Category Archives: First Person Singular

Inquirer spotlights John Updike Childhood Home

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When John Updike was still alive, writer William Ecenbarger convinced the famed novelist to drive with him through Berks County to visit childhood haunts. That account first appeared in The Inquirer Sunday Magazine on June 12, 1983, and was reprinted in part in the first chapter of Adam Begley’s biography (Updike, HarperCollins 2014) and in full in John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews (Lehigh University Press, 2016).

Recently Ecenbarger returned to Shillington to write about Updike again—this time to see for himself how Updike’s beloved childhood home looks now that it has been turned into a museum.

In “Step inside Pulitzer Prize-winner John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pa.,” which appeared in the Sunday, April 2 Inquirer, Ecenbarger wrote, “The house in Berks County, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been professionally restored to look as it did during Updike’s days here but the ‘John Updike Childhood Home’ museum is still a work-in-progress. They just received an Olivetti manual typewriter that was used by Updike.”

Ecenbarger added, “There are 10 rooms of exhibits, many with explanatory storyboards: Items owned by the Updikes and original to the house. His high school transcript shows nearly all A’s except physical education. Copies of The Chatterbox, the high school newspaper to which Updike contributed many articles. . . . Smiling down from the living room wall is a portrait of Updike done by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson, Edward.”

Ecenbarger wrote, “Updike was inconsolable when, at his mother’s insistence, the Updikes moved from 117 Philadelphia Avenue to a farm owned by her family. He wrote in a poem, ‘We have one home, the first.'” This home, once a source of pride for Updike, is now a source of pride for the community. Thanks to the efforts of director Maria Lester, close to 800 Berks County students toured the house last year to learn about one of Berks County’s most famous and accomplished residents. But Ecenbarger was right: the museum still is a work in progress. Seven new exhibit cases of unique items will be added within the next several months—reason enough to visit and revisit the place where Updike said his “artistic eggs were hatched.”

Writer recalls golfing with Updike, wants less AI, more Updike

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In an opinion column (“Take That, ChatGPT!”) written for Boston Magazine, John D. Spooner voiced his reaction to a new artificial intelligence writing program and cited Updike as an example of “some things that only a human can do well. Writing is one of them.”

“John Updike was one of my gods,” Spooner wrote. “In my view, Updike was the greatest man of letters in America from the 1960s through the 1990s. He wrote novels and short stories. He wrote poems and essays. When he was president of the Harvard Lampoon, there were times when he wrote the entire issue. And illustrated it as well. He had gone to Oxford to study drawing. One of his classic pieces described Ted Williams’s last baseball game. ‘The Kid’ would never tip his hat to the crowd after a home run. He just ran the bases, with no expression and his classic, easy stride. Williams hit a home run that last day. He never acknowledged the fans. Updike wrote, ‘Gods do not answer letters.’ One of the greatest lines ever to describe an athlete.

“Amazingly, this most erudite of authors loved golf. A mutual friend arranged a game at Updike’s course, where they both belonged. I was excited about what I could ask him about his books, his life, and his insights on writing. But on the course, Updike was all business. It wasn’t ‘a good walk spoiled.’ It was his focus on the game, his game, and not about my favorite sport, ‘shootin’ the breeze.’ It was a drizzly day on the North Shore of Boston. Updike was polite, a gentleman on the course, long pants in the summertime. His swing was a manufactured one as if he had spent a lot of money on a lot of lessons, and it produced a routine with a lot of parts—a routine he completely focused on. We played for a few dollars, two players against two. The rain came down harder and harder, with no chance to ask my hero anything related to writing.

“We kept playing in the rain. Updike seemed, on every shot, to be replaying the lessons he had taken. The friend who had invited me to play said, ‘John is a focused dude. He goes through his routine like there’s no one else here. And he wants to win.’ My glasses were fogged up from the rain. Now I know that Updike was not going to give me any creative secrets, which, of course, I resented. So I did not want to fork over any money to my hero. My host, who was a really good player, said to me, ‘If we lose, it’s your fault.’

“We came to the 18th hole all even. Updike had a three-foot putt to win the match. It curled around the cup. And stayed out. I won two dollars, carried over from the front nine.

“We all shook hands and had a beer in the clubhouse. I figured that now was my chance to ask him about his writing life. But he tossed down his beer, got up, and said, ‘Nice playing with you, gentlemen.’ Updike walked out of the club bar. Gods do not answer letters.”

Updike’s favorite typewriter, a manual Olivetti Linea 88 made in Great Britain circa 1968-69. It will soon go on permanent display in The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shillington, Pa.

Sportswriter marks the anniversary of Updike’s passing

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Today The Salem News published a column (“Updike remembered 14 years later”) by sportswriter Gary Larrabee.

“It’s hard to comprehend that it’s been 14 years since one of our most famous and accomplished North Shore residents died,” the column began. “John Updike, of 675 Hale St., Beverly, died on Jan. 27, 2009, at Kaplan Family Hospice House, also known as Care Dimensions, in Danvers, less than two months shy of his 77th birthday.”

