Category Archives: Lost & Found

Michael Updike: Moran’s haul wasn’t trash

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We received the following note and accompanying materials from Michael Updike, who notes that the bags that Paul Moran famously hauled away from his father’s Beverly Farms curbside contained much more than trash, and offers an important donation if Moran will donate his part to The John Updike Childhood House:

Dear John Updike Society,
As you know my father, as a young aspiring cartoonist, sent off fan letters asking established cartoonist for original artwork. I have enclosed a letter to Harold Gray of The Blondie strip that has miraculously survived.
The most famous successes to these letters were original works by Saul Stienberg and James Thurber. These were in the exhibit of JHU items at the Boston conference and mentioned in Due Consideration P.612 . Another bit of booty was this original Mickey Finn strip by Lank Leonard. It is signed in cartoon capitals “-TO JOHN UPDIKE-WITH ALL THE BEST FROM Lank Leonard”. It has been kicking around our house ever since I remember. At some point (circa mid seventies) the last three panels went missing. The tape had long given way. I assumed they were lost for good to the far corners of the house or thrown out. Recently, to my great surprise, the lost panels showed up on The Other John Updike Archive. I can only assume that my father took them during the divorce and they went to the trash shortly before or after his demise. My siblings and I would love to see the two parts of this comic reunited after forty years of separation. We would happily donate our half of the work to the John Updike House if the other owner would donate as well.
Thanks very Much
Michael

Unknown

Unknown-1

January 2, 1948

Mr. Harold Gray
c/o New York News Syndicate
220 East 42nd Street
New York 17, New York

Dear Mr. Gray:

I don’t suppose that I am being original when I admit that ORPHAN ANNIE is, and has been for a long time, my favorite comic strip. There are many millions like me. The appeal of your comic strip is an American phenomenon that has affected the public for many years, and will, I hope, continue to do so for many more.

I admire the magnificent plotting of Annie’s adventures. They are just as adventure strips should be–fast moving, slightly macabre (witness Mr. Am), occasionally humorous, and above all, they show a great deal of the viciousness of human nature. I am very fond of the gossip-in-the-street scenes you frequently use. Contrary to comic-strip tradition, the people are not pleasantly benign, but gossiping, sadistic, and stupid, which is just as it really is.

Your villains are completely black and Annie and crew are practically perfect, which is as it should be. To me there is nothing more annoying in a strip than to be in the dark as to who is the hero and who the villain. I like the methods in which you polish off your evil-doers. One of my happiest moments was spent in gloating over some hideous child (I forget his name) who had been annoying Annie toppled into the wet cement of a dam being constructed. I hate your villains to the point where I could rip them from the paper. No other strip arouses me so. For instance, I thought Mumbles was cute.

Your draughtsmanship is beyond reproach. The drawing is simple and clear, but extremely effective. You could tell just by looking at the faces who is the trouble maker and who isn’t, without any dialogue. The facial features, the big, blunt fingered hands, the way you handle light and shadows are all excellently done. Even the talk balloons are good, the lettering small and clean, the margins wide, and the connection between the speaker and his remark wiggles a little, all of which, to my eye, is as artistic as you can get.

All this well-deserved praise is leading up to something, of course, and the catch is a rather big favor I want you to do for me. I need a picture to alleviate the blankness of one of my bedroom walls, and there is nothing that I would like better than a little momento of the comic strip I have followed closely for over a decade. So–could you possibly send me a little autographed sketch of Annie that you have done yourself? I realize that you probably have some printed cards you send to people like me, but could you maybe do just a quick sketch by yourself? Nothing funny, just what you have done yourself. I you cannot do this (and I really wouldn’t blame you) will you send me anything you like, perhaps an original comic strip? Whatever I get will be appreciated, framed, and hung.

Sincerely,

(Signed, ‘John Updike’)

John Updike
Elverson P. D. #2

Moran did the Updike world a huge favor when he saved all those bags from the dumpster, and the Society would have loved to bid on them. They would have made for terrific exhibits for The John Updike Childhood Home at 117 Philadelphia Avenue in Shillington, Pa., where Updike said his “artistic eggs were hatched.” Hopefully they’ll end up in a public, not private, collection.

The John Updike Society is committed to building a world-class author home museum, and anyone with materials to donate or offer for sale should contact Society president James Plath, jplath@iwu.edu. We are a 501c3 non-profit organization so all donations are tax deductible, and all donors will be acknowledged at the point of exhibit. We are also planning a donor wall where all who donate $500 or more, cash or in-kind, will be honored.

Vintage Centaur review is anything but kind

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In a review of The Centaur published in the February 1, 1963 issue of The New York Review of Books, now online, Jonathan Miller takes Updike to task for “a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features.”

Such as?

