Odd Jobs (159 page)
Authors: John Updike
For this novel—the fourth, and the fourth that the Franklin Mint has honored, in one or another of its series, with publication in elegantly tooled leather—I transplanted Rabbit to Florida, for six months of the year, as a natural extension of his week-long sally into the Caribbean in
Rabbit Is Rich
. Americans have gained mobility in thirty years, and so has Harry. Exercising my own mobility, I travelled to Florida several times to scout out the landscape. But Deleon, like Brewer, is fictional and must not be held to strict geographical account; it lies roughly where Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida and the hero of a frequently revised and never-published novel by my mother, was slain by Indian arrows. Using the materials and to some extent the maps and newspapers
of our real world, fiction locates its characters in a cloudland where they can find the freedom to fulfill their tendencies. I wanted, in
Rabbit at Rest
, while plausibly portraying a specimen American male’s evolution into grandpaternity, frailty, lassitude, sensations of dispensability, and even inklings of selflessness, to allow the thematic tendencies, conscious or unconscious, of the three other novels to run to their destination, to wind up. I wanted to cap my series and make it a tetralogy while I still had most of my wits about me, and before my living connections with Pennsylvania quite ceased.
As long as my parents and then, after 1972, my mother lived in Pennsylvania, I had opportunity to visit and keep tabs on Rabbit’s changing world. Two weeks after the completion of the first draft of
Rabbit at Rest
, my mother died; her decline, long forestalled but unignorable in her last year, contributed to the hospital scenes of this book and to its overall mortal mood. For me 1989 was a year of goodbyes, to the real and the unreal. During my many visits to Reading and its environs in this year—my most intense dose of Pennsylvania since the Fifties—I was 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.
*
Augmented, in November of 1989, by the narrowly posthumous publication of another collection,
The Predator
(Ticknor & Fields).
†
By a coincidence truly uncanny, my Shillington High School classmate Barry Nelson, in the April 1984 issue of
Governor Mifflin Area History
, wrote at length of “Pow-Wows and Faith Healers in the Mifflin Area” just as my novel was being published. The “witch doctor” in Grille was identified as Harry C. Ohlinger, a Reading native and weaver by trade who died in 1955 at the age of sixty-two; he had lived in Grille, opposite the Center Hotel, since 1938, and had begun to practice his healing arts before then, at a farmhouse near Angelica on Candy Road, in Cumru Township. He was a Bible-reading, prayerful man, some of whose cures were simply traditional faith healing. Some were a bit stranger: “A woman who ran a farm in Maxatawny thought she had a jinx on her. He told her to put an ace of spades in a milk bucket, and milk a cow’s milk into it. This broke the hex or spell.” People lined up on his porch to see him, waiting two or three hours; he never charged money and was instead paid with “donations, whiskey, food, or knick-knacks.” One satisfied customer recalled, “He cured my wife’s back in three visits. He put his hand on your body, said something, and you could feel something happening.” In Shillington, the widow of the pow-wow doctor Ellsworth Mohn remembered, “Ells would sit in front of you and he’d cup his left hand and hold it out like he was receiving something, holding it palm up. He took his right hand in a sweeping move across the inflammation in a catching motion, blew into the right hand, and slapped it into his upper hand. He would do this three times.” Mohn always said his spells in “Dutch” (Pennsylvania German) and had learned how to pow-wow from a Mammy Bitting, also of Shillington. A sexual curiosity of the art of pow-wowing is that only a woman can teach it to a man, and vice versa. “The prayers are passed on by word of mouth. They must be memorized. There is no hexerei involved. The prayers are from the Bible.” Yet some of the cures cited are distinctly elaborate: to cure a sick baby, a mother is instructed “to take the baby’s shirt off, turn it inside out, and pinch it in the attic door over night.” And: “Another story involved a small baby that cried constantly. The mother tried to quiet the child, but the crying got worse. Finally, in frustration, she said, ‘Enough! I’m going to do something about this!’ She placed a bucket of hot water in the middle of the parlor and placed a burning hot poker into the water while reciting a prayer. The next day a woman in the same town was scalded to death. This woman had visited the mother and had given the mother and her family something to eat. She was really putting a hex on them.”
