Rabbit Revised

RANDALL H. WALDRON
Ohio Wesleyan Unmersity

arc two significantly different published texts of John

JL Updike's Rabbit, Run^ and a third which is less substantially yet
still importantly variant. Though Updike himself called attention
to the major of these differences in his foreword to the Modern
Library edition, the situation has remained virtually unacknowl-
edged by scholars and bibliographers/ The existence of such differ-
ing texts of so central a contemporary work is itself deserving of
notice and some elaboration« Further, a study of the progressive
revisions—supplemented by reference to the development of the text
in manuscript and proof—-demonstrates the integral place of the
revisor's craft in Updike's meticulous artistry. Perhaps most im-
portant, the history of these revisions reveals that the text of refer-
ence for virtually all the published commentary on the novel (the
first edition) fails to represent not only the author's final intention
but also his original one.
After publication of the first edition in this country by Knopf in
i960, and in England by Andre Deutsch the following year, Updike
undertook a thoroughgoing verbal overhaul of the novel for the
Penguin edition (1964), beginning with the restoration of sexual
e and descriptions which he had reluctantly excised at
Kjiopfs request before the first edition went to press. Thus this
revised text is closer in one important sense to his original intention
than is the first edition itself« Howeveij he also made at that time
many additional, or "new" changes, so that from another perspective
^ Two brief notes by Albert E. Wilhelm introduce the subject and offer helpful obserra-
tions on Updike's motivés for revising the novels but do not recognize the existence of the
second revision and are unclear OB some points regarding the ñrst» See "Updike's Revisions
oi\Rahbit, Run" Notes on Modern American Literature, 5 (Summer 1981), Item I5J and
"Rabbit Restored; A Further Note on Updike's Revisions," Notes on Modern Amencsm
Literature, 6 (Spring-Summer 1982)^ ítem 7.

American IJterature, Volume 56, Number i, March 1984. Copyright © by the Duke
University Press.
52 American Literature

the second text may be said to be closer to a "final" intention.

Several years later, when Knopf decided to adopt the revised text for
its 1970 reprinting, Updike undertook what might be called a fine
tuning, which likewise included restorative elements (mostly
reversals of some of the changes made in the earlier revision) as
well as further new refinements. It is this edition, the last in a
"bi-directional" process of revision—casting back to recover original
or earlier readings and working forward in the form of newly
conceived adjustments—that can most accurately be called "the real
Rabbit, Run:'

In the Modern Library foreword Updike explained the first of

his revisions as follows:
Rabbit, Run was written in 1959, in the present tense. The time of its
writing contained the time of its action. The songs and news that Harry
Angstrom hears on the car radio in his drive south, on the night before
Spring arrives, were what came over my own, more northerly radio that
very night. I fell behind in this synchronization, but still worked with
such haste that I felt impelled to rework all proofs heavily and, after the
book was published, to make further revisions for the Penguin edition
printed in England four years later. I thank the Modern Library for
troubling to include these revisions in this reset text.^

This statement is interesting not only because the rather casual

phrase "further revisions" seems to indicate something considerably
less than the extensive and meticulous work that was in fact done
for the Penguin edition, but more so because it refrains from men-
tioning the motive that Updike has more lately identified as the
"main stimulant" for revision:
The story is a simple enough one : because of the then fearful inhibitions
on what sexual words and things might be reproduced in print, a few—
not more than several hundred words' worth—deletions and softenings
were asked in the text of my novel in 1959. . . . I knuckled under and
made some revisions one day in the company of a young lawyer, . . .
But the changes rankled and when in 1962 the Penguin edition came
along I asked if they would mind including a few changes in their

^ John Updike, The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run (New York: Modern Library, 1965),
 Updike's Rabbit, Run 53
resetting of the text. In the interval. Lady Chatterly, Lolita, and Tropic
of Cancer had all, I believe, been published, making a whole new ball
game vis-a-vis Gutenbergian prudery. So, working ten pages a night, in
France with my family that winter, I slowly amended the text of RR,
putting back in some dirty bits (Ruth sitting on the toilet bowl was one,
as I recall) and making what other changes occurred to me. . . . Every
time an author gets a chance to go over a text, some changes are likeîy—
not all of them improvements. Only in this one instance have I delved
back into a printed novel so thoroughly, and the main stimulant was
to restore the censored bits. The other changes are just small improvised
changes with no overall intention in mind beyond simple aesthetic im-
provement. , . , I was in no way trying to alter Rabbit, Run basically; just
bring out its best self. All such changes are of that nature, like scraping
scum off a garden statue.^

Updike's reluctance to do the cutting requested by Knopf, and

his eagerness to restore at the first opportunity what had been
excised may be explained in part by his having himseîf progressively
"softened" the novel at every stage of its composition, as is amply
evident in the heavily reworked manuscript, typescript and proofs
at the Houghton Library/ He appears, for example, to have rather
unwillingly purged the text of a number of uses of the strongest
four-letter word for sexual intercourse, replacing it—sometimes after
several vacillations—^with a tamer alternative such as "frig" or
"screw." A similar tendency is observable respecting descriptions
of genitalia and sexual activity: references to Ruth's "secret mouth"
as she sits on the toilet and to Janice's "cunt" are excised, as is a
description in which Ruth "revolves her wet weight on [Rabbit's]
spindîe [and] her îove flows down/' But the text had not been
tempered enough in the eyes of the editors, and Updike "knuckled
under" to make further such compromises. Because the novel was
stiîl undergoing extensive revision in galleys and even page proof it
is sometimes difficult to distinguish with confidence between changes
made on the author's own initiative and those which may have been
made under the pressure of Knopf's request. However, a number of
revisions on the page proof appear quite clearîy to be those occa-
sioned by editoriaî censorship: they amount to no more than the
^Letter to Randall Waldron, i i May 1981, quoted with the permission of the author.
*I am grateful to John Updike for permission to examine these materials, and for
much other help as well; Í also thank Rodney Dennis and his staff at the Houghton
Library for their gracious and expert assistance.
54 American Literature

"several hundred words' worth" which Updike says he altered;

they are all in the same blue ball-point ink, suggesting they were
done on that "one day in the company of a young lawyer"; and all
but three are wholly or partially restored for the Penguin edition.
One category of these involves that four-letter word over which
Updike had already troubled more than a little. Though it survives
several times as an expletive in the first edition, three instances of
its use as a direct reference to copulation are censored in the blue
ink: "fucked woman" of page proof becomes "done woman" in the
first edition (F.85.28), the "thought of fucking" becomes "the bald
idea" (F.175.17), and "machine for fucking" becomes "machine for
loving" (F.233.32),^ The Penguin revision deleted the sentence in
which the first of these references comes, but that sentence, restoring
the censored adjective, reappears in the 1970 Knopf edition (see
below, p. 64); "machine for fucking" was restored for Penguin
(P.189.31), leaving only "the bald idea" to survive in the softened
reading (P.Ï41.33).
The expurgating editorial eye was most intensely focused on the
extended account of Rabbit's first night with Ruth, beginning with
that "dirty bit" that Updike specifically recalls having later restored:
"Ruth sitting on the toilet bowl." The scene, still quite graphic in
page proofs though toned down considerably in typescript rework-
ing, was rendered completely innocuous by the blue pen: "she sits,
like women do, primly. At home he and Janice had been trying to
toilet-train Nelson, so leaning there in the doorway be feels a
ridiculous urge to praise her. She is so tidy" (F.77.25-~29). In Penguin
the passage reappears with all its intimate details restored:
She sits, like women do, primly, her back straight and her chin tucked in.
Her knees linked by stretched underpants, Ruth waits above a whispering
gush. At home he and Janice had been trying to toilet-train Nelson, so
leaning in the doorway tall as a parent he feels a ridiculous impulse to
praise her. She is so tidy, reaching under her dress with a piece of lemon-
colored paper; she tugs herself together and for a sweet split second the

^ Page and line references to the novel are indicated in the text as follows: the first
edition (New York: Knopf, 1900), designated F; the Penguin edition (Hammondsworth:
VcnguiB. Books, 1964), designated P; the second Knopf edition (New York, 1970), desig-
nated S. (Mr. Updike informs me that the first of Knopfs reprints subsequent to the 1970
edition was inadvertently made from the old, first edition plates, but Î have not seen any
of those mistaken printings, and the error was corrected in the next impression, January
1973
 Updike's Rabbit, Run 55
whole intimate vulnerable patchwork of stocking tops and straps and
silk and fur and soft flesh is exposed. (P.64.34-65.2)
For the details in the last clause Updike turned all the way back to
the original manuscript version of the scene, and with the word
"fur" was even able to retrieve, obliquely yet more tastefully, that
which had been lost in the typescript excision of "secret mouth."
The description of Rabbit helping Ruth undress was variously
cut and blurred in detail during censoring, then largely restored
in revision. Most indicative of what had become admissible after
some relaxation of "Gutenbergian prudery" is the substantial restora-
tion of a paragraph in which Rabbit experiences a slight involuntary
ejaculation as he kneels at the bedside to wash Ruth's face. Censoring
had left for the first edition only a rather grotesque picture of the
results of the washing: "her wet face, relaxed into slabs, is not pretty;
the thick lips, torn from most of their paint, are the pale rims of a
loose hole" (F.82.15-Ï6). One imagines Updike glad to be rid, in
revision, of this unfortunate sentence, with its tortured syntax and
impossible image of Kps torn from their paint. In any event, it dis-
appears and the original passage, somewhat shortened but retaining
its detail and its couple of bizarre metaphors, is restored: "In kneel-
ing by the bed to grip her face he presses the sensitive core of his
love against the edge of the mattress and now without his will a
little spills, like cream forced over the neck of a bottle by the milk's
freezing. He backs away from contact; the shy series of
puzzled, throbs to a halt" (P.68.35-39),
The changes made in response to editorial censorship show a
writer known for his candid—to some, indeed, shocking—treatment
of sex and bold use of "vulgar" diction, systematically restoring
an aspect of his original intention which had been compromised,
first, by what appears to have been his own anticipation of what
would not be acceptable, then more extensively by the prohibitions
of his publisher. In spite of Updike's stress upon this restoration as
his "main stimulant" for revision, it comprises only a small fraction
of the Penguin reworking, the remainder belonging to that category
which he called "small improvised changes." Though remembering
that he had worked slowly and thoroughly, Updike appears to
minimize the significance of these other changes, or to have for-
gotten by 1981 how extensive his alteration of the text had been that
winter in France, The more than six hundred such additional
 American Literature

changes, ranging from single words to lengthy paragraphs and

passages, and encompassing such various functions as clarification of
diction, deletion and simplification, enrichment of texture, adjust-
ments in narrative pacing, focusing of characterization, and thematic
emphasis, demonstrate the meticulous, even agonizing carefulness of
a writer known for the exquisiteness—to some, indeed, the excessive
preciousness—of his craft. This carefulness produced, if not a
"basically" altered novel, significant and provocative differences from
the first edition, not only with respect to aesthetic polishing (scrap-
ing scum from the statue) but in more substantive ways as well.
Among the almost two hundred one-word changes there are some
whose efficacy is questionable. Why, for example, is a never-seen
neighbor's door any better shut like a "hurt" (P.8.6) rather than
an "angry" (F.7.10) face? Nor is it clear how Rabbit's ire at Janice's
having left the car at her mother's is any better expressed in "that's
just the frigging place for it" (P.9.11-12) than in "that's just the
Goddamn place" (F.8.20-21), which seems to have identical force
and tone. Frequently, however, what may appear a gratuitous altera-
tion is discovered on a closer look to testify to the care and precision
with which the revising artist has worked. Why should Rabbit's
indignation be provoked by having to buy "sugar" (P.12.29) rather
than "oranges" (F.12.26) for Janice's Old-fashioneds ? Because his
disgust at her drinking so many of them had been underlined by
adding, in revision, "sugar has stained the side [of the glass] she
drank from" (P-io.37-38). Changing oranges to sugar echoes that
disgust. And most of the other single-word adjustments do their
work equally well, replacing the casual with the telling^—Janice's
girlish breasts were "shy" not just "soft" (P.11.12, F.ii.i) ; the vague
with a concrete image—Mr. Springer's moustache is "sandy" not
"yellow" (P.20.26, F.22.20); the metaphorically strained or im-
possible with something that works—Lucy Eccles' tone of voice is
"twitty" not "curly" (P.167.29, F,2O6.Ï6); the ordinary or flat with
the vivid—bars of dust in window-light "stripe" rather than merely
"touch" a room (P.229.34, F.283.24). And as Rabbit bolts for his last
flight, hurrying down Ruth's stairwa]^, "worries come as quick as
the clicks [not the 'sound'] of his footsteps" (P.247.32, F.305.5):
rhyme, sibilance, and onomatopoeia, all functions of a single
changed word, transform an ordinary sentence into a striking one
that mimics the action and mood it describes.
 Updike's Rabbit, Run 57

Moving from the single word to changes of somewhat greater

extent—phrases, clauses, a sentence or two—we might first notice
those revisions that may quite literally be designated by Updike's
provocative metaphor, "scraping scum off a garden statue"; that is,
deleting, reducing, simplifying to reveal a part of the figure in
its clearest, sharpest outline. The simplest kind of deletions are those
in which opaque, gratuitous, or otherwise infelicitous language is
jettisoned without replacement The inert and unrevealing obser-
vation that the faces of Chinese people "look washed always"
(F.57.IÎ) is a good example, as is this curious description of the
passage from Ruth's bath to bedroom: "the edges of the doorway
they pass through seem very vivid and sharp. They will always be
here" (F.77o3i~32)„ The masterfully rendered account of Rabbit and
Ruth's first lovemaking (especially as strengthened by the restoration
of its censored elements) is certainly better for the removal of such a
couple of syntactically and metaphorically strained sentences as : "he
kisses her lips; her lips expect more than they get. Into their wet
flower he drops a brief bee's probe" (F.80.24-26). Nor can we regret
the disappearance, in revision, of the blurry metaphysical suggestion
that the pink of Mrs, Smith's rhododendrons is "a color through
whose raw simplicity, as through stained glass, you seem to look
into the ideal subsoil of reality" ( F . Î 3 9 . I I ~ Ï 3 ) .
In addition to complete deletions, Updike also effected many
improvements by reducing cumbersome, over-long or obscure
passages to more straightforward distillations. A personification of
wieners, "torn and twisted, cracked from end to end in wide pink
mouths that seemed to cry out they'd been tortured" (F.94.1-3) is
almost redeemed by reduction to "torn and twisted and tortured-
looking" (P.77.39-40), though the idea of sausages being tortured
remains hard to imagine. A more substantial and effective reduction
comes in Ruth's long MoUyesque rumination, as she muses about her
proficiency in heavy high-school petting. Bringing boys to orgasm
by letting them rub against your dress "made you dirty," she thinks
in the first edition, "you, their stickurn. They couldn't forgive her
. Her forgiving them. She didn't blame them though that was
their mothers making them write her name on the lavatory walls"
(F.147.21-23), Even within the license of the stream-of-consciousness
mode this is jumbled and opaque; revision rescues only the final
detail and substitutes for murky abstraction two poignant, simply
58 American Literature

Stated facts: "they wrote her name on lavatory walls; she became a
song in the school" (P. 119.26-27).
Of course not aîî the revisions of intermediate îength were
achieved by deletion or reduction ; as well as scraping off scum
Updike îaid on new materiaî, usually to the effect of deepening and
enriching the texture of the sensualîy apprehended worîd that is
always so much a part of his subject. For exampîe, the already
visuaîîy rich description of Rabbit's drive back into Brewer after his
abortive southward flight is given severaî telling embellishments of
light and color, including the two I have italicized in this excerpt:
"He drives around the mountain in company with a few hissing
trailer trucks. Sunrise^ an orange strip crushed against a far hill,
fiares between their wheels. As he turns left from Central into
Jackson he nearly sideswipes a milk truck idling out from the curb.
He continues up Jackson, past his parents' house, and turns into
Kegcrise Alley. Suddenly cool pin}{ pallor tinges the buildings"
(P.34.5~ii). Such added touches are equally felicitous throughout
the novel, often enmrin^ senses other than the visual. The
"MagiPeel" kitchen device Rabbit sells is described in the first edition
as taking the skin off "turnips and stuff as neat and quick—"
(F.181.7-^8). The revision not only evokes a tactile detail—"it had a
long sort of slot with razor sharp edges"—but in adding a quick list
of other vegetables, miirdcs in rhythm such a gadget's swift mechan-
ical movement and sound: it takes the skin off "turnips, carrots,
potatoes, radishes, neat, quick" (P.Î46.26--27).
Greater enrichments of texture may be gained, of course, by some-
what greater additions, as a couple of examples may suffice to
illustrate. After his harrowing evening at the Springers' on the day
of Becky's death. Rabbit, in the first edition, "walks home in the
soupy, tinkling dark" (F.276.9~-io). The obscurity of "tinkling dark"
is cleared up and Rabbit's stunned loneliness, grief and exhaustion
are registered in the revision, as he "walks home in the soupy sum-
mer dark, tinkling with the sounds of supper dishes being washed.
He climbs Wilbur Street and goes in his old door and up the stairs,
which still smell faintly of something like cabbage cooking"
. The first edition contains no account of the drive to
the cemetery for Becky's burial, shifting immediately there from the
funeral home. In revision Updike added a passage most effective in
its suggestion of the busy mundane world halting for a moment in
 Updi\e's Rabbit, Run 59

curious reverence. The quality is cinematic, like a stop-action scene :^

"They get into their cars and drive through the streets uphill. The
town hushes around them ; a woman comes out on her porch with a
basket of wash and waits there, a small boy stops himself in the
middle of throwing a ball to watch them pass. They pass between
two granite pillars linked by an arch of wrought iron" (P.237.11-16).
One other function served by brief additions demands notice as
an indicator that the Penguin revision reached beyond merely
"aesthetic improvements." Several subtle elaborations bring more
clearly to light the weakness of the priest Eccles, regarding his uncer-
tainty of faith and insecurity in his calling. His inward admission
that "he doesn't believe anything" is exposed to view in the added
line: "Mrs. Springer seems to read this in his face" (P. 125.26-27).
Later he muses, not just that "he's forgotten much theology"
(F.161.8), but that "he's forgotten most of the theology they made
him absorb" (P.i3o.29-3o)5 the change not only indicating a greater
degree of lost knowledge but a fundamental resistance to it in the
first place. And upon encountering some of his parishioners "buying
medicine or contraceptives or Kleenex" in tbe drugstore, he in-
securely concludes, in an added sentence: "it is here in truth they
come to find the antidotes to their lives" (P.139.16-17). But the most
interesting change raises a question about Eccles' sexuality. To the
description of Rabbit's embarrassment as Eccles pays his green-fee
and helps him select rented golf clubs, the revision adds that "the
thought flits through his brain that Eccles is known as a fag and he
has become the new boy" (Pao5.25-26). Thus a suggestion of
Eccles' possible homosexuality is provocatively added to the similar
one—already clear in the first edition—^regarding another of Rabbit's
dubious authorityfigures^the coach, Tothero.^
^ Updike's intensely visual way of apprehending and representing experience compels
analogies between his work and the arts of painting and drawing in which he has much
talent and training, but comparisons with cinema are often tempting as well. Interestingly
enough, an early subtitle for Rabbit, Run—pencilled in but then deleted on the first page
of the original manuscript—^was "A Motion Picture."
^ïn this connection see Gerry Brenner's ''Rabbit, Rum John Updike's Criticism of 'The
Return to Nature'," Twentieth Century Literature, 12 (1966), 3—14, which stresses the
ineffectual ity of traditional authority figures—teacher, priest, parent—in Rabbit's life.
However inchoate the idea of Eccles' homosexuality may have been at the time oí the
Penguin revision, it was later to become fully developed in Updike's imagination, though
published, eventually, only as a fragment: "An Encounter Left Out of Rabbit Redux,''
printed (without annotation) in Pieces, 2 (Jan. 1980), n. pag., describes Rabbit, ten years
after the action of Rabbit, Run, accidentally meeting Eccles, who is divorced, separated
from the church, and unmistakably, indeed stereotypically gay.
6o American Uterature
At only two points, one in the novel's center, one near its end, did
Updike undertake passages of rewriting more extensive than those
considered thus far. Refinements in diction, style, clarity, and texture
are achieved, as well as adjustments in organization and narrative
pacing. In each case there is also a notable effect on the character-
ization of Rabbit, one highlighting elements of virtue, the other feel-
ings of guilt in this morally most ambiguous protagonist.
One of the most memorable passages in the novel is that remark-
ably Joycean one in which Ruth, stung by her poolside argument
with Rabbit, slips from resentful brooding about her pregnancy into
free-associative ruminations on her promiscuous past and consequent
attitudes toward sex and men. In addition to a number of minor
changes in this four-page passage, two parts are rewritten at length—
seventeen lines substituted for an original thirteen, eight lines where
there had been one. In the first a great deal of obscurity is done
away with in favor of a markedly more straightforward presen-
tation of Ruth's thoughts and feelings. More important, the focus
shifts from those thoughts and feelings per se to Rabbit's infiuence
upon them. In the original he is referred to only at the beginning:
"for him, that was what was rich, changing herself for him when
he was worth nothing, less than nothing, he was a menace, for all
his mildness. He had that mildness" (F.146.3-5). In revision the
harsh indictment that Rabbit is worth less than nothing is removed
and, while he is still "a menace for all his mildness," the emphasis is
shifted to his salutary influence—salving the bitterness of Ruth's
past, mollifying her hatred and suspicion of men, and making it
possible for her to think of herself as other than a "sex object":

For him, that was what was rich, changing herself in one direction for
him [dieting] when in his stupidity [getting her pregnant] he was
changing her in the other. He was a menace for all his mildness. Still he
did have the mildness and was the first man she ever met who did. You
felt at least you were there for him instead of being something pasted
on the inside of their dirty heads. God she used to hate them with their
wet mouths and little laughs but when she had it with Harry she kind
of forgave them all, it was only half their fault, they were a kind of
wall she kept battering against because she knew there was something
there and all of a sudden with Harry there it was and it made everything
that had gone before seem pretty unreal. After all nobody ever really
hurt her, left her scarred or anything, and when she tries to remember
 Updike's Rabbit, Run 6i
it it sometimes seems it happened to somebody else. They seemed sort of
vague, as if she had kept her eyes shut, vague and pathetic and eager,
wanting some business their wives wouldn't give, a few army words or a
whimper or that business with the mouth» (P. Ï15.16-31)
The second substitution, replacing two brief and redundant sen-
tences, provocatively reiterates the idea stressed in the first—Rabbit's
meliorative effect on Ruth: "She wonders what he has. He's beautiful
for a man, soft and uncircumcised lying sidewise in his fleece and
then like an angel's sword, he fits her tight but it must be more than
that and it isn't just him being so boyish and bringing her bongo
drums and saying sweet grateful things because he has a funny
power over her too; when they're good together she feels like next
to nothing with him and that must be what she was looking for.
To feel like next to nothing with a man" (P,i2O.7-i4). The associa-
tion of Rabbit's erect penis with the redemptive angelic sword,
complemented by the image of its detumescent state as lamblike
in its fleecy softness, and the idea of his strange power that moves
Ruth to surrender herself and become "next to nothing," redouble
the ironic import of his having said sardonically to her minutes
earlier, "I'm a mystic . , . I give people faith" (P.ii7.i3)5 and her
scoffing, just afterward, at his having got "the idea he's Jesus Christ
out to save the world"
The other extended revision is a substantial overhaul of the
sequence of scenes at the Springer house on the afternoon of the
funeral Clearly a section that Updike found difficult to get into
a form that satisfied him, it shows heavy reworking in manuscript,
typescript, galley and page proof, and then was further altered in
several ways for the Penguin revision. One point of action is
relocated: Rabbit reads to Nelson in an upstairs bedroom after lunch
rather than downstairs beforehand, the occasion—vaguely alluded to
in the first edition—becoming a touching little vignette of the boy
falling asleep under his father's arm. Several other scenes are con-
siderably slowed in pace and thickened with detail, thus more effec-
tively dramatizing the tortuous passing of the time. Most notably,
^ The added passage would appear to support David Galloway's argument that Rabbit
is an "absurd saint" whose desire to comfort and heal is expressed through sex. On the
other hand the Christian implications of the passage (which Galloway, working with the
first edition, did not know) tend to refute his contention that Rabbit's saintliness is
inimical to the Christian tradition—The Absurd Hero in American Fiction, rev. ed. (Austin:
Univ. of Texas Press, 1970), pp. 27-40.
62 American Literature

however, the end of the sequence is fundamentally recognized and a

new scene added—changes which not only contribute to the sub-
stance and intensify the mood of the sequence, but effect a remark-
able improvement in dramatic timing as well. In the first edition, as
soon as everyone is dressed, "the undertaker's black Cadillac comes
and takes them to the funeral parlor," the interior of which is then
immediately described (F.288.8~io). In revision the blurring swift-
ness of this shift is slowed to a pace consistent with the rest of
the agonizing afternoon. When all are ready, they wait, and the
new scene—followed by an added inch of white space which lowers
the curtain momentarily before raising it again on the funeral parlor
—brings the harrowing day at the Springers' to a dramatic and
tonally appropriate close: "There is something undignified about
waiting and as they mill around in the living-room watching the
minutes ebb in the silver-faced clock they become uncomfortably
costumed children nervous for the party to begin. They all press
around the window when the undertaker's Cadillac stops out front,
though by the time the man has come up the walk and rings the
doorbell they have scattered to the corners of the room as if a bomb
of contagion has been dropped among them" (P.234.14-21).
In addition to such changes which affect the overall mood and
pace of the sequence, another crucial one stresses Rabbit's sense
of guilt, indeed sharpening it to a desire for punishment that does
not appear at al! in the first edition. There, the arrival of Janice's
father from downtown is a minor detail, dispatched in a single
rather awkward sentence: "Mr. Springer comes home, comes in, and
tries to talk about nothing and senses that Harry's status in the
house has gone down again" (F.286.9-11). In the Penguin version
this obliquely, casually touched moment becomes a carefully timed
and dramatically effective scene. Rabbit, alone in the darkened
living-room, is wrenched from drowsy peacefulness—as the soporific
hum of Mrs. Springer's sewing machine "spins out into the birdsong
and murmur of the early afternoon"—by a slamming door and Mr.
Springer's jarringly matter-of-fact announcement:
The front door slams and Springer comes into the living-room. None of
the shades have been pulled up and he starts at seeing Harry in a chair.
"Harry! Hello!"
"Hello!"
"Harry, Tve been down at Town Hall talking to Al Horst. He's the
 Updike's Rabbit, Run
coroner. He's promised me there won't be a manslaughter charge; they're
satisfied. Accidental. He's been talking to just about everybody and wants
to talk to you sometime. UnoiEcially."
"O.K." Springer hangs there, expecting some kind of congratulation.
"Why don't they just lock me up.^" Harry adds.
"Harry, that's a very negative way to think. The question is^ How do
we cut the losses from here on in ? "
"You're right. Vm sorry." It disgusts him to feel the net of law slither
from him. They just won't do it for you, they just won't take you o£E the
hook. (P. 232.6-20)
While the first edition makes clear enough Rabbit's feelings of
self-hatred during these hours, it does not reach to the psycholog-
ical insight revealed here: self-hatred taking the form of a need
to suffer punishment (the rabbit needing for once not to bolt and
run but to be confined) and anger at the failure of institutions of
authority to impose that punishment. The added scene is a refine-
ment and elaboration of the only change Updike hurried to make for
the first English edition, published by Andre Deutsch in 1961. (He
inserted
i there a briefer version of the exchange between Springer
and Rabbit, and deleted a couple of sentences down the page to
justify line count, the Deutsch edition being—but for this instance—
a photographic duplication of the Knopf text,) In a letter to me
Updike explained that he probably had been moved to make the
change because he was ''troubled by the blithe way the legal aspects
of Rebecca June Angstrom's death is [sic] glided over" in the first
edition.^ While the new scene does make clear that some ofHcial—
or "legaî"—attention is given the case, it nevertheless îays stress on
Rabbit's guilt-ridden feeling that that attention isn't enough.

As we have seen, what Updike described as the "smaîl improvised

changes" of the Penguin reworking in fact included, as well as care-
ful refinements of the surfaces of the text, revisions of greater extent
and moment, affecting such aspects of the novel as narrative and
dramatic presentation and—most notably—^characterization, espe-
ciaîîy that of the protagonist. The fine-tuning revision for the 1970
Knopf edition aîso reaches beyond mere "aesthetic improvements" to

^ 4 October 19B2; quoted with permission of the author.

 American Literature

effect often subtle and minute but nevertheless real clarifications of

character and theme.
The later revision parallels in small the bi-directional procedure
of the Penguin revision, turning back—in eighteen cases—to restore
wholly or partially first edition readings which had been changed
in 1962, and making, by my count, sixty-seven additional "first-time"
adjustments as well. Among the restorations of the first-edition
readings are such minor reversals as changing "pretending" (P.10.21)
back to "a fraud" (S.10.9) ^^ reference to Rabbit's MagiPeeler spiel,
and "ping" (P.30.37) back to "itch" (S.35.27) for the sensation he
feels in his ears when driving too fast. The sun outside Rabbit's
apartment again straightforwardly "almost knocks him down"
(S.98.10) rather than "hits him like a pillow," which it rather
incongruously was made to do in a Penguin change (P.80.17).'^*' But
not all the restorations are as minute. For example, the first edition's
account of Rabbit and Ruth's first love-making contains the passage,
"wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat;
he wants the heat his groin gave given back in gentle ebb. Best bed-
friend, done woman. Bit of bowl about their bellies always" (F.85.26-
29). The Penguin revision having replaced this with the brief and
simple "wonderful, women, the way they can join in" (P.71.26),
the original is now restored, with two alterations: the extravagant
alliteration of the last sentence is reduced to simply "Bowl bellies,"
and "done woman" becomes the now admissible "fucked woman"
(S.87.4) which had been excised in the censoring of the first edition.
By far the most extensive reversal of an earlier change restores a
deleted paragraph about Jack Eccles which affects his character-
ization in such a way as to suggest why Updike came to see that
the deletion had been a mistake. It will be recalled that several of the
Penguin changes lent stress to the weakness and insecurity of the in-
effectual priest. But that emphasis was certainly undercut by the
removal of this paragraph, a last view Eccles, registered in the con-
sciousness of Rabbit, whom he has failed as spiritual and moral guide:

He seems to leave behind him in the cafeteria all the poison she [Lucy
Eccles] must be dripping into the poor tired guy's ears. He imagines her
telling Eccles how he slapped her fanny and thinks he hears Eccles laugh-

^0 A similar unhappy Penguin revision earlier in the novel, likening the stin to "a great
pillow in the sky," survives in the 1970 Knopf edition (S.30.9—10).
 Updike's Rabbit, Run 65
ing and himself smiles. He'll remember Eccles as laughing; there was
that in him that held you off, that you couldn't reach, the nasal business,
but through the laughter you could get to him. Sort of sneaking in
behind him past the depressing gripping clinging front. What made it
depressing was that he wasn't sure, but couldn't tell you, and worried his
eyebrows instead, and spoke every word in a different voice. All in all,
a relief to be loose from him. Soggy.
A reconsideration of the Penguin changes would quite logically have
revealed to the author that a point regarding Eccles which had been
strengthened by some of those changes had been weakened by this
deletion. It is not clear, however, why the restoration of the passage
(S.301.8-18) omits that telling last word, "Soggy," which had been
deliberately added in galley proof .^^
The new (as opposed to restorative) changes for the second Knopf
edition range from simple corrections in grammar and tense, and
such adjustments in accuracy as calling trees "Norway" not "Nor-
wegian" pines, to refinements which have a more measurable effect.
This is not to say their efficacy is always clear: the change from
"yards with tricycles" (P.103.40) to "yards holding tricycles"
(S.Ï27.3Ï) is distinctly for the worse, and those tormented wieners
are no more acceptable "looking tortured" (S.95.9) than they were
as "tortured looking." Usually, however, improvements are achieved,
though often minor. For example, "he hated it" (S.15.3) makes
better sense than "it ruined him" (P.14.16) as a reference to Rabbit's
feeling when his mother criticizes Janice, and the pathos of Tothero's
affection for mean and vulgar Margaret is somehow sharpened
when he calls her a city "petunia" (S.50.11) rather than just a city
"flower" (P42.25). More significantly, several subtle changes in
Rabbit's speech reflect the acuteness of Updike's ear for the idiom
appropriate to his character. When the gas-station attendant offers
to check his "batteries," Rabbit says, after revision, "they're great"
(S.28.8), which is more like him than "they're fine," which he had
said earlier (P.24.35).^^ Similarly it is much truer to his character
for Rabbit to tell Eccles his sermon was "nifty" (S.239.2) rather than
"very nice" (P.193.Î4) and for Eccles to remember Rabbit exclaim-

^^ Among the scores o£ miscellaneous notes for the novel at the Houghton, one, on a
small scrap of paper, reads, " 'Soggy'; Rabbit thus caps his summary of Eccies."
^^The author's attention to automotive details is not so careful; 1955 Fords, like most
cars, have only one battery.
66 American Literature

ing on the golf course not "Tes, yes,' or 'That's the one!'"
(P,i36.2o), but " 'Hey, hey,' or 1 love it, lope it!' " (S.168.22).
Beyond the exquisite niceness of such refinements, the fact that
twenty—or almost one-third^—of the new changes are in passages
that Updike had already reworked for the Penguin edition testifies to
the degree of his concern for getting the surfaces just right in this
final revision—for scraping the last traces of scum from the garden
statue. More important, however, some of those twenty changes also
have provocative pertinence to central thematic concerns.
The account of Rabbit's attempt to flee his claustrophobic and
polluted urban warren for the broad clean beaches and purifying
sunlight of the Gulf is punctuated by suggestions of spiritual quest-
ing: the lure of such towns as Mt. Airy and Paradise, and—most
pointedly—the repeated reference to the Dalai-Lama, with whom
Rabbit later identifies himself. At a point where, forcing himself to
obey his map against his instinctive sense of direction. Rabbit turns
onto a side road, Updike had added in the Penguin revision: "there
is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first"
(P.30.20~2i). For the second Knopf edition he added the pointed
final stroke "to test our faith" (S.35.Ï0), lending further emphasis
to the suggestion that Rabbit's search for that "something that wants
me to find it" is indeed a spiritual, perhaps even a saintly endeavor.
While Rabbit here resists his instinct in favor of faith in external
guidance, the "right way" of that instinct itself—his capacity for
feeling joy and fulfillment in moments of harmony with the im-
peratives of his own nature—is of course also stressed in the novel,
and another of Updike's final refinements of a passage already
revised speaks to this point. In the first edition, as Rabbit says "So
long, ace" to the boy who has played on his side in the alley basket-
ball game, "he feels grateful to the boy, who continued to watch
him with disinterested admiration after the others grew sullen, and
who cheered him on with exclamations: 'God. Great. Gee' " (F.6.8--
10). For the Penguin revision, the sentence was ended after "sullen"
and the deleted remainder replaced by a new sentence, "Naturals
know each other" (P7a3-ï4), signifying an unspoken mutual
recognition among those with natural ability. Returning to the
passage again for the Knopf correction, Updike subtly adjusted its
meaning, shifting the stress to the rightness of the individual's
instinctive and intuitive feeling: "Naturals know. It's all in how it
 Updi\e's Rabbit, Run

feels" (S.6.11), This final touch, so meticulously laid on at a point

which had already undergone careful alteration, highlights at the
novel's outset what may be its most crucial issue: whether instinc-
tive reliance on his own "natural" feeling is the redeeming strength
or the destructive flaw in the chzizctcr of Harry Angstrom.

Whether one might argue from the foregoing exposition that

either of the revised texts of Rabbit, Run is "basically altered" from
the first edition must depend on one's understanding of that term.
It has not been the concern of this essay to pursue that argument
but, less ambitiouslyj to point out what appears to have escaped the
notice of most scholars—that three different texts exist—and to give
some account of the nature and possible significance of the differ-
ences. Clearly the first edition does not represent—especially with
regard to sexual explicitness—what Updike wanted to publish in
i960. And the revisions, after restoring something very close to his
original intention in that respect, move by way of some seven hun-
dred additional changes toward a text that registered in 1970 a
significantly refined if not flnal intention—which last much-worried
term may refer anyway to an "impossible object." Study of these
changes reveals the part played by sometimes exquisite exercises of
revision in the work of a notoriously meticulous writer, who recently
declared himself a striver after the standards of Flaubert and Joyce,
"the great exquisitists."^^ Though this American exquisitist, in his
non-fictional comments, has underplayed all but the aesthetic func-
tion of his reviáons, it seems fair—considering their implications for
such aspects of the novel as narrative timing, dramatic presentation,
characterization, and theme—to say that substantively as well as
aesthetically "Rabbit Revised" is sufficiently different from the first
edition of Rabbit, Run for scholars and critics to take notice.

13 Michiko Kakutani, "Updike's Latest Novel Draws on Himself," New York Times,
7 Oct. 1982, Sec. 3, p . 21.
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