Updike has been a professional writer for two decades. His first decade's work, for the most part, records the strife, observation, and feeling of that pre-twenty year old wherein nostalgic recollections of boyhood are transmuted by an adult's imagination and youthful autobiography is altered into art…. [His] youthful memory informs almost all the fiction of [the] 1955–65 decade.

Updike wrote [the] Foreword to Olinger Stories in 1964 with the intention of saying farewell to Pennsylvania and to his boyhood memories. Except for brief returns in Rabbit Redux (1971) and Buchanan Dying (1974), he has sustained that intention. After the novel, Of the Farm (1965), his favorite fictional locale moves from Pennsylvania to New England (often Tarbox) and his themes no longer reflect boyhood recollections but adult concerns. In the decade 1965–76 the tensions of marriage, the process of aging, and the varied losses of "faith"—religious, political, sexual—become his central themes. (pp. 219-20)

The years 1964–66, therefore, mark an important transitional stage in Updike's pilgrim's progress and so are of crucial significance for a complete understanding of his writing career….

The Music School [1966] collection holds a distinctive place in the Updike corpus because it contains several stories that, in addition to more familiar Updike themes, specifically engage the issues of artistic self-consciousness and the act of composition itself. In the story, "The Bulgarian Poetess,"… Updike created a spokesman who would explicitly engage these issues, Henry Bech. (p. 220)

Bech's character is only the most obvious alter ego in The Music School collection. Most of the remaining stories reveal a narrator or character wrestling with similar "writerly" problems of sterility and creativity and the tensions that result…. The primary and ostensible theme of almost every story is that of the mystery of sexuality and sexual relationships examined in the light of their sterility or vitality. Subordinate, but concomitant with it, is the secondary theme of the mysterious relationship between the imagined and the real, between artistic re-creation and Creation, between the sterile and vitalizing processes of the mind…. The most obvious clue … that Updike is addressing these twin themes is found in the epigraph chosen for The Music School, a quotation from Wallace Stevens' poem, "To the One of Fictive Music":

      Now, of the music summoned by the birth
      That separates us from the wind and the sea,
      Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,
      By being so much of the things we are,
      Gross effigy and simalcrum, none
      Gives motion to perfection more serene
      Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
      Most rare or ever of more kindred air
      In the laborious weaving that you wear.

These lines represent well Stevens' continuing poetic theme: that the apparent dichotomy that exists between the realm of reality, disorder, the actual (earth) and the realm of the imagination, order and the ideal (music) is bridged only through Art. (p. 221)

Updike's choice of epigraph is most apt since most of the stories deal with the "Stevensian" theme of re-creating reality and the past via imagination and memory. (p. 222)

[In the stories of The Music School] composition and theme, frame and form are one in that each story's inner dynamic is heuristic in a composite way. We find the narrator, explicitly or not, seeking "connections" amid remembered or imagined events so that the resultant structure (i.e., where these connections intersect) both shapes and is shaped by this heuristic movement. Throughout, there is three-fold pursuit taking place as there is continually throughout the poetry of Wallace Stevens: (1) pursuit of the elusive, disordered reality (Nature and Woman); (2) the conscious effort to draw upon the resources of the imagination through the medium of metaphor; and finally, (3) this heuristic movement outward becomes simultaneously a search for the self, the symbolic center of the pursuit. But the goal and instrument of these three quests are the same; recovery and re-creation.

The dense and difficult story, "Harv is Plowing Now," illustrates well this triple-layered attempt at recovery. In it the controlling metaphor is that of an archeological excavation. Just as the archeologist "unearths" both the precious and the dross, and a farmer like Harv plows the dead earth in order to revitalize it, so too the narrator-artist must mine his memory (memory of a Woman) in order to effect a recreation by re-imagining, thus issuing in a "resurrection" of his very self at the story's end. (pp. 222-23)

"Leaves" is a very brief story, only nine paragraphs long, but in its integration of imagery and subtlety of structure it represents well Updike's successful effort to engage the Reality-Art-Imagination relationships, and, as a prose-poem, it exemplifies the Stevens epigraph.

The title "Leaves" itself suggests multiple meanings, each warranted in the story, for the word "leaves" can connote the product of Nature (as in grape leaves), and, as a verb, can indicate departure, loss, and time, and significantly, it can also suggest a book's "leaves," its pages, which are the outcome of art. The story is ostensibly a confession-meditation in that the narrator, now isolated in a forest retreat, is essaying to recover from the emotional disaster of imminent divorce by "sorting out the events" of his predicament. The story's framework is both heuristic and cruciform. The crux of X pattern is manifest in the sequence of reflections as the narrator pursues the "connections" among them. (pp. 223-24)

In both technique and theme we recognize similarities [in "Leaves"] between Updike and Wallace Stevens. Like so many of Stevens' poems, this story develops through an imaginative exploration of the potential implications of the central metaphor. The plurisignificant metaphor becomes an instrument for discovery, therefore, the vehicle for grappling with the mysterious relationship between natural reality and man's imaginative consciousness. The poem, or the story here, not only records this process of discovery and the problems engaged, but is the process.

Furthermore, not only does this story proceed like a Stevens "meditation," but it deals specifically with the Stevens problematic, and, in a sense, reads like a commentary on the Stevens epigraph. In "Leaves," the "real" autumn leaves at the story's start are both inviting and repulsive, and make the narrator aware that he is "at the intersection of two kingdoms"; these real leaves then merge with a memory of his wife's "leaving" so that once again "real nature" (symbolized by the spider) seems alien for they "inhabit … incompatible cosmoses." These memories and thoughts then conjoin with his recollection of the imaginative Leaves of Grass which, in its turn, once had united with the elm tree "leaves" in his own imaginative "awakening," so that finally, memory of this previous union of "leaves" brings a "new angle of illumination" to the real autumn leaves which he now imagines falling "flat at my feet like a penitent." The story's structure, then, records the central theme in Stevens: that, despite the apparent dichotomy between the realms of imagination and reality, a reciprocal interpenetration is possible, and the "leaves" of an artist's book can capture it briefly—"it" being a merger of reality, memory, and imagination. Nature informs the artist's imagination, and in turn or reciprocally, his imagination transforms Nature and the art-work is born. (pp. 228-29)