‡
She seems to be present thrice: once as Richie (“of great price”), secondly as Paula, and thirdly—well, why
does
Esther’s weight at last swell to over a hundred pounds?
§
Not the first such overestimation in my mother’s life. A child when her grandfather died, she remembered in her short story “Translation” how “The church was strangely warm and empty, as railroad stations sometimes are after a train has passed, and much of the food that the caterer had brought to our house to make a feast for my grandfather’s friends had to be taken away.”
T
O
M
ARTHA
AcknowledgmentsGrateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines and publishers, who first printed the pieces specified, sometimes under different titles and in slightly different form:
THE NEW YORKER:
“Five Days in Finland at the Age of Fifty-five,” “First Wives and Trolley Cars,” “Mr. Volente,” “John Cheever—I,” “Emersonianism,” “Howells as Anti-Novelist,” “Many Bens,” the introductions to Mikhail Prishvin’s
Nature’s Diary
and to Franz Kafka’s
Complete Stories
, the two pieces of “Notes and Comment” in the appendix, and eighty-eight of the book reviews, including sixteen first published as “Briefly Noted.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW:
“Hymn to Tilth,” “Was B.B. a Crook?”, “The Bimbo on the Barge,” “Bull in a Type Shop,” the introduction to Isak Dinesen’s
Seven Gothic Tales
, and the material on
this page
and
this page
.
THE NEW YORK TIMES:
“Books into Film.”
THE BOSTON GLOBE:
“Overboard on
Overboard
,” “The Boston Red Sox, as of 1986,” and “Can Architecture Be Criticized?”
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS:
“How Does the Writer Imagine?”, “Should Writers Give Lectures?”, and the introductions to William Dean Howells’s
Indian Summer
and to Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory
.
THE NEW REPUBLIC:
Introduction to
Appointment in Samarra
, by John O’Hara.
THE ONTARIO REVIEW:
“The Parade.”
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST:
“Fictional Houses,” “A Sense of Transparency,” and “Is New York City Inhabitable?”
ESQUIRE:
“Edmund Wilson,” “Popular Music,” “The Importance of Fiction,” and the response on
this page
.
HARPER
’
S MAGAZINE:
“Twisted Apples.”
VOGUE:
“Mother” and “High Art Versus Popular Culture.”
COSMOPOLITAN:
“Women.”
LEAR
’
S:
“Spirituality.”
“
W
”: “Beauty.”
SPORT:
“Ted Williams, as of 1986.”
POPULAR MECHANICS:
“Our National Monuments,” titled “Sacred Places.”
NEW ENGLAND MONTHLY:
“A Short and Happy Ride” and “The Fourth of July.”
MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW:
“The Female Body” and the response on
this page
.
TV GUIDE:
“Being on TV—I” and “Being on TV—II.”
CORRIERE DELLA SERA:
“A Nameless Rose” and “Mr. Palomar.”
LIBÉRATION:
Answer to “
Pourquoi écrivez-vous?
”
LIFE:
“John Cheever—II”
PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC.:
Introduction to
Nature’s Diary
, by Mikhail Prishvin. Introduction copyright © 1987 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” and Introduction to
The Power and the Glory
, by Graham Greene. Introduction copyright © 1990 by John Updike.
THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB:
Introductions to
Seven Gothic Tales
, by Isak Dinesen, and
Appointment in Samarra
, by John O’Hara.
VINTAGE BOOKS:
Introduction to
Indian Summer
, by William Dean Howells. Introduction copyright © 1990 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
SCHOCKEN BOOKS:
Foreword to
Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
edited by Norm Nahum and N. Glatzer. Originally published in
The New Yorker
in 1983. Foreword copyright © 1983 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO.:
Introduction to
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
, by Karl Barth. Copyright © 1986 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
ADDISON-WESLEY CO.:
“The Fourth of July,” in the anthology
Summer
, copyright © 1990 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc.
