Category Archives: Publications

Updike’s first New York Times mention came in a parenting article

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Photo:  Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

Here’s a fascinating bit of trivia:  John Updike—reviewed and interviewed at least as much and probably more than any other writer—first appeared in The New York Times not in connection with his writing, but rather his parenting.

Way back on March 2, 1958, Dorothy Barclay compiled an article on “The Magic World of Words” that appeared in The Times.

The public was reminded of this by a recent article, “John Updike on Parenting, Agatha Christie in the Gossip Pages: First Mentions of Famous Authors in The Times.”

“Not long before his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published, Updike—already an acclaimed short-story writer—was featured in a parenting article, ‘The Magic World of Words,’ which discussed the best ways to spark a child’s love for language. Updike, the father of toddlers, told the paper in 1958, ‘When children are picking up words with rapidity, between 2 and 3, say, tell them the true word for something even if it is fairly abstruse and long. A long correct word is exciting for a child. Makes them laugh; my daughter never says “rhinoceros” without laughing.’”

Blogger shares Abigail George artists-on-artists poems

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Blogger Mia Savant posted a Ponder Savant entry on “Jackson Pollock and Other Poems by Abigail George” that includes the Pollock poem and also poems dedicated to John Updike and Georgia O’Keeffe.  Here’s the Updike poem:

 

John Updike

He writes. He writes. He writes. He writes. And it feels
as if he is writing to me. There’s the letting go of sadness,
the letting go of emptiness, of the swamp ape in the land.
Lines written after communion, and as I write this, I am
aware of growing older, men growing colder. And this
afternoon, the dust of it, the milky warmth of it loose like
flowers upon me fastening their hold on me, removes the
oppression that I know from all of life. Youth is no longer
on my side. The bloom of youth. Wasteland has become a
part of my identity. I am a bird. A rejected starling. To age
sometimes feels as if you are moving epic mountains. Valleys
that sing with the force of winds, human beings, the sun.
And he is beautiful. And he is kind. And he is the man facing
loneliness, and the emptiness of the day. And I am the woman
facing loneliness, and the emptiness of the day. But how
can you be lonely if you are surrounded by so many people.
I want to be those people, if only to be in your presence a
little while longer. Death is gorgeous, but life is even more so.
I have become weary of fighting wars. Of the threshold of
waiting. And so, I let go of solitude at the beach. I see my mother’s
face in every horizon. She is my sun. And the man makes
a path where there is no path before. The minority of the day
longs for power. The light reckons it has more sway over
the clouds. And there’s ecstasy in the shark, in his heart with
a head full of winter. Freedom is his mother tongue lost in
translation of the being of the trinity. Tender is the night.
The clock strains itself. Its forward motion. Its song. Its lull
during the figuring of the daylight. He’s my knight but he
doesn’t know it. He makes me forget about my grief, loss, my loss,
the measure of my grief. Driftwood comes to the beach and
lays there like a beached whale. Not stirring, but like some
autumn life, something about life is resurrected again, and the
powerful hands of the sea become my own. Between the grass
and the men, there is an innocent logic. I don’t talk to anyone,
and no one talks to me. It is Tuesday. Late. I think you can
see the despair in my eyes. The kiss of hardship in my hands.
It always comes back to that, doesn’t it somehow. The hands
The hands. The hands. Symbolic of something, or other it seems.
Wednesday morning. It is early. After twelve in the morning,
and I can’t sleep. For the life of me I can’t sleep. Between the
two of us, he’s the teacher. There is a singing sound in his voice.
I don’t know why I can’t read his mind anymore. There’s
confusion in forgetting that becomes a secret. Almost a contract
between two people. And when I think of him, I think of love
and Brazil, love and couples. And there’s a silent call from a
remote kind of land, and ignorance is a cold shroud. Some
things are born helpless in a world of assembled images, and
how quickly some people go mad with grief (like me), dream
of grief (like me), sleep with grief on their heart (like me). Speak
to me before all speech is gone. This image, or perhaps another.
His face is made up of invisible threads. Each more handsome
than the last. And my face becomes, turns into the face of love.

