Updike, Harry Angstrom and Me :: essays research papers

This is a prose-poem on Updike. It follows Updike done his mouse hare Tetralogy._______________________________UPDIKEJohn Updikes Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I set-back had contact with the Bahai assent 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 Bahai in October 1959. The book was published a few months laterward in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one Harry Rabbit Angstrom, from a small town in the USA. The book concerns Harrys 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 too left the take up for a set of limits. I was only too well certified 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 lifes, from rescripts, constraints. I kne w from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was care 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 Updikes book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced. The Bahai 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 Updikes work.When I was preparing to word of farewell North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the impression Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970. Rabbit Redux, Updikes 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. Updikes final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak retreat and old age. The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harrys. Ron Price with thanks to Articles on John Updikes Works, in The New York Times on the Web.