Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (135 page)

Feminists have debated the sexual politics of
The Bell Jar
without any consensus other than that the novel is important. Equally important is the point it makes about fiction – niceness must sometimes be abandoned in the interest of art. That realisation may perhaps be one of the many things that tore Plath apart.

What a threadbare thing we make of life!
Rabbit is Rich

Updike was born in semi-rural Pennsylvania, of deep-rooted Dutch-German stock, and grew up in Shillington – the kind of town his fiction would make, in its quiet way, familiar to a mass readership. He was the only child of a high-school maths teacher and a mother with a family background in farming and a fondness for writing, something, he claimed, that had a formative effect on him. His childhood after the age of thirteen was spent, much of it, on a farm ten miles out of town, recollected as the setting of his novella,
Of the Farm
(1965). Everything in his background, he once said, was ‘middling’. In an age of celebrity novelists he was chronically self-deprecating: he never got into fights, like Mailer; never turned his back on the world, like Salinger; never cursed God, like (the later) Roth; never saw the horrors of war like Vonnegut.

A precociously clever boy, his first observed cleverness was with the artist’s pencil. He might, he dreamed, become famous in that line. The dream lasted well into his twenties and it was a great moment in his later life when the
New Yorker
(with whom he would publish over a hundred short stories) took one of his cartoons. Working on a local paper over his summer holidays as a ‘copyboy’, he also cultivated a lifelong reverence for the printed word. He particularly admired the skills of the linotype operators (the Angstrom family trade in the ‘Rabbit’ tetralogy).
‘The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts,’ he said, ‘and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.’ A prize-winner at school, Updike won a full scholarship to Harvard where he continued to shine. He chose – as a devotional nod to his mother – to study English, although he retained a lingering affiliation towards his father’s harder subject. Ostentatiously, knowledgeable riffs on science, technology and astronomy embellish his later fiction; one could learn all the average person needs to know about quantum mechanics from
Roger’s Version
(1986) and more than one needs to know about computer assembly language from
Villages
(2004).

Harvard was formative on the young Updike – but unsettling: ‘I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly.’ Oddly he never wrote anything that could be labelled a campus novel, though the refined aura of the Ivy League hangs over much of his work – notably
Couples
(1968), his only major work to be set near the city of Boston. He generally preferred what he called ‘villages’ – small, newly thrown together, exurban communities of the upwardly mobile. At Harvard he edited and was a star contributor to the college paper, the
Lampoon.
It was, he said, ‘very kind to me. I was given, beside the snug pleasures of club solidarity,
carte blanche
as far as the magazine went – I began as a cartoonist, did a lot of light verse, and more and more prose. There was always lots of space to fill.’ Such extracurricular activity usually means an undistinguished degree – but not for John Updike. He graduated in 1954
summa cum laude
. The previous year he had married a Radcliffe student, Mary Pennington, and soon had a child on the way. A pipe-smoking, leather-elbowed academic career looked in prospect. Towards that end he took up a year’s fellowship at Oxford and while in England placed a short story and poem in the
New Yorker.
It was, he said, ‘the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life’ – an annunciation. Hereafter he would be a writer: the academy lost its Professor Updike.

The ‘best of possible magazines’ consolidated his early success by giving him a staff job. He gave it up after a couple of years not because he disliked the
New Yorker
but because he was uncomfortable in New York. He cited Hemingway’s jaundiced crack that the city’s literary world was ‘a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other’. His natural habitat was the small towns of New England where he retired with his wife and growing family. It was also, he felt, the right locus for his writing. As he put it, ‘once you have in your bones the fundamental feasibilities of a place, you can imagine there freely’.