Abigail George is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, essayist, writer, and novelist . She received four grants from the National Arts Council in Johannesburg, the Centre for the Book in Cape Town and ECPACC in East London. She is the author of 15 books, including two poetry chapbooks forthcoming in 2020: Of Bloom and Smoke (Mwanaka Media and Publishing) and The Anatomy of Melancholy (Praxis Magazine).

New Updike monograph by Fromer now available for pre-order

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The Moderate Imagination: The Political Thought of John Updike and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism, a monograph by John Updike Society member Yoav Fromer, is now available for pre-orders at Amazon.com.

Scheduled for June 12, 2020 publication by the University Press of Kansas, the new critical work on Updike is 288 pages, hardcover, and priced at $39.95.  Here’s the description:

“In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white, working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential rust-belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era, but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it.

“Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt ‘left behind.’ In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash.

“A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.”

Updike and Politics book release date approaches

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In under three weeks Updike fans can finally read the much-anticipated Updike & Politics: New Considerations, edited by Matthew Shipe and Scott Dill.

Cover image: James Plath

The collection of essays, to be published on July 15 by Lexington Books, features essays from Marshall Boswell, Kirk Curnutt, Dill, Biljana Dojcinovic, Michial Farmer, Ethan Fishman, Yoav Fromer, Jo Gill, Louis Gordon, Sylvie Mathé, Takashi Nakatani, Judie Newman, James Schiff, Pradipta Sengupta, Shipe, and Aleksandra Vukotic.

As the back cover copy proclaims, “Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of John Updike’s political thought, Updike & Politics establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. Bringing together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, France, Serbia, Israel, and the United Kingdom, this volume presents the most comprehensive exploration of the rich political commentary that runs through Updike’s work. Like Updike himself, the collection endeavors to be comprehensive as it covers a wide range of the work he produced during his fifty-year career, including his too-often overlooked poetry and his single play [Buchanan Dying]. The chapters address a variety of political issues, from the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence, to the more divisive issues in Updike’s work such as race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and the rise of neoliberalism.”

“This collection of essays adds depth to our understanding of Updike as a political writer,” writes Liliana M. Naydan (Penn State Abington) in her cover blurb. “The book is especially valuable to scholars of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century literature for its investigations of intersections between the personal and the political. It exposes Updike’s nuanced perspectives on institutions such as the American presidency, and it provides thought-provoking explorations of politically charged and transformative American experiences including the War in Vietnam, the Cold War, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Amazon link

Belgrade BELLS features three Updike essays

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Radojka Vukčević, the editor of the peer-reviewed Belgrade English Language & Literature Studies, attended the 5th John Updike Society Conference in Serbia and was impressed with the quality of papers presented, just as members were impressed by Belgrade BELLS. Three of those conference papers were recently published in Volume 11 (2019):

—”Recreation of the Second Degree: Updike’s Shakespeare in Translation,” by Alexander Shurbanov
—”John Updike’s The Centaur and the Artist Divided,” by James Plath
—”Psychic Sexuality: Memory and Dream in John Updike’s Villages,” by Pradipta Sengupta

New Updike publication in Portuguese

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Member Carla Ferreira, who is an associate professor in the Literature and Language Department at Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil, reports that her dissertation has been published in book form.

The title is North and South Readings: Perception of Oneself and the Other in Updike’s Fiction. “The book is written in Portuguese,” Ferreira says, “and it is about The Coup and Brazil.”

“The next book I am writing in English so JUS members can read it,” Ferreira writes. She is finishing up her postdoctoral research on Updike’s New Yorker essays at the University of South Carolina, under the direction of Donald J. Greiner.

Serbian poet’s A Dream for John Updike translated into English

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In 1977, the year when Couples was translated and published in Serbian, the prominent Serbian (then Yugoslavian) woman poet Ljiljana Djurdjić wrote a poem titled “A Dream for John Updike”—obviously inspired by the novel The Centaur, which was translated in Yugoslavia in 1968.

