Updike (71 page)

273 Updike “describes to no purpose”: Gore Vidal, “Rabbit’s Own Burrow,”
Times Literary Supplement
, April 26, 1996, 5.

273 “I guess I’ve recovered from your review”: JU to John Aldridge, September 18, 1973, John W. Aldridge Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

275 “I distrusted orthodoxies,” he wrote in his memoirs:
SC
, 142.

275 “Like most Americans I am uncomfortable”: Ibid., 112–13.

276 “apologetic” is how he describes his letter: Ibid., 116.

276 a “strange underdog rage about the whole sorry thing”: Ibid., 148.

277 “I wanted to keep quiet, but could not”: Ibid., 126.

277 “My face would become hot, my voice high and tense”: Ibid., 124.

277 a “central trauma” in John’s childhood: Ibid., 127.

277 “[T]he possibility exists”: Ibid., 134.

277 “I was, perhaps, the most Vietnam-minded person”: Ibid., 124.

277 Vietnam “made it impossible to ignore politics”: Ibid., 129.

278 “In my mind I was beset, defending an underdog”: Ibid., 126–27.

278 “I found him lively, funny, and mischievous”: Fax, Philip Roth to author, December 1, 2011.

279 “distinctive brands of irony”: Ibid.

279 “Have I not stayed away from the Amish”: Roth to JU, August 24, 1978, Houghton.

279 the “twin peaks” of Updike’s achievement: Fax, Philip Roth to author, December 1, 2011.

279 Roth had become “an exhausting author to be with”:
MM
, 298.

279 “A good woman wronged”: JU to MA, November 10, 1996.

280 “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife”:
MM
, 9.

280 “cruelly obtuse—and I knew he wasn’t obtuse”: Fax, Roth to author, December 1, 2011.

280 Roth categorically denied: Fax, Roth to author, December 2, 2011.

280 they never spoke again: Fax, Roth to author, December 1, 2011.

281 The living Americans he weighed up:
CJU
, 17.

281 “a 17th century house with enough rooms”: Ibid., 12.

282 He took, he admitted, “snobbish pride”:
PP
, 31.

282 “I wear them until they get quite big”: LP, December 6, 1959, Houghton.

282 “By my mid-thirties,” he wrote in his memoirs:
SC
, 122.

282 “parasitic relationship with Steuben Glass”:
CJU
, 12.

282 He estimated, for example, that in 1967:
T
d.

284 the “little fantasy” featuring young Wendell Morrison: JU to ND, October 4, 1968, Michigan.

285 “oddly good-looking, with an arresting hook nose”:
CJU
, 12.

285 “I seem to remember, on one endless drive”:
SC
, 123.

286 “At moments of suburban relaxation”: Ibid., 123–24.

286 Jane Howard noted how “enmeshed” Updike was:
CJU
, 13.

286 in Ipswich he felt “enlisted in actual life”:
SC
, 253.

286 he claimed still to feel, in his “innermost self”:
MM
, 806.

286 “inner remove” apparent in the backward tilt of the head:
SC
, 256.

287 “the patriotic grace to cancel”: JU to JCO, January 22, 1985.

287 “the dancing couples were gliding”:
Couples
, 375.

287 “monstrous” self-absorption:
CJU
, 161.

287 “Shh. You’ll wake the children”:
Couples
, 9.

288 “Daddy, wake up! Jackie Kenneny’s baby died”: Ibid., 256.

288 “a young man almost of her generation”: Ibid., 356.

288 “Her lips were pursed around the stem of a lollypop”: Ibid., 435.

289 “All these goings on would be purely lyrical”: “View from the Catacombs,” 67.

290 “God’s own lightning”:
Couples
, 536.

290 The burning of the church is a “great event”: Ibid., 535.

290 “Television brought them the outer world”: Ibid., 259.

291 “Not since Korea had Piet cared about news”: Ibid.

291 “the meaningless world beyond the ring of couples”: Ibid., 282.

291 “a nice blend of Noel Coward and Krafft-Ebing”: Wilfred Sheed, “Play in Tarbox,”
The New York Times Book Review
, April 7, 1968, 33.

291 “I wrote the book in a spirit, mostly, of love and fun”: JU to JCO, January 12, 1976, Syracuse.

291 “smothered in pubic hair”: “View from the Catacombs,” 75.

