Oates essay offers Poorhouse Fair insights

Posted on August 13, 2015 by James Plath

In 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.'”

Man’s six-year grave tour ends with an urge to have Michael Updike carve his epitaph

Posted on August 10, 2015 by James Plath

Walter Skold is a poetry lover who lives in Maine. But partially inspired by John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, he set out on a tour of poet’s graves across America. And lacking a poodle companion, he brought along a life-sized stuffed black panther he named Raisin.

Six years later that tour has come to an end, and John Updike’s tombstone, designed by his son, was one of Skold’s favorites. So much so that he asked Michael Updike to carve his own tombstone. “The last poet’s grave I find will be my own,” he wrote in an unfinished poem he worked on throughout his journey.

Here’s the full story by York Dispatch writer David Weissman: “York native finishes six-year grave-visit tour.”

Blogger thinks Rhinoceros, not Rabbit, will survive

Posted on July 31, 2015 by James Plath

Blogger Patrick Kurp, of Houston, posted an entry today titled “As Big, Perhaps, as Four Oxen” on his site, Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life.

“Handicapping literary reputations is a mug’s game,” he writes, “but if I were calculating John Updike’s odds, I’d bet on a handful of his stories, reviews and poems—especially the poems. Leave the novels alone, as readers and critics seldom did during his lifetime.”

Kurp calls Updike’s “a poetry of wit” and cites “The Menagerie at Versailles in 1775” as a prime example.

On Kirkus, reviewing, and U and I

Posted on July 13, 2015 by James Plath

In today’s online Chronicle of Higher Education J.C. Hallman contributes an essay on “Book Reviewing’s Grunt Squads,” a confession from one of those grad students who served on the squads, and an indictment of sorts, exposing of a system that is full of “irrational contradiction.”

Exhibit B is “the original Kirkus review of Nicholson Baker’s U and I,” which is “nasty right from the start.”

“What’s notable here, for anyone who’s read U and I, is just how far the review seems from the book it purports to consider”: “Surely nearly 200 pages of dreams, digressions, puns, self-ridicule, and self-congratulation would please the world, or Updike, or someone.”

Here’s the complete article.

Allegra Goodman reads and discusses A&P on a New Yorker podcast

Posted on July 4, 2015 by James Plath

Allegra Goodman, author of such novels as The Cookbook Collector, The Other Side of the Island, and Intuition, is featured in a New Yorker: Fiction podcast. Each month a fiction writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker selects a story to read and discuss, and Goodman picked Updike’s “A&P,” which she said had special meaning for her because she grew up in Hawaii and had her share of experiences with people in bathing suits in supermarkets, and she said she and her sister had names that began with “A” and “P” and began calling themselves that.

Here’s the link to the podcast.

John Updike: In Memory Flickr group started

Posted on June 7, 2015 by James Plath

Michelle Kinsey Bruns has started a Flickr group page devoted to “John Updike: In Memory” for the purpose of discussion and photo-sharing.

She writes, “I noticed that many John Updike fans are posting photos of their Updike book collections today—the day after the great author’s death. There are some wonderful tributes out there on Flickr (I find the photos of overseas editions of Updike’s books especially fascinating!), but there was no group in which to collect them all. So I created one. Please contribute your Updike-related photos here, for the enjoyment of all of us who loved his work.”

Her first post is titled “In Reading, Pa., Memories and Monuments…”

Mass. artist pays poetic tribute to Updike

Posted on May 29, 2015 by James Plath

Michael Updike writes, “I received a cold call from an admirer of my father’s tonight. She had hoped to read this poem to my father but his demise put an end to that. So reading it to me was the bridesmaid’s option.” Mathilde Duffy is an artist who works and teaches art classes in the greater Boston area.

Paris Review blog post recalls Cheever’s Updike scare

Posted on May 27, 2015 by James Plath

Today The Paris Review uploaded a blog post by Dan Piepenbring which featured the photo below of John Updike and John Cheever on The Dick Cavett Show and an entry from Cheever’s journal, circa 1974, 1978, that’s here titled, “False Alarm.”

It begins, “The telephone rings at four. This is CBS. John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment. I am crying. I cannot sleep again. I think of joining Mary in bed but I am afraid she will send me away.”

Later, Cheever writes, “As for John he was a man I so esteemed as a colleague and so loved as a friend that his loss is indescribable. He was a prince. I think it not difficult to kiss him goodbye—I can think of no other way of parting from him although he would, in my case, have been embarrassed. As a writer of his generation I think him peerless; and his gifts of communicating, to millions of strangers, his most exalted and desperate emotions was, in his case, fortified by immense and uncommon intelligence and erudition.”

It would be Cheever, Updike’s senior by two decades, who would die first, in 1982. Here’s a link to the October 14, 1981 Dick Cavett Show featuring the two luminary Johns.

Author writes about Updike Country

Posted on May 9, 2015 by James Plath

In a post for the “Idle Chatter” department of The Smart Set, from Drexel University, Morgan Meis reports on “Updike Country; In the semi-rural suburbs of southeastern PA, finding—and living in—Rabbit Angstrom’s middle America.”

“John Updike always wrote beautifully about this part of the world. The middle class houses. The certain kind of red clay. The specific attitude of a person who grew up around here, in the vicinity of Reading.

“If John Updike were still alive and driving around Limerick he’d write something about the beautiful pseudo-cloud coming from the cooling tower of the Limerick plant. He’d say, the white powder of that cloud drifts over the farmland and the strip malls all the same. It dusts the heads of the locals on their way out of the bar on Township Line Road. It dusts everything. You can’t see or feel the dust. It does not harm. But it’s heavy nonetheless. It keeps you here even when you want to pass on through. . . .”

The New Republic on why we need physical books

Posted on April 20, 2015 by James Plath

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.”

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