In “‘The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine’: William Maxwell’s New Yorker and the Midcentury Short Story,” Ben Fried described, essentially, how even a light-handed editor can have a tremendous influence on writers and published literature.

“One editor among several,” Fried wrote, “Maxwell’s selection and revision of texts took place against the backdrop of “the New Yorker story,” that enduring stereotype which, while considerably oversimplified, nevertheless captures the magazine’s penchant for conventionally realist stories chronicling the domestic lives of a white upper middle class — a demographic that, not coincidentally, overlapped with the editors themselves. Maxwell alternately heeded and bucked this aesthetic and social current, although he did little to disturb its racial homogeneity. The archival records of Updike’s stories of Pennsylvania boyhood, of Cheever’s increasingly experimental fiction, and of Gallant’s Linnet Muir series reveal both the scope and the limits of the editor’s sympathetic reading. I argue that Maxwell at once enforced and expanded the company line, reluctantly policing The New Yorker‘s more rigid notions of realism while drawing ever more wide-ranging autobiographical story sequences from a constellation of writers.”

Read the entire article.

Alexandra K. Glavanakova, of Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski, recently published an essay on “Authenticity and Autofiction: John Updike’s ‘The Bulgarian Poetess'” online at escholarship.org, where a full-text version is available.

ABSTRACT:  This article provides an innovative perspective on John Updike’s visit to Eastern Europe in the 1960s, including Bulgaria, as reflected in his short story “The Bulgarian Poetess” first published in The New Yorker on March 13, 1965. The inspiration for this interpretation is as much academic as it is anthropological. It comes from Updike’s use of my own surname, Glavanakova, which is not a common Slavic one, for the fictional character of the real-life Bulgarian poetess he met, whom researchers have established to be Blaga Dimitrova. Many have delved into the text aiming at a detailed and, more significantly, an authentic reconstruction of events, places and people appearing in the story (Katsarova 2010; Kosturkov 2012; Briggs and Dojčinović 2015). A main preoccupation of these analyses has been to establish the degree of factual distortion in Updike’s representation of the people and places behind the Iron Curtain. The pervasive imagery of the mirror, implying both its reflecting and doubling function, and the repetitive use of cognates associated with truth and honesty in the story suggest the focus of this article, which falls on the dynamics between authenticity and artifice from the perspective of autofiction by way of illustrating how one culture translates into another “at the opposite side[s] of the world” (Updike, “The Bulgarian Poetess”). In my interpretation, autofiction opens ample spaces for representations and discussions of identity and self-/reflexivity in a transcultural context.

“The Bulgarian Poetess” was published in the March 6, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. Here is the link.

PNAP: Scientific Journal of Polonia University in Czestochowa, Poland published an academic article by Olena Bezhan on “The Image of ‘An Ordinary American’ in J. Updike’s Short Stories” in their most recent issue. Bezhan, an associate professor at Odesa National I.I. Mechnikov University in Ukraine, called Updike “a barometer of American sentiment” and focused on the short story “Pigeon Feathers.” Birds, Bezhan wrote, are “an essential element of various mythopoetic traditions” that are “widely represented in symbolism and emblematics. Birds as embodiments of deity play an important role in myths about the creation of the world: the cosmic spirit in the form of a bird or a bird as an assistant to the divine creator, a giant bird as a common image of the Creator.”

“The most famous ‘function’ of the bird is its personification of the human soul. The idea of the soul in the form of a bird is present in ancient cultures, such as Egypt, Greece, China and Siberia, South America, etc. Thus, the bird is a symbol of the soul, and in the Bible it is a dove that arrives with the news that Mary will give birth to the son of God. The fact that the boy has to shoot the pigeons and is forced to experience all these negative emotions, combined with the impressive hunting scene that the reader watches, can-and-should-be interpreted as David being required to part with his soul in order to move into the adult state, but as we see, he cannot get rid of his soul. However, it turns out that killing birds does not help the hero come to terms with the thought of death—the expected mental breakthrough did not occur. Realizing this, we can say that the mystery of death, as well as the desire to live, remain constant categories for the writer, in his opinion, this mystery accompanies a person all his life: ‘with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever’.”

Read the full article in English.

Juan Manuel Camacho Ramos, of the Universidad de Alcalá, wrote an essay on “Tristan and Iseult,” an Updike short story that was published first in The New Yorker and later in his collection The Afterlife and Other Stories. “‘Tristan and Iseult’: John Updike’s Medieval Method or an Ancient Mirror for Modern Man” was recently made available online. Here is the link and the abstract:

“Updike began to explore the Tristan legend after reading Denis de Rougemont’s books Love in the Western World and Love Declared which he examined exhaustively in the early 1960s and, although he did not wholly agree with the entire content of Denis De Rougemont’s thoughts, it left a very deep impression on him. Consequently, Updike uses the story of Tristan and Iseult in three novels and several of his short stories mostly to deal with the issue of conjugal infidelity and to present the traditional themes of the legend like self-affirmation, social marginalization, indecision, despair, sexuality, life, and death in contemporary settings. In both his novels and short stories, Updike tries to modernize the legend dissecting marital conflict and generally showing adultery as the escape valve which will lead the lovers to the paradoxical world of unreal freedom where the mixture of intense passion and pain will finally threaten the family and the social order of the protagonists just like in the Tristan romances of old.”

Curiously, as Ramos noted, “The couple in this adaptation of the Tristan legend have nothing but a dental appointment in common. There is, moreover, no other objective explanation for Tristan’s attraction to Iseult apart from her motherly skills of caring for him and making him feel as if at home. . . . Magic is present in Updike’s ‘Tristan and Iseult’ to the extent that Tristan numbs his mind through fantasy creating a world where he can evade reality and live a dream. In ‘Tristan and Iseult’ Updike turns a dental appointment into a modernized medieval romance that happens solely in Tristan’s imagination. It contains a pathetic undertone that accompanies the story and is highlighted to the extent that Tristan is unaware of his own guile and Iseult remains ignorant of any event save her duty to remove the rot from her client’s mouth.”

Read the whole essay.