¹ The Dial, 75 (Nov. 1923), 480.

² Robert Taubman, “God Is Delicate,” rev. of The Centaur, New Statesman, 27 Sept. 1963, p. 406. See also Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Chiron at Olinger High,” rev. of The Centaur, The New Leader, 4 Feb. 1963, p. 20.

³ “Half Man, Half Beast,” rev. of The Centaur, The Reporter, 14 March 1963, p. 53. For a similar comparison, see Norman Podhoretz, “A Dissent on Updike,” rev. of The Centaur, Show, April 1963, p. 49; rpt. in Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, 1964), p. 257.

⁴ See, e.g., Phoebe Adams, “Potpourri,” rev. of The Centaur, The Atlantic, Feb. 1963, pp. 134–35, where she insists that “the olympians have taken possession of Mr. Updike and compelled him to clutter a perfectly good short book about a hard pressed schoolmaster with a lot of mythological baggage.” Even Granville Hicks, generally amiable to Updike, feels that in this case he has overreached himself “to find a contemporary parallel for every god in the pantheon,” “Pennsylvania Pantheon,” rev. of The Centaur, Saturday Review, 2 Feb. 1963, p. 27. Similar points of view are expressed in Eleanor Cook, “Mythical Beasts,” rev. of The Centaur, The Canadian Forum, Aug. 1963, p. 114, and in Harold C. Gardiner, “Some Early Spring Novels,” rev. of The Centaur, America, 9 March 1963, p. 340.

⁵ “John Updike: The Centaur” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 6, No. 2 (1963), 110, 111.

⁶ Peter Buitenhuis, in his review of The Centaur for The New York Times Book Review, expressed a similar point of view: “While we have long forsaken the myths in which the ancients put their trust we need more than ever artists of Updike's caliber to fill the same role as those early mythmakers who attempted to account for the cruelty and wonder of existence through the shaping power of the imagination” (“Pennsylvania Pantheon,” 7 April 1963, p. 26). This is remarkably close to John Updike's own view of his role as creative writer, expressed in “The Sea's Green Sameness,” in New World Writing 17, ed. Stewart Richardson and Corlies M. Smith (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960). Also see Thomas Curley, “Between Heaven and Earth,” rev. of The Centaur, Commonweal, 29 March 1963, p. 27.

⁷ Letter from John Updike, 7 Dec. 1967.

⁸ John Updike, The Centaur (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 17. Further references to this book are included in the text.

⁹ One should view the mythological index which Updike has so unfortunately inserted at the end of this novel in the light of the statement above. Highly berated, offered as a proof of the pointless character of the myth, this index is also a final indication of the omnipresence of the mythic element throughout the world of this novel. Certainly, it is not necessary for us to trace the allusions page by page in order to gain the meaning or the vicarious experience of the novel. Perhaps the index is a piece of pretentious and naive display on the part of Updike; more likely, it is one of the comic elements of the novel, a spoof on allegorical novels and on “the critics-with-keys,” Jack De Bellis, “The Group and John Updike,” rev. of The Centaur, Sewanee Review, 72 (Summer 1964), 535.

¹⁰ The point might be made that the relationship of the adult Peter to his father is analogous to the theological explanation of Christ's relationship to His people through the ritual of the Mass. In a sense, George Caldwell is Peter's redeemer; through his sacrifice, Peter lives. This sacrifice, offered during Peter's adolescence, continues to bear fruit for Peter in the present through its ritual re-enactment.

¹¹ For David D. Galloway, as a case in point, George Caldwell has been reduced to a variation on the Camusian rebel. What he chooses to emphasize, then, is that “there is no more compelling requirement for any of Updike's characters than that of existing—no matter how essentially absurd the struggle for life may be” (p. 48). The entire novel is consequently seen as “an optimistic assertion of man's ability to overcome his environment and to project his compassion and concern to the degree of absurdity at the heart of the religious experience” (p. 50). See The AbsurdHero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1966), pp. 41–50.

¹² Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: SCM Press, 1949), pp. 60–61; hereafter referred to as Dogmatics.

¹³ The Centaur, p. 218. For a similar experience in the dentist's chair, see “Dentistry and Doubt,” in John Updike, The Same Door (New York: Knopf, 1959), pp. 41–50.

¹⁴ Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 118.

¹⁵ Eliade, p. 71. For the ideas on time that are expressed in this paragraph, I am indebted to Eliade's discussion on pp. 68–113 of this same book.

¹⁶ For an appreciative interpretation of the comic values in The Centaur, see Hazel Sample Guyol, “The Lord Loves a Cheerful Corpse,” EJ, 55 (1966), 863–66.

¹⁷ In a letter of 7 Dec. 1967, John Updike has said that the obituary is imagined and the rock that Peter lies on.

¹⁸ The rejection of the mythic consciousness as a valid tool for the author is at least partially behind Mizener's judgment on The Centaur, and probably completely behind Podhoretz's view. Arthur Mizener objects to “the incoherence between the realistic novel that constitutes the heart of The Centaur and the mythology that is attached to it, an incoherence that would exist even if the mythology were successfully represented,” “The American Hero as High School Boy: Peter Caldwell,” The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel (Boston: Houghton, 1964), p. 265. What Mizener sees as a mixture of genres is, I believe, a successful integration of cosmic reality. Norman Podhoretz is more emphatic in his condemnation: “In my opinion, the effect of seeing the story of George Caldwell as a reenactment of the legend of Chiron is neither to illuminate his plight nor to enrich our understanding of his character; all it does is to surround this Centaur with a fake aura of profundity while at the same time permitting Updike to plug up holes of motivation and to impose a spurious significance on characters and events which have failed to earn any significance in their own right” (Doings and Undoings, p. 256). While this opinion reveals a lack of understanding of Updike's intention in the use of the myth, perhaps based on Podhoretz's naturalistic bias, it also follows from his misreading of The Centaur as nothing but the story of a man who commits suicide for the sake of his 15-year-old son.

¹⁹ Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 84. For the description of mythic consciousness in this paragraph, I have depended on the discussion in pp. 75–84 of this same book.

²⁰ Norris W. Yates, “The Doubt and Faith of John Updike,” CE, 26 (1965), 473.