Updike (28 page)

For Rabbit, this is a moment of redemption celebrated with “a grin of aggrandizement.” For the reader, it’s equivocal, thrilling yet deeply worrisome, in that it harks back to Rabbit’s high school glory days. His sense of himself as a “first-rate” athlete, the idea that he’s a natural and should follow his “inner imperatives,” is at the root of the sudden restless impulse that sent him scampering from his marriage. Whatever “it” is, it does nothing to reconcile him to his responsibilities as a social being, a husband, and a father; on the contrary, it hardens his resolve, and two months later he’s still AWOL, still in the arms of Ruth Leonard, the other woman. He returns home only when Janice goes into labor. Eccles, in the meantime, perseveres with his unique approach to pastoral care: “Playing golf with someone is a good way to get to know him,” he tells Harry’s aggrieved mother-in-law, assuring her that he’s learned, thanks to their games, that Harry is “a good man.” He believes that Harry is “worth saving and could be saved,” but their weekly games mostly pander to Rabbit’s flattering conception of himself as a hero on a quest and as a star athlete in tune with the “harmless ecstasy” of sporting excellence. Eccles notes that on the golf course, Harry is both better and worse than he, an apt judgment in all respects: Harry is as good as his game—wonderful at times, at times appalling.

As Updike regularly told interviewers, Harry Angstrom is a portrait of the author in straitened circumstances—without a Harvard degree or a marketable talent, as though Uppie had lingered in Shillington after high school, married young, and skidded into a dead-end job: “Although Harry hasn’t studied the things I did or taken up my line of work, he still is fairly alert.” Rabbit was a product of the author’s imagination and intelligence working with intimately familiar material, superimposing elements of his own character on memories of stories his father used to tell about the top athletes at Shillington High and their fate, postgraduation. (“Shillington was littered . . . with the wrecks of former basketball stars.”) Into the mix, too, went the Sunday basketball Updike was playing with the Ipswich crowd; the golf he was playing (often with the Episcopalian minister in Ipswich, Goldthwaite Sherrill, whose father was the bishop of Massachusetts); and the “clutter and tensions of young married life” (Mary was five months pregnant with their third child, Michael, when Updike started the novel). Like “The Happiest I’ve Been,”
Rabbit, Run
grew out of the tension between Shillington and Ipswich, between his past and his present.

He began writing in January 1959, and finished in less than nine months. Three and a half decades later he still vividly recalled the rush of excitement with which he worked, sequestered in a small corner room on the second floor of the house, looking out over a busy intersection from one window and at the spreading branches of a huge elm tree from the other. He wrote hurriedly, in soft pencil. Under the old-fashioned upright desk with its fold-down writing surface, his kicking feet wore bare spots in the varnished pine floorboards. The momentum of the accumulating sentences thrilled him. Writing in the present tense, an unconventional choice at the time, had a liberating effect on him; it felt “exhilaratingly speedy and free.” At first he thought he was working on a novella, and imagined that the headlong pace of the prose was cinematic; he even considered giving the book the subtitle “A Movie,” to capture the sense of continuous forward motion.

He was excited, too, by the sex. As he later acknowledged, a “heavy, intoxicating dose of fantasy and wish-fulfillment went into
Rabbit, Run
. . . . Rabbit ran while I sat at my desk, scribbling”—and kicking his feet with excitement.

Having left Janice, Rabbit moves in with Ruth, who on their first night together allows him to make love to her “as he would to his wife.” Thanks to Rabbit’s tender ministrations, Ruth achieves the sensual equivalent of the breakthrough Harry later experiences on the fifth tee. Here, too, Updike introduces a numinous “it”:

“I’d forgotten,” she says.

“Forgot what?”

“That I could have it too.”

“What’s it like?”

“Oh. It’s like falling through.”

“Where do you fall to?”

“Nowhere. I can’t talk about it.”

The word
orgasm
never appears in the book;
climax
figures once (as does
orgasmatic climax
, in a snippet of scabrous dialogue). My guess is that Updike avoids more clinical terms not for propriety’s sake, or even for aesthetic reasons, but because a vague “it” does more to suggest transcendence. In general, he substitutes impressionistic descriptions for exact anatomical labeling. When, for example, Rabbit insists that Ruth be entirely naked before they make love, Updike concentrates on the effect of Ruth’s bare skin on Rabbit’s aroused sensibility without naming any more of the exposed body parts than strictly necessary.

