INTRODUCTION
In the spring of 1978 John Updike was invited by William F. Buckley Jr to publish his testimony before the House Committee on Select Education in the pages of National Review. Updike, who was asked by Congress to share his thoughts about federal funding for the humanities, promptly agreed to Buckley's proposal (which was conveyed with this caveat: “but I would not want to do that if you are hostile to its appearing in National Review”).Footnote 1 Updike was not hostile and the piece was published in May of that year. Since Updike voiced his concern with government involvement in cultural endeavors it is obvious why Buckley was so enthusiastic to publish it. “I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone,” Updike told legislators, and recommended they steer clear of active funding of the arts lest a “cultural totalitarianism” emerge in America.Footnote 2
The appearance of the famed novelist's byline in what was the conservative movement's flagship journal led to a series of letters between Updike and Buckley, the founder and editor of the influential magazine and one of the leading conservative intellectuals in America. In September of that year, Buckley invited Updike to lunch in order to offer him a surprising assignment:
What did I hope for, aside from the pleasure of meeting you? To induce you to write an essay on Whittaker Chambers as a writer . . . What I had hoped—indeed, still hope—is that you would undertake to do a review of Chambers’ work (this would require reading three, at most four, books) with the view to salvaging his literary reputation from the wreckage of the Hiss case,
Buckley wrote. “I think you would find, very quickly, the Remnant, easily altered, if someone of your distinction arrested their attention, to the necessity to rescue from the ordure of the Hiss case, a considerable artist.”Footnote 3 Updike respectfully declined: “I don't want to seem unwilling to share a lunch with you, but I get to New York rarely, and then overcommitted, and I can't imagine what you could say about Whittaker Chambers that might induce me to add to the considerable heap of books by and about this bedeviled [added in handwriting] man already.”Footnote 4
That Buckley would invite Updike to reassess the legacy of Whittaker Chambers, the author of the anticommunist memoir Witness and one of the most influential conservative thinkers in America, seems counterintuitive.Footnote 5 Updike, whose fiction mostly steered clear of politics, was, after all, a born-and-bred New Deal Democrat. He voted for the Democrats in every election he remembered, and even inscribed “Wow” on an invitation to the White House by Jimmy Carter. Updike was also an ardent supporter of the liberal Congressman Michael J. Harrington, who represented his Massachusetts district at the time.Footnote 6 Just a few years prior, Updike was even invited by the New School for Social Research in New York—hardly a conservative bastion—to spend a sabbatical teaching there (although he declined, he did take part in a lecture series called “New Yorker at the New School” in 1990).Footnote 7 Given the ideological polarization and deep political divisions that have plagued America since the 1960s, it would be hard to find too many writers who would be comfortable simultaneously writing in National Review and lecturing at the New School.Footnote 8 Yet what may appear today as anomalous was for Updike what being a liberal was all about.
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The perennial ambiguity that pervaded Updike's novels and his unwillingness to provide readers with a satisfying and unambiguous resolution to his plots has long been a source of interest for scholars who have attributed it to his literary—rather than political—sensibilities. Even his breakthrough novel, Rabbit, Run (1960) is mired in contradiction: the protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a family man who cannot help but run away from his family while oscillating between individual desires and social responsibilities and struggling to mediate demands of the heart and the head.Footnote 9 Some critics have misinterpreted this reluctance to take a stand and achieve closure as evidence that Updike “has very little to say” and complained that “it is impossible to find the essence beneath all the words” since Updike suffered from “failure of nerve.”Footnote 10 More recently, Marshall Boswell attributed this to Søren Kierkegaard's influence on Updike and his penchant for “mastered irony” (i.e. “either/or”), which presents two sides of an issue so that readers “contend privately and personally with the text's unresolved tensions.”Footnote 11 While acknowledging this trait, Updike sought to go beyond it. “Unlike Mailer and Bellow, I don't have much itch to pronounce on great matters, to reform the country, to get elected mayor of New York, or minister to the world with laughter,” he said in 1968. “I find it hard to have opinions. Theologically, I favor Karl Barth; politically, I favor the Democrats. But I treasure a remark John Cage made, that not judginess but openness and curiosity are our proper business.”Footnote 12
What I would like to suggest is that Updike's ostensibly apolitical refusal to take a distinct and unambiguous position about anything, especially politics, was essentially a political position in and of itself (as much as it was an ethical, even metaphysical, inclination) that reflected the liberal temper of postwar political thought. Rather than betray a failure of his literary imagination, I argue that this predisposition is emblematic of the nuance and complexity with which many liberal intellectuals at the time engaged reality. Whereas politically outspoken novelists like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal followed in the footsteps of Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck by advocating radical themes, Updike never went down that path. Likewise, he was uncomfortable with the blind reverence for power or capitalism that Herman Wouk and Ayn Rand often displayed.Footnote 13 On the contrary, Updike had lamented the fact that “the writer as hero” had been replaced by “the writer as educationist” and complained sardonically, “how dare one confess that the absence of a swiftly expressible message is, often, the message; that reticence is as important a tool to the writer as expression; that the hasty filling out of a questionnaire is not merely irrelevant but inimical to the writer's proper activity . . . that what he makes is ideally as ambiguous and opaque as life itself.”Footnote 14 For Updike, the art of writing was rooted in ambivalence. “I guess I hope to show in fiction that goodness and evil are mixed. My instinct is to show the other side—the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ of circumstances, the comic incongruities of life.” He went on to suggest that “to be a person, is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation. A truly adjusted person is not a person at all—just an animal with clothes on or a statistic. So that it's a happy ending, with this ‘but’ at the end.” He conceded, “There's a yes-but quality about my writing, that evades entirely pleasing anybody.”Footnote 15
This essay advances the counterintuitive argument that Updike's signature “yes-but” quality was not merely a literary device but an extension of his liberal imagination. The penchant for balance, synthesis, and pluralism that enabled Updike to simultaneously hold opposing ideas and remain receptive to contradiction is consistent with the unique tendency that Lionel Trilling, borrowing from the poet John Keats, had labeled “negative capability.” “This negative capability, this willingness to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, is not, as one tendency of modern feeling would suppose, an abdication of intellectual activity,” Trilling explained in his seminal study of politics and literature The Liberal Imagination (first published 1949). “Quite to the contrary, it is precisely an aspect of their intelligence, of their seeing the full force and complexity of their subject matter.”Footnote 16 After sociologist Richard Sennett complained to Trilling that “you have no position” since “you are always in between,” the critic responded, “Between . . . is the only honest place to be.”Footnote 17 Trilling believed, “The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.”Footnote 18 Updike gradually acquired such a liberal imagination. But unlike other notable liberal intellectuals—Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Daniel Bell, and Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance—who were mainly invested in its political–programmatic possibilities, he chose the less familiar road of literature through which to express it. And although Updike never went as far as explicitly reproducing their political prescriptions in his fiction, his creative energies were clearly inspired by the prevailing liberal temper.
While critics and scholars have accepted at face value Updike's persistent claims to being apolitical—and accordingly dubbed him generically “liberal” or “democrat”—they have never investigated the implications of these distinct political categorizations for his writing. This article hopes to accomplish just that by bridging the gap between Updike's politics and literature and demonstrating how his proud liberal sensibilities closely informed his literary ones. I shall substantiate this highly nuanced link by offering a multilayered analysis. After contextualizing his work within the postwar liberal mindset, I will utilize unpublished materials from the recently opened Updike Papers at Harvard's Houghton Library to illuminate two overlooked aspects of Updike's intellectual development: his liberal education at Harvard in the 1950s and his nonfiction and verse in the 1950s and 1960s. I will conclude by surveying two of Updike's earliest prominent novels—The Poorhouse Fair (1959) and Rabbit Redux (1971)—to demonstrate how his evolving liberal temper manifested itself in the pages of his fiction.
THE POSTWAR LIBERAL MINDSET
Born during the Depression, Updike's political sensibilities were forged in the decade following World War II and reflected a newly reconstituted version of American liberalism. The horrors of totalitarianism and the nuclear threat of annihilation that the Cold War bred led many intellectuals to shed their progressive beliefs in the potential perfectibility of man, the redemptive qualities of science and the utopian possibilities of social engineering—without necessarily abandoning their dedication to core egalitarian principles of the left. In their place they adopted a sobering and realist view of politics that was fed by doses of skepticism, irony, and doubt. As a result, pragmatic inclinations of ambivalence, incrementalism, and deep pluralism overtook the ideological maxims that had previously shaped leftist thought.Footnote 19 “Most political intellectuals in the two decades after World War II agreed that pluralist democracy, democracy which was characterized by openness, compromise, practical problem solving, and the politics of interests, was the practice as well as the norm in America,” Robert Fowler concluded in his study of postwar political thought.Footnote 20
The reformulated liberal mindset of the 1950s sought to cope with the sweeping socioeconomic, political, and cultural changes remaking the country alongside the new existential threats through experimentation and moderation. Instead of embracing radical solutions in the economic sphere that sought the abolition of capitalism or anachronistic laissez-faire panaceas, postwar liberals found in the New Deal and its political culture a satisfying balance that could ameliorate the ills of capitalism without having to replace it. According to Howard Brick, this transformative moment that saw the potential displacement of the economy and shift away from a market society expressed the culmination of an imaginative reorientation towards social liberalism that many intellectuals had begun experiencing as early as the 1910s with the emergence of what he dubbed the “postcapitalist vision.” This new vision essentially represented “a fusion of liberal and social democratic dispositions—a new social liberalism—that dwelled on the left side of the mainstream reform politics,” but took a more cautious and gradual approach towards change that “could support both ‘utopian’ and ‘ideological’ dispositions, looking forward to an imagined future different from the present, while vesting confidence in what currently prevailed as the means of getting there.”Footnote 21
Given the fear of mass politics that had degenerated into totalitarianism abroad, American liberals also placed great faith in the pluralist political model. The New Deal's commensurate reliance on bureaucratic expertise and interest-group competition—as opposed to class competition—was considered the ideal manner to keep government, business and public all in check and preserve the principles of constitutional democracy necessary for winning the Cold War. “The very absence of any absolute justifications in the modern world was a common ground on which American thinkers sought to justify what values they had and obviously this was never truer than with their endorsement of pluralism. It was the acceptance in principle of the idea that there were no answers,” Fowler explained.Footnote 22 Since ideologies provide readymade solutions, they were deemed obsolete and dangerous to the rediscovered pragmatism of liberals. “There is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism,” Daniel Bell declared in his aptly titled study The End of Ideology.Footnote 23
No one embodied this new liberal temper better than historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, whose book The Vital Center became a manifesto for many liberals. Conceived as a call to arms, Schlesinger's best seller wanted to forge a coalition dedicated to fighting communism by revitalizing what he perceived to be America's centrist political inheritance:
So long as society stays free, so long will it continue in its state of tension, breeding contradiction, breeding strife. But we betray ourselves if we accept contradiction and strife as the total meaning of conflict. For conflict is also the guarantee of freedom; it is the instrument of change; it is, above all, the source of discovery, the source of art, the source of love . . . The new radicalism derives its power from an acceptance of conflict—an acceptance combined with a determination to create a social framework where conflict issues, not in excessive anxiety, but in creativity. The center is vital; the center must hold.Footnote 24
The way to uphold the vital center and obviate extremism was by perpetual competition between interest groups that would breed mutual accommodation. “The thrust of the democratic faith is away from fanaticism. It is toward compromise, persuasion and consent in politics, toward tolerance and diversity in society; its economic foundation lies in the easily frightened middle class. Its love of variety discourages dogmatism, and its love of skepticism discourages hero worship,” he wrote.Footnote 25 Although Schlesinger's emphasis on conflict was emblematic of old radical impulses (residues of his study of Jacksonian democracy), he adopted a firm anti-ideological stance. “Where Marxism envisioned that struggle as warfare to the apocalyptic death, Schlesinger's versions kept it, through an emphasis on gradualism, pragmatism, and parliamentarianism, as a ‘perpetual tension’ issuing not in actual warfare or final resolution but in an ongoing balancing and rebalancing of social forces which offered society the best guarantee of freedom, stability, and progress,” James Neuchterlein observed.Footnote 26
When the sociologist Robert Nisbet warned in 1953 that “more and more of us have come to feel, with Melville, Hawthorn, and Dostoevsky, that in men's souls lie deep and unpredictable potentialities for evil that no human institutions can control” he was signaling the pivotal shift away from progressive optimism.Footnote 27 The rediscovery of man's fallen nature, alongside the recognition of the limits of science and social engineering, helped spark a critical discourse surrounding what Mark Greif recently called “the age of the crisis of man.” It was this imminent sense of crisis that forced many intellectuals to reappraise the project of Enlightenment and seek a more sobered—and less ambitious—path forward. “The midcentury generations’ way of addressing the crisis of man represented consensus that something specific had gone wrong and must be made right,” Greif contended. “Re-enlightenment represented a questioning of what could be left of the Enlightenment without the idea of progress.”Footnote 28 This disenchantment fed deep political misgivings that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was foremost in highlighting when advocating for what Eyal Naveh called “a non-utopian Liberalism.”Footnote 29 “Liberalism has been tempted into an attitude of fatuous optimism. It does not see sin in individual, in society and in nature,” Niebuhr warned.Footnote 30 By reintroducing human fallibility into the political equation, Niebuhr asked liberals to abandon their optimistic faith in progress, embrace irony as a guiding principle and formulate a political vision that nurtures the better angels of human nature while keeping vigilance against the devils.Footnote 31 “Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises,” he opined.Footnote 32
