The Kindly Mr. Updike
Ross, Mitchell S.
and disarmament. "The essence of our policy," he said, "is peaceableness . . . . " The Coolheads do not think the Soviet Union is a benign power, but they do agree with Brezhnev that the major...
...But the Administration should not make any offer without also saying that unless the Soviet Union itself makes an offer, it may do a number of things, including supplying the Afghan freedom fighters with more sophisticated weapons and reinstating the grain embargo...
...Where else can you buy in the marketplace honest-toGod fingernail clippings...
...No more cuckoldry for the aging Rabbit...
...There were two girls from Kansas whose passion it was to enter the museums of Europe and proceed directly to the gift shops, where they would spend hours pawing through poster-sized reproductions of the great works of art which actually hung inside the museums...
...Reading this book and Bech Is Back,t which is superior to Bech: A Book in the same measure that Rabbit Is Rich is superior to Rabbit Redux, I finally met minds with that gal who had risen from the wheatfields of Kansas to announce, amid reproductions of Rembrandt, that she liked Updike--and in her case, no wonder...
...In 1978 he published The Coup, a somewhat satirical (and weaker for being somewhat) t r e a t m e n t of an imaginary African nation, Kush, in which "the average life expectancy is thirty-seven years, the per capita gross national product is $79, the literacy rate 6...
...then, in 1970, Bech: A Book, which represented a quantum leap forward...
...I think that one way or the other, we make those around us pay, and maybe in my case as in many others, divorce for all of the immediate sorrows around it is kinder than not...
...Harry wouldn't have given him such an all-out handshake this way a week ago, but since fucking Thelma up the ass he's felt freer, more in love with the world again...
...even as a child he had seen there was nobody to be-angry at, only tired people anxious to please, good hearts asleep and awake, wrapped in the limits of a universe that itself, trom the beauty of its details and its contagious air of freedom, seemed to have been well-intentioned...
...Who was he...
...A Jew, a modern man, a writer, a bachelor, a loner, a loss...
...It is a brief book in which the activity concerns the disposition of a family farm and the efforts of family members to discover their true feelings about one another...
...Even so, the strengths of the entire Rabbit series are in evidence here: clean descriptive prose ("The fireman, an old rodent of a man, with tufty eyebrows and long yellow teeth . . , '~), sharp observations (Updike depicts the gradual idiotization of the American people through television), and fine characterization of greater Brewer's permanent occupants...
...A smothered scream...
...Don't woFry about it, Felix...
...As the old Puritan ethic fades away, the average Americano appears to regard adulthood as an awful and even illegitimate experience with which he is unprepared and often unwilling to deal, and from which he yearns to escape...
...The high-school basketball star at loose ends in the real world is a thoroughly American character...
...Ah: runs...
...He writes of Nabokov, "If Transparent Things is a splintered hand-mirror, and Ada cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset cumulus, Look at the Harlequins...
...He is enraged one day when he discovers that the Ghanaian chocolate he normally drinks has been replaced by Ovaltine...
...Harry has inherited his father-in:law's Toyota dealership...
...You're very brave...
...When he had published Rabbit, Run in 1960, Updike was judged by perceptive readers to have struck an authentic note...
...is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments as a magician's sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness...
...0Qg@0@go000@QoQ0D@0@@QmO@@oQ~oQI00o0QoQ000QDoQ0@@0Q@000Q0oo00Q000Q00~@~0@@0QIQ~D0IQ0IDIOQQ0ooQ~OQD0QO9QQ00@0aa0III0Q0I0@Dg00B000Q@QIo~ Mitchell S. Ross THE KINDLY MR...
...The country he chronicles is for the most part stupid, vulgar, and as obsessed with sex as in its Puritanical yesteryear it was repressed by it...
...You're a beautiful Unitarian...
...It has class and sass, brightness and bite...
...This is good domestic art: sophistication treated with simplicity...
...He is an honest writer, and, in Rabbit Is Rich, blessed by a certain detachmentmGeorge - town, Massachusetts is a suitable redoubt from which to launch artistic assaults on the Brewer, Pennsylvanias of this world-and his second marriage, Updike is, at least in the ongoing Rabbit series, writing books that are alive and enlightening...
...Hold your halloo, brave Timesman...
...The theological note is once again sounded in A Month of Sundays, the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 15 confessions of a libidinous minister with a taste for pun and fun...
...This is unfortunate...
...This sort of semi-American dialogue runs throughout the novel, which although adroit in many ways is not altogether convincing...
...The essence of our policy," he said, "is peaceableness . . . . " The Coolheads do not think the Soviet Union is a benign power, but they do agree with Brezhnev that the major share of" blame for the erosion of detente belongs to Ronald Reagan...
...For the United States and her allies should realize that a policy of reassurance, not reciprocation, will result at the very least in the slow transformation of Western Europe into a vassal state that provides its Big Brother to the East with cheap loans, advanced technology, and food...
...A mouse in a furnace...
...Another time her pal, asked what she liked to read, responded, "I like Updike...
...So I bought it, and read it, and failed to enjoy it...
...The first of these stories was published in 1956, the most recent in 1979, and yet the book forms a coherent whole...
...She appeared to me during those afternoons of copulation as a promontory on some hitherto sunken continent of light...
...We first view Harry Angstrom as a man in his middle twenties, a former high school basketball star now inspecting a future high school basketball star on the local playground: He's a natural...
...The narrative concerns itself with the doings of various Pennsylvanians on limited budgets, and of the worthies who look after them...
...Despite the low orange sun, still wet from its dawning, crescents of mist like the webs of tent caterpillars adhered in the crotches of the hills...
...Here is a body of work which ought deeply to impress schoolteachers in search of assignments...
...Rabbit has become Babbitt, an image to cherish...
...His wife (number three), Settina, daughter of a tribal chief but also American-educated (at "a small all-black college in the state of Alabama, and indeed had s e t several sprint records there"), "consoles him...
...Harry Angstrom's life has attained solidity at the same time his body has turned to flab...
...I mean, i t ' s wild...
...Fortune's hostage, heart's desire, a granddaughter...
...You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheats...
...In two subsequent novels, Marry Me and A Month of Sundays, the theme is again central...
...14 various parts of the United States...
...Even if you get over this woman, we're in no condition to make another child welcome," "Well, we can argue later...
...The writing is very fine and adjectival: "In the cool wash of early sun the individual strands of osier compounding the chairs stood out sharply...
...It is a mocking but affectionate portrait of a middle-aged Jewish writer written by a WASP who was raised in small-town Pennsylvania and settled in New England: a brave arid liberating exercise, given the composition of the New York critical establishment...
...I look forward to the days of Rabbit's impotence, and in the meantime I wish Mr...
...and Updike's short stories and book reviews became as familiar a feature of the magazine as John O'Hara's stories had been in an earlier era...
...His spiritual affiliation dates back even further...
...as criticism it is worthless, leading inevitably to such excrescences as the famous encomium with which Updike greeted Erica Jong's Fear of Flying: "Erica Jong's first novel feels like a winner...
...worse, they never heard of him...
...Then in late 1981 Rabbitls Rich* was published...
...For fifty cents it seemed worth a shot...
...Updike's remarriage had obviously relaxed him, and I wonder if it did not dilute The Coup's potential strength...
...Life, to such a fellow, is but a heap of unexpected burdens piled unexpectedly on .the head of one who would perpetuate the irresponsibility of youth as long as possible...
...Updike II's three rascals (from her previous marriage) into the family car and settled in Georgetown, another high-toned town near Boston, where Updike went back to his typewriter...
...These days, of course, many do...
...Rabbit...
...As word-play this is great fun...
...Updike many happy nights of love together on a bedful of Krugerrands, or perhaps some more civilized equivalent [] tAlfred A. Knopf, $13.95...
...In the second of the Rabbit books, Rabbit Redux (1971), the estrangement of Harry and Janice Angstrom opens the action...
...I just wanted to say that...
...Yes, yes, but a good p o r t r a i t i s t ought better to convey the tone of his subject's flesh, and to permit us to see what manner and color of clothes fiis subject wears...
...Though he could be irritable and even vengeful, obstinate savagery was excluded from his budget of emotions...
...Sleep tight...
...The Poorhouse Fair was followed by Rabbit, Run, which I saved to read in combination with Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich...
...To be sure, the magazine is graceful in much the same way that well-bred old ladies are,graceful, and certainly some first-rate writing does manage to get published in the thing from time to time...
...As in the books that would fotlow, there is the matter of adultery...
...I've been waiting for an act of God and this is it...
...Run is a story told in language that is alive, even "gliding on a blessing...
...It was all very earnest and at the same time curiously coldmin the case of Updike's novel, a sort of naturalism kissed by Kierkegaard...
...THEAMFRICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 17...
...All is noted with a comic touch that rings true, more so than anything else in Updike's body of books, even Rabbit, Run, which is, after all, more anxious than it is comic...
...Updike whe.n they all lived in Ipswich...
...AfterA Month of Sundays, so utterly uninteresting except for its occasional verbal horseplay, it is a relief to turn to the Collection of short stories which Updike published in 1979 under the title Too Far to Go...
...The form of government is a constitutional monarchy with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed...
...16 What a difference between this lovely, evocative passage and the heavy verbiage of The Poorhouse Fair, which preceded Rabbit, Run in the Updike canon, and The Centaur and Of the Farm, which followed...
...This isn't Updike's fault...
...The" Coup is reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief in its general approach and attitude, but Updike lacks the sublime contempt that made Waugh such a swell writer and impossible human being--one senses that for Updike, as for Richard Maple, "anger had never been easy...
...He is prosperous...
...The official currency is the lu...
...Also encouraging was the epigraphic bow to Sinclair Lewis's fondly remembered Babbitt which preceded the text of Rabbit Is Rich...
...That may be one reason why I for so long shied away from John Updike, who has been closely associated with the New Yorker ever since his graduation from Harvard University in the early fifties...
...His revolting son, Nelson, returns from Colorado and the rigors of scholarship at Kent State University in order to'make a botch of the used-car business and earn his father's enduring disrespect...
...I know, but please accept it...
...The flag is a plain green field...
...his skepticism of their righteousness, healthy...
...He has become a Rotarian and belongs to the Chamber of Commerce...
...Couples was next...
...This was enough to keep me away froin the man for several years thereafter...
...Land ho...
...In 1977 Updike remarried...
...He returns from a Florida vacation and Harry gives, him a hearty welcome home...
...Of the Farm followed in 1965...
...I had recently removed myself from a college scene Where much the same sort of thing occurred in less perfumed circumstances...
...Take Updike's first book, The Poorhouse Fair, published in 1959, when Updike was twenty-six...
...After a Roman sojourn ("Twin Beds in Rome"), Richard Maple reflects that his wife "was happy, and, jealous of her happiness, he again grew reluctant to leave her...
...In the last decade or so, the Soviet Union has engaged in an extraordinary military buildup (especially in its sea power), invaded Afghanistan, sent its Cuban legionnaires to several African countries, forced the Poles to squelch their own revolution, and crushed those Soviet citizens who dared to take the Helsinki Accords seriously...
...Yet the new leadership in the Kremlin indicated recently that it expects some concrete American moves to ease tensions before taking up Reagan's offer to seek a "more constructive relationship...
...That's verygood and generous of you, Jerry, but I intend to have an~abortion in any case...
...I must confess that this is the sort of stuff that kept me from developing a serious interest in literature until i discovered in my mid-teens that not all writers wrote in this way...
...The ruler of Kush, Colonel Ellelou, has been educated in America and is therefore understandably anti-American...
...Rabbit knows the way...
...Too much of Updike's description is beside the point...
...Any work of fiction that concludes with a mythological index cannot be all good...
...and there is a way in which it is better to act and take the blame than to act hopeless and complain...
...The New Yorker has never been my favorite magazine...
...My willing spirit once again permitted itself to be wooed...
...The only consolation on this moral level is that it is your idea and that you are, in a sense, carrying out something myou are acting...
