Janet Cormier of Oddball Magazine was inspired to write a prose poem about a writer and fan because of “a radio interview about John Updike by one of his biographers and a first time caller fan.”
Here’s the link to “Bamboozled No More! Writer and Fan”
Writing for PBS, Victoria Fleischer on September 11 posted an article titled, “Have you read the 200 ‘best American novels’?”
She reported that a single individual “embarked on an experiment” and “committed to reading only American novels and decided to compile a list of the 100 best that were published between 1770 and 1985.”
The architect of this plan was, well, an architect from Massachusetts named David Handlin.
Not surprisingly, Updike’s Rabbit, Run made the list. But it does raise an eyebrow that it’s the ONLY Updike book included. The Pulitzer Prize winner Rabbit Is Rich didn’t make his list, nor did Updike’s own favorite book, the National Book Award-winning The Centaur.
Handlin’s picks have caused a stir, with Sandra Gilbert, a distinguished professor of English emerita at the University of California, questioning the criteria for “novel” and “American.” She wrote her own list in response, and one of the things she did was to remove Updike—though she was quoted in the PBS article as saying “I’m not at all inclined to demand deletions, but prefer instead to suggest additions that would make this mini-narrative of our literature (for a narrative it is) more representative of the culture we’ve inherited.”
In “Controlled Rapture” (September 15, 2014), which is not available through open-access online yet, William Deresiewicz reviews Begley’s Updike for The New Republic. Though he has some very nice things to say about Updike, he begins, curiously, with the (some might think flawed) assumption that Updike’s literary star is currently dim, tarnished, or falling. Ignoring the large volume of major newspapers and critics who continue to assess Updike as one of the great writers of his century, Deresiewicz instead trots out Harold Bloom’s “oft-quoted remark that Updike was ‘a minor novelist with a major style'”—a great sound-byte in an era that feeds off of them—and David Foster Wallace’s decades-old indictment of Updike and the white male literary establishment in an essay many dismissed as the howl of a young buck trying to take on the alpha male(s) during rutting season.
“Only time will tell if Begley’s book becomes a final send-off or the start of its subject’s rehabilitation,” Deresiewicz continues. “Neither, I suspect. Updike’s prospects, in the near term, do not look any brighter than they did around the time that Wallace dropped his bomb in 1997 (or than those of Mailer and Roth, the other ‘phallocrats’ he named in his indictment). Our cultural politics are still pretty much where they were at the time: shackled to our identity politics. But Updike strikes me as the kind of writer who is going to be rediscovered, and who is going to keep being rediscovered. The time will come—in thirty or fifty or a hundred years—when the values of our own effulgent age will seem as odious as those of the 1950s (or for that matter, of the 1850s) do to us today. No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote. They will turn to him—readers will, and writers, I think, especially will—for what is permanently valid in his work: the virtuosity of his technique, his ability to craft a sentence, a scene, a story, to calibrate tones and modulate effects; the penetration of his eye, his gift for seeing things and seeing into minds; his brave, honest, unembarrassed frankness; and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of his prose.”
The word count for this review—close to six thousand words—justifies not only the writer’s predictions for Updike’s literary legacy, but also underscores the fact that, at least according to The New Republic, he’s a major figure now.
Perhaps the most telling sentence in Deresiewicz’s review is “No one then will care how Updike did or didn’t vote.” Those who would deny Updike his seat in the American literary pantheon are still bothered by his hawkish stance during the Vietnam years, and still annoyed that a man who steadfastly and consistently voted Democratic wouldn’t be more political in his fiction. But while Bellow and Roth were writing about professors and a segment of society that many would consider more elite, Updike gave us that quintessential fictional representation of the American middle class: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. That in itself is as political a statement as the artists who first departed from unwritten academy rules and painted everyday scenes with the scale and scope normally reserved for great battles and historical events. And it’s no coincidence that Updike’s painterly hero was Vermeer.
Reputations ebb and flow, and those fortunate enough to become part of the canon in their literary afterlives must be complex enough, important enough, and representative enough to withstand future attempts to oust them. Updike’s fiction, as Deresiewicz suggests, has the potential to last because when all is said and written about, Updike was and will always remain for readers a very talented writer who had plenty to say about science, religion, relationships, and trying to live life as a middle-class American in a century that was moving technologically forward at such a rapid pace that life itself could become a challenge.
“Does the Rabbit cycle finally cohere?” Deresiewicz asks, rhetorically. “Does it amount to the ‘epic’ that its author dreamed of writing, Begley tells us, in his youth? Maybe not,” he concludes, though there are many who would disagree. “Maybe, like Rabbit, it loses momentum and shape. Maybe Updike never did write that one big book, that single indelible masterpiece. Maybe his corpus is less than the sum of its parts. But what parts.”
Ian McEwan is on a book tour promoting his new novel, The Children Act, but consciously or subconsciously he’s been promoting John Updike as well. In a previous interview (JUS post) he mentioned Updike favorably, and in this interview-article he’s quoted as saying,
“Updike at his best is . . . a great observer. He never ceases to surprise and delight me. I love the intelligence of the sentences with that odd little hard-to-define spring . . . an extra beat that quickens my pulse. Who else does that? Shakespeare, Milton, and many, many other poets. Bellow does. Calvino. There’s no end of them, really. But never so copiously as Updike. One can open him at random and find some felicity on the page.”
