|
"John Updike,
the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted
a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as
to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers,
Mass.
His best-known protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom, first appears
as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a
sales job he hates.
Through the four novels whose titles bear his
nickname — "Rabbit, Run," "Rabbit Redux," "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at
Rest" — the author traces the funny, restless and questing life of this
middle-American against the background of the last half-century's major
events." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
"John Updike shows how vapid American
culture really is."- AA |
Rabbit, Run
1960
Hearing this speech has made the sliding
sickness in her so steep that Janice wonders if she can keep her grip on the
phone.
"Don't come over, Mother," she begs. "Please."
"I'll
have a bite of lunch and be over in twenty minutes. You go to bed."
Janice replaces the receiver and looks around her with
horror.
The apartment
is horrible.
Panicked with the double idea of not disturbing Nelson and
of concealing Harry's absence, she runs to the crib and nightmarishly finds it
smeared with orange mess.
"Damn you, damn you," she moans to Rebecca,
and lifts the little filthy thing out and wonders where to carry her. She takes
her to the armchair and biting her lips unpins the diaper.
"Oh you
little shit," she murmurs, feeling that the sound of her voice is holding off
the other person who is gathering in the room.
She takes the soaked
daubed diaper to the bathroom and drops it in the toilet and dropping to her
knees fumbles the bathtub plug into its hole.
She notices the glass of
watery whisky she left on the top of the toilet and takes a long stale swallow
and then puzzles how
to get it off her hands.
All the while Rebecca screams as if she has
mind enough to know
she's filthy.
Janice takes the glass with her and spills it on the rug
with her knee while she strips the baby of its nightie and sweater.
Her
head aches with all this jarring up and down.
Her knees sting from so
much kneeling.
She
gives up and to her surprise sits flatly on a kitchen
chair.
Hide the
whisky.
Her body doesn't move for a second but when it does she
sees her hands with the little lines of dirt on her fingernails put the whisky
bottle into a lower cabinet with some old shirts.
She shuts the door,
it bangs but doesn't catch, and on the edge of linoleum beside the sink the
cork cap of the whisky bottle stares at her like a little top hat.
She puts it in the garbage
bag.
Now the kitchen is clean enough.
In the living-room
Rebecca is lying naked in the
fuzzy armchair with her belly puffing out sideways to yell and her lumpy
curved legs clenched and red.
Janice's other baby was a boy and it
still seems unnatural to her, between the girl's legs, those
two little buns of fat
instead of a boy's plump
stub.
When the doctor had
Nelson circumcised Harry hadn't wanted him to as he hadn't been and thought it
was unnatural, she had laughed at him
he was so mad.
The
wavery gray line of the water is almost up to the lip of the tub.
She
wishes she could have the bath.
Brimful of composure she returns to the
living room.
She tips too much trying to dig the tiny rubbery thing out
of the chair so drops to her knees and scoops Rebecca into her arms and carries
her into the bathroom held sideways against her breasts.
She is proud
to be carrying this to completion; at least the baby will be clean when Mother
comes.
She drops gently to her knees by the big calm tub and does not
expect her sleeves to be soaked.
The water wraps around her forearms
like two large hands; under her eyes the pink baby sinks down like a gray
stone.
With a sob of protest she grapples for the child but the water
pushes up at her hands, her bathrobe tends to float, and the slippery thing
squirms in the sudden opacity.
She has a hold, feels a heartbeat on her
thumb, and then loses it, and the skin of the water leaps with pale refracted
oblongs.
Then she has Becky squeezed in her hands and it is all right.
She lifts the living thing into air and hugs it against her sopping chest.
Water pours off them onto the
bathroom tiles.
The little weightless body flops against her neck.
A contorted memory of how they
give artificial
respiration pumps Janice's cold wet arms in frantic rhythmic hugs.
Though her wild heart bathes the universe in red, no spark kindles in
the space between her arms; for all of her pouring prayers
she doesn't feel the faintest
tremor of an answer in the
darkness against her.
