Rabbit Redux

by John Updike

  Rabbit became too much a receptacle, perhaps, for every item in the headlines. A number of reviewers invited me to think so. But though I have had several occasions to reread the novel, few excisions suggested themselves to me. As a reader I am carried along the curve that I described in my flap copy: “Rabbit is abandoned and mocked, his home is invaded, the world of his childhood decays into a mere sublunar void; still he clings to semblances of patriotism and paternity.” The novel is itself a moon shot: Janice’s affair launches her husband, as he and his father witness the takeoff of Apollo 11 in the Phoenix bar, into the extraterrestrial world of Jill and Skeeter. The eventual reunion of the married couple in the Safe Haven Motel is managed with the care and gingerly vocabulary of a spacecraft docking. It is the most violent and bizarre of these four novels, but then the Sixties were the most violent and bizarre of these decades. The possibly inordinate emphasis on sexual congress – an enthusiastic mixture of instruction manual and de Sadeian ballet – also partakes of the times.

  In Rabbit, Run, there is very little direct cultural and political reference, apart from the burst of news items that comes over his car radio during his night of fleeing home. Of these, only the disappearance of the Dalai Lama from Tibet engages the fictional themes. In Rabbit Redux, the trip to the moon is the central metaphor. “Trip” in Sixties parlance meant an inner journey of some strangeness; the little apple-green house in Penn Villas plays host to space invaders – a middle-class runaway and a black rhetorician. The long third chapter – longer still in the first draft – is a Sixties invention, a “teachin”. Rabbit tries to learn. Reading aloud the words of Frederick Douglass, he becomes black, and in a fashion seeks solidarity with Skeeter. African Americans, Old-World readers should be reminded, have an immigrant pedigree almost as long as that of Anglo-Americans; “the Negro problem” is old in the New World. The United States is more than a tenth black; black music, black sorrow, black jubilation, black English, black style permeate the culture and have contributed much of what makes American music, especially, so globally potent. Yet the society continues racially divided, in the main, and Rabbit’s reluctant crossing of the color line represents a tortured form of progress.

  The novel was meant to be symmetric with Rabbit, Run: this time, Janice leaves home and a young female dies on Harry’s watch. Expatiation of the baby’s death is the couple’s joint quest throughout the series; Harry keeps looking for a daughter, and Janice strives for competence, for a redeemed opinion of herself. Nelson remains the wounded, helplessly indignant witness. He is ever shocked by “the hardness of heart” that enables his father to live so egocentrically, as if enjoying divine favor. Rabbit, Run’s epigraph is an uncompleted thought by Pascal: “The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.” In Rabbit Redux, external circumstances bear nightmarishly upon my skittish pilgrim; he achieves a measure of recognition that the rage and destructiveness boiling out of the television set belong to him. Many of the lessons of the Sixties became part of the status quo. Veterans became doves; bankers put on love beads. Among Harry’s virtues, self-centered though he is, are the national curiosity, tolerance, and adaptability. America survives its chronic apocalypses. I did not know, though, when I abandoned to motel sleep the couple with a burnt-out house and a traumatized child, that they would wake to such prosperity.

  Rabbit is rich, of course, in 1979, only by the standards of his modest working-class background. It was a lucky casual stroke of mine to give the used-car dealer Fred Springer a Toyota franchise in Rabbit Redux, for in ten years’ time the Japanese-auto invasion had become one of the earmarks of an inflated and teetering American economy, and the Chief Sales Representative of a Toyota agency was well situated to reap advantage from American decline. As these novels had developed, each needed a clear background of news, a “hook” uniting the personal and national realms. In late June, visiting in Pennsylvania for a few days, I found the hook in the OPEC-induced gasoline shortage and the panicky lines that cars were forming at the local pumps; our host in the Philadelphia suburbs rose early and got our car tank filled so we could get back to New England. A nuclear near-disaster had occurred at Three-Mile Island in Harrisburg that spring; Carter’s approval rating was down to thirty per cent; our man in Nicaragua was being ousted by rebels; our man in Iran was deposed and dying; John Wayne was dead; Sky-Lab was falling; and Rabbit, at forty-six, with a wife who drinks too much and a son dropping out of college, could well believe that he and the U.S. were both running out of gas. Except that he doesn’t really believe it; Rabbit Is Rich, for all its shadows, is the happiest novel of the four, the most buoyant, with happy endings for everybody in it, even the hapless Buddy Inglefinger. The novel contains a number of scenes distinctly broad in their comedy: amid the inflationary abundance of money, Harry and Janice copulate on a blanket of gold coins and stagger beneath the weight of 888 silver dollars as they lug their speculative loot up the eerily deserted main drag of Brewer. A Shakespearian swap and shuffle of couples takes place in the glimmering Arcadia of a Caribbean island, and a wedding rings out at the novel’s midpoint. “Life is sweet, that’s what they say,” Rabbit reflects in the last pages. Details poured fast and furious out of my by now thoroughly mapped and populated Diamond Country. The novel is fat, in keeping with its theme of inflation, and Pru is fat with her impending child, whose growth is the book’s secret action, its innermost happiness.

