Updike

by Begley, Adam

  As Adlai Stevenson noted in a 1952 campaign speech poking fun at President Eisenhower’s famous enthusiasm for golf, “Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses.” Updike spread his bets, worshipping in church and also casting his golfing experience in theological terms. A secular pastime commonly associated with material well-being, golf, oddly, gave Updike a spiritual thrill; from the very beginning, he was acutely sensitive to what he called “the eerie religious latency” of the game; when he wrote about it, he invariably invoked the supernatural. “Intercession” set the pattern, ending with a curse and turning on a seeming miracle. On his second time around, long after his progress across the course has become “a jumbled rout,” Paul yearns for divine intervention:

  All he wanted was that his drive be perfect; it was very little to ask. If miracles, in this age of faint faith, could enter anywhere, it would be here, where the causal fabric was thinnest, in the quick collisions and abrupt deflections of a game. Paul drove high but crookedly over the treetops. It dismayed him to realize that the angle of a metal surface striking a rubber sphere counted for more with God than the keenest human hope.

  On Paul’s next drive, however, it seems that his halfhearted prayer is answered, that God does intervene: “The ball bounced once in the open and, as if a glass arm from heaven had reached down and grabbed it, vanished.” Quitting in disgust, walking off the drought-parched course, he imagines that the one green he’s missed seeing is “paradisiacal—broad-leaved trees, long-tailed birds, the cry of water.”

  For Updike, golf was like a cycle of mystery plays covering the entire Christian calendar from Creation to Judgment Day. An unplayed course is a Garden of Eden, from which the duffer is expelled with his first wayward shot (“We lack the mustard-seed of faith that keeps the swing smooth”); during a bad round one suffers torments of the damned; yet “miracles . . . abound”—not least the “ritual interment and resurrection of the ball at each green”; and next week’s game holds out the promise of paradise regained. He found it hard to resist the urge to draw moral lessons: “Our bad golf testifies, we cannot help feeling, to our being bad people—bad to the core.” Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.

  TWO YEARS AFTER “Intercession,” teeing off on the page for only the second time, Updike pitted Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom against an Episcopalian minister, the Reverend Jack Eccles, and used their first round together as a pivotal moment in Rabbit, Run. The novel is usually associated with basketball, the sport that briefly turned Rabbit into a local teenage celebrity, but it’s on the golf course that Updike supplies his hero with tardy justification for the impulsive act that sets the narrative in motion.

  Feeling trapped by drab domesticity, Rabbit has run away from his pregnant wife, Janice, and young son, zigzagging into the arms of a blowsy part-time prostitute. Eccles, by inviting him to play golf, thinks he’s doing his pastoral duty, coaxing home a parishioner’s wayward husband. In the car on the way over to the Chestnut Grove Golf Course, the minister chats about the theological wrangles between his father and grandfather (who was, he explains, the bishop of Providence); the talk is of family worship and belief in hell, of atheists dwelling in “outer darkness,” the rest of us in “inner darkness”—all of which sets the scene for a round of golf freighted with religious significance.

  Updike once described Harry Angstrom as a “representative Kierkegaardian man”:

  Man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of the social contract and the inner imperatives.

  “Twisted,” indeed. Rabbit feels “dragged down, lame”; at the first tee, his drive “sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin.” Although Eccles encourages him, praising his “beautiful natural swing” (Updike’s “natural” swing was similarly admired), his play deteriorates: “Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease.” His vision warped by guilt, he looks down the fairway and sees Eccles in the distance; the clergyman’s shirt resembles “a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.” Rabbit’s nightmare round resembles Paul’s “jumbled rout”—until he reaches the fifth tee, where he produces a superb shot, a drive that climbs and climbs “along a line straight as a ruler-edge.” He exults: “That’s it!” His miracle drive washes away the nightmare and utterly defeats Eccles—not in the game, but in their simmering wrangle over Rabbit’s unorthodox religious beliefs and his reasons for leaving home. The “it” in Rabbit’s jubilant “That’s it!” is at once the supernatural “something” he identifies as his faith in God (“I do feel that somewhere behind all this . . . there’s something that wants me to find it”); the element missing from his marriage (“There was this thing that wasn’t there”); and the essential kernel of his self, his soul (“Hell, it’s not much. . . . It’s just that, well, it’s all there is”). This multipurpose “it” offers Rabbit absolution of a kind that makes the prospect of Eccles’s forgiveness irrelevant. With one miraculous swing of a golf club, he has legitimized, in his own mind, his defection from married life; “it” shows him that he was right to abandon his pregnant wife and toddler son, and no mere argument will persuade him otherwise.

