by John Updike
“Be November pretty soon.”
“Isn’t there a thermostat?”
“Yeah. I see it. Way over in the corner. You can go turn it up if you want.”
“Thanks. The man should do that.”
Neither moves. Harry says, “Hey. Does this remind you of Linda Hammacher’s bed?” She was the girl who when they were all working at Kroll’s had an apartment in Brewer she let Harry and Janice use.
“Not much. That had a view.”
They try to talk, but out of sleepiness and strangeness it only comes in spurts. “So,” Janice says after a silence wherein nothing happens. “Who do you think you are?”
“Nobody,” he answers. He snuggles down as if to kiss her breasts but doesn’t; their presence near his lips drugs him. All sorts of winged presences exert themselves in the air above their covers.
Silence resumes and stretches, a ballerina in the red beneath his eyelids. He abruptly asserts, “The kid really hates me now.”
Janice says, “No he doesn’t.” She contradicts herself promptly, by adding, “He’ll get over it.” Feminine logic: smother and outlast what won’t be wished away. Maybe the only way. He touches her low and there is moss, it doesn’t excite him, but it is reassuring, to have that patch there, something to hide in.
Her body irritably shifts; him not kissing her breasts or anything, she puts the cold soles of her feet on the tops of his. He sneezes. The bed heaves. She laughs. To rebuke her, he asks innocently, “You always came with Stavros?”
“Not always.”
“You miss him now?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’re here.”
“But don’t I seem sad, sort of?”
“You’re making me pay, a little. That’s all right.”
He protests, “I’m a mess,” meaning he is sincere: which perhaps is not a meaningful adjustment over what she had said. He feels they are still adjusting in space, slowly twirling in some gorgeous ink that filters through his lids as red. In a space of silence, he can’t gauge how much, he feels them drift along sideways deeper into being married, so much that he abruptly volunteers, “We must have Peggy and Ollie over sometime.”
“Like hell,” she says, jarring him, but softly, an unexpected joggle in space. “You stay away from her now, you had your crack at it.”
After a while he asks her – she knows everything, he realizes –“Do you think Vietnam will ever be over?”
“Charlie thought it would, just as soon as the big industrial interests saw that it was unprofitable.”
“God, these foreigners are dumb,” Rabbit murmurs.
“Meaning Charlie?”
“All of you.” He feels, gropingly, he should elaborate. “Skeeter thought it was the doorway into utter confusion. There would be this terrible period, of utter confusion, and then there would be a wonderful stretch of perfect calm, with him ruling, or somebody exactly like him.”
“Did you believe it?”
“I would have liked to, but I’m too rational. Confusion is just a local view of things working out in general. That make sense?”
“I’m not sure,” Janice says.
“You think Mom ever had any lovers?”
“Ask her.”
“I don’t dare.”
After another while, Janice announces, “If you’re not going to make love, I might as well turn my back and get some sleep. I was up almost all night worrying about this – reunion.”
“How do you think it’s going?”
“Fair.”
The slither of sheets as she rotates her body is a silver music, sheets of pale noise extending outward unresisted by space. There was a grip he used to have on her, his right hand cupping her skull through her hair and his left hand on her breasts gathering them together, so the nipples were an inch apart. The grip is still there. Her ass and legs float away. He asks her, “How do we get out of here?”
“We put on our clothes and walk out the door. But let’s have a nap first. You’re talking nonsense already.”
“It’ll be so embarrassing. The guy at the desk’ll think we’ve been up to no good.”
“He doesn’t care.”
“He does, he does care. We could stay all night to make him feel better, but nobody else knows where we are. They’ll worry.”
“Stop it, Harry. We’ll go in an hour. Just shut up.”
“I feel so guilty.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
“Relax. Not everything is your fault.”
“I can’t accept that.”
He lets her breasts go, lets them float away, radiant debris. The space they are in, the motel room long and secret as a burrow, becomes all interior space. He slides down an inch on the cool sheet and fits his microcosmic self limp into the curved crevice between the polleny offered nestling orbs of her ass; he would stiffen but his hand having let her breasts go comes upon the familiar dip of her waist, ribs to hip bone, where no bones are, soft as flight, fat’s inward curve, slack, his babies from her belly. He finds this inward curve and slips along it, sleeps. He. She. Sleeps. O.K.?
Afterword by the Author
The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow. An outsiderish literary stance is traditional; such masterpieces as Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn deal with marginal situations and eccentric, rootless characters; many American writers have gone into exile to find subjects of a congenial color and dignity. The puritanism and practicality of the early settlers imposed a certain enigmatic dullness, it may be, upon the nation’s affective life and social texture. The minimization of class distinctions suppressed one of the articulating elements of European fiction, and a close, delighted grasp of the psychology of sexual relations – so important in French and English novels – came slowly amid the New Worlds austerities. Insofar as a writer can take an external view of his own work, my impression is that the character of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit’s eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight; his life, less defended and logo-centric than my own, went places mine could not. As a phantom of my imagination, he was always, as the contemporary expression has it, there for me, willing to generate imagery and motion. He kept alive my native sense of wonder and hazard.