  My own circumstances had changed since the writing of Rabbit Redux. I was married to another wife, which may help account for Janice’s lusty rejuvenation, and living in another town, called Georgetown, twenty minutes inland from Ipswich. Each of the Rabbit novels was written in a different setting – Redux belonged to my second house in Ipswich, on the winding, winsomely named Labor-in-Vain Road, and to my rented office downtown, above a restaurant whose noontime aromas of lunch rose through the floor each day to urge my writing to its daily conclusion. Whereas Ipswich had a distinguished Puritan history and some grand seaside scenery, Georgetown was an unassuming population knot on the way to other places. It reminded me of Shillington, and the wooden house that we occupied for six years was, like the brick house I had spent my first thirteen years in, long and narrow, with a big back yard and a front view of a well-trafficked street. The town was littered with details I only needed to stoop over and pick up and drop into Mt. Judge’s scenery; my evening jogs through Georgetown could slip almost unaltered into Rabbit’s panting peregrinations three hundred miles away. In two respects his fortunes had the advantage of mine: I was not a member of any country club, nor yet a grandfather. Within five years, I would achieve both privileged states, but for the time being they had to be, like the procedures of a Toyota agency, dreamed up. A dreamy mood pervades the book; Rabbit almost has to keep pinching himself to make sure that his bourgeois bliss is real – that he is, if not as utterly a master of householdry and husbandry as the ineffable Webb Murkett, in the same exalted league.

  Once in an interview I had rashly predicted the title of this third installment to be Rural Rabbit; some of the words Harry and Janice exchange in the Safe Haven Motel leave the plot open for a country move. But in the event he remained a small-city boy, a creature of sidewalks, gritty alleys, roaring highways, and fast-food franchises. One of Rabbit, Run’s adventures in my mind had been its location in Brewer, whose model, the city of Reading, had loomed for a Shillington child as an immense, remote, menacing, and glamorous metropolis. Rabbit, like every stimulating alter ego, was many things the author was not: a natural athelete, a blue-eyed Swede, sexually magnetic, taller than six feet, impulsive, and urban. The rural Rabbit turns out to be Ruth, from the first novel, whom he flushes from her cover in his continued search for a daughter. Farms I knew firsthand, at least in their sensory details, from the years of rural residence my mother had imposed on her family after 1945. Rabbit spying on Ruth from behind the scratchy hedgerow is both Peter Rabbit peeking from behind the cabbages at the menacing Mr. McGregor and I,
the self-exiled son, guiltily spying on my mother as, in plucky and self-reliant widowhood, she continued to occupy her sandstone farmhouse and eighty acres all by herself. She did not, in fairness, keep the shell of a school bus in her yard; rather, the town fleet of yellow school buses was visible from the window of my drafty study in Georgetown.

  Though 1979 was running out, I seem to have worked at a leisurely speed: the end of the first draft is dated 19 April 1980, and seven more months went by before my typing of the manuscript was completed on 23 November. Happily, and quite to my surprise, Rabbit Is Rich won all three of 1981’s major American literary prizes for fiction (as well as a place in the Washington critic Jonathan Yardley’s list of the Ten Worst Books of the Year). An invigorating change of mates, a move to a town that made negligible communal demands, a sense of confronting the world in a fresh relation cleared my head, it may be. The Rabbit novels, coming every ten years, were far from all that I wrote; the novel that precedes Rabbit Is Rich, The Coup, and the semi-novel that followed it, Bech Is Back, in retrospect also seem the replete but airy products of a phase when such powers as I can claim were exuberantly ripe.

  Ripeness was the inevitable theme of my fourth and concluding entry in this saga. By 1989 my wife and I had moved to Beverly Farms, a bucolic enclave of old summer homes. Most of our neighbors and new acquaintances were elderly; many spent part of their year in Florida. My children were all adult, and three stepsons nearly so; as it happened, my wife and I each had a widowed mother living in solitude. My mother, well into her eighties, was my principal living link with Rabbit’s terrain; countless visits over the years had refreshed my boyhood impressions and reassured me that southeastern Pennsylvania was changing in tune with the rest of the nation. Thirty years before, a reader had asked me if Harry didn’t die at the end of Rabbit, Run, and it did seem possible that death might come early to him, as it often does to ex-athletes, especially those who are overweight and not usefully employed. All men are mortal; my character was a man. But I, too, was a man, and by no means sure how much of me would be functioning in 1999. The more research I did to flesh out my hero’s cardio-vascular problems, the more ominous pains afflicted my own chest. As a child, just beginning to relate my birth year to the actuarial realities, I had wondered if I would live to the year 2000. I still wondered. I wanted Harry to go out with all the style a healthy author could give him, and had a vision of a four-book set, a squared-off tetralogy, a boxed life. I began Rabbit at Rest early in 1989, on 12 January, as if anxious to get started, and finished the first draft on the last day of September, and the typed draft on 20 January 1990. Like Rabbit, Run, it was published in a zero year.

  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 mid-air 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 goodbye.”

  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 imagined, 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 coprotagonist 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.