a freelance book reviewer, I would review a couple of Updike's novels for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I didn't love all of his books, but I admired them all for different reasons. And I always thought he would/should win the Nobel Prize. Such a talent. But he didn't ...

Updike died in 2009 at the age of 76. Cancer. On his death bed he was writing poems about his illness.

And that, my friends, is the Way to Go!