Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  And, like Rabbit, Run, it is in three parts. The hero of both novels flees south from domestic predicaments. In March of 1959 “his goal is the white sun of the south like a great big pillow in the sky.” He fails to get there and, lost and exasperated on the dark roads of West Virginia, turns back; but his fifty-six-year-old self knows the way. Harry has acquired the expertise and the money and he gets there, and lays his tired head upon that great big pillow. No distinctly American development, no moon shot or gas crunch, offered itself as a dominant metaphor, at this end of Reagan’s decade; instead, the midair explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which occurred before Christmas of 1988, haunts Rabbit acrophobically. And he senses the coming collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, whose opposition to the free world has shadowed and shaped his entire adult life. Freedom has had its hazards for him, and capitalist enterprise its surfeit, but he was ever the loyal citizen. God he can doubt, but not America. He is the New World’s new man, armored against eventualities in little but his selfhood.

  The novel’s two locales have an exceptional geographical density. For the Florida city of Deleon, I did several days of legwork in the vicinity of Fort Myers. To give substance to Harry’s final, solitary drive south, I drove the route myself, beginning at my mother’s farm and scribbling sights, rivers, and radio emissions in a notebook on the seat beside me, just as, more than three decades previous, I turned on my New England radio on the very night, the last night of winter 1959, and made note of what came. Accident rules these novels more than most, in their attempt to take a useful imprint of the world that secretes in newspapers clues to its puzzle of glory. The fictional name “Deleon,” along with the murals Rabbit notices in the hospital lobby, constitutes homage to my mother, whose cherished project it had long been to write and publish a novel about the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico and discoverer of Florida, Juan Ponce de León. She enriched, too, the city of Brewer, for a grim interplay developed between my novel, in the year of its writing, and her physical decline. Her several hospitalizations generated medical details that I shamelessly fed into Rabbit’s ordeal; my frequent filial visits exposed me more intensely to Reading and its environs than at any time since the Fifties, and so Rabbit’s home turf, especially as evoked at the beginning of Chapter II, acquired substance and the poignance of something slipping away. I became, as I have written elsewhere, “conscious of how powerfully, inexhaustibly rich real places are, compared with the paper cities we make of them in fiction. Even after a tetralogy, almost everything is still left to say. As I walked and drove the familiar roads and streets, I saw them as if for the first time with more than a child’s eyes and felt myself beginning, at last, to understand the place. But by then it was time to say good-bye.”14

  My mother died two weeks after I had completed the first draft of Rabbit at Rest. If she pervades its landscape and overall mortal mood, my father, who died in 1972, figures strongly also. Rabbit, in his near-elderly, grandpaternal condition, more and more talked, I could not but notice, like George Caldwell in The Centaur. My two projected novellas had merged: the dodgy rabbit had become the suffering horse; the man of impulse and appetite had aged into humorous stoicism. In trying to picture a grandfather (my own enactment of that role had just barely begun) I fell back upon memories of my father, whose patient bemusement and air of infinite toleration had enchanted my own children. A number of readers told me how much more lovable Harry had become. My intention was never to make him—or any character—lovable. He was conceived, at a time when I was much taken with Kierkegaard, as a creature of fear and trembling; but perhaps my college exposure to Dostoevsky was more central. Rabbit is, like the Underground Man, incorrigible; from first to last he bridles at good advice, taking direction only from his personal, also incorrigible, God.

  His adventure on the Sunfish with Judy rehearses once more the primal trauma of Rabbit, Run, this time successfully, with the baby saved by a self-sacrificing parent. Ripeness brings to fruition many of the tendencies of Rabbit’s earthly transit. His relations with the opposite sex appear to have two main aspects, the paternal and erotic; they come to a momentarily triumphant climax in his contact with his daughter-in-law. His lifelong involvement with Ronnie Harrison—that repugnant locker-room exhibitionist whose very name seems a broken mirroring of Rabbit’s—reaches its terminus in a tied golf match. Harry’s shy but determined advance into the bodies of women slowly brings him to a kind of forgiveness of the flesh. Whatever his parental sins, their wages are generously paid him by his son in an act of corporate destruction. Harry’s wary fascination with his black fellow-Americans leads him to explore the black section of Deleon, in its stagnation comfortingly similar to the Depression world of his childhood. So many themes convene in Rabbit at Rest that the hero could be said to sink under the burden of the accumulated past, and to find relief in that “wide tan emptiness under the sun,” the recreation fields next to the abandoned Florida high school.