Later in the book, Rabbit demands that Ruth perform oral sex, though in fact he’s “too fastidious to mouth the words.” Updike again chooses to suggest the act rather than describe it; he arranges a tableau:

He takes his [clothes] off quickly and neatly and stands by the dull wall in his brilliant body. He leans awkwardly and brings one hand up and hangs it on his shoulder not knowing what to do with it. His whole shy pose has these wings of tension, like he’s an angel waiting for a word.

Ruth undresses, kneels at his feet. As far as today’s reader is concerned, the idea that under these circumstance Rabbit could be in any way angelic is possibly the only disturbing aspect of the truncated scene that follows. At the time, however, even to hint at fellatio was to court censorship. Particularly objectionable to readers in 1960 was Ruth’s reaction after the deed is done, after Rabbit has bolted: “When the door closes the taste of seawater in her mouth is swallowed by the thick grief that mounts in her throat so fully she has to sit up to breathe.” The sudden access of visceral accuracy (and the congregation in one sentence of the words
taste
,
seawater
,
mouth
,
swallowed
, and
throat
) was at the limit of what contemporary sensibilities could bear. Unable to bring himself to describe the offending sentence in English, Victor Gollancz resorted to Latin: “
gustum in ore feminae post fellationem consummatam
.”

Updike’s publishers recognized at once the literary value of the novel, and also foresaw the legal difficulty in publishing a book likely to be judged obscene by the powers that be. Gollancz, not a man who’d led a sheltered life, nonetheless circulated an internal memo in which he declared, “I have . . . never read a novel which approaches this one for absolute sexual frankness.” To Updike he telegraphed:
RABBIT RUN A SUPERB NOVEL BY AN ALREADY MAJOR AND POTENTIALLY VERY GREAT NOVELIST
. The reaction from Alfred Knopf was muted by comparison (“we all admire it greatly”) and accompanied by an understated caveat: “There are one or two little matters to discuss.” Gollancz’s telegram and Knopf’s letter reached Updike on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, where he had taken his family on an extended winter vacation (the first of many trips to the West Indies in search of a sun cure for his psoriasis), so a month went by before Updike presented himself at his publisher’s Madison Avenue offices. He was ushered into the presence of Knopf himself, who announced to his author, milking the moment for drama, that his lawyers had warned that publishing
Rabbit, Run
would land them both in jail. Faced with this opening gambit, Updike rapidly calculated the odds of finding a reputable publisher who would print the uncensored manuscript—and consented to cuts. As he put it, “I agreed to go along with the legal experts, and trim the obscenity to the point where the book might slide past the notice of hypothetical backwoods sheriffs vigilant against smut.”

It’s possible that the cuts were unnecessary, that no legal challenge would have been forthcoming. Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
had been published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958, attracting considerable controversy but no prosecutions; by January 1959,
Lolita
had reached the top spot on the
New York Times
bestseller list. In July 1959, the U.S. Post Office ban on the unexpurgated Grove Press edition of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was overturned in federal court, and Lawrence’s novel also climbed the bestseller list. But two years later, when Grove published an American edition of Henry Miller’s previously banned
Tropic of Cancer
, dozens of booksellers were arrested and obscenity cases filed coast to coast. In a bizarre twist, as if to fulfill Knopf’s dark prophecy, charges of conspiracy were filed in a Brooklyn court against both the publisher, Barney Rosset, and Henry Miller himself; when Miller declined to appear before the grand jury, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Neither man went to jail, and in any case
Tropic of Cancer
is a much bawdier book; it’s deliberately, even gleefully salacious in a way
Rabbit, Run
isn’t. (“The novels of Henry Miller,” Updike once quipped, “are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue.”) Yet Updike, in this uncertain climate, was perhaps wise to conclude that self-censorship was preferable to state censorship. No scenes were removed from his novel, only a few “dirty” words; as he later acknowledged, “none of the excisions really hurt.” The sex was still there. Updike felt that in agreeing to the changes, he had sold out, but he wasn’t, in fact, being asked to compromise his artistic integrity. If, as he told an interviewer in 1990, his aim was “to write about sex on the same level, as explicitly and carefully and lovingly as one wrote about anything else,” the bowdlerized version did the job as thoroughly as the original.
*

