Monthly Archives: May 2017

Updike and others on symbolism

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In 1963, a 16 year old was tired of hearing about symbolism from his English teacher, wondering, as many students still do, if teachers read too much into a literary work. So he mailed a four-question survey to 150 novelists asking them about symbolism in their work. Exactly half of them responded, among them John Updike. Had young Bruce McAllister sent that survey just three years earlier, he could have included Ernest Hemingway, who famously once remarked, “All symbolism is shit.”

Specifically, McAllister wanted their opinion of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, which his class was reading, but some of the responses were more general . . . and eye-opening.

MacKinlay Kantor (Andersonville, Gettysburg) was the most blunt:  “Nonsense, young man, write your own research paper. Don’t expect others to do the work for you.

Jack Kerouac offered the briefest response to the question of placing symbolism in his work. “No,” Kerouac wrote back.

“Consciously?” Isaac Asimov responded. “Heavens, no! Unconsciously? How can one avoid it?”

Normal Mailer defined the best symbols as “those you become aware of only after you finish the work,” while Ralph Ellison seemed more reflective and representative of the writer’s method:  “Symbolism arises out of action. . . . Once a writer is conscious of the implicit symbolism which arises in the course of a narrative, he may take advantage of them and manipulate them consciously as a further resource of his art.”

John Updike, meanwhile, spoke along the lines of writer-as-mystic, answering “Yes” to the question of whether he consciously, intentionally places symbolism in his writing, adding, “I have no method; there is no method in writing fiction; you don’t seem to understand.”

To the question of whether readers ever infer what is not intended, Updike responded, “Once in a while—usually they do not (see the) symbols that are there.”

Asked if he feels the great writers of classics consciously put symbols in their works, Updike wrote, “Some of them did (Joyce, Dante) more than others (Homer) but it is impossible to think of any significant work of narrative art without a symbolic dimension of some sort.”

As for the last question, whether he has anything to add that’s pertinent to a study of symbols, Updike sounded like Kantor:  “It would be better for you to do your own thinking on this sort of thing.”

Read the full Mental Floss article.

Teaching Updike in Serbia

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Already in Serbia there is excitement and anticipation of the upcoming Fifth Biennial (International?) John Updike Society Conference in Belgrade, scheduled for June 1-June 5, 2018 and hosted by the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. Conference director Biljana Dojčinović reports that a doctoral student of hers “who is also a very devoted member of the organizational committee of our future conference, Nemanja Gllintić, has made an interesting teaching experiment.

“As he is a primary school teacher of language and literature, he lectured at two of his final grade classes (15-year-old children) the story ‘Friends in Philadelphia.’ The reception of the story by the pupils has been fantastic. Everybody read it (it had been translated into Serbian in 1966), did their research, and understood everything about the narrative techniques as well as the documentary elements.

“The teaching staff colleagues that Nemanja invited to be at these lectures where stunned by the pupils’ performance and all the enthusiasm that permeated these lectures. Also amazed were some of the parents I spoke later to—their children made them read the story in order to discuss it with them!

“Nemanje is now writing the report, and there will be a written and video poll among the pupils, which will be translated into English. Right now, the pupils are busy with their homework, which is to write a sequel to the story.”

Call for Papers and Other Fifth International JUS Conference posts

Updike among authors who made readers wait?

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John Updike wasn’t only one of America’s greatest writers; he was also among the most prolific, averaging a book a year during his long career. So it’s more than a little surprising to see his name turn up on a list of “Authors who have made us wait for their books,” which was recently published in the Life & Style section of The Times of India.

But the concept is this:  the gap between an original book and a sequel.

“Author John Updike took a gap of 24 years between his books The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick. Updike revisited the witches more than two decades later to wrap their story up before he died less than a year later in 2009. He explained why he wrote the sequel: ‘Taking those women into old age would be a way of writing about old age, my old age.'” (Photo credit: Wikipedia).

Updike featured at new American Writers Museum in Chicago

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Visitors to Chicago may not be able to walk through the George Lucas museum—Friends of the Park shot that project down—but a new American Writers Museum near the Art Institute recently opened, and it includes, not surprisingly, John Updike.