  A problem for the author of sequels is how much of the previous books to carry along. The nuclear family—Harry, Janice, Nelson—and Ronnie Harrison figure in all four installments of Rabbit Angstrom. The older generation, potently present in the first two novels, has dwindled to the spunky figure of Bessie Springer in Rabbit Is Rich; I was charmed to find her so spirited and voluble as she manipulated the purse strings of her little dynasty. Characters dominant in one novel fall away in the next. Ruth vanishes from Rabbit Redux but returns in the next decade. I have restored to Redux an omitted brief reappearance by Jack Eccles, who almost became the co-protagonist of Rabbit’s first outing, and whose own “outing” seemed to deserve a place in the full report. Skeeter, who takes over Redux, dwindles to a news item and a troubling memory; what later novel could hold him? Perhaps he returns in the form of Tiger. That the neo-Babbitt of the third volume contains the witness to the apocalyptic events of the second would strain plausibility did not so many peaceable citizens contain lethal soldiers, so many criminals contain choirboys, so many monogamous women contain promiscuous young things. An adult human being consists of sedimentary layers. We shed more skins than we can count, and are born each day to a merciful forgetfulness. We forget most of our past but embody all of it.

  For this fresh printing, apt to be the last I shall oversee, I have tried to smooth away such inconsistencies as have come to my attention. Various automotive glitches—a front engine assigned to a rear-engine make of car, a convertible model that never existed in all of Detroit’s manufacture—have been repaired. The flora and fauna of commercial products and popular culture posed many small spelling problems that should be now resolved. Birthdays: real people have them, but fictional characters usually do without, unless an extended chronicle insists. To my best knowledge Harold C. (a mystery initial) Angstrom was born in February 1933, and Janice Springer sometime in 1936. They were married in March of 1956, and their son, Nelson, was born the following October, seven months later—on the 22nd, by my calculations. Nelson’s daughter, Judith, was born in January of 1980 and his son, Roy, in November of 1984. Rabbit, Run takes place from March 20, 1959, to June 24 of that year; Rabbit Redux from July 16, 1969, to late October; Rabbit Is Rich from June 23, 1979, to January 20, 1980; and Rabbit at Rest from December 28, 1988, to September 22, 1989. Spring, fall, summer, winter: a life as well as a year has its seasons.

  FOREWORD to The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003).

  This is a collection. A selection, surely, is best left to others, when the writer is no longer alive to obstruct the process. Any story that makes it from the initial hurried scribbles into the haven of print possesses, in this writer’s eyes, a certain valor, and my instinct, even forty years later, is not to ditch it but to polish and mount it anew. However, I did omit two stories, “Intercession” and “The Pro,” which were already safely reprinted in Golf Dreams (1996), and two more, “One of My Generation” and “God Speaks,” which, both of them first-person reminiscences based on college memories, trembled insecu
rely on the edge of topical humor, and felt dated.

  These grudging omissions left 103 stories, composed between 1953 and 1975. The oldest is “Ace in the Hole,” submitted toward the end of 1953 by a married Harvard senior to Albert Guerard’s creative-writing course. Guerard, the very model of a cigarette-addicted Gallic intellectual, who nonetheless faithfully attended the Crimson’s home basketball games, liked the story—he said it frightened him, an existential compliment—and suggested I send it to The New Yorker, which turned it down. The next year, though, after “Friends from Philadelphia” and some poems had been accepted by the magazine in my first post-collegiate summer, I resubmitted the story and it was accepted. With modifications to the coarse exchange with which it begins, it was run in April of 1955, toward the back of the magazine; such was the reading public’s appetite for fiction then that “casuals” (a curious in-house term lumping fiction and humor) appeared in “the back of the book” as well as up front. The story is entangled, in my memory of those heady days of the dawning literary life, with the sudden looming, in the lobby of the Algonquin, of J. D. Salinger, a glowingly handsome tall presence not yet notoriously reclusive; he shook my hand before we were taken in to lunch with our respective editors, William Shawn and Katharine White. He said, or somebody later said he said, that he had noticed and liked “Ace in the Hole.” His own stories, encountered in another writing course (taught by Kenneth Kempton), had been revelations to me of how the form, terse and tough in the Thirties and Forties, could accommodate a more expansive post-war sense of American reality; the bottle of wine that ends “Friends from Philadelphia” owes something to the Easter chick found in the bottom of the wastebasket at the end of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” But my main debt, which may not be evident, was to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates. Other eye-openers for me were Franz Kafka and John O’Hara, Mary McCarthy and John Cheever, Donald Barthelme and Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce and James Thurber and Anton Chekhov.