Although postwar liberal intellectuals were hardly uniform in their thinking and carried very diverse ideological baggage—many were previously associated with the Popular Front, others with the anti-Stalinist left, while some still remained loyal to Populist or Progressive causes—what they did share was a newly acquired critical, at times even tragic, perspective about politics that instilled them with a healthy respect for the limitations of what government can do. Since man was flawed, his political, economic, and cultural ambitions must be circumscribed. This realization led Schlesinger to gravitate towards the center, Trilling to occupy the ambiguous realm of the “in-between,” and Niebuhr to advocate for an enlightened Christianity. The newfound awareness of limitations also drove economist John Kenneth Galbraith to distinguish between private and public goods in search of “social balance” and sound the alarm against excessive consumption, and caused Daniel Bell to lament the cultural abandonment of restraint in pursuit of self-fulfillment.Footnote 33 The overwhelming concern with equilibrium and restraint helped transform postwar liberalism, in the words of Kevin Mattson, into an “intellectual balancing act.”Footnote 34
THE LIBERAL EDUCATION OF JOHN UPDIKE
When Updike entered Harvard in the fall of 1950, he gradually imbibed many of these sensibilities and began cultivating his own intellectual balancing act. Although Harvard had transformed the rural Pennsylvania boy into an urbane writer and instilled him with the competencies of English literature (his major), newly opened archival material suggests that it had also helped make him a self-aware political thinker. Literary scholars have recently turned their focus on Updike's youth: Jack De Bellis's study of Updike's pre-college years has revealed how instrumental his adolescence had been to his fiction, while Jeffrey Ludwig has begun shining much-needed light on Updike's entirely overlooked college experience by exploring the relationship with his roommate Christopher Lasch.Footnote 35 I will add a new chapter to this unfolding story by demonstrating how Harvard shaped Updike's liberal imagination by fostering in him a deep pluralism that credibly sustains opposing viewpoints under a singular holistic system.
The atmosphere at Cambridge in those years was shaped by the new liberal mindset. Meritocratic reforms initiated in the 1930s and boosted by the GI Bill unleashed a “demographic overhaul” that transformed Harvard after World War II by nearly doubling prewar enrollment numbers and enabling someone like Updike, who was in possession of talent though inadequate resources, to attend.Footnote 36 “The old Harvard of clubmen, gentleman's C's and acute social stratification was fading away,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr recalled.Footnote 37 This equalization of opportunity helps explain why, in their study of Harvard's postwar political climate, Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman found that the university was pervaded by a “pattern of greater liberalism.”Footnote 38 Chris Niebuhr, the son of Reinhold, who was a student there at the time, aptly expressed this liberal triumphalism: “In a way, liberalism today is conservative. You talk about conservation of cultural values. I’m for that. But what are the values you want to conserve? Liberal values. The thing is that liberalism has won, and that has a tendency to make us conservative.”Footnote 39
Concerned by an apathetic and fragmented society that was driven by careerism and bifurcated along ethnic and socioeconomic lines, the Harvard administration under President James Bryant Conant sought to enact reforms that would establish a “coherent national culture.” The result was the “Redbook” report of the Harvard Committee for General Education in a Free Society (1945) that recommended a blend of traditional and modern ideas—what Richard Smith called “a conservative response to radical demands”—in order to instill in students a broader sense of purpose and citizenship.Footnote 40 Since liberalism had a unique capacity to liberate individuals from submission to certain traditions—while still insisting upon their value as intellectual and moral beacons guiding individual development—the Redbook sought to balance them out. According to historian Eric Miller, the report inaugurated an “intensive period of experimentation with a new, liberal arts-driven curriculum” that was pervaded by “the sense that the religious heritage of the West should not be neglected and could actually be appropriated for salutary ends.”Footnote 41 As the Redbook stated,
It [the overall logic] is evidently to be looked for in the character of American society, a society not wholly of the new world since it came from the old, not wholly given to innovation since it acknowledges certain fixed beliefs, not even wholly a law unto itself since there are principles above the state. This logic must further embody certain intangibles of the American spirit, in particular, perhaps, the ideal of co-operation on the level of action irrespective of agreement on ultimates—which is to say, belief in the worth and meaning of the human spirit, however one may understand it.Footnote 42
Fusing elements of past and present, the pluralist bent that defined Updike's education had on the one hand embraced the New Deal's progressive ideals (like economic equality and scientific management) while on the other still conveying an appreciation for such conservative staples as individual liberty, private property, and religion. As part of the Gen Ed reforms fully implemented the very semester Updike entered Harvard, incoming students were required to take two year-long courses in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences.Footnote 43 But the reforms, according to philosopher Alston Chase, an undergraduate there at the time, bred a basic conflict:
The undergraduate curriculum, therefore, was initially designed to be neatly divided into two categories, one general and one specialized, one emphasizing history and values, the other emphasizing the value-free methodologies employed by scholars in the various academic fields. This attempt at balance would give rise to a battle in the long war between humanism and positivism . . . By 1950 the Harvard faculty was divided between those who, chastened by their experience in World War II and especially by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw science and technology as a threat to Western values and even human survival and those—a majority—who saw science as a liberator from superstition and an avenue to progress.Footnote 44
The Gen Ed's attempt to balance these opposing forces was emblematic of the liberal temper notable among many faculty members teaching at Harvard in the 1950s. In addition to historians like Schlesinger and Louis Hartz (author of The Liberal Tradition in America), Isaiah Berlin (who taught there in 1951 and 1953), John Kenneth Galbraith, and Talcott Parsons were formulating important, albeit often disparate, visions of liberalism in those years.Footnote 45 Although they did not teach Updike, there were a handful of lesser-known faculty members who shared their liberal sensibilities and registered a lasting impression on him. Among these were Archibald MacLeish, Theodore Morrison and Harry Levin (English Department); Michael Karpovich (Russian literature); Eric Havelock (Classics); and Crane Brinton and Gavin Langmuir (social science). Despite their diverse backgrounds and disciplinary affiliations, they helped imbue Updike with an ambivalent approach to texts and ideas—as a reader and a writer—that informed the pluralist lens through which he came to think about politics and literature.
Many Updike enthusiasts know that Archibald MacLeish denied him entrance into his prestigious writing course at least twice. But this did not stop Updike, who desperately wanted to study with MacLeish, from attending a poetry appreciation class with him or maintaining social ties after college.Footnote 46 In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, playwright, and journalist, MacLeish, dubbed “the poet laureate of the New Deal,” had filled several key posts in the Roosevelt administration before returning to Harvard.Footnote 47 According to Robert Vanderlan, MacLeish “developed a conception of himself as a public intellectual with crucial responsibilities in the development of a democratic culture.”Footnote 48 This often led MacLeish to prod Americans towards introspection and push them to look past the economics of the New Deal: “You do not fight a war for the privilege of buying things and then not buying them—for the privilege of becoming the world's most numerous consumers and thereafter the world's most numerous unemployed.”Footnote 49 Liberalism, he implied, cannot simply stand for material progress; it must be a means to loftier ends.