  For Rabbit, this is a moment of redemption celebrated with “a grin of aggrandizement.” For the reader, it’s equivocal, thrilling yet deeply worrisome, in that it harks back to Rabbit’s high school glory days. His sense of himself as a “first-rate” athlete, the idea that he’s a natural and should follow his “inner imperatives,” is at the root of the sudden restless impulse that sent him scampering from his marriage. Whatever “it” is, it does nothing to reconcile him to his responsibilities as a social being, a husband, and a father; on the contrary, it hardens his resolve, and two months later he’s still AWOL, still in the arms of Ruth Leonard, the other woman. He returns home only when Janice goes into labor. Eccles, in the meantime, perseveres with his unique approach to pastoral care: “Playing golf with someone is a good way to get to know him,” he tells Harry’s aggrieved mother-in-law, assuring her that he’s learned, thanks to their games, that Harry is “a good man.” He believes that Harry is “worth saving and could be saved,” but their weekly games mostly pander to Rabbit’s flattering conception of himself as a hero on a quest and as a star athlete in tune with the “harmless ecstasy” of sporting excellence. Eccles notes that on the golf course, Harry is both better and worse than he, an apt judgment in all respects: Harry is as good as his game—wonderful at times, at times appalling.

  As Updike regularly told interviewers, Harry Angstrom is a portrait of the author in straitened circumstances—without a Harvard degree or a marketable talent, as though Uppie had lingered in Shillington after high school, married young, and skidded into a dead-end job: “Although Harry hasn’t studied the things I did or taken up my line of work, he still is fairly alert.” Rabbit was a product of the author’s imagination and intelligence working with intimately familiar material, superimposing elements of his own character on memories of stories his father used to tell about the top athletes at Shillington High and their fate, postgraduation. (“Shillington was littered . . . with the wrecks of former basketball stars.”) Into the mix, too, went the Sunday basketball Updike was playing with the Ipswich crowd; the golf he was playing (often with the Episcopalian minister in Ipswich, Goldthwaite Sherrill, whose father was the bishop of Massachusetts); and the “clutter and tensions of young married life” (Mary was five months pregnant with their third child, Michael, when Updike started the novel). Like “The Happiest I’ve Been,” Rabbit, Run grew out of the tension between Shillington and Ipswich, between his past and his present.

  He began writing in January 1959, and finished in less than nine months. Three and a half decades later he still vividly recalled the rush of excitement with which he worked, seq
uestered in a small corner room on the second floor of the house, looking out over a busy intersection from one window and at the spreading branches of a huge elm tree from the other. He wrote hurriedly, in soft pencil. Under the old-fashioned upright desk with its fold-down writing surface, his kicking feet wore bare spots in the varnished pine floorboards. The momentum of the accumulating sentences thrilled him. Writing in the present tense, an unconventional choice at the time, had a liberating effect on him; it felt “exhilaratingly speedy and free.” At first he thought he was working on a novella, and imagined that the headlong pace of the prose was cinematic; he even considered giving the book the subtitle “A Movie,” to capture the sense of continuous forward motion.

  He was excited, too, by the sex. As he later acknowledged, a “heavy, intoxicating dose of fantasy and wish-fulfillment went into Rabbit, Run. . . . Rabbit ran while I sat at my desk, scribbling”—and kicking his feet with excitement.

  Having left Janice, Rabbit moves in with Ruth, who on their first night together allows him to make love to her “as he would to his wife.” Thanks to Rabbit’s tender ministrations, Ruth achieves the sensual equivalent of the breakthrough Harry later experiences on the fifth tee. Here, too, Updike introduces a numinous “it”:

  “I’d forgotten,” she says.

  “Forgot what?”

  “That I could have it too.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Oh. It’s like falling through.”

  “Where do you fall to?”

  “Nowhere. I can’t talk about it.”

  The word orgasm never appears in the book; climax figures once (as does orgasmatic climax, in a snippet of scabrous dialogue). My guess is that Updike avoids more clinical terms not for propriety’s sake, or even for aesthetic reasons, but because a vague “it” does more to suggest transcendence. In general, he substitutes impressionistic descriptions for exact anatomical labeling. When, for example, Rabbit insists that Ruth be entirely naked before they make love, Updike concentrates on the effect of Ruth’s bare skin on Rabbit’s aroused sensibility without naming any more of the exposed body parts than strictly necessary.

  Later in the book, Rabbit demands that Ruth perform oral sex, though in fact he’s “too fastidious to mouth the words.” Updike again chooses to suggest the act rather than describe it; he arranges a tableau:

  He takes his [clothes] off quickly and neatly and stands by the dull wall in his brilliant body. He leans awkwardly and brings one hand up and hangs it on his shoulder not knowing what to do with it. His whole shy pose has these wings of tension, like he’s an angel waiting for a word.

  Ruth undresses, kneels at his feet. As far as today’s reader is concerned, the idea that under these circumstance Rabbit could be in any way angelic is possibly the only disturbing aspect of the truncated scene that follows. At the time, however, even to hint at fellatio was to court censorship. Particularly objectionable to readers in 1960 was Ruth’s reaction after the deed is done, after Rabbit has bolted: “When the door closes the taste of seawater in her mouth is swallowed by the thick grief that mounts in her throat so fully she has to sit up to breathe.” The sudden access of visceral accuracy (and the congregation in one sentence of the words taste, seawater, mouth, swallowed, and throat) was at the limit of what contemporary sensibilities could bear. Unable to bring himself to describe the offending sentence in English, Victor Gollancz resorted to Latin: “gustum in ore feminae post fellationem consummatam.”