“Lung cancer was the culprit. Danvers was never so famous than in becoming the dateline of Updike’s death, read and spoken in newscasts around the world.

“He left behind his wife, Martha, four children, a golf game with which he constantly struggled for many years at his beloved Myopia Hunt Club, and an epic literary bibliography that garnered the Pennsylvania native global fame.

“As much as he savored the opportunity over many years to play the revered Myopia layout, he also got a kick, for years, playing our region’s public nine-hole courses, like Cape Ann and Candlewood.”

Larrabee recalled Updike’s prodigious output and wrote, “This scorecard does not include his one hugely popular book on his ruminations of the game he loved, Golf Dreams, and essays he wrote for the magazines published for the 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline and the 2001 U.S. Senior Open at Salem Country Club.

“The vast majority of these works were created from his gifted imagination in his two North Shore hometowns, first Ipswich, where he wrote in a small upstairs rental space downtown, and later in his Beverly Farms home where he wordsmithed overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.”

Read the whole column.

from the Myopia Hunt Club website

New writers-on-writers collection features Oates on Updike

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Aimed as a resource for creative writers and teachers of creative writing, Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories (David R. Godine, hardcover, 320 pages) will be published on April 25, 2023. The collection, edited by Andre Dubus III, features successful writers invited to talk about a pair of unforgettable stories in a brief essay. Joyce Carol Oates chose Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royale” and John Updike’s “A & P.”

“John Updike’s brilliantly condensed, intensely lyric homage to the voice of another contemporary, J.D. Salinger, has long been the Updike story most anthologized, as it is likely the Updike story that is the most readily accessible to young readers,” Oates wrote.

“Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, in its very brevity and colloquial lyricism, ‘A & P’ isn’t characteristic of Updike’s short stories, which tend to be much longer, richer in detail and background information, slower moving and analytical; this is a story told exclusively from the perspective of a teenaged boy, in the boy’s mildly sardonic voice—’In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.'”

Oates was the keynote speaker at the 2nd Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Suffolk University in Boston. Her novel, Blonde, was recently made into a movie.

Will Updike’s ‘Marry Me’ catch on as a proposal prop?

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Back in 1995, John Updike helped Updike scholar James Plath propose to his wife, Zarina, by inscribing a copy of his novel Marry Me: A Romance and postdating it to the day that Plath was to get down on one knee at the top of the Empire State Building on a trip to New York City. A recent Daily Mail story on British journalist, writer, and TV personality Piers Morgan revealed that he too used Updike’s book when he popped the question:

“Piers proposed on a romantic trip to Paris in 2009 by presenting Celia with a book by her favourite novelist, American John Updike, entitled Marry Me.

“Previously he claimed he was planning to use a video recording he had prepared of singer Stevie Wonder ordering Celia to accept his proposal,” but went with Updike instead—proving, perhaps, that the pen is mightier than the piano?

Now that it’s been revealed a celebrity has used the Marry Me gambit, will it catch on as a proposal prop?

Updike scholar George Hunt on the meaning of Christmas

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Updike fans know the name George Hunt from his early monograph, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art, but Hunt was also an ordained Jesuit priest who served as literary editor and then editor-in-chief of America magazine for 14 years. The current editor, James T. Keane, remembers Hunt and his associations with people like Updike and former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent in an article that draws heavily from Jesuit Father Hunt’s own words.

You’ll want to read the entire article, which also has a link to the essay “John Updike” Suspicious of Santa but fond of Christ.” We’ll end this post with pullout quotes from the article:

“George Hunt: If it is true, as Aquinas said, that God created the world at play, then a fortiori God was definitely at play—partying—when he re-created that world in the image of his Son.”

“George Hunt: What kind of an earth shall we pass on to our children? Shall it be one in which the Word would wish to be enfleshed?”

“George Hunt: As Karl Rahner reminds us, the Word in the announcement means: I love you. Our answer must be an echo of that word: Yes, I heard, I will be there at your party.”

Oxford writer names Updike’s Rabbit series a shaping influence

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Writing for a new Oxford University newspaper, The Oxford Blue, Nicholas Champness identified “Books That Made Me: Rabbit.” He of course was referring to Updike’s Rabbit,Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, collected together in the Everyman’s Library as Rabbit Angstrom.

First UK Edition

“The novels deal with a period of great change in American society. We see American change from the Eisenhower era, through the ‘Summer of Love,’ then Watergate, the Vietnam War, Reaganomics, and the Cold War. However, the focus of the novels is not on the great sweeping canvas of history and certainly not an influential figure. Rather, Updike presents us with history and politics as they affect a real person, someone totally ordinary with little claim to fame other than the provincial sporting prowess of his youth. The canvas of current affairs becomes the conversations had in the car en route to the ball game, opinions discussed curtly over the dinner table. Simply put, Updike shows how the ‘ordinary Joe’ reacts to these events,” Champness wrote.