LORD JOHN PRESS:
Foreword to
Jester’s Dozen
. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
SYLVESTER
&
ORPHANOS:
“John Cheever—III.”
POETS
&
WRITERS MAGAZINE:
“Writers as Progenitors and Offspring.”
BOOKENDS:
“I Was a Teen-Age Library User.”
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY:
“A Book That Changed Me.”
SPECIAL REPORT:
“Harvard Yard.”
HARVARD GAZETTE:
“I had a lot to learn when I came …”
HARVARD MAGAZINE:
Answer to “What is your favorite spot in and around Harvard?”
HARVARD UNIVERSITY:
Preface to the catalogue of an exhibit of my own papers in Houghton Library.
THE FRANKLIN LIBRARY:
The forewords for
The Witches of Eastwick, Roger’s Version
, and
Rabbit at Rest
are copyrighted 1984, 1986, and 1990 respectively by The Franklin Library, Franklin Center, PA, for exclusive use in its Signed First Editions of those books. The Forewords have been reprinted in this edition by special permission of The Franklin Library.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
Expanded version of remarks on artistic freedom. Shorter version published in the
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
(Second Series, No. 40).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS INC.:
Excerpt from “Traveler’s Song” from
The Fox of Peapack
by E. B. White. Copyright 1938 by E. B. White. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC.:
“Résumé,” copyright 1926, renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker, “Garden Spot,” copyright 1931, renewed 1959 by Dorothy Parker, from
The Portable Dorothy Parker
edited by Brendan Gill. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
JOEL WHITE:
“A Forward Glance O’er the Obituary Page” by E. B. White.
The New Yorker
, August 28, 1948. Reprinted by permission of Joel White.
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen
(1958) •
Telephone Poles
(1963)•
Midpoint
(1969)
• Tossing and Turning
(1977) •
Facing Nature
(1985) •
Collected Poems 1953–1993
(1993)
• Americana
(2001)
• Endpoint
(2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair
(1959)
• Rabbit, Run
(1960)
• The Centaur
(1963) •
Of the Farm
(1965)
• Couples
(1968)
• Rabbit Redux
(1971)
• A Month of Sundays
(1975)
• Marry Me
(1976)
• The Coup
(1978)
• Rabbit Is Rich
(1981)
• The Witches of Eastwick
(1984)
• Roger’s Version
(1986)
• S
. (1988)
• Rabbit at Rest
(1990)
• Memories of the Ford Administration
(1992)
• Brazil
(1994)
• In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1996) •
Toward the End of Time
(1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius
(2000)
• Seek My Face
(2002)
• Villages
(2004)
• Terrorist
(2006)
• The Widows of Eastwick
(2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door
(1959)
• Pigeon Feathers
(1962)
• Olinger Stories
(a selection, 1964)
• The Music School
(1966)
• Bech: A Book
(1970)
• Museums and Women
(1972)
• Problems
(1979)
• Too Far to Go
(a selection, 1979)
• Bech Is Back
(1982)
• Trust Me
(1987)
• The Afterlife
(1994)
• Bech at Bay
(1998)
• Licks of Love
(2000)
• The Complete Henry Bech
(2001)
• The Early Stories: 1953–1975
(2003)
• My Father’s Tears
(2009)
• The Maples Stories
(2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose
(1965)
• Picked-Up Pieces
(1975)
• Hugging the Shore
(1983)
• Just Looking
(1989)
• Odd Jobs
(1991)
• Golf Dreams
(1996) •
More Matter
(1999)
• Still Looking
(2005)
• Due Considerations
(2007) •
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
(2010)
• Higher Gossip
(2011)
• Always Looking
(2012)
PLAY
Buchanan Dying
(1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness
(1989)
CHILDREN
’
S BOOKS
The Magic Flute
(1962)
• The Ring
(1964)
• A Child’s Calendar
(1965)
• Bottom’s Dream
(1969)
• A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects
(1996)