MacLeish's concern for establishing a sense of purpose for American freedom closely resonates with Matthew Arnold's famous observation that “Freedom, like Industry, is a very good horse to ride;—but ride somewhere.”Footnote 50 The considerable influence of the Victorian poet and critic who similarly sought to locate a sense of purpose for British liberals disenchanted by modernization a century earlier seems to have been pervasive in Harvard's English department. Both MacLeish and Theodore Morrison, who headed the writing program (and closely mentored Updike), were fond of Arnold and his ambivalent reception of modernity.Footnote 51
The young Updike clearly shared their admiration. His appreciation of Arnold manifested itself in a paper he wrote for an English course in which he examined the melancholy impulses in the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, and Arnold, only to conclude that “Arnold's Dover Beach, the best and most complex of these four poems, is concerned likewise with the ebb of faith. The pivots of Tennyson's meditations—the new vastness, the futile confusion of human effort—combine with Byron's apathy and Wordsworth's historical nostalgia.” What impressed Updike was Arnold's unique capacity for synthesis and ambivalence. “Few poems fuse such a sense of immediacy with such weight of universality,” he writes. “Dover Beach is virtually unique in its elevation of spiritual fatigue to the level of a grand emotion.”Footnote 52
Updike's appreciation of Arnold is germane to understanding the development of his liberal sensibilities exactly because of what Arnold symbolized for postwar liberals. It was, after all, Lionel Trilling who introduced Arnold's ambivalent liberalism (Trilling called it a “liberalism for the future”) to Americans in his doctoral dissertation “Matthew Arnold” (1939). This work, as Michael Kimmage has noted, became “the foundation of Trilling's career and something of a milestone for his generation” (and provided the basis for The Liberal Imagination).Footnote 53 What Trilling found so attractive about Arnold was his caution against the excessive utilitarian and philistine qualities of “middle class liberalism” that facilitated the disintegration of bourgeois values and bred “the emotional situation of modern man—his insufficiency, his uncertainty, his dilution of spirit” and “a terrible sense of the loneliness of man.”Footnote 54
But Arnold never succumbed to despair. And his ambivalent response to the “darkling plain” of modernity anticipates the newly sobered liberal mindset that Trilling embodied:
Arnold declared that modern man was crippled and incomplete. His poetry, on the one hand, is a plangent threnody for a lost wholeness and peace; on the other hand, it is the exploration of two modern intellectual traditions which have failed him and his peers, the traditions of romanticism and rationalism, and, moving between these two strands, it is an attempt to weave them together into a synthesis. Each alone, he feels, is insufficient, but together, they promise much. The effort of reconciliation produces a body of poetry which is philosophical but not systematic; what is declared at one point, is contradicted in another.Footnote 55
Michael Kimmage found in Arnold's synthetic vision—what he labeled “an amalgam of conservative and progressive tendencies”—the source of his inspiration for postwar liberals:
The pivotal event was the French Revolution, which created the modern spirit even while failing to solve the modern crisis in politics. Arnold's ambivalent relationship to this spirit lent drama to his thought because Arnold fell between the established categories of conservative and progressive. He was never merely for or against the French Revolution; he was, in Trilling's mysterious formulation, a “liberal for the future,” and Arnold sought to balance the rationalist liberalism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill with a culture that could plausibly replace religion as a source of moral and aesthetic excellence. If it achieved such balance, the liberalism of the future would realize the democratic promise of the French Revolution without yielding to nihilism or anarchy or to the perils of untamed democracy.Footnote 56
Always in search of compromise, Arnold believed that “openness and flexibility of mind” are “the first of virtues.” “He welcomed rationalism but feared its effects. He was far from being at one with established religion yet he feared the void which its disappearance would leave,” Trilling concluded. “Arnold's criticism was, in effect, his refusal to move forward until Burke and Voltaire compounded their quarrel, bowed to each other and, taking him by either hand, agreed on the path to follow.”Footnote 57
It is fair to speculate that the influence of Arnold and Trilling was transmitted to Updike through Harry Levin. The renowned modernist scholar with whom Updike remained in contact long after college was considered by him an “excellent” teacher and would be remembered in endearing terms for providing him “access to the world of modern, living letters.”Footnote 58 Reassessing his own work, Levin noted, “I have considered some of the reasons for this flow and ebb of talent in my essay, ‘What Was Modernism?,’ and have taken note that Lionel Trilling reached a parallel view by a different route.” In perceiving of Trilling as an ally in a shifting literary landscape permeated by postmodern sentiments, Levin conceded that “perhaps we may need critics with apocalyptic sensibilities, like George Steiner, rather than stodgy old humanistic liberals like Professor Trilling and myself.”Footnote 59 What Levin passed on to Updike was Arnold's (and Trilling’s) unique approach to texts. Updike recalled that Levin “not only opened my eyes to our supreme classic but, with their emphasis on dominant metaphor, to a whole new way of reading.”Footnote 60 This new approach contained a pluralist bent that resisted the dictates of the dominant schools of formalism and New Criticism. “I was so fiercely caustic as to be labeled a young Turk . . . and guarded my independence so jealously that I withdrew from the Partisan Review because of its doctrinaire partisanship in those days and disappointed the editor of the Kenyon Review by taking a middle ground between New Criticism and old scholarship,” Levin recalled. In a familiar line that could have been borrowed from Trilling, Levin admits, “It has always seemed to me that, if it is truth we seek, then every conceivable path to it should be considered viable, and that the seeker should try as many of them as he can, or at least do his best to keep them open.”Footnote 61 As one of his colleagues observed, Levin's writings exhibited a “skeptical pluralism” that asks the reader “not to decipher, but to ponder.”Footnote 62
Having closely studied John Keats, Updike was certainly familiar with “negative capability” and incorporated it into his own essays.Footnote 63 Tasked in an English course with evaluating whether objective criticism can assess the irrationality of poetry, Updike delicately navigates between realms of “the mysterious” where faith, madness, and the unconscious generate inspiration, and the realm of reason that imposes order upon them, in search of middle ground. “The modern metaphor of the catalyst, the embodiment of neutrality, is an attempt to remove the supernatural and moral overtones without denying the mystery,” Updike wrote. Fusing Alexander Pope's rational formalism with Percy Shelley's romantic outbursts, he proposed a compromise:
Indeed, if one considers Pope as emphasizing one aspect of poetry and Shelley, a different aspect, the two do not clash: they dovetail. There is a broad middle way between the extreme banks of brittle formalism and rhapsodic nonsense. The greatest poets—Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, in a way, Goethe—seem to tread the middle of the road, and are usually neglected in a paper of this sort.Footnote 64
