Authors: Adam Begley
Harry’s obsession with Annabelle is usually explained as a symptom of his unacknowledged (in fact, loudly denied) guilt over Becky’s death. Ruth’s pregnancy begins, so to speak, when Janice lets her baby girl sink into the bathwater—the symmetry is essential to the internal logic of the novel. And Rabbit’s refusal to believe that a pregnant Ruth would go through with a threatened abortion gives birth, metaphorically, to a phantom daughter. Until Rabbit catches sight of Annabelle at the beginning of
Rabbit Is Rich
, he has to make do with surrogates: enter the doomed Jill, whose fiery death still haunts him. But could the obsession with a fantasy daughter also be the product of the author’s own long-term guilt—could Updike have been thinking back to his lover’s abortion fifteen years earlier? Did Updike, like Harry, moon over might-have-beens, plotting the hypothetical future of a child who was never born? I very much doubt it. Rabbit’s baby daughter died on paper on a summer afternoon in 1959, at the Penningtons’ farmhouse in Vermont. Once the work-weary young author came downstairs and announced to his family that he had “drowned the baby,” his hero’s obsessive yearning for a daughter was inevitable. It’s a literary conceit, not some kind of slip an amateur shrink might decode.
Annabelle threads through the tetralogy, in utero in the first volume and nearly a spinster in the last. As long as she’s only possibly, wishfully, Rabbit’s daughter, she’s pure potential. She’s his most reliable source of hope and wonder. Conservative, nostalgic, occasionally morbid, acutely sensitive to signs of national decline, Harry is nonetheless eager to look on the bright side, to detect glimmers of renewal. This complex attitude, the mix of elegy and longing, is on display in his late-night meditation on the unexpected, awkward beauty of Pru, Nelson’s pregnant wife-to-be, a flight of poetic prose that shows again how far Updike can push Harry’s point of view:
She breathed that air he’d forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.
Pru’s pale loveliness shines out against this grim backdrop, a harbinger of good things to come; at the novel’s end she will place in Harry’s lap what he’s been waiting for without knowing it: not a daughter but a granddaughter.
Updike thought
Rabbit Is Rich
the “happiest” novel of the tetralogy, despite “shadows” such as Harry’s elegiac brooding on dying and the dead. He gallantly gave credit for the upbeat mood to his new marriage; “an invigorating change of mates,” he explained, cleared his head and sharpened his talent. Martha, he also suggested, was the inspiration for “Janice’s lusty rejuvenation”; Rabbit’s sex life improved with his creator’s. And once he was truly settled in Georgetown, the shock of divorce and alimony receding, he allowed himself to feel rich like Rabbit. Both were content, and the result was happy endings all around, the author’s exuberance spilling over.
Updike’s happiness, his own bourgeois bliss, swelled with the tremendous reception of the novel, which was published in late September 1981. Most reviewers loved it. Mark Feeney, writing in
The
Boston Globe
, pronounced it “unquestionably” Updike’s finest novel; loyal champion Anatole Broyard judged it “the best book I’ve ever read about an ordinary man.” Even skeptics came around. In
The New York Times Book Review
, a grudging Roger Sale listed a series of caveats before concluding that “
Rabbit Is Rich
is the first book in which Updike has fulfilled the fabulous promise he offered with
Rabbit
,
Run
and
The Centaur
twenty years ago.” As if to ratify the critics’ verdict, the book scooped up all three major prizes: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the Pulitzer. This comprehensive triumph naturally stirred up some ill will. Jonathan Yardley of
The
Washington Post
, a rare dissenter among reviewers, was dismayed to see so many prizes lavished on a “thoroughly bad novel”; he argued that it put on display “all of Updike’s worst characteristics” and that the author was sneering at the common man rather than celebrating him. “What comes through most vividly,” Yardley wrote, “are Updike’s condescension and contempt.”
It was easy to ignore Yardley, especially when the eminent British critic V. S. Pritchett, writing in
The
New Yorker
, declared Updike “both a poet and a historian” and the three Rabbit books a “monumental portrayal of provincial and domestic manners.” The sense of a cumulative achievement was especially gratifying to Updike, whose book-a-year rate of production sometimes made his fiction seem like units rolling off the assembly line; any praise that suggested a substantial, enduring accomplishment was particularly pleasing.
