Spiritual Iffyness

James Yerkes wrote a book about John Updike's thoughts and messages on religion. Yes, one author wrote about another and they both used printed media to spread their message. Somewhere the space time continuum is collapsing. Yerkes, whom I give credit for having studied Updike far longer and deeper than myself, quotes Updike by saying that there are three great "secret things" in humanity: they are sex, religion and art. This gives me pause; first because if I had known that two months ago all of this shit would have certainly been easier to write. The other is because of how these things are found in the Rabbit books.

Sex is not gratuitous in the Rabbit novels. There is no great love for the physical act found in Rabbit. Even in his younger days he seemed tired of sex, as though during his high school days and time in the Army he had had his fun. But these are not the sex novels. We covered sex and Updike's thoughts on the subject are contained in Couples. So, moving on.

Art. At this I shrug my shoulders. Rabbit is no art fan. Brewer is devoid of artistic culture, there is no Short North district there and no public sentiment that more art is better for the city and its denizens. I have yet to read Updike's "art" novel and I am doubting if there is one. But, the interesting thing here that leads into religion is this: Brewer, Pennsylvania is completely devoid of those sacred institutions of the spirit. This town never had an artist or a gallery. Never contained a live theater nor were there citizens who clamored for it. Hmm. I believe that I have discovered the "fatal flaw" of Harold "Rabbit" Angstrom and his universe and it is this: because there are no temples to the human spirit and no celebrations of human existence, the people lead empty lives. When they encounter hardship and tragedy, they look for answers. However, because there is no beauty and no spirituality they are left looking around for something that never existed. So, because they do not know what they never had they feel empty but do not understand why.

For the third secret thing, we have said much on religion and Updike. I am finding that because Rabbit has no real religious institution to turn to (even one he despises or forsakes) he is left at a loss when things in his life go badly. For Rabbit there is no beauty and no faith. He is caught in a spiritual iffyness because he wants to do good and be positive, but those tasks become difficult when he never knew really what was good and what was bad. It is like this: if all a person ever knew about art were paintings by Monet he would be a poor judge of art. Not because Monet is a poor artist, but because the world of art is so much wider and fuller than one artist, not to mention the forms of art that occur outside of the canvas. The same can be said for spirituality. Rabbit has never had real spiritual awareness because there is no outlet for it in Brewer. He is caught with a vague notion of what is good and no way to exercise it. 

Death in a Bathtub

Rabbit Angstrom is a man awash in a sea of meaningless life. I have covered already his struggles with race and an evolving world in Rabbit Redux.  But, there is one instance where rabbit finds meaning, loss and a necessity. One thread that Updike spins throughout the tetralogy is the death of Rabbit’s infant daughter, Rebecca.

She dies shortly after her birth in Rabbit Run. She has no speech and no character development. This child is a sticking point of feud for Rabbit and Janice because they already have one child that they are ill prepared to care for in Nelson and they cannot manage as a family with two children. Rebecca is unwanted from the start; poor thing never had a chance. Janice and Rabbit have a row, Rabbit leaves and Janice settles into the bath with Rebecca. Peace and calm are found in the soothing mist and warmth of the tub for Janice. However, this proves too calming as Janice drops the baby as she falls asleep and wakes up in a gray tub with a drowned infant. Janice is paralyzed, though not a nurturing mother to wither of her children, she is floored by her action (or inaction, really the proof of negligence or knowledge is left to the reader; as a positive person I like to think the she fell asleep under pressure and did not intend to drown the child) and is in shock at the outcome. Rabbit thinks for years after of the scene in his home and his final act of pulling out the drain plug to allow the murderous liquid to run down the drain and into the sewer. His act of first rolling up his sleeve and considering the water that killed his progeny is horrifying to me. Looking a killer in the face is difficult, but when the killer is a liquid enclosed in a benign basin like the bathtub must be the hardest of all. The water did no more than it was supposed to; it warmed the bodies of mother and daughter, cleansed their skin and gave them calming comfort. It would be different if a human had killed the babe or if a raging inferno had claimed her soul. But water. In a bathtub. Horrifying that it occurred that way. Harry feels more than guilt and anger. He blames Janice and yells at her, but really he blames himself for more. He goes so far as to blame himself for impregnating in his words “that mutt of a Springer with her thin bangs and tan skin,” he runs away at her funeral giving the first novel its name.

