Here come the desolating consolations of age. Escape may not lead to freedom; the skin remembers; the body rebels. Even adultery, that old reliable, becomes less commanding an impulse, easily loses its thrall. In ‘Outage’, a near-infidelity during a power failure is comically headed off when the electricity returns, house lights suddenly blaze, and domestic machinery begins distractingly to hum and bleep. In ‘The Apparition’, Henry Milford, a retired professor in his seventies, half-bored on a cultural tour of India, falls into ‘a default alliance of wilful ignorance’ with a younger married woman. But – perhaps because of a lifetime spent teaching ‘statistics and probabilities’ – he is satisfied with merely savouring ‘lust’s folly’ from a distance; the pleasures of the flesh being illustrated instead by a temple’s erotic statuary.
Not all is retrospect: ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ (first published in the Atlantic in November 2002) is Updike’s initial response to 9/11, and thus a partial precursor to Terrorist. Dan Kellogg, a 63-year-old Episcopalian staying with his daughter in Brooklyn Heights, realises that there is no God the instant he watches the South Tower fall. He is puzzling over the oily smoke from the buildings ‘when, as abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silver rippling noise’. It is a comparison few except Updike might have noticed, let alone dared write; and if the simile isn’t really confirmed by the footage – the tower’s cladding would be its sheath, which didn’t drop separately to reveal the building’s body; further, as the building collapsed, smoke rose to conceal its downfall – it is, again, not a gaudy one-off, but an image with thematic resonance. That there can be beauty (and, for some, eroticism) in destruction is unarguable; and this moment links directly to the second episode of the story, a flashback to one of the hijackers drunkenly expounding his zealotry in a Florida strip club. After the imagined viewpoints of two victims (a man in the World Trade Center, a woman aboard the fourth plane pleading with the Lord for mercy), we rejoin Kellogg, six months later, to find he has now lost his atheism as he had previously lost his belief. Why? Because human consciousness always insists on narrative and meaning, and so, for him, on faith. The story is in part about levels of belief – like the levels of a skyscraper – from atheistic ground zero to a space close to the invisible godhead.
In one of his final poems, ‘Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth’, Updike addresses both his old friends and fundamental source material:
Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,
scant hundred of you, for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,
twin, and fatso — all a writer needs,
all there in Shillington, its trolley cars
and little factories, cornfields and trees,
leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.
Corroboration (if any were needed) comes in the title story of the final collection, ‘My Father’s Tears’, in which Jim (home escaper/father of four/twice married/high-school reunionist) is told by his second wife that his escape from his background has only ever been partial: ‘Sylvia … recognises that I have never really left Pennsylvania, that it is where the self I valued is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.’ Much of this volume may be seen as a variegated checking on that early, continuing soul. Jim’s time and place – post-war Alton – contained two iconic buildings: the old station where ‘the tall-backed waiting benches were as dignified as church pews’, and ‘the stately Carnegie-endowed library two blocks down Franklin Street’. Both, of course, are locations for escape. Also, ‘both had been built for eternity, when railroads and books looked to be with us forever’. Yet within a decade Alton’s station, ‘like railroad stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up’, awaiting its obliteration.
Implications about the Death of the Book, here merely implied, are pessimistically clarified in ‘The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005’:
A life poured into words — apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? The printed page
was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder …
Perhaps; but there is way too much vitality in Updike (and in life, and literature, and the maligned book – and the reader) for that. ‘My Father’s Tears’ cuts swiftly to the upcountry Vermont farmhouse belonging to Jim’s first wife’s family, where as a young husband he once observed a rare, ordinary phenomenon:
The lone bathroom was a long room, its plaster walls and wooden floor both bare, that was haunted by a small but intense rainbow, which moved around the walls as the sun in the course of the day glinted at a changing angle off the bevelled edge of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. When we troubled to heat up enough water on the kerosene stove for a daylight bath, the prismatically generated rainbow kept the bather company; it quivered and bobbed when footsteps or a breath of wind made the house tremble.
For Jim this ‘Ariel-like phenomenon’ has an extra resonance, since it was here, in the farmhouse, that his then wife first became pregnant: ‘This microscopic event deep within my bride became allied in my mind with the little rainbow low on the bathroom wall, our pet imp of refraction.’
When Updike and John Cheever appeared together on The Dick Cavett Show in 1981 (their only joint TV appearance), the true fact of mutual admiration made for untypically quiet television: Updike at one point mused that Cavett must be regretting not having booked Mailer and Vidal instead. When Cavett pushed these two writers, whom ignorance sometimes lumped together, to describe their differences, Cheever said that Updike was the only writer he knew who gave a sense of American lives being performed in an environment of a grandeur that escaped them. In reply and counterpraise, Updike emphasised that Cheever was a transcendentalist, feeling and conveying a radiance which he, Updike, was unable to feel and convey. Comparatively, this is the case; though in and by himself Updike is, if not a transcendentalist, at least a transformationist, looking for the rainbow in the bathroom, the imp of refraction.