On January 28, 1982, when he should have been at the New York Public Library in Manhattan receiving the first of his three prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, Updike was in Los Angeles being sued for libel. This was the farcical climax of a slow and tortuous litigation that began six years earlier with a seemingly innocuous
New Yorker
review of Doris Day’s “as-told-to” autobiography. What got Updike into trouble was a passing reference to “a swindler named Rosenthal,” whose schemes had swallowed up buckets and buckets of the star’s money. Jerome B. Rosenthal had been Day’s lawyer, and his swindle was well documented: Day sued Rosenthal for legal malpractice and fraud, and won a $26 million judgment, at the time the largest civil judgment in the state of California. In addition to being a swindler, Rosenthal was almost pathologically litigious; he went after Updike despite the blatant futility of his suit. His legal shenanigans were the factual basis of “Bech Pleads Guilty,” in which Bech is sued in L.A. for calling a disgraced Hollywood agent an “arch-gouger.” But it’s worth noting that Updike waited fifteen years before repackaging the courtroom drama of
Rosenthal v. The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
as a short story, a rare show of restraint. The whole episode was a nightmare enactment of the “legal assault” he had feared from Alex Bernhard.
When the case came to trial before L.A. Superior Court in early January, Updike and Martha flew out to California. They stayed in a wedge-shaped room in the Hotel Bonaventure, and spent the first week sightseeing, Martha enjoying the warm, sunny weather and the La Brea Tar Pits; John, the Forest Lawn Cemetery. Updike was disappointed that the only living movie star he spotted was Goldie Hawn. Two more weeks were spent observing the operatic comedy of the plaintiff’s lawyer’s bumbling bombast. Martha eventually flew home to take care of eleven-year-old Ted, whom she’d left behind in wintry New England, but Updike stayed on to testify in his own defense. This in spite of bad news from Plowville: his mother had been sent to the hospital with severe chest pains. After formally asserting his innocence in the witness box—loudly and carefully, with no trace of a stammer—he caught the red-eye to Philadelphia, arriving at dawn and making his way to the farmhouse to feed the horse, the dog, and the herd of semiferal cats before visiting his mother on the ward. More happy endings were brewing: Liz rushed down to take over the feeding of the animals and to bring a rapidly recovering Linda home from the hospital; and back in California the jury found unanimously for the defense.
Between the trial in L.A. and the medical emergency in Plowville, Updike had been away from his desk for an entire month.
At the National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony, Judith Jones read out to the assembled guests a letter from Updike apologizing for his absence and expressing his gratitude to his editor and to Knopf in general. The letter also thanked Martha, “not only for her many reassurances and suggestions . . . but for standing foremost in that band of intimates who surround with forbearance the homely and sometimes hopeless-seeming labor of concocting fiction.” Last, he thanked his characters “for coming to life as best they could and for enduring in resilient style the indignities I had planned for them.” This eccentric courtesy was not the only sign that, for him, Harry, Janice, Nelson, et al. lived and breathed. At the end of
Rabbit Is Rich
, Rabbit moved into a new house; Updike, shortly after finishing the novel, announced to his mother that he and Martha were doing the same. They were negotiating the purchase of a property in the Gold Coast town of Beverly Farms—no truck route outside the front door this time, he promised; the rumble of traffic would no longer disturb a visiting parent. The new house, he told her, was “a largish white edifice with a distant look at the sea.”
An adult human consists of sedimentary layers. We shed more skins than we can count, and are born each day to a merciful forgetfulness. We forget most of our past but embody all of it.
—Introduction to
Rabbit Angstrom
(1995)
Updike spotted a pattern in his comings and goings, and drew attention to it in the foreword to his third collection of essays and reviews, the mammoth
Hugging the Shore
(1983). When his first marriage broke up, he noted, “I had left a big white house with a view of saltwater”; now, after “an inland interim of reconsolidation”—a snappy euphemism for twenty months of Boston semi-bachelorhood followed by six years with Martha in unassuming Georgetown—he was back where he started: “I live again in a big white house with a view of saltwater.”