Rabbit Redux is full of guilt and shame. Janice sleeps around and moves out to forget the horrors. She cannot forgive herself or Harry for the loss of a child. Nelson feels neglected with a different form of survivor’s guilt than normal because though he is the child that survived, he feels anger than he is forgotten by his parents. In their loss they don’t care for their only remaining child as they should. Harry allows him too much exposure to drugs, sex and radical ideas. Janice for her part completely cuts him out except to take him shopping. Nelson is not given the upbringing he deserves and his parents pay in the end with his cocaine addiction and how he loses the family business in the end. Instead of shame and loss, the parents should have remembered Rebecca and thanked God that they have a child remain.

Rabbit is Rich finds Angstrom expansive in both waist size and demeanor. Harry has hopped into some luck as a successful Toyota dealer. He sells cars without passion though. He also has sex without passion all around town and plays dispassionate golf. He is middle-aged and killing himself with 1970’s hydrocarbons and foodstuffs. However, though he sucks down massive amounts of TV dinners and leaded gasoline smog, he cannot forget the daughter that he lost. Rain makes him think of Rebecca as does Janice’s midafternoon drunk that comes around six days a week.  Wasting her liver away with Campari, Janice cannot forget the crime she committed against her baby and she does not forgive Harry for she thinks that their fights and her stress caused it. Harry cannot leave the memory behind; it is though a ghost child follows him everywhere. He gets so nervous that he leaves in the middle of the night and drives through Pennsylvania to Virginia in search of peace. His thoughts are heavy. And though he drives many miles, slams doors, eats at diners and sleeps in cheap motels he knows that eventually he must return. He is shackled to his town, his cars and his woman as well as the horrifying scene he found in his bathroom so long ago. It is as though he drives with a bathtub chained to the back of his car; every mile and every exit, every turn and every route he takes but he cannot shake the truth. That bathtub, ominous and brooding, full of life and death as well as the dead body of an infant girl, Rabbit can shake none of this. For richer or poorer, better or worse, sick and in health, Rabbit remembers the tub and reaching into the lukewarm killer to release it into the world.

Rabbit doesn't care about cars.

In Rabbit is Rich, there is a lack of spirituality that permeates the entire story. Rabbit is a Godless man in a lacking world created by Updike. He attends no church, has no epiphany and feels nothing new. He compulsively sleeps around, but just as easily would sleep with his wife. He is a serial philanderer and is bored with sex and bored with his life. He plays golf but dislikes his partners. Rabbit sells cars but lacks the depth to care about what he is selling. He could just as easily sell other products.

This is the key point to me. A man with soul loves his car. A man with heart works on his car. And a man with pride shines the emblem on the hood and proudly wears his fuel injected, piston powered, overhead cam fired heart on his sleeve. Cars are a way of life to me. I am proud to be the great-grandson of a machinist, grandson of a body man and son of a mechanic. I have been in garages and shops since I could walk.  My father has built and rebuilt vehicles for the better part of thirty years.  He has an innate ability to work with his hands and produce a strong running machine. He began working at Newlon Chrysler Dodge Jeep and Eagle before I was born and cut his teeth on 2.2l powered K-cars and minivans as well as seeing the last days of the 318 ci V8 in trucks and big cars. But this passion for cars, especially Mopars, is something that he has passed to me. He has what Rabbit lacks. Rabbit sees the cars as appliances, necessities that transport people here and there and nothing more. And as far as cars are appliances, the small ricer machines he sells are the epitome of that. Small, cheap, underpowered and Spartan interiors abound in Toyota products of the 1970s. Now, the 70’s were not a kind decade to the Chrysler Corporation. But look at the difference:

Notable Chryslers:

-Chrysler Cordoba

-Dodge Challenger

-Dodge Charger

-Plymouth Road Runner

-Plymouth ‘Cuda

-Plymouth Duster

Notable Toyotas:

-Cressida

-Corona

-Carina

-Celica

The Chrysler cars above connote power, comfort and speed. Even the cheap Plymouth Road Runner could be had with Chrysler’s Hemi engine rated (more like underrated) at 425 factory horsepower. But that engine block can be modified and worked over to produce in excess of 1,000 horsepower.   They were large and had a long and low and wide stance. Toyotas are tin crapboxes that can’t get out of their own way. Would you rather have a 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda breathing fire with a 440 ci V8 pushing 390 hp, three two bbl carbs on top with rallye wheels and purple paint? Or would you prefer a Japanese made Cressida with a 2 valve per cylinder I-6 pumping out a brutish 108 hp? In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, as quoted in Talledega Nights, “America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed.”

