High Life (UK) published a piece in their Culture section titled “What I’m reading this summer,” a round-up in which celebrities share what was on their summer 2014 reading list.
Writer William Boyd responded,
“Updike by Adam Begley. I’m a John Updike fan and this is the first biography. Also The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams as I’m writing a film script about PoWs.”
Ever since Paul Moran began sharing Updike ephemera on a blog called The Other John Updike Archive (the link to which you can find on our home page), Updike scholars have been wondering where he got the materials—with many speculating that he may have rescued them from a dumpster after Updike died.
Now in a story titled “The Man Who Made Off With John Updike’s Trash” by Adrienne LaFrance, posted on The Atlantic website on August 28, 2014, the mystery is explained . . . sort of.
Moran, a bicyclist, cycled past the Updike house and grabbed bags of trash, some of which Updike himself had just carried out. He did this regularly, and the family didn’t seem to mind, Moran says. Martha Updike is not quoted—only Estate literary agent Andrew Wylie, who says that Moran would “steal the Updike’s trash bags every Wednesday” and that the family tried to get him to stop.
The article is subtitled “Who really owns a great writer’s legacy?” but the law is pretty clear here. It’s not illegal to take someone’s trash from the curb. People do it in every town everywhere in America, so Moran did nothing against the law. And if he had taken the items after what amounted to an Estate housecleaning, thrown away after Updike’s death, he could be considered heroic for saving things that future scholars might find useful. I would have done it myself.
Even if he got the items while Updike was still alive, if there was no objection, where’s the foul? The problem, for some people, comes if the Updikes truly did want him to stop. That adds a moral dimension to it, and as someone who’s put the brakes on an idea the minute that Updike objected, my own inclination on such things has always been to abide by Updike’s wishes. Still, there are other collectors and scholars who would argue that preservation of the materials is more important than personal feelings, just as Updike, as we read in Begley’s recent biography, put fiction ahead of people. And it’s not clear from the Atlantic article whether the family truly objected, or to what degree. One quote from a literary agent doesn’t make the case.
The law is pretty clear regarding the items themselves. The physical items are owned by whoever bought or in this case salvaged them. And it’s terrific that Moran has chosen to share them with the world. He can get away with “publishing” items like the Hotel Algonquin bill, or ticket stubs, or invitations, or a call to jury duty, because they’re artifacts not subject to intellectual property law. Any drawings that Updike did, any doodles, any notes, anything that expressed a thought or opinion of his are covered by that law and Moran cannot make those items public because the content is owned by the Updike Estate, even though he owns the physical objects.
Puzzles remain, though: Updike was a pack-rat. He saved everything. So why throw away these things after holding onto them so long, especially all of those old slides and photographs? Why not give the latter to his children? I know from talking with him that he cared very little about the honorary degrees, but I find it hard to believe that he didn’t include them with the Harvard materials, or that “Mrs. Updike said it was fine and she was glad [the honorary degrees Moran found and sold] were going to support a local bookstore.”
So there are aspects about this that we may never know. Moran is quoted as saying that “he’s looked for permanent homes for the archive” but “says everyone he’s approached has turned him down.” Maybe he wants something in return, and the price is too high. But I do know that if the items were displayable and not a violation of intellectual property laws, if the items were Pennsylvania-related, and if the board of The John Updike Childhood Home approved, some of those items would find quite a welcome home.
William Pritchard, known in Updike circles for his book, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (Steerforth Press, 2000), graduated from Amherst College in 1953 and, now retired as a Professor Emeritus after teaching for the same institution for many decades, has written a piece for Amherst Magazine titled “Life After Amherst?”
In it, he talks about his career and a piece he thought about writing, though he admits, “When I revealed to my spouse that I was going to write something vaguely on the subject of life after Amherst, she scoffed, declaring that there was, for me, no life after Amherst.”
Here is the link.
On Tuesday, October 7, 2014, Updike biographer Adam Begley will be interviewed by Professor Jacques Berlinerblau of the Program for Jewish Civilization on “John Updike and the Jews.”
The program is scheduled for 12 p.m. at Georgetown University and it is free and open to the public. An RSVP is requested, with a light lunch served.
Location: Copley Hall, Copley Formal Lounge, 37th and O St., N.W., Washington, D.C.
Here is the link.
One of the events at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival paired two biographers: Adam Begley and William Burroughs biographer Barry Miles.
