Updike

by Begley, Adam

  For Updike, as for Harry, Skeeter was a revelation. Taking a black man into his home, offering him even temporary asylum, is a huge step for Harry. You would think that for Updike, who noted that he had “hardly met a black person” until he arrived at Harvard, creating a credible black character to play a major, catalytic role in the novel would have been similarly daunting. And yet the finished product bears no trace of authorial jitters. On the contrary, there are three notable black characters, all presented with aplomb: Skeeter; Buchanan, who works at Verity Press with Harry and his father; and Buchanan’s friend Babe, a singer-cum-hooker.

  Invited by Buchanan, Rabbit ventures into Jimbo’s Friendly Lounge, and discovers that he’s the only white man in the bar:

  Black to him is just a political word but these people really are, their faces shine of blackness turning as he enters, a large soft white man in a sticky gray suit. Fear travels up and down his skin, but the music of the great green-and-mauve-glowing jukebox called Moonmood slides on, and the liquid of laughter and tickled muttering resumes flowing; his entrance was merely a snag. Rabbit hangs like a balloon waiting for a dart; then his elbow is jostled and Buchanan is beside him.

  “Come meet some soul,” says Buchanan, and leads him to a booth where Babe and Skeeter sit, Babe smoking “a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing.” It’s hard to resist quoting from the twenty-page scene; it’s a virtuoso turn, magnificently conceived and executed. From a narrative point of view, the aim is to connect Harry and Jill and Skeeter, and to unload Jill, who’s been staying with Babe, onto Harry. But the details of the encounter are so gorgeous, the interaction between the black characters so tense and intricate, that the reader never notices that the plot is being eased forward. Babe is old and wise and tragic, in touch with psychic powers (she reads Rabbit’s hand, extolling the virtues of his thumb—“extremely plausible,” she calls it); Skeeter is young and fierce, taunting the others with lacerating wit; and Buchanan is a conciliator, a patient negotiator working his angle. Updike was indulging in a bit of fun with Buchanan, namesake of the pragmatic president from Pennsylvania whose story had stymied him: “Having told a number of interviewers that I was writing a book about Buchanan,” he later explained, “I painted him black and put him in, too.” Like Rabbit’s thumb, Buchanan is extremely plausible—and appealing, whereas Skeeter is plainly nasty and dangerous.

  Daring to make a black man not just a villain but a would-be Antichrist; daring to stage the rape of a white girl by a black man; or simply daring to dip into a black man’s point of view—in the morally strident sixties, in the heyday of the Black Power movement, Updike was taking a risk, as demonstrated by the fate of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron chose to write in the voice of Nat Turner, the messianic leader of a bloody slave rebellion, and though his novel was warmly received when it was first published in 1967 (it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), a year or so later it was loudly and repeatedly condemned as racist, a tag that stuck for decades. Though defended by his friend James Baldwin, Styron was vilified in print by a group of black writers and intellectuals; he was pronounced “psychologically sick” and “morally senile”; he was accused of having “a vile racist imagination”—partly because he was a white southerner assuming the persona of a key figure in African American history, and partly because he invented a sexually charged relationship between a black man and a white teenage girl he eventually murders. Updike was well aware of this bitter, much-publicized controversy. He’d read the book when it came out and found it “laborious.” When he was six months into the writing of Rabbit Redux, he told Maxwell about a long subway ride from the National Institute of Arts and Letters on the Upper West Side down to Fourteenth Street, during which he endured “a very eloquent and intelligent negro critic shouting in my ear, above the roar, about how bad Styron’s book was and how much ‘coercive self-righteousness’ was in the air now.” A load of coercive self-righteousness (what today we would call political correctness) could easily have landed on Updike had Skeeter, and the graphic descriptions of Skeeter having sex with Jill, been misconstrued.

  Updike thought Rabbit’s “reluctant crossing of the color line” was a sign of progress. And so it was, in more ways than one. Anatole Broyard, the daily reviewer for The New York Times, was unstinting in his praise of Updike’s accomplishment:

  Skeeter is something new in black characters, including those in books by blacks. He goes beyond the familiar anger and rhetoric into the wild humor blacks no longer seem to allow themselves. He is an inspired preacher. . . . Skeeter is a compound of drug-induced delusions of grandeur, real indignation, homicidal rage and quirky genius. He has a talent for provoking, for getting to the absolute bottom, for traveling through disillusion and coming out on the other side, where everything is exposed.*

  Broyard’s praise includes a hint of sympathy for Skeeter. His villainy has its reasons; his outrageousness makes sense. It fits; it chimes with the outrageousness of the era.

  So much in the sixties was too big, too bright, too loud, especially when it came to flaunting newly won sexual freedom. Updike later conceded that there was in the novel a “possibly inordinate emphasis on sexual congress.” There are fewer sex scenes than in Couples, but they’re raunchier, more blatantly pornographic. Fellatio and miscegenation feature prominently. And a good deal of the sex takes place in Harry’s head—for example, his masturbatory fantasy featuring a “hefty coarse Negress,” and his incestuous compulsion to imagine the graphic details of his sister, Mim, copulating with Stavros, his wife’s lover. Rabbit has come a long way. When we first met him, he was “too fastidious to mouth the words” to say that he wanted Ruth to perform oral sex. Now, when Mim asks him what he’s learned, he tells her flatly, “I learned I’d rather fuck than be blown.”

  Like the decade, the novel is strong poison, and it will always have its detractors, among them Christopher Ricks, whose essay in The New York Review of Books bore the telltale title “Flopsy Bunny.” But some of the reviews were among the most ecstatic Updike ever received. Broyard positively gushed: “Rabbit Redux is the complete Updike at last, an awesomely accomplished writer who is better, tougher, wiser and more radically human than anyone could have expected him to be.”* A week after that panegyric, Richard Locke, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, declared Rabbit Redux “by far the most audacious and successful” of Updike’s books. Locke’s long front-page essay looked back over the breadth of his career; Locke noted that this was the first time Updike had dealt “in a large way with public subjects.”

  Concentrating on the new, and on the risks he took, shouldn’t distract us from the carefully planned continuity between the second Rabbit novel and the first. They were designed as a set; the sequel, he wrote, was “meant to be symmetric” with the earlier novel. In Rabbit Redux, Janice leaves her husband and saves a life (that of her lover); Harry stays home, and a girl dies on his watch. In Rabbit, Run, Eccles, the milquetoast clergyman, tries to rescue Rabbit with rounds of golf;* in the next installment, the messianic Skeeter preaches apocalypse and passes the sacramental joint. The fun-house mirroring is pervasive—as Updike helpfully suggested, “Anybody who really cared could get some interesting formal things out of the two books together.” Between them, Harry and Janice cancel out the events of the first novel and inch, at the end of the second, toward a tentative reconciliation. The tranquil, uncertain ending, which finds husband and wife in bed together at the Safe Haven Motel, invites a sequel: “He. She. Sleeps. O.K.?” According to Updike, “The question that ends the book is not meant to have an easy answer”—but it seems more hopeful than not, and a third installment of the Rabbit saga was already taking shape in the author’s mind. In the mid-seventies, Updike told Joyce Carol Oates, “I feel at home in Harry’s pelt and may not have spent my last term there.”

  The major incidents in Rabbit Redux were entirely made up. There was never a Jill in Updi
ke’s life, no nineteen-year-old flower-child lover moving into his house, strumming on the guitar and cooking him fillet of sole; and there was no Skeeter, no black Jesus prophesying revolution and promising to return in glory. Here, as in The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run, Updike uncoupled fiction from autobiography. He went right back to the well, of course, dipping into his personal experience when it suited him, writing about himself and those around him without a second thought. But Rabbit Redux, which spilled out in a rush—looking back, he remembered that it “kind of wrote itself”—released him into a new and expansive freedom. It paved the way for The Coup, the most outlandish of his creations.

  He took brave leaps of imagination with Rabbit Redux, and invited into the pages of his novel all the disorienting upheaval of what he identified as “the most dissentious American decade since the Civil War.” He worked harder than ever to achieve his goal of “intuition into the mass consciousness and an identification with our national fortunes”—and yet the writing didn’t take him far from home. His fundamental concern was domestic and quotidian; “the basic action remains familial,” he noted; “marital fidelity and parental responsibility are still the issues.”

  He sported, in the months after the novel’s publication, an increasingly thick and bohemian-looking beard. But though it looked like a statement of solidarity with the counterculture, it wasn’t; he had broken his leg playing defensive end in a game of Sunday football, and being on crutches made it hard to shave. Hobbling, hirsute, he went back to work on James Buchanan.

  The hundred pages of his abandoned historical novel seemed to him “stiff, unreal, and lacking in electricity.” Unable to vivify those pages, he convinced himself that the material he’d laboriously accumulated over the last four years required a dramatic form—he decided to turn the novel into a play. It was a peculiar decision. He was not, as he candidly admitted, a theatergoer; in fact, he found most plays “pretty silly.” He knew next to nothing about stagecraft. And the unattractive and fatally passive Buchanan was hardly ideal as the hero of live drama. Updike was aware, even as he was writing it, that the play would be unplayably long (seven hours, according to one estimate), not to mention static and pedantic. But he persevered, calculating that if he called it a “closet drama,” spiced up the text with lively stage directions, and tacked on a historical afterword, it would be, as he wrote to André Deutsch, “bindable and thence forgettable.” As it happened, Buchanan Dying was twice brought to the stage (in abbreviated form): first at Franklin and Marshall College, near Buchanan’s home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in a fully staged production; and a year later in San Diego, as a dramatic reading. A delighted Updike escorted his mother to the Franklin and Marshall production. Linda wore a gray fox fur he had brought back from Russia; she looked, her son thought, “every inch a first-nighter.” There was no opening night disaster, certainly nothing like the jeering that Henry James endured at the premiere of Guy Domville. Updike remained fond of his play (as he was of all his work), though he couldn’t suppress the suspicion that his theatrical foray was a disappointment. He somehow still wasn’t done with Buchanan, but it would be nearly two decades before he found a way to get the fifteenth president off his back for good.

  A PATTERN, ALREADY emergent in the mid-sixties, solidified in the seventies: Updike zigzagged, from short story to short story, between the conspicuously experimental and the comfortably familiar. He later grouped the experimental stories under the rubric “Far Out,” a tip of the hat to the spirit of the times. “During the Jurassic” and “Under the Microscope,” written in 1965 and 1967, respectively, are early attempts to wrap the mundane in a radically unfamiliar package. Each takes an ordinary cocktail party and makes it strange. In “During the Jurassic,” the guests are a taxonomy of dinosaurs, from Hypsilophodon to Stegosaurus; in “Under the Microscope,” they’re a sampling of pond life—water mites, rotifers, flatworms. In “The Baluchitherium,” an enterprising journalist time-travels to an interview with the largest-ever land mammal, extinct since the Oligocene. Three historical fantasies offered an easy avenue of escape from the here and now: “The Invention of the Horse Collar,” a tale of fratricide set in the “darkest Dark Ages”; “Jesus on Honshu,” an alternative life of Christ; and “Augustine’s Concubine,” a fictional elaboration of the bare facts known about the mother of Augustine’s child, the woman he renounced after thirteen years as her lover. “Commercial”—a different kind of experiment, classed by Updike as a Tarbox tale—first analyzes the script of a saccharine television advertisement replete with cozy images of family togetherness, and then, still casually spoofing advertising conventions, follows a man (Updike in thin disguise) preparing for bed and trying with difficulty to fall asleep next to his slumbering wife. The cleverness on display in this and other stories only partly conceals an underlying restlessness, an intermittently urgent need to rethink his methods, to tackle domestic issues without automatic recourse to the domestic realism he had long since thoroughly mastered—and would never abandon for long.*

