Category Archives: Updike in Context

Writer recalls Wolfe’s feud with Updike and others

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Writing for The Telegraph days after Tom Wolfe died, Jake Kerridge recalls a feud between Wolfe and writers who dared criticize him in public reviews—among them, John Updike.

Kerridge sides with Updike and the others. “There are many reasons to mourn Wolfe, who has died aged 88. I can’t say that the thought that he won’t write any more novels is one of them,” admits Kerridge, who reviewed Wolfe’s last “bloated” novel, Back to Blood.

As for the feud with Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, which Kerridge says was “possibly more entertaining than anything the four of them actually published in the 1990s,”

“It began when Wolfe, who had made his name as a brilliant journalist, wrote an essay condemning modern American novelists for navel-gazing when they should be out researching and reporting on modern America.

“Norman Mailer then denounced Wolfe as a show-off, reserving his strongest contempt for Wolfe’s flamboyant dress sense,” and Wolfe “declared war, dismissing Updike (a year younger than himself) and Mailer as ‘these two old piles of bones.'”

Below is a link to the entire article, photo by The Telegraph staff:

“When writers knew how to fight: Tom Wolfe and the lost art of the literary feud”

Horticulturalist gives a shout-out to literary greats

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Jim Chatfield, a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension, referenced T.S. Eliot and John Updike in his column, “Plant Lovers’ Almanac: Spring and its blooms have finally arrived.”

After alluding to Eliot’s famous reference to spring as “the cruelest month,” he wrote, of Updike,

“Dogwoods were important to one of my favorite writers, John Updike (1932-2009). In his 1965 autobiographical essay ‘The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood’ he wrote:

“‘When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree . . . was, in a sense, me.’

“This Shillington, Pa., tree was actually planted on John’s first birthday, according to his mother. John Updike wrote in 1965 that ‘My dogwood tree still stands in the side yard, taller than ever . . .’ and it still lives today.”

It might interest Prof. Chatfield to know that The John Updike Society is cultivating a cutting/graft taken from the still-thriving dogwood, since the tree has already lived longer than the typical pink dogwood. So when it does finally die, as all organic things must, a clone of it will grow in its place. Below is a photo of Updike’s dogwood, taken this past week by Dr. Susan Guay, director of The John Updike Childhood Home at 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington.

Updike the benchmark for magical prose?

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A story from The Guardian, “Book clinic: which current authors produce the most magical prose,” uses Updike as the lead-in and apparent benchmark for prose that sparkles. As the subtitle suggests, “The supernatural, witchcraft or sex can be spellbinding, while others conjure gold from the everyday human struggle.”

Writer Amanda Craig begins with a question from a Beijing reader: “John Updike described himself as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Who today delivers the most magic in their prose?”

She responds, “Magic may be evoked in many ways and Updike did it both in the sense of mixing the mundane with the supernatural (The Witches of Eastwick) and in conjuring contemporary fiction whose realism is threaded through with hypnotic lyricism (the Rabbit novels, Couples, etc).”

She recommends Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, AS Byatt’s Possession and short stories, and then, comparatively, two others:

“If it is Updike’s realist magic you are after, then Meg Wolitzer is, like him, a lyrical chronicler of love and marriage – but unlike Updike, brilliant at female characters as well as male ones. Her descriptions in The Interestings and The Female Persuasion of loneliness, love, growing maturity and reading itself evoke quotidian joys and sorrows with humour, generosity and hope.

“Diana Evans is another superb domestic realist. Her new novel, Ordinary People, contains some of the best descriptions of happy and unhappy sex I’ve read since Ian McEwan’s Atonement. She writes about black south Londoners struggling with young families, ambition, adultery and disappointment with the wry insights Updike gave to his white east coasters.”