I have strewn way off topic to once again proclaim my love for the Plymouth brand. But, men who drive Plymouths are like me and my father, men who care about how fast their car is and know how to make it faster. Soulless men like Rabbit drove Cressidas and got their doors blown off at every stop light. Not because the Plymouth driver is mean or brutish, but because he can blow the doors off the Cressida. And in that ancient maxim: the strong do what they will, and the weak do what they must. Give a man a Plymouth, and make him a car guy for life. Give a man a Toyota, and he probably doesn’t care about much. 

1979

This novel is the reason that I began to read Updike at all. It was also one of the first novels that brought me to consider writing as more than an academic necessity. The words on Rabbit are many, and I would say that this novel is Rich is the flagship of the series. This is Rabbit at his peak; he has his life together…mostly. He runs the dealership and has reconciled with Janice. They live together with Janice’s mother. Seemingly this was their idea for a place to stay after the fire in Penn Villas and it has gone on for ten years. It is now 1979, Skylab is falling, Detroit’s Big Four (including AMC before they were bought by Chrysler in the 1980’s) are at the height of malaise (big, slow cars that were poorly built and engines that were completely detuned and smogged out thanks to the bastards at the EPA) and Rabbit golfs. He sleeps around and is infatuated with Cindy Murkett, the curvaceous blonde wife of his golfing partner Webb. It seems that Rabbit is not greedy, but is never satisfied. He doesn’t work hard for what he has, so he has no idea of its value. 

Further because he doesn’t work hard he doesn’t have a good idea of how to attain more. So he has what he has, and it is very nice comparatively, but he aspires for more because he is clueless.

Rabbit has also gotten over those odd days of harboring Skeeter and Jill. He is content to garden and golf in the suburbs of Brewer. He takes a vacation with other couples from the Country Club and tries wife swapping with disastrous results. Though he has a fun night with Thelma, it hurts his relationship with Janice. And just before he can finally sleep with Cindy, he and Janice must rush home because Nelson’s pregnant girlfriend Pru is going into labor.

Once again Rabbit doesn’t get it all. But he cannot see the forest for the trees because he doesn’t know what is really important.

Back to Basics

I have been remiss; this blog has not received the love and attention it deserves. That will be rectified.

Transitioning from The Coup to Rabbit is Rich is an interesting slide. Updike returns to that familiar enclave that launched his career: the American suburb. Ellelou and his plight in an African nation did not hold my interest like the minutiae of Rabbit’s life does. I empathize with Ellelou, he is trying to move heaven and Earth, literally building his nation by hand, all to see it swept out from under him. He is a man who was doomed from the start yet kept trying. He was a Muslim at heart and a Marxist by default. His is a political tale of trial and despair. Updike really did a great job of writing and building the world of Kush.

But, the world of Brewer Pennsylvania, USA is one that is ready-made for the reader. Updike’s audience (me especially) can picture in the mind’s eye an image of suburban American more readily and with clearer definition than I can of a failing African state. Rabbit is more compelling that Ellelou, even though I empathize with Ellelou as a leader and a decision maker, because Rabbit is more approachable. While I am entering a conversation on race or religion, Rabbit is more visible to Updike’s general readership. He is a local car salesman with an adipose midsection and a taste for Schlitz beer and the Philadelphia Phillies. He is not a Black-African-Muslim-Dictator-Russian Ally who was college educated in the US and served in several armies as a sort of mercenary. No, Rabbit played basketball in high school and is the son of a union printer. He had no greater ambitions than to work and buy a house. While Ellelou tried and failed, Rabbit never tried and found a modicum of success.

And that is the key difference, Rabbit is an everyman. Updike wrote him ambiguously and shifty enough to hold no great ideology or dogma. He is a Republican, kinda. He does not trumpet his politics anymore but he does vote for Nixon. While he used to drive a Ford Falcon, with an American flag decal in the rear window no less, he now drives and peddles small, foreign made Toyotas. He plays golf badly enough to be approachable.  His wife left him, and then came back; but now he sleeps around and tries swapping partners on a bizarre vacation in the Caribbean. In summary: Rabbit is nothing. He is a shill, a stuffed shirt. Harold Angstrom, a man with no college degree and dubious Swedish heritage, is a specter of a man. In this we find the middle of America. Men who weren’t movers and shakers and certainly could never lead an African nation; but men who can hit jump shots and chip from the sand. Men who have unsatisfying love lives and children they can’t raise because they can’t speak to them. Rabbit is a stand in for the average man of the Baby Boomer generation. A group, who never really found themselves, but let interesting lives and in the end had a compelling story to tell. Rabbit’s is the story of millions of men: listen to me. I am a man who never wanted for anything and received more than I could handle.

