On May 3, John Updike Society president James Plath was invested as the R. Forrest Colwell Chair of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he has taught for the past 27 years. The appointment is for six years, renewable for five-year terms thereafter. The committee cited his work on Hemingway and Updike, his work with student organizations, and his long-term service on both major committees and the Faculty-Staff Recognition Committee.
Here is the article.
As a fellow lampooner, John Updike would no doubt appreciate his inclusion in The Onion‘s tongue-in-cheek story of the “Top Prom Trends For 2015.”
“Here are this year’s most popular prom trends:
Live streaming feed for students who couldn’t get date
Moment of silence to honor our fallen heroes overseas
The Centaur replacing Rabbit Redux as this year’s most popular John Updike–based prom theme
Adult chaperones given two minutes at start of dance to explain why exactly they chose to spend night off doing this
Cash bar for dates 21 and over
Viennese Waltz continues to supplant American-style tango as preeminent dance
King and queen required to break at least five social boundaries in order to be crowned
More DJs ending night with special father-son dance
After-party held right in lobby of hospital ER
Many students are following up their prom experience with unprotected intercourse”
In “‘As usual, words fail him’—6 great literary feuds,” a glorified “list” story meant to entertain, The Telegraph’s Morwenna Ferrier and Rupert Hawksley offer a fluff piece that doesn’t go into much detail and didn’t involve much research. But it’s worth noting that Updike gets a mention:
Salman Rushdie vs John Updike
“Rushdie, as we know, is no stranger to controversy, but his battle with John Updike tops all his feuds.
“In 2006, Updike denounced Rushdie’s novel, Shalimar the Clown, writing ‘Why, oh why did Salman Rushdie, in his new novel call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls?.’ Rushdie responded to Updike’s query in The Guardian: ‘Why, oh why… ? Well, why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called “John Updike”.’ He went on to describe Updike’s latest, Terrorist, as ‘beyond awful,’ and suggested Updike should ‘stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do.’ Because what’s a little quibbling between literary giants…”
Blogger Jeffrey Keeten, whose interest in books goes beyond reviews, has posted a review of Updike’s novel The Centaur. “I’m not really sure why people have quit reading John Updike,” he muses (though there’s really no justification for thinking so). “I could not put down this flawed, but wonderful book.”
Though his review is mostly plot summary, Keeten remarks, “The novel in many ways is brilliant, reflecting an author’s mind that is brimming with intelligence and convoluted thoughts, maybe the inspiration for the labyrinth of George’s own mind.”
Thanks to the 60 members of The John Updike Society who paid their 2015 dues promptly, and to the members who added a donation for our continuing work on The John Updike Childhood Home: Gerald J. Connors, Steven J. Malcolm, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, Livia Lloyd-Hawkins, Robert M. Luscher, Joseph Moser, Joseph Truitt, Bryan L. Bodwell, Mary Carol Fee, Kevin R. Fox, Richard Seabrook, Kevin Schehr, Carole and Richard Sherr, Jay Althouse, Kasuko Kashihara, Sylvie Mathé, Deana and Gardiner “Gary” Rigg, and Rev. Leslie Smith.
That makes 60 down, and 200 to go. And for people wanting to join the society, dues are a remarkably low $25 per year for regular members and $20 per year for retirees and graduate students. Send your check (made payable to The John Updike Society) along with name, preferred snail mail and email address, and phone (to contact only if your information becomes outdated) to: James Plath, Dept. of English, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL 61702-2900.
Peter C. Herman, Professor of English Literature at San Diego State University, recently published “Terrorism and the Critique of American Culture: John Updike’s Terrorist” in Modern Philology 112: 4 (May 2015), 691-712.
In “Object Lesson,” a consideration of “Why we need physical books published in the New Republic, William Giraldi inevitably turns to Updike:
“There was little that escaped the Updikian caress, and he wrote more than once about the pleasures and peculiarities of book collecting. In an essay called “The Unread Book Route,” about A History of Japan to 1334, Updike wrote: ‘The physical presence of this book, so substantial, so fresh, the edges so trim, the type so tasty, reawakens in me, like a Proustian talisman, the emotions I experienced when, in my youth, I ordered it.’ Leave it to the unerringly sensual and curious Updike to a) refer to book type as ‘tasty,’ and b) think as a youth that he needed to know something about Japan prior to 1334.