New book of European Perspectives on John Updike now available for pre-order

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European Perspectives on John Updike, a collection of essays edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton featuring scholars living and working in Europe, is scheduled for publication in June 2018. From the Camden House/Boydell and Brewer Spring 2018 catalog:

“From the publication in 1958 of his first book, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages. He had a strong following in the United Kingdom and it was also common to find Updike’s work reviewed in publications in Germany, France, Italy, and other countries. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his writing remains strong among European scholars. They are active in The John Updike Society and on The John Updike Review (which began publishing in 2011). During the past four decades, several Europeans have influenced the study of Updike worldwide. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on his oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike’s renditions of America through the eyes of scholar-readers from both Western and Eastern Europe.”
The book is part of the European Perspectives on North American Authors series published by Camden House.  It includes essays from such scholars as Judie Newman, Sylvie Mathé, Biljana Dojčinović, Teresa Botelho, Eva-Sabine Zehelein, Brian Duffy, Karin Ikas, Andrew Tate, Aristi Trendel, Ulla Kriebernegg, Kasia Boddy, and Norton.
The book specifications, according to Camden House:  309pp., 9×6″ trim size, hardcover. Suggested retail price is $99.00 U.S. Libraries, scholars, and Updike lovers can now pre-order the title from the publisher or through Amazon.com.

Updike on the ghost particle of the universe

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In an article titled “In search of the neutrino, ghost particle of the universe,” The Guardian turned to John Updike again.

“Every second,” Robin McKie writes, “billions of neutrinos pass through our bodies. The sun sends trillions streaming across space every minute. Uncountable numbers have been left over from the Big Bang birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago.

“In fact, there are more neutrinos in the universe than any other type of particle of matter, though hardly anything can stop these cosmological lightweights in their paths. And this inability to interact with other matter has made them a source of considerable frustration for scientists who believe neutrinos could bring new understandings to major cosmological problems, including the nature of dark matter and the fate of our expanding universe. Unfortunately, the unbearable lightness of their being makes them very difficult to study.”

The article notes, “Three different forms of the particle are now known to exist: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino and until relatively recently it was thought that none of them had any mass at all. They were the ultimate in ephemeral ghostliness, a bizarre situation that was celebrated by John Updike in his poem, ‘Cosmic Gall.'”

Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

John Updike: a literal man of letters

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Writers write. And the great ones were often great at correspondence. Like Ernest Hemingway, John Updike wrote for popular publications of his day, and like Hemingway he was a proliferate letter-writer. How MUCH of a letter-writer is now coming to light, as people have begun to respond to scholar James Schiff‘s call for Updike letters.

As Schiff told The Guardian, “While it is hardly surprising that he carried on a correspondence with editors, translators, publicists, critics, journalists and fellow writers, what is remarkable is how often and generously he responded to letters from readers, fans and complete strangers.”

Schiff said Updike even responded to “a stranger who asked him to write a note of encouragement to his nine-year-old son who suffered from psoriasis,” a condition Updike shared and wrote about in his essay “At War with My Skin.” Schiff speculates that Updike’s experience as a teenager requesting samples of work from his favorite cartoonists might help to explain his own “pay it forward” attitude toward correspondence.

“Though some of his letters and postcards are perfunctory and mundane, the large majority reveal his attempt to say something witty, funny, or clever,” The Guardian article notes.

Schiff is still gathering letters for a volume of collected letters to be published in 2021. If you have any, send a scan or photocopy to updikeletters@gmail.com.

Updike’s Ladder intrigues novelist-blogger

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Fellow Harvard alum and novelist Alec Nevala-Lee (The Icon Thief, City of Exiles, Eternal Empire) recently posted thoughts on “Updike’s Ladder,” whose clichéd meteoric rise “is like lifestyle porn for writers” than more often than not struggle to gain traction in their writing careers or find any meaningful audience for their work. Quoting from the Adam Begley biography, he notes,

“[Updike] never forgot the moment when he retrieved the envelope from the mailbox at the end of the drive, the same mailbox that had yielded so many rejection slips, both his and his mother’s: ‘I felt, standing and reading the good news in the midsummer pink dusk of the stony road beside a field of waving weeds, born as a professional writer.