Proust, Updike, and class reunions

Posted on June 27, 2014 by James Plath

Willard Spiegelman, in “Proust Goes to the Country Club,” an essay published in the Summer 2014 issue of The American Scholar, contemplates remembrances of things past after attending “a largely forgettable class reunion”—with the late John Updike’s help.

“As he lay dying of cancer in a Boston hospital,” Spiegelman begins, “John Updike composed a sonnet sequence, ‘Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth 12/13/08’ that ranks with his best work in verse and even prose. Clear-sighted, sober, but witty, unlike many deathbed works, the poems acknowledge feelings of wonder and gratitude. The poet looks at his surround—the equipment, the noise, and the doctors and nurses—and he also takes a backward glance at his early years as a schoolboy in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He thanks his classmates, childhood friends, a mere hundred, because they showed him, in miniature, all the human types he would make use of later on: ‘beauty, / bully, hanger-on, natural, / twin, and fatso.’

“And he continues, more self-consciously, to consider the possibility that ‘we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.’ He knew the town; the town knew him and it stayed with him forever, especially after he left it: ‘I had to move / to beautiful New England—it’s triple /deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets—/ to learn how drear and deadly life can be.’ Shillington gave Updike all he needed as an artist, nurturing him as a young man. And like Joyce, who fled Dublin but never truly escaped it, Updike had to get away to realize what he had been given.”

Later in the essay, which requires a login to access, Spiegelman anticipates his 50th high school reunion and writes, “Like Updike, I had always thought long and hard about classmates from early childhood and adolescence. I remembered most of them fondly, even the ones who may have been irksome at the time when I was a know-it-all baby Beatnik, a pesky intellectual who resisted football games, pep rallies, anything that smacked of mindless conformity.”

But, he learns, “not everyone shared my genial fondness for the whole, imagined group of us. I had hoped that some people who loomed large in my memory, the way Updike’s Shillington schoolmates did in his, would take a personal invitation from me as an occasion to demonstrate fellow feeling. Apparently I did not mean as much to them as they did to me. Or at least they didn’t want to meet and greet me at a big party. They maintained sangfroid invisibility. Did the objects of my affections feel the same about me? I’ll never know.”

He concludes, after noting that his reunion “flew by quickly . . . pleasant as it was brief, if nothing special,””Life eventually becomes for everyone ‘drear and deadly,’ as Updike put it, but for some—most? the lucky few?—it offers gratification as well. Looking back becomes itself a source of such pleasure, even as looking forward, as the end of life approaches, becomes the opposite.”

Spiegelman’s most recent book is Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness.

Blogger contemplates John Updike’s Secular Vision

Posted on June 27, 2014 by James Plath

The New Yorker & Me, a blog by a man who calls himself Capedrifter, yesterday posted an entry titled “John Updike’s Secular Vision (Contra Christian Lorentzen),” in which he challenges Lorentz’s characterization of Updike’s art criticism.

“John Updike’s art essays are among the glories of modern literature,” he writes, noting that “Updike’s moments of art religiosity seem to have been most intense when he visited MoMA.”

But he adds, “To say, as Lorentzen says, that Updike ‘never tired of writing about painting and sculpture in religious terms’ is a shade misleading. Only in ‘What MoMA Done Tole Me’ and ‘Invisible Cathedral’ did he do so expressly. Perhaps he sublimated his religious feeling towards art in his other pieces. That may account, in part, for their greatness. But Updike’s sensual apprehension of life (‘Flesh is delicious,’ he says, eyeing Lucas Cranach’s Eve) is also a key ingredient of his criticism—one that’s totally secular.”

Updike mentioned in essay on New Yorker critic James Wood

Posted on June 25, 2014 by James Plath

In an essay written for The Millions, Charles Finch considers the “genius of James Wood, the literary critic at The New Yorker, and how it influenced the novel I’m about to publish.” But he also references John Updike in praising Wood’s ability to closely read a text and to “re-describe” what he reads.

