Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  FOOTNOTES to Self-Consciousness (1989).

  For one of our performances, she had been quite ill with a stomach flu.

  —page 38

  Mary Ann Stanley Moyer reports that in fact she had food poisoning, from, of all things, some canned grapefruit juice.

  My mother tells me that up to the age of six I had no psoriasis; it came on strong after an attack of measles in February of 1938, when I was in kindergarten.

  —page 42

  My mother sometimes kept carbons of letters that she had worked especially hard on, and among her papers I found a blue carbon of a letter from May 2, 1939, to her sister-in-law, Mary Ella Updike, on the occasion of the death of my grandmother Virginia Blackwood Updike. It begins, “On Sunday night a soldier quit fighting and all our lives will have a new emptiness because your mother loved life enough to fight for it,” and goes on to mention me—“Now and then one of our neighbors tells me that John is a ‘good boy.’ They always say it with an exclamation point, as if hard to believe”—and concludes with this medical description:

  John came out last November with the worst case of psoriasis I ever saw outside of a book on skin diseases. It’s like mine except that it doesn’t even try to confine itself to his scalp as mine did but parades in all its flaming scabbiness from head to toe. He had a very sore throat in March and an increase in the skin disease which may indicate a chronic infection of the tonsils. So, we think of selling John a tonsillotomy. How I’ll make a convincing sales talk with all my scabs and no tonsils to cause them I don’t know. Yet chronic infections do add to the horrors of psoriasis. And, of course, we want to do whatever can be done to keep the thing within the limits of decency. Bad as it sounds and looks, the children and teachers have treated him so humanely that (so far) there have been almost no mental complications and I’m mighty thankful. What the thing would do to his personality worried me most because, physically, there is little discomfort. But it has left him sane as far as I can tell and Wesley and I are trying to keep our heads too.

  Louris Jansen Opdyck came to New Netherland before 1653, at which time he resided in Albany and bought land at Gravesend, Long Island. —page 192

  David M. Riker, of the Holland Society of New York, wrote me early in 1990, “You might be interested in the enclosed record from the Van Rensselaer Bowier manuscripts which shows that Laurens (Louris) Jansz and his wife (Stijntje) Christina, were recorded as living on a Rensselaerswyck farm in January of 1650.” Thus my Dutch-American roots were deepened by several years. Rensselaerswyck was the second-most-populous settlement in New Netherland; a large tract granted in 1629, by the Dutch West India company, to Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, a diamond merchant of Amsterdam, it extended on both sides of the Hudson and included Beverwyck, which was renamed Albany when the English took over the Dutch colonies in 1664. Thanks to this genealogical chapter addressed to my two (now three) African-American grandsons, I have joined the Holland Society, a body of less than a thousand male descendants of the solid settlers of New Netherland.

  I hear my mother turn and breathe in her bed. The sleet sprinkles in the fireplace and a mouse scrabbles behind the baseboard beneath the table and the picture of me as a pretty child. My mother knows this mouse; she has told me that in the darkest of her post-fall, bedridden days, he used to come into her bedroom and, standing right there on the floor beside the baseboard, would vigorously make noises, trying to tell her something. His attempt to offer advice amuses her in the telling and she does not yet have the heart, nor perhaps the muscular strength, to set a trap for him.

  —pages 241–42

  My mother died on October 10, 1989, alone, in the house she wanted to be in, where she had been born eighty-five years and four months before. She was dressed to drive her car to a garage in New Holland, first thing in the morning, and a heart attack felled her as she stood behind the kitchen sink. Her doctor had told her not to drive, and the excitement of the trip ahead of her, ten miles down Route 23 with its tricky mix of trailer trucks and horse-drawn Amish buggies, may have stressed her frail heart that extra, fatal amount. Since a day passed before her body was found, the date is officially recorded as October 11, an everlasting inaccuracy that bothers me more than it would have her. She had always been one for the big picture, with a sometimes surprisingly relaxed attention to details. Even as a young woman she had had high blood pressure, and this gift for intermittent relaxation—for laughter when you least expected it—may have enabled her to live so long. Toward the end, her blood pressure dropped, along with her appetite and weight, and it was clear to those who knew her that she was no longer herself.