  The year 1975 seemed an apt cut-off; it was the one and only full year of my life when I lived alone. My marriage, of twenty-two years, to a barefoot, Unitarian, brunette Radcliffe graduate was ending, but all of these stories carry its provenance. Perhaps I could have made a go of the literary business without my first wife’s faith, forbearance, sensitivity, and good sense, but I cannot imagine how. We had lived, from 1957 on, in Ipswich, a large, heterogeneous, and rather out-of-the-way town north of Boston, and my principal means of support, for a family that by 1960 included four children under six, was selling short stories to The New Yorker. I had in those years the happy sensation that I was mailing dispatches from a territory that would be terra incognita without me. The old Puritan town was rich in characters and oral history. Though my creativity and spiritual state underwent some doldrums, the local life and the stimulation of living with growing children, with their bright-eyed grasp of the new, never left me quite empty of things to say. A small-town boy, I had craved small-town space. New York, in my twenty months of residence, had felt full of other writers and of cultural hassle, and the word game overrun with agents and wisenheimers. The real America seemed to me “out there,” too homogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape. Out there was where I belonged, immersed in the ordinary, which careful explication would reveal to be extraordinary. These notions propelled the crucial flight of my life, the flight from the Manhattan—the Silver Town, as one of my young heroes pictures it—that I had always hoped to live in. There also were practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange.

  I arrived in New England with a Pennsylvania upbringing to write out of my system. The first section of these early stories, “Olinger Stories,” appeared as a Vintage paperback in 1964. It has been long out of print, though a few professors who used to assign it have complained. Its eleven stories constitute, it may be, a green and slender whole—the not unfriendly critic Richard Locke once wrote of their “hothouse atmosphere”—but the idea of assembling my early stories (half of them out of print) presented, to me, no temptation stronger than the one of seeing Olinger Stories back together. Their arrangement, which is in order of the heroes’ ages, has been slightly changed: “Flight” and “A Sense of Shelter” both feature a high-school senior, but the one of “Flight” seemed on reconsideration older, further along in his development. All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well—the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence to a farm—but no attempt is made at an overall consistency. As I wrote in the original introduction,

  I have let the inconsistencies stand in these stories. Each started from scratch. Grand Avenue here is the Alton Pike there. In “Pigeon Feathers” the grandfather is dead, in “Flight” the grandmother. In fact, both of my mother’s parents lived until I was an adult. In fact, my family moved eleven miles away from the town when I was thirteen; in “Friends from Philadelphia” the distance is one mile, in “The Happiest I’ve Been” it has grown to four. This strange distance, this less than total remove from my milieu, is for all I know the crucial detachment of my life.… The hero is always returning, from hundreds of miles finally.

  And, intoxicated by the wine of self-exegesis, I went on:

  It surprised me, in making this arrangement, to realize that the boy who wrestles with H. G. Wells and murders pigeons is younger than the one who tells Thelma Lutz she shouldn’t pluck her eyebrows. But we age unevenly, more slowly in society than in our own skulls. Among these eleven brothers, some are twins. John Nordholm and David Kern, having taken their turn as actors, reappear as narrators. And optically bothered Clyde Behn seems to me a late refraction of that child Ben who flees the carnival with “tinted globes confusing his eyelashes.”