“Updike’s didactic allegory suffers by contrast with the delicacy with which Joyce uses the myth of Daedalus. . . . Updike’s quotations, his pretentious index, and interpolated episodes of mythical narrative simply provide an irritating distraction.”

One has to wonder what Miller’s reaction was when The Centaur was awarded the National Book Award. And John Updike Society members who listened to Adam Sexton gush about how his students at the Parsons School of Design really respond to The Centaur will wonder if Miller read the same book.

Here’s the whole review:  “Off-Centaur.”

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.

 

Gallery features vintage, current Reading photos

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Screen Shot 2014-08-24 at 8.21.55 PMFaulkner had his Yoknapatawpha County, and Steinbeck the Salinas Valley. For Updike it was his boyhood borough of Shillington and the nearby big city of Reading, Pa.

Newsworks recently posted a gallery of “Photos: Then and Now, Reading places and faces” that includes shots of the Pagoda and the Reading Public Museum—the latter especially of interest because the facade has changed.

 

 

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.

 

Golf Digest Updike article resurfaces

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Screen Shot 2014-08-01 at 1.15.17 PMClick on Victor Bond’s Golf Dream blog and you’ll discover that the most recent post is “John Updike, Golfer” by David Owen, which begins, “If golfers were allowed to vote for the Nobel Prize in literature, John Updike would have won it in 1991, when The New Yorker published his short story ‘Farrell’s Caddie.'” The article-remembrance originally appeared in the April 2008 Golf Digest.

Here’s the link.

Updike makes a 10 Worst list

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Screen Shot 2014-07-25 at 11.36.32 AMJohn Updike has made another list, but this time it’s a worst, rather than a best list.

His piece on “A Desert Encounter” was rated #5 on “The 10 Worst New Yorker #Longreads.” 

5. “A Desert Encounter,” John Updike

The New Yorker is a magazine for writers, writerly writers of wonderful words. These writers write with pens, using their hands to move the pens and their brains to control what their hands and thus the pens do. They are the Great Chroniclers of Life and Letters. Their names will hang weighty on the pages of the New Yorker long after they are buried beneath this dusky earth of ours, as long as there is anything article-shaped of theirs left to publish. Thus this twilight dispatch from John Updike, in which the literary colossus loses his hat.

“My sense of triumph when my wife and I agreed that the job had been completed was marred by a mysterious circumstance: my hat had disappeared.”

Updike fans can take some comfort in the fact that one of the author’s more vocal critics, Jonathan Franzen, placed #2 on the list with “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.” 

WBUR presents The John Updike Radio Files

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Screen Shot 2014-07-04 at 8.46.43 AMRadio Open Source, “arts, ideas & politics with Christopher Lydon,” yesterday posted “The John Updike Radio Files,” which includes a video clip of Lydon interviewing Updike “on the occasion of his second Pulitzer win in 1991 for Rabbit at Rest, from The Ten O’Clock News.”

Adam Begley is also featured. “We’ve discovered some old gems in our radio archives and sprinkled them through a conversation with John Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, for our show this week.

“Begley talks about Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood, his wives and lovers north of Boston, his children, his spiritual life, his voracious reading, his travels—and how he created the most graceful prose of our time by cannibalizing all of it for his art.”

Boston’s North Shore responds to Begley bio

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This morning The Boston Globe printed an article titled “Updike found ‘the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America’ on North Shore,” in which residents who knew Updike react to what biographer Adam Begley had to say about that chapter in Updike’s life, and Begley is quoted as well. “My feeling is that Martha and John drew up the drawbridge,” Begley writes of the Beverly Farms move.

Screen Shot 2014-05-29 at 7.48.41 AMThere’s also a sidebar on “Updike’s North Shore homes” that has no text to speak of—just a briefly annotated list of addresses where John Updike lived from 1957-2007, with Adam Begley’s biography of Updike cited as the source.

Though the purpose of the articles aren’t stated, it’s clear that there’s plenty of interest in Updike and just as much pride that he called the Boston North Shore home for 50 years:

Little Violet, Essex and Heartbreak roads, Ipswich (1957-58)—The wood-frame cottage Updike and first wife Mary rented when they first moved to town.

Polly Dole House, 26 East St., Ipswich (1958-70)—Historic 17th-century home near downtown Ipswich, upgraded considerably while Updike lived there (pictured).

50 Labor-in-Vain Road, Ipswich (1970-74)—Larger home the Updikes and their four children lived in until John and Mary’s separation.

58 West Main St., Georgetown (1976-82)—After a brief stint living as a bachelor in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, Updike moved to Georgetown to be nearer his children.

675 Hale St., Beverly Farms (1982-2007)—The stately home near the water where Updike and his second wife, Martha, spent their later years together.

Let the literary pilgrimages begin. What other outcome could there be for an article like this?

 

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

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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:

Screen Shot 2014-05-17 at 6.05.05 AMOf 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.