Updike

by Begley, Adam

  As Updike would say, “internal evidence” identifies the “bigger child” as Judith, eldest of the Maple children. The others are Richard Jr. (“Dickie”), John, and Margaret (nicknamed “Bean” as a baby). First introduced as a foursome in the early sixties in “Giving Blood,” they began to emerge as full-fledged characters several years later, beginning with “Eros Rampant”; from that point on, it was obvious that Updike had no compunction about using Liz, David, Michael, and Miranda as his models. Lightly fictionalized, the young Maples are as much like the young Updikes as Richard and Joan are like John and Mary—which is to say that in each case the outline is more or less accurate. There’s no scrambling of identities: Friends and relatives recognized all the children immediately, and the children recognized themselves.

  The prayer scene in “Plumbing” was probably played out in real life essentially as Updike wrote it; by the late sixties, an adolescent Liz had grown out of saying prayers with her father, but the other children continued with what had become a family ritual: John would go into each of their rooms separately, sit on the bed, and repeat with them the Lord’s Prayer.

  The children began to figure more prominently in the Maples stories, and elsewhere in Updike’s fiction, in part because they were more involved in grown-up activities. During the Labor-in-Vain years, Liz began to play volleyball with the adults during Sunday sports. David took up golf and photography. Michael helped his father, more than the others, with carpentry projects around the house. Each of the four children was now a vocal, even articulate, presence. But another reason for their prominence in the fiction is the moral weight they carried. As in “Plumbing,” children are a reminder of the parents’ obligations, their duties and responsibilities. The actions of the parents vis-à-vis the children are an important gauge of decency, a gauge that exposes failure more often than success. Over and over again in Updike’s fiction from the late sixties and early seventies, children see things they shouldn’t; their presence, or even just the possibility of their presence, shames the parents—or ought to shame the parents—into behaving better. At times, John felt uncomfortably sandwiched between his children on the one hand and Wesley and Linda on the other. As he once remarked, he belonged to “a generation . . . that found itself somewhat pushed around by its parents, and now feels it’s being pushed around by its children—we’re a generation that never got on top.” Wesley wasn’t pushy (he left that to Linda), but he was an exemplar—however eccentric and irritating—a good man who showed what it meant to be a good son, a good husband, a good father. How heavily John’s children weighed on him is harder to measure. When he was trying to leave Mary for Joyce Harrington, the thought of abandoning them was not in itself enough to tip the balance, not enough to make him stay. And yet he did stay (his father possibly the deciding factor)—and wrote movingly of the torment of a parent poised on the brink of breaking up his family.

  Richard Maple occupies a clearly defined space in the constellation of Updike alter egos. He is the character into whom Updike poured, over a span of thirty-eight years, his feelings about being a husband and father. Outside that narrow segment of the domestic realm, Richard scarcely exists. We’re told in “Snowing in Greenwich Village” that he works in advertising, but his professional life has no bearing at all in the later stories; he might as well be unemployed, or the beneficiary of a trust fund sufficient to maintain a middle-class existence in an Ipswich-like Boston suburb. He has parents and a hometown (in West Virginia), but what little pre-Joan past he’s given is lifted straight from Updike’s own background, with only minor cosmetic adjustments, such as substituting West Virginia for southeastern Pennsylvania. Neither Harry Angstrom (an indifferent husband and an epically bad father) nor Henry Bech (a bachelor at heart and not a father until his seventies) offered Updike much chance to explore the role of paterfamilias; Richard Maple was tailor-made for exactly that.

  And in that role, he’s an almost exact facsimile of Updike. More consistently than Bech or Rabbit, Richard presents an undistorted reflection of his creator’s inner being. His wildly oscillating emotions about Joan; his yearning to leave her and his chronic love for her; the pangs of sexual desire he experiences in her presence, even when their marriage is in ruins; the bitter frustration; the revulsion—all this is very close to home. So, too, his hypochondria, his sadistic pleasure in harmful teasing, and his instant (but passing) remorse. And so, too, his misgivings about his parenting skills, his sense that he’s somehow doing damage to the very beings he least wants to harm. Updike occasionally tried to distance himself from his doppelgänger—“there’s more fiction to those stories than would meet the eye”—but the attempt was always halfhearted and transparently disingenuous. There is one crucial distinction between the character and his creator: unlike Richard, Updike hoarded his experience as a husband and father for use in his writing. He observed with intent, monitoring his teetering home life with a loving, greedy eye, precisely aware of its value as material. His undoubted affection was accompanied by an opportunistic urge to make use of what he was witnessing. Conscious of a sliver of inner detachment, a gap between thought and feeling that made surreptitious surveillance possible, he felt guilty about it, another layer of regret and remorse.