  Updike’s publishers recognized at once the literary value of the novel, and also foresaw the legal difficulty in publishing a book likely to be judged obscene by the powers that be. Gollancz, not a man who’d led a sheltered life, nonetheless circulated an internal memo in which he declared, “I have . . . never read a novel which approaches this one for absolute sexual frankness.” To Updike he telegraphed: RABBIT RUN A SUPERB NOVEL BY AN ALREADY MAJOR AND POTENTIALLY VERY GREAT NOVELIST. The reaction from Alfred Knopf was muted by comparison (“we all admire it greatly”) and accompanied by an understated caveat: “There are one or two little matters to discuss.” Gollancz’s telegram and Knopf’s letter reached Updike on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, where he had taken his family on an extended winter vacation (the first of many trips to the West Indies in search of a sun cure for his psoriasis), so a month went by before Updike presented himself at his publisher’s Madison Avenue offices. He was ushered into the presence of Knopf himself, who announced to his author, milking the moment for drama, that his lawyers had warned that publishing Rabbit, Run would land them both in jail. Faced with this opening gambit, Updike rapidly calculated the odds of finding a reputable publisher who would print the uncensored manuscript—and consented to cuts. As he put it, “I agreed to go along with the legal experts, and trim the obscenity to the point where the book might slide past the notice of hypothetical backwoods sheriffs vigilant against smut.”

  It’s possible that the cuts were unnecessary, that no legal challenge would have been forthcoming. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita had been published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958, attracting considerable controversy but no prosecutions; by January 1959, Lolita had reached the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. In July 1959, the U.S. Post Office ban on the unexpurgated Grove Press edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was overturned in federal court, and Lawrence’s novel also climbed the bestseller list. But two years later, when Grove published an American edition of Henry Miller’s previously banned Tropic of Cancer, dozens of booksellers were arrested and obscenity cases filed coast to coast. In a bizarre twist, as if to fulfill Knopf’s dark prophecy, charges of conspiracy were filed in a Brooklyn court against both the publisher, Barney Rosset, and Henry Miller himself; when Miller declined to appear before the grand jury, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Neither man went to jail, and in any case Tropic of Cancer is a much bawdier book; it’s deliberately, even gleefully salacious in a way Rabbit, Run isn’t. (“The novels of Henry Miller,” Updike once quipped, “are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue.”) Yet Updike, in this uncertain climate, was perhaps wise to conclude that self-censorship was preferable to state censorship. No scenes were removed from his novel, only a few “dirty” words; as he later acknowledged, “none of the excisions really hurt.” The sex was still there. Updike felt that in agreeing to the changes, he had sold out, but he wasn’t, in fact, being asked to compromise his artistic integrity. If, as he told an interviewer in 1990, his aim was “to write about sex on the same level, as explicitly and carefully and lovingly as one wrote about anything else,” the bowdlerized version did the job as thoroughly as the original.*

  But even with the obscenity trimmed, the book presented an insuperable problem for Gollancz, who anguished and dithered and pleaded for additional changes—and finally concluded that despite his fervent admiration, he couldn’t publish it. The British rights were immediately snapped up by André Deutsch Ltd., a small but highly regarded house, run on a shoestring and named for the Hungarian-born publisher who founded it in 1952. Having weathered an injunction against the British publication of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (although Mailer had substituted fug for fuck, the F-word was still omnipresent and unmistakable), Deutsch had acquired a reputation for fearlessness, which he embraced with characteristic verve. He hardly blinked at Rabbit, Run. Impetuous and irascible, but also charming and charismatic—“effervescent,” Updike called him—the diminutive Deutsch made yearly trips to New York, and occasionally ventured north to Ipswich to visit Lovell Thompson. Deutsch quickly became a friend, as did his colleague Diana Athill, Updike’s editor. André Deutsch Ltd. continued to publish Updike’s books until the early 1990s, well after Deutsch himself had retired.

  Updike was naturally keyed up about venturing into the risky, uncharted territory of sexual realism, and yet that was only part of the adventure he’d embarked on. The novel was conceived as a character study of a moral type: “the crea
ture of impulse,” jittery, uncomfortable Rabbit Angstrom, with his animal urge to untangle himself from a web of obligations. This was the first time Updike had plunged so deeply and at such length into the consciousness of a single character. The present tense carried him along as he chased after his restless Rabbit, the author’s reach extending as the pages piled up.

  The most harrowing scene, the accidental drowning of Janice’s newborn baby, testifies to a dramatic expansion of his capacity for empathy. In The Poorhouse Fair he relied on his familiarity with his beloved grandparents to create elderly characters who were not only plausible but engaging; in Rabbit, Run he managed to channel, sympathetically, the thoughts of an inebriated housewife, not a class of citizen he was well acquainted with. The bumbling of the drunken Janice is terrifyingly convincing, leading with a dreadful inevitability to the moment when the baby “sinks down like a gray stone” into the overfilled bathtub: