Updike (72 page)

337 “Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls”:
RRedux
, 395.

337 sees himself as “the man in the middle”: Ibid., 330.

337 he had “hardly met a black person”:
SC
, 196.

338 “Black to him is just a political word”:
RRedux
, 114.

338 “Come meet some soul,” says Buchanan: Ibid., 115.

338 “a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in”: Ibid.

338 “extremely plausible,” she calls it: Ibid., 117.

338 “Having told a number of interviewers”:
HS
, 858.

339 he was pronounced “psychologically sick”: William Styron,
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(New York: Vintage International, 1992), 448.

339 He’d read the book when it came out and found it “laborious”: JU to ND, November 29, 1967, Michigan.

339 “a very eloquent and intelligent negro critic”: JU to WM, May 30, 1970, NYPL.

339 Rabbit’s “reluctant crossing of the color line”:
HG
, 454.

339 “Skeeter is something new in black characters”: Anatole Broyard, “Updike Goes All Out at Last,”
The New York Times
, November 5, 1971, 40.

340 “possibly inordinate emphasis on sexual congress”:
HG
, 454.

340 a “hefty coarse Negress”:
RRedux
, 378.

340 “I learned I’d rather fuck than be blown”: Ibid., 358.

340 “
Rabbit Redux
is the complete Updike at last”: Broyard, “Updike Goes All Out at Last,” 40.

340 “I’m rather baffled,” Updike told Jones: JU to JJ, November 8, 1971, Ransom.

340 “by far the most audacious and successful”: Richard Locke, “Rabbit Returns: Updike Was Always There—It’s Time We Noticed,”
The New York Times Book Review
, November 14, 1971.

341 the sequel, he wrote, was “meant to be symmetric”:
HG
, 454.

341 “The Sixties did a number on him, too”: JU,
Rabbit Angstrom
(New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 611.

341 “Anybody who really cared”:
CJU
, 62.

341 “The question that ends the book”:
HS
, 859.

341 “I feel at home in Harry’s pelt”: JU to JCO, January 12, 1976, Syracuse.

342 he remembered that it “kind of wrote itself”: Unpublished outtakes from James Atlas’s taped interview with JU for “John Updike Breaks Out of Suburbia,”
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
, December 10, 1978.

342 “the most dissentious American decade”:
HS
, 858.

342 “intuition into the mass consciousness”:
SC
, 124.

342 “marital fidelity and parental responsibility”:
MM
, 818.

342 “stiff, unreal, and lacking in electricity”: Quoted in Josh Rubins, “The Industrious Drifter in Room 2,”
Harvard Magazine
, May 1974, 45.

342 he found most plays “pretty silly”: Ibid., 51.

342 “bindable and thence forgettable”: JU to AD, December 29, 1973, Tulsa.

343 “every inch a first-nighter”: JU,
Buchanan Dying
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), vii.

344 sex was hardly “the only sore point”: Author interview, MW, July 14, 2012.

344 “It was true, [Mary] and I saw many things the same way”:
SC
, 102.

345 “nearest and dearest of that time didn’t complain”:
WMRR
.

346 “Wonderful
contes
from a veteran
conte
-chaser”: JU to JJ, March 20, 1972, Ransom.

350 “stay on the right side of the road”: LGH to JU, June 8, 1972, Ursinus.

352 their mother said to him, “Coward!”: E-mail, MW to author, July 7, 2012.

354 David told me that he had no specific memory: Author interview, David Updike, April 12, 2011.

354 “I think the fact that all of our parents had died”: Author interview, MW, April 7, 2011.

354 “In our attempt to be beautiful”:
WMRR
.

355 “The basic human condition of being a social animal”: Hiller.

IX. Marrying Martha

358 “What had been unthinkable under Eisenhower”:
MFA
, 6.

358 he had a “gorgeous” view: LP, June 3, 1975, Houghton.

359 His living “derangements,” he wrote: JU to William Koshland, November 14, 1974, Ransom.

359 he “lived rather shapelessly”:
ES
, 823.

359 a “rakish” Volkswagen Karmann Ghia:
DC
, 89.

359 his “furtive semi-bachelorhood”:
EP
, 24–25.

360 his sense of guilt “triggered a metabolic riot”:
SC
, 73.

360 After only a few sessions in the “magic box”: Ibid., 74.

360 “clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion”:
TM
, 83.