*
This was a false symmetry; the new property, Haven Hill, was in fact a mansion, much grander and more imposing than the handsome yet utterly unpretentious house on the edge of the salt marshes where he’d lived with Mary. Built as a summer “cottage” at the turn of the century by a Boston banker, Franklin Haven, the aptly named Haven Hill was hidden away on a craggy wooded hilltop; except for its “distant look at the sea,” it was sheltered from the world, a private place for private comforts. To the few who saw it, gleaming and magnificent, it signaled wealth, status, and the safety of secure privilege. When Updike thought of it during the long months before the papers were signed and the property was his, the image in his mind was of “a pale white castle in a fairy tale.”
On a rainy Saturday morning in early June 1982, carrying on an old tradition, he formally marked the beginning of his residence by erecting a mailbox at the foot of the steep, curving driveway, within sight of a small pond. Still thrifty in his plush new surroundings, he invested in yet another rubber stamp to personalize his stationery; henceforth his correspondence would bear in blue ink an address that gave little away: 675 Hale Street, Beverly Farms, MA 01915.
Joyce Carol Oates, who’d also been an early visitor to the house in Georgetown, stopped by about four months after the planting of the mailbox. She and her husband arrived by car from Boston, a journey of a little less than an hour. At the top of the drive, they were confronted with a sight so extravagant that only a reference to an American masterpiece could do it justice. “As we drove up the lane,” Oates wrote in a letter to Updike, “I found myself thinking not of poor Gatsby’s house but of Tom and Daisy’s—the splendid white mansion overlooking the bay—at which Gatsby stared.”
*
If Oates was teasing him, he took it well, writing back to say that there was indeed a green light at the end of Marblehead Neck, visible across Salem Sound, there to remind them of ineffable glory and things unobtainable.
Haven Hill made a similarly strong impression on other friends. An irreverent golfing buddy liked to call it The Palazzo. The mere mention of upscale Beverly Farms was enough for Michael Arlen to tease him: “Now that I think of it[,] wasn’t 675 Hale the house once occupied by General Patton . . . ?” Austin Briggs, Updike’s Harvard classmate, was reminded of Xanadu in
Citizen Kane
. Briggs and his wife were served dinner in the gigantic dining room. “We ate at a table that was much too large for only four people,” he remembered. “As the daylight faded, we were left with only two or three candles, and I could scarcely see the walls of the room, or even, almost, the faces of the others.” Briggs marveled at the formality and grandeur of his surroundings, and at the distance Updike had traveled from Shillington. Like the others, Briggs associated Haven Hill with unreal privilege, a fantastical remove from ordinary life. Sheer size (the Plowville farmhouse could have fitted comfortably inside, several times over) had something to do with it, and so did the unusual access: the only way to get to the Updikes’ ten-acre property was to cross the railroad tracks that run between Boston and Cape Ann. On one side of the tracks was the hilly strip of coastal land where Haven Hill, from its lofty perch, looked out to the southeast over Misery Island, Salem Sound, and the Atlantic; on the other side of the tracks—the wrong side of the tracks—was the rest of America. Although the railroad cut him off, it kept him in touch, too, as he remarked in an essay about the Boston commuter line:
My own house, up a wooded hill, trembles when the train passes, and the effect is of a caress, a gentle reminder, like the sight of airplane lights circling in over Massachusetts Bay toward Logan Airport, that an urban congeries lurks over the arboreal horizon.
The trains also provided “a rumor of motion, a suggestion of potential escape”—not that one would want to escape from a house blessed with an “arboreal horizon.”
