After a brief hiatus, The Other John Updike Archive is posting again:
“In Every Dream Home A Heartache”
“Will you still love me tomorrow?”
“Couples: The story you’re about to read is true…”
“Celestial Seasonings (on being JUish)”
Veooz.com recently posted “John Updike: Trending Photos and Videos” that have been “tweeted” recently on Twitter. Have a look. What’s online may surprise you.
Begley’s in the news again, and so are John Updike and Philip Roth. Begley’s remarks about “Updike’s friendship with and estrangement from another great American writer, Philip Roth,” appear in the Wednesday, April 23 edition of EverydayeBook.com, posted by David Burr Gerrard:
“Philip Roth With—and Versus—John Updike, by Adam Begley”
“The story of Updike’s relationship with Philip Roth is a sad one,” Gerrard writes. “In some ways they were perfect for each other . . . . All the way through the 1970s and 1980s, they corresponded. When they saw each other, they were like the smartest kids in the class, getting together and making barbed comments and gossiping madly and talking about literature.
“Their letters are hysterical: Roth warning Updike that it was fine for him to mine his territory in Pennsylvania, but he better be damned sure not to do anything about New Jersey; Updike sending Roth his long and very ambitious autobiographical poem called ‘Midpoint,’ crossing out the title and writing instead, ‘Poor Goy’s Complaint.’
“Then came some darker stuff,” Gerrard writes, then summarizes what caused the rift between them, concluding, “These are two of the most important writers of the second half of the century, and in cahoots they could have been brilliant. For many years, they weren’t.”
Dangerous Minds, a pop culture website, recently published a piece titled “Philip Roth to John Updike: FTFY! Updike to Roth: LOL! STFU.”
In it, Martin Schneider considers literary feuds past and present, finally settling on an exchange of letters following a 1999 New York Review of Books publication of an essay on literary biography in which Updike had referenced negative remarks about Roth in a biography (Leaving a Doll’s House) published in 1996 by Roth’s ex-wife, Claire Bloom.
“Three years later, Roth was still bristling at the apparent presumption of guilt . . . . Roth wrote in to complain, resulting in one of those exquisite disputes that happen often in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Letters going each way, eye squarely on the reader, outraged rhetorical high dudgeon in abundance . . . . But this one would be short and sweet. Roth offered to rewrite a key sentence—on the Internet, you could distill part of his lengthy, indeed overlong missive as the common Internet acronym, the breezy and condescending “FTFY”: “Fixed that for you!” Updike didn’t take the bait, deciding that his original sentence was good enough, thank you very much.”
Both letters are published verbatim in the article.
In a November 8, 2012 essay on “John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Redux’ and White Working-Class Angst” published under the shortened name “Man in the Middle”—an essay that many may have missed—New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus reports,
“John Updike visited The New York Times a week before Election Day in 2008. Whom, I asked him, would Rabbit Angstrom most likely vote for? ‘I’m so for Obama,’ Updike replied, that I can’t imagine creating a character who wouldn’t vote for him.’
“And yet in ‘Rabbit at Rest’—the last novel in the cycle, which concludes with the hero’s death—we discover he cast his final vote for George H.W. Bush.
“When I reminded Updike of this, he looked startled. But he was right about 2008. Obama carried Reading that year, and he did it again on November 6 [2012].”