  Cleaning out the house in the course of several solitary visits that fall, I encountered, in drawers and behind cupboards, hoards of sunflower-seed husks her pet mice had built up, as well as caches of old cleaning supplies—furniture polish, silver polish, floorwax of several sorts—that testified to her high domestic hopes when we moved to this house in October of 1945. Decades, it seemed, had passed since these signifiers of good “Dutch” cleanliness had been touched. There were, even deeper under the kitchen sink, pre-war food-grinders, potato-mashers, cake tins, muffin pans, all savoring of the Shillington kitchen as it had been, with an oak icebox and a stone sink and oilcloth shelf-liners, in my childhood fifty years before. Everywhere, I found a stifling wealth of souvenirs—a pocketbook with two pairs of navy-blue gloves mildewed within, liniments for my grandparents’ aches and pains, lotions and lace and brooches, vases and crystal and figurines wrapped in tissue paper and boxed toward some loving resurrection, every object freighted with its years and a whiff of appeal to my memory, to some once-living self long layered over. Suddenly the tenderly musty old house was ripped open as if by brutal winds. My children and I divided up the best furniture and hauled it away in a rented truck; an auctioneer was engaged to dispose of the rest. Still, there were awkward leftovers: the stray cats my mother used to feed, now starving, and pounds of aging cold cuts in the refrigerator—the caterer had greatly overestimated the number of mourners.§ In my frenzy of efficiency, on the last afternoon of a visit in early November, happening upon several mousetraps neatly tied together in a drawer, I set a trap with a bit of funeral cheese and went out for dinner.

  The ex-wife of an old college friend had invited me; she and her second husband had a weekend house in Chester County, not an hour away. Philadelphia Avenue, the street of my boyhood in Shillington, extended east, past what had been the poorhouse property, toward Birdsboro, and became Route 724, running along the south side of the Schuylkill as it flowed from Reading through Pottstown toward Philadelphia. In all my years here, and in twice that number as a returning native, I had never driven this way, that I remembered, and was struck, as the autumn sun sank from gold to red amid the thin clouds of late afternoon, by the beauty of the road, the soft tall yellowy vine-laden trees of the riverine woods, the hopeful stone houses and tawny shorn cornfields of Pennsylvania. The dinner, at my hosts’ authentic yet, compared with my mother’s rugged place, cosseted and chic Chester County farmhouse, took me back to a college mood, for my old Harvard friend’s wife was a literary scholar, and to her all those majestic modernist presences that haunted the Fifties, Eliot and Pound and Stevens and William Carlos Williams and H.D. and Marianne Moore, were still living presences, occasioning gossip and titillation. Their antique celebrity, and the reverent precisions of the New Criticism, and the old faith that books make a proudly self-sufficient world animated the evening and brought back to me the cloistered, ivied warmth in which my awkward countrified ambitions had expanded and acquired sophistication. I drove back in the dark by another, faster route and found, turning on the kitchen light, that my trap had caught a mouse: the mouse, I was certain, that had kept my mother company during her long vigil of bodily decline and growing helplessness, while I pursued my life hundreds of miles away.

  I felt sick, guilty, exhilarated. I removed the downy little body, curled up in death like a fetus, and tossed it by th
e tail into the swampy area between the backyard and the old spring. To be alive is to be a killer. That night I slept in the house for the last time. The guest bed, with its cover of white dotted swiss and its rounded cherry bedposts, had startled me, entering the bedroom with my suitcase a few days before, by being so crisply made, so welcoming amid the parallels of sun rays and soft floorboard, so innocently unknowing of its changed status, on the edge of dismantling and auction. Things have such crisp faces, such clear consciences.

