Authors: Adam Begley
Looking through Harry’s eyes, Updike surveyed a nation in torment, riven by rioting and assassination, anguished protest and uncomprehending reaction. Not surprisingly, the novel, by Updike’s own admission, is “violent and bizarre,” the violence and bizarrity invading Harry’s little world in the shape of Jill, an upper-class teenage runaway; and Skeeter, a black Vietnam veteran with a messianic streak, also on the run. Even before these two fugitives move into Harry’s Penn Villas ranch house, his home has been turned upside down; Janice, who’s been having an affair with Charlie Stavros, a savvy salesman at her father’s Toyota franchise, moves in with her lover, leaving her husband in sole charge of twelve-year-old Nelson—an augmentation of parental responsibility for which Harry is ill-equipped. His own father is aging, his mother slowly dying of Parkinson’s disease—“having the adventure now we’re all going to have,” his father says bleakly. Rabbit himself is sunk in apathy; he reacts but seems sadly incapable of asserting himself, his passivity in marked contrast to the tumult all around him.
It’s the summer of 1969, and man is bound for the moon; Harry and his father watch reruns of the Cape Canaveral blastoff in the Phoenix Bar, down the street from Verity Press, where they’ve worked together for a decade. In York, Pennsylvania, just fifty miles away, a race riot is in full swing; snipers target firemen; policemen patrol the streets. In Vietnam, the body count escalates; it’s one of the worst years of the war, with more than eleven thousand American casualties. On Martha’s Vineyard, Senator Edward Kennedy drives off a bridge in the wee hours and a young woman from Pennsylvania drowns. “If the novel seems hectic, so were the times,” Updike wrote decades later. “[T]he news had moved out of the television and into our laps, and there was no ignoring the war, the protest, the civil-rights movement, the moon shot, and the drugs and sexual promiscuity that were winning favor in the middle classes.” With the moon shot as framing metaphor (Harry launched into the outer space of radically new experience), the novel blends national trauma and domestic disarray so smoothly that they merge; the political and the personal are indistinguishable on every level—plot, characterization, and imagery all contribute to a highly suggestive confusion of categories. In her review of
Couples
, Diana Trilling had scolded Updike for using the tragic public events of the Kennedy era as mere backdrop: “We recognize them,” she wrote, “as the fashionable trappings of all contemporary fiction that pretends to big meanings.” With
Rabbit Redux
, no one could complain that history serves “only a decorative function.”
Rabbit and America, both drastically demoralized, need to be nursed back to health; “Pray for rebirth,” Harry’s ailing mother tells him.
*
Whether or not that happy result is actually achieved, there’s certainly a concerted effort to reeducate our hero by anatomizing the flaws of the nation he loves, beginning with slavery and the ongoing saga of racial oppression and exploitation, then veering into the horrors of Vietnam. The venue is the living room of the ranch house, and the cast of characters consists of Harry, Nelson, Jill, and Skeeter—another of Updike’s quartets. The waiflike Jill, a flower child who’s fled a drug problem and the stifling family manse in Stonington, Connecticut (though she could easily have been a hillie from Tarbox), moves in first, and makes herself at home in various agreeable ways. She’s Harry’s lover and his daughter; she’s a big sister for Nelson and the object of the boy’s lust-tinged affection. Then Skeeter, a trickster figure who’s jumped bail on a drug charge, crashes the party, promising to be gone in a few days; instead, casting a sinister spell, he stays on, even though Jill and Nelson both beg Harry to throw him out. Skeeter stays until disaster forces him to flee.
The living room teach-ins intended to raise Rabbit’s consciousness quickly descend into something much more emotionally complex and volatile, Skeeter ranting and raging with terrifying rhetorical skill. Each character is in an altered state: Harry mesmerized; Skeeter unhinged; Jill drugged and increasingly spacey; Nelson frantic with worry about Jill—until Rabbit is roused to banish him upstairs. Unable to resist the messianic power of Skeeter’s wild sermons, Harry fails to recognize Jill’s peril. The reader, too, is under a spell, lulled by fearless, majestically assured writing:
Physically, Skeeter fascinates Rabbit. The lustrous pallor of the tongue and palms and the soles of the feet, left out of the sun. Or a different kind of skin? White palms never tan either. The peculiar glinting lustre of his skin. The something so very finely turned and finished in the face, reflecting at a dozen polished points: in comparison white faces are blobs: putty still drying. The curious greased grace of his gestures, rapid and watchful as a lizard’s motions, free of mammalian fat. Skeeter in his house feels like a finely made electric toy; Harry wants to touch him but is afraid he will get a shock.
