Begley defends Dirt for Art’s Sake

In a piece written for The Guardian, Updike biographer Adam Begley noted, and not without some experience, “Widows and biographers don’t get along. . . . To the widow, or widower, or surviving children, any biography that digs deep into the private life of the subject is almost guaranteed to be obnoxious.

9780061896453.jpg“There are exceptions: John Cheever’s family allowed Blake Bailey full and free access to papers they knew (or at least strongly suspected) contained sad and sordid secrets. But it’s a safe bet that any family will want the biographer to focus on public achievements, not private peccadilloes. You can’t libel the dead, but revealing the seamy side, or simply speaking ill of them, invariably causes collateral damage, mostly to descendants but occasionally (think David Foster Wallace) to parents.”

Begley concludes that while “literary lives are tasteful, biographies are not. I know this to be true because when I was writing my biography of John Updike, I always insisted, snobbishly, that it was a book about how Updike’s life shaped his work. I looked down my nose at sensational biographies that aimed to satisfy the prurient curiosity of that mythical creature, the ‘average’ reader. The prospect of digging up dirt, even accidentally, appalled me. It made me squeamish.

“Yet because Updike was a self-confessed serial philanderer, I was repeatedly quizzed—by my friends and his—about his sex life. It was the inescapable topic. I righteously declined to name names, and omitted as many graphic details as I could,” he writes. “And then it emerged, after I finished the book, that there was a character who had spent the last three years of Updike’s life sifting through the author’s trash, creeping up to the bottom of Updike’s driveway and hauling off garbage bags so he could hunt at his leisure for collectible memorabilia—anything with Updike’s handwriting on it, from discarded drafts to cancelled cheques. This revelation sickened me, in part because I could see, obscurely, a parallel with what I’d done.

“Tasteful biographers sift through archives, not trash cans. But what they look for is biographical gold (very valuable dirt), and that nearly always involves something written for private purposes: unpublished letters, say, or a diary no one knew about. Is unearthing this treasure very different from going through the garbage? I used to be sure, now I’m not.”

“Dirt for art’s sake: what’s offensive and what’s essential in author biographies?”

Franzen on The Birth of The New Yorker Story

in an essay “drawn from The ’50s: The Story of a Decade, an anthology of New Yorker articles, stories, and poems” published the last week in October, Jonathan Franzen considers the writers and stories that came to characterize the magazine’s fiction.

“Along with John Updike and Ann Beattie, Cheever was the paradigmatic ‘New Yorker story’ writer, Franzen says, adding, “While Cheever and Updike were creating the main template for the New Yorker story, regional variants were flourishing.”

“The Birth of ‘The New Yorker Story'”

Schlemiel Theory considers Rabbit

unknown-1At Schlemiel Theory, subtitles “The Place Where the Laugh Laughs at the Laugh,” Menachem Feuer published a piece titled “The Rise and Fall of American Dreams: On John Updike’s ‘Rabbit, Run’.” In it, he considers the opening scene in Rabbit, Run where an older Rabbit plays basketball with young men and notices a “natural” among them. Then he realizes that his own basketball fame has faded:  “They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.”

“What Updike manages to do in this passage is to show the contradictions at the heart of the American dream. It may lift you up but at a certain point you may have to realize that you’re just one-in-a-million. But, to be sure, the struggle between being someone and being no-one is at the core of modernist art, literature, and philosophy. The question we have, as readers, is how Rabbit deals with his sinking into significance. Will he give up, will he try to be someone, or will he just . . . run away? Will he hurt people along the way?

Retro review: Blogger praises The Witches of Eastwick

WOEOn November 3, 2015, Jason Fernandes posted a retro review of The Witches of Eastwick, the book he read years ago as an introduction to John Updike, on his blog, Rants & Raves.

“From the opening pages of The Witches of Eastwick, I was immediately put to mind of Pride and Prejudice. That might sound like a strange connection to make,” he writes. “Whether this is just a coincidence or Updike is consciously having some fun with the reader is something I cannot say. Neither would surprise me. But it did give me a warm first impression and the sense that I was in for a treat. . . .

“The prose is exquisite. I have been fed on mostly contemporary fiction in recent years, and even the ‘modern classics’ I have read have not impressed me greatly. This novel was a welcome return to a higher class of writing,” he writes.

“Book Review: The Witches of Eastwick”

 

Milwaukee journalist moves on to Updike’s poetry

recreadingJim Higgins, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has been reading his way through the two-volume Library of America Collected Stories, but decided to take a detour this week and read and respond to the recently published volume of Updike’s Selected Poems. This post he reads and briefly comments on “Ex-Basketball Player,” “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” and “Fever.”

“Reading John Updike: ‘Selected Poems'”

Sunday Times columnist lauds Bellow, Updike

UnknownIn “The Books That Built Me, by Justin Cartwright” published October 5, 2015 in the Sunday Times, the author—a writer himself and a judge for the Canadian Giller Prize last year—writes,

“If had to pick out one writer who influenced me most when I started, it would be Saul Bellow. What attracted me was his apparently effortless ability to deal with both the comedy of human life and the serious and intellectual. I found it intoxicating and have – in my own way – tried to do the same thing. There are descriptions in Saul Bellow’s books which are astonishing, and his description of the human face are absolutely brilliant. Very difficult to do with any originality. This too I have tried to emulate.”

He adds,

“I also loved the Rabbit books by John Updike, whom I knew quite well. The best of these is Rabbit at Rest, intensely moving as Rabbit heads for oblivion. I have written many times of Updike’s realism, his understanding of America and its people with all their idealism and longing, and I think that the Rabbit series are among the finest novels of the last quarter of the 20th century. He is certainly the finest chronicler of the ordinary life of the US in my lifetime.”

