Updike's First Two

On "The Poorhouse Fair" (1959) and "Rabbit, Run" (1960)

Harold Bloom called Updike ‘a minor novelist with a major style’ adding: ‘he is a quite beautiful and very considerable stylist [but] he specializes in the easier pleasures.’ Which, ouch. Patricia Lockwood is less unkind, though her bravura long review-essay certainly doesn’t spare Updike for his representation of women, the cringe and objectifying excession of much of his sexual writing. But she sees the merit in him, or in bits of him. She’s also clear that he’s yesterday’s man, a writer who has fallen from the literary eminence and importance of the last century. She quotes David Foster Wallace’s ‘diagnosis of how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation’ in 1997:

Penis with a thesaurus is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has learned to read. Today, Updike has fallen even further, still in the pantheon but marked by an embarrassed asterisk: died of pussy-hounding. No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter. Offensive criticism of him is often reductive, while defensive criticism has a strong flavour of people-are-being-mean-to-my-dad.

I read a lot of Updike over the years, for better and worse. A little while ago I bought a number of the Library of America editions of Updike’s work: two volumes of his short stories, Novels 1986-90 (that is, Roger’s Version and Rabbit at Rest) and the above, Novels 1959-65, his first four published titles. I have quite a few Updikes in paperback, but I like Library of America’s editions, and this gives me the chance to read through the whole of his oeuvre in order.

I hadn't previously read Updike's debut The Poorhouse Fair (1959). I now have and ... golly but it's bad. It's actively bad. It's actually very bad. The thing is: going straight from that to rereading Rabbit, Run (1960), I was struck by how good the second novel is, even better than I remember. I'm not sure I can think of another writer with such a precipitous step-up from bad first to extraordinary second novel, really. Perhaps Conrad going from the clumsy mess of Almayer's Folly to the masterpieceship of Lord Jim (though he stepped-up via the intermediate An Outcast of the Islands).

Poorhouse Fair is, in a thin sort of way, science-fiction, set as it is in a near-future (that ism, 1970s) socialist America. There are glancing asides referencing this, but nothing so substantial as worldbuilding, and the actual paraphernalia of the tale is all solidly 1950s: old people at a state-run retirement facility, moping about and kvetching at the officious young administrator who rules them, Stephen Conner. It looks like their fair, at which the poorhouse's inhabitants sell food, trinkets and quilts to people from the local town, might have to be called off because of the weather. In the end, though, it goes ahead. The oldsters moan about various things: food, chairs, modern society, a diseased cat, an escaped parrot, how Conner isn't as good as the previous administrator, Mendelssohn. A delivery driver, backing his truck in through the poorhouse's narrow gateway, knocks part of the wall down. Various petty grievances come to a head at this, and a number of the old folk pick up some of these stones and chuck them at Conner, but in a pretty desultory way, and he's not badly hurt.

The book opens with old people grumbling because Conner has added name-tags to their porch chairs, to prevent them bickering over who sits where, a development they dislike. It ends with a long passage comprised of the various unattributed voices of visitors at the fair talking, decontextualised and juxtaposed so as to provide a train of jaw-jaw nonsequiturs. The unelected leader, or at least voice of moral authority in the home, is nonagenerian Joe Hook. Joe talks a lot about God and Conner talks a lot about atheistical materialist utilitarianism and somewhere in the middle, Updike implies, with a certain hoofing obviousness, is the possibility of something J + C Christlike, something that could finally leave the Jewishly-named Mendelssohn behind. It is a possibility of redemption and forgiveness on which the novel never quite delivers. The interpretive superstructure the novel invites us to erect upon its base is, I'm afraid, as schematic and arid as this.