“Updike’s point about the Proustian talisman is a crucial one for bibliophiles: Their collections are not only proof of their evolution but monuments to their past, fragrant and visual stimulators of recall.”
In a story written for The Sacramento Bee books section, writer Sam McManis considers “Sex on the page: Often cringe-worthy, occasionally uplifting.” The pun was most certainly intended, considering some of the examples McManis cites as less than effective—among them this passage from Updike’s Brazil: “…he felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam.”
Updike’s contemporary and rival Philip Roth also gets “ribbed” for a passage from “The Humbling,” in which he attempts to describe a threesome: “It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote…”
“‘Good sex is impossible to write about,’ [Martin] Amis once told the Washington Post. ‘[D.H.] Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can’t do—like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.”
“Yet the late Updike, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, once told NPR’s Fresh Air that writing about ‘sexual transactions’ is realism at its core and a window into the human condition.
“‘For many people it’s the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters, who, for the record, had the Bad Sex ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ bestowed upon him in 2008, a year before his death. ‘And furthermore … human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists. Not all lovemaking is alike. Anyway, it seemed a writer should clearly be free to describe it.'”
Katie Roiphe is more complimentary of Updike’s attempts in a 2010 New York Times Book Review essay, especially the passages from the Rabbit novels. A “top-form” passage is cited: “…a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure…there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely.’
“Roiphe credits Updike’s ‘unnerving gift: to be frank and anesthetizing all at once, to do poetry and whorehouse,” and gently scolds a newer generation of great American writers…for being passive and sexually ambivalent.”
Alvernia University just posted an online version of an earlier published memoir by David Updike, “Growing up Updike.” Here’s an excerpt:
“As children, we grew up with the click-and-clackety sound of his typewriter — a battleship gray, Olympia manual — in our ears, and a gathering sense of his success, then growing fame. By the time I was seven he had published Rabbit, Run, then won the national book award from The Centaur, and moved his office from our house to a larger space in a modest, somewhat run-down office building downtown that he shared with a dentist, accountants and other such small businesses,” David writes.
“There, on a side table, lay The Centaur, with a picture of a half horse, half man. At night, he sat in a chair, reading proofs — long, scroll-like pieces of paper, on which he made small adjustments with a pencil. One fall, my grandparents arrived from Pennsylvania, with a basketful of fruit and a skittish dog, to look after us while my parents went to Russia for a month on a state department tour. His picture began to appear in magazines, and he was even sometimes on TV. A year or two later, Russians visited us, bearing gifts, and we took them for a lively walk on the beach, dogs and children included. Perhaps only with the publication of Couples in 1968, and the news from my friends that my father wrote a ‘dirty book,’ did I feel a twinge of unease, tempered by the knowledge he would be paid $400,000 for the movie rights! For soon we were on a boat, crossing the ocean in my new gray flannel pants, to spend the year in England attending a fancy American school and making side trips to Amsterdam, Austria for skiing, and then Morocco in April, to get some warmth and sun. Then by June, we flew back to America.
“My parents were still very young, in their thirties, and by my estimation the best-looking couple in their groups of friends — my father certainly the cleverest and most famous, my mother surely the most beautiful. But as a child my father had psoriasis, and asthma, and so shied away from organized sports, and even, I believe, felt inferior to the sports stars at Shillington High — the Harry Angstroms of his class.
“My mother had played field hockey in high school, and was an excellent ice skater, and they took us for long skating expeditions up the Ipswich River, back when it still froze solid. They played volleyball on Sunday afternoons, and then all migrated to someone else’s house, for ‘cocktails.’ They learned to play tennis, and ski, and we all went on Pleasant Mountain in February, where they had renamed the beginners slope Rabbit, Run, after his best-known novel.
“In tennis and skiing, they both became what I might call elegant intermediates. My father played kickball with us in the backyard, wheeling around the bases on long, loose legs while we frantically tried to retrieve the ball in some distant bushes. In the fall, there was touch football with the men, and in spring, before volleyball, half-court basketball, where he played shirtless and had a reliable, baby sky hook.”
Paul Moran recently posted “Spring, Summer, Fall and Sissman” on The Other John Updike Archive. Included is this broadside:
