Category Archives: Updike Family

Editor Schiff and Updike siblings interviewed about the Selected Letters

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In his introduction to an interview he conducted with James Schiff, Joe Donahue wrote, “John Updike remains one of the most admired and prolific voices in American Literature. Over five decades he produced novels, short stories, poems, criticism, and essays that examine faith and art, desire, and the American experience in all its complexity. . . . Now in the new book ‘Selected Letters of John Updike’ editor James Schiff offers readers a window into that private world drawing from decades of correspondence. Schiff presents a portrait of Updike as both craftsman and confidante, generous, witty, and endlessly reflective about writing and life.”

Here’s the link to the WAMC Northeast Public Radio podcast.

More conversation about John Updike and the letters comes from a Radio Open Source interview with Michael Updike and Miranda Updike conducted by Christopher Lydon, a Boston-area fixture who interviewed John Updike on numerous occasions. In sending the link to the Updike siblings, Lydon wrote, “We want you to take a bow… and enjoy this piece as we do! You and Michael are heroic here, and funny and deep… And we all fall in love with your marvelous dad, all over again.”

Here’s the link to “John Updike’s Vocation.”

If you haven’t gotten a copy of the book yet, here’s a link to order from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports local independent bookstores.

Michael Updike talks about gravestone sculpting

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Stewart Lytle, who also gets the photo credit, wrote a nice article on “Michael Updike: Gravestones Don’t Have to be Morbid,” which was published by The Town Common, “The Largest Independent Weekly Community News for the North Shore of Mass. and Coastal NH.”

A familiar site at Updike Society gatherings, Michael Updike is equally familiar on the North Shore art fair circuit. Pilgrims to the Plowville (Pa.) cemetery who go there to see the headstone Michael carved for his father are also familiar with his work, characterized by a heartfelt impulse or emotion offset by a wry-and-dry sense of humor.

“Updike has carved headstones for Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket, Gumby and a frog, ‘who gave his life for science,’ read his epitaph,” Lytle wrote. “Updike created a gravestone for a possum, to absolve his guilt for killing one as a child. He sold the possum memorial slate to a woman who also suffered guilt from a possum’s death.

“On a long thin piece of slate, he carved a headstone for a grasshopper he once crushed with a rock. He placed a rock on top of the slate.

“He is also the carver of the penguins that float near the shore of the Merrimack. He carved the penguins to humor his children, or more likely himself. But many a car driving on Water Street have pulled over to make sure they were not seeing an illusion.”

Read the entire article

Updike Childhood Home adds two paintings from the fiction

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John Updike’s children recently donated more one-of-a-kind objects to The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, among them two still life paintings that their father and mother had painted side-by-side while Updike was a student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, England. Michael Updike said that as a trailing spouse who majored in art as an undergrad, his mother talked her way into sitting in and participating in John’s classes. Mary sat to his father’s right, Michael pointed out, given the placement of objects on each canvas. The paintings are referenced in Updike’s short story “Still Life” (from Pigeon Feathers, reprinted in The Early Stories):

“At the greengrocer’s on Monday morning they purchased still life ingredients. The Constable School owned a great bin of inanimate objects, from which Leonard had selected an old mortar and pestle. His idea was then to buy, to make a logical picture, some vegetables that could be ground, and to arrange them in a Chardinesque tumble. But what, really, was ground, except nuts? The grocer did have some Jamaican walnuts.

“Don’t be funny, Leonard,” Robin said. “All those horrid little wrinkles, we’d be at it forever.”

“Well, what else could you grind?”

“We’re not going to grind anything; we’re going to paint it. What we want is something smoothe.”

“Oranges, miss?” the lad in charge offered.

“Oh, oranges. Everyone’s doing oranges—looks like a pack of advertisements for vitamin C. What we want…” Frowning, she surveyed the produce, and Leonard’s heart, plunged in the novel intimacy of shopping with a woman, beat excitedly. “Onions,” Robin declared. “Onions are what we want.”

John gave his still life to his mother, who displayed it at the Plowville house, while Mary kept hers. Now the paintings are together again, above the bed that John painted with his mother—John’s on the left, Mary’s on the right . . . just as in Oxford.

Visit and look at the paintings up close and vote: Who did it best? John (left) or Mary (right)?

The John Updike Childhood Home & Museum, 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington, Pa., is owned and operated by the 501c3 John Updike Society. It is open most Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. For questions about visiting the museum, contact director Maria Lester, johnupdikeeducation@gmail.com.

Updike’s second Ipswich residence lists for sale

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The Local News reported that J. Barrett Realty just listed the Polly Dole house on 25 East Street—the second house John and Mary Updike lived in after they moved to the Ipswich area—for sale at $729,000. It’s the first time the house has been listed in 30 years.

Photo: J. Barrett Realty

The Updikes bought the house in 1958, a year before his first novel (The Poorhouse Fair) and first short story collection (The Same Door) were published by Knopf. The purchase, he told a New Yorker editor, made him feeling “quite panicked” because of mortgage payments that, for a writer still trying to establish himself, could be burdensome.

As Local News reporter Trevor Meek wrote, fictional versions of the Polly Dole house appeared in many of Updike’s short stories, “most notably in the ‘Maples Stories’ that trace the doomed-to-fail marriage of recurring characters Joan and Richard Maple,” and the “house inhabited by Angela and Piet Hanema, central characters in Updike’s controversial novel Couples (1968), also seems to be based on the East Street home.” Publication of the latter caused a row in Ipswich because people in this small North Shore town recognized elements of themselves in the novel, prompting the Updikes to move to London for a year to let things calm down.

In 1969, John and Mary sold the Polly Dole house to Alexander and Martha Bernhard. Meek quoted biographer Adam Begley’s succinct summary of what happened next:  “Soon, the Bernhards were part of the gang, and several years later John and Martha launched into an affair that broke up both marriages.”

Photo: J. Barrett Realty

Updike had jokingly told his young children that a big nut on the ceiling that had been turned to straighten the house was holding the house together, and if it was loosened the whole house might collapse. “Once we moved, the fact is, things fell apart,” Updike wrote in Architectural Digest.

According to the Historic Ipswich, the Polly Dole house has “elements from 1687, but acquired its current form in 1720.” Meek noted, “At 2,942 square feet, it sits on 0.24 acres and is being advertised as a multi-family home with two separate side-by-side units. The house last sold in 1995 for $238,000, according to property tax records.”

Updike’s ‘Little Violet’ Ipswich home is for sale

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If you’re a John Updike fan and an old house fan—this one was built in 1832—and if $850,000 is within your budget, you should know that J. Barret & Co. recently listed the property at 68-70 Essex Road for sale.

The house was known as “Little Violet” when Updike and first-wife Mary lived in the house for 10 months before buying the Polly Dole House on East Street in Ipswich. It was their first residence in Ipswich, where the town commemorated Updike’s presence with a plaque on the side of the Choate Bridge building where he maintained a second-floor office years later.

As a Local News story points out, Updike turned a marble-floored room at the back of Little Violet into a study where he wrote. The article notes that Updike’s first chore at any house he bought was to make sure the mailbox or mail slot was fully functional and accessible. He wrote a poem about “Planting a Mailbox” first thing after moving into Little Violet.

Poet considers Updike, her father, and truth in fiction (and vice versa)

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Poet Molly Fisk published an essay on “John Updike, His Stories, and Me” in the Oct. 25, 2021 issue of Harper’s Bazaar that shares some Updike family history and confronts the issues of truth in fiction . . . and fiction in truth.

“Almost exactly three years after my dad’s death, a short story by Uncle John appeared in The New Yorker called “Brother Grasshopper.” Everyone who knew me and my family knew that my uncle was John Updike. He married my mother’s older sister, Mary, when they were in college, and we Fisks spent every summer back East in Ipswich or Vermont or on Martha’s Vineyard with the Updikes. Each couple produced four children at regular intervals, so we had nearly parallel cousins. If you’ve read Couples or The Maples Stories, you know the general scene: beaches, chaos, shucking corn, tennis and cocktails, adultery. There were the usual family spats now and then, but as a child, I always thought of the four adults as good friends.”

But after “Brother Grasshopper” was published, Fisk’s answering machine blew up with messages asking if she’d seen the story and if she was “okay.” So she went out and bought a copy of the magazine to read Updike’s latest.

“There were all our family stories: driving home from Crane Beach jammed into the Ford Falcon with dripping ice cream cones that Irving cheerfully told us to throw out the window, so we did. There was the one wild one about Irving going missing just before my parents’ wedding and John finding him taking a bath in the brook. There was even the terrible saga of my dad’s climb on Mont Blanc when he was 20, where two of his friends died. John reset the event in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and killed only one.”

What shocked Fisk was that Updike had “written an essentially nonfictional story about my dad, changing only his name (to Carlyle), and then made him a producer of pornography. I was mortified.”