At this period Updike is reported as having undergone a spiritual crisis and a religious conversion. Particularly influential were Kierkegaard and Karl Barth – thinkers frequently encountered in his fiction. The clearest exposition of his religious
dilemmas and conclusions are found in
Roger’s Version
. A work rarely ranked among his best, on account of its wordiness, the narrative centres on a long quarrel about God between a computer whizz, Dale Kohler, and Roger Lambert, a professor of divinity. The exchange is complicated by adultery between the whizz kid and the professor’s wife. Both protagonists are ‘believers’, but the younger man, with all the resources of modern physics, astronomy and technology, believes he can prove the existence of a deity. Such a God, Roger believes, would not be worth believing in. He agrees with Barth on the subject: ‘There is no way from us to God – not even a
via negativa
– not even a
via dialectica
or
paradoxica
. The god who stood at the end of some human way would not be God.’ Omnipresent, too, in Updike’s fiction (as in Kafka’s later work) is the Kierkegaardian imperative to maintain faith in God, despite everything that most convincingly seems to deny his existence.

Not yet thirty, Updike, from his literary base on the
New Yorker
, had established a formidable reputation as a writer of short fiction and was tentatively moving into longer narratives. A notable moment in this shift was the first of the ‘Angstrom agonistes’ novels,
Rabbit, Run
(1960). All three successors would arrive calendrically at the end of a decade – as a kind of summing up of where America had just been and where it was heading. Initially Updike did not have a ‘mega novel’ in mind, but a ‘biune’ work partnering
The Centaur
(1963). The heroes of the twinned novels would, in Aesopian fashion, embody two complementary types in America, the rabbit and the horse. One plods dutifully through life, the other sprints away from responsibility.
Rabbit, Run
also began with a censorious impulse. Updike had been irritated by the ‘irresponsibility’ of Jack Kerouac’s ‘Beatnik Bible’,
On the Road
(1957) and intended to offer, by way of moral contrast, ‘a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road … There [is] no painless dropping out.’ The ‘sloppiness’ of Kerouac’s writing also offended the stylist in him: the American novel deserved something better. By now Updike had settled down with his wife and children (there would be four, eventually) and had bought his first house in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Whatever else, he was not on the run.

Once given life on the page, Angstrom outgrew the original conception. Updike discovered he could be extraordinarily articulate through a character wholly unlike himself, even one who was, by his standards, inarticulate. Pentecostalism has its place in Updike’s theology – the ability to speak in tongues not one’s own. The most virtuosic of his ventriloquisms is the insertion of his writing self into the gloomy Jewish novelist, Henry Bech. An unhappy, unmarried, Nobel Prize-winner (which Updike never was) and New York man of letters who could not breathe the air outside Manhattan, Bech – in one hilarious episode – interviews John Updike for the
New York Times
. There would be three Bech books.

Rabbit Angstrom is very different. Blue-eyed, of Swedish stock, he is ‘a high-school athletic hero in the wake of his glory days’. His home town, Shillington, Updike recalled, ‘was littered with the wrecks of former basketball stars’. There is no more delectable fame in America than that of the sporting hero, but Rabbit’s heroism has lasted a mere two seasons. He has some fifty unheroic leftover years to live in the shadow of his brief glory. ‘After you’re first-rate at something,’ he discovers, ‘no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.’ In fact, as we first encounter him, Rabbit is not even second-rate. A minimum wage salesman selling a new-fangled (and useless) vegetable peeler on commission, Harry is a ‘regular working guy’, like most American males. This, as it emerged, was not a limitation, but the opposite for the kind of novel Updike had in mind. As he put it, ‘Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me’. Below him, he might more frankly have said.

As the saga opens, it is not yet the 1960s when the term ‘dropping out’ would become one of life’s platitudes. Unhappily married, with a child and another on the way, Harry decides he can’t take it any more and ‘goes on the run’. He takes up with another woman, a part-time prostitute, whom he impregnates. His alcoholic wife, in her marital abandonment, accidentally drowns their daughter while hopelessly drunk. It is ‘the worst thing’. And he – not she – is the guiltier party. Harry remorsefully returns – abandoning his mistress and his child (a daughter, as it turns out). One of the technical innovations in
Rabbit, Run
was the use of the present rather than the past tense in the narrative. It added to the cursive feel. The novel’s publication coincided with, and took advantage of, the new freedoms brought in with the 1959/1960
Lady Chatterley
trials. Brilliant as Updike’s narrative is, this liberation was not entirely beneficial. His extendedly detailed descriptions of sex can be wearing – and occasionally creepy (the description of flies hovering interestedly over the groin of the menstruating heroine in
Of the Farm
comes to mind). There are worthier
longueurs
. The Angstrom tetralogy, Updike notes, ‘is deeply immersed in the Lutheran creed of my childhood’. It is, as he puts it in the novel, ‘scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription’. The heart referred to is Angstrom’s, but it could as well be Updike’s, who often, as he records, plotted his novels sitting in church.
Rabbit, Run
spends many of its pages on long dialogues between the hero and the local minister, Jack Eccles (a closet gay, we apprehend, and spiritually unsettled). Hovering over the whole book is the question: can a man be good and yet do bad things? It is a dilemma Harry will never solve but which his life, regarded in its entirety, poses.

The novel was well received but at this stage Updike did not contemplate going further with it. His breakthrough into the first rank of novelists came in 1968 with
Couples.
Set in ‘Tarbox’ (identifiably the author’s home town, Ipswich), the novel ponders the formation of American suburban, young, sexually adventurous communities. The two pillars of such communities are married couples and extramarital copulation.
Couples
shot to the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list and put its author’s face (‘snaggle-toothed’, he complained) on the cover of
Time
magazine. Now rich and esteemed, Updike moved to England for a year in 1969, to read up in the British Museum on American history. It was not, as with many of his compatriots, to escape the Vietnam imbroglio. Surprisingly to some, he approved of that war.

Runaway rogue that he was, Rabbit endeared himself to readers. What, they asked, had happened to Updike’s ‘skittish pilgrim’? Does he die, does he disappear without trace, does he become a model husband and father? The last paragraph in the narrative, ending on the word ‘run’, is enigmatic on the point. Updike picked up the life-story again in the end-of-the-decade
Rabbit Redux
(1971) – the offputting title was a nod to Trollope’s
Phineas Redux
, itself the second part of a series which ran to five titles. Rabbit is now in Dantean middle age, thirty-five years old, a linotype operator, alongside his similarly employed father, both of them imminently to be made redundant by the offset printing process. The US is in ferment. The
Apollo
moonshot is the novel’s ‘central metaphor’ and the race riots rocking the country’s cities are the big sub-lunar issue. The narrative gives a central role to a black dissident, Skeeter, from whom Harry learns the facts of American life and the hollowness of ‘Civil Rights’ legislation. This time round, his wife Janice has run away from him and he is shacked up with Skeeter, his pubescent son Nelson, and a drop-out hippy girl, Jill, whose death by arson (Rabbit having infuriated his neighbours to criminal revenge by lowering their property values) he causes. Yet again, ‘he knows he is criminal, yet is never caught’. In the background, outside ‘America’s great glare’, the towns like Harry’s are dying. The whole country is moribund: ‘so zonked out on its own acid’, Harry observes, ‘sunk so deep in its own fat and babble and laziness, it would take H-bombs on every city from Detroit to Atlanta to wake us up and even then, we’d probably think we’d just been kissed’.

The narrative of
Rabbit Redux
ends, enigmatically, with the question, ‘OK?’ The answer comes, after the statutory ten years, in
Rabbit is Rich
(1981). Over this decade, Updike’s own life was in upheaval. In 1974 he separated from his wife and taught for a while in Boston University (the inspiration for Roger Lambert, in
Roger’s Version
). In 1977 he remarried. His new wife brought three children into the marriage; he brought four. They settled not too far from Ipswich where he had owned his first house and where he had set
Couples
. In
Rabbit is Rich
, the hero is rich only by the standards of his ‘modest working class background’: he has grown fat on his relative prosperity. He is now a car salesman, thanks to his wife’s family money and
Brewer’s only Toyota franchise, and he makes a nice packet on the side, speculating in silver coins, and tries out some varieties of sex, outside marriage, which are new to him. There have been no more children and his relationship with his son Nelson is fraught. Life may be comfortable for Rabbit, but it continues to perplex him: ‘In middle age’, he discovers, ‘you are carrying the world in a sense and yet it seems more out of control than ever.’ And where is he going? ‘Your life’, he now realises, ‘is over before you wake up.’