Her sense of the third person within widens
enormously, and she knows, knows, while knocks sound at the door, that
the worst thing that has
ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.
Rabbit Redux
1971
Jill goes on gently, "Americans are exploiters.
The first things they
exploit are themselves."
Lifting her face, her eyes fixed and her
freckles a constellation, "You've never given yourself a
chance to think, except on self-exploitative techniques,
basketball and
printing. You carry
an old God with you, and
an angry old
patriotism. And now an old
wife."
He takes breath to protest, but her hand begs him to let her
finish.
"You
accept these things as sacred not out of love or faith but fear;
your thought is frozen
because the first moment when your instincts failed,
you raced to the conclusion
that everything is nothing, that zero is
the real answer. As we see in
Vietnam."
He at last can speak.
"There was violence in Vietnam before
we ever heard of the fucking place.
You can
see by just the way I'm sitting here listening to
this crap I'm basically a
pacifist."
He points at Skeeter. "He's the violent son of a
bitch."
"But you see," Jill says, her voice lulling and nagging,
with just a teasing ragged hem showing of the voice she uses in bed, "the
reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is you don't know a thing about his
Afro-American
history."
Skeeter's face is shedding its shell of scorn and
writhing as if to cry.
He has taken his glasses off.
He is
reaching toward Jill for the marijuana cigarette,
keeping his eyes on Rabbit's face.
Rabbit is frozen,
his mind racing. Nelson. Put
him to bed. Seeing too much.
His own face as he listens to Skeeter
feels weak, shapeless, slipping.
The beer tastes bad, of malt.
Skeeter wants to cry, to yell.
"So what did the South do? They said
baboon and lynched and whipped and cheated the
black man of what pennies he had and thanked their white Jesus they didn't
have to feed him anymore.
And what did the North do? It copped out. It
pulled out. It had put on all that muscle for the war and now it was wading
into the biggest happiest muck of greed and graft and
exploitation and
pollution and slum-building and Indian-killing this poor old whore of a planet
has ever been saddled with?
The Southern assholes got together with the
Northern assholes and said, Let's us do a deal. And that was the
Revolution of 1876. Far as the black man goes, that's the
'76 that hurt, the one a hundred years before was just a bunch of English gents
dodging taxes."
Rabbit is Rich
1981
Janice has on underpants beneath her
nightie but no bra and in the bright light her nipples show inside the cloth
with their own pink color, darker, more toward wine.
She is saying, "It's a hard age.
They seem to have so many
choices and yet they don't. They've
been taught by television all their lives to want this and that and yet when
they get to be twenty they find money isn't so easy to come by after all.
They don't have the opportunities even we had."
In bed,
perhaps it's the
rain that sexes him up, he insists they make love, though at first Janice
is reluctant.
"I would have taken a bath," she says, but
she smells great, deep jungle
smell, of precious rotting mulch going down and down beneath the ferns.
When he won't stop, crazy to lose his face in this essence, the cool
stem fury of it takes hold of her and combatively she comes, thrusting her hips
up to grind her clitoris against his face and then letting him finish inside
her beneath him.
Lying spent and adrift he listens again to the rain's
sound, which now and then quickens to a metallic rhythm on the window glass,
quicker than the throbbing in the
iron gutter, where ropes of
water twist.
*****
"This is horrible," Nelson announces from the
sofa. "What'd we drag this poor guy in here for anyway? Pru and I didn't ask to
be married in a church, I don't believe any of that stuff."
"You
don't?" Harry is
shocked, hurt.
"Nobody knows
for sure," Pru points out in a quiet voice.
Nelson asks her furiously,
"How many dead people have you seen?"
Even as a child, Harry remembers,
Nelson's face would get white around the gills when he was
angry.
He would
get nervous stomach aches, and clutch at the edge of the banister on his way
upstairs to get his books.
They would send him off to school anyway.
Harry still had his job at Verity.
Janice was working part-time
at the lot.
They had no babysitter.
School was the
babysitter.
****
"Harry."
Her voice presses into his
ear. "I want to do something for you so you won't forget me, something you've
never had with anybody else. I suppose other women have sucked you off?"
He shakes his head yes, which
tugs the flesh of her
breast.
"How many have you fucked up the ass?"
He lets
her nipple slip from his mouth. "None. Never."
"You and Janice?"
"Oh God no. It never occurred to us."
"Harry.
You're not fooling me?"
How dear that
was, her old-fashioned "fooling."
From talking to all those
third-graders.
"No, honestly. I thought only queers ... Do you and
Ronnie?"
"I am a Catholic and Ronnie is a Jew. So we do it a lot of the
time. He loves it."
"And
you?"
"It has its charms."
"Doesn't it hurt? I mean, he's big."
"At first. You use Vaseline. I'll get ours."
"Thelma, wait. Am
I up to this?"
She laughs a syllable. "You're up."
She slides away
into the bathroom and while she is gone he stays enormous.
She returns
and anoints him thoroughly, with an icy expert
touch.
Harry shudders.
Thelma lies down beside him with her back turned, curls forward as if
to be shot from a cannon,
and reaches behind to guide him.
"Gently."
It seems it won't go,
but suddenly it does.
The medicinal odor of displaced Vaseline reaches
his nostrils.
The grip is tight at the base but beyond, where a cunt is
all velvety suction and caress, there is no sensation:
a void, a pure black box, a casket of
perfect nothingness.
He is in that void, past her tight ring of
muscle.
He asks, "May I come?"
"Please do."
Her voice sounds faint and
broken.
Her spine and shoulder blades
are taut.
It takes only a few thrusts, while he rubs her scalp with
one hand and clamps her hip steady.
"O.K.," he says.
"Thank you. That I won't forget."
"Promise?"
"I feel
embarrassed. What does it do for you?"
"Makes me feel full of you.
Makes me feel fucked up the ass. By
lovely Harry Angstrom."
"Thelma," he admits, "I can't believe you're so
fond of me.
Rabbit at Rest
1990
Everything falling apart, aeroplanes,
bridges, eight years under
Reagan of nobody minding the store, making money out of nothing,
running up debt,
trusting in god.
"You weren't quite yourself today,"
Bernie admits. " You got
girlfriend trouble or something?"
Horny, Jews:
he once read a history of
Talmudwood about their womanizing.
Harry Cohn,
Groucho Marx, the Warner
Brothers, they went crazy out there with the
sunshine and swimming pools
and all the Midwestern shiksas
who'd do anything to be movie stars.
Janice would get back at
ten-thirty at the earliest.
There was plenty of time to see this through.
He relaxes back into his pillows.
Good he had that nap this afternoon.
"Is that how you see it?" he asks. "He was a shit to you?"
"Absolutely. Terrible. Out all night doing God knows what, then this
snivelling and begging for
forgiveness afterwards. I hate that worse than the chasing; my father was a
boozer and a chaser, but then he wouldn't whine to Mom about it, he'd at least
let her do the whining. This immature dependence of Nelson's was totally
outside my experience."
Her cigarette tip glows.
A distant
concussion of thunder steps closer.
Pru's presence here feels hot in Harry's mind,
she is awkwardly big and
all sharp angles.
Her talk seems angular and tough, the gritty
Akron toughness overlaid with a
dismissive vocabulary learned from
professional coppers.
He doesn't like hearing his son called immature.
"You knew him
for some time out at Kent," he points out, almost hostilely.
"Harry, I
didn't," she says, and the
cigarette tip loops through an agitated arc.
"I thought he'd grow,
I never dreamed how enmeshed he was, with you two. He's
still trying to work out what you two
did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep
wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty.
A thing that goes fast with coke
is shame; these women that are hooked will do anything. I say to him,
You're not going to give me AIDS from one of
your coke whores. So he goes out again. It's a vicious circle. It's been
going on for years."
"How many years, would you say?"
When she
shrugs her shoulders, Ma's old bed shakes.