  The next morning I loaded the car with the last furniture and souvenirs to be saved and drove to New York, where I had to attend a meeting, in city clothes. Always, in driving away from the farm, the hour on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, skimming through Valley Forge, had been a green and shaggy limbo, where the Jersey Turnpike was a kind of inferno and yet a path of freedom. I stopped finally at the Admiral William Halsey Service Area, beyond the Newark airport, amid junk dumps and tatters of marshland. Though it was November, the asphalt of the parking lot still exuded a swampy heat, a mugginess that reminded me of Updike family reunions in a hot summer meadow near Trenton. My father had come from New Jersey. I was on his turf now. In the roadside cafeteria—Roy Rogers having displaced Howard Johnson—I treated myself to a cinnamon doughnut and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I had given up coffee years before, in deference to my own high blood pressure. Through the smeared big windows I looked out at the many slanting levels of the exit ramps, the steady murmuring stream of the traffic beyond, and thought of the mouse, and the bed, whose dotted-swiss bedspread was folded in the trunk of my car, and felt in my daze of loss and ragged sleep an old emotion, that I used to feel when an adolescent and stranded, for an hour or two, in a booth of the luncheonette near the high school where my father was working after hours. Soon he would finish, and come and pick me up, and drive me home to our farm. But for now, I was an orphan, full of the triumphant, arid bliss of being on my own.

  AN ANSWER to the question “Why Are We Here?,” posed for a Life-sponsored book shamelessly titled The Meaning of Life.

  Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. This formulation (knowing what we know of the universe’s ghastly extent) is more incredible, to our sense of things, than the Old Testament hypothesis of a God willing to suffer, coddle, instruct, and even (in the Book of Job) to debate with men, in order to realize the meagre benefit of worship, of praise for His Creation. What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here.

  A “SPECIAL MESSAGE” for the Franklin Library’s First Edition Society printing of Rabbit at Rest (1990).

  When I am asked—least welcome of questions—which of my novels is my favorite, I grope for the answer but never name any of the Rabbit books. They have enough friends; they have gone out into the world and made their mark. They are not, it may be, the kind of novel I most like to read: my taste is for crotchety modernist magicians like Joyce and Nabokov and Calvino; of my own, I prefer the trickier novels, with several layers in different colors, like The Centaur and The Coup, or narratives that have a nice informational abundance, like Roger’s Version and S. Plain realism has never seemed to me enough—all those “he said”s and “she said”s, those obligatory domestic crises and chapter-concluding private epiphanies. Novel-readers must have a plot, no doubt, and a faithful rendering of the texture of the mundane; but a page of printed prose should bring to its mimesis something extra, a kind of supernatural as it were, to lend everything roundness—a fine excess that corresponds with the intricacy and opacity of the real world.

  Yet Rabbit’s world is not perfectly plain. Rereading the first three novels in preparation for this fourth and final one, I was struck by the oddities perpetrated by my younger self thirty years ago, when he, in Rabbit, Run, laid down the basic elements of the Angstrom saga. Rabbit’s old nemesis, Ronnie Harrison, for instance, the embodiment of physical vulgarity to my somewhat squeamish Swede—why that name? There are two “son”s in the continuing cast of characters, Nelson and Harrison. And some other names that I felt obliged to impose upon my phantoms are odd, surely, from Marty Tothero (death[Tod]-hero, an assiduous critic has explained to me) to Fern and Bernie Drechsel. Webb Murkett? Ollie Inglefinger? In this present novel, I couldn’t rest, for some reason, until I had given Joe Gold’s wife a name, even though she scarcely exists as a character. After a number of meditation sessions I arrived at it: Beu, short for Beulah. Not to be confused with another character of mine, Bea Latchett, who grotesquely became, in her marriage to my other revival-prone hero, Bea Bech.

  And Harry’s search for a daughter—what is going on here? In the first novel, his infant daughter drowned; in the next novel, Rabbit Redux, a kind of adopted daughter, Jill, dies by fire. In the third of the sequence, Rabbit Is Rich, my hero becomes obsessed with the notion that a girl who wanders into the car lot is his illegitimate daughter by his mistress in Rabbit, Run, and spies upon her in her rural home—the closest he and I ever came to Rural Rabbit, a title I once tossed off in a self-interview. It would seem that the novels as a whole trace Rabbit’s relations with the opposite sex, which have two principal aspects, the paternal and the erotic. In each novel—this much was a conscious decision—his sexual experience is deepened, his lifelong journey into the bodies of women is advanced. Fellatio, buggery—the sexual specifics are important, for they mark the stages of a kind of somatic pilgrimage that, smile though we will, is consciously logged by most men and perhaps by more women than admit it. In Rabbit at Rest, he has very little further to go, just a bit of incest and impotence, while his old bed partners are joining the dead.

