by Begley, Adam
315 “one of the globe’s great animate spectacles”: JU to JCO, March 18, 1992, Syracuse.
316 “ill-advised” was Updike’s verdict: JU to JCO, July 3, 1993, Syracuse.
317 “still imperfectly tourist-friendly”: DC, 17.
317 from communism to “superheated mercantilism”: Ibid., 20.
317 he found the Indian expedition “existentially damaging”: JU to Werner Berthoff, January 26, 2006, Houghton.
317 “It shatters my composure”: Ibid.
VIII. Tarbox Redux
319 “In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person”: SC, 54.
319 “If that nut goes, everything goes”: LP, February 9, 1958, Houghton.
319 “Once we moved, things fell apart”: OJ, 59.
320 “I sort of ignored them,” Liz remembered: Author interview, Elizabeth Cobblah, April 11, 2011.
323 “the first American masterpiece”: CJU, 129.
323 civil disobedience “antithetical” to his fifties education: HG, 452.
324 “It is so quiet in my new house”: JU to MW, June 3, 1970, Illinois.
325 based on “internal evidence”: JU, Too Far to Go (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1979), 10.
329 “a generation . . . that found itself somewhat pushed around”: WMRR.
331 “there’s more fiction to those stories”: Ibid.
331 the “vigorous fakery” essential to historical fiction: HG, 453.
331 he turned to an “old friend”: PP, 491.
332 “the perpetual presentness of my former hero”: HG, 453.
332 “Rabbit to the rescue”: HS, 858.
332 “I am beginning to wince”: JU to JJ, June 16, 1970, Ransom.
332 Updike’s dismay at “all the revolutions in the air”: HG, 453.
332 Harry became a “receptacle” for Updike’s concerns: Ibid.
332 the novel, by Updike’s own admission, is “violent and bizarre”: HG, 454.
333 “having the adventure now we’re all going to have”: RRedux, 238.
333 “[T]he news had moved out of the television”: MM, 818.
333 “We recognize them,” she wrote: Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders,” 129.
334 “Pray for rebirth,” Harry’s ailing mother tells him: RRedux, 198.
335 “Physically, Skeeter fascinates Rabbit”: Ibid., 250–51.
335 “she is liking it, being raped”: Ibid., 280.
335 “His heart skips. He has escaped. Narrowly”: Ibid., 283.
336 inspired by “a piece of authentic social violence”: CJU, 90.
336 “the rage and destructiveness”: HG, 455.
336 given to Updike by his family—“in loving exasperation”: SC, 129.
336 “It’s not all war I love . . . it’s this war”: RRedux, 357.
336 a town that was “abnormally still”: CJU, 167.
336 “authority was the Shillington High School faculty”: SC, 128.
337 the status quo could be “lightly or easily altered”: CJU, 60.
337 “[r]evolt, rebellion, violence, disgust”: Ibid., 62.
337 “The cost of the disruption of the social fabric”: HS, 858–59.
337 “Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls”: RRedux, 395.
337 sees himself as “the man in the middle”: Ibid., 330.
337 he had “hardly met a black person”: SC, 196.
338 “Black to him is just a political word”: RRedux, 114.
338 “Come meet some soul,” says Buchanan: Ibid., 115.
338 “a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in”: Ibid.
338 “extremely plausible,” she calls it: Ibid., 117.
338 “Having told a number of interviewers”: HS, 858.
339 he was pronounced “psychologically sick”: William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 448.
339 He’d read the book when it came out and found it “laborious”: JU to ND, November 29, 1967, Michigan.
339 “a very eloquent and intelligent negro critic”: JU to WM, May 30, 1970, NYPL.
339 Rabbit’s “reluctant crossing of the color line”: HG, 454.
339 “Skeeter is something new in black characters”: Anatole Broyard, “Updike Goes All Out at Last,” The New York Times, November 5, 1971, 40.
340 “possibly inordinate emphasis on sexual congress”: HG, 454.
340 a “hefty coarse Negress”: RRedux, 378.
340 “I learned I’d rather fuck than be blown”: Ibid., 358.
340 “Rabbit Redux is the complete Updike at last”: Broyard, “Updike Goes All Out at Last,” 40.
340 “I’m rather baffled,” Updike told Jones: JU to JJ, November 8, 1971, Ransom.
