Category Archives: First Person Singular

McEwan says he and Updike talked about mortality

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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.'”

Updike mentioned in a summer reading round-up

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Screen Shot 2014-08-30 at 8.01.48 AMHigh 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.”

The Atlantic on The Other John Updike Archive

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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.

 

Updike scholar contemplates Life After Amherst

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Screen Shot 2014-08-26 at 8.45.22 PMWilliam 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.

A post on The Protestant Novel

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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.”

 

Australian e-journal publishes opinion on Updike

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ON LINE opinion, Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate, today published a piece on “Updike!”by Peter Sellick, who begins by saying that Updike’s death “precipitated a dilemma” in his household because for so many years his wife would buy him the latest Updike book for Christmas. But he quickly turns to observation, some of it based on his rereading of the LOA short stories and the Begley bio:

“Updike served up his immediate experience; all was grist for his mill. So much so that after telling his children that he was leaving the family of his first marriage, a painful episode for all, he published, soon after, an episode in the Maple stories, ‘Separating’ that was drawn with little disguise from the event. One wonders at the facility of a writer who could do such painful things to his family and then serve it all up in a short story to the New Yorker for a fairly large amount of money. One wonders about his facility for detachment! For Updike all of experience was fodder for his literature. He could be called the Vermeer (one of Updike’s favorite artists) of American letters, so intent was he on the gravity and beauty of the everyday. The glory of the small town of Shillington where he grew up was often celebrated in his short stories as if it were the centre of the universe.”   Continue reading →

Begley: Updike’s last sin was writing

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Adam Begley, in Scotland for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, gave an interview to Alan Taylor of The Herald that was assigned the somewhat titillating headline “The final sin of John Updike.”

In the long interview, which was published in the Saturday, August 9 online version, Begley covers a lot of ground and concludes that Updike had given up all but one of his vices—smoking, drinking, sleeping around. “‘It’s true, his last sin was writing,’ says Adam Begley. ‘This compulsion to take other people’s lives and use them for his own ends. Other than that, he had given up naughtiness.'”

Says Begley, “I didn’t think Updike’s biography was difficult to write because my training is in literary criticism and my inclination is towards literary criticism. What Updike offers to me is much more valuable that [Norman Mailer-esque] derring-do or political campaigns; punching one’s colleagues in the faces or biting their ears or stabbing your wife. What he did is write books that drew me to them like a magnet and stories that I could turn to.”

“The character who emerges from Begley’s book is complex and fascinating and, to a degree, elusive,” Taylor writes. “There was, for example, the public figure, who could turn on the charm as one might a light. He was studiedly polite and played the part of literary gent almost to the point of parody. By nature, Updike was also careful and cautious and conservative. For much of his life, moreover, he had a stammer and was plagued with psoriasis. And, having grown up as a single child in a family that always had to count pennies, he could never fall back on privilege.

“But there was also another side to him, observes Begley, that of the daredevil and the practical joker. As a teenager he would woo his pals with stunts, jumping on the running board of his parents’ old black Buick and steering it downhill through the open window. He was prone to tomfoolery, as if determined to draw attention to himself. He liked to leap over parking meters and would through himself downstairs as if he were part of a slapstick act. ‘So there is that contradiction in him,’ says Begley, ‘that is elemental in him and that biographers like and which they pretend they can explain, but can’t.”

The Witches of Eastwick makes 20 Great Movie Speeches list

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CherWe Got This Covered put out a list called “Ladies And Gentlemen: 20 Great Movie Speeches,” and compiler Sarah Myles ranked the speech by Cher-as-Alexandra in the 1987 film The Witches of Eastwick #5 on the list.

“There is a vast amount of great dialogue in the script for this horror-comedy—which is Michael Cristofer’s adaptation of the John Updike source novel. Three very different, single female friends unwitting summon a mysterious man to their small Rhode Island town, and all manner of mayhem ensues. Alexandra—played by Oscar winner Cher—is perhaps the more rational of the three women and, when Darryl Van Horne (the ridiculously good Jack Nicholson) begins to cause pain and injury, she goes to confront him in an effort to save her friends—prompting a blistering argument.

“‘Well, you know, I have to admit that I appreciate your directness, Darryl, and I will try to be as direct and honest with you as I possibly can be. I think—no, I am positive—that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know in the short time we’ve been together you have demonstrated every loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you’re morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor, and you smell. You’re not even interesting enough to make me sick.’

“It is—quite simply—one of the most fabulous responses to a ‘bad guy’ in all of modern cinema. Who hasn’t wanted to dismiss an unpleasant soul using this combination of accurately observed insults? This speech is made all the more delicious by Cher’s almost nonchalant delivery—it’s as if she is attempting to swat an annoying fly which is proving itself to be nothing more than a fleeting distraction. The fact that she failed to consider the otherworldly powers at his disposal is almost irrelevant. For that one shining moment, Alexandra Medford is the master of of her own, beautifully articulated universe.”

Here’s the scene on YouTube.

Of course for fans of the novel, it’s Van Horne’s sermon that’s the rhetorical show-stopper.

A Book & A Read recommends The Coup and a Saharan Martini

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Screen Shot 2014-08-07 at 1.21.03 PMYou’ve heard of dinner and a movie? Well, why not a book and a drink? That’s what led Toronto Star‘s Bruce DeMara to come up with a book and a compatible drink every Thursday this summer.

“Reading can be thirsty work. And so, every Thursday this summer, to acknowledge that prose can inspire our minds as well as what’s in our glass, we recommend a weekend read—a book that elicits the heat, the smell, the feel of summer—and a recipe for the perfect drink accompaniment.”

His recommendation for Thursday, August 7, 2014? John Updike’s 1978 satirical novel The Coup, set in the fictional sub-Saharan African nation of Kush, and a Saharan Martini, made from Amarula cream liquor and garnished with dark chocolate shavings. The recipe is included in the article, “A Book & A Read: The Coup’s desert setting will leave you parched.”

“This is a novel that will have you feeling parched from the opening pages,” DeMara writes. “Updike’s description of desiccated trees and animals, sun-blasted rock, blistering desert and withering heat is relentless. Although the protagonist is a devout Muslim and therefore an abstainer, the novel makes passing reference to Russian vodka, palm wine, guinea-corn beer and Kaikai.”

And why is it worth the read?

“As grim as the setting may be, the novel has much to recommend it, including an array of interesting characters—among them Ellellou’s four very different wives—and a comically absurdist tone. There’s an archly satirical streak throughout, skewering colonialism, consumerism, religion and Cold War geopolitics. Updike’s prose is, as always, challenging in its detail but evocative and rewarding.”

Pictured is the Saharan Martini, photo by Chris So.