In his very last story, ‘The Full Glass’ (published in the New Yorker on 26 May 2008), a former insurance salesman turned floor sander, now approaching eighty, reviews his life through the prism of water (the sea, the body’s constitution, human tears, the glass of the stuff he needs to swallow his ‘life-prolonging pills’). Most people tend to see life as a glass which is, according to temperament, half full or half empty. This (for once unnamed) first-person narrator prefers to retrospect in terms of ‘moments of that full-glass feeling’. The story’s last sentence, in which the narrator stands back and looks at himself – or Updike stands back and looks at the narrator, or Updike stands back and looks at himself – runs: ‘If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.’
Impossible not to think of and feel for Updike as he tapped out that sentence and then added his last full stop, his fictional endpoint. Impossible equally not to honour and thank him with a reader’s raised glass, full to the brim – though preferably not with water.
2
When a writer you admire dies, rereading seems a normal courtesy and tribute. Occasionally, it may be prudent to resist going back: when Lawrence Durrell died, I preferred to remain with forty-year-old memories of The Alexandria Quartet rather than risk such lushness again. And sometimes the nature of the writer’s oeuvre creates a problem of choice. This was the case with John Updike. Should you choose one of his previously unopened books (in my case two dozen or so)? Or go for one you suspect you misread, or undervalued, at the time? Or one, like Couples, which you might have read at the time for somewhat non-literary reasons?
The decision eventually made itself. I had first read the Rabbit Quartet in the autumn of 1991, in what felt near-perfect circumstances. I was on a book tou
r of the States, and bought the first volume, Rabbit, Run, in a Penguin edition at Heathrow. I picked up the others in different American cities, in chunky Fawcett Crest paperbacks, and read them as I crisscrossed the country, my bookmarks the stubs of boarding passes. When released from publicity duties, I would either retreat inwards to Updike’s prose, or outwards to walk ordinary American streets. This gave my reading, it felt, a deepening stereoscopy. And even when, too exhausted to do anything, I fell back on the hotel minibar and television, I found I was only replicating Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s preferred way of ingesting politics and current events. After three weeks, both Harry and I found ourselves in Florida, ‘death’s favourite state’, as he puts it in the final volume, Rabbit at Rest. Harry died; the book ended; my tour was over.
I came home convinced that the Quartet was the best American novel of the post-war period. Nearly twenty years on, with Updike newly dead, and another American journey coming up, it was time to check on that judgement. By now those four volumes had, with a final authorial revision, been fused into a 1,516-page hardback under the overall title Rabbit Angstrom. If the protagonist’s nickname denotes a zigzagging creature of impulse and appetite, the angst of his Scandinavian surname indicates that Harry is also the bearer of a more metaphysical burden. Not that he is more than fleetingly aware of it; and the fact that he isn’t makes him all the more emblematically American.
Harry is a specific American, a high-school basketball star, department-store underling, linotype operator and finally Toyota car salesman in the decaying industrial town of Brewer, Pennsylvania (Updike based it on Reading, Pa., which he knew as a boy). Until Rabbit starts wintering in Florida in the final volume, he scarcely leaves Brewer – a location chosen to represent Middle America by a New York film company in Rabbit Redux. Harry is site-specific, slobbish, lust-driven, passive, patriotic, hard-hearted, prejudiced, puzzled, anxious. Yet familiarity renders him likeable – for his humour, his doggedness, his candour, his curiosity and his wrong-headed judgements (for example, preferring Perry Como to Sinatra). But Updike was disappointed when readers went further and claimed they found Rabbit lovable: ‘My intention was never to make him – or any character – lovable.’ Instead, Harry is typical, and it takes an outsider to tell him so. An Australian doctor asked by Janice what is wrong with Rabbit’s dicky heart replies: ‘The usual thing, ma’am. It’s tired and stiff and full of crud. It’s a typical American heart, for his age and economic status etcetera.’ Harry’s quiet role as an American everyman is publicly confirmed in Rabbit at Rest when he is chosen for his second, brief moment of public fame: dressing up as Uncle Sam for a town parade.
Rereading the Quartet, I was struck by how much of it is about running away: Harry, Janice and Nelson all take off at different points, and all return defeatedly. (Updike explained that Rabbit, Run was partly a riposte to Kerouac’s On the Road, and intended as a ‘realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road’ – i.e. the family gets hurt, and the deserter slinks home.) I had forgotten how harshly transactional much of the sex was; how increasingly droll Rabbit becomes as he ages (Reagan reminds him of God in that ‘you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything’, while Judaism ‘must be a great religion, once you get past the circumcision’); how masterfully Updike deploys free indirect style, switching us in and out of the main characters’ consciousness; and how, instead of making each sequel merely sequential, he is constantly back-filling previous books with new information (the most extreme example being that we only get Janice’s pre-Rabbit sexual history in the 2000 follow-up novella Rabbit Remembered – forty years after we might have learned it).