Why was the man who liked middles, the self-proclaimed bard of “middling, hidden, troubled America,” living in a part of the North Shore known as the Gold Coast, “a bucolic enclave” of elegant summer places built by “quiet Boston money”? Updike disliked reckless expenditure and admired things practical and convenient; why would he move into a huge house that was awkward to maintain and hard to heat—especially if only three, then two, people were going to live there? (Martha’s older sons were already away at boarding school; Teddy lived with his mother and stepfather until the mid-eighties, before he, too, went off to school.) The Ipswich crowd and some of his own children believed that Updike had been largely content in the Georgetown house, truck route or no truck route, that it suited him, that he didn’t want to move at all, let alone to a mansion. They said that Haven Hill was the kind of property Martha wanted to own, and it’s true that she threw herself into decorating and tending the extensive gardens with a gusto that suggested a full measure of pride. But even if buying a grandiose house was his wife’s idea, even if he bowed only reluctantly to her wishes, it was still a joint decision, and the money that paid for it was his. And as it turned out, Beverly Farms suited him just as well as Georgetown had.
On the second floor of the new house, over the kitchen, were the old servant quarters, a corridor with a pair of small rooms on each side; he parceled out his professional life between them. In the largest he built a bookcase to house all his own books, including two sets of the collected Knopf first editions, one with the dust jacket, the other without; on a small rolling table with folding wings sat his typewriter. In another room was a word processor acquired a year after he moved in, for the typing of second drafts. There was a reading room crammed with books written by other people. And finally there was a room with the large green metal army desk that had been the centerpiece of his office in downtown Ipswich. To the left of the desk, a window looked out over treetops (the arboreal horizon) to the Atlantic Ocean. Having grasped the beauty of the setup in this last room—perfect for the longhand composition of first drafts—Oates wrote, “I envy John the metaphorical resources of Infinity at his left hand.”
The literary production line housed in the suite of offices ran full tilt. The hiccups of the early seventies, the false starts and dead ends and emotional turmoil, were now a fading memory. Even before leaving Georgetown, he’d already settled back into his book-a-year rhythm. In the eighties and nineties, in his warren of little rooms, his output peaked and never again faltered: in twenty-seven years at Haven Hill, he wrote thirteen novels; his memoirs; nearly a hundred short stories; more than 250 poems; some three hundred reviews; and countless odds and ends, the essays and miscellaneous scraps of commissioned prose all scrupulously collected in the hefty omnium-gatherum volumes produced like clockwork every eight years.
This unstoppable flow of writing was the result of the rededication he promised himself when he set up housekeeping with Martha. With her help, he constructed a well-defended life
*
—a life designed for devotion to the written word (and to golf). The transformation was gradual, the six years in Georgetown a time of transition. Oates, when she visited him in the house on West Main Street, thought he resembled a character in an Updike story. She was right. The Georgetown house was a quirky, attractive old place—noisy, unspectacular, but convenient and friendly, the sort of place where one could imagine the Maples living. The rumble of the trucks was like an admission of guilt, an explanation, so to speak, for the incompletely obscured traces of wreckage, of harm done. The rumble also warned of more trouble to come—a danger that couldn’t be ruled out, given this particular character’s track record. His flaws were on display, flagged by the presence of family number two (three boys living apart from their father) and the periodic intrusion of the children from a defunct first marriage.
By the end of the Georgetown years, the flaws were harder to spot. His reputation boosted by the triumphant success of
Rabbit Is Rich
, Updike had perfected a convincing, engaging impersonation of an eminent man of letters. Here was a mask he could present to the world—and the world, its expectations met, would signal its approval by keeping its distance. He gave a bravura performance playing John Updike in a BBC documentary,
What Makes Rabbit Run?
Filmed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts during the fall of 1981 (while he was still negotiating the purchase of Haven Hill), the documentary was aired on public television in the United States nearly two years later. Relaxed, self-assured, reasonable, and painstakingly modest, Updike floats through his scenes dispensing low-key bonhomie, equally at home wherever the camera finds him: in the Knopf offices in midtown Manhattan with Judith Jones (slim, elegant, evidently attuned to her author’s charms); in an auditorium, reading his work to rapturous applause; undaunted on the set of
The Dick Cavett Show
; stuttering innocuously in a bookstore as he signs a fan’s copy of
Rabbit Is Rich
; in Plowville with Linda, who is looking handsome but somewhat glazed, as though the camera lights are too bright for her; munching on parsley in the garden of the Georgetown house, and inspecting with Martha the last of the kohlrabi crop. Reviewing
What Makes Rabbit Run?
and taking note of its hero’s blandly affable demeanor,
New York Times
critic John Corry concluded that the “television Updike” was a “respectable, uncomplicated fellow”:
What is clearest in the documentary is that Mr. Updike is blessed with easy charm and possessed by quiet conviction. . . . If Mr. Updike has demons he does not show them; if he has Angst he keeps it to himself. In a culture where self-exposure knows no bounds, he places his psyche under wraps.