...Because the Reagan Administration has .not been careful in its exposition of its foreign policy, making too many casual statements about nuclear war, it will be under strong pressure from the Coolheads to respon d to the Soviet suggestion...
...Wisely, he refocused his attention on life back home, setting to work on Rabbit Is Rich...
...There is a country club and snobbish friends, sex as fantasy and sexual indulgence...
...With luck he'll become in time a crack athlete in the high school...
...In Rabbit Is Rich Updike confirms his place as the foremost novelistic chronicler of American mores in our time...
...very dull...
...His interest in "the young" who grew With the grass of that era is natural...
...As his wife, Janice, carries on an affair with Charlie Stavros, a used-car salesman, Harry beds down a runaway named Jill and receives wisdom from a godlike black called Skeeter...
...Subtitled "The Maples Stories," these brief reports on a marriage patterned after Updike's own (both the Maples and the Updikes divorced in 1976) are both more earnest in tone and more penetrating than all of Updike's other treatments of matrimonial life in New England...
...When I was thirteen," Updike once wrote, "a magazine came into the house, the New Yorker by name, and I loved that magazine so much I concentrated all my wishing into an effort to make myself small and inky and intense enough to be received into its pages...
...The Reagan Administration, Sherwin said, has resurrected and promoted "the vision of Soviet aggression and duplicity set in place during the early years of the cold war.., to orchestrate a new cold war that facilitates an ongoing military buildup...
...In a review of Kennan's latest book, Martin Sherwin (a revisionist.historian) summed up the views of the Cooll~eads...
...But for the most part the New Yorker is just there, as elegant and as stale as an uneaten croissant a week after it has been baked...
...I just love those reproductions," said one of the girls on one occasion...
...The new Mrs...
...That's not the way it should be decided...
...In Rabbit Is Rich these superior traits achieve full flower...
...Charlie Stavros is now his employee and best friend...
...We are rewarded with one of the most ingenious scenes Updike has ever written, in which Harry makes love to his wife on a bedful of Krugerrands...
...and Mrs...
...A con artist in the days of academic modernism undergoing a Victorian shudder...
...In humor and trenchancy it surpasses Updike's earlier novels...
...A mood of domestic tranquillity is not necessarily best for a writer aspiring to accuracy in his depiction of foreign affairs...
...There is such an index here, as well as more poetic prose, and a narrative in which the names of various personnel around a Pennsylvania high school are interchanged with the names of mythological Greeks, Many cowed critics have called The Centaur Updike's best novel...
...Reverend Tom Marshfield informs us at one point, "Sex can be fun...
...They've not forgotten him...
...Such wisdom as he had already stored continued to concentrate on the theme of adultery and its attendant guilt...
...Containing all the cracked eggs Of the feminist litany, her souffl~ rises with a poet's afflatus...
...Updike in Brewer is Updike at home, observing, sketching, and coloring Middle America...
...There is a minister whispering words of Protestant guilt, but there is none of the forced whimsy of A Month of Sundays, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 none of the dull dialogue of Marry Me, none of the claustrophobic characterizations of Couples...
...The way be moves sideways without taking any steps, gliding on a blessing: you can tell...
...And yet even here Updike is unable to avert from his old practice of piling on words...
...When I was sixteen, in 1970, I first toured Europe, as one of a group of similarly aged bicyclists who hailed from Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...Face it, Africa is crazy about trading...
...Updike came equipped with a Boston background and had furthermore been friendly with John and the first Mrs...
...So is Jill, a sweet young thing full of the bogus insights of the Woodstock generation...
...Absolutely, put abortion out of your mind...
...Runs...
...Marry Me is but an anecdote that got out of hand, as did the sexual adventures depicted therein, as we learn from the following colloquy: "If you're pregnant, I'll come back and be your husband and Sally and I will forget each other...
...Very poetic...
...Divorce is a great guilty-making thing, of course, especially when it's your idea," Updike said some months ago in Saturday Review...
...Like Updike's first two chronicles of the misadventures of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, the book was set in Updike's native Pennsylvania, far removed from the high-toned precincts of Updike's other novels and of his precious New Yorker stories...