The emphasis is on the published word rather than artifacts, so it’s an interactive museum of ideas. As a Chicago Tribune editorial recently pointed out, “This playful, thought-provoking museum encompasses the entire scope of American letters, from important novels, poetry and nonfiction books to potboilers, children’s literature and, yes, even journalism.

“If you’ve ever had a favorite book (or wanted one), your interests will be piqued. You’ll find everything from Vladimir Nabokov’s shocking Lolita to Robert McCloskey’s endearing Make Way for Ducklings. Not to mention Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather and Henry Miller, among others. . . .

“American writing, protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, tells the ongoing story of our turbulent nation with unfettered creativity and zeal. That’s the big idea this museum hurls at visitors through interactive exhibits, quotes, lists and the like.

“The museum, which opens Tuesday, is the brainchild of Malcolm O’Hagan, a retired manufacturing executive from Maryland who saw a museum of Irish writers in Dublin and thought America needed a similar one. He organized a board that has raised nearly $10 million in private funding. It’s located in a compact space on the second floor of 180 N. Michigan Ave. but packs a big punch of intellectual energy. John Updike, Octavia Butler and the Federal Writers’ Project (which employed Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren in Chicago) get mentions, among scores more. . . .

“The museum’s setup is modern, thankfully, with lots of video screens and quick capsules of information, as if to cater to the depleted attention spans of young people while subversively wooing them to read nice long books.”

Read the full editorial:  “Lots of reading and thinking at the American Writers Museum”

American Writers Museum website

On semicolons and writers

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Data is everywhere these days, but Ben Blatt offers a wonderfully refreshing apolitical crunching of numbers in a Slate article that asks the question, “Do Semicolons Make You Pretentious?”

His conclusion?

“While semicolons are more present in the Pulitzer winners on the whole, it’s not a necessary condition to have them to appeal to literary circles. Some writers, like Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove had almost 650 semicolons per 100,000 words, choose to use them often; others, like Cormac McCarthy, who won a Pulitzer for The Road without using a single semicolon, choose to follow [Kurt] Vonnegut’s advice and avoid them.”

Joseph Epstein on Sex and Euphemism

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Open access online archives continue to spring up, and the latest Updike-related essay to become available is an essay written for the April 1, 1984 Commentary by Joseph Epstein. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s Joke or anything remotely Orwellian. “Sex and Euphemism” is a consideration of sex in western popular culture, and of course that means John Updike merits a mention.

“It is not always clear what the purposes of other novelists are in placing elaborately described bouts of sex in their novels. It might be kindest to say that they are, in manifold senses, just screwing around. But I think these writers rather desperately need sex in order to stay in business as writers. It isn’t that sex is all they know; it is merely that sex seems to be what they know best. To restrict myself to American novelists alone, I can think of three prominent figures who, but for the opportunity that the contemporary novel allows them to write about sex, would probably have to go into the dry-cleaning business: John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer,” Epstein writes.

“These three gents, to be sure, make quite different uses of sex in their novels. For John Updike sexual descriptions often provide an opportunity for a metaphor-soaked, lyrical workout; exceptions are the frequent sexual paces Updike puts his character Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom through, when it becomes lower-middle-class sex, plain-spoken and snarly and nasty. Philip Roth plays the sex in his novels chiefly for laughs, but play it he does, over and over and over. But whereas Up-dike can be by turns pretentious and repellent, and Roth depressing while trying for humor, Norman Mailer, in his handling of the sexual subject, is unconsciously comic (not, I hasten to add, that reading him is likely to cheer anyone up). Sex almost always provides the big moments in Norman Mailer’s novels; in these novels, sex, somehow, is always a challenge, a chance for triumph, an over the hill, boys, walk on the moon bullfight, though when it is over what one mostly remembers is the bull. Quotations on request.”

Epstein concludes, “Suffice it to say that in contemporary writing about sex, we are not talking, and haven’t been for some years, about your simple Sunday afternoon fornication. Not only must sex in the contemporary novel grow more regular but it must become more rococo. Thus Updike presents us with an activity known euphemistically as California sunshine; Roth in his most recent novel has a woman whose purse contains a “nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K.Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope”; Mailer, relying on fundamentals, concentrates on heterosexual sodomy. Ah, the literary life.”