Updike broadened his horizons by studying Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with the Russian scholar Michael Karpovich—an emotional experience that once caused him to weep.Footnote 65 Karpovich, who served in the short-lived liberal government of Alexander Kerensky, represented, according to historian Martin Malia, a “moderate westernism” that gravitated to “the center” and evolved “towards moderation.” Fusing literature with politics, he embraced “tolerance, open-mindedness, pluralism,” and “believed in the actions of human will and chance in history as opposed to all determinisms. He held to the autonomy of thought and art with respect to politics, and he equated true civilization with a diversified culture and ‘marketplace of ideas’.” For Karpovich, Malia concluded, “Liberalism, precisely because it refuses to be categorical, means sanity, balance, judiciousness—that ability ‘to encompass both sides of a question’ and to see ‘that the truth is somewhere in between.’”Footnote 66
Eric Havelock, who taught Updike Latin, was also a source of inspiration in shaping his liberal temper: so “fond” had Updike grown of Havelock that he audited another of his courses “just to. . .listen to him talk about philosophy.”Footnote 67 Updike studied with Havelock while he was working on his seminal book The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, which challenges traditional concepts of liberalism rooted in universal presuppositions of natural rights, and provides an alternative anthropological portrait of a fluid liberalism grounded in pragmatic adjustments to contingencies as practiced by the pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus, Protagoras, Antiphon, and Lycophron. For Havelock, modern democracy constituted
a synthesis of the postulates of the Greek liberals on the one hand, and of Greek idealism on the other. Its organs of political power are so framed as to express as far as possible some conformity with the thesis that a common mind exists, that the common men are best judges of their own political interests, that political wisdom is empirical and pragmatic and that men are naturally more inclined to co-operate than to fight, and that divergent personal opinions can be negotiated to the point of effective decision.Footnote 68
Havelock's notion of liberalism resisted the systematic idealism of Plato or Aristotle and opted instead for a political reality “in which power-patterns existed pragmatically and temporarily,” and policy reflected “man-made choices for material and natural ends” in a dynamic historical vision “that remained open at both ends.”Footnote 69
Updike's most thorough introduction to the world of political ideas was the yearlong Gen Ed course Social Science I (“Introduction to the Development of Western Civilization”) taught by historians Crane Brinton, Charles Taylor, and his beloved teaching assistant Gavin Langmuir (labeled by Updike “the awesome section man”).Footnote 70 They fed Updike a blend of classic and modern political thought and medieval Christian philosophy that combined to formulate his uniquely tempered liberal imagination. Updike's reading assignments reveal a rich diversity of texts and ideas: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Vico, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Feuerbach (among others), supplemented by Sidney Hook, Isaiah Berlin, and Edmund Wilson.Footnote 71
Updike demonstrated keen interest in both medieval philosophy and modern political thought. He wrote a twenty-two-page paper titled “Marx: Man on a Mission” as his final assignment for the course, analyzing how Marx's intellectual environment shaped his ideas. “As a historical theorist Marx asserts his least-challenged claim to genius. And it is here that we find that element most difficult for which to find precedent,” Updike writes.Footnote 72 Marx's ability to weave competing philosophies into a cogent historical tapestry was for Updike what made him so compelling:
Marx was the heir of a great transformation in Europe. The English industrial revolution found definitive expression in the classical school of economists. The French Revolution is remembered by the writings of the philosophes. The intellectual upheaval in Germany manifested itself in the idealistic philosophies of Kant and Hegel. In Marx is found a synthesis of aspects of German idealism, French rationalism, and English political economy.Footnote 73
As impressed as Updike had been by Marx (he would write another paper about the Communist Manifesto) he was equally fascinated with medieval thought.Footnote 74 His penchant for drawing inspiration from both past and present is evident in a pair of essays that he wrote about King Louis IX and Peter Abelard. Asked to determine “what relevant values” of Louis IX (1214–70) remain for “a modern western culture,” Updike found quite a few. In the essay “Just Ruler, Pious Saint, Chivalrous Knight” he conveyed “qualified admiration” for the French king, who, despite his “fierce intolerance,” upheld firm moral convictions—a quality Updike found wanting in America. “Our culture is tolerant. It is not because our nation was founded for tolerance of religious belief, or because our Constitution is based upon equality of human rights,” Updike explained before betraying his own sense of skepticism: “We cannot be equated with medieval fanaticism because the modern western mind is too full of doubt in anything strongly enough to impose its half convictions on others.”Footnote 75 In another essay about the French philosopher Peter Abelard (1079–1142) Updike exhibited his propensities for synthesis by celebrating the scholastic teachings linking reason and faith for which Abelard was condemned: “It was his reasoning, questioning mind that made him dangerous. He rose to heights through rationalism; his rationalism caused his downfall.” Abelard, insisted Updike, did not “rebel against religion, but only against blind faith,” since he believed that “human reason must now be the guide to faith; faith is the result of reason.”Footnote 76
Updike's ostensibly confounding admiration for Marx, Louis IX, and Abelard is emblematic of the pluralist vision he cultivated in college. The intensive academic engagement with various facets of Western thought—classic, medieval, and modern—had taught him to appreciate rival intellectual persuasions. And this was clearly manifest in his final paper for the Gen Ed literature course Humanities 4, titled “The Decline of Moral Sensibility since The Divine Comedy,” which reveals the maturity of his liberal mindset:
The form and pressure of our age emerge from that of the ages preceding. Modern literature would be unfaithful to its function if it reflected obscurely the facts of our moral condition. Science's quest for objective order has dimmed the reality of those ideals to which man looked to order his life; it has emphasized man's insecure and minor place in the cosmos; it has, by the very nature of its inductive method, neither provided an absolute purpose nor pointed out an ultimate direction. It explores reality yet suggests no attitude with which that reality may be viewed. The two extremes, objective and subjective, are “determinism” and “absurdity.” Both are futile. Helplessness and aimlessness are equally hopeless conditions. Compromise is suggested. The moral schemes and attitudes we have discussed are all based upon some compromise of logical accuracy, man's nature, or external reality.Footnote 77