A writer aspires not to describe his work but to call it into being. Of these four related novels, I know principally – and that by the fallible light of recollection – what went into them, what stimuli and ambitions and months of labor. Each was composed at the end of a decade and published at the beginning of the next one; they became a kind of running report on the state of my hero and his nation, and their ideal reader became a fellow-American who had read and remembered the previous novels about Rabbit Angstrom. At some point between the second and third of the series, I began to visualize four completed novels that might together make a single coherent volume, a mega-novel. Now, thanks to Everyman’s Library, this volume exists, titled, as I had long hoped, with the name of the protagonist, an everyman who, like all men, was unique and mortal.
Rabbit, Run was begun, early in 1959, with no thought of a sequel. Indeed, it was not yet clear to me, though I had one short novel to my credit, that I was a novelist at all. At the age of twenty-seven I was a short-story writer by trade, a poet and light-versifier on the side, and an ex-reporter for The New Yorker. I had come, two years before, to New England to try my luck at freelancing. Rabbit, Run at first was modestly conceived as a novella, to form with another, The Centaur, a biune study of complementary moral types: the rabbit and the horse, the zigzagging creature of impulse and the plodding beast of stoic duty. Rabbit took off; as I sat at a little upright desk in a small corner room of the first house I owned, in Ipswich, Massachusetts, writing in soft
pencil, the present-tense sentences accumulated and acquired momentum. It was a seventeenth-century house with a soft pine floor, and my kicking feet, during those excited months of composition, wore two bare spots in the varnish. The handwritten draft was completed, I noted at the end, on 11 September 1959. I typed it up briskly and sent it off to my publisher just as the decade ended and headed, with my family, to the then-remote Caribbean island of Anguilla.
There, after some weeks of tropical isolation, I received a basically heartening letter from my publisher, Alfred A. Knopf himself, indicating acceptance with reservations. The reservations turned out to be (he could tell me this only face to face, so legally touchy was the matter) sexually explicit passages that might land us – this was suggested with only a glint of irony – in jail. Books were still banned in Boston in those days; no less distinguished an author than Edmund Wilson had been successfully prosecuted, in New York State in 1946, for Memoirs of Hecate County. My models in sexual realism had been Wilson and D. H. Lawrence and Erskine Caldwell and James M. Cain and of course James Joyce, whose influence resounds, perhaps all too audibly, in the books several female soliloquies. Not wishing, upon reflection, to lose the publisher who made the handsomest books in America, and doubting that I could get a more liberal deal elsewhere, I did, while sitting at the elbow of a young lawyer evidently expert in this delicate area, consent to a number of excisions – not always the ones I would have expected. It was, I thought, a tactful and non-fatal operation. The American edition appeared toward the end of 1960 without legal incident; in England, Victor Gollancz asked for still more cuts and declined to publish the Knopf text as it was, but the youthful firm of André Deutsch did. The dirty-word situation was changing rapidly, with the legally vindicated publication of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer. Censorship went from retreat to rout, and when I asked Penguin Books, late in 1962, if I could make some emendations and restorations for their edition, they permissively consented. For ten pages a day that winter, sitting in a rented house in Antibes, France, I went through Rabbit, Run, restoring the cuts and trying to improve the prose throughout. This text was the one that appeared in the Modern Library and eventually in Knopf hardcover; I have made a few further corrections and improvements for this printing. Rabbit, Run, in keeping with its jittery, indecisive protagonist, exists in more forms than any other novel of mine.
Yet my intent was simple enough: to show a high-school athletic hero in the wake of his glory days. My father had been a high-school teacher, and one of his extra-curricular duties was to oversee the ticket receipts for our basketball games. Accompanying him, then, at home and away, I saw a great deal of high-school basketball, and a decade later was still well imbued with its heroics, as they are thumpingly, sweatily enacted in the hotly lit intimacy of jam-packed high-school gymnasiums. Our Pennsylvania town of Shillington was littered, furthermore, with the wrecks of former basketball stars, and a thematically kindred short story, “Ace in the Hole”, and poem, “Ex-Basketball Player”, had preceded Rabbit into print:
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ‘46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
To this adolescent impression of splendor my adult years had added sensations of domestic interdependence and claustrophobia. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave. Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my only intention: the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our hearts stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace. The title can be read as a piece of advice. (My echo of a British music show tune from 1939, by Noel Gay and Ralph Butler, was unintentional; just recently I was given the sheet music of “Run, Rabbit, – Run!” and read the lyrics’ injunction “Don’t give the farmer his fun, fun, fun. / He’ll get by without his rabbit pie.”)