  Of the sections that follow, two, “Out in the World” and “Tarbox Tales,” take their titles from a Penguin collection, Forty Stories, selected by me and published in London in 1987. Their contents, however, have shifted and expanded, and the remaining five sections are newly invented, to give some friendly order—as in my five non-fiction collections—to so large a number of items. As the writer-editor shuffles his stories back and forth, he begins to see all sorts of graceful and meaningful transitions and sub-surface currents: each set seems to have a purling flow that amounts to a story of its own, a story in turn part of a larger tale, the lived life evoked by these fragments chipped from experience and rounded by imagination into impersonal artifacts. The reader, however, does not have access to the writer’s core of personal memory, and is furthermore free to read the stories in any order he chooses. Each is designed to stand on its own, though perhaps the stories concerning Joan and Richard Maple, scattered herein though collected in a Fawcett paperback called (after a television script) Too Far to Go (1979) and in a Penguin edition titled (by me) Your Lover Just Called, do gain from being grouped. My other sequential protagonist, the writer Henry Bech, is represented only by his first manifestation, when I didn’t know he was to star in an ongoing saga, now bound in The Complete Henry Bech (2001).

  The index dates the titles by the time of composition rather than of publication. Introducing Forty Stories, I wrote, “Social contexts change; it is perhaps useful to know that ‘The Hillies’ was written in 1969, and ‘A Gift from the City’ in 1957.” And that “Ethiopia” was written when Haile Selassie was still in power and “Transaction” when “transactional analysis” was the hottest psychological fad. Rereading everything in 2002, I was startled by the peaceful hopes attached to Iraq in “His Finest Hour,” amazed by the absurdly low prices of things in Fifties and Sixties dollars, and annoyed by the recurrence of the now suspect word “Negro.” But I did not change it to “black”; fiction is entitled to the language of its time. And verbal
correctness in this arena is so particularly volatile that “black,” which is inaccurate, may some day be suspect in turn. “Negro” at least is an anthropological term, unlike the phrase “of color,” which reminds me that in my childhood the word “darky” was, in the mouths of middle-aged ladies, the ultimate in polite verbal discrimination. As to the word “fairies,” used twice in “The Stare” to refer to gay men, I doubt that it was ever not offensive to those designated, but it was much used, with its tinge of contempt, by heterosexuals of both genders, and after pondering, pencil in hand, for some pained minutes, I let it remain, as natural to the consciousness of the straight, distraught male who is my protagonist. After all, The New Yorker’s fastidious editors let it slip by, into the issue of April 3, 1965. In general, I reread these stories without looking for trouble, but where an opportunity to help my younger self leapt out at me, I took it, deleting an adjective here, adding a clarifying phrase there. To have done less would have been a forced abdication of artistic conscience and habit. In prose there is always room for improvement, well short of a Jamesian overhaul into an overweening later manner.

  My first editor at The New Yorker was Katharine White, who had done so much to shape the infant magazine only three decades before. After accepting four stories of mine and sending back a greater number, she, with her husband, came to visit the young Updikes and their baby girl in Oxford, and offered me a job at the magazine. Of the year or two when we shared the premises—before she followed E. B. White to Maine, giving up the high position of fiction editor—I remember her technique of going over proofs with me side by side at her desk, which made me fuzzy-headed and pliant, and how she once wrinkled her nose when asking me if I knew why my writing, in the instance before us, wasn’t very good. She had made her way in Harold Ross’s otherwise all-boy staff and could be brusque, though there was no mistaking her warm heart and high hopes for the magazine. My next editor, until 1976, was never brusque; William Maxwell brought to his editorial functions a patient tact and gentle veracity that offered a life lesson as much as a lesson in writing. My fiction editor since has been Katharine White’s son, Roger Angell, whose continued vitality and sharpness into his eighties gives me, at the outset of my seventies, hope for the future. All three, not to mention the unsung copyeditors and fact checkers, contributed many improving touches to these stories and on occasion inspired large revisions, though my theory in general is that if a story doesn’t pour smooth from the start, it never will. Though it was more than once alleged, in the years 1953–75, that The New Yorker promoted a gray sameness in its fiction, it permitted me much experimentation, from the long essayistic conglomerations capping the Olinger stories to the risky and risqué monologues of “Wife-Wooing” and “Lifeguard.” The editors published so much fiction they could run the impulsive brief opus as well as the major effort, and as William Shawn settled into his long reign he revealed a swashbuckling streak of avant-gardism, a taste for Barthelme and Borges that woke up even the staidest in his stable to new possibilities.