“He draws his characters, rather than simply describing them. He makes them authentic and believable, imbued with nuance. Well-drawn female characters in the series can prove to be somewhat sparse, for which Updike has faced criticism. Yet, I wonder whether this is an issue,” Champness wrote.

“Rabbit’s mundanity and Updike’s decision that such mundanity is a worthy subject of literature invites the reader to reconsider. What is the point of literature and what is a worthy subject of it? What makes something beautiful or otherwise? Perhaps, then, we can understand Updike’s role as one of a mediator. He invites his reader to see the beauty in the ordinary,” Champness wrote.

“Updike’s treatment of life is one of the main reasons why I chose this series. Updike shows us that life and humans are much the same; they are both flawed and mundane, yet this is where we find beauty in them. I often find myself coming back to the ideas expressed here,” Champness wrote.

Writer finds inspiration in Updike’s Letter to a Baby Boomer

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A guest columnist for the Daily Post Athenian [Tenn.] was inspired by Updike’s essay “Letter to a Baby Boomer” to write “a similar epistle to my former students, who now range between the ages of 30 and 45.”

Stephen W. Dick, a teacher at Athens Junior High School from 1989-2005 and a baby boomer himself, wrote that in Updike’s “Letter to a Baby Boomer” [re: those born between 1946-1964], “Mr. Updike, born in 1932 and writing to the generation following his own, simultaneously challenges and reassures us. Of course, addressing any generation in its entirety involves significant generalization, but thinking of us baby boomers, I believe we could largely agree on how we are perceived, even if individually we don’t fit those perceptions.”

“According to Mr. Updike, we baby boomers, in our youth, ‘went to Woodstock, experienced altered states of consciousness, protested Vietnam, fought in it, or both.’

“In our adulthood, he writes that we ‘invented yuppieness, health consciousness, and corporate greed.’

“That stings, especially the last. Time always erodes youthful idealism, but my generation didn’t give it time to erode. We abruptly abandoned it, citing spouses and/or children as rationales, as if the future we once imagined couldn’t include families,” Dick wrote.

“In his conclusion to ‘Letter to a Baby Boomer,’ Updike quotes Shakespeare’s Prospero who, upon retiring, feared that ‘Every third thought shall be my grave.’

“Updike suggests the first two thoughts should be these: (1) Love one another, and (2) Seize the day. Those, I think, are beyond amendment.”

North Carolina pastor considers Updike’s remarks on the resurrection

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Raphael’s Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1502)

God’s Truth for Today published a short contemplation by Dr. Chris Simmons, a member of the pastoral team at Frye Regional Medical Center in Hickory on “Resurrection: Our Impossible Anchor — Faith and Values.” John Updike’s often-quoted “Seven Stanzas at Easter” were immediately invoked.

“At 28, novelist John Updike got to the bottom of the Resurrection,” Simmons wrote. “Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of this surely led him to write “Make no mistake: if He rose at all / it was His body; / if the cells dissolution did not / reverse, the molecules / reknit, the amino acids reignite, / the Church will fall.”

“Updike realized that the scandal of the resurrection, that a human could raise the dead, had to be true or the faith had to be abandoned. He wouldn’t want to make a metaphor out of it or redefine it or make it less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had conquered it himself,” Simmons wrote.

Read the whole meditation.

Ian McEwan names 18 books in fun categories

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Elle magazine’s Riza Cruz asked award-winning author and book lover Ian McEwan (Atonement, Lessons) to name favorite books in 18 different categories—a bit more fun than the usual Top 10 format. His non-annotated responses are below. For the Full Monty you’ll need to read the Shelf Life books column article . . . on the book that:

Made him miss a train stop: The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)

Made him weep: Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

He would recommend: The Dead (James Joyce)

Shaped his worldview: The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer)

Made him rethink a long-held belief: The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth)

He read in one sitting, it was that good: Youth (Joseph Conrad)

Currently sits on his nightstand: We Don’t Know Ourselves (Fintan O’Toole)

He’d pass on to his kid: God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens)

He’d gift to a new graduate: On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

Made him laugh out loud: The Bech Trilogy [The Complete Henry Bech] by John Updike. Bech is Updike’s Nobel Prize-winning, Jewish alter ego, whose literary career rises, nosedives, and rises again. By the end, Bech murders his various hostile critics and is heroically damned by a dying victim.

He’d like to turn into a Netflix show: We Had to Remove This Post (Hanna Bervoets)

He first bought: Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)

He last bought: The Darkroom of Damocles (Willem Frederik Hermans)

Has the best title: What Katy Did (Susan Coolidge)

Has the best opening line: Herzog (Saul Bellow)

Has the greatest ending: Reunion (Fred Uhlman)

Everyone should read: Middlemarch (George Eliot)

Holds the recipe to a favorite dish: Appetite (Nigel Slater)