What I had never forgotten was the audacity of Updike’s starting point. Harry is only twenty-six, but past it: his brief years of sporting fame lie behind him, and he is already bored with his wife Janice. On the second page, he refers to himself as ‘getting old’ – and there are still several hundred thousand words to go. Even when he attains bovine contentment and material success in Rabbit is Rich, it is against a general background of things being over before they have really begun. Each book is purposefully set at the dying of a decade – from the fifties to the eighties – so there is little wider sense of fresh beginnings: the Sixties America of Rabbit Redux isn’t filled with love and peace and hopefulness, but with hatred, violence and craziness as the decade sours and dies. Perhaps America is itself dying, or at least being outpaced by the world: this is what Harry, and the novel, both wonder. What is American power if it can be defeated by the Vietcong; what is American inventiveness if it can be out-invented by the Japanese; what is American wealth when national debt piles up? In Rabbit Redux Harry feels he has ‘come in on the end’ of the American dream, ‘as the world shrank like an apple going bad’; by the start of Rabbit is Rich he feels ‘the great American ride is ending’; by the end of Rabbit at Rest ‘the whole free world is wearing out’.
Whereas in my first reading I was overwhelmed by Updike’s joy of description, his passionate attentiveness to such things as ‘the clunky suck of the refrigerator door opening and shutting’ – by what he called, in the preface to his Early Stories, ‘giving the mundane its beautiful due’ – in my second I was increasingly aware of this underlying sense of things being already over, of the tug of dying and death. Thus the whole trajectory of Janice’s life is an attempt to expiate the sin of having accidentally, drunkenly, drowned her baby. And while Harry imagines himself a genial and harmless life-enhancer, others see him quite differently. ‘Boy, you really have the touch of death, don’t you?’ his sort-of-whore girlfriend Ruth says at the end of Rabbit, Run. ‘Hold still. Just sit there. I see you very clear all of a sudden. You’re Mr Death himself.’ Harry’s son Nelson agrees with this analysis. In Rabbit Redux, Harry is away on another sexual escapade when his house burns down, killing the runaway hippie Jill; teenage Nelson, equally smitten by the girl, thereafter treats his father as a simple murderer. And in Rabbit at Rest Harry fears his female-killing curse is striking a third time when his rented Sunfish capsizes and his granddaughter Judy is nowhere to be seen. This time, as it happens, the hex is reversed: Judy is only hiding beneath the sail, and the scare triggers Rabbit’s first heart attack, a dry run for his death.
And after death? Harry’s intimations, not of immortality, but of the numinous, show up more clearly on rereading. Updike said that he couldn’t quite give up on religion, because without the possibility or dream of something beyond and above, our terrestrial life became unendurable. Rabbit shares this vestigial need. ‘I don’t not believe,’ he assures his dying lover Thelma, who replies, ‘That’s not quite enough, I fear. Harry, darling.’ But it’s all he can manage: ‘Hell, what I think about religion is … is without a little of it, you’ll sink.’ But this ‘little’ doesn’t find or express itself, as did Updike’s, in churchgoing. God-believers in the Quartet tend to be either crazies like Skeeter, fanatics, or pious post-Narcotics Anonymous droners like Nelson. Harry is not exactly a joined-up thinker, but he has an occasionally questing mind, a sense of what it might be if there were something beyond our heavy-footed sublunary existence. It’s perhaps significant that the sport at which he excelled, which he plays in both the opening and closing pages of the tetralogy, involves a leaving of the ground and a reaching-up to something higher, if only to a skirted hoop. A greater reaching-up is offered by the US space programme, whose achievements (and failures, as in the Challenger mission) run through the book; Harry has a couch potato’s fascination for it – as he does for the fate of the Dalai Lama, with whom he bizarrely, mock-heroically identifies. But there are also moments when he is able to recognise his longings more precisely. Beside the big stucco house belonging to Janice’s parents there grew a large copper beech, which for many years shaded Harry and Janice’s bedroom. When Nelson comes into occupation of the family house, in Rabbit at Rest, he has the tree cut down. Harry doesn’t argue; nor can he ‘tell the boy that the sound of the rain
in that great beech had been the most religious experience of his life. That, and hitting a pure golf shot.’ In such moments Rabbit exemplifies a kind of suburban pantheism, giving the mundane its spiritual due.
Rabbit Angstrom has its imperfections. The second volume is usually considered the weakest of the four; and it’s true that Skeeter’s mau-mauing of whitey Rabbit goes on too long, and to decreasing effect; a weakness perhaps ascribable to Updike’s authorial glee at having found the voice, and then getting carried away by it. And there is a change in register after the first volume, where the hushed Joyceanism of his early mode – when he thought of himself as a short-story writer and poet, but not yet fully as a novelist – is to the fore. (Updike didn’t realise that he was heading towards a tetralogy until after the second volume.) On the other hand, it’s rare for a work of this length to get even better as it goes on, with Rabbit at Rest the strongest and richest of the four books. In the last hundred pages or so, I found myself slowing deliberately, not so much because I didn’t want the book to end, as because I didn’t want Rabbit to die. (And when he does, his last words, to his shrieking son, are, maybe, also addressed consolingly to the reader: ‘All I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.’) Any future historian wanting to understand the texture, smell, feel and meaning of bluey-white-collar life in ordinary America between the 1950s and the 1990s will need little more than the Rabbit Quartet. But that implies only sociological rather than artistic virtue. So let’s just repeat: still the greatest post-war American novel.
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) Page 22