UPDIKE
John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I first had contact with the Baha’i Faith back in 1953. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship Updike was working on the first of these four books, Rabbit, Run, when I became a Baha’i in October 1959. The book was published a few months later in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, from a small town in the USA. The book concerns Harry’s attempts to escape the constraints of life. In my teens I, too, lived in a small town and, although I could see the attractiveness of escaping from social constraints, I also left the need for a set of limits. I was only too well aware of just how easily I could go beyond the appropriate limits. By the late fifties I could see what happened to those who did escape from life’s, from society’s, constraints. I knew from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was like to be caught stealing, breaking and entering, going too far sexually, misbehaving around the family home, at school or with my play-mates and pushing the envelope of life. Had I read Updike’s book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced. The Baha’i Faith provided that framework, those limits, at a critical stage in my life, my mid-teens. This Faith also provided that sense of the sacredness of life which is at the centre of Updike’s work.
When I was preparing to leave North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the movie Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970. Rabbit Redux, Updike’s sequel to Rabbit, Run came out four months after I arrived in Sydney for what became my life in Australia. Harry Angstrom took to the road in 1971 in Rabbit Redux as I took to a different road in the southern hemisphere. Updike’s final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak retirement and old age. The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harry’s. –Ron Price with thanks to “Articles on John Updike’s Works,” in The New York Times on the Web.
You didn’t think much about politics
back then in the ‘50s, did you John?
Private destiny was your concern,
then and now--not that partisan game.
And your then theories about how
to write are now forgotten, eh John?
When Rabbit is Rich was set in ’79,
I was living in Tasmania fighting
another bi-polar episode; Harry was
fighting his many losses in life
or was it life’s pleasures--sex, booze,
marital infidelity and having fun?
Then Harry got old--at just 55--
in 1990 in Rabbit At Rest, a decade
before I headed into quieter pastures
where death and age awaited---
inevitably long down life’s road,
but not with fear, emptiness
and Harry’s downward slide
with its world inhabited by
ghosts and demons of his past.
Ron Price