The present tense was a happy discovery for me. It has fitfully appeared in English-language fiction – Damon Runyon used it in his tough tall tales, and Dawn Powell in the mid-Thirties has a character observe, “It was an age of the present tense, the stevedore style.” But I had encountered it only in Joyce Cary’s remarkable Mister Johnson, fifteen or so years after its publication in 1939. In a later edition of that ground-breaking portrait of a West African entrapped by colonialism, Cary wrote of the present tense that it “can give to a reader that sudden feeling of insecurity (as if the very ground were made only of a deeper kind of darkness) which comes to a traveller who is bushed in unmapped country, when he feels all at once that not only has he utterly lost his way, but also his own identity.” At one point Rabbit is literally lost, and tears up a map he cannot read; but the present tense, to me as I began to write in it, felt not so much ominous as exhilaratingly speedy and free – free of the grammatical bonds of the traditional past tense and of the subtly dead, muffling hand it lays upon every action. To write “he says” instead of “he said” was rebellious and liberating in 1959. In the present tense, thought and act exist on one shimmering plane; the writer and reader move in a purged space, on the travelling edge of the future, without vantage for reflection or regret or a seeking of proportion. It is the way motion pictures occur before us, immersingly; my novella was originally to bear the sub-title “A Movie”, and I envisioned the credits unrolling over the shuffling legs of the boys in the opening scuffle around the backboard, as the reader hurried down the darkened aisle with his box of popcorn.
A non-judgmental immersion was my aesthetic and moral aim, when I was fresh enough in the artistic enterprise to believe that I could, in the Poundian imperative, “make it new”. The Centaur’s fifteen-year-old narrator, Peter Caldwell, awakes with a fever after three trying days with his plodding, prancing father, and looks out the window. He is a would-be painter:
The stone bare wall was a scumble of umber; my father’s footsteps thumbs of white in white. I knew what this scene was – a patch of Pennsylvania in 1947 – and yet I did not know, was in my softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of colored light. I burned to paint it, just like that, in its puzzle of glory; it came upon me that I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
The religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission underlies these Rabbit novels. The first one, especially, strives to convey the quality of existence itself that hovers beneath the quotidian details, what the scholastic philosophers called the ens. Rather than arrive at a verdict and a directive, I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human. Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed.
Unlike such estimable elders as Vonnegut, Vidal, and Mailer, I have little reformist tendency and instinct for social criticism. Perhaps the Lutheran creed of my boyhood imbued me with some of Luther’s conservatism; perhaps growing up Democrat under Franklin Roosevelt inclined me to be unduly patriotic. In any case the rhetoric of social protest and revolt which roiled the Sixties alarmed and, even, disoriented me. The calls for civil rights, racial equality, sexual equality, freer sex, and peace in Vietnam were in themselves commendable and non-threatening; it was the savagery, between 1965 and 1973, of the domestic attack upon the good faith and common sense of our government, especially of that would-be Roosevelt Lyndon B. Johnson, that
astonished me. The attack came, much of it, from the intellectual elite and their draft-vulnerable children. Civil disobedience was antithetical to my Fifties education, which had inculcated, on the professional level, an impassioned but cool aestheticism and implied, on the private, salvation through sensibility, which included an ironical detachment from the social issues fashionable in the Thirties. But the radicalizing Thirties had come round again, in psychedelic colors.
I coped by moving, with my family, to England for a year, and reading in the British Museum about James Buchanan. Buchanan (1791-1868) was the only Pennsylvanian ever elected to the White House; the main triumph of his turbulent term (1857–61) was that, though elderly, he survived it, and left it to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to start the Civil War. A pro-Southern Democrat who yet denied any Constitutional states’ right to secede, he embodied for me the drowned-out voice of careful, fussy reasonableness. For over a year, I read American history and tried unsuccessfully to shape this historical figure’s dilemmas into a work of fiction. But my attempted pages showed me too earthbound a realist or too tame a visionary for the vigorous fakery of a historical novel.
By the first month of 1970, back in the United States, I gave up the attempt. But then, what to do? I owed my publisher a novel, and had not come up with one. From the start of our relationship, I had thought it a right and mutually profitable rhythm to offer Knopf a novel every other book. In the ten years since Rabbit, Run had ended on its ambiguous note, a number of people asked me what happened to him. It came to me that he would have run around the block, returned to Mt. Judge and Janice, faced what music there was, and be now an all-too-settled working man – a Linotyper. For three summers I had worked as a copy boy in a small-city newspaper and had admired the men in green eyeshades as they perched at their square-keyed keyboards and called down a rain of brass matrices to become hot lead slugs, to become columns of type. It was the blue-collar equivalent of my sedentary, word-productive profession. He would be, my thirty-six-year-old Rabbit, one of those middle Americans feeling overwhelmed and put upon by all the revolutions in the air; he would serve as a receptacle for my disquiet and resentments, which would sit more becomingly on him than on me. Rabbit to the rescue, and as before his creator was in a hurry. An examination of the manuscript reveals what I had forgotten, that I typed the first draft – the only novel of the four of which this is true. I began on 7 February 1970, finished that first draft on 11 December, and had it typed up by Palm Sunday 1971 – which means that my publisher worked fast to get it out before the end of that year. If the novel achieved nothing else, it revived the word redux, which I had encountered in titles by Dryden and Trollope. From the Latin reducere, “to bring back”, it is defined by Webster’s as “led back; specif., Med., indicating return to health after disease”. People wanted to pronounce it “raydoo”, as if it were French, but now I often see it in print, as a staple of journalese.