361 he admitted in a frightening aside, “I read slower than I write”:
PP
, 15.

361 “youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion”: Ibid., 14.

361 “Review the book, not the reputation”: Ibid., 15.

361 “Evidently I can read anything in English”: Ibid., 14.

362 “the payment for a monthly review”:
HS
, xx.

363 “Rape is the sexual sin of the mob”:
PP
, 206.

363 “unstitching the sequined embroidery”: Ibid., 201.

363 “[T]he last pages of
Ada
are the best”: Ibid., 203.

363 they were both afflicted with “a writer’s covetousness”: Ibid., 199.

363 “Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer”:
AP
, 248.

363 “His sentences are beautiful out of context”: Ibid., 249.

363 “aimless intricacies” and “mannered” devices: Ibid., 255.

364 Nabokov’s “cruelty” to his own characters:
HS
, 243.

364 Updike offered handsome tribute in
The
New Yorker
: Ibid., 246.

364 “Rich, healthy, brilliant, physically successful”:
PP
, 204.

364 whose “brain was so excited” he could scarcely sleep:
HS
, 242.

364 “cerebral self-delight”: Ibid., 243.

364 “He asked . . . of his own art and the art of others”: Ibid.

365 “When our Miss Ruggles, a tender twenty”: Ibid., 232.

366 the possibility of a “legal assault” from Alex Bernhard: JU to RA, December 11, 1978, NYPL.

367 the pain and confusion his “dereliction” has inflicted:
P
, 246.

367 just enough to fog his emotional landscape and add to his “life-fright”: LP, March 29, 1975, Houghton.

368 he described the condition as “emotional bigamy”:
MT
, 21.

368 “seducing” parishioners (“by way of being helpful”):
MS
, 136.

369 “When is it right for a man to leave his wife?”: Ibid., 192.

369 “His prose has never . . . menaced a cowering reader”:
PP
, 199.

369
askew
is the apt word Updike uses:
OJ
, 858.

369 he “wanted to make the book kind of abrasive”:
CJU
, 75.

369 “virtuosity . . . too gleefully displayed”: Anatole Broyard, “Some Unoriginal Sins,”
The New York Times
, February 19, 1975, 33.

370 he was “living like a buzzard in a tree”: LP, June 3, 1975, Houghton.

370 “those embarrassing, disarrayed years”:
TM
, 89.

370 being a “divorcing bachelor”: Michiko Kakutani, “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic,”
Saturday Review
, October, 1981, 22.

371 “I felt badly,” Updike remembered: Bailey,
Cheever
, 499.

371 “I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes”:
OJ
, 118.

371 “with all the alcohol squeezed out of him”: LP, June 27, 1975, Houghton.

372 throwing, as John put it, “the shadow of my girlfriend over the holidays”: LP, December 26, 1975, Houghton.

373 “an unassuming population knot on the way to other places”:
HG
, 456.

373 “With all Updike’s money, and his and Martha’s good sense”: Joyce Carol Oates,
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
(New York: Ecco Press, 2007), 125. (Hereafter cited as Oates,
Journal
.)

373 “I was at home in America, all right”: JU, “Why Rabbit Had to Go,”
The New York Times
, August 5, 1990, 23. (Hereafter cited as JU, “Why Rabbit Had to Go.”)

374 two hours of “lightweight, amusing gossip”: Oates,
Journal
, 126.

374 “[H]e’s a hillbilly from rural Pennsylvania”: Ibid., 127.

374 “the various agonies they experienced”: Ibid., 125.

374 John had introduced Martha as an “old and ardent Oates reader”: JU to JCO, June 26, 1976, Syracuse.

375 “Nobody can read like a writer,” he told Oates: JU to JCO, December 14, 1978, Syracuse.

375 “I’d go mad in such a small town myself”: Oates,
Journal
, 125.

375 The cellar was “foul”: LP, November 9, 1976, Houghton.

375 the “rotten places” in a house:
CP
, 144.

375 Georgetown “made negligible communal demands”:
HG
, 457.

376 “a patch of human quicksand”: LP, November 20, 1976.

376 public speaking was “a whorish thing to do”: Hiller.

377 “Gracious, self-deprecating, and casually attentive”: Kakutani, “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic,” 14.

377 “John is one of the few people I know”: Quoted in Hiller.

