John Updike and his fictional legacy continue to be a part of American pop culture, the most recent case-in-point being a Washington Post review of a one-person show featuring fashion photographer Richard Avedon.
In “Review: An electrifying exhibit shows Richart Avedon at his most ambitious,” Sebastian Smee wrote, “The first of the ‘murals,’ as he called them, was a group portrait of Andy Warhol and 10 other members of the Factory. Avedon photographed the superstars in his studio over several weeks in the fall of 1969. Clustered together near the center of the image are five naked figures, one of them the transgender actress Candy Darling. The clothes crumpled on the floor at their feet feel oddly eloquent, legible both as statements of liberation and the shadows of their social selves. (I thought of Rabbit Angstrom, in John Updike’s ‘Rabbit, Run,’ enjoying, as he shed his clothes, the way ‘the flying cloth puts him at the center of a gathering nakedness.’) ‘You couldn’t keep the clothes on anybody in those years,’ Avedon later joked. ‘Before you could say “hello,” they were nude and ready to ride.’”
Avedon will be celebrated with “Avedon 100,” May 4-June 24, 2023 at Gagosian, 522 West 21st St., New York—an exhibition commemorating the centenary of Avedon’s birth featuring 150 “celebrated artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives” and their favorite Avedon photographs.
One day after what would have been John Updike’s 91st birthday, The John Updike Society acquired the Pulitzer Prizewinning author’s typewriter from his four children. The purchase was made possible by a donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, which provided the initial funding for the society to buy and restore The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.
The manual typewriter—an Olivetti Linea 88—was made in Great Britain in 1968-69, the year Updike moved with his family to London following the publication of Couples. It will be displayed in a case upstairs in the house at 117 Philadelphia Ave., where Updike lived from “age zero to thirteen” and where he said his “artistic eggs were hatched.” In the front bedroom of this house, at age eight, Updike used his mother’s portable Remington to type his first story, which began, “The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cozy cave fire.” According to biographer Adam Begley, Updike said, “I still carry intact within me my happiness when, elevated by the thickness of some books to the level of my mother’s typewriter, I began to tap at the keyboard and saw the perfect letter-forms leap up on the paper rolled around the platen.”
When the typewriter is installed at some point in the near future, it will instantly become the most important piece in this small museum, which celebrates Updike and the affection he felt for the house, the neighborhood, and Berks County. The John Updike Childhood Home is presently open Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. See the house website for more details about Updike and the house, which officially opened on October 2, 2021. The John Updike Childhood Home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was awarded a Pennsylvania Historic Marker.
The new (and largest ever) Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam is apparently as hard to get tickets for as a football championship. A World Today News columnist recently said, “I had given up all hope of a ticket for Vermeer, until an attentive, art-loving one NRC reader managed to get my wife and me in after all, even without having to smash a window of the Riijksmuseum.”
Officer and Laughing Girl. 1657-58, oil on canvas. The Frick Collection, New York: Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.—from the Riijksmuseum press website
The writer lamented, in a column titled “Still Vermeer” (in apparent reference to Updike’s second published volume of art criticism, Still Looking),”If only John Updike, the American writer (1932-2009), could experience this exhibition. I mention him because of all literary writers he has been the greatest connoisseur and admirer of Vermeer. . . . Updike became interested in Vermeer as a schoolboy. He wrote a nice, autobiographical story about it: ‘The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.’ In it, a boy, together with his father, visits an older brother of that father in New York. The boy’s father is a passive man, the older brother is a successful businessman. It is the boy’s first visit to New York, where he wants to buy a ‘good book’ about Vermeer.
“The wealthy uncle listens to him skeptically and starts bragging about four paintings by Degas that he has hanging in his living room in Chicago. ‘Yes,’ says the boy, ‘but don’t Degas’ paintings remind you of colored drawings? When it comes to it to look to things in terms of paint, with a sharp eye, Degas can’t match Vermeer.’
“The uncle says nothing and the father apologizes: ‘That’s how he and his mother always talk. I can not reach it. I never understand any of it.'”
The writer talks about walking through the new exhibit and wondering what Updike had thought of his personal favorite, The soldier and the laughing girl . . . “a painting that seems made for Updike and his ‘lucid eye.'”
Biljana Dojčinović, University of Belgrade, recently published this critical notice of the most comprehensive Vermeer exhibit ever assembled, which she was kind enough to translate for us:
The largest Jan Vermeer’s exhibition has been opened in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on February 10, 2023:
“The 28 Vermeer paintings are presented in a spacious setting that spans all ten galleries of the museum’s Phillips Wing. In 11 thematic sections, the exhibition brings visitors closer to Vermeer and offers rich insights into the life and paintings of Vermeer, including: early ambitions, first domestic interiors, balance between the indoor and outdoor worlds, the letters, musical seduction, outlook on the world and inner values,” says Taco Dibbits, General Director of the Rijksmuseum.
This, largest ever, exhibition of Vermeer will be open until June 4th, 2023.
The “master of light” had a great impact on John Updike and his fiction, as pointed out in James Plath’s seminal article “Verbal Vermeer: Updike’s Middle-Class Portraiture.” Plath named Updike a Verbal Vermeer when exploring the visual aspects of Rabbit novels. The phrase itself is an ingenious way to describe Updike’s complete opus. The alliteration and assonance (Verbal Vermeer) point to the poetical aspects of the pun, while its meaning connects the medium Updike uses (words) with his favorite painter – Vermeer – mentioned many times especially in his early work.
Vermeer is for the first time mentioned in Updike’s fiction in the early story “Lucid Eye in Silver Town,” in which a boy travels with his father to New York hoping to buy a book on Vermeer. In Updike’s second novel, The Centaur, published in 1963, the young protagonist, Peter Caldwell, wants to become a painter, and not “just any” painter, but Vermeer himself:
“In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and may skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. “ (Updike 1993: 62)
In the poem “Midpoint” Vermeer is grouped with some other painters and visual artists, including Walt Disney:
Praise Disney, for dissolving Goofy’s stride Into successive stills our eyes elide; And Jan Vermeer, for salting humble bread With Dabs of light, as well as bricks and thread. (Updike 1995: 96)
In the essay “Verbal Vermeer,” Plath names domesticity – i.e., the importance of objects which are equal to humans, the usage of light and the phenomena of “dynamic stasis” – as methods that Vermeer and Updike had in common. Domesticity refers to the people Vermeer had presented at his canvases: the cozy life of middle class in the 17th century Delft, in what was later named genre painting. Plath emphasizes the importance of objects, which were not merely a background for Updike:
Because he treated objects and humans equally, the former acquired a sense of importance, and the latter a kind of memorialized stasis – each “favored” by the artist’s even, modulated light. (Plath 1998: 208)
James Plath argues that Updike makes the traditional archetypal connection of light with the truth, deliverance, knowledge, and transfiguration – in contrast to darkness and shadows. Thus the usage of light is actually a connection with the Creator: both Vermeer and Updike like to dwell at the first and most sensual level of creation, the moment closest to the birth of an object (see Plath 1998: 221). According to Plath, light also means present. Further, he de- scribes the present tense as something like “dynamic stasis.”
The similar effect is poetically presented in Wislawa Szymborka’s poem “Vermeer”[1] :
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl the World hasn’t earned the world’s end.
(translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)
1] Wislawa Szymborska, the Literature Nobel Prize winner for 1996, was a great friend of Blaga Dimitrova, the poet who had been the prototype for Updike’s 1965 story, “The Bulgarian Poetess.”