  In “Sublimating,” a fresh episode of the Maples saga written a few months after he’d finished Rabbit Redux, marital fidelity and parental responsibility are again the central concerns. The story begins with the announcement that Joan and Richard, still hoping to salvage the marriage (though their respective involvement in serial adultery is now frankly acknowledged), have sworn off sex—“since sex was the only sore point in their marriage.”* For once the Maples are in sync; abstinence affects them in much the same way, sharpening their senses, putting them on edge, fueling morbid daydreams. Emphasizing this common ground, Updike tells us that the Maples’ eyes had “married and merged to three” and that the shared eye in the middle allows them, on occasion, to read each other’s mind. This elaborate image was suggested by a drawing made for Mary and John by a “picturesque” Russian artist during their trip to the Soviet Union in 1964. The sketch was of two overlapping heads with a third eye shared between them. The artist insisted that it was a portrait of the Updikes as husband and wife. John saw his point; as he wrote in Self-Consciousness, “It was true, [Mary] and I saw many things the same way, and never had much trouble understanding each other.” But what sounds like an asset turns out to be a liability: “We rarely needed . . . to talk, and under this quietness resentments and secret lives came to flourish. Had we had two eyes each, we might have made a better couple.” This interpretation—arrived at more than a decade after they had ceased to be a couple—is clearly skewed by hindsight. In “Sublimating,” the shared third eye makes it more difficult for the Maples to hide secrets from one another; it allows them to sense each other’s thoughts and punctures self-deceit.

  Abstinence, alas, fails to make the heart grow fonder, and by the end of “Sublimating,” the Maples’ marriage is as rickety as ever. The children, meanwhile, are omnipresent, each of them acting out a predictable Freudian role, as one would expect in a story with a psychoanalytic catchphrase as its title. Bean, the youngest, flirts with her father, yet retains a measure of infantile polymorphous perversity; she’s fixated on any nearby “warmth-source.” John, still in the latency stage, is building a guillotine in the cellar (“Jesus,” Richard exclaims, underlining the point, “he better not lose a finger”). Newly adolescent Dickie is threatened by his older sister’s maturing body; her “blind blooming” pains him. And it drives her father crazy: Judith flaunts her nubile charms, doing stretching exercises in front of the poor sex-starved man. The children are distinct, fully particularized characters (as in the earlier “Eros Rampant”), and yet they function as a unit, a mute chorus offering implicit comment on the behavior of their parents. The object of love and the source of love—and of guilt, regret, and frustration—they are foils, mirrors, prods to the conscience. They bind their mother and father and drive them apart, like every couple’s children.

  Like the Updike children. But the Updike children—unlike most other children—were also fodder for a fictional record of their parents
’ failing marriage, a record published serially in The New Yorker, and read with relish by family friends and neighbors, and any number of the magazine’s subscribers (of whom there were nearly half a million by the early seventies). Their father claimed to have no qualms about broadcasting intimate details of his family life in stories with titles such as “Your Lover Just Called” and “Eros Rampant”; he pointed out that his “nearest and dearest of that time didn’t complain, I think because among other things there was some respect for what I was trying to do—something that transcended the personalities around me.” Tell-all in print, he was utterly discreet in conversation. One of his friends told me, “I don’t remember any boy-talk about our different romances. We never exchanged war stories.” Another friend, the young Nicholas Delbanco, who for many years harbored a platonic, worshipful love for Mary, asked Updike during this period about the ubiquity of adulterous liaisons in his fiction, particularly the Maples stories. He found it hard to believe that anyone with such an attractive, engaging wife would be sleeping around. Updike assured him that it was merely a socially validated form of daydreaming—in other words, harmless fantasy. With Judith Jones, who was by now officially his editor at Knopf, he turned the topic of his fictional lovers into a salty joke; after writing the flap copy for Museums and Women (1972), a collection of twenty-nine stories, nearly half involving adultery, he suggested the following “cap-line”: “Wonderful contes from a veteran conte-chaser.”