377 “Updike read faultlessly each time”: Author interview, Ian McEwan, December 5, 2012.

378 “Now I live with yet another family group”: Sally Quinn, “Updike on Women, Marriage and Adultery,”
The Washington Post
, December 9, 1976, C1.

379 A full-blown feminist critique: Mary Allen, “John Updike’s Love of ‘Dull Bovine Beauty,’ ” in
The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Nineteen Sixties
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 97–132.

379 “I can’t think of any male American writer”:
CJU
, 78.

381 his “once-close-woven relationship” with the magazine: LP, January 12, 1976, Houghton.

381 “a novel about penguins, perhaps, or Hottentots”: Ibid.

381 “If I marry a third time, it’ll have to be Lazarus”: JU to ND, October 4, 1977, Michigan.

381 “It was a protest,” she said, “I wanted my absence felt”: E-mail, Miranda Updike to author, October 12, 2012.

381 Michael was absent, too (and “glad not to be there”): E-mail, Michael Updike to author, September 25, 2012.

382 “amalgamate and align all his betrayals”: JU,
The Maples Stories
, 215.

382 Emerson’s famous line “We boil at different degrees”:
MT
, 206.

382 “She was good in bed”:
ES
, 829.

382 he felt that over time they became “artistically estranged”: Alba, “A Relaxed Conversation with John Updike,” 499.

383 “I was very confiding and she was very interested”: Ibid.

384 Ada asks him why he’s “abandoning” his children: Linda Grace Hoyer,
The Predator
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990), 37.

384 “they were,” he told Maxwell, “very
tender
stories”: JU to WM, February 6, 1978, Illinois.

385 the acceptance of David’s first story was “a soul-stirring event”: JU to WM, May 29, 1978, Illinois.

385 “box it with his grandmother’s”: JU to AD, March 5, 1981, Tulsa.

387 “One of the problems of being a fiction writer”: Unpublished
Atlas
interview, December 10, 1978.

388 “Martha was very upset that John had included the scene”: Fax, Roth to author, December 1, 2011.

390 “spokes of a wheel”:
ES
, 447.

391 “all the gifts but the one of making their way in the world”: LP, August 30, 1981, Houghton.

391 “The work ethic is crumbling,” he told a journalist in the early seventies: Hiller.

392 “You grow up of course with these people”: Unpublished
Atlas
interview, December 10, 1978.

393 “YOU ASKED FOR IT, WE GOT IT”:
RRich
, 13.

393 The traffic on Route 111 is “thin and scared”: Ibid., 3.

393 Harry thinks; “the great American ride is ending”: Ibid.

393 “Life is sweet,” he tells himself: Ibid., 6.

393 “Bourgeois bliss” is how Updike described Rabbit’s state of mind:
HG
, 456.

393 He’s “king of the lot”:
RRich
, 5.

393 “paternal talkativeness keeps bubbling up in Harry”: Ibid., 16–17.

393 “this matter of men descending from men”: Ibid., 212.

394 a single-sentence stream of consciousness: Ibid., 28–29.

394 snug in his “Luxury Edition” 1978 Toyota Corona: Ibid., 30.

394 “standing around on some steamy city corner”: Ibid., 36.

394 “glorified pancakes wrapped around minced whatever”: Ibid., 87.

394 the “lean new race of downtown office workers”: Ibid.

394 “The world keeps ending”: Ibid., 88.

395 “An invisible force month after month”: Ibid., 458.

395 they feel “like a bull’s balls tugging at his pockets”: Ibid., 211.

395 running shoes skim “above the earth, above the dead”: Ibid., 141.

395 “And the burning in his tear ducts”: Ibid., 244.

396 “one hundred and eighty-five American dollars”: Ibid., 235.

396 “What a great waste of gas it seems”: Ibid., 245.

396 “a whole new ethic”: Ibid., 226.

396 his father (“poor dead dad”): Ibid., 29.

396 “never got out from under”: Ibid., 69.

396 “didn’t live to see money get unreal”: Ibid., 402.

397 the “ultimate Toyota,” a model “priced in five digits”: Ibid., 434–35.

397 His father was “narcissistically impaired”:
LL
, 248.

397 he, in his novel, was “mucking about the same area”:
CJU
, 226.

398 “Nelson remains: here is a hardness he must carry”:
RRun
, 305.