340 “by far the most audacious and successful”: Richard Locke, “Rabbit Returns: Updike Was Always There—It’s Time We Noticed,” The New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1971.
341 the sequel, he wrote, was “meant to be symmetric”: HG, 454.
341 “The Sixties did a number on him, too”: JU, Rabbit Angstrom (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 611.
341 “Anybody who really cared”: CJU, 62.
341 “The question that ends the book”: HS, 859.
341 “I feel at home in Harry’s pelt”: JU to JCO, January 12, 1976, Syracuse.
342 he remembered that it “kind of wrote itself”: Unpublished outtakes from James Atlas’s taped interview with JU for “John Updike Breaks Out of Suburbia,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 10, 1978.
342 “the most dissentious American decade”: HS, 858.
342 “intuition into the mass consciousness”: SC, 124.
342 “marital fidelity and parental responsibility”: MM, 818.
342 “stiff, unreal, and lacking in electricity”: Quoted in Josh Rubins, “The Industrious Drifter in Room 2,” Harvard Magazine, May 1974, 45.
342 he found most plays “pretty silly”: Ibid., 51.
342 “bindable and thence forgettable”: JU to AD, December 29, 1973, Tulsa.
343 “every inch a first-nighter”: JU, Buchanan Dying (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), vii.
344 sex was hardly “the only sore point”: Author interview, MW, July 14, 2012.
344 “It was true, [Mary] and I saw many things the same way”: SC, 102.
345 “nearest and dearest of that time didn’t complain”: WMRR.
346 “Wonderful contes from a veteran conte-chaser”: JU to JJ, March 20, 1972, Ransom.
350 “stay on the right side of the road”: LGH to JU, June 8, 1972, Ursinus.
352 their mother said to him, “Coward!”: E-mail, MW to author, July 7, 2012.
354 David told me that he had no specific memory: Author interview, David Updike, April 12, 2011.
354 “I think the fact that all of our parents had died”: Author interview, MW, April 7, 2011.
354 “In our attempt to be beautiful”: WMRR.
355 “The basic human condition of being a social animal”: Hiller.
IX. Marrying Martha
358 “What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower”: MFA, 6.
358 he had a “gorgeous” view: LP, June 3, 1975, Houghton.
359 His living “derangements,” he wrote: JU to William Koshland, November 14, 1974, Ransom.
359 he “lived rather shapelessly”: ES, 823.
359 a “rakish” Volkswagen Karmann Ghia: DC, 89.
359 his “furtive semi-bachelorhood”: EP, 24–25.
360 his sense of guilt “triggered a metabolic riot”: SC, 73.
360 After only a few sessions in the “magic box”: Ibid., 74.
360 “clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion”: TM, 83.
361 he admitted in a frightening aside, “I read slower than I write”: PP, 15.
361 “youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion”: Ibid., 14.
361 “Review the book, not the reputation”: Ibid., 15.
361 “E
vidently I can read anything in English”: Ibid., 14.
362 “the payment for a monthly review”: HS, xx.
363 “Rape is the sexual sin of the mob”: PP, 206.
363 “unstitching the sequined embroidery”: Ibid., 201.
363 “[T]he last pages of Ada are the best”: Ibid., 203.
363 they were both afflicted with “a writer’s covetousness”: Ibid., 199.
363 “Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer”: AP, 248.
363 “His sentences are beautiful out of context”: Ibid., 249.
363 “aimless intricacies” and “mannered” devices: Ibid., 255.
364 Nabokov’s “cruelty” to his own characters: HS, 243.
364 Updike offered handsome tribute in The New Yorker: Ibid., 246.
364 “Rich, healthy, brilliant, physically successful”: PP, 204.
364 whose “brain was so excited” he could scarcely sleep: HS, 242.
364 “cerebral self-delight”: Ibid., 243.
364 “He asked . . . of his own art and the art of others”: Ibid.
365 “When our Miss Ruggles, a tender twenty”: Ibid., 232.
366 the possibility of a “legal assault” from Alex Bernhard: JU to RA, December 11, 1978, NYPL.
367 the pain and confusion his “dereliction” has inflicted: P, 246.
367 just enough to fog his emotional landscape and add to his “life-fright”: LP, March 29, 1975, Houghton.