Nick Major posted “EBIF2014: Adam Begley on Updike and Barry Miles on Burroughs” as a guest blogger—a summary of the presentation and a reminder, perhaps, that comparative studies need not always be of kindred spirits.
“The discussion chopped and changed between talk of Burroughs and Updike,” he writes. “It was almost a real-life replica of Burroughs’ famous cut-up technique of writing novels. Although it was thankfully told in plain English and only the occasional sentence was sliced in two. Updike was from a poor background. Burroughs came from wealth. Updike went to Harvard. So did Burroughs. Updike went on to work for The New Yorker. Burroughs became a heroin addict. Updike quit The New Yorker to become a full time novelist. Burroughs quit the country after a game of William Tell went wrong and he killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. Updike ‘never broke any laws.’ Burroughs made his own laws.
“Begley shadowed Updike as a journalist in the mid-1990s. Burroughs invited Miles to catalogue his archives in 1972. . . . It was a woefully small audience that were fortunate enough to hear these two biographers talk about their subjects in such fine detail. It was a shame such fascinating insights found so few ears. Most of those present were there out of an interest in Updike, so the last words should go to that notoriously generous reviewer who ‘took in the entire globe as a critic.’ Responding to Burroughs’ Port of Saints Updike wrote: ‘claptrap, but murderous claptrap and for that we owe it respect.'”
Here’s the full article.
On August 20, 2014 another thesis on John Updike was listed on Shodh ganga: a reservoir of Indian theses. The 274-page thesis, in English, came out of Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh. The researcher-author, Tehreem Zehra, wrote about the “Idea of America in select novels of John Updike.”
Abstract:
A literature which emerged out of the roots of wilderness managed to wipe out the stain of plagiarism whenever accused by the already rich and mature European typewriters outpourings and has always been ready to reform itself through the oeuvre of distinguished writers of the nation in every literary era. What Hawthorne did for American Puritanism was further carried out by Updike in his literary career through 20th century America. Beginning with Rabbit series which make up the backbone of his literary outburst he seldom eulogises 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.
There are all sorts of interesting blogs out there, and on one called The Pulitzer Project, Joshua Riley and Drew Moody have “committed themselves to reading all 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning novels” and posting reviews.
Here are the entries that relate to Updike:
“Entry 80.1: an Introduction to John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Series”
Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha County, and Steinbeck the Salinas Valley. For Updike it was his boyhood borough of Shillington and the nearby big city of Reading, Pa.
Newsworks recently posted a gallery of “Photos: Then and Now, Reading places and faces” that includes shots of the Pagoda and the Reading Public Museum—the latter especially of interest because the facade has changed.
In a brief piece originally published in The Scotsman and reprinted by WOW24-7, David Robinson writes,
“Apart from Harvard, biographers Adam Begley and Barry Miles agreed, their subjects – John Updike and William Burroughs respectively – had almost nothing in common, though as Begley generously pointed out, ‘even if Burroughs hadn’t written a word, his life would still have made a fascinating biography.’
“In his fiction, Updike’s nostalgia for his small-town childhood home of Shillington, Pennsylvania, was intense. It was, he said, where all his ‘artistic eggs were hatched.’ And while Burroughs headed out for life’s extremes, at least Ulpdike did go home again.”
The Internet is full of new news and old, and what surfaced on August 13, 2014 was a piece from the New Republic archives, “John Updike Beautifully Explains How Difficult It Was To Read John Cheever’s Tortured Journals.”
“A journal,” Updike writes, “even when cut to 5 percent of its bulk, reflects real time, where we can experience how sluggishly our human adventure unravels and how unprone people are to change. In a novel, Cheever’s alcoholism would have been introduced, dramatized in a scene or two, and brought to a crisis in which either it or he would have been vanquished. In these journals, the decades of heavy drinking, of hangovers and self-rebukes and increasingly ominous physical and mental symptoms, just drag on.”
Updike adds, “To speak personally, this old acquaintance and longtime admirer of Cheever’s had to battle, while reading these Journals, with the impulse to close his eyes. They tell me more about Cheever’s lusts and failures and self-humiliations and crushing sense of shame and despond than I can easily reconcile with my memories of the sprightly, debonair, gracious man, often seen on the arm of his pretty, witty wife.”
One begins to understand, rereading this in the context of Adam Begley’s recent biography, why Updike was so adamantly opposed to literary biography.