“In the last ten or fifteen years precision of language has become the password that marks out serious writers of fiction. (In this respect, though in fewer and fewer others, John Updike’s influence remains enormous.) There aren’t many literary novelists at the moment who are content to be plainspoken, and those who are, Kazuo Ishiguro for instance, have clear narrative motives for the choice. Instead, when you open almost any well-regarded novel today it will have long passages of precisely poetic prose, full of surprising and carefully curated language.”

Finch later writes, “Of John Updike, whom I mentioned earlier, Wood has written’he is not, I think, a great writer, and the lacuna is not in the quality of his prose but in the risk of the thought.’

“The risk of the thought. That phrase has settled in my brain. The Last Enchantments [Finch’s own novel] is a relatively conventional story about an American abroad at Oxford, where he makes a break with his past life, meets new people, and falls in love. These could be the elements of a radical book or a safe one, a good one or a terrible one. I don’t personally think it’s terrible, but it may be safe. . . .”

Here’s the full article: “Winning Over James Wood”

Children’s book blogger posts Updike-Wilde item

Posted on June 24, 2014 by James Plath

Yesterday blogger Ariel S. Winter (We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie) posted an item titled “John Updike on Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories,” with illustrations of The Young King and Other Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde, which was introduced by John Updike.

Winter offers a summary and assessment of Updike’s remarks.

“In the modern age, fairy stories become necessary, Updike says, ‘For if men do not keep on speaking terms with children they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. This danger was not so clear until machines entered the world in force and began to make men resemble them.'”

Here’s the link.

Dybek reviewer cites Updike as a major influence

Posted on June 23, 2014 by James Plath

Charles Finch, in writing a review of MacArthur recipient Stuart Dybek’s most recent collections of short fiction, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, begins by trying to describe a style of writing that he feels is characteristic of the American short story, and credits John Updike for being a progenitor of style:

“For a while there the American short story was in dismal shape. It was never a problem of skill—many of the notable story collections of the 1990s and 2000s were technically beautiful, morally subtle, narratively refined—as much as a problem of tone. The stories that dominated the serious magazines and journals seemed to share a flat fireless quality, something like politeness, perhaps even fear. It was all so tasteful. The sense of drama was minimal. Characters dropped half out of love, or endured a minor crisis, or just wandered around treasuring their sense of dismay about, you know, the fallenness of the world. And above all, of course: that wheedling and constant push toward epiphany.

“I think of John Updike’s 1961 story ‘A&P’ as either the infectious agent or the patient zero of this style. It’s narrated by a teenager working in a grocery store, who quits on behalf of a group of girls his manager is hassling for shopping in bathing suits. They don’t even notice his gallantry, and in the last line of the story he leaves the store, looks back, and says, ‘and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.’

“What a line! No wonder its example has been intoxicating. Its vagueness expresses such a specific ache, and it expands the meaning of the story’s mild events to suddenly and deftly. Writers before Updike had used such a turn—think of ‘Araby’ or ‘The Little Joke’—but his captured some modernist blend of longing, boredom, and elegy just behind the speakable, which has lingered in the form ever since.”

But while, in his Slate review, Finch has praise for the master, he’s critical of the limitations that imitation has imposed on American short fiction.

Read the whole review in “The ‘A&P’ Problem,” published June 6, 2014.

Updike gets a mention in The Keillor Reader

Posted on May 28, 2014 by James Plath

Garrison Keillor, the NPR humorist best known for his tall tales of Lake Wobegon, published a new book earlier this month, and member Larry Randen reports that John Updike is prominently mentioned in the introduction of The Keillor Reader:

“I think often of John Updike, who lovingly re-created the backyards and clotheslines of the 1940s small town and described a snowstorm as ‘an immense whispering’ and wrote beautifully of his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform and astonishing him by planting a kiss on his cheek. I last saw John on the New York subway, riding from 155th Street down to 72nd, a white-haired gent of seventy-five grinning like a school kid. At 110th a gang of seminarians boarded and crowded around him, chattering, not recognizing him, and he sat soaking it up, delighted, surrounded by material” (xxxi).

Randen says that he and his wife, Lollie, went to hear Keillor read from his new book at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., and that Updike also was mentioned during a Q&A session.

According to Randen, “The first question was: ‘Who is/was your favorite writer?’ Keillor said, ‘John Updike’ and offered a few sentences about how good Updike’s writing was and then added an anecdote about ‘The Last Time I Saw Updike a Couple Years Before His Death.’

“In his response to the first question he told the same account [as he included in the introduction] but added that ‘the seminarians were excitedly arguing about Karl Barth, a favorite neo-orthodox theologian who was also a favorite of Updike’s; the students had just come from a lecture about Barth and were caught up with discussing issues about Barth, pro and con, and hearing this pleased Updike to no end as he sat there anonymously soaking the moment up and smiling, perhaps, because another generation had discovered Barth.”

Here’s a link to the Amazon.com sell-page for The Keillor Reader, where you can “look inside” and see the table of contents and a sample chapter.

Summer reading list includes Updike biography

Posted on May 25, 2014 by James Plath

Jim Higgins, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has posted “96 books for your summer reading,” and topping the category titled “12 Editor’s Picks” is Updike, Adam Begley’s “sympathetic but honest biography of the writer, which pays close attention to the ways John Updike frequently transmuted real-life incidents into his fiction.”

Other categories: “14 Books We’ve Already Liked,” “8 Books for Recent Graduates,” “11 Books by Wisconsin Writers,” “10 Visiting Writers,” “8 Mysteries and Thrillers,” “5 Pop Culture Books,” “7 Visually Appealing Books,” “18 Books for Children and Teens,” and “5 Books for Baseball Fans.”

Updike poem inspires tuba composition

Posted on May 22, 2014 by James Plath

The San Jose Mercury-News ran a story about a physics professor and composer named Brian Holmes who says he was inspired to write a piece for chorus and tuba by John Updike’s poem, “Recital.”

That composition will have its world premiere on May 31 at Lincoln Glen Church, featuring Symphony Silicon Valley tuba player Tony Clements as soloist.

“Updike was inspired to write the poem after seeing a headline in the New York Times that read ‘Roger Bobo Gives Recital on the Tuba’ on a story about the tuba virtuoso who spent 25 years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“‘I agree with Updike that the words ‘Bobo’ and ‘tuba’ are immensely silly in one headline,’ Holmes says.

“Updike took this silliness and ran with it; the first stanza of ‘Recital’ reads, ‘Eskimos in Manitoba / Barracuda off Aruba / Cock an ear when Roger Bobo / Starts to solo on the tuba.’

“Holmes’ piece sticks to the poems text but plays with Bobo’s name a bit more.”

According to the article by Anne Gelhaus, it’s not the first time that Holmes has found inspiration in Updike.

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson: Begley on “Mighty Mothers”

Posted on May 17, 2014 by James Plath

The ubiquitous Adam Begley has written a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Adam Begley on mighty mothers,” in which he names five books that feature dominant matriarchs. Given his recent biography of John Updike it’s no surprise that he included Updike, and even less of a surprise that the book he chose was Of the Farm, the novel that Updike has said was written about his mother. You need to subscribe to access the full article, which was published in the Bookshelf/Life & Culture section on May 16, 2014, but here’s what he had to say about Updike:

Of the Farm

By John Updike (1965)

4. There are only four voices in this gem of a novel, a fractious quartet performing under a spotlight in and around an elderly widow’s isolated Pennsylvania farmhouse. Joey Robinson, a 35-year-old mama’s boy, has brought his second wife, Peggy, and her young son to visit Joey’s garrulous, manipulative mother. By the second night, Joey’s mother has bullied him into agreeing that Peggy is vulgar and stupid and that divorcing his first wife was a mistake. After an emotional melee worthy of Edward Albee, mother and son achieve a kind of mutual forgiveness. But when all the skirmishes are done, and all the wounds more or less neatly bandaged, Joey and his mother engage in a bit of pointed banter about selling the farm after she is dead. She refers to it as “my farm,” and before he replies, Joey reflects: “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed. I must answer in our old language, our only language, allusive and teasing, that with conspiratorial tact declared nothing and left the past apparently unrevised.” He says, “Your farm? . . . I’ve always thought of it as our farm.” The mother-son conspiracy endures.