Daily Beast writer considers Updike’s Seven Stanzas at Easter

Posted on April 5, 2015 by James Plath

In a Daily Beast think-piece titled “Did Updike Sell the Resurrection Short?” writer Matthew Sitman considers Updike’s poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”

“The poem gains new life of its own every year around this time. It inevitably flits across social media as Holy Week draws to a close, a very quotable addition to the Facebook feeds of America’s more literary Christians. Updike’s words circulate in more traditional ways, too, giving pastors and priests just the rhetorical flourish they need for their Easter nominees. This Sunday, many churchgoers who’ve never read a page of Rabbit, Run will nod along at Updike’s verse.

“The force of ‘Seven Stanzas,’ however, goes beyond its seasonal affiliation. After all, there are other poems about Easter. Perhaps Updike’s resonates because it seems attuned to the nature of belief in the modern world—or rather, it asks the modern believer what she is willing to believe. The poem forces the reader to answer for herself what really happened in that backwater of the Roman Empire in the days after Jesus was executed as a criminal. There can be, to use Updike’s word, no ‘sidestepping’ this issue. Are you ’embarrassed’ by this ‘miracle’ or not?

“This is a perennial question, the place where all quests for the historical Jesus give way to faith—or not—and Updike is wrong not to remind us of its stakes. But for all his theological sophistication, and despite my admiration for his literary gifts, Updike’s poem leaves me unsatisfied. It achieves its existential urgency by skirting the complexity and strangeness of what the Gospels actually tell us about the resurrection. The poem is a blunt instrument, jarring and powerful, but it obscures as much as it reveals.

“Updike asks us to leave aside figurative language and interrogate the Gospel accounts of the resurrection for their literal truth, if it really happened or not. When we read these passages, however, they also should interrogate us, unsettling our judgments about what we think we know and how we understand what it meant for Jesus to rise from the dead. They defy all our inevitable attempts to escape the uncertainty of real faith and reduce the resurrection to a pat story that does little more than comfort those who encounter it.”

Sitman thinks it is a “sense of wonder at the sheer perplexity of what Jesus was like after his resurrection that seems to be missing from Updike’s ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter.’ The problem is not that Updike challenges us to consider the strange idea that a man rose from the dead; it’s that what he holds before us isn’t strange enough. Whatever is going on in the Gospels, it seems to resist the efforts of those who want to assimilate the Easter story either through a literalism uncomfortable with paradox or by turning it into a somewhat embarrassing myth meant to inspire hope.”

Read the full article.

See also: “A few minutes with Updike’s ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter,'” by Tom Grosh IV and a 2009 post recommended by Grosh, “On Easter and Updike” by David E. Anderson.

Reading columnist thinks Rabbit a four-part bummer

Posted on March 23, 2015 by James Plath

In a Reading Eagle column titled “My 2 cents: ‘Rabbit’ series a four-part bummer,” columnist Andrew Wagaman makes it clear that he’s no fan of the tetralogy. But he also clears up some matters that have had locals festering for decades now.

“Updike created a crude, misogynistic narcissist whose belief in his own immortality gradually sours. The downfall is at times hilarious but also excruciating. Any hope for redemption—a son, a bank account—serves only as a prop for more pratfalls. His dying words, ‘It isn’t so bad.'”

“After my first column, I heard from some that I should quit the series because Updike basically spits on Berks County, where he was born. While Updike sets most of the series in Berks and describes it vividly, he’s really skewering the entire nation, at least its hubris and excess.

“Thought-provoking? Yes. A four-part bummer? Absolutely. Finishing it isn’t so bad.”

Addendum: Society member and John Updike Childhood Home patron Bruce Moyer submitted the following humorous pastiche in response:

Bouvier sickened by Updike book!

After his first bite, he heard from some that he should quit because Updike’s books
are less than tasteful. As he continued to devour it, against all those “learned” men
who had advised against doing so, he did become sickened. However, his opinion,
as noted was, “Finishing it isn’t so bad.”

Updike mentioned in L.E. Sissman reconsideration

Posted on March 20, 2015 by James Plath

Danny Heitman wrote a piece for The Magazine of The Weekly Standard about “Darkness Visible: L.E. Sissman, poet in a gray flannel suit” in which Updike is mentioned. The news “peg” is the final season of Mad Men, and Sissman is evoked as an example of “a real-life advertising executive in the 1960s, who appeared to survive the experience with his soul intact—even deepened.

