Authors: Adam Begley
The Maples’ old house is a mile away. Emptied of the family’s belongings, it holds only the “ghosts” of their past selves; Richard imagines these ghosts arranged in a series of tableaux that together sum up the dozen years they lived there. First there’s the husband and wife at two o’clock in the morning on Easter Sunday; drunk, still dressed for the formal dinner party they’ve evidently just left, they are hiding chocolate eggs in the backyard for the children’s Easter egg hunt. Another scene shows the husband saying prayers with his children; a younger child prays with him, an older child refuses. In the next tableau the husband and wife quarrel bitterly in the large living room, weeping, exchanging blows, scaring the children and the family dog. Contemplating this distressing dumbshow, Richard asks, “What are they saying, what are these violent, frightened people discussing?” Knowing the Maples, we can be certain that the fight is about infidelity; we can imagine the back-and-forth of accusation and denial, confession and ultimatum. Richard, however, wants us to see the bigger picture, and tells us that the couple are in truth discussing the human condition: “change, natural process, the passage of time, death.” He’s suggesting that at the root of their unhappiness, of the violence and the fear, is transience, the appalling brevity of our existence.
*
Trading one house for another (the moving van assisting in a practical demonstration of transience) stirred Updike’s memories of the relocation to Plowville, especially as the family was leaving the center of town for a more rural spot; it triggered a wave of nostalgia for the house in Shillington. In “Plumbing,” Richard compares his memories of the recent past, of the life he shared with Joan and the children (“feeble ghosts”), with mythic memories excavated from the sacred site where he spent his early years. Drawing an explicit contrast, he goes into rhapsodies over the “potent, powerful, numinous Easter eggs of my childhood.” Potent, powerful, numinous—not just the eggs but the memories themselves; the distant past has a bonded grip on him, as though his connection with his childhood had been crafted with the same care as the plumber’s “antique joint.” The distant past has weight and dignity; the recent past is pale and trivial—“frivolous,” like that partying couple in their finery tiptoeing drunk around the yard in the small hours of the morning with a stash of chocolate eggs wrapped in tinfoil.
Religious concerns, flagged by the heavy, repeated emphasis on Easter and prayer, were clearly weighing on Updike’s mind. In the broadest terms, the story pits time against the eternal, death against resurrection. For Richard, nostalgia involves hankering after an uncomplicated childhood faith in the “impossible-to-plumb well of mystery where the stars swam, and old photographs predating my birth were snapped, and God listened”—an unplumbed well of mystery that’s also, we’re told, the source of those potent, powerful, numinous Easter eggs. Like his nine-year-old daughter, who dreads growing older and tells him she doesn’t want a birthday, Richard is wishing not to age, not to die, not to be “outlasted.”
Loaded, possibly overloaded, with metaphysical significance, “Plumbing” offers only hazy clues to the here and now—to the rate at which, for instance, the Maples’ battered marriage is deteriorating. Joan appears as a “feeble ghost”; she’s given no dialogue. In the quarrel tableau, Richard dramatizes his conception of himself as a prisoner (an old complaint) by sitting slumped, head bowed, ankles together, as if shackled. Contemplating a dozen years at the old house, he’s strangely numb; mild regret is what he seems to feel about his marriage, and a twinge of guilt. The story also provides a glimpse of Richard with his offspring, an increasingly common thread in the Maples stories. Richard is a loving father—but worn out, distracted, self-involved, ashamed of his shortcomings as a parent. Despite his good intentions, he fears that he’s failing his children. With remarkable economy, Updike packs nearly all this into a brief paragraph featuring Richard and two of his progeny:
A man bends above a child’s bed; his voice and a child’s voice murmur prayers in unison. They have trouble with “trespass” versus “debts,” having attended different Sunday schools. Weary, slightly asthmatic . . . anxious to return downstairs to a book and a drink, he passes into the next room. The child there, a bigger child, when he offers to bow his head with her, cries softly, “Daddy, no, don’t!” The round white face, dim in the dusk of the evening, seems to glow with tension, embarrassment, appeal. Embarrassed himself, too easily embarrassed, he gives her a kiss, backs off, closes her bedroom door, leaves her to the darkness.