Despite his keen interest in politics, Updike was first and foremost a writer, and the bulk of his studies were dedicated to fiction. What I have attempted to reconstruct here is a certain atmosphere that helped nurture in Updike a set of liberal sensibilities. And the fact that his college papers demonstrate a powerful urge towards pluralism and compromise suggests a durable link between the ideas he imported as a student and those he would export as a writer. The older Updike grew, the more unequivocal his appreciation for his liberal education became. In his poem “Apologies to Harvard” Updike graciously conceded, “The possible is but a suburb, Harvard, of your city.” For his fiftieth anniversary reunion, he recalled that “Harvard's education in literary appreciation and analysis has stood me in good practical stead as a book reviewer and a creative writer, as well as lubricated the course of all my reading.” In his submission for the fifty-fifth anniversary, published posthumously, he gave a parting salute to his alma mater: “Daily I thank my lucky stars for the many blessings life has brought me, not least among them admission to Harvard.”Footnote 78
THE LITERATURE OF LIBERALISM
By the time he became a household name less than a decade after leaving Harvard (mostly due to the success of his second novel, Rabbit, Run), Updike had gravitated, both conceptually and politically, toward the center. “My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class,” he revealed in 1966. “I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” Careful to distinguish himself from his ideologically driven colleagues, Updike insisted that “my work is meditation, not pontification,” and explained, “I think of my books not as sermons or directives in a war of ideas but as objects, with different shapes and textures and the mysteriousness of anything that exists.”Footnote 79
Influenced by Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, Updike, who was raised in the Lutheran tradition, shared their disenchantment with the human condition and acquired a strong suspicion of progress.Footnote 80 Despite their diverging assessments of modernity—Tillich sought to embrace it while Barth's orthodoxies kept him more hostile—like Niebuhr they both exhibited an Augustinian awareness of human fallibility that deeply impressed Updike. Lutheranism, he approvingly noted, “is itemized by Tillich as a ‘consciousness of the corruption of existence, a repudiation of every kind of social Utopia (including the metaphysics of progressivism), an awareness of the irrational and demonic nature of existence’” and, in such, contains “tolerance of uncertainly and of contradiction.”Footnote 81
The search for such tolerance was evident in Updike's capacious body of criticism that was informed not only by his formal concerns as a writer but also by his political sensibilities:
Dance the Eagle to Sleep fails as a novel of ideas because “the system” is never allowed to have a cogent, let alone persuasive, spokesman. The policemen are uniformly faceless and brutal, the school teachers are all “frustrated, embittered lumps” . . . Anything genial in middle-class life is dismissed as “co-optative softness.” Fascinating suggestions pass unchallenged: research scientists have no alternative to participation in nerve-gas projects, Che and Mao will deliver us from toilet training, all people over twenty-five hate all people under twenty-five because television commercials present youthful beauty as an ideal. The actions of the government, as it blitzkriegs the movement into smithereens, pretend to have no rationale beyond the author's desire to allegorize the Vietnam War . . . No mitigating circumstances are allowed in the Piercy condemnation—no historical causality, no suspicion that the system is a self-admittedly imperfect patchwork of changeable human devices, no comparison with other systems, living or dead.Footnote 82
In Updike's tepid review of the novel Morning, Noon, and Night (1968) by James Gould Cozzens a few years later, he made a surprising suggestion: “Not that political conservatives should be barred from the halls of fiction; rather, they should be better represented there, to relieve the present rather shrill unanimity on the left.”Footnote 83 This call is not unique to Updike—and had been sounded by Trilling in The Liberal Imagination two decades earlier. The fact that his criticism echoes Trilling's suggests not only the persistence of Updike's “negative capability,” but also how closely aligned his literary and political imaginations have become.Footnote 84
Despite his insistence on being designated an apolitical writer, Updike was proud of his liberal credentials. “By European standards, I don't belong to the extreme left, but by American standards I think I do. Every election I have voted for a Democratic president,” he admitted. Updike's dedication to the party of Roosevelt was instilled in him growing up in rural Pennsylvania during the Depression. “We were Democrats. My grandfather lived for ninety years, and always voted, and always voted straight Democrat,” he recalled. “My parents are closer to me. The events that shaped their views are in my bones. At the time when I was conceived and born, they felt in themselves a whole nation stunned, frightened, despairing . . . With Roosevelt, hope returned.” Updike, who eventually befriended prominent liberal intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, remained a committed New Dealer all his life: he was staunchly anticommunist (and gladly participated in State Department delegations abroad during the Cold War while communicating with Americans for Democratic Action); supported Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter; and enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama's presidency before his death.Footnote 85 As one American diplomat in Moscow who hosted Updike recalled, “he was a patriot, a believer in America and its role in the world.”Footnote 86
Even while remaining mostly silent on politics—his reluctant support of the Vietnam War being the exception—Updike's liberal sensibilities continued to shape his work.Footnote 87 When asked in 1971 about his “philosophy,” Updike referred readers to Midpoint, a lengthy autobiographical poem written in 1969 for his thirty-seventh birthday.
Updike crafted another poem titled “Washington” that appeared in the same collection as a strange ode to the nation's capital with a familiar bent for compromise:
Updike's early novels offer the greatest testament to the potency of his liberal imagination. The Poorhouse Fair (1959), for instance, is not a typical debut novel: influenced by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, it portrays a dystopian 1970s America and explores seemingly un-extraordinary, almost banal, events that occur during a single day in a state poorhouse for the aged in New Jersey as the “inmates” (Updike's term) host their annual fair.Footnote 89 Driving the plot is the central axis of conflict between the main protagonists: Stephen Conner, the young technocratic poorhouse prefect who runs the place in a regimented fashion, and its oldest inmate, Hook, a ninety-four-year-old maverick who resists Conner's reforms. An emblem of the modern state, Conner is efficient, cold, and calculating, while Hook is a remnant of a bygone America: a romantic individualist, he is spiritual and highly attuned to the sensory experiences of nature. Each of them representing archetypes for opposing forces engaged in a 1950s-type clash of civilizations, scholars have interpreted the novel as a dialectic collision between modernity and tradition and their competing sets of values: bureaucracy versus individualism, equality versus liberty, secularism versus religion.Footnote 90 They spar over everything from seating arrangements (Conner has ordered nametags put on all chairs) to the existence of God. But while their arguments often engage broader questions about power, democracy, and virtue, they are never really resolved.