  The converse of his detachment was his fierce concentration when he was at work. David remembered going with a couple of his siblings to visit their father in his downtown Ipswich office sometime in the sixties. As they climbed the stairs they could hear the busy noise of his typewriter, a continuous clickety-click that ceased the instant they knocked. The children piled into the office and delivered some message or made some trivial request. Their father was perfectly happy to see them and faultlessly attentive; he wasn’t remotely grumpy about being disturbed. After a few minutes, their business settled, the kids trooped out again, shutting the door behind them—and before they reached the stairs, the clatter of the typewriter had resumed, rapid-fire, unbroken.

  There were of course times when he was stymied, when his powers of concentration and magical fluency were unavailing. For example, he was unable to make progress on the novel about James Buchanan that he had begun researching and writing in London. Back home in Ipswich, he struggled, and finally gave up in the first weeks of the new decade. He later declared himself incapable of the “vigorous fakery” essential to historical fiction. Feeling he owed Knopf a novel, he turned to an “old friend” firmly rooted in realist detail: Harry Angstrom, last seen running through the streets of Brewer, fleeing complications and entanglements—“Ah: runs. Runs.” For nearly a decade, people had been asking what happened next; where did Rabbit run to? Updike began cooking up an answer, and in the first week of February 1970, he started work on the novel that became Rabbit Redux.* As he later put it, “the perpetual presentness of my former hero beckoned as a relief”; or, more simply, “Rabbit to the rescue.”

  THE COURAGE TO contemplate a sequel came in part from his success with serial installments of the Maples’ marital woes and Bech’s far-flung literary adventures. Bech: A Book, in the works for a year or so, appeared in June and, to Updike’s surprise, was greeted with voluble pleasure by reviewers, many of whom proclaimed it his best book. To Judith Jones he complained, only half seriously, “I am beginning to wince at the way they praise this little jeu at the expense of all the other books. Somehow, as everybody treats Bech so courteously, I am beginning to wonder if there isn’t indeed a Jewish Mafia.” The miseries of the Maples, meanwhile, were the subject of nakedly prurient fascination. With two thriving alter egos close by and in regular contact, it’s not particularly surprising that Harry, presenting himself as a character ripe for revival, should be invited to join them. Updike’s dismay at “all the revolutions in the air”—the same disquiet about the counterculture voiced in “The Hillies”—needed a fresh outlet. As a middle American, representative of the socioeconomic class Updike had left behind, and as a member of Nixon’s “silent majority”—the mass of ordinary, law-abiding citize
ns feeling overwhelmed by raucous jeers of dissent from a “vocal minority”—Harry became a “receptacle” for Updike’s concerns. Patriotic resentments, Updike realized, would sit more becomingly on a paunchy thirty-six-year-old Linotype operator scraping payments on an apple-green ranch house and a quarter-acre of lawn than on a trim millionaire author, recent resident of a London terrace with a $10,000-a-month price tag.

  Looking through Harry’s eyes, Updike surveyed a nation in torment, riven by rioting and assassination, anguished protest and uncomprehending reaction. Not surprisingly, the novel, by Updike’s own admission, is “violent and bizarre,” the violence and bizarrity invading Harry’s little world in the shape of Jill, an upper-class teenage runaway; and Skeeter, a black Vietnam veteran with a messianic streak, also on the run. Even before these two fugitives move into Harry’s Penn Villas ranch house, his home has been turned upside down; Janice, who’s been having an affair with Charlie Stavros, a savvy salesman at her father’s Toyota franchise, moves in with her lover, leaving her husband in sole charge of twelve-year-old Nelson—an augmentation of parental responsibility for which Harry is ill-equipped. His own father is aging, his mother slowly dying of Parkinson’s disease—“having the adventure now we’re all going to have,” his father says bleakly. Rabbit himself is sunk in apathy; he reacts but seems sadly incapable of asserting himself, his passivity in marked contrast to the tumult all around him.