In fact there are two levels of badness here. One is that Updike is not yet quite in charge of his instrument. The book, though short, is dull, stilted, not so much badly paced as not paced at all. The characters are sketched-in, unmemorable and in some cases indistinguishable. The dialogue (generally handled pretty well in Updike's maturer novels) is here mannered and awkward. Hook speaks in a creaky old-time preacher idiom, his diction hyphenated to notate its slowness (‘we must bide our time, for any size-able mo-tion on our part will make Conner that much more in-secure’ [8] etc) like TikTok the Clockwork Man from Oz. Conner himself speaks in excerpts from an ongoing university lecture on humanism. Worse of all, Updike's descriptive prose, the jewel in his fully-formed writer's crown, here feels strained:

The river's apparent whiteness was dissolved in its evident transparency; the contours of bars of silt and industrial waste could easily be read beneath the gliding robe of water. A submerged bottle reflected sunlight. Occasionally, among the opaque fans of corrugation spread by each strand of shore growth, the heavy oblong of a catfish could be spied drifting. [5]

This passage can't make up its mind as to whether the water is ‘white’ (‘opaque’) or an ‘evident transparency’. ‘Gliding robe’ seems to me unconvincing (in what sense do robes glide, after all?) and ‘heavy oblong’ isn't quite on the nose as a description of a catfish. Worst of all is that underlying rhythm, a sort of pastiche blank-verse, as it might be:

A submerged bottle reflected sunlight.
Occasionally, among the opaque fans
Of corrugation spread by each strand of
Shore growth, the heavy oblong of a catfish
Could be spied, drifting.

... and so on. The odour of weak poetry in little magazines, here.

To turn from this to the opening few pages of Rabbit Run is to breathe fresh air and brilliance. Here Harry Angstrom stopping by on his way home from work to watch some kids playing the game he used to play, as a kid (and at which he excelled: the only thing in his life of which he can say that):

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up. ... There are six of them and one of him.

The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. ‘Hey!’ he shouts in pride. ‘Luck,’ one of the kids says.

This is much more immediate and kinetic writing, sharp and lovely. The continuous present tense helps (perhaps more striking and obviously experimental in 1960 than it is today, when every third novel employs it) but also Updike manages to nail his Joycean staccato sometimes-verbless sentences to relevant and on-the-bounce detail. The quasi-poetic estrangements work better too, are better chosen: the crotch of the basketball hoop, the ladylike whisper of its net. It's not over-obvious, but neither is it far-fetched or baffling.

This is another, larger sense in which Poorhouse Fair fails, I think. It's a novel about America (that's fair enough, of course). But the way it tropes that country is as a decrepitude: a nation declining into the vale of years, with nothing but dusty-souled materialists and socialists to inherit its promise. This is, I'd say, just wrong. I mean, wrong as a way of characterising 1950s USA, aesthetically as much as anything. Nabokov's Lolita (published four years earlier in Paris, although not in the States until 1967) tropes America as a luscious nymphet, but that's an outsider's, a European's perspective. Updike in Rabbit, Run lights on something cleverer: America is not a 90-something godfearing old geezer, but neither is it an alluring teenager. It's an adult, but one who hasn't properly grown-up. America is, in other words, a superannuated adolescent, inhabiting a big and powerful body, and with considerable charm and sex appeal, but lacking self-discipline and commitment to duty. America is religious, but its religion is window-dressing for a libidinal fixation, a facile eroticisation of the sublime. America has energy and passion but no capacity for endurance or self-sacrifice. America, when push meets shove, will do a runner.

Updike conceived this novel as a twofer: Harry, the Rabbit, was one half of the American yin-yang; the nervy, pop-eyed, randy, make-a-break-for-it type. The other half is the centre of The Centaur (1963), Updike's next novel: a book about a head-down, get-on-with-it, dutiful stayer and worker called George Caldwell (based on Updike's own father), the carthorse as opposed to the rabbit. But of the two it was Rabbit endured, engendering four sequels. The Caldwell type slides out of Updikean view.

One reason for that might be adventitious: Updike decided, it seems on a mere whim, to style The Centaur as a Ulysses-type emulsion of mundane realism and Greek mythology, swapping with ungainly brio between finely written mimesis and awkwardly gauche hey-prithee classicism of gods and monsters, and that's a gimmick tiresome enough the first time, and impossible to imagine extending into multiple sequels. But another, more pressing reason is presumably that Updike just figured: hey, my nation really is more Rabbit than Centaur, an apperception that reflected variously Vietnam-era travails, 1970s-inflation, Reaganite flight from reality into cinematic nationalist fantasy and then Clinton, a very Rabbit-like character, I'd say; and not just because of his sexual incontinence. No prizes for guessing which way Rabbit would have voted in 2024.

With Rabbit, Run, though, all this is ahead of us. Rabbit starts by going home, taking a look at his wife Janice, pregnant with their second child in their poky apartment, realising he can't stand any of it and just going. A bravura 25-page episode sees him get in his car and just driving away, looping round through small-town east-coast America. This running-away is unplanned and directionless, so Harry eventually makes his way back to his home, in Brewer, Pennsylvania (not, though, before imparting to the reader a sense of the scale of America, its topography of endless tiny town and vast intervening spaces). He doesn't return to his wife, though; instead he stays with his old basketball coach, through him meeting Ruth, a single woman and part-time prostitute with whom later Harry moves in. His pastor tries to broker a reconciliation with Janice, but for much of the novel Rabbit stays with Ruth. There's lots of ecstatic sex, which, even more so than their running, is of course what rabbits are famous for. Though 1950s publishing wasn't ready to put out a novel entitled Rabbit, Fuck I suppose.

Having lost his original employment Rabbit gets a job as a rich widow's gardener. This in turn enables some descriptive prose that is, really, Updikery at its best:

In Mrs Smith's acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpacked their trumpets. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad-leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets running brokenly made the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone-flecked, horny, raggedly patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia grow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebud prunings that cling together like infuriating ankle-clawing clumps. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty-eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer in the bus he smells the warm ashes. [242]

A leap-up from Poorhouse, this, with some lovely, spot-on word-choices (‘suds’!); and the novel is full of similar vividnesses. Playing golf, Harry's attention is taken by ‘the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag.’ He goes to the hospital to attend the birth of his baby daughter—it's a Catholic hospital, as many are in the States: ‘The hospital light is bright and blue and shadowless. “Angstrom,” he tells the nun behind the typewriter. “I think my wife is here.” Her plump washerwoman's face is rimmed like a cupcake with scalloped linen.’ [290].

Here Rabbit, leaving church, walks down the street with the pastor's attractive young wife, whom, he thinks, might have a crush on him (she doesn't, I think; but it's Rabbit's consciousness we're inside): ‘Sunshine quivers through the trees ... along unshaded sections of the pavement it leans down with a broad dry weight. Lucy pulls off her hat and shakes her hair; in the broad gaps of sun her face, his shirt, feel white, white; the rush of motors, the squeak of a tricycle, the touch of a cup and saucer inside a house are sounds conveyed to him as if along a bright steel bar. As they walk along he trembles in light that seems her light’ [328]. What makes this kind of deliberately vivified style different from the technically similar, differently focused other kind of vivified style for which Updike is famous, or infamous—I mean his baroquely cod-Keatsian descriptions of fucking and vaginas, the ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’ stuff Patricia Lockwood so brilliantly critiqued, in the essay quoted above—is that this stuff is clearer, actually, on the way an individual like Rabbit can only conceptualise religious transcendence in quasi-erotic terms. It's the ecstasy of Saint Theresa, but mundanified to middle-class 1950s America: the light, and the fuckable woman, yes, but also the clink of teacups as you sit down for a civilised chat with your Episcopalian pastor, or the kid's trinity-wheeled ride that signifies the family that fucking eventually entails. I know Updike sometimes takes flak for his trademark stylistic richness, and it can't be denied that this sometimes trespasses into a sticky over-egging (in U and I Nicholson Baker parodies it without mercy: ‘the blank seemed, in its blankety blankness, and blanketed blinkness, almost blonky in the late afternoon blonk’). But when it works it really works, and most of it works gorgeously here. It is a mode of excess, stylistically speaking, it's true; and sometimes that excess slides into a kind of egregious excessiveness, an excessiveness for the sake of excessiveness. But it's also a mode designed to respond to a perception of the beauties of existence as themselves excessive, as the world itself loading its every rift with ore, and there's something marvellous about that.

It's not all good, Rabbit, Run, mind. Fluent and compelling though most of it is, parts of this novel are raggeder. Instead of sticking with the main character's p.o.v. Updike occasionally shifts focus to interiorised passages from Ruth's or Janice's perspective, or even from Jack Eccles's, the pastor's; these step-aways are jolting and more distracting than enriching. It's important to Updike's purposes that young Rabbit, for all his various delinquencies, be likeable, since young Rabbit is ‘America’, young and randy and not very forward-thinking but, you know: fun, nice, life, youth, beautiful. He's not, though. Likeable, I mean. He's a kind of monster of cock-prompted ego and thoughtlessness, which means Updike has to keep prodding the reader with passages like this:

“Oh all the world loves you,” Ruth says suddenly. “What I wonder if why?”
“I'm lovable,” he says.
“I mean why the hell you. What's so special about you?”
“I'm a saint,” he says. “I give people faith.” Eccles has told him this Once, with a laugh, probably meaning it sarcastically. Rabbit took it to heart. He never would have thought of it himself. He doesn't think that much about what he gives other people. [249]

This doesn't quite carry, though. We don't, I think, love Rabbit as much as Updike loves Rabbit; just as we're entitled to respond to Updike's famous description of his homeland as a conspiracy to make you happy with ... depends on the you, though, buster, don't you think?

There's something a bit blooey about the ending, too. The denouement is plotted around Rabbit leaving the woman he left his wife for, Ruth. He goes back to Janice because she's given birth to their daughter; and having gone back can't retrace his steps to Ruth. One reason for this is, knowing that (as a former prostitute) Ruth often performed oral sex on men, Rabbit insists he gets a blow-job too. This somehow ruins their relationship, and Updike, not normally coy about sexual matters, doesn't really explain why. The act sort-of floats around the latter portions of the novel as though it's somehow obviously a dreadful and appalling and humiliating thing. The other thing that happens in the last stretch of the novel is that Janice, always a bit of a boozer, gets drunk, decides to give her new baby a bath and accidentally drowns her. This is properly dreadful, a heart-sinking scene that does not stint on the ghastly, ghastly consequences: the intensity of the grief that follows, for both Janice and Rabbit. The book ends on the baby's funeral, which finally gets too much for Rabbit, such that (in a deliberate echo of the opening) he runs out. But powerfully written as this scene is, it seems to me to entail two problems. One is the bathos, edging ludicrousness, of pairing it with Harry's Improbably Consequential Blow-Job. The other is more enduring: Updike ends the book this way because it is the one thing from which we cannot run. Not our own mortality, which is what, we might intuit, sets all of us running in the first place, but the death of a loved-one, especially the death of your child. Rabbit's tear-blinded dash out of the cemetery at the end isn't going anywhere; he has finally encountered That Which Cannot Be Run From. Except—

—except that I know, as someone who has read all the subsequent Rabbit books, that Updike decides by authorial fiat that, well, he can. Janice suffers no legal sanction for what is, surely, culpable homicide (she's as guilty as, let's say, a drunk driver would be if they killed someone). She would surely go to jail for a term, she would likely be shunned by her neighbours. But more credulity-strenuous still, she and her husband suffer no longer-term emotional consequences. This death is mentioned only occasionally and in passing in the later novels; it's just something the two of them step past. Worse, Rabbit has resumed his lepus-mode. He's still evading responsibility, still running. It's a kind of novelistic infidelity to the emotional gravity of the last chapters of Rabbit, Run. Through Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), not to mention the 2001 novella Rabbit Remembered continues to get away with it: with extra-marital sex, with carnal pleasures, with myriad irresponsibilities and flights. He is not punished for any of this; indeed, on the contrary he gets wealthier (as per the title of the third novel), more socially secure, is loved by and indulged by beautiful woman after beautiful woman.

Adam Phillips notes that the phrase ‘getting away with it’ is actually a way of restating the rules, authority. ‘Believers don’t think of God as “getting away with it”,’ he says, because ‘the phrase itself implies the existence of a higher authority.’ And whilst getting away with something—a crime, an irresponsibility, an affair—exposes that higher authority’s fallibility, its capacity for oversight, it also reinforces it.