But even with the obscenity trimmed, the book presented an insuperable problem for Gollancz, who anguished and dithered and pleaded for additional changes—and finally concluded that despite his fervent admiration, he couldn’t publish it. The British rights were immediately snapped up by André Deutsch Ltd., a small but highly regarded house, run on a shoestring and named for the Hungarian-born publisher who founded it in 1952. Having weathered an injunction against the British publication of Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
(although Mailer had substituted
fug
for
fuck
, the F-word was still omnipresent and unmistakable), Deutsch had acquired a reputation for fearlessness, which he embraced with characteristic verve. He hardly blinked at
Rabbit, Run
. Impetuous and irascible, but also charming and charismatic—“effervescent,” Updike called him—the diminutive Deutsch made yearly trips to New York, and occasionally ventured north to Ipswich to visit Lovell Thompson. Deutsch quickly became a friend, as did his colleague Diana Athill, Updike’s editor. André Deutsch Ltd. continued to publish Updike’s books until the early 1990s, well after Deutsch himself had retired.

Updike was naturally keyed up about venturing into the risky, uncharted territory of sexual realism, and yet that was only part of the adventure he’d embarked on. The novel was conceived as a character study of a moral type: “the creature of impulse,” jittery, uncomfortable Rabbit Angstrom, with his animal urge to untangle himself from a web of obligations. This was the first time Updike had plunged so deeply and at such length into the consciousness of a single character. The present tense carried him along as he chased after his restless Rabbit, the author’s reach extending as the pages piled up.

The most harrowing scene, the accidental drowning of Janice’s newborn baby, testifies to a dramatic expansion of his capacity for empathy. In
The Poorhouse Fair
he relied on his familiarity with his beloved grandparents to create elderly characters who were not only plausible but engaging; in
Rabbit, Run
he managed to channel, sympathetically, the thoughts of an inebriated housewife, not a class of citizen he was well acquainted with. The bumbling of the drunken Janice is terrifyingly convincing, leading with a dreadful inevitability to the moment when the baby “sinks down like a gray stone” into the overfilled bathtub:

With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing squirms in the sudden opacity. She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted oblongs that she can’t seize the solid of; it is only a moment, but a moment dragged out in a thicker time. Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.

Of course it’s not all right; baby Becky, dead, is now just “the space between her arms,” a space that can be filled only by sorrow. The whole catastrophic scene (seventeen manuscript pages) poured out of Updike in one sitting during a week in mid-August that he and the family spent with Mary’s parents in their Vermont farmhouse. At the end of his very long day, he came downstairs and announced, “Well, I just drowned the baby.”

Michael Updike was three months old at the time, and his father later acknowledged that he’d dreaded writing the scene: “Obviously, there was no real baby involved; only a few sentences and adjectives on some pieces of paper. But I had babies of my own at the time, and I found the prospect of writing about infanticide unsettling.” He steeled himself and got it done. Tempering his ruthlessness, he managed, in the midst of horror, to keep alive a spark of tenderness for Janice. We pity her, knowing that what she tells herself is true, that “the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.”

It’s happened to Harry, too; his baby daughter’s death resonates not just in
Rabbit, Run
but also in the other volumes of the tetralogy. Janice evolves, recovering, growing in stature and importance (without ever losing her taste for tipple); their son, Nelson, eventually plays an important role as his father’s antagonist; and the pregnant Ruth, though she threatens to have an abortion, gives birth to a baby girl (note the symmetry) who decades later will become the object of Rabbit’s fitful attention—but
Rabbit Angstrom
, as Updike called the completed work, is nonetheless all about Harry. It gives us the measure of the man in all dimensions over the course of three decades. When Updike defined his “aesthetic and moral aim” as a “non-judgmental immersion,” he meant immersion in the particulars of Harry’s existence. That’s especially true of the first volume. Critics have praised the style of
Rabbit, Run
, and scholars have tracked with great ingenuity complex patterns of imagery, but the novel ultimately succeeds or fails as a portrait of its central character. From the beginning there were readers who found Rabbit reprehensible and rejected the novel along with its protagonist; others, including the influential Granville Hicks, managed to admire it in spite of their distaste for the “irresponsible and troubled young man” whose agitated movements it tracks. But Updike, it seems clear to me, wanted us to root for Rabbit even at his most abysmally selfish, to sympathize when he tells Eccles, “I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball, I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, it kind of takes the kick out of being second rate.” We’re meant to respect his ideal of excellence, to treasure the signs of goodness in this manifestly fallible individual.