"More than you'd think. That
crowd around Slim was always
doing pot and uppers - gays don't give a
damn, they have all this money only for themselves. Maybe two years ago
Nelson became a big enough user on his own to need to steal. At first he just
stole from us, money that should have gone into the house and stuff, and then
he started stealing from you - the company. I hope you send him to jail."
She has been cupping her hand beneath the cigarette, to catch the ash,
and now she looks around for an ashhtray and sees none and finally flips the
butt toward the window, where it sparks against the screen and sizzles out on
the wet sill.
Her voice is hoarsening and finding a certain swing,
a welling up.
"I'm scared to fuck him, I'm scared to be legally
associated with him. I've wasted my life. My husband hates me and I hate him
and we don't even have any money to split up! I'm scared - so scared. And my
kids are scared, too. I'm
trash and they're trash and they know it."
"Hey, hey," he has to
say. "Come on. Nobody's
trash."
But even as he says it he knows this is an old-fashioned
idea he would have trouble defending.
Without God to lift us up and make
us into angels we're all trash.
Her sobbing is shaking the bed so
badly that in his delicate postop state he feels queasy.
To quiet her
big body he reaches out and pulls her toward him.
As if expecting his
touch, she huddles tightly, though a blanket and a
sheet are between them, and continues sobbing in a bitter, lower register, her
breath hot on his chest, where a pajama button has come undone. His chest. They
want to carve it up.
"At least you're healthy," he tells her. "Me, all
they need to do is nail down the coffin lid. I can't run, I can't fuck,
I can't eat anything I like, I know
damn well they're going to talk me into a bypass. You're scared? You're still
young. You've got lots of cards still. Think of how scared I feel."
In
his arms Pru says in a voice gone calm again, "People have bypass operations
all the time."
"Yeah, easy for you to say. Like me telling you people
are married to shits all the time. Or you telling me people have their
kids turn out to be
dope-addict embezzlers all the time."
A small laugh.
A flash of light outside and, after
some seconds, thunder. Both listen.
She
asks, "Does Janice say you can't fuck?"
"We don't talk about it. We
just don't do it much lately. There's been too much else going on."
"What did your doctor say?"
"I forget. My
cardiologist is about Nelson's age, we were all too shy to go into it."
Pru sniffs and says, "I
hate my life."
She seems to him to be
unnaturally still, like a deer in oncoming headlights.
He lets the hand
of the arm around her broad back move up across the bumps of the quilted robe
and enter the silken cave at the nape of her neck, to toy with the warm hair
there.
"I know the feeling,"
aware through the
length of his body of a cottony sleepiness waiting to claim.
She tells
him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson
would grow into somebody like you."
"Maybe he did. You don't get to see
what a bastard I can be."
"I can imagine," she says. "But people
provoke you."
He goes on, "I see a lot of myself in the kid."
The nape of her neck tingles under his fingers, the soft hairs rising
to his electricity.
''I'm glad you're letting your hair grow long," he
says.
"It gets too long."
Her hand has come to rest on his bare
chest, where the button is unbuttoned.
Not waiting too long to think
about it, he with his free hand lifts hers from his chest and places it lower,
where an erection has surprisingly sprouted from his half-shaved groin.
His gesture has the pre-sexual quality of one child sharing with
another an interesting
discovery - a stone that moves, or a remarkably thick-bodied butterfly.
The eyes widen in the dim face inches from his on the pillow.
He lets his face drift, on
the tide of blood risen within
him, across those inches to set their mouths together, carefully testing
for the angle, while her fingers caress him in a rhythm slower than that of his
thudding heart.
As the space narrows to
nothing he is watchful of his heart, his accomplice in sin.
Their
kiss tastes to him of the fish she so nicely prepared, its lemon and chives,
and of asparagus.
Rain whips at the screen.
The leak onto the
windowsill accelerates its tapping.
A brilliant close flash shocks the air
everywhere and less than a second later a heart-stopping crack and
splintering of thunder crushes
the house from above.