The phrase “trouble with ‘trespass’ versus ‘debts’ ” refers to competing versions of the Lord’s Prayer. It could also serve as a condensed description of a family being pulled apart by adultery, a home where fighting parents hit each other in front of bewildered children. The parents trespass; they default on debts owed to each other and to their sons and daughters; trouble brews. The older child’s pleading refusal to join her father in prayer, most easily explained as the rebellion of a young girl who feels she’s outgrown what she thinks of as a childish ritual, could also be seen—if, for example, you were a father with a guilty conscience—as the rebuke of a daughter who senses a hint of falsity in your rote display of piety. You might think that she’s uneasy about saying her prayers with an enervated man anxious to be elsewhere, a man who has “trouble with ‘trespass’ versus ‘debts.’ ”
As Updike would say, “internal evidence” identifies the “bigger child” as Judith, eldest of the Maple children. The others are Richard Jr. (“Dickie”), John, and Margaret (nicknamed “Bean” as a baby). First introduced as a foursome in the early sixties in “Giving Blood,” they began to emerge as full-fledged characters several years later, beginning with “Eros Rampant”; from that point on, it was obvious that Updike had no compunction about using Liz, David, Michael, and Miranda as his models. Lightly fictionalized, the young Maples are as much like the young Updikes as Richard and Joan are like John and Mary—which is to say that in each case the outline is more or less accurate. There’s no scrambling of identities: Friends and relatives recognized all the children immediately, and the children recognized themselves.
The prayer scene in “Plumbing” was probably played out in real life essentially as Updike wrote it; by the late sixties, an adolescent Liz had grown out of saying prayers with her father, but the other children continued with what had become a family ritual: John would go into each of their rooms separately, sit on the bed, and repeat with them the Lord’s Prayer.
The children began to figure more prominently in the Maples stories, and elsewhere in Updike’s fiction, in part because they were more involved in grown-up activities. During the Labor-in-Vain years, Liz began to play volleyball with the adults during Sunday sports. David took up golf and photography. Michael helped his father, more than the others, with carpentry projects around the house. Each of the four children was now a vocal, even articulate, presence. But another reason for their prominence in the fiction is the moral weight they carried. As in “Plumbing,” children are a reminder of the parents’ obligations, their duties and responsibilities. The actions of the parents vis-à-vis the children are an important gauge of decency, a gauge that exposes failure more often than success. Over and over again in Updike’s fiction from the late sixties and early seventies, children see things they shouldn’t; their presence, or even just the possibility of their presence, shames the parents—or
ought
to shame the parents—into behaving better. At times, John felt uncomfortably sandwiched between his children on the one hand and Wesley and Linda on the other. As he once remarked, he belonged to “a generation . . . that found itself somewhat pushed around by its parents, and now feels it’s being pushed around by its children—we’re a generation that never got on top.” Wesley wasn’t pushy (he left that to Linda), but he was an exemplar—however eccentric and irritating—a good man who showed what it meant to be a good son, a good husband, a good father. How heavily John’s children weighed on him is harder to measure. When he was trying to leave Mary for Joyce Harrington, the thought of abandoning them was not in itself enough to tip the balance, not enough to make him stay. And yet he
did
stay (his father possibly the deciding factor)—and wrote movingly of the torment of a parent poised on the brink of breaking up his family.
Richard Maple occupies a clearly defined space in the constellation of Updike alter egos. He is the character into whom Updike poured, over a span of thirty-eight years, his feelings about being a husband and father. Outside that narrow segment of the domestic realm, Richard scarcely exists. We’re told in “Snowing in Greenwich Village” that he works in advertising, but his professional life has no bearing at all in the later stories; he might as well be unemployed, or the beneficiary of a trust fund sufficient to maintain a middle-class existence in an Ipswich-like Boston suburb. He has parents and a hometown (in West Virginia), but what little pre-Joan past he’s given is lifted straight from Updike’s own background, with only minor cosmetic adjustments, such as substituting West Virginia for southeastern Pennsylvania. Neither Harry Angstrom (an indifferent husband and an epically bad father) nor Henry Bech (a bachelor at heart and not a father until his seventies) offered Updike much chance to explore the role of paterfamilias; Richard Maple was tailor-made for exactly that.