368 he described the condition as “emotional bigamy”: MT, 21.
368 “seducing” parishioners (“by way of being helpful”): MS, 136.
369 “When is it right for a man to leave his wife?”: Ibid., 192.
369 “His prose has never . . . menaced a cowering reader”: PP, 199.
369 askew is the apt word Updike uses: OJ, 858.
369 he “wanted to make the book kind of abrasive”: CJU, 75.
369 “virtuosity . . . too gleefully displayed”: Anatole Broyard, “Some Unoriginal Sins,” The New York Times, February 19, 1975, 33.
370 he was “living like a buzzard in a tree”: LP, June 3, 1975, Houghton.
370 “those embarrassing, disarrayed years”: TM, 89.
370 being a “divorcing bachelor”: Michiko Kakutani, “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic,” Saturday Review, October, 1981, 22.
371 “I felt badly,” Updike remembered: Bailey, Cheever, 499.
371 “I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes”: OJ, 118.
371 “with all the alcohol squeezed out of him”: LP, June 27, 1975, Houghton.
372 throwing, as John put it, “the shadow of my girlfriend over the holidays”: LP, December 26, 1975, Houghton.
373 “an unassuming population knot on the way to other places”: HG, 456.
373 “With all Updike’s money, and his and Martha’s good sense”: Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (New York: Ecco Press, 2007), 125. (Hereafter cited as Oates, Journal.)
373 “I was at home in America, all right”: JU, “Why Rabbit Had to Go,” The New York Times, August 5, 1990, 23. (Hereafter cited as JU, “Why Rabbit Had to Go.”)
374 two hours of “lightweight, amusing gossip”: Oates, Journal, 126.
374 “[H]e’s a hillbilly from rural Pennsylvania”: Ibid., 127.
374 “the various agonies they experienced”: Ibid., 125.
374 John had introduced Martha as an “old and ardent Oates reader”: JU to JCO, June 26, 1976, Syracuse.
375 “Nobody can read like a writer,” he told Oates: JU to JCO, December 14, 1978, Syracuse.
375 “I’d go mad in such a small town myself”: Oates, Journal, 125.
375 The cellar was “foul”: LP, November 9, 1976, Houghton.
375 the “rotten places” in a house: CP, 144.
375 Georgetown “made negligible communal demands”: HG, 457.
376 “a patch of human quicksand”: LP, November 20, 1976.
376 public speaking was “a whorish thing to do”: Hiller.
377 “Gracious, self-deprecating, and casually attentive”: Kakutani, “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic,” 14.
377 “John is one of the few people I know”: Quoted in Hiller.
377 “Updike read faultlessly each time”: Author interview, Ian McEwan, December 5, 2012.
378 “Now I live with yet another family group”: Sally Quinn, “Updike on Women, Marriage and Adultery,” The Washington Post, December 9, 1976, C1.
379 A full-blown feminist critique: Mary Allen, “John Updike’s Love of ‘Dull Bovine Beauty,’ ” in The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Nineteen Sixties (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 97–132.
379 “I can’t think of any male American writer”: CJU, 78.
381 his “once-close-woven relationship” with the magazine: LP, January 12, 1976, Houghton.
381 “a novel about penguins, perhaps, or Hottentots”: Ibid.
381 “If I marry a third time, it’ll have to be Lazarus”: JU to ND, October 4, 1977, Michigan.
381 “It was a protest,” she said, “I wanted my absence felt”: E-mail, Miranda Updike to author, October 12, 2012.
381 Michael was absent, too (and “glad not to be there”): E-mail, Michael Updike to author, September 25, 2012.
382 “amalgamate and align all his betrayals”: JU, The Maples Stories, 215.
382 Emerson’s famous line “We boil at different degrees”: MT, 206.
382 “She was good in bed”: ES, 829.
382 he felt that over time they became “artistically estranged”: Alba, “A Relaxed Conversation with John Updike,” 499.
383 “I was very confiding and she was very interested”: Ibid.
384 Ada asks him why he’s “abandoning” his children: Linda Grace Hoyer, The Predator (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990), 37.
384 “they were,” he told Maxwell, “very tender stories”: JU to WM, February 6, 1978, Illinois.
385 the acceptance of David’s first story was “a soul-stirring event”: JU to WM, May 29, 1978, Illinois.