  A Rabbit novel has certain traits. For one, the present tense, taken up when it was a daring novelty and sustained into this present period, when it has become a cliché. It is a delightfully apprehensive tense, quick on the pickup and easy to ride between external event and inner reflection. For another trait, a sprinkling of news items, following the precedent of the March 1959 radio news faithfully transcribed during the course of Rabbit’s first southward flight. America—its news items, its popular entertainment, its economic emanations—is always a character. And there is a gauzy, accidental quality to these books. Taking place in the present, they are disturbingly open to accidents, to the random promptings of contemporary event, national and personal. In Rabbit, Run, a number of the Pennsylvania details—the rhododendron gardens, the Episcopal rectory—were suggested by features of my new New England environment. While writing Rabbit at Rest, I walked in a summer parade, and hence so does Harry; I subscribed to a Florida paper, and the local adventures of Deion “Prime Time” Sanders joined my hero’s stream of experience, and Hurricane Hugo supplied the last chords of his Götterdämmerung.

  Rabbit, Janice, Nelson, Mim, and the four grandparents, which last are all alive in 1959 and even 1969, but by 1979 are reduced to Ma Springer and by 1989 all dead and reduced to vivacious memories—this is the family. The city of Brewer and its suburban outriggers Mt. Judge and Penn Park and its rural satellites Galilee and Oriole and Maiden Springs compose the environment, whose name, once given as Brewer County, came to be Diamond County, after the diamond shape of my native county of Pennsylvania, Berks. When, at the age of twenty-seven, six years married, five years a published writer, and two years a New Englander, I sat down to write my fable of an ex-basketball player gone off the rails, I drew haphazardly on the geography of my native turf, getting most of it rather wrong. To a child raised in Shillington, Reading was an ominous great city; its geography consisted of scattered eminences and glimpses, and in cooking up Brewer I twisted its orientation by ninety degrees, making what was east north, and jumbled real
route numbers like 422 with unreal ones like 111. The fictional geography has solidified during the subsequent novels, but only up to a point; the mind’s eye in the end overrules the surveyor’s transit. Rabbit experiences his Pennsylvania milieu much as I did mine—as a series of impressions, whose interconnections and historical background dawn but raggedly, if at all.

  For this novel—the fourth, and the fourth that the Franklin Mint has honored, in one or another of its series, with publication in elegantly tooled leather—I transplanted Rabbit to Florida, for six months of the year, as a natural extension of his week-long sally into the Caribbean in Rabbit Is Rich. Americans have gained mobility in thirty years, and so has Harry. Exercising my own mobility, I travelled to Florida several times to scout out the landscape. But Deleon, like Brewer, is fictional and must not be held to strict geographical account; it lies roughly where Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida and the hero of a frequently revised and never-published novel by my mother, was slain by Indian arrows. Using the materials and to some extent the maps and newspapers of our real world, fiction locates its characters in a cloudland where they can find the freedom to fulfill their tendencies. I wanted, in Rabbit at Rest, while plausibly portraying a specimen American male’s evolution into grandpaternity, frailty, lassitude, sensations of dispensability, and even inklings of selflessness, to allow the thematic tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the three other novels to run to their destination, to wind up. I wanted to cap my series and make it a tetralogy while I still had most of my wits about me, and before my living connections with Pennsylvania quite ceased.

  As long as my parents and then, after 1972, my mother lived in Pennsylvania, I had opportunity to visit and keep tabs on Rabbit’s changing world. Two weeks after the completion of the first draft of Rabbit at Rest, my mother died; her decline, long forestalled but unignorable in her last year, contributed to the hospital scenes of this book and to its overall mortal mood. For me 1989 was a year of goodbyes, to the real and the unreal. During my many visits to Reading and its environs in this year—my most intense dose of Pennsylvania since the Fifties—I was 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 goodbye.