Here’s the full article: “Science and Religion Clash in Ian McEwan’s New Novel”
Novelist Ian McEwan was recently interviewed for the Books/Culture section of The Observer in a piece published on Saturday, August 30, 2014: “Ian McEwan: ‘I’m only 66—my notebook is still full of ideas.'”
Although interviewer Robert McCrum mostly asks about McEwan’s latest book, The Children Act, he also describes a moment in the interview in which McEwan evoked John Updike:
“Out of the blue he remembers interviewing the late John Updike in his final years. ‘We talked about all this,’ he recalls. ‘He told me: The older you get the less frightening death becomes.’ He frowns in puzzlement. ‘I’m not sure whether to believe him.’
“So does he believe him?
“‘No.’ A beat. ‘Do you believe those obituaries that say, ‘Died peacefully in his sleep?’ (McEwan was at Christopher Hitchens’s bedside shortly before he died.) ‘Still, wouldn’t be a bad way to go.'”
High Life (UK) published a piece in their Culture section titled “What I’m reading this summer,” a round-up in which celebrities share what was on their summer 2014 reading list.
Writer William Boyd responded,
“Updike by Adam Begley. I’m a John Updike fan and this is the first biography. Also The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams as I’m writing a film script about PoWs.”
Ever since Paul Moran began sharing Updike ephemera on a blog called The Other John Updike Archive (the link to which you can find on our home page), Updike scholars have been wondering where he got the materials—with many speculating that he may have rescued them from a dumpster after Updike died.
Now in a story titled “The Man Who Made Off With John Updike’s Trash” by Adrienne LaFrance, posted on The Atlantic website on August 28, 2014, the mystery is explained . . . sort of.
Moran, a bicyclist, cycled past the Updike house and grabbed bags of trash, some of which Updike himself had just carried out. He did this regularly, and the family didn’t seem to mind, Moran says. Martha Updike is not quoted—only Estate literary agent Andrew Wylie, who says that Moran would “steal the Updike’s trash bags every Wednesday” and that the family tried to get him to stop.
The article is subtitled “Who really owns a great writer’s legacy?” but the law is pretty clear here. It’s not illegal to take someone’s trash from the curb. People do it in every town everywhere in America, so Moran did nothing against the law. And if he had taken the items after what amounted to an Estate housecleaning, thrown away after Updike’s death, he could be considered heroic for saving things that future scholars might find useful. I would have done it myself.
Even if he got the items while Updike was still alive, if there was no objection, where’s the foul? The problem, for some people, comes if the Updikes truly did want him to stop. That adds a moral dimension to it, and as someone who’s put the brakes on an idea the minute that Updike objected, my own inclination on such things has always been to abide by Updike’s wishes. Still, there are other collectors and scholars who would argue that preservation of the materials is more important than personal feelings, just as Updike, as we read in Begley’s recent biography, put fiction ahead of people. And it’s not clear from the Atlantic article whether the family truly objected, or to what degree. One quote from a literary agent doesn’t make the case.
The law is pretty clear regarding the items themselves. The physical items are owned by whoever bought or in this case salvaged them. And it’s terrific that Moran has chosen to share them with the world. He can get away with “publishing” items like the Hotel Algonquin bill, or ticket stubs, or invitations, or a call to jury duty, because they’re artifacts not subject to intellectual property law. Any drawings that Updike did, any doodles, any notes, anything that expressed a thought or opinion of his are covered by that law and Moran cannot make those items public because the content is owned by the Updike Estate, even though he owns the physical objects.
Puzzles remain, though: Updike was a pack-rat. He saved everything. So why throw away these things after holding onto them so long, especially all of those old slides and photographs? Why not give the latter to his children? I know from talking with him that he cared very little about the honorary degrees, but I find it hard to believe that he didn’t include them with the Harvard materials, or that “Mrs. Updike said it was fine and she was glad [the honorary degrees Moran found and sold] were going to support a local bookstore.”
So there are aspects about this that we may never know. Moran is quoted as saying that “he’s looked for permanent homes for the archive” but “says everyone he’s approached has turned him down.” Maybe he wants something in return, and the price is too high. But I do know that if the items were displayable and not a violation of intellectual property laws, if the items were Pennsylvania-related, and if the board of The John Updike Childhood Home approved, some of those items would find quite a welcome home.
William Pritchard, known in Updike circles for his book, Updike: America’s Man of Letters (Steerforth Press, 2000), graduated from Amherst College in 1953 and, now retired as a Professor Emeritus after teaching for the same institution for many decades, has written a piece for Amherst Magazine titled “Life After Amherst?”
In it, he talks about his career and a piece he thought about writing, though he admits, “When I revealed to my spouse that I was going to write something vaguely on the subject of life after Amherst, she scoffed, declaring that there was, for me, no life after Amherst.”
Here is the link.
The Old Life Theological Society posted a reaction piece by D.G. Hart titled “The Protestant Novel?” in which he considers “whether Protestantism has produced novelists the way that Roman Catholicism allegedly has.”
To answer that question he turns to Wikipedia and writer David Lodge, who writes, “If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist . . . Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example.”
Hart concludes, “Protestants intuitively know (but often refuse to admit) that novels don’t need to be Christian, that the question of whether a novel is Christian is actually silly. Some of the worst novels have tried to be redemptive, while some of the best don’t make the slightest reference to religion, let alone sin and grace.”
After reading Louis Menand’s review of Updike, the writer of a blog titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science jotted down his reactions and thoughts—most of which revolved around Updike, O’Hara, and Menand’s sin of omission (not mentioning O’Hara).
Here’s the link: “Updike and O’Hara”