The novel begins with Conner's regulation of the seating and ends with the inmates, tired of Conner's regimentation, “revolting” by stoning him with the stones he made them clear from the broken poorhouse wall. Instead of resolution or triumph, the final passage suggests the inability of Hook and Conner—and the forces they represent—to achieve closure:
His [Hook’s] encounter with Conner had commenced to trouble him. The young man had been grievously stricken. The weakness on his face after his henchman had stolen the cigar was troubling to recall; an intimacy had been there Hook must reward with help . . . He stood motionless, half in moonlight, groping after the fitful shadow of the advice he must impart to Conner, as a bond between them and a testament to endure his dying in the world. What was it?Footnote 91
That the novel commences and concludes with a question mark is fitting (the opening line reads “What's this?” after Hook first spots the nametags) since it engages the ostensibly irreconcilable tensions between competing ideas and values. But rather than reflect an intellectual or formal failure, as critics have complained, the delicate balancing act that Updike has performed here betrays his liberal instincts to sustain opposing ideals in a complementary fashion that partially embraces both—without rejecting either.Footnote 92
There is a conscious obfuscation of the relationship between Conner and Hook that subtly draws them together as much as it outwardly pulls them apart. Although Hook had initially protested the nametags, he still respects the burdens of governing and the responsibilities of wielding power: after Gregg, a malevolent inmate, smuggles a diseased cat into the grounds, Hook agrees with the prefect's decision to put the wounded animal out of its misery rather than have it endanger the residents. It is after this fleeting moment of camaraderie that the narrator remarks how Conner “rather enjoyed the balm of standing by Hook's side.”Footnote 93 Siding with Conner, Hook surprisingly shares his pragmatic reasoning for protecting the public welfare. Conner, too, undergoes a gradual transformation that drives him closer to Hook: early in the novel, Conner finds himself contemplating whether he is a “shepherd” to the inmates, or merely their “captive.” The recurring use of the sheep-herding similes acquires religious flavor in the wake of the climactic stoning: “Stunned and quickly sickened Conner felt as a revelation dropped from a red heaven the word Unjust.” But instead of punishing the inmates he forgives them. After his assistant Buddy questions this, “Forgive them? Just that?” Conner explains, “All of that. It's a great deal. I’m quite hurt; I had no idea of that much hate.”Footnote 94 That Conner, a self-avowed atheist and rationalist, decided in an uncharacteristic moment of unreason to demonstrate the compassion that has been the sine qua non of Christianity is a reminder that he is willing to partially embrace Hook's ideals just as Hook was willing to accept some of his.
Time and again in the novel Updike ostensibly conveys sympathy for one opinion—only to slyly undermine it with another. For example, after the inmates fondly reminisce about Conner's personable and warm, yet dangerously incompetent, predecessor Mendelssohn, the narrator interjects, “The window and [fire] escape were Conner's innovation; in Mendelssohn's day they would have burned.” Later on, when Hook's unwavering faith appears to have bested Conner's atheism in an impassioned debate over Creation, it is Buddy who is given the last word—and uses it to reveal how prayer failed his ailing brother whose grave pain was alleviated only by modern medicine (“It would have been such a little thing for God to do, yet it was not done, even that little thing”). We see this again in Conner's response to complaints about his rigidness: “Half the country home acres were lying fallow, waste. The outbuildings were crammed with refuse and filth. The west wing was a death trap. When Hook, last autumn, ate that unwashed peach, he would have died if Mendelssohn had still been in charge.”Footnote 95 By masterfully counterweighing the appeal of both characters and the competing ideas they espouse, Updike's liberal imagination has created a delicate symbiosis that sustains fictional life in this metaphorical ecosystem he has built within the poorhouse walls: Conner gives life, while Hook gives that life purpose; so that for every sensual celebration of life by Hook, we are reminded that without Conner life would not have been possible in the first place.
Unlike the serene and depoliticized 1950s atmosphere in which The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run were set, Updike injected Rabbit Redux with the tumult and chaos of the 1960s, augmenting his documentary-styled social realism with an uncharacteristic analytic dimension. The narrative opens with the historic Moon landing in July 1969 and ends three months later. The eponymous hero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a faithful LBJ Democrat described as part of Nixon's “silent majority,” has reunited with his wife Janice and they lead a typical suburban life in Brewer, Pennsylvania. Rabbit works as a linotype setter at a printing plant and Janice is employed at her father's Toyota dealership. But the story is rooted in a reversal of fortune: whereas a decade earlier it was Rabbit who abandoned his family in order to temporarily shack up with a prostitute named Ruth during an existential crisis (the consequence of which was the accidental drowning of his baby daughter by his wife), it is Janice who now leaves Rabbit for her coworker Charlie Stavros, a “bleeding heart liberal” vociferously opposed to the Vietnam War—which Rabbit supports. During this time Rabbit raises their thirteen-year-old son Nelson while undergoing a host of adventures. First, he meets a nineteen-year-old “hippie teenager” named Jill who has run away from her affluent Connecticut family. Having essentially been pimped out to him, the insecure Jill moves in with Rabbit and substitutes as both his lover and child. After she invites into the home her boyfriend Skeeter, a black power advocate and Vietnam vet with messianic fantasies, the trio enter into a bizarre psycho-sexual three-way relationship that brings the acrimony of the 1960s—from which Updike had personally fled by moving to London—into Rabbit's living room: racial strife, Vietnam, feminism, and counterculture are all afforded central roles in the plot, as news reports constantly spew information about the growing body count in southeast Asia, urban riots, and the trial of the Chicago Eight. The plot culminates when Rabbit's neighbors, enraged by the interracial relationship, burn down his house, with Jill still in it.
This is a symbolic denouement: it is not only Rabbit's home that goes up in flames but the political house that Roosevelt's New Deal coalition had built—fittingly occupied by a white working-class male, female flower child and black power radical. Whereas The Poorhouse Fair reflected a clash between two opposing world views, here Updike consciously complicates the pluralist discourse by constructing a diverse set of characters that represent the competing forces tearing America apart—and affording them all ample opportunity to articulate their positions.Footnote 96 Alongside the voices of the old generation belonging to Rabbit's father and father-in-law, who respectively express traditional liberal and conservative viewpoints (the former is a loyal New Dealer who can't stop raving about Medicare and the latter a John Bircher who blames the Kennedys for America's ills), Updike amplifies the revolutionary sounds of the counterculture and black power through Jill and Skeeter. Indifferent to material concerns, the carefree Jill, who has abandoned her family on a journey of self-discovery and spends her time reading about yoga and Zen, offers a compelling critique of the Fordist economy in which Rabbit is trapped. “Whatever men make, what they felt when they made it is there. If it was made to make money, it will smell of money that is why these houses are so ugly, all the corners they cut are still in them,” she tells him. “Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”Footnote 97 Her monologs read like passages from Marx's Alienated Labor and echo the concerns about the dehumanizing effects of corporate capitalism made by the New Left.Footnote 98
Despite being an unsympathetic protagonist—angry, violent, and abusive—Skeeter, who is often reduced to a racial stereotype, has important things to say. When Jill tells Rabbit that “the reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is he's opaque, you don't know a thing about his history,” she ignites an introspection on American race relations. The result is a series of bizarre “seminars” on Rabbit's sofa, during which Skeeter skillfully articulates the ideas of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and offers a historically informed analysis of the economic origins of racism by reading aloud works of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Franz Fanon (“What's all this about democracy, let's have here a dollar-cracy. Why’d we ever care, free versus slave? Capital versus labor, that's where it's at, right?”).Footnote 99 Skeeter's endless harangues (which comprise the longest chapter) linking capitalism to racism do not fall on deaf ears: when he asks Rabbit, “You believe any of this?” the latter earnestly responds: “I believe all of it.”Footnote 100
Updike's conscious decision to transform Janice's lover of all people into a sympathetic figure ascribes particular import to his views and compels us to listen to what he has to say. After scoffing at the flag decal on Rabbit's car, Stavros remarks, “I just can't get too turned-on about cops bopping hippies on the head and the Pentagon playing cowboys and Indians all over the globe. That's what your little sticker means to me. It means screw the blacks and send the CIA into Greece.” Stavros is more than an antiwar mouthpiece: he challenges Rabbit's (and Updike’s) Cold War sensibilities and like a Socratic gadfly pokes holes in his conventional domino-theory-meets-quiet-American rationalization for war. Rabbit proclaims,
We’d turn it into another Japan if they’d let us. That's all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the Goddam Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs. . .