As if in overflow of this natural heedlessness,
Pru says "Shit," jumps from the bed, slams shut the window, pulls down the
shade, tears open her
bathrobe and sheds it, and, reaching down, pulls her nightie up over her head.
Her tall pale wide-hipped nakedness in the dimmed room is lovely much
as those pear trees in blossom along that block in Brewer last month were
lovely, all his it had seemed, a piece of
Paradise blundered upon,
incredible.
"I know how to inflame a cunt.
I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania.
I make your ovaries
incandescent.
Your Sylvester is a little
jealous now?
He feels something does he?
He feels the
remnants of my big prick.
I have set the shores a little wider.
I have ironed out the wrinkles."
- Henry Valentine Miller,
Tropic of Cancer, 1934 |
|
 |
This web site is not a commercial web site and
is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a
new perspective with which to en❡a❡e Яeality to which its
author adheres. The author feels that the faλsification of reaλity
outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern
pr☠paganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an
internati☣nal c☣rp☣rate cartel through their agents who wish
to foist a corrupt version of reaλity on the human race. Religi☯us
int☯lerance ☯ccurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious
practices, religi☸us beliefs or persons due to their religi⚛us
ide⚛l⚛gy. This web site marks the founding of a system of
philºsºphy nªmed The Truth of the Way of the Lumière
Infinie - a rational gnostic mystery
re☦igion based on reaso🐍 which requires no leap of faith,
accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each
and every individual is encouraged to develop a pers∞nal relati∞n
with Æ∞n and Sustainer through the pursuit of the knowλedge of
reaλity in the hope of curing the spiritual c✡rrupti✡n that
has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of the Mŷsterŷ of the
Lumière Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the
author. Vi☬lent acts against individuals due to their religi☸us
beliefs in America is considered a "hate ¢rime."
This web site in
no way c☬nd☬nes vi☬lence. To the contrary the intent here is
to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the internati☣nal
c☣rp☣rate cartels desire to c✡ntr✡l the human race.
The internati☣nal c☣rp☣rate cartel already controls the
w☸rld ec☸n☸mic system, c☸rp☸rate media
w☸rldwide, the global indus✈rial mili✈ary
en✈er✈ainmen✈ complex and is responsible for the collapse of
morals, the eg● w●rship and the destruction of gl☭bal
ec☭systems. Civilization is based on coöperation. Coöperation
with bi☣hazards of a gun.
American social mores and values have
declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international
cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to
deceive the p☠pulace in general through c✡rp✡rate media by
pressing emotional buttons which have been πreπrogrammed into the
πoπulation through prior c☢rp☢rate media
psych☢l☢gical ☢perati☢ns. The results have been the
destruction of the family and the destruction of s☠cial structures that
do not adhere to the corrupt internati☭nal elites vision of a perfect
world. Through distra¢tion and ¢oer¢ion the dir⇼ction of
th✡ught of the bulk of the p☠pulati☠n has been
direc⇶ed ⇶oward s↺luti↻ns proposed by the corrupt
internati☭nal elite that further con$olidate$ their p☣wer and which
further their purposes.
All views and opinions presented on this web
site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through
their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational,
insightful and unpopular ☨hough☨. All factual information presented
on this web site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as
originally presented in print media which may or may not have originally
presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and ☨hough☨s have been
adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and
re-corrected as nearly all opinion and ☨hough☨ has been throughout
time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with the intent
of making his or her ☨hough☨s and opinions clearer and relevant to
the reader in the present time.
Fair Use Notice
This site may contain
copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our
efforts to advance understanding of ¢riminal justi¢e, human
rightϩ, political, politi¢al, e¢onomi¢,
demo¢rati¢, s¢ientifi¢, and so¢ial justi¢e
iϩϩueϩ, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any
such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for rėsėarch and ėducational
purposės. For more information see:
www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted
material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner. |
 Copyright
© Lawrence Turner
All Rights Reserved
|