385 “box it with his grandmother’s”: JU to AD, March 5, 1981, Tulsa.
387 “One of the problems of being a fiction writer”: Unpublished Atlas interview, December 10, 1978.
388 “Martha was very upset that John had included the scene”: Fax, Roth to author, December 1, 2011.
390 “spokes of a wheel”: ES, 447.
391 “all the gifts but the one of making their way in the world”: LP, August 30, 1981, Houghton.
391 “The work ethic is crumbling,” he told a journalist in the early seventies: Hiller.
392 “You grow up of course with these people”: Unpublished Atlas interview, December 10, 1978.
393 “YOU ASKED FOR IT, WE GOT IT”: RRich, 13.
393 The traffic on Route 111 is “thin and scared”: Ibid., 3.
393 Harry thinks; “the great American ride is ending”: Ibid.
393 “Life is sweet,” he tells himself: Ibid., 6.
393 “Bourgeois bliss” is how Updike described Rabbit’s state of mind: HG, 456.
393 He’s “king of the lot”: RRich, 5.
393 “paternal talkativeness keeps bubbling up in Harry”: Ibid., 16–17.
393 “this matter of men descending from men”: Ibid., 212.
394 a single-sentence stream of consciousness: Ibid., 28–29.
394 snug in his “Luxury Edition” 1978 Toyota Corona: Ibid., 30.
394 “standing around on some steamy city corner”: Ibid., 36.
394 “glorified pancakes wrapped around minced whatever”: Ibid., 87.
394 the “lean new race of downtown office workers”: Ibid.
394 “The world keeps ending”: Ibid., 88.
395 “An invisible force month after month”: Ibid., 458.
395 they feel “like a bull’s balls tugging at his pockets”: Ibid., 211.
395 running shoes skim �
��above the earth, above the dead”: Ibid., 141.
395 “And the burning in his tear ducts”: Ibid., 244.
396 “one hundred and eighty-five American dollars”: Ibid., 235.
396 “What a great waste of gas it seems”: Ibid., 245.
396 “a whole new ethic”: Ibid., 226.
396 his father (“poor dead dad”): Ibid., 29.
396 “never got out from under”: Ibid., 69.
396 “didn’t live to see money get unreal”: Ibid., 402.
397 the “ultimate Toyota,” a model “priced in five digits”: Ibid., 434–35.
397 His father was “narcissistically impaired”: LL, 248.
397 he, in his novel, was “mucking about the same area”: CJU, 226.
398 “Nelson remains: here is a hardness he must carry”: RRun, 305.
398 “Why doesn’t Dad just die?”: RRich, 323.
398 “The kid was no threat to him for now”: Ibid., 456.
399 “She breathed that air he’d forgotten”: Ibid., 189.
400 Updike thought Rabbit Is Rich the “happiest” novel: HG, 455.
400 “an invigorating change of mates”: Ibid., 457.
400 the inspiration for “Janice’s lusty rejuvenation”: Ibid., 456.
400 “unquestionably” Updike’s finest novel: Mark Feeney, “Rabbit Running Down: Intimations of Immortality in Updike’s Finest,” The Boston Globe, September 27, 1981, 1.
400 “the best book I’ve ever read about an ordinary man”: Anatole Broyard, “Ordinary People,” The New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1981, 43.
400 “Rabbit Is Rich is the first book”: Roger Sale, “Rabbit Returns,” The New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1981, 32.
400 “What comes through most vividly,” Yardley wrote: Jonathan Yardley, “Rabbit Isn’t Rich,” The Washington Post, April 26, 1982.
400 declared Updike “both a poet and a historian”: V. S. Pritchett, “Updike,” The New Yorker, November 9, 1981, 206.
401 “a swindler named Rosenthal”: JU, “Suzie Creamcheese Speaks,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1967, 110.
402 a letter from Updike apologizing for his absence: HS, 875–76.
402 “a largish white edifice with a distant look at the sea”: LP, May 25, 1981, Houghton.
X. Haven Hill
403 “An adult human consists of sedimentary layers”: HG, 460.
403 “I had left a big white house with a view of saltwater”: HS, xx.
403 He also thought of the Shillington house, where as a child he “soaked up love and strength,” as a “big white house”: SC, 25, 27.
