Author Archives: James Plath

TLS letter writer responds to the Begley bio

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Dale Salwak, who teaches in the English department at Citrus College in Glendora, California, wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement editor that was published on June 27, 2014:

Updike’s real self

Sir, – Near the end of his review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike (June 13), James Campbell wonders how Updike would have reacted “to seeing the ‘sadly prurient’ details of his moral and mortal failings laid out on page after page so soon after his death in 2009”. In the foreword to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) Updike answers that question. He would be repulsed: “to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!” And in a later piece, “The Man Within”, published in the New Yorker (June 26 and July 3, 1995), he adds: “The trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one”.

DALE SALWAK
Department of English, Citrus College, 1000 West Foothill Boulevard, Glendora, California 91741.

On writers and their would-be-writer moms

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Today the National Post posted a story by “Barbara Kay: We all know about John Updike. But what about his mother?” 

In it, she talks about her friend, David Siegel, an “evolving short-story writer” and his experience taking an Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer class from Robert Anthony Siegel in which a classmate was Siegel’s own 75-year-old mother, and that leads her to consider the relationship that Updike had with his own mother, also an aspiring writer who was published late in life after her son’s success, but who worked at becoming a writer when he was still a young boy.

“Perhaps Linda’s greatest gift to her son was her unconditional respect for the artist’s obligation to speak his own truth without regard to the feelings of those he writes about,” Kay writes.

Theater critic bristles at the maleness of Updike’s work

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In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible, critic Ingrid D. Rowland bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible.”

That led her to take exception with Updike’s “irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones ‘haunches'” and to name him, along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as standard bearers for the “apogee” of novelists whose works command a largely male readership. Here’s what she wrote in response to fellow theater critic Quentin Letts:

“Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers’ irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones “haunches”)—or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Yaël Farber, The Crucible’s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed “artistic license” in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.”

“The Witches of West End”

Radio Open Source uploads David Updike clip

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DavidUpdikeRadio Open Source, which recently uploaded a podcast featuring Adam Begley intercut with John Updike audio quotes, also uploaded “From WHAT MAKES RABBIT RUN?: David Updike on being a writer’s child.” The clip only runs a minute and a half, but Updike enthusiasts might appreciate seeing the difference in philosophy between Updike and his son, who is also a writer.

David Updike is the author of numerous books, among them Old Girlfriends: Stories, of which Kirkus Reviews noted, “Thoughtful work from a writer clearly unintimidated by the family name.” And a reviewer for Elle wrote, “David Updike does himself—and his late father, John—proud with his second collection, Old Girlfriends . . . these 10 ruminative stories set in New England sport a winning sense of whimsy, quiet surprise, and fresh, frank sensuality.”

NY Times Magazine essayist invokes Updike

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Screen Shot 2014-07-06 at 9.50.10 AMIn an essay titled “794 Ways in Which BuzzFeed Reminds Us of Impending Death” (NY Times Magazine, July 3, 2014), Heather Havrilesky invoked John Updike:

“The next summer, after a long year spent adjusting to life without my dad in the house, I happened to pick up John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich.’ Perhaps given the timing, it was the first novel that felt real and relatable to me, like a ticket straight into the bloodstream of another human being. And no wonder — Updike knew exactly how the intrusions of pop-culture minutiae had the power to evoke the cheery dread of Middle America.   Continue reading →

Daily Beast picks Updike as a Best Biography

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In selecting “The Best Biographies of 2014 (So Far),” The Daily Beast noted, “Only half way into 2014, historical biographies are already having a banner year. Adam Begley’s Updike—a ‘superb achievement’ and ‘brilliant new biography’—is perhaps the most lauded title so far this year in any genre, Ramachandra Guha’s just-published Gandhi Before India is garnering similar buzz, and an armload of other big bios are making waves.”

Of Updike, they wrote:

“The reviews of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike—the prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and serial philanderer—approach universal acclaim. Wall Street Journal: ‘Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.’ Washington Post: ‘[A] convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout.’ Newsday: ‘Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography.’ New York Observer: ‘[A] monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'”

WBUR presents The John Updike Radio Files

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Screen Shot 2014-07-04 at 8.46.43 AMRadio Open Source, “arts, ideas & politics with Christopher Lydon,” yesterday posted “The John Updike Radio Files,” which includes a video clip of Lydon interviewing Updike “on the occasion of his second Pulitzer win in 1991 for Rabbit at Rest, from The Ten O’Clock News.”

Adam Begley is also featured. “We’ve discovered some old gems in our radio archives and sprinkled them through a conversation with John Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, for our show this week.

“Begley talks about Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood, his wives and lovers north of Boston, his children, his spiritual life, his voracious reading, his travels—and how he created the most graceful prose of our time by cannibalizing all of it for his art.”

Beam us up, Michael

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Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 8.07.21 AMMichael Updike recently got a chance to look inside the Polly Dole House at 26 East Street in Ipswich where his father and family lived from 1958-1970, because the current tenants were moving out. And he took the opportunity to snap a photo of the nut and washer in the summer beam that his father described in an essay for Architectural Digest, “John Updike: The Houses of Ipswich,” which Begley cites in his biography:

“In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point the whole house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.”

 

 

John Updike Childhood Home gets a tenant

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RuoffsignageThe John Updike Childhood Home is still being renovated, but the annex built by Dr. Hunter—who lived in the house after the Updikes left and needed additional space for his practice—is being rented as of July 1 to a tenant who grew up in the neighborhood, knew John Updike, and counts Updike’s father, Wesley, among his mentors.

The Borough of Shillington has approved David W. Ruoff Financial Services as a tenant in the annex of The John Updike Childhood Home, in effect establishing an onsite presence and giving the society a small rental income that will go toward monthly utilities, fees, and taxes.

The society reconfigured the annex space so that the former doctor’s waiting room will serve as the museum’s education room, with chairs lined up so groups of 24 or so can listen to speakers, or, thanks to a donation from Bruce Moyer, watch Updike-related videos on a TV monitor. The former doctor’s office has been turned into a museum gift shop, while a bathroom will be shared by the museum and the tenant, who will occupy the rooms that Dr. Hunter used for his examinations. One of those rooms even has an x-ray light that’s still operational.

Both the society board and the tenant are excited about the new arrangement.

“I consider it a privilege to occupy that space which is 1/2 block from where I was raised in Shillington, Pa.,” Ruoff said. “I knew John in his youth, but I knew his father Wesley Updike a lot better. As you know, his father was a math teacher in the Shillington High School for many years. I consider him one of my mentors during my childhood.

MaxwellRuoff said Wesley Updike “would throw snowballs at a blackboard to start showing us how to use the  decimal system: ‘Numbers to the right are smaller, numbers to the left are bigger—you get that David?’

“My mother was born 99 years ago on Philadelphia Ave. Then my grandfather moved the family up to Fourth Street, which is right next to the Jewish cemetery overlooking Shillington and Reading. The family would delight in seeing my grandfather coming from Reading on Lancaster Ave. (now 222) and they had no trouble identifying him because he had the only car in Shillington at that time. He sold spices to hotels, etc., and it was actually a company car”—a 1910 Maxwell.

Ruoff said that “John Updike gave a lot of people around here paranoia—drove everybody crazy figuring out who was who [in the fiction].”

Ruoff, who started his life insurance agency in 1967 and financial service organization in 1974, has joined The John Updike Society and looks forward to sharing stories with members.