If, as Freud remarks, the child’s first successful lie against his parents is his first moment of independence—the moment when he proves to himself that his parents cannot read his mind, and so are not omniscient deities—then it is also the first moment when he recognizes his abandonment … You will use the phrase “getting away with it” only when a higher authority is appealed to. So if getting away with it were to become the new ethos, the new thing to do, then quite quickly there would be no such thing as getting away with it. If God is dead it is not that everything is permitted—which would simply be his reappearance as the pemitter rather than the forbidder—but that there would be no more getting away with it. I think it is worth wondering, if we can imagine such a thing, what kind of loss that might be. [Phillips, Missing Out (2012), 87]

I’m a saint, says Rabbit. I give people faith: because he keeps getting away with it, and we vicariously get away with it through him. Updike recurs to God in his writer, not directly but through the epiphanic moments of, for instance, sexual consummation, or more precisely of sexual anticipation. He is sometimes called a conservative writer, which in some senses, politically, he was; but his conservatism is invested in an idea of infidelity.

Phillips discussion of the phrase ‘getting away with it’ sees him taking in literary criticism, since a critic’s job, we could say, is not ensure that a writer doesn’t ‘get away with it’. That’s what Lockwood’s essay is doing with Updike. Phillips tags Geoffrey Hartman, who is interested in the subordination of criticism to the art it critiques. ‘One of the ways we idealize literature,’ says Hartman, ‘is to disparage the critic’; Phillips sums-up ‘there are things that the critic won’t let the writer get away with; but the critic, who is also a writer, must not be allowed to get away with positioning himself as a higher authority than the writer.’ Here is Hartman in Criticism in the Wilderness:

The English tradition in criticism is sublimated chatter; but it is also animated by a fierce ability to draw reputation into question. Even Shakespeare had once to be made safe; and Milton is restored, after Leavis, to his bad eminence. This power to alter reputations is formidable, and it shows that criticism has an unacknowledged penchant for reversal in it, which is near-daemonic and brings it close to the primacy of art. This penchant, of course, can be dismissed as the sin of envy: as a drive for primacy like Satan's or Iago's. Yet, as Lukacs remarked, there is something ironic about the critic's subordination of himself to the work reviewed. At best he keeps testing that work, that apparent greatness, and by force of doubt or enthusiasm puts it more patently before us. He plays the role now of accuser and now of God. A judicious rather than judicial criticism will, needless to say, not try for a single verdict: like Dr.Johnson, it exposes virtues and weaknesses, strong points and failings together. But it can also frighten by opening a breach—or the possibility of transvaluation—in almost every received value. [The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (Edinburgh 2004), 268]

Updike’s apparent greatness is, according to recent criticism, less apparent than once it seemed. He is no longer getting away with his sex-robot malfunction, his excess, his lapses in taste, his sexism and sexual objectification of women. And yet his strong points are, actually, reinforced by this. His, I do not think it too much to say, greatness. Lockwood’s essay in a great piece, and she is a great writer; but the piece is as aware of the fineness and excellence of Updike as well as his lubriciousness. And Updike is a greater writer than Wallace.

At times it felt that each sentence carried me further from understanding him. At other times it felt that I had never read anyone with such animal attention, all reflexes relocated to the tip of my pen. It was like wrestling an angel with a massive erection, who towards morning marks you in another way. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ may be the punchline of the David Foster Wallace piece, but the quieter takeaway is that Wallace was a fan. A failed em dash in one paragraph gives us the accidental line ‘beautiful flashes of writing-deer,’ and before I understood, I thought: yes, that is what they are like. Beautiful flashes of writing-deer. In the end Wallace loved the sinner, as Updike wanted us to love Rabbit Angstrom. And part of the problem with our 360-degree view of modern authors is knowing where to put any of it. Wallace’s vivisection of Updike’s misogyny seems calm and cool and virtuous, and then you remember that to the best of anyone’s knowledge Updike never tried to push a woman out of a moving car. ‘I cannot greatly care what critics say of my work,’ he said. ‘If it is good, it will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink, having in the meantime provided me with a living, the opportunities of leisure, and a craftsman’s intimate satisfactions.’