Author Archives: James Plath

Author thinks Updike foresaw the Trump era

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updikeWriting for the American Conservative, Charles F. McElwee III asks, “Did John Updike Foresee the Trump Era?”

“Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism—in the form of Donald Trump—prevailed on Election Day 2016,” he writes.

“Although Rabbit supported Humphrey in 1968, he later has a ‘Reagan Democrat’ conversion, voting for George H.W. Bush in the final novel. If anything, he’s the fictional embodiment of a political prototype, a cross-party coalition infuriated by the loss of what communities like Brewer once symbolized: economic prosperity and a shot at a stable middle-class American life. The Rabbit novels could serve as the fictional companion to any social-policy book by Charles Murray,” McElwee writes. “The realism of Updike’s characters and plot lines is a tribute to Updike’s understanding of this durable voting bloc, one that determined Hillary Clinton’s fate.”

Read the whole article.

 

Bookseller offers Updike association copies for sale

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screen-shot-2016-12-14-at-10-38-34-pmCloud Hill Books of New York City is selling a collection of inscribed and signed Updike first editions from the library of Theodore Vrettos and his wife, Vassile. Darren of Cloud Hill Books writes, “The Vrettos were residents of Peabody, Mass. In addition to being social acquaintances of John and Martha Updike, Vrettos was Updike’s regular golfing partner [until his death in 2004] and also a consultant for Greek characters and text in Updike’s stories and novels. After attending Tufts College and Harvard University, Vrettos taught creative writing at Salem State College and was director of the Writers’ Conference at Simmons College for 13 years. He was also the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction works, including Hammer on the Sea (1965), A Shadow of Magnitude: The Acquisition of the Elgin Marbles (1974), Origen: A Historical Novel (1978), Birds of Winter (1980), Lord Elgin’s Lady (1982), The Elgin Affair: The Abduction of Antiquity’s Greatest Treasures and the Passions It Aroused (1997), and Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (2001).

Here is the list of first editions for sale:  john-updike-first-editions-from-the-library-of-theodore-vrettos

The John Updike Society won’t be bidding because our funds are tied up with the house restoration, but if an Updike fan or Secret Santa would like to purchase one or two to donate for rotating display in The John Updike Childhood Home, items #15 and #49, with interesting content inscriptions, certainly would be nice additions to our museum-in-progress!

 

Updike letters to be published

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The John H. Updike Literary Trust announced yesterday that James Schiff will edit a volume of John Updike’s letters, with a target completion date of 2020. A publisher has not yet been named.

schiff-130x150Anyone familiar with Updike studies knows that this is good news on several counts. The decision to release a collection of letters comes after years of the Literary Trust saying it would not permit them to be published. The reversal opens the door to not just a single published volume, but more, as happened in Hemingway studies when an initial Selected Letters edited by Princeton scholar Carlos Baker led to several thematic volumes of correspondence before the complete letters were (and are still being) published in a multi-volume set. Updike, like Hemingway, was a prolific letter-writer who was generous with his comments, producing hundreds of what are typically described in the autograph world as “content letters.” A volume of published letters always sparks new reader interest in an author and gives scholars additional material with which to work and find inspiration for new insights, essays, and books.

It’s also good news that James Schiff was chosen to edit the volume. As editor of The John Updike Review and cofounder and current vice-president of The John Updike Society, Schiff is well positioned to collect and edit the interviews. An associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Schiff is also known in the Updike world for his three books: Updike’s Version: Rewriting the Scarlet Letter (1992), John Updike Revisited (1998), and Updike in Cincinnati: A Literary Performance (2007).

“Updike was a masterful and prolific letter writer, and so it pleases me greatly to be working on this project,” said Schiff, who has already begun collection letters from institutional libraries and requesting them from private owners and recipients. The letters span six decades of Updike’s life, from his teens in postwar rural Pennsylvania to his seventies, when he was revered as one of America’s most accomplished and honored men of letters.

“Collecting the staggering number of extant letters will take time,” Schiff said. “Yet it is already clear that these writings have literary and biographical significance. Updike is a major figure in American literature, and his letters reveal yet another aspect of his literary genius.”

Schiff said he would be grateful to hear from anyone in possession of Updike’s correspondence. He can be reached at james.schiff@uc.edu or updikeletters@gmail.com.

De Bellis featured in WDIY interview

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jackdebellis-webJohn Updike Society cofounder and former director Jack De Bellis, whose John Updike Encyclopedia and John Updike’s Early Years have been indispensable for Updike scholars, was featured in an interview on WDIY, Lehigh Valley’s Community NPR Station, on Dec. 6, 2016.

Asking the questions was Lehigh Valley Discourse host John Pearce.

Here’s the audio link.

Updike wrote to oppose John Lennon deportation

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screen-shot-2016-12-11-at-6-38-17-pmA City Pages article on music by Jay Boller titled “Hey Prude: How one penis-fearing Minnesotan tipped the FBI to John Lennon” tells of the reaction that started an FBI file that grew until it deportation became a threat for the former Beatle. Featuring himself and mate Yoko Ono naked on the album cover for Two Virgins (1968) was only the beginning. It was his anti-war voice that was the loudest and his involvement with experimental drug-use that gave the FBI its opening.

However, “Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan would join dozens of rational stars—including Jasper Johns, Joan Baez, and John Updike—in writing letters of support for Lennon to the INS, which began deportation efforts in 1972.

For the whole story, click here.