Her poem was published in 1977 in the literary magazine Književna reč and was recently translated by Biljana Dojčinović and Milica Abramović in anticipation of the 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference to be held June 1-5 2018 at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, in Serbia. “Another proof of John Updike’s popularity in Yugoslavia in the ’70s,” conference director Dojčinović writes. Below is the new translation and a scan of the poem as it first appeared in print, published here in translation for the first time:

Ljiljana Đurđić, 1977 Književna reč

A DREAM FOR JOHN UPDIKE

As if trillions
Had been marching behind me
In that insomnia
Suffocated by the gracefulness of protozoa
The followers of an acrid wind
From the Galaxy of The Centaur
Could have easily forgotten
That there had ever been
A space trodden by
The hoves of the wild horses
With the animal gentleness
Of parasites and amoebas
In the guts of a hippopotamus
Should we equate it with
The image of a herd
Crossing the Rubicon?

Translated by Biljana Dojčinović and Milica Abramović

Updike’s half-moon, small cloud poem and others

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How can April be the cruelest month when it’s National Poetry Month? And The Atlantic teases readers with a reminder that John Updike wasn’t just a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. He was a pretty good poet as well.

Exhibit A is this excerpt from Updike’s “Half Moon, Small Cloud”:

For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated.f
from the system’s less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?

The full poem was published in their October 2006 issue, and you can read it here. Additional poems of Updike’s that The Atlantic published are also linked:

“Madurai” (July/August 2007)

“Rainbow” (November 2000)

“Doo-Wop” (November 2007)

 

Updike letters to be published

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The John H. Updike Literary Trust announced yesterday that James Schiff will edit a volume of John Updike’s letters, with a target completion date of 2020. A publisher has not yet been named.

schiff-130x150Anyone familiar with Updike studies knows that this is good news on several counts. The decision to release a collection of letters comes after years of the Literary Trust saying it would not permit them to be published. The reversal opens the door to not just a single published volume, but more, as happened in Hemingway studies when an initial Selected Letters edited by Princeton scholar Carlos Baker led to several thematic volumes of correspondence before the complete letters were (and are still being) published in a multi-volume set. Updike, like Hemingway, was a prolific letter-writer who was generous with his comments, producing hundreds of what are typically described in the autograph world as “content letters.” A volume of published letters always sparks new reader interest in an author and gives scholars additional material with which to work and find inspiration for new insights, essays, and books.

It’s also good news that James Schiff was chosen to edit the volume. As editor of The John Updike Review and cofounder and current vice-president of The John Updike Society, Schiff is well positioned to collect and edit the interviews. An associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Schiff is also known in the Updike world for his three books: Updike’s Version: Rewriting the Scarlet Letter (1992), John Updike Revisited (1998), and Updike in Cincinnati: A Literary Performance (2007).

“Updike was a masterful and prolific letter writer, and so it pleases me greatly to be working on this project,” said Schiff, who has already begun collection letters from institutional libraries and requesting them from private owners and recipients. The letters span six decades of Updike’s life, from his teens in postwar rural Pennsylvania to his seventies, when he was revered as one of America’s most accomplished and honored men of letters.

“Collecting the staggering number of extant letters will take time,” Schiff said. “Yet it is already clear that these writings have literary and biographical significance. Updike is a major figure in American literature, and his letters reveal yet another aspect of his literary genius.”

Schiff said he would be grateful to hear from anyone in possession of Updike’s correspondence. He can be reached at james.schiff@uc.edu or updikeletters@gmail.com.

What’s new in Updike scholarship?

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Screen Shot 2016-01-27 at 8.11.18 AMTwo essays on Updike scholarship have come to our attention, one newly discovered and the other newly published:

Newly discovered:

“Fire, Sun, Moon: Kundalini Yoga in John Updike’s S.: A Novel,” by Sukhbir Singh, in The Comparatist 38 (October 2014): 266-96, published by The University of North Carolina Press. Full text

Newly published:

“Modernist Narrative Techniques and Challenges of Humanity: John Updike in European Perspective,” by Biljana Dojčinović, in From Humanism to Meta-, Post- and Transhumanism Vol. 8. Ed. Irina Deretic and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016. Synopsis-Contents