Read the full article.

Of Hub Fans, Red Sox Nation, and the Chicago Cubs

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Christopher Borrelli‘s Chicago Tribune think piece on “Building a baseball story: 7 lessons Red Sox can teach Cubs” invokes that most famous of sports stories, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which Borrelli calls “a kind of gospel of the Red Sox, as hallowed as a prayer in New England,” written, of course, by John Updike.

“Like the New Englander he became, Updike romanticized the Red Sox, both ups and downs.

“He fed the narrative,” Borrelli writes, offering ideas on how the Chicago Cubs can “serve its narrative and wrangle its history, broaden its reach and nurture its relationship with fans” and it involves the celebration of pop culture’s baseball embrace. He recalls one saturated moment in Boston:

“Driving to Fenway from the diner, I flipped through the radio: On a sports station, a former Red Sox player was telling stories about how former manager Terry Francona would sit naked on the toilet during meetings in his office. Someone on local NPR was reading from Updike’s classic. On music stations, songs about the Red Sox, songs that have become synonymous with Fenway, ‘Dirty Water’ and ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Shipping Up to Boston’ and Jonathan Richman’s ‘As We Walk to Fenway Park in Boston Town.’ A Budweiser commercial has a bro doing a bad Boston accent, giving an opening-day rally speech that makes no sense in 2017: ‘We’re Boston! We’re not supposed to win!”

Part of that pop-cultural narrative includes the story of how Theo Epstein and the team’s new management “slapped Updike’s words on that wall, alongside the water cooler” to inspire players.  He might as well have broken into a chorus of Fiddler on the Roof‘s “Tradition”. . . .

Asian scholar considers Updike’s Idea of America

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The “Idea of America in Select Novels of John Updike,” a Ph.D. thesis by Tehreem Zehra (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India) published in 2014, is available to read online courtesy of Shodhganga: a reservoir of Indian theses.

“What Hawthorne did for American Puritanism was further carried out by Updike in his literary career through 20th century America,” Zehra writes. “Beginning with Rabbit series which make up the backbone of his literary outburst, he seldom eulogizes the American spirit of adultery, selfishness, capitalism, consumerism, and wavering faith. He puts his heart and soul to reform the deteriorating self and values of his nation.”

Here is the link to the full paper, downloadable in 18 front matter, chapter, and bibliography files.

Newly archived: Updike and Suburbia essay

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The IAFOR Paper Archive recently uploaded “John Updike and the Grandeur of American Suburban Life,” a critical study by Oliver Hadingham, Rikkyo University, Japan presented at the 2016 Asian Conference on Literature, Librarianship & Archival Science.

Abstract:
The standing of John Updike (1932-2009), a multiple prize-winning author of more than 60 books, has suffered over the last two decades. Updike’s great subject was ordinary middle class America. He strove to illuminate the truths of small town America, to reveal the beauty in its ordinariness. Updike captures the texture of ordinary American life and the way sex and religion frame modern American existence, and the path of America itself, from the cozy Eisenhower era to the uncertainties and exhaustion of the early 21st century. Updike mission was to articulate something serious and empowering to the ordinary reader – the truths and texture of America itself.

Link to full paper

Essay on Updike’s late-life essays

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Issue 5 (Spring 2016) of the Irish Journal of American Studies features an essay by John Updike Society members Laurence W. Mazzeno and Susan Norton titled “Thirty-Six Point Perpetua: John Updike’s Personal Essays in the Later Years.”

Abstract:
This article considers the central preoccupations and modus operandi of the American writer John Updike as an essayist with personal, autobiographical intent. Best known in the American canon for his many works of fiction, he produced nonfiction in equal measure over the course of his lengthy career. His far-ranging critical reviews and topical, discursive writings have occupied pride of place in the most prominent periodicals of our times and have garnered much critical and popular attention. Yet his specifically self-referential essays, especially those composed in the final years of his life, deserve closer notice for the ways in which they reveal a survival impulse that speaks to the willing vulnerability not only of Updike, but of all who write about themselves.

Here’s the link to the full article on the journal’s website.