Read the rest of the article.

Updike typewriter now at the Childhood Home museum

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John Updike’s Olivetti Linea 88—”the only manual typewriter he used regularly from 1969-2009,” according to his son, David Updike—is now on display at The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shillington, Pa.

The Childhood Home museum is owned by The John Updike Society, a 501c3 organization devoted to promoting Updike’s works. With Dr. Maria Lester as director, the museum is staffed by dedicated Updike lovers who live in the area.

The typewriter, acquired from Elizabeth Updike Cobblah and David, Michael and Miranda Updike, instantly became the crown jewel of the museum’s holdings. According to David, his father had bought/brought a white Adler typewriter to London in September 1968, but it “seemed inadequate—not sturdy enough. . . . A typewriter salesman came to the house, sold him on this Olivetti Linea 88, which he then bought and used for the rest of the year there.”

“It was big and heavy,” David said. “At the end of the school year, the green Citroen was being shipped across the ocean to us, and he had the idea to put the typewriter in the car too: thus, it made the voyage back to America, and my father used it for the rest of his life: Ipswich, Georgetown, Beverly Farms, and typed tens of thousands (I would guess) poems, short stories, letters, postcards, notes, many of which will soon be in the collection edited by Jim Schiff.

“At some point, he started to write longer letters on a word processor, but continued to use this one for shorter communications, all the way until January, 2009. It was in fine working order, and as you see it was serviced by a fellow in Beverly, Mass.”

Next to the typewriter is Updike’s dictionary, which he kept near his typewriter—a habit, no doubt, picked up from his mother. Linda Updike’s dictionary is also on display at the house.

Updike event in Ipswich features a plaque and “tats”

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It was a long time coming, and Linda George Grimes, the woman who spearheaded the campaign to honor John Updike with a plaque, was not there to see the fruits of her labors. She passed away in March at age 66. But the Ipswich Historical Commission took over and Ipswich finally recognized its most famous resident on April 28, 2023.

The plaque, which was mounted next to the Caldwell Building entrance that Updike took to reach his second-floor office, reads: “From 1960 to 1974, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike had an office in the Caldwell Building, where he wrote many acclaimed literary works, including ‘A&P,’ Bech: A Book, The Centaur, Couples, ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ Midpoint, A Month of Sundays, Of the Farm and Rabbit Redux.”

Couples, a 1968 novel, caused a stir in Ipswich because of its scandalous content: wife swapping. Some locals recognized themselves in the book, and the Updike family decided to spend the next year in London. Fittingly, there was just the slightest hint of scandalous behavior at the plaque unveiling, as grandchildren Trevor and Sawyer Updike proudly posed alongside the plaque to show matching tattoos of the self-portrait caricature their grandfather had drawn to accompany his Paris Review interview. The tattoos were on their thighs, which, of course, required that their trousers be dropped in order to show them off.

Trevor Meek covered the event for The Local News. Read the full story and see photos of the event.

Updike Society acquires author’s typewriter

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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 flock, you say – Mr. Updike’s Penguins

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Sculptor Michael Updike loves a good joke, and so, apparently, does Newbury, Mass., where John Updike’s son makes his home. The Newburyport News posted a piece titled “Joppa’s penguins go into hibernation”—about four “beloved and iconic penguins that have shown up at Joppa Flats during the summer months” and “make their way ‘south’ to Updike’s home, for the winter.”

Reporter Ashlyn Giroux asked Updike about the penguins, and got the full story.

“The kids were sort of middle childhood, like 8 and 10, and we were coming back from a soccer game in Lynn or Revere, one of those places, and we stopped at Newbury Comics and somehow, probably as an impulse buy, I thought we’d buy the penguin along with the Yugioh cards, and so we had this penguin and I said ‘Oh, I really should put it on an iceberg and put it out there,’ said Updike. The kids didn’t really respond much, and then I thought, ‘I don’t wanna be that dad who makes a promise or says something and doesn’t follow through.’ So, I went and got three more penguins and built the iceberg out of styrofoam and then put it out there, and the kids sort of looked at it for three seconds and went back to what they were doing.”

After moving to Newbury, Giroux said Updike put the penguins out on the marsh behind his home to the amusement of a few neighbors.

“When I moved down here to Newbury, I brought the penguins and said ‘OK that’s the end of that.’ But, all my former neighbors on Water Street kept saying ‘where are the penguins? We want the penguins back!’ So I just started putting it in in the spring and taking them out every fall, and it’s something that just I do,” he said.

Read the full story.