  It’s the summer of 1969, and man is bound for the moon; Harry and his father watch reruns of the Cape Canaveral blastoff in the Phoenix Bar, down the street from Verity Press, where they’ve worked together for a decade. In York, Pennsylvania, just fifty miles away, a race riot is in full swing; snipers target firemen; policemen patrol the streets. In Vietnam, the body count escalates; it’s one of the worst years of the war, with more than eleven thousand American casualties. On Martha’s Vineyard, Senator Edward Kennedy drives off a bridge in the wee hours and a young woman from Pennsylvania drowns. “If the novel seems hectic, so were the times,” Updike wrote decades later. “[T]he news had moved out of the television and into our laps, and there was no ignoring the war, the protest, the civil-rights movement, the moon shot, and the drugs and sexual promiscuity that were winning favor in the middle classes.” With the moon shot as framing metaphor (Harry launched into the outer space of radically new experience), the novel blends national trauma and domestic disarray so smoothly that they merge; the political and the personal are indistinguishable on every level—plot, characterization, and imagery all contribute to a highly suggestive confusion of categories. In her review of Couples, Diana Trilling had scolded Updike for using the tragic public events of the Kennedy era as mere backdrop: “We recognize them,” she wrote, “as the fashionable trappings of all contemporary fiction that pretends to big meanings.” With Rabbit Redux, no one could complain that history serves “only a decorative function.”

  Rabbit and America, both drastically demoralized, need to be nursed back to health; “Pray for rebirth,” Harry’s ailing mother tells him.* Whether or not that happy result is actually achieved, there’s certainly a concerted effort to reeducate our hero by anatomizing the flaws of the nation he loves, beginning with slavery and the ongoing saga of racial oppression and exploitation, then veering into the horrors of Vietnam. The venue is the living room of the ranch house, and the cast of characters consists of Harry, Nelson, Jill, and Skeeter—another of Updike’s quartets. The waiflike Jill, a flower child who’s fled a drug problem and the stifling family manse in Stonington, Connecticut (though she could easily have been a hillie from Tarbox), moves in first, and makes herself at home in various agreeable ways. She’s Harry’s lover and his daughter; she’s a big sister for Nelson and the object of the boy’s lust-tinged affection. Then Skeeter, a trickster figure who’s jumped bail on a drug charge, crashes the party, promising to be gone in a few days; instead, casting a sinister spell, he stays on, even though Jill and Nelson both beg Harry to throw him out. Skeeter stays until disaster forces him to flee.

  The living room teach-ins intended to raise Rabbit’s consciousness quickly descend into something much more emotionally complex and volatile, Skeeter ranting and raging with terrifying rhetorical skill. Each character is in an altered state: Harry mesmerized; Skeeter unhinged; Jill drugged and increasingly spacey; Nelson frantic with worry about Jill—until Rabbit is roused to banish him upstairs. Unable to resist the messianic power of Skeeter’s wild sermons, Harry fails to recognize Jill’s peril. The reader, too, is under a spell, lulled by fearless, majestically assured writing:

  Physically, Skeeter fascinates Rabbit. The lustrous pallor of the tongue and palms and the soles of the feet, left out of the sun. Or a different kind of skin? White palms never tan either. The peculiar glinting lustre of his skin. The something so very finely turned and finished in the face, reflecting at a dozen polished points: in comparison white faces are blobs: putty still drying. The curious greased grace of his gestures, rapid and watchful as a lizard’s motions, free of mammalian fat. Skeeter in his house feels like a finely made electric toy; Harry wants to touch him but is afraid he will get a shock.