...Like the black men created by other novelists who live in rural New England and have practically no contact with black people, e.g., John Irving, Skeeter is preposterous, a heroic caricature...
...Rabbit runs on behalf of all those who would escape if only they knew how to manage it...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1963 Pa., however, I first examined the rest of Updike's world...
...And yet The Coup would be a better book if it were angrier...
...A fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust...
...In that case, let us eat roast beef...
...The prose and the sex were equally fluent: characters drifting from one bed into another~ seeking theological gratification of their fleshly desires...
...The newlyweds packed Mrs...
...UPDIKE Appearances notwithstanding, John Updike may now be the foremost chronicler of Middle American mores...
...Before leaping into the life of Brewer, *Alfred A. Knopf, $13,95...
...When a book like this comes along," declared the now forgotten reviewer for the New York Times whose words are quoted on the paperback edition I am holding in my hands, "a critic must, before attemPting anything else, raise his voice in a halloo of praise...
...Harry is feeling fine himself after having enjoyed some sexual adventure while vacationing with his wife and other members of the country club set...
...At the time Updike created them they doubtless seemed like terrific and e(zen necessary notions, but they have not worn well, and Rabbit Redux suffers as a result...
...Pain ebbed from the muscles of his eyeballs as they lengthened to suit the horizon, and he felt positive pleasure...
...I turned away from Updike again, with no plans to return...
...Waiting Up" for his wife one night when she is late returning from a mission of sexual diplomacy, Richard reflects, "Anger had never been easy for him...
...In an address on the subject, "Why Write...
...Bech, we learn, "was a Jew...
...One day in the mid-seventies, while browsing among used books, I came upon Couples, Updike's novel chronicling adultery in Tarbox, a fictitious New England town...
...A white monkey hung far out on a spindly heaventree of stars...
...Snobbery also fed my aversionRnot so much because the New Yorker is the favorite magazine of various Ivy League types who feel themselves civilized and superior for receiving it every week, but because of an unpleasant personal memory...
...He likes having money to floatin, a big bland good guy is how he sees himself, six three and two ten by rmw, with a forty-two waist the suit salesman at Kroll's tried to tell hirn until he sucked his gut in and the man's thumb grudgingly inched the tape tighter...
...Finally Harry becomes a grandfather...
...In 1960 it was harder...
...He tried, instead, to pass the time, to cryIbut produced only the ridiculous dry snarling tears of a man alone...
...After various ordeals, uncertain of his destiny, at book's end, Rabbit's "hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs...
...The way he waits belt,re he moves...
...Ten years later, in Rabbit Redux, our hero, now more Harry than Rabbit, finds himself adrift in the counterculture of the era...
...Scarcely more than a decade had passed since Alfred Knopf expressed his shock that the house which still bore his name (it was by then a subsidiary of Random House, owned by RCA) would publish such a book as Couples, but now here is Harry advancing through middle age and into the eighties in all his pot-bellied lust...
...Good night...
...In due course, this happened...
...Still, what a relief to have intelligere become esse...
...Another nail in his coffin...
...arched like separate serpents springing up and turning again into the knit of the wickerwork...
...delivered in Adelaide, Australia in 1974, Updike declared, "To become less and transmit more, to r e p l e n i s h energy with wisdom--some such hope, at this more than midpoint of my life, is the reason why I write...
...You're out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them...
...In The Centaur, Updike wedded pretense to preciosity in order to create an unreadable novel which won the National Book Award...
...We feel sorry for Rabbit but wish him well: he is so clearly one of our own...
...The same excesses mar Updike's critical writing, which is nevertheless accomplished at a higher level than that of other journalistic reviewers or college professors...
...with the sweat in your eyebrows you can't see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you're out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free...
...I myself am inclined to release a Bronx cheer when I read such sentences as, "My mother within the mythology she had made of her life was like a mathematician who, having decreed certain severely limited a s s u m p t i o n s , performs feats of warping and circumvention and paradox: ical linkage that an outside observer, unrestricted to the plane of their logic, would find irksomely arbitrary...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