only to be reminded by Stavros that it was America that started throwing them.Footnote 101
A self-described “conservative” who supported Hubert Humphrey, Rabbit desperately tries to hold on to a disappearing center increasingly squeezed between reactionary and revolutionary forces. His characteristic ambivalence is indicative of Updike's own confused devotion to the middle: he extols law and order—at one point while sitting in a police car he realizes his “love of the law”—but he also acquiesces in breaking it by doing drugs and harboring a fugitive, Skeeter, whom he eventually helps to escape justice. In one scene, he voices support for the Vietnam War (“I’m all for it”) by explaining his opposition to antiwar protesters: “I’m not saying it's pleasant to fight in or be caught in. I just don't like the kids making the criticisms.” He goes on to admit, “I guess I don't much believe in college kids or the Viet Cong. I don't think they have any answers. I think they’re minorities trying to bring down everything that halfway works. Halfway isn't all the way but it's better than no way.” After reading a fiery Garrison passage in another scene (“If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery agitation, then let the State perish”), Skeeter interprets it to mean “More Power to the People, Death to the Fascist Pigs.” But Rabbit disagrees: “To me it means, Throw the baby out with the bath.”Footnote 102
By the end of the novel Rabbit begins to have a change of heart. When he and his father come across an antiwar vigil that prompts the latter to castigate the protesters, it is Rabbit who surprisingly comes to their defense. “Pop, all they are saying is they want the killing to stop,” he says, causing his dad to remark, “They’ve got you too, have they?” A similar transformation affects his racial attitude: the same Rabbit who initially employs racist epithets and complains that there are “too many negroes on the bus” ends up transfixed by Frederick Douglass's writings and aids a black power fugitive to escape police. Despite his hostility to Skeeter (at one point he beats him severely), Rabbit is drawn to him and emulates his behavior. When Skeeter, who realizes this, asks him, “you like being a nigger, don't ya?” Rabbit firmly replies, “I do.”Footnote 103
After the climactic scene in which his house burns down, Rabbit ponders, “The freshening sky above Mt. Judge is Becky, the child that died, and the sullen sky to the west, the color of a storm sky but flawed by stars, is Nelson, the child that lives. And he, he is the man in the middle.”Footnote 104 But unlike the benign ambivalence of The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit Redux painfully reveals the utter failure of the middle way. Whereas all other characters have something important to say, it is Rabbit who is speechless (and it is germane when his father-in-law tells him “your silence disturbs me” after Rabbit refuses to discuss politics).Footnote 105 The same deep pluralism that had informed Updike's previous works appears unable to meet, let alone resolve, the problems of racial discrimination and an unjust war. These moral challenges that are carefully explored in the novel become so unsettling to Rabbit, and to Updike, exactly because they reveal that fundamental assumptions regarding liberty, equality, and justice that many liberals like him took for granted (aka the “liberal consensus”) had yet to be secured—and that their newfound inclinations for moderation were wholly inadequate for securing them.Footnote 106 What Gordon Hutner considered “the insubstantiality of its [the novel’s] social vision” essentially reveals itself to be a political and not an imaginative failure; the novel lacks a redemptive vision because by this point the liberal mindset did not really have one.Footnote 107
Despite being branded naive and reactionary by some critics, Updike's candid reassessment of the 1960s in Rabbit Redux suggests that he too understood these failures.Footnote 108 “All these investigations of our origins and terrible flaws, the built-in problems of the way things work in America is a little like scouring the plumbing in your own home,” he admitted upon the novel's publication. “It's hard for some of us to get down in the cellar. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.” Looking back on the Rabbit series, Updike conceded,
The books are all about his [Rabbit’s] education, and he's a somewhat slow learner, you may think. Vietnam was a considerable shock for middle-of-the-road Americans who had known nothing but victories in wars, who had no reason to doubt that America was always right and would always win. And suddenly we couldn't seem to win, and it wasn't very clear that we were right, either.Footnote 109
CONCLUSION
The resistance to resolution that informs Updike's early work is as much a product of his liberal sensibilities as it was of his formal style or metaphysical beliefs. Instilled in him at home and cultivated at Harvard, Updike wove the pluralist bent into the rich texture of his prose. And it was exactly the suspension of ideological conflict that he held so dear that, according to James Kloppenberg, had always been, and still remains, American liberalism's key virtue:
Historically, the reconciling and balancing of competing values, which seems so elusive in the polarized culture of the United States in the end of the twentieth century, has been another defining feature of the liberal and democratic traditions in America. These traditions have not reflected the false dichotomies of our current debates but instead demonstrate the necessity and even the desirability of holding in suspension, and deliberating about the meaning and implications of, values that may seem incommensurable in theory but that inspire practices capable of sustaining and enriching our lives. The principles we need are right in front of our eyes in the virtues of liberalism: in the deliberate and delicate balancing of freedom against responsibility, of the desire for individual wealth and security against the importance of social equality, and of genuinely constitutive commitments to religious traditions or other cultural ideals against the awareness of the sometimes incompatible values of other Americans.Footnote 110
* * *
This article has attempted to offer a fresh interpretation of Updike's early work by navigating his previously unchartered political imagination. It demonstrates how he produced a body of literature that reflected a set of particular sensibilities compatible with the postwar liberal temper with which he himself had been imbued. By reminding us that the literary and political imaginations occupy parallel domains that often converge, Updike, who prided himself on being apolitical, ironically also offers us a potential blueprint for mending our broken political system: reclaiming the literary sensibilities that sustain opposing viewpoints under the same narrative framework through malleability, openness, and synthesis could, after all, help ameliorate the ideological polarization that mars contemporary American politics and repave the path towards compromise and cooperation. Embracing genuine political pluralism is a complex intellectual feat that requires a certain solicitude for the lost art of public dialogue and a free and honest exchange of ideas. Updike's fiction is a good place to rediscover them.