“Along with his advertising career in Boston, where, over the years, he worked as a creative vice president at two leading firms, Sissman built a national reputation as a man of letters, penning book reviews for The New Yorker, a regular first-person column for The Atlantic, and several books of poetry. John Updike was a big fan, admiring Sissman’s literary work as an expression of ‘amiable, attentive intelligence.’ Other contemporary admirers included fellow poets Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, and Howard Moss. The writer behind Sissman’s poems and essays seemed centered, charming, humane. ‘A sensible, decent man: that is the voice,’ Updike said of his friend.”

“Sissman reflexively avoided the bland generality in favor of the telling particular, which is why Updike, another master of precise observation, liked him so much. ‘When he evokes a city, it is Detroit or New York or Boston; there is no confusing the tint of the pavements,’ Updike wrote. ‘When he recalls a day from his life, though it comes from as far away as November 1944, it arrives not only with all its solid furniture but with its own weather—in this case, ‘thin, slate-colored clouds sometimes letting through flat blades of sun.’ '”

Garrison Keillor remembers Updike’s birthday

Posted on March 19, 2015 by James Plath

Although The Writer’s Almanac featured a poem by Tom Hennen yesterday, unabashed Updike fan Garrison Keillor still remembered the author’s birthday with a nice long biographical summary, lest anyone forget:

“It’s the birthday of writer John Updike (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1932). His father was a high school teacher, and his mother aspired to be a writer; Updike said: ‘One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk. I admired the writer’s equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in.’ As a boy, Updike wanted to be a cartoonist, not a writer. He cut out comic strips and sent fan letters to cartoonists, drew caricatures of classmates, made posters, and tried to draw cartoons like the ones he saw in his family’s copy of The New Yorker. As a teenager, he sent his cartoons to major magazines, including The New Yorker, and although he didn’t publish any there, he did earn five dollars selling a cartoon to a dairy journal. He went to Harvard, where he joined the staff of The Harvard Lampoon as a cartoonist, but ended up writing too. By graduation, he was fairly certain that he would become a writer instead of an artist. He said of writing: ‘It took fewer ideas, and I seemed to be better at it. There is less danger of smearing the ink.’

“Despite his intentions to become a writer, he got an art scholarship to study at Oxford. He was newly married, and he and his wife moved to England, where their first daughter was born. While he was at Oxford, he met E.B. and Katherine White, who were vacationing in England. They convinced him to apply for a job at The New Yorker, so after his time at Oxford, he moved to Manhattan to work as a staff writer for the magazine, writing the ‘Talk of the Town’ column. He was not a big fan of life in the city — he said, ‘The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect.’ Two years later, the Updikes had a second child and decided to leave New York and move toIpswich, Massachusetts. Updike had just turned 25 years old.

“Soon after his move, he published his first books: a book of poems, The Carpentered Hen (1958); a novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959); and a book of short stories, The Same Door (1959). Another son was born in 1959, and a daughter 19 months later. Despite the success of those early years — in 1960 he published Rabbit, Run, the first of his great books featuring Rabbit Angstrom — he underwent a spiritual crisis. He said, ‘These remembered gray moments, in which my spirit could scarcely breathe, are scattered over a period of years; to give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men’s wives.’

“After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: ‘Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.’ He wanted to publish about one book a year, and took Sundays off for church, although later in his career he sometimes worked on Sundays too. In 2008, he said, ‘I’ve become a beast of the written word, a monster of a kind, in that it’s all I can do.’

“Updike published more than 60 books in his lifetime, including 28 novels. His books include Couples (1968), Rabbit is Rich (1981), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and The Complete Henry Bech (2001).

“He said: ‘At the point where you get your writerly vocation you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.'”

Gopnik cites Updike in essay about American norms

Posted on March 18, 2015 by James Plath

Adam Gopnik‘s latest essay for The New Yorker on American norms, “Iran, Inequality, and the Battle of American Norms,” references John Updike:

“The play between norms and laws is one of the great subjects of literature. Should Achilles give back Hector’s body to the Trojans? It’s only a battlefield norm, but the Iliad turns on it. The great novels of norms—American norms, at least—are the four books in John Updike’s Rabbit series, which are, exactly, all about the price of accepting the norms that a middle-class society imposes on the average sensual male (or female) citizen. Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom marries his pregnant girlfriend, stays with her dutifully after various failed attempts at escape to a life of more immediate gratifications, and then has the ironic sense, as the books go on, that he is the only one in America still sticking to the old self-imprisoning norms. Group sex comes in the door, and the inhibitions go right out the window. Is it an entrapping net or a reassuring pattern of premade choices? It depends on which side of the norm you’re sitting.”