And in that role, he’s an almost exact facsimile of Updike. More consistently than Bech or Rabbit, Richard presents an undistorted reflection of his creator’s inner being. His wildly oscillating emotions about Joan; his yearning to leave her and his chronic love for her; the pangs of sexual desire he experiences in her presence, even when their marriage is in ruins; the bitter frustration; the revulsion—all this is very close to home. So, too, his hypochondria, his sadistic pleasure in harmful teasing, and his instant (but passing) remorse. And so, too, his misgivings about his parenting skills, his sense that he’s somehow doing damage to the very beings he least wants to harm. Updike occasionally tried to distance himself from his doppelgänger—“there’s more fiction to those stories than would meet the eye”—but the attempt was always halfhearted and transparently disingenuous. There is one crucial distinction between the character and his creator: unlike Richard, Updike hoarded his experience as a husband and father for use in his writing. He observed with intent, monitoring his teetering home life with a loving, greedy eye, precisely aware of its value as material. His undoubted affection was accompanied by an opportunistic urge to make use of what he was witnessing. Conscious of a sliver of inner detachment, a gap between thought and feeling that made surreptitious surveillance possible, he felt guilty about it, another layer of regret and remorse.
The converse of his detachment was his fierce concentration when he was at work. David remembered going with a couple of his siblings to visit their father in his downtown Ipswich office sometime in the sixties. As they climbed the stairs they could hear the busy noise of his typewriter, a continuous clickety-click that ceased the instant they knocked. The children piled into the office and delivered some message or made some trivial request. Their father was perfectly happy to see them and faultlessly attentive; he wasn’t remotely grumpy about being disturbed. After a few minutes, their business settled, the kids trooped out again, shutting the door behind them—and before they reached the stairs, the clatter of the typewriter had resumed, rapid-fire, unbroken.
There were of course times when he was stymied, when his powers of concentration and magical fluency were unavailing. For example, he was unable to make progress on the novel about James Buchanan that he had begun researching and writing in London. Back home in Ipswich, he struggled, and finally gave up in the first weeks of the new decade. He later declared himself incapable of the “vigorous fakery” essential to historical fiction. Feeling he owed Knopf a novel, he turned to an “old friend” firmly rooted in realist detail: Harry Angstrom, last seen running through the streets of Brewer, fleeing complications and entanglements—“Ah: runs. Runs.” For nearly a decade, people had been asking what happened next; where did Rabbit run to? Updike began cooking up an answer, and in the first week of February 1970, he started work on the novel that became
Rabbit Redux
.
*
As he later put it, “the perpetual
presentness
of my former hero beckoned as a relief”; or, more simply, “Rabbit to the rescue.”
T
HE COURAGE TO
contemplate a sequel came in part from his success with serial installments of the Maples’ marital woes and Bech’s far-flung literary adventures.
Bech: A Book
, in the works for a year or so, appeared in June and, to Updike’s surprise, was greeted with voluble pleasure by reviewers, many of whom proclaimed it his best book. To Judith Jones he complained, only half seriously, “I am beginning to wince at the way they praise this little jeu at the expense of all the other books. Somehow, as everybody treats Bech so courteously, I am beginning to wonder if there isn’t indeed a Jewish Mafia.” The miseries of the Maples, meanwhile, were the subject of nakedly prurient fascination. With two thriving alter egos close by and in regular contact, it’s not particularly surprising that Harry, presenting himself as a character ripe for revival, should be invited to join them. Updike’s dismay at “all the revolutions in the air”—the same disquiet about the counterculture voiced in “The Hillies”—needed a fresh outlet. As a middle American, representative of the socioeconomic class Updike had left behind, and as a member of Nixon’s “silent majority”—the mass of ordinary, law-abiding citizens feeling overwhelmed by raucous jeers of dissent from a “vocal minority”—Harry became a “receptacle” for Updike’s concerns. Patriotic resentments, Updike realized, would sit more becomingly on a paunchy thirty-six-year-old Linotype operator scraping payments on an apple-green ranch house and a quarter-acre of lawn than on a trim millionaire author, recent resident of a London terrace with a $10,000-a-month price tag.