  As the weeks go by, the political theater played out in the living room degenerates into an orgiastic, drug-fueled romp, with Harry and Skeeter high on marijuana, and Jill on mescaline, then heroin. The drugs are sacraments administered by Skeeter, the self-styled “black Jesus” arranging a psychedelic black Mass. As Rabbit, stoned, weirdly acquiescent, reads aloud from The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Skeeter “rapes” Jill.* Alone with Harry, Skeeter masturbates—again to the tune of the ex-slave’s narrative—and Harry has to smother a spark of homoerotic desire kindled by the naked man on his sofa: “His heart skips. He has escaped. Narrowly.” Nelson glimpses enough of this mayhem to send him sobbing to his room. It’s a brutal sequence, repellent and compelling in equal measure.

  If Rabbit Redux is Updike’s most powerful novel—and I would confidently argue the case—part of that power comes from high stakes: the soul of the nation and the soul of the hero teetering in the balance. The psychodrama played out in Rabbit’s living room culminates in the shock of Jill’s degradation; her death in a house fire deliberately set by Peeping Tom neighbors outraged by glimpses of a black man having sex with a white woman occurs offstage, a mercy to the reader.* Violence was rare in Updike’s fiction up to this point; Jill’s fiery death is a sure sign that we’re all being pushed to extremes, the characters, the reader, the author; it’s a high-wire act for all concerned.

  To Updike, a “vehement and agitated . . . undove” who harbored a half-hidden conservative streak and couldn’t kick the unfortunate habit of mocking civil rights rhetoric (as in “Marching Through Boston”), it must have felt as if his own soul were also in play. Harry’s “angry old patriotism” (as Updike remarked, “the rage and destructiveness boiling out of the television set belong to him”) is an echo of the “strange underdog rage” provoked in Updike by any mention of antiwar sentiment. The flag decal on the back window of Harry’s car finds its equivalent in the large American flag given to Updike by his family—“in loving exasperation”—as a Christmas present just before he started Rabbit Redux. When Harry tells Stavros, “It’s not all war I love . . . it’s this war. Because nobody else does. Nobody else understands it,” we’re catching a glimpse of Updike launching into the “good row” he had with Philip Roth (and many others) over Vietnam. The teach-ins were part of Updike’s own reeducation; he was putting his prejudices and political convictions to the test, subjecting them to the full force of a ferocious counterblast: Skeeter’s insidiously persuasive attack on racist America as a big pig wallowing in a muck of greed. Updike loathed this kind of critique. As we know, he bristled at any form of organized social protest: sit-ins, marches, rallies. He sometimes claimed that this aversion was the result of his apolitical fifties education, but the “immutability” of his Shillington childhood was surely at the root of it. Growing up safe and happy in a town that
was “abnormally still,” in an unchanging family structure, taught him to associate happiness and well-being with stability. “To me,” he wrote in his memoirs, “authority was the Shillington High School faculty”—his father and his father’s colleagues. He was never going to agitate for the overthrow of institutions, or even wholeheartedly endorse social idealism; he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the status quo could be “lightly or easily altered.” And yet he gave the firebrand Skeeter a starring role (like Satan in Paradise Lost) and allowed him to vent his spleen with hypnotic eloquence. When the novel appeared, Updike told an interviewer that “[r]evolt, rebellion, violence, disgust are themselves there for a reason . . . and must be considered respectfully.” He gave equal billing to the radical and the reactionary, and equal weight to their grievances.

  Neither patriotism nor protest gets the last word. The teach-ins end when Jill dies, victim of the flames engulfing the nation and Harry’s home. When it’s all over we’re left to sift through the ashes. As Updike put it, “The cost of the disruption of the social fabric was paid, as in the earlier novel, by a girl.” Or in Harry’s pithy formulation, linking the fire with Janice fumbling for their infant daughter in too-deep bathwater, “Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls.” Passive, hard-hearted, callously egocentric, Harry gives little sign of grief for his dead lover; the business of mourning Jill, of raging against her death, falls to Nelson, further complicating the bruised relations between father and son. If any good news can be said to come out the whole sorry mess, it’s that Harry—who sees himself as “the man in the middle”—has listened; his curiosity and his native openness have led him to entertain ideas that would otherwise be anathema to him.