Guardian offers a brief survey of the short story: Updike

Posted on February 22, 2015 by James Plath

The Guardian Books Blog has been writing their version of “A brief survey of the short story,” and this past week writer Chris Power got around to John Updike. He writes that “there is enough Updike, with enough difference in quality, that you could plausibly read a lot of him without encountering a dud, and read just as much in another, unluckier direction without encountering anything particularly good. Few writers are more in need of a well-chosen collection of selected stories.”

He’s right, actually. A single volume of “greatest hits” would be a sure contender for another Pulitzer Prize and make Updike the all-time leader in fiction Pulitzers. Right now he’s tied with Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner as the only American writers to win the prize twice.

Power, who says the “best place to begin is in Olinger,” concludes with a quote from Updike: “‘I cannot greatly care what critics say of my work,’ Updike said in 1968. ‘If it is good, it will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink.’ Much of his work, despite the nearly unfailing presence of a memorable simile, or pitch-perfect phrase, will disappear in time. Some—a small amount by Updike’s standards perhaps, but more than many can hope for—deserve the permanence we ourselves are denied.”

“A brief survey of the short story: John Updike”

New Yorker copy editor talks about work . . . and Updike

Posted on February 16, 2015 by James Plath

In an essay titled “Holy Writ: Learning to love the house style,” Mary Norris writes a “personal history” that covers her first job and how she came to be a copy editor for The New Yorker. She also talks about some of the writers she admired, among them, John Updike:

“And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. . . .

“I was on the copydesk when John McPhee’s pieces on geology were set up. I tried to keep my head. There was not much to do. McPhee was like John Updike, in that he turned in immaculate copy. Really, all I had to do was read,” she writes.

Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and has been a query proofreader at the magazine since 1993. Her book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, will be published by W. W. Norton & Co. on April 6, 2015.

Irish actor’s favorite book: Rabbit, Run

Posted on February 15, 2015 by James Plath

The entertainment section of The Independent today ran a Q&A interview, “A question of culture: Actor Emmet Kirwan,” in which they asked the young Irish actor what his favorite book was.

“Rabbit, Run by John Updike,” he answered. “The first of a quartet of Rabbit books, but still my favorite. It speaks to a restlessness in people edging towards 30. Updike makes a flawed American everyman character likable, even as he wrecks the lives of everyone around him.”

Ironically, when asked to name a book he couldn’t finish, Kirwan cited the Jack Kerouac novel that inspired Updike to write Rabbit, Run as a kind of counter-argument:

“On the Road. It’s one I felt I should read as opposed to wanting to. I was encouraged to give it a second chance, but found it tough work and boring.”

For Kirwan, “favourite city” was no contest: “It would have to be Dublin, wouldn’t it? It’s a capital city but it’s also a village. Just the right size.”

British comedian picks Updike for his one book on a desert island

Posted on February 7, 2015 by James Plath

The Daily Mail asked British comedian David Baddiel (The Mary Whitehouse Experience) which book he’d take to a desert island, and he chose John Updike. Or more specifically,

“The Rabbit omnibus by John Updike. This is actually five books all about the same character: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest and Rabbit, Remembered. All human life is there.”

The occasion for the interview was the publication of Baddiel’s first children’s book, The Parent Agency (HarperCollins). It’s available from Amazon.

English major talks about Getting Over Updike

Posted on January 13, 2015 by James Plath

First Person Singular focuses on a January 14 blog post by Jon Busch titled “Getting Over Updike,” which begins,

“John Updike was a living legend around Gordon College. He lived mere miles from our tiny campus, and swapping tales of ‘Updike sightings’ was a common pastime among English majors.”

Updike “encounters” were apparently just as common, and Busch shares several humorous anecdotes, along with his somewhat embarrassed reaction to A Month of Sundays.

He writes, “Regardless of the absurdity and vulgarity of A Month of Sundays, I do wish we Gordonites had not irrevocably offended Updike all those years ago. His ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter’ alone is adequate atonement for a lifetime of bad sex writing.”

Gordon College is a Christian school in Wenham, Massachusetts. “Legend has it (and I have no way to verify this) that an intrepid English professor in the late seventies or early eighties struck up a friendship with Updike and asked him to come speak on campus. Updike accepted the invitation, but had to be ‘disinvited’ when the president of the college famously declared, ‘I don’t want that pornographer anywhere near our campus.

“Decades later, an Updike convocation was still off the table. Apparently, the man knew how to hold a grudge. We English majors held a grudge as well, against that ignorant, foolish president who damned us to an Updike-less, and thus incomplete, education.”

It was only after reading A Month of Sundays many years later that Busch says he developed “sympathy for the old president’s position.”

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