Plath, James. “Verbal Vermeer: Updike’s Middle-Class Portraiture.” Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Ed. Lawrence R. Broer. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998. Online at https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/eng_scholarship/42/
Updike, John. The Centaur. New York: Fawcett Crest, Ballantine Books, 1993. ——“Midpoint.” Collected Poems (1953–1993). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
One of America’s most celebrated writers would have turned 88 today if he were still alive. His voice is missed, but his legacy goes on. With the help of family, classmates, friends, and fans, the John Updike Society is currently working to create unique exhibits that will celebrate the author and the influence that Shillington and Berks County, Pa. had on his life and works.
Here, in remembrance of his birthday, is a photo of an early childhood book with a very young John Updike owner signature inside that will go on display in the house come October 3, when The John Updike Childhood Home, at 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington, has its Grand Opening.
Also at this 1 p.m. ceremony, the plaque confirming the house as being listed on the National Register of Historic Places will be unveiled, as well as a Historic Pennsylvania Marker—both of which were approved last year.
Updike often said that his first ambition was to be a cartoonist and a Disney animator. Instead, he wound up being one of only three American writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, and he wrote more than 60 books over a storied career that spanned some 60 years—enough to earn him the unofficial title of “America’s Man of Letters.”
Yesterday a new major exhibition—You Say You Want a Revolution—opened at the New York Public Library in collaboration with Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival, “The ’60s: The Years that Changed America.” The exhibition will run through September 1, 2018.
Timothy Leary’s notes on his experiences with psychedelic drugs; Tom Wolfe’s notes about Haight-Ashbury for his book The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test; Gloria Steinem’s letter to The New York Times‘ Abe Rosenthal; John Updike’s opinion on the Vietnam War: The contemplative and divergent themes of the 1960s can be rediscovered through over 125 artifacts in The New York Public Library’s new exhibition, You Say You Want a Revolution: Remembering the 60s.
Featuring material from three of the Library’s research centers—the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Library for the Performing Arts—the free exhibition is curated by Isaac Gewirtz of NYPL’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature. It opens in Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Library’s renowned 42nd Street Library on January 19, 2018, and will remain open to the public through September 1.
Exhibition hours are Mondays 10am-6pm, Tuesday and Wednesdays 10am-7:30pm, Thursday, Friday and Saturdays 10am-6pm, and Sundays 1-5pm.
Visitors to Chicago may not be able to walk through the George Lucas museum—Friends of the Park shot that project down—but a new American Writers Museum near the Art Institute recently opened, and it includes, not surprisingly, John Updike.
The emphasis is on the published word rather than artifacts, so it’s an interactive museum of ideas. As a Chicago Tribune editorial recently pointed out, “This playful, thought-provoking museum encompasses the entire scope of American letters, from important novels, poetry and nonfiction books to potboilers, children’s literature and, yes, even journalism.
“If you’ve ever had a favorite book (or wanted one), your interests will be piqued. You’ll find everything from Vladimir Nabokov’s shocking Lolita to Robert McCloskey’s endearing Make Way for Ducklings. Not to mention Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather and Henry Miller, among others. . . .
“American writing, protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, tells the ongoing story of our turbulent nation with unfettered creativity and zeal. That’s the big idea this museum hurls at visitors through interactive exhibits, quotes, lists and the like.
“The museum, which opens Tuesday, is the brainchild of Malcolm O’Hagan, a retired manufacturing executive from Maryland who saw a museum of Irish writers in Dublin and thought America needed a similar one. He organized a board that has raised nearly $10 million in private funding. It’s located in a compact space on the second floor of 180 N. Michigan Ave. but packs a big punch of intellectual energy. John Updike, Octavia Butler and the Federal Writers’ Project (which employed Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren in Chicago) get mentions, among scores more. . . .
“The museum’s setup is modern, thankfully, with lots of video screens and quick capsules of information, as if to cater to the depleted attention spans of young people while subversively wooing them to read nice long books.”
The Boston Public Library in Copley Square recently underwent a $78 million renovation, and one new feature is a “Literary Awards Wall” in the Fiction section featuring authors with a Massachusetts connection who have won an award.
“Writers like John Updike and Dennis LeHane are already up on the wall, but there’s plenty of room for future authors,” the article says.