And that is why Rabbit is so compelling. 

Contradicitons Abound

Updike steps outside of the comfort of American suburbia for his novel, The Coup. Here we find an author at odds with himself, toeing the line between fiction and reality. Hailed by some as his most political novel, The Coup is an interesting case of contradictions.

To begin, Ellelou’s government in the novel is a form of Islamic Marxism. This brand of rule is a contradiction within itself. Islam is a government and ideology and religion all rolled into itself. Islam recognizes no other government or rule for man that that of Allah himself. Shariah law dictates the lives of Muslims and supersedes all other forms of government that man might create for himself. So in this state of Kush, composed of tribal villages and farms, there was largely no need for a Marxist dictator. The people through their faith and local customs govern themselves. National government did not bring about sweeping changes for the local populace. Being farmers they never had the industrial infrastructure that other socialist states like China and Soviet Russia did. Thus, there were no factories to bring under state control and no private wealth to redistribute. This makes Ellelou largely unnecessary. While he looked inward to Kush to solve some issues of starvation and disease, he should have been looking outward. Reaching out for more foreign aid revenue could promote new agriculture and foreign investment could put his people to work in industrial jobs. This is what created his downfall. In a bloodless turnover of power, his Minister of the Interior works with the American government to bring in foreign aid and industry, two things which Ellelou detested.

But further this novel is a contradiction because it is a work of fiction. To the author, fiction can be a contradiction. He has control over everything in the story; as the characters are fictional he can bend them to his will and shape them in his (or another) image. However, that much power can become a problem because in the writing it can get out of control. Politics and fiction do not normally mesh because they belong to separate worlds. All politics is work of physical men and women. It is real and tangible. Fictitious politics are the work of one man: the author. His political views and opinions and workings always shine through into the novel. No other input is required. In the writer’s world, good guys share his political views and the bad guys don’t. Take Updike, his Islamic-Marxist dictator rules over a starving country that has seen drought for five years. But, when he is overthrown in favor of a pro-American man who is a dubious Muslim and has a taste for foreign clothing, the rain returns, foreign aid pours in and seemingly Kush becomes a far better place. As an American, Updike’s disdain for Russian-style communism shows when Ellelou, the Soviet ally and former soldier, is cast aside for a softer man favorable to Western powers and ideas. Ellelou has a heart of gold and genuinely tries for his people. But when the chips are down and the buck stops here and other overused colloquial sayings are needed, Updike casts aside his warrior prince to make way for a silk-shirted, pro-American man who rules by the numbers. And in between, Ellelou is cast into exile.

Making Something out of Nothing

OK, role play time. Picture yourself in the following situation:

-You are the revolutionary leader of a sub-Saharan African state.

-Your revolution brought into power a fascist state based upon two ideas seemingly at odds, Marxism and Islam.

-Your third world country is mainly subsistence farmers, and those precious goods you do manage to export are cash crops dependent on floating world market prices

-Your people yearn for Western goods and ideas, but you quash their access in the name of the revolution that brought you to power.

-Oh, and finally there has been a drought in your country for the past five years, baking the ground hard as clay and forcing a famine onto your already struggling people.

If you were given the above scenario and considered it in your mind, you would see that it is a tight spot. However, if you are Colonel Ellelou in The Coup, this is not a hypothetical; this is real. Ellelou is a former French colonial soldier who has travelled the world, studied at a college in the United States and returned to his native land to lead a revolution and become President. This novel is set in 1973 and the Cold War is dividing the world. Under his reign the nation of Kush has signed an agreement with the Soviet Union and allowed Russian missiles to be planted in bunkers in the country.

He is a proud man how holds fast to both the ideals of Islam and Marxism. He has four wives but it is in doubt if any of their collective children came from him. He also prays morning noon and night and does not partake in drugs or alcohol. Further, Ellelou believes in a socialist system but does not have a social economy. The problem lies in the fact that socialism doesn’t work when there is nothing to socialize. Kush had no banking system to be nationalized and no manufacturing economy to be governed. This is a former European colony made of differing tribes who want no central government.

Critics called this Updike’s most political novel, and I have to largely agree. Not because it contains party politics or the thrills and drama of American political showmanship, but because The Coup is government at a basic level. This novel is a story of statecraft. Considering the above scenario, how could one person ever hold all of that together? Well, Ellelou tries. His policies try to make Kush a fair and honest land. Really, in building a nation from the ground up, it is a wonder that any one man could do it at all.