It was perfectly obvious to Corry, as it was to any Updike reader watching the film, that the casual, seemingly reflexive modesty (“I feel in most respects that I am a pretty average person”) was undisguised self-fashioning. The lack of guile was in itself appealing; it was as though he were saying, with a wink,
As long as they’re filming me, I might as well put my best foot forward.
Offered a chance to present himself to posterity in a flattering light, he cheerfully grabbed it, bequeathing to us the dutiful son, the genial colleague, the bashful public speaker, the loyal, frolicsome husband.
This polished new persona pushed back into the dim reaches of the past all previous incarnations, so that earlier selves, even relatively recent ones, became the stuff of legend. The humble origins of the hick from rural Pennsylvania were now ancient history; traces could still be unearthed—he could be spotted putting the storm windows up on his mother’s isolated farmhouse—but there was something comical in thinking that this distinguished gent once actually lived there, back in the days when the house lacked indoor plumbing. Gone were the ragged sweaters and shaggy haircuts of the bohemian interlude in Ipswich. Updike did his best to quash rumors of bad behavior:
Couples
was reinvented as a novel about “friendship” rather than adultery; the autobiographical basis of the Maples stories was called into question—he claimed he had lost track of what was real and what was invented, and that there was more fiction in the stories than met the eye. As for the guilty disarray of the Boston days—the vulnerability of the emotional bigamist dithering between wife and mistress—those ugly cracks had been papered over. The psyche may have been under wraps, decorously out of sight, but the “sedimentary layers” remained accessible; he could still excavate them for fictional purposes, a process he referred to as “personal archeology.”
Also out of sight were his children, who felt less than entirely welcome at the grand mansion on the hill. Back in Georgetown, they had dropped in when they liked; Beverly Farms was another matter. According to Michael, “That was when you really got the impression that a casual stop-by was not something that could happen. You needed to announce your intention to come by.” It was their father’s house, but it certainly was not their family home.
There’s no question that Updike loved his children. Over the years, his letters to his mother were punctuated with acutely observed reports of their comings and goings. He watched them with a full heart. And they never doubted his affection, even though they recognized that in the Martha era, the hours he spent with them were strictly rationed. As Michael put it, “It felt like we’re his mistress and he’s sneaking away from Martha to see us.” But he was also sneaking away from his work, the realm Martha fiercely guarded. She took responsibility for limiting intrusions and was blamed by friends and family for cutting off access. Filter out the children’s resentment of a stepmother and the old friends’ resentment of a second wife, and all that’s left of this complaint is the bedrock fact of the last three decades of Updike’s life: his professional activities—not just the writing but the single-handed management of a vast, ever-expanding backlist of work published all over the globe—took up a huge amount of time. Merely keeping up with his business correspondence would have been a full-time job for anyone less fluent and less focused. And he needed time not only to write but also to let his imaginings percolate, time to spend on routine, relatively mindless chores such as spreading mulch, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, shoveling snow. A certain ruthlessness was required to divest the day of unwanted distractions, to keep business matters and family matters and the daily press of niggling demands at bay. Martha wanted to teach him to say no. Failing that, she was happy to say no for him. Her unyielding rigor in this respect could hardly escape notice, but it was her husband’s will to work that invited her to take up the role of gatekeeper—the ruthlessness was as much his as hers.
*
It was during his very brief appearance in
What Makes Rabbit Run?
that David, looking pained, stated the case with unhappy precision: his father decided early on that his writing would “take precedence over his relations with real people.”