Greek Gods in Pennsylvania

With The Centaur, his seventh published volume in the last six years, John Updike has switched into a new mode: use of the classic myth set up as framework for a contemporary tale. Updike readers will find it a bit of a jolt. One is used to seeing Updike detail the perfectly ordinary life; the marriage that never should have been, or, again and again, minutiae of his boyhood in rural Pennsylvania.

The Centaur, which takes place at once in Olinger, Pennsylvania,--and on Mount Olympus, tells the story of George W. Caldwell, teacher of science at Olinger High. Peter, his son, narrates. Metaphorically, Caldwell appears as the centaur Chiron, a tutor of heroes, who in mythology was distinguished from other rapacious, lecherous Centaurs by his kindness and wisdom. Chiron was erroneously wounded by a poisoned arrow, and, unable to bear the pain, he longed for death. He prayed that he might pass on his immortality to Prometheus, and that his death would be accepted in atonement for Prometheus's sin, the presentation of divine fire to man. Zeus answered his prayer, and placed Chiron among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer.

Premonitions of Death

During the three days which The Centaur spans, Caldwell lives with heightened awareness of the possibility that he might die. He feels, he tells his wife half-jokingly, "a poison snake wrapped around my bowels;" he continuously fears cancer. Hardly a speech goes by in which he does not allude, in some form, to dying.

In his son's eyes, Caldwell-Chiron seems, not surprisingly, a dichotomized being, for whom life takes on a quality of doubleness: the obvious and the metaphorical, the literal and the mythical. "Take your time," he said with a sudden sweeping motion of his hand, as if remembering that unseen audience before which he was an actor. You got lots of time to kill. At your age I had so much time to kill my hands are still bloody."

Caldwell's greatest talent lies in his ability to rescue from the ordinary whatever humor, whatever unexpected might otherwise slip by into the hour-after-hour sameness of the past. He finds wisdom even in an encounter with a hitchhiker, praises the man's courage to live by bumming ("I take my hat off to you mister") and generally disconcerts the degenerate by taking him so seriously. "My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers," Peter relates. "They found themselves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent search for the truth."

Shifting scenes and persons and points of view, Updike's narrative switches in emphasis between the mythical and the actual. Sometimes within one chapter, especially the first, the juxtaposition of the two seems awkward, a forced and unnatural union. Sometimes the counter-poise is executed with great finesse, as in the chapter purporting to be his father's obituary. Updike shows his control of style; he is a master of pastiche in his broad caricature of the small-town newspaper.

If The Centaur were a terribly serious attempt to explain the nature of man or to elucidate the father-son relationship by means of a classic myth, it would be a silly book. Fortunately, the book is not so serious. Updike treats the myth lightheartedly, operating on three levels: First, the corresponding characters of Chiron and Caldwell; next, parallel nomenclature (for those who like to play such games, it has been suggested that Olinger is Olympus; Zimmerman, principal of Olinger High, is Zeus; and third, the subtle penetration of mythical allusions into what appears the most straightforward Pennsylvania prose.

In this last respect, Updike is not above playing a stylistic joke on himself. In one scene Peter stands by the side of a pool, listening to the sounds made by bodies breaking water: "Cecrops! Inachus!" Perfectly good sounds, both of them; one can hear the upper body cutting through, then perhaps the legs flopping and hitting the surface: "Cecrops!" But the sounds are the names, respectively, of the first king of Attica and that of a river god who became first king of Argos.

It cannot be fairly said that Updike has written a pompous book. His merging of myth and biography is light and pleasing, as full of humor and vitality as the man who inspired it.