As the weeks go by, the political theater played out in the living room degenerates into an orgiastic, drug-fueled romp, with Harry and Skeeter high on marijuana, and Jill on mescaline, then heroin. The drugs are sacraments administered by Skeeter, the self-styled “black Jesus” arranging a psychedelic black Mass. As Rabbit, stoned, weirdly acquiescent, reads aloud from
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
, Skeeter “rapes” Jill.
*
Alone with Harry, Skeeter masturbates—again to the tune of the ex-slave’s narrative—and Harry has to smother a spark of homoerotic desire kindled by the naked man on his sofa: “His heart skips. He has escaped. Narrowly.” Nelson glimpses enough of this mayhem to send him sobbing to his room. It’s a brutal sequence, repellent and compelling in equal measure.
If
Rabbit Redux
is Updike’s most powerful novel—and I would confidently argue the case—part of that power comes from high stakes: the soul of the nation and the soul of the hero teetering in the balance. The psychodrama played out in Rabbit’s living room culminates in the shock of Jill’s degradation; her death in a house fire deliberately set by Peeping Tom neighbors outraged by glimpses of a black man having sex with a white woman occurs offstage, a mercy to the reader.
*
Violence was rare in Updike’s fiction up to this point; Jill’s fiery death is a sure sign that we’re all being pushed to extremes, the characters, the reader, the author; it’s a high-wire act for all concerned.
To Updike, a “vehement and agitated . . . undove” who harbored a half-hidden conservative streak and couldn’t kick the unfortunate habit of mocking civil rights rhetoric (as in “Marching Through Boston”), it must have felt as if his own soul were also in play. Harry’s “angry old patriotism” (as Updike remarked, “the rage and destructiveness boiling out of the television set belong to him”) is an echo of the “strange underdog rage” provoked in Updike by any mention of antiwar sentiment. The flag decal on the back window of Harry’s car finds its equivalent in the large American flag given to Updike by his family—“in loving exasperation”—as a Christmas present just before he started
Rabbit Redux
. When Harry tells Stavros, “It’s not all war I love . . . it’s
this
war. Because nobody else does. Nobody else understands it,” we’re catching a glimpse of Updike launching into the “good row” he had with Philip Roth (and many others) over Vietnam. The teach-ins were part of Updike’s own reeducation; he was putting his prejudices and political convictions to the test, subjecting them to the full force of a ferocious counterblast: Skeeter’s insidiously persuasive attack on racist America as a big pig wallowing in a muck of greed. Updike loathed this kind of critique. As we know, he bristled at any form of organized social protest: sit-ins, marches, rallies. He sometimes claimed that this aversion was the result of his apolitical fifties education, but the “immutability” of his Shillington childhood was surely at the root of it. Growing up safe and happy in a town that was “abnormally still,” in an unchanging family structure, taught him to associate happiness and well-being with stability. “To me,” he wrote in his memoirs, “authority was the Shillington High School faculty”—his father and his father’s colleagues. He was never going to agitate for the overthrow of institutions, or even wholeheartedly endorse social idealism; he couldn’t bring himself to believe that the status quo could be “lightly or easily altered.” And yet he gave the firebrand Skeeter a starring role (like Satan in
Paradise Lost
) and allowed him to vent his spleen with hypnotic eloquence. When the novel appeared, Updike told an interviewer that “[r]evolt, rebellion, violence, disgust are themselves there for a reason . . . and must be considered respectfully.” He gave equal billing to the radical and the reactionary, and equal weight to their grievances.
Neither patriotism nor protest gets the last word. The teach-ins end when Jill dies, victim of the flames engulfing the nation and Harry’s home. When it’s all over we’re left to sift through the ashes. As Updike put it, “The cost of the disruption of the social fabric was paid, as in the earlier novel, by a girl.” Or in Harry’s pithy formulation, linking the fire with Janice fumbling for their infant daughter in too-deep bathwater, “Her trip drowns babies; his burns girls.” Passive, hard-hearted, callously egocentric, Harry gives little sign of grief for his dead lover; the business of mourning Jill, of raging against her death, falls to Nelson, further complicating the bruised relations between father and son. If any good news can be said to come out the whole sorry mess, it’s that Harry—who sees himself as “the man in the middle”—has
listened
; his curiosity and his native openness have led him to entertain ideas that would otherwise be anathema to him.
