Move over, David Levine. There’s another caricaturist working the literary crowd. Illustrator Ward O’Neill has posted a caricature of John Updike on his website. Updike’s is among 67 drawings in the category of writing and ideas, wedged between Günter Grass and Adam Smith.
You can see the full caricature here.
A revised version of Adam Sexton’s presentation at the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference was recently published in Issue #27 of Post Road Magazine:
In it, he talks about teaching The Centaur to the painting, fashion, photography, and architecture majors who were required to take his course at the Parsons School of Design.
“Together my Parsons students and I moved slowly through the novel’s protean first chapter and another psychotic-seeming one in which Peter, chained to a rock, is visited in turn by schoolmates as well as the spirit of the town in which they live. We skimmed the chapter that was undiluted mythology and focused on the rest. The students engaged in passionate debates regarding the identity of The Centaur’s protagonist—was it George Caldwell or his son?”
To make a long story short, Adam says, “They had fallen in love with The Centaur.”
The Other John Updike Archive recently shared a torn and taped photo of Updike sitting in a boat, from the cover shoot for Hugging the Shore. But of great curiosity: Paul Moran has posted a photo of the shorts that Updike was wearing, along with the “cheap watch.” And he speculates why Updike would have held on to those particular items for so long, only to finally throw them out.
Here’s the link.
On her blog, The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood published an entry titled “E. Michael Jones on John Updike” that considers Updike in the context of what Christopher Lasch called “the Culture of Narcissism.”
Given the recent essay on the Christian roommates in The John Updike Review, what she and her responders have to say might be of interest.
“According to Jones, ‘Literature used to be a WASP avocation. It is now a Jewish business, and John Updike, because of his narcissism and his moral defections, enabled the transition from the former to the latter state.'”
Robert Matzen published a piece on his blog titled “Umbrella Man,” in which he talks about maybe writing about the fate of TWA Flight 3 and recalls the book Six Seconds in Dallas buy Josiah Thompson and John Updike’s response to reading it.
“Six Seconds in Dallas appeared in 1967, nearly 50 years ago, and now Tink [Thompson] is advanced in age, but he popped up in a fascinating Youtube video that had been forwarded to me, and I delighted in the concept he described—a concept developed by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike in response to reading Thompson’s book.”
“The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive,” Updike wrote in 1967; “the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.”
And now Thompson is quoting Updike. “‘In historical research,’ says Thompson of the Updike position, ‘there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and the usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.'”
Blogger Matzen writes, “Seeing the YouTube video and reading Updike’s original think piece [in The New Yorker] hit me like a pumpkin to the head because I had spent years trying to sort out the circumstances leading up to the crash of Flight 3— circumstances that should have been sortable and explainable but read like Fiction 101. The crash of Flight 3 and the reasons why Carole Lombard died on the plane with 21 others fit perfectly with Updike’s subatomic realm because the more we apply the rules of man’s physical world, the less the story makes sense.”
Here’s the entire article: “Umbrella Man.”
In “Cast Aside: John Updike’s posthumous reputation,” The Skinny: Independent Cultural Journalism, a teaser reads,
“As John Updike biographer Adam Begley appears at Manchester Literature Festival this month[Tuesday, Oct. 14, 6 p.m.], we consider the posthumous reputation of one of America’s best-known writers. It’s arguably never been at a lower ebb, but should this be so?”
Never mind that it’s debatable Updike’s reputation has ebbed, because he’s always had admirers and detractors.
For a springboard, writer Jim Troeltsch uses Updike himself.
“John Updike, speaking in 2005, four years before his death: ‘Reputations do subside, is one of the conclusions I’ve drawn. Your life as a famous writer, like your life as a human being, is limited, and now that we all live so long, a lot of us live to see ourselves become faded reputations. I don’t know if that’s true of me or not—I try not to think about it too much.’ The subtext’s pretty transparent; even then Updike knew his reputation, at least as a novelist, was waning.”
Never mind that Troeltsch may have been reading too much into Updike’s statement. What follows is a discussion that begins with often-cited dismissals by James Wood, Harold Bloom, and Gore Vidal and a subsequent dismissal of the charges that Updike is a misogynist without much else to say.