Cartwright’s latest book is Up Against the Night

John Updike as punch line?

changesevenEver since Nicholson Baker lionized John Updike in an admirer’s confession titled U and I: A True Story, the anecdotes from Updike readers and fans have kept coming. The latest to surface is a reminiscence about one particular American Booksellers Association Convention, three speakers (Geraldine Ferraro, Richard Ford, John Updike), and one joke . . . with Updike as the punch line.

Here is Corey Mesler‘s mini-essay, “The Updike Joke and After,” which was published today on the Change Seven Magazine website.

Blogger defends Updike’s literary criticism

John Updike by Tom BachtellThe New Yorker & Me blog featured a post on September 11, 2015 titled “In Praise of John Updike’s Criticism (Contra James Wood).” The blogger takes exception with Woods’ assessment of Updike’s criticism, which surfaces in a Slate interview (18 August 2015) with Isaac Chotiner.

Chotiner complains, “I felt like he was always just sort of going through the motions of telling me what the book was about,” and Wood piles on:

“The maddening equilibrium of [Updike’s] critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything would be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put on the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself.”

This blogger responds, “Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The great literary critic of my life is Updike. His reviews are like no others; they show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.”

As “an offset against Wood’s sour remarks” the blogger quotes a passage from an Orhan Pamuk review of Adam Begley’s recent biography and also cites a dozen favorite and memorable passages from Updike’s criticism to prove that Updike’s reviews, like his fiction and poetry, was full of insights, as well as his omnipresent appreciation for language itself. Photo credit: Tom Bachtell.

Maxim talks to actress Emily Ratajkowski about Updike

Screen Shot 2015-08-28 at 6.21.49 PMIn an article titled “Exclusive: Emily Ratajkowski on John Updike, Acting and Getting Naked,” writer Aaron Gell profiled the Blurred Lines,” We Are Your Friends and Gone Girl star and had this exchange:

Ratajkowski: “And there’s a John Updike story I always love that my mom gave to me when I was 13 that’s about the daughter of this guy, and her female friend comes over and is wearing a tank top or something sexual, and the father makes her leave. It’s about the guilt and the shame that she feels for something she doesn’t understand. And to me, that’s always been so huge, because so much of our culture is about how women are supposed to behave in men’s eyes, and it’s never just a celebration of who they are. Like, what a wonderful thing to be a beautiful, sexual woman. How terrible that young women in our culture have to look towards pornography or over-sexualized versions of themselves to understand how to embrace their beauty. So, that’s sort of where I come from, and that’s definitely something my mom instilled in me.

Gell: “Updike hasn’t always been considered much of a feminist, so maybe that will change now.”

Ratajkowski:  “It might…”

Read the full article; photo by Getty Images via Maxim.

 

 

Oates essay offers Poorhouse Fair insights

Screen Shot 2015-08-13 at 7.51.57 AMIn a fascinating essay on “Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature” published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, writer (and former JUS conference keynote speaker) Joyce Carol Oates spends a significant amount of time discussing Updike’s debut novel, The Poorhouse Fair, partly in relation to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and partly in the context of Toward the End of Time:

“John Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), published when the author was twenty-six, is a purposefully modest work composed in a minor key; unlike Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), also published when the author was twenty-six. Where Mailer trod onto the literary scene like an invading army, with an ambitious military plan, Updike seems almost to have wished to enter by a rear door, claiming a very small turf in rural eastern Pennsylvania and concentrating upon the near-at-hand with the meticulous eye of a poet.

“The Poorhouse Fair is in its way a bold avoidance of the quasi-autobiographical novel so common to young writers: the bildungsroman of which the author’s coming-of-age is the primary subject. Perversely, given the age of the author, The Poorhouse Fair is about the elderly, set in a future only twenty years distant and lacking the dramatic features of the typical future, dystopian work; its concerns are intrapersonal and theological. By 1959 Updike had already published many of the short stories that would be gathered into Olinger Stories, which constituted in effect a bildungsroman, freeing him to imagine an entirely other, original debut work.

The Poorhouse Fair, as Updike was to explain in an introduction to the 1977 edition of the novel, was suggested by a visit, in 1957, to his hometown, Shillington, which included a visit to the ruins of a poorhouse near his home. The young author then decided to write a novel in celebration of the fairs held at the poorhouse during his childhood, with the intention of paying tribute to his recently deceased maternal grandfather, John Hoyer, given the name “John Hook” in the novel. In this way The Poorhouse Fair both is not, and is, an autobiographical work, as its theological concerns, described elsewhere in Updike’s work, were those of the young writer at the time.

“Appropriately, Updike wrote another novel set in the future near the end of his life, Toward the End of Time (1997), in which the elderly protagonist and his wife appear to be thinly, even ironically disguised portraits, or caricatures, of Updike and his wife in a vaguely postapocalyptic world bearing a close resemblance to the Updikes’ suburban milieu in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Is it coincidental that Updike’s first novel and his near-to-last so mirror each other? Both have theological concerns, and both are executed with the beautifully wrought, precise prose for which Updike is acclaimed; but no one could mistake Toward the End of Time, with its bitter self-chiding humor and tragically diminished perspectives, for a work of fiction by a reverent and hopeful young writer. . . .

“The confessional poets—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, to a degree Elizabeth Bishop—rendered their lives as art, as if self-hypnotized. Of our contemporaries, writers as seemingly diverse as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike created distinguished careers out of their lives, often returning to familiar subjects, lovingly and tirelessly reimagining their own pasts as if mesmerized by the wonder of ‘self.'”