For Updike, as for Harry, Skeeter was a revelation. Taking a black man into his home, offering him even temporary asylum, is a huge step for Harry. You would think that for Updike, who noted that he had “hardly met a black person” until he arrived at Harvard, creating a credible black character to play a major, catalytic role in the novel would have been similarly daunting. And yet the finished product bears no trace of authorial jitters. On the contrary, there are three notable black characters, all presented with aplomb: Skeeter; Buchanan, who works at Verity Press with Harry and his father; and Buchanan’s friend Babe, a singer-cum-hooker.
Invited by Buchanan, Rabbit ventures into Jimbo’s Friendly Lounge, and discovers that he’s the only white man in the bar:
Black to him is just a political word but these people really are, their faces shine of blackness turning as he enters, a large soft white man in a sticky gray suit. Fear travels up and down his skin, but the music of the great green-and-mauve-glowing jukebox called Moonmood slides on, and the liquid of laughter and tickled muttering resumes flowing; his entrance was merely a snag. Rabbit hangs like a balloon waiting for a dart; then his elbow is jostled and Buchanan is beside him.
“Come meet some soul,” says Buchanan, and leads him to a booth where Babe and Skeeter sit, Babe smoking “a yellow cigarette that requires much sucking in and holding down and closing of the eyes and sighing.” It’s hard to resist quoting from the twenty-page scene; it’s a virtuoso turn, magnificently conceived and executed. From a narrative point of view, the aim is to connect Harry and Jill and Skeeter, and to unload Jill, who’s been staying with Babe, onto Harry. But the details of the encounter are so gorgeous, the interaction between the black characters so tense and intricate, that the reader never notices that the plot is being eased forward. Babe is old and wise and tragic, in touch with psychic powers (she reads Rabbit’s hand, extolling the virtues of his thumb—“extremely plausible,” she calls it); Skeeter is young and fierce, taunting the others with lacerating wit; and Buchanan is a conciliator, a patient negotiator working his angle. Updike was indulging in a bit of fun with Buchanan, namesake of the pragmatic president from Pennsylvania whose story had stymied him: “Having told a number of interviewers that I was writing a book about Buchanan,” he later explained, “I painted him black and put him in, too.” Like Rabbit’s thumb, Buchanan is extremely plausible—and appealing, whereas Skeeter is plainly nasty and dangerous.
Daring to make a black man not just a villain but a would-be Antichrist; daring to stage the rape of a white girl by a black man; or simply daring to dip into a black man’s point of view—in the morally strident sixties, in the heyday of the Black Power movement, Updike was taking a risk, as demonstrated by the fate of William Styron’s
The Confessions of Nat Turner
. Styron chose to write in the voice of Nat Turner, the messianic leader of a bloody slave rebellion, and though his novel was warmly received when it was first published in 1967 (it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), a year or so later it was loudly and repeatedly condemned as racist, a tag that stuck for decades. Though defended by his friend James Baldwin, Styron was vilified in print by a group of black writers and intellectuals; he was pronounced “psychologically sick” and “morally senile”; he was accused of having “a vile racist imagination”—partly because he was a white southerner assuming the persona of a key figure in African American history, and partly because he invented a sexually charged relationship between a black man and a white teenage girl he eventually murders. Updike was well aware of this bitter, much-publicized controversy. He’d read the book when it came out and found it “laborious.” When he was six months into the writing of
Rabbit Redux
, he told Maxwell about a long subway ride from the National Institute of Arts and Letters on the Upper West Side down to Fourteenth Street, during which he endured “a very eloquent and intelligent negro critic shouting in my ear, above the roar, about how bad Styron’s book was and how much ‘coercive self-righteousness’ was in the air now.” A load of coercive self-righteousness (what today we would call political correctness) could easily have landed on Updike had Skeeter, and the graphic descriptions of Skeeter having sex with Jill, been misconstrued.
Updike thought Rabbit’s “reluctant crossing of the color line” was a sign of progress. And so it was, in more ways than one. Anatole Broyard, the daily reviewer for
The New York Times
, was unstinting in his praise of Updike’s accomplishment: