Conferences are fun reunions, but they also inspire people to attempt new projects. Shortly after the Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading, Pa. this past October, John McTavish thought it would be a great idea to do a round-up of members who would share their first exposures to Updike and important discoveries, as well as any recommendations they would have for would-be readers of Updike. Below are the fruits of his labor:

John Updike Readers Share Discoveries and Recommendations

“Only a very tiny list of writers comes to mind when you think of the finest American novelists,” Dick Cavett once noted, “and John Updike is certainly upon that very short list.” The British novelist Ian McEwan went even further recently claiming that “Updike at his best is… a great observer. He never ceases to surprise and delight me. I love the intelligence of the sentences with that odd little hard-to-define spring… an extra beat that quickens my pulse. Who else does that? Shakespeare, Milton and many, many other poets. Bellow does. Calvino. There’s no end of them, really. But never so copiously as Updike. One can read him at random and find some felicity on the page.”

This is high praise indeed from some pretty reputable sources. But the fact that Updike wrote over sixty books (compared with, let’s say, four for Salinger and nine for F. Scott Fitzgerald), makes it hard to say which is his best book or short story. Hence the variety of testimonies and recommendations here from a variety of readers all of whom have no hesitation in saying how much we appreciate that “odd little hard-to-define spring” in John Updike’s sentences.

First Exposures

We begin with DON GREINER, the dean of Updike criticism, who discovered the writings of John Updike while he was a student at the University of Virginia: “Because those were the days after the deaths of Hemingway and Faulkner, Frost and Eliot, etc. we used to gather in a pub after leaving the library around 10 pm to drink a few beers and to argue about which current American writer would take the place of the recently deceased American modernists. Bellow was mentioned a great deal, but most of us put our money on Salinger. We did not know, of course, that Salinger had vowed not to publish again, a vow that he kept. But one of our group of beer-drinking ‘intellectuals’ insisted that I read his copy of Pigeon Feathers and then decide. I have been reading Updike ever since.”

It was one of those stories collected in Pigeon Feathers that first turned JAMES PLATH onto Updike: “Like so many, my first exposure to Updike came in high school, when I encountered a short story vaguely reminiscent of J. D. Salinger’s that began, ‘In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.’ With that first sentence, Updike grabbed the attention of every pubescent boy in every high school in America – even the back-row jocks who leaned in their chairs against the wall. ‘A & P’ appeared in the Points of View anthology, and it was easily one of the most accessible yet resonant stories we read in Honor’s English. ‘You know,’ the 19-year-old narrator says, ‘it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet padding along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.’

“Apart from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t recall reading any literature with a capital ‘L’ where even a word like ‘naked’ or ‘bra’ appeared, much less a description of ‘the two smoothest scoops of vanilla’ inside it. Like the more graphic sexual descriptions which would follow in Couples, the Rabbit novels, and countless others, the metaphor seemed so startlingly right. But I also thought Updike perfectly captured the disconnect, the unrequited love between high school boys and girls that, at this stage in their lives, might as well have been Greek goddesses, for all their inaccessibility. Other Updike passages from other novels and short stories resonate, but you never forget the very first time that a writer speaks not just to you, but for you.”

JACK De BELLIS stumbled upon Updike in 1962 while teaching a freshman comp/lit course at UCLA and searching for a book that would show the world of Holden Caulfield as a grown-up, a person who couldn’t be saved from adulthood by the catcher in the rye:          “I thought Rabbit, Run was perfect, and it was. Later I did a 45-minute radio review of the book; much later I published two articles: ‘Oedipal Angstrom’ and ‘Names in the Rabbit Trilogy,’ and of course went on to teach the book many times.”

BILJANA DOJCINOVIC was 15 or 16 years old when she went to the municipal library in Belgrade to borrow the recently translated novel everybody was talking about — Couples. But the librarian thought that she was too young for such a book, and refused to hand it to her, saying that Couples was a sociological study:

“Instead, she gave me Rabbit, Run…. The recognition of closeness came in the scene when Rabbit comes back home and finds Janice, pregnant and alcoholic in their messy apartment. Before he goes out again to fetch Nelson from his mother, Janice calls from the kitchen, ‘And honey, pick up a pack of cigarettes, could you?’ Her voice awakens in Harry a strange sensation: ‘Rabbit freezes, standing looking at his faint yellow shadow on the white door that leads to the hall, and senses he is in a trap. It seems certain. He goes out.’

“It was this image of the character in the trap, between the door leading back to the hall/hell and the one which was seemingly the exit, that made the deepest impression on me. Anti-hero Angstrom, obviously marked by existential Angst, facing the classic either/or of going with the family, problems and all, or moving outside and risking the loneliness and cold — spoke to my not-quite-conscious youthful dilemmas.”

“Seems to me, WILLIAM PRITCHARD recalls, “that one of the first, perhaps the first time I became really aware of Updike’s presence as a writer was at the end of ‘The Happiest I’ve Been,’ the final story in The Same Door. John Nordholm and his friend are driving to Chicago, and on the Pennsylvania Turnpike John’s friend Neil let him take the wheel while he sleeps. The following great sentence raised my consciousness:

There was the quality of the 10 a.m. sunshine as it existed in the air ahead of the windshield, filtered by the thin overcast, blessing irresponsibility – you felt you could slice forever through such a good pure element – and springing, by implying how high these hills had become, a widespread pride: Pennsylvania, your state – as if you had made your life.

“I found attractive earlier parts of the story, a post-high school gathering of John and his friends, but it was the ending that took off, and I felt as exhilarated as our hero.”   

BERNARD RODGERS initially encountered Updike via ‘A & P’ in a high school English class: “I was 15 or so, and I already knew that I wanted to be a college professor of literature because of my discovery of writers like Updike whom I enjoyed so much. This seemed then, and still seems more than fifty years later, to be an amazing way to make a living: getting paid for doing what I love        — reading good books — and then having the chance to share that with young people…. There was just something about Updike’s tone of voice, and the beauty of his language, not to mention his subjects, that captured me from the beginning, even as an adolescent, and has never let go. Yesterday, I went back to Higher Gossip to reread some of the pieces for a few hours in front of my fire in the midst of the snowstorms here, and, as always, there was the charm, wit, and easy grace I find so congenial and welcoming. Such a pleasure to be in the company of his well-informed and inquisitive mind!”

KATHLEEN VERDUIN read Updike in her junior year at Hope College: “A good friend who had (gloriously, I thought) gone on to graduate school dropped me a line. ‘If you get a chance,’ he wrote, ‘take a look at Updike’s collection Pigeon Feathers, especially the short story ‘Lifeguard.’ When I saw the Fawcett Crest paperback edition of Pigeon Feathers for sale on the bookrack of the local drug store, I bought it immediately — probably for something like fifty cents. I liked ‘Lifeguard’ very much, but I was most taken by the title story. Born on a farm, I could appreciate its rural setting; an avid reader since childhood, I sympathized with young David Kern’s frantic running back and forth from book to book, from his mother’s copy of H. G. Wells to his grandfather’s worn Bible to the shallow platitudes of his catechism workbook; and of course I was moved by the circumstances of his sudden and personal confrontation with mortality.

“This was in the fall of 1963: Updike’s name was still new, but his star was definitely rising, even — or maybe especially — at a small church-related college like Hope. The next Updike book I bought was Rabbit, Run, and there was enough campus interest for me to review it for the student newspaper. When I finally (and rather to my surprise) found my way to a graduate program myself, I settled on Updike for the topic of my M. A. thesis. Couples had just come out to great acclaim (naturally I bought the issue of Time magazine featuring a portrait of Updike on the cover), and I felt that I somehow understood it. It was partly that Updike’s protagonist, Piet Hanema, came from a Dutch Reformed background like mine; but more than that, I recognised a kind of longing in him, a stubborn drive for some kind of happiness, and the excitement I felt as I finished the thesis made even my cramped apartment endurable in the sweltering heat of a Washington D. C. summer.

“I still like these two books, Pigeon Feathers and Couples, very much, and they are probably the titles I would recommend to new readers of Updike. They present already the poles that famously define much of Updike’s writing: the refreshing theological literacy that set him apart from the first but also the unflinchingly honest depictions of sexuality as it was playing out in what one of his characters calls ‘the post-pill paradise.’ Couples retains for me an earnestness, a sense of the potential tragedy in human relations: there is very little of what seems to me the self-consciously puckish sexual banter of some of the later fiction (as when the Rev. Thomas Marshfield, in A Month of Sundays, quips that women in his congregation swoop unerringly toward the scrotal concealed in the sacerdotal).

“Pigeon Feathers and Couples contain as well some stunning examples of what is probably Updike’s signature theme, the existential conviction of personal mortality: as when David Kern envisions the empty, gaping pit of a grave or Piet Hanema contemplates the vertiginous abyss of the night sky: ‘Amid these impervious shining multitudes he felt a gigantic slipping; sinking upwards, he gripped the dim earth with his eyes.’ ”

GLEN SMITH also cites Couples as a favorite: “I remember it well, a paperback in pinkish red color. The main character: Piet – roaming the streets of Tarbox (in his construction man’s pickup on which someone has inscribed, in its dust, WASH ME), bedding all the nubile, young, willing wives of the town and finally settling on the newcomer; and Foxy– the earthy woman for whom Piet abandons his angelic wife Angela. Couples is a sexy book, of course, but the sex in Couples is real, its emotional context utterly convincing. This eloquent teller of home truths is the Jane Austen of the latter part of the 20^th century.”

BARBARA KAY is pretty sure the first book of Updike she read was Pigeon Feathers: “All the Maple Family stories captivated me. Couples certainly had me riveted, and the Rabbit series was tremendous. But I also loved his critical writing. I remember Hugging the Shore – the essays just kept astonishing me with his insights, gorgeous writing and incredible referential range in literature.”

Shortly after JONATHON HOULON moved to Pennsylvania in 1992, he remembers asking a fellow graduate student in American literature who he would suggest was the most significant writer from the Keystone state: “My friend growled, ‘John Updike,’ as if there could be any other answer. I picked up a copy of Rabbit, Run and it really knocked me out. It might have been my age (close to Harry’s in that particular book) but I think it was mostly the lyrical writing. I am a musician. I hear books as much as I read them. There is not a false note in the Rabbit Tetralogy — an incredible accomplishment considering its length. I continue to learn from Updike and his painterly voice and apply the lessons to my song writing. I’ve read a fair amount of JU at this point. And there’s certainly more to recommend than Rabbit. But, really, that’s where I’d tell someone to start. If you want to learn about what it means to be an American — ‘criminal yet never caught’ is one way Updike describes his ‘hero’ — start with Harry Angstrom.”

CHRISTOPHER BIGELOW is another reader who was turned on first by Rabbit, Run, a book that he read as an undergraduate at Emerson College in Boston. Updike has been his favorite author ever since: “One of the things I most anticipate is eventually rediscovering the Rabbit tetralogy and Couples, 30-plus years after reading them. Other standouts for me have included The Witches of Eastwick, S., In the Beauty of the Lilies, Toward the End of Time, and the memoir, Self-Consciousness.

“I’m also fascinated by the man and his career, all the more so after devouring the new Begley biography. As a sixth-generation Mormon, I used to be involved with some Mormon literary groups, and for many years I called for a ‘Mormon Updike,’ but such an author would likely portray too much sex (and other expressions of realism) for Mormon readers and too much Mormonism for outside readers.”

‘Pigeon Feathers’ is the story that brought Updike into LARRY RANDEN’S reading life: “The story of this young boy struggling with faith, doubt, and other weighty questions about death and eternal life spoke to me with staying power. I had no idea that a writer could be so profound and yet so joyous, poetic, in a word, readable.”

A college friend once handed JOHN McTAVISH a copy of Rabbit, Run in the hope of disabusing McTavish of making noises about becoming a minister: “Instead the novel simply knocked me over with its stunning mix of emotional realism and poetic beauty. Granted, the ministers in Rabbit, Run are terrible role models: one an exasperatingly wishy-washy liberal and the other a painfully unbending conservative. But it wasn’t too hard to see that Updike is using these two clerical clowns as illustrations of how the motions of grace can reach us through even the most unlikely channels, recalling the novel’s epigraph from Pascal: ‘The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.’ ”

Favorite Updike Books and Stories

Of the Farm is DON GREINER’S favorite Updike book: “The prose is exquisite, of course, but I like the contrast between the lovely prose and the intensity of the debates between Joey and his mother, debates that are certainly not ‘lovely’ particularly when Joey betrays Peggy to his mom. Although the novel is written in the first person, I find the novel to be Updike’s ‘James novel,’ although I realize that James generally disparaged the use of first person narration. Updike persuades me to have extreme reactions to Mrs. Robinson: sympathy for her loneliness, but distaste and even detestation for her selfish and dominating treatment of her son. I can only nod when Joey says, ‘I think of myself as a weak man.’ I don’t know who ‘wins’ at the end, but I know, with regret, that Peggy loses.’ ”

BRUCE McLEOD notes that in the shrinkage of bookshelves occasioned by their move to a condo years ago, “I lost some old friends, but hung on to some special ones like Pigeon Feathers and Roger’s Version. Picking up the latter today, I notice many margin marks and underlinings, especially in the early part of the book.

I think I was attracted by the interrupting student way back in 1986. Only later did I begin to appreciate the deeper insights of Pascal and others, that the world provides ‘enough light for those who desire to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.’ And of course Updike’s passing comments — like ‘The pious often, I have noticed, have a definiteness that in others they would judge rude’ were always worth a margin stroke.

“Along the way, I loved his playing with words and images like Glenn Gould plays with notes and keys. I loved his ‘noticing’. Or ‘paying attention’ where we look away quickly. I long ago marked a favorite paragraph in Roger’s Version – his memorable description of the pipe-smoker (having once been one myself!):

‘The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting; those first cheek-hollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.’ Who else would notice that, describe it so exactly, or deepen it to a comment on despair!!”

ELIZABETH UPDIKE COBBLAH states that she reads what crosses her path, largely on the recommendations of others, or what strikes her fancy at the moment, adding, “my father’s work included.” She goes on to say, “I suppose that makes me a grazer. I have to be careful reading my father’s work as it is alluring and might also take me to a raw nerve of familiarity or feeling — potentially anything having to do with domestic life does so. It can also be comforting to read his work — a poem here, a snippet there — it brings him back, I hear his voice and the cadence of his sentences. Whatever feelings are evoked by the subject, I am always transported to a place of awe by the beauty of his words, his sensitivity and his ability to capture the essence of something.”

MICHAEL UPDIKE reports that at the time of his father’s death he set out to read all of his father’s fiction, poetry and essay collections: “I had read the Rabbits, Marry Me, S., Brazil and Gertrude and Claudius. In addition to the novels completed there were some that I stopped reading before page fifty. I got stalled in Roger’s Version reading the science-can-prove-God-exists theory. Memories of the Ford Administration was put down early when a scene involving cunnilingus presented itself. Nor did I have better luck with Seek My Face. I had read about a third of the short stories. As each new book arrived by mail or in person after a round of golf, it felt like required reading. I had the best intention of getting to it before the reviews came out but I usually didn’t and the reviews, good or bad, would convince me that there was no hurry. It always seemed that I was about to open the last book when a new one would arrive. The joke between my siblings was ‘…. another book from father? I’m not finished not reading the last one.’

“In tackling the long list of unread Updike here is what I enjoyed.            I have put the Rabbits aside. The Centaur was fabulous as a novel and I learned many things about my grandfather. Of the Farm is my favorite. It is such a spooky little gem that captures my Grandmother’s ‘ways’ on that claustrophobic farm. Roger’s Version was very enjoyable. I have aspirations to repeat the walk that the character takes down Mass Ave. Memories of the Ford Administration wasn’t so bad. I enjoyed S. It was very funny and doesn’t deserve the anti-women charge. The Coup needs to be made into a movie. It was hilarious. Toward the End of Time worked for me.”

PETER SELLICK has read all of Updike’s fiction but comes back to Couples every couple of years: “I think it is his most theologically deft work. The novel is centred around four main characters: Piet Hanema the earth man, his wife Angela who is divine and abstracted, Foxy Whitman, earthy and real, and the dentist Freddy Thorne, demonic and nihilistic. The essence of the book is the outworking of the relationships between these four. After an agreement that Freddy would sleep with Angela in exchange for arranging an abortion for Foxy, Freddy proves impotent. The demonic may not penetrate the divine! The activities of the couples are judged by an act of God who strikes the Congregational Church with lightening releasing a shower of old sermons, one of which Piet reads. It shows how America has not lived up to its original hopes. In the end, Piet and Foxy, the incarnate couple, leave town, and the life of the couples reverts to the ordinary. Couples rewards re-reading because of, among other choice felicities, its theological complexity and insight.”

GARY RIGG cites not a book or passage but a favorite moment in one of Updike’s interviews with Charlie Rose: “Pushed for a ‘why’ concerning his churchgoing, Updike, seeming a little uncomfortable about making any sort of avowal one way or another, replied, in his very droll fashion, ‘It’s the only place where they’ll let me sing.’ ”

BRIAN KENNEDY cites a short story from Problems as his favorite: “ ‘Minutes of the Last Meeting’ sticks in my mind. It has great insight into human nature and makes me chuckle every time I think of it. The story concerns the narrator’s account of the minutes taken at a church committee meeting, but it’s applicable to many of the meetings that many of us attend over a lifetime. I’m chuckling now just remembering it.”

JACK De BELLIS’S most cherished book is “Rabbit, Run with The Centaur, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, Roger’s Version, S and The Witches of Eastwick on the novels-short-list. Afterlife and Pigeon Feathers among the story collections, Picked-Up Pieces and Just Looking among essay collections, and The Collected Poems and Endpoint among the poetry collections.”

In connection with Rabbit, Run, De Bellis adds, “I was stunned when I first read it. Like most others, I was floored by the language, but also by the description of the failure of the institutions from church to family to support a weak marriage      (I had just gone through a divorce). I was also stunned by Updike’s courage in drowning the baby and depicting male desire so honestly. And I loved the open-ended ending, the dreams, and Updike’s ability to notice and to know so much about people.”

Recommendations

JACK De BELLIS again: “I’d go with J U’s own recommendation and say Olinger Stories. They are easier for a first reader and amply demonstrate Updike’s genius with language, his three-dimensional characters, and his knowingness.”

DON GREINER’S recommendation consists of six short stories: three stories with conventional form, three with more experimental form: “Pigeon Feathers,” “The Bulgarian Poetess,” and “A Sandstone Farmhouse”; and – the experimental stories – “Leaves,” “Harv is Plowing Now,” and “The Music School.”

ANDREW FAIZ: “The Rabbits.”

BRUCE McLEOD: “The poems always grab, and sometimes stick like burrs. They’re not sweet; always (or often) a dark edge. I love “Baseball” – “invented in America, where beneath/the good cheer and sly jazz the chance/of failure is everybody’s right,/ beginning with baseball”. Also, “The Rockettes” for sheer precision of word choice. And, of course, “Religious Consolation”: “… Strange, the extravagance of it, who needs/ those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints/whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,/ those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books/ Moroni etched in tedious detail? We do; we need more world. This one will fail.”

JOHN McTAVISH recommends Marry Me “with its diadem-shaped structure, reader-friendly dialogue and unsparing portrayal of the irresolvable nature of eros. Interestingly, Adam Begley’s biography suggests that Marry Me is Updike’s most underrated book. It is certainly a radical love story showing Jerry Conant ‘destroying his wife and wading through his children’s blood’ in order to marry his — for the moment — great love.”

RYAN ROBERTS offers, as favorites, not so much books as particular moments and sentences:

“John Updike came at me like a fog that hovers over my personal literary landscape. I remember no clear moment of introduction and have no original story to tell. Instead, I have moments of reading that cling to me. I remember the sound I imagined as ‘Cars licked by on the asphalt’ in a ‘Soft Spring Night in Shillington.’

“I remember my wonder at his description of a sidewalk in Terrorist: ‘cracks in the concrete hold crabgrass and mullein and dandelions and ridges of the minute particles, shining like coffee grounds, of the underlying earth which ants have brought to the surface.’

“I remember the alliteration and the poetry of his prose in Rabbit, Run: “He feels the faded night he left behind in this place as a net of telephone calls and hasty trips, trails of tears and strings of words, white worried threads shuttled through the night and now faded but still existent, an invisible net overlaying the steep streets and in whose center he lives secure in his locked hollow hutch.

“I remember the pain I felt for the Maples and their sometimes   awkward and demanding love as they unmarried in Rome.

“I remember the uncertainty Updike made me feel about myself and my personal history. That our memories are but moments in time lost to the past. And what are we to know about that past? ‘After all, doesn’t history demonstrate over and over how hard it is to say what actually did happen…? ” (Memories of the Ford Administration).

“I remember all these things and more, but Updike’s greatest gift seems to be his sustained quality, so even with a dozen or more books thumbed and shelved, so much remains to discover.” 

Contributors

–Christopher Bigelow is a freelance writer, editor, and publisher from Provo, Utah.
— Elizabeth Updike Cobblah is an art teacher and John Updike’s oldest child.
–Jack De Bellis is a JUS director and has published several books on John Updike including the recent John Updike’s Early Years.
–Biljana Dojcinovic is Professor of Literature, Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.
–Andrew Faiz is a playwright and editor of The Presbyterian Record in Toronto.
–Donald Greiner is a JUS director and has published several books and articles on John Updike including John Updike’s Novels.
–Jonathon Houlon is a singer and songwriter based in Philadelphia.
–Barbara Kay is a columnist for the Canadian national broadsheet The National Post.
–Brian Kennedy operates an antiquarian book business in Glen Williams, Ontario.
–Bruce McLeod lives in Toronto, Ontario and is a former Moderator of the United Church of Canada.
–John McTavish lives in Huntsville, Ontario and is the compiler of these reflections on John Updike’s work.
–James Plath teaches English at Illinois Wesleyan University and is the President of the John Updike Society.
–William H. Pritchard is the author of Updike: America’s Man of Letters and a specialist in British poetry and contemporary fiction.
— Larry Randen is a retired minister of the United Church of Christ and former Updike researcher and contributor to The Centaurian.
–Gary Rigg is a retired engineer and avid reader who rates Updike highest on his list of all time favorite authors (followed by Isaac Singer and probably Hemingway).
–Ryan Roberts is a College librarian and maintains the official websites of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.
–Bernard Rodgers is an English professor and the editor of Critical Insights: John Updike.
–Peter Sellick is an Anglican Deacon and lives in Perth, Australia.
–Glen Smith is a lawyer in Huntsville, Ontario.
–Michael Updike is a sculptor and John Updike’s youngest son.
–Kathleen Verduin is an English professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.