“To label Updike a misogynistic narcissist and leave it at [that] is surely to miss the point. Was Proust a longwinded snob? Joyce a drunken lech? Céline a crazed anti-Semite? Yes; but do such things really matter when it comes to judging their work on its own terms (even when such odious traits are shared by their characters)?
“The novel’s a container of consciousness—the author’s. And when the consciousness, as in Updike’s case, is so great as to allow us to apprehend the world anew, to actually augment our reality—to really do this; to make us see the tea-soaked sugar cube in the shaded sandstone farmhouse—then perhaps we should put the faults to one side and say: yes, maybe this really is enough.”
It’s funny how one appraisal leads to another, or a conversation . . . or a debate.
William Deresiewicz’s essay-review of Updike for The New Republic has already inspired a favorable response from National Review, that other side of the aisle publication. That’s encouraging, because these days Updike appears to be one of the few subjects that a liberal or conservative can agree upon.
Now Peter J. Leithart (First Things) weighs in with “Painter of Surfaces,” posted online on September 10, 2014, which oddly enough has nothing much to do with Updike’s painterly style.
“No one has to defend Updike’s skill as a writer,” Leithart writes, “and he was surely a success, as Deresiewicz’s rapid-fire summary indicates. . . . Updike’s reputation suffers more because he was, in Deresiewicz’s words, ‘an unembarrassed, unreconstructed middle-American. . . . Updike’s life and work are testaments to the idea that mid-American values, beliefs, and sensibilities are adequate to address and interpret modern experience.’ That cannot be forgiven.
“Nor can Updike’s theological conviction. . . . But he, like the non-judgmental God of his novels, stays on the surface. Updike will be remembered as a chronicler of his times, but Deresiewicz doesn’t convince me that his novels have the depth to be of enduring importance.”
“It’s not cool to like the writing of John Updike,” National Review‘s Michael Potemra declares in “Looking at Updike, Again.” “But it’s the right thing to do.”
Wasn’t that what actor Wilford Brimley told us about eating oatmeal?
Potemra explains that the “anti-feminist rap against Updike deserves, in our current cultural plight, a little more attention. The locus classicus of this opinion was the famous phrase of David Foster Wallace, who quoted a female friend’s gibe that Updike was ‘a penis with a thesaurus.’ Now, David Foster Wallace has basically been canonized as a secular saint, and to be dismissed by him in this fashion amounts to having the phrase NOT. COOL. branded on your forehead.”
Potemra was apparently inspired to reconsider Updike after reading a New Republic book review of Adam Begley’s Updike by William Deresiewicz, whom he quotes:
“Updike—and Mailer, and Roth, and the other men (and women) of their generation—were situated at a complicated juncture in the history of sexuality. They came of age before the revolution, but not so long before that they couldn’t try to join it. Sexual freedom descended on them not as a birthright, but as a miracle. Of course they went a little wild. When the Pill came out in 1960, the oldest member of the baby boom was fourteen. Updike was 28. If he spent a lot of time thinking about sex, it’s not a big surprise. Updike, like his contemporaries, was also too early for feminism. That may not be conducive to the most progressive attitudes . . . but it also means that Updike stood between the old and new Victorianisms.”
Potemra adds, “Deresiewicz is pointing to something important: Updike, as a man of his generation, did not view ideologizing about men and women to be his basic calling in life. It was sufficient for him to watch men and women, to notice, and to record his observations in some of the best prose ever produced by an American writer.”
Film critic A.O. Scott dips one toe in familiar waters and the other in American literature to discuss what he perceives as “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” which was published on September 11, 2014.
Both Philip Roth and John Updike are mentioned—Roth, more so than Updike.
“While [Leslie] Fiedler was sitting at his desk in Missoula, Mont., writing his monomaniacal tome [on Love and Death in the American Novel], a youthful rebellion was asserting itself in every corner of the culture. The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom—a new crop of semi-antiheroes in flight from convention, propriety, authority and what Huck would call the whole ‘sivilized’ world.
“From there it is but a quick ride on the Pineapple Express to Apatow. The Updikean and Rothian heroes of the 1960s and 1970s chafed against the demands of marriage, career and bureaucratic conformity and played the games of seduction and abandonment, of adultery and divorce, for high existential stakes, only to return a generation later as the protagonists of bro comedies. We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from Catch-22 to The Hangover, from Goodbye, Columbus to The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.