292 Tarbox was “blatantly recognizable as Ipswich”: JJ, August 7, 1967, Ransom.

292 “libel and invasion of privacy”: AAK to JU, August 10, 1967, Ransom.

292 “indeed I know of no abortions at all”: JU to AAK, August 12, 1967, Ransom.

292 its “grim” portrait of a “fretful,” squinting author:
CP
, 70.

293 “I disavow any essential connection”:
CJU
, 27.

293 “The Tarboxians are not real people”: JU, “Letter to the Editor,”
Ipswich Chronicle
, April 25, 1968.

293 the possibility that it would create a “furor”: JU to WM, October 7, 1967, Illinois.

294 “cerebral raunch,” the tag applied to Updike’s oeuvre: Dwight Garner, “Sex, Drugs and E Chords While Seeking Remission,”
The
New York Times
, December 22, 2011, C1.

294 how “wearying” she found the “sexual redundancies”: Diana Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders,”
The Atlantic Monthly
, April 1968, 131. (Hereafter cited as Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders.”)

294 dismissed her review as “a banshee cry of indignation”:
CJU
, 25.

294 “I can think of no other novel, even in these years of our sexual freedom”: Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders,” 130.

294 Trilling’s acid kicker: “But to what purpose?”: Ibid.

294 “artistic creation is at best a sublimation”:
HG
, 469.

294 “Art is his pastime, but love is his work”: Ibid.

VII. Updike Abroad

295 “In the era of jet planes and electronic communication”:
MM
, 769.

296 “It was good to read about Bech on the boat”: JU to WM, September 27, 1968, Illinois.

296 a “deeper, less comfortable self”:
OJ
, 4.

297 the “basic and ancient” function of bringing news:
MM
, 768.

298 “the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson”:
CB
, 308.

298 Wordsworth prepared them for the “nodding” daffodils: JU to WM, April 14, 1969, Illinois.

298 “pigeons the color of exhaust fumes”:
CB
, 103.

298 “every shire,” Updike wrote, “has been the site of a poem”:
PP
, 62.

298 “there are recesses of England that exist only for the initiates”: Ibid., 59.

298 “parade in everything from yak hides to cellophane”: Ibid., 57.

298 “Here,” Updike wrote, “things are . . . cheap”: Ibid., 55.

298 “They entered a region where the shaggy heads”:
CB
, 111.

299 “turning a touch cosmopolitan”: LP, February 25, 1969, Houghton.

299 “full of unworkable antiques and devices”: JU to WM, September 27, 1968, Illinois.

299 The rent, moreover, was “princely”:
CP
, 364.

300 he brooded about the fact that he was now irrefutably “successful”: JU to WM, March 6 and 7, 1969, Illinois.

300 “[A]s a light verse writer I am through”: JU to HM, March 5, 1958, NYPL.

300 “I may have reached the age”: JU to RA, January 30, 1979, NYPL.

300 feeling “like each thing is produced on the verge of silence”: Hiller.

301 he left it out of
The Early Stories
:
PP
, 16.

302 Richard Nixon’s looks and his “vapid” campaign: JU to WM, November 8, 1968, Illinois.

302 “It had been years since we heard anybody”: Author interview, Anthony Lewis, January 17, 2012.

302 “having made him a photographer”: JU to WM, December 2, 1968, Illinois.

303 “the futile Buchanan project”: JU to JJ, December 18, 1969, Houghton.

304 he didn’t want to become “a huckster for myself”: JU to AD, April 8, 1968, Tulsa.

305 he declared them “masterful flirts”:
PP
, 61.

305 “I see why they call English women birds”: JU to WM, October 24, 1968, Illinois.

305 “an extremely pleasant and intelligent man”: E-mail, Diana Athill to author, October 3, 2011.

306 “Tony Lewis and his wife Linda sort of adopted us”: Author interview, MW, July 14, 2012.

306 “tremendous intellectual energy and
fun
”: Author interview, Eliza Lewis, January 19, 2012.

306 Steiner remembered the author being “delightful company”: Letter, George Steiner to author, January 14, 2012.

307 “I have felt like a balloon on too long a tether”:
PP
, 63.

307 a sentence lifted from a letter to Maxwell: JU to WM, June 4, 1969, NYPL.

307 “a meal for six,” he groused: JU to WM, April 14, 1969, Illinois.

308 “What frightens me really is not how much I dislike it”:
WMRR
.

308 The African lecture proved awkward:
PP
, 16.

308 “Henry Bech is bleary,” he added, “but in good voice”: JU to WM, undated, Illinois.

309 “slightly enlarged my sense of human possibilities”:
CJU
, 68.

310 A land of “delicate, delectable emptiness”:
Coup
, 4–6.

310 Kush “suggests . . . an angular skull”: Ibid., 6.

310 “dreaming behind his sunglasses”: Ibid., 298.

310 “mandarin explosions,” Updike called them:
HG
, 473.

311 “the low, somehow liquid horizon”:
Coup
, 21.

311 “the paramilitary foolery between the two superparanoids”: Ibid., 57.

311 “fountainhead of obscenity and glut”: Ibid., 3.

312 “Out-of-the-way places,” he noted:
MM
, 768.

312 a “fraught and sad . . . expedition”:
MT
, 115.

313 “As it hoveringly descended”:
SC
, 152.

314 “All Venezuela, except for the negligible middle class”:
HS
, 31.

314 “
Los indios
and
los ricos
rarely achieve contact”: Ibid., 34.

314 “Updike!
Rabbit, Run
! We love his works!”: Author interview, Luers, November 5, 2011.

315 “That was why, he supposed, you travelled”:
CB
, 308.

315 “For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe”: Ibid., 303.

315 “More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer”: Ibid., 326.

315 He worries that he will “cease to exist”: Ibid., 329.

315 “one of the globe’s great animate spectacles”: JU to JCO, March 18, 1992, Syracuse.

316 “ill-advised” was Updike’s verdict: JU to JCO, July 3, 1993, Syracuse.

317 “still imperfectly tourist-friendly”:
DC
, 17.

317 from communism to “superheated mercantilism”: Ibid., 20.

317 he found the Indian expedition “existentially damaging”: JU to Werner Berthoff, January 26, 2006, Houghton.

317 “It shatters my composure”: Ibid.

VIII. Tarbox Redux

319 “In Ipswich my impersonation of a normal person”:
SC,
54.

319 “If that nut goes, everything goes”: LP, February 9, 1958, Houghton.

319 “Once we moved, things fell apart”:
OJ
, 59.

320 “I sort of ignored them,” Liz remembered: Author interview, Elizabeth Cobblah, April 11, 2011.

323 “the first American masterpiece”:
CJU
, 129.

323 civil disobedience “antithetical” to his fifties education:
HG
, 452.

324 “It is so quiet in my new house”: JU to MW, June 3, 1970, Illinois.

325 based on “internal evidence”: JU,
Too Far to Go
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1979), 10.

329 “a generation . . . that found itself somewhat pushed around”:
WMRR
.

331 “there’s more fiction to those stories”: Ibid.

331 the “vigorous fakery” essential to historical fiction:
HG
, 453.

331 he turned to an “old friend”:
PP
, 491.

332 “the perpetual
presentness
of my former hero”:
HG
, 453.

332 “Rabbit to the rescue”:
HS
, 858.

332 “I am beginning to wince”: JU to JJ, June 16, 1970, Ransom.

332 Updike’s dismay at “all the revolutions in the air”:
HG
, 453.

332 Harry became a “receptacle” for Updike’s concerns: Ibid.

332 the novel, by Updike’s own admission, is “violent and bizarre”:
HG
, 454.

333 “having the adventure now we’re all going to have”:
RRedux
, 238.

333 “[T]he news had moved out of the television”:
MM
, 818.

333 “We recognize them,” she wrote: Trilling, “Updike’s Yankee Traders,” 129.

334 “Pray for rebirth,” Harry’s ailing mother tells him:
RRedux
, 198.

335 “Physically, Skeeter fascinates Rabbit”: Ibid., 250–51.

335 “she is liking it, being raped”: Ibid., 280.

335 “His heart skips. He has escaped. Narrowly”: Ibid., 283.

336 inspired by “a piece of authentic social violence”:
CJU
, 90.

336 “the rage and destructiveness”:
HG
, 455.

336 given to Updike by his family—“in loving exasperation”:
SC
, 129.

336 “It’s not all war I love . . . it’s
this
war”:
RRedux
, 357.

336 a town that was “abnormally still”:
CJU
, 167.

336 “authority was the Shillington High School faculty”:
SC
, 128.

337 the status quo could be “lightly or easily altered”:
CJU
, 60.

337 “[r]evolt, rebellion, violence, disgust”: Ibid., 62.

337 “The cost of the disruption of the social fabric”:
HS
, 858–59.