Review of The Violet Hour cites Updike

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VioletHourKatie Roiphe included John Updike in her book The Violet Hour, so it’s no surprise that a review of that book would cite Updike, as Shirley Hershey Showalter did for The Christian Century. In “Death’s call and our response,” published October 2, 2016, she writes,

“Kalanithi uses a quotation from Montaigne as an epilogue: ‘If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.’ The quotation could apply to Katie Roiphe’s book also. The Violet Hour takes up Montaigne’s challenge but with less confidence in the outcome. Roiphe roiled cultural waters in the 1990s withThe Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism. The Violet Hour defies genre, mixing memoir, journalism, biography, and literary criticism as it ponders the dying of six writers—Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, James Salter, and Susan Sontag.”

Later, she writes, “Updike is the only practicing Christian in the group. His lifelong devotion to the Book of Common Prayer and the Episcopal Church present a puzzle to Roiphe. She’s not tripped up by the apparent contradiction of his adulteries; she has a special interest in his linking of adultery and immortality: ‘I have a soft spot for those who try to defeat death with sex.’ It’s irony, not sex, that makes it difficult for her to understand Updike’s religious life.

“She explains in an endnote that Updike’s biographer Adam Begley helped her see continuity where she could only see confusion. Updike’s final book of poems, Endpoints, includes these lines about clergymen: ‘comical purveyors / of what makes sense to just the terrified.’ Roiphe settles on this explanation: ‘Updike approached everything under the sun with irony, including his deeper passions, his beliefs, his sources of marvel and awe.'”

Here’s the full article.

On editors (and Updike’s take on them)

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Rosemary Goring, literary editor for The Herald (Scotland), considered the writer-editor relationship in an essay, “Is writing on the wall for editors?”

“Great editors helped make the name of their writers,” she wrote. “Perhaps the most famous, Max Perkins, was Hemingway’s literary right hand, and that of F. Scott Fitzgerald too. Raymond Carver might never have reached the limelight but for the unsentimental and vigorous reshaping his editor Gordon Lish demanded. And those who wrote for the New Yorker will never forget the firm but courteous intervention of an editor such as William Maxwell, himself a fine novelist, who saved many authors from embarrassing themselves with a glitch or a cliche or a tired sentence. One of the New Yorker‘s regular contributors, John Updike, was rare in admitting he was always delighted to be edited. If someone wanted to suggest improvements, he was more than happy to consider them.”

Essay on Kierkegaard quotes Updike

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kierkegaardWriting on “Cruel Intentions” for TLS (Times Literary Supplement), Will Rees discusses the life of Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard at some length and draws upon Updike at one point:

“John Updike famously argued that Kierkegaard’s works owe much to the art of novel-writing. After all, they are written by and about fictional characters whose world views they attempt to occupy from within. In a way that would please the contemporary teacher of creative writing, Kierkegaard does not tell – he shows. But we mustn’t get carried away; we do Kierkegaard a disservice if we simply appreciate his books. By departing from the normal philosophical form, they arguably tighten rather than slacken the demand on our attention, because arguments are present, but one must search for them, and often they reside in what Kierkegaard’s characters do not or cannot say – in the implicit gaps in their imperfect world views.”

 

Golf dreamers (and writers): a North Shore man remembers Updike

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updike-shem“I met John Updike in 1980, at a PEN/New England gathering,” recalled Dr. Steve Bergman, Professor of Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School. “I was shocked to see him–I’d never met a writer before. I overheard him telling Tim O’Brien the writer that he wanted to play golf that week and would Tim be interested? Tim said yes. They needed another for a foursome,and I introduced myself, and was accepted,” Bergman wrote on his blog, Samuel Shem: Conversation, Events & Book Talk. Shem is his pen name.

“Over the years, I would say we became best friends. Not that John would show much feeling, really, but I would often ask him to read something I was working on, and he’d talk about his work–and he used a character named Toby Bergman, editor of the local paper in Witches of Eastwick, who ‘breaks his leg’ (Bergman my real name) and in my next novel, The Spirit of the Place, there was, in return, one “Toby Updike, editor of the local paper, who breaks his leg.” Marvelous man.

Bergman concluded, “In a rough time, when he hadn’t heard from me in a while, he would always call–to talk about golf, or when we could next lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club (I was a member and they had a great buffet). He scheduled the next drop-off of a few cartons of his memorabilia at the Houghton Library just across the street, so it was convenient. I have this photo on my desk, of him and me in golf gear. I miss him to this day.”

You can “read up” on Bergman-Shem at Goodreads.

Member’s book on Updike’s fiction now available for pre-order

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farmerbookMichial Farmer, who presented a paper on “The Failure of Moderation in Buchanan Dying and Memories of the Ford Administration” at the Fourth Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, S.C., has written a book on Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction that is now available for pre-order from Camden House and Amazon. The book (236pp., cloth) is scheduled for March 2017 publication.

From the Boydell and Brewer website:

“Concentrating on the role of the imagination in Updike’s works, this book shows him to be an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being.

“This book looks past the frequently discussed autobiographical nature of John Updike’s fiction to consider the role in Updike’s work of the most powerful and peculiar human faculty: the imagination. Michial Farmer argues that, while the imagination is for Updike a means of human survival and a necessary component of human flourishing, it also has a destructive, darker side, in which it shades into something like philosophical idealism. Here the mind constructs the world around it and then, unhelpfully, imposes this created world between itself and the ‘real world.’ In other words, Updike is not himself an idealist but sees idealism as a persistent temptation for the artistic imagination. Farmer builds his argument on the metaphysics of Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist thinker who has been largely neglected in discussions of Updike’s aesthetics. The book demonstrates the degree to which Updike was an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being.”

Michial Farmer is Assistant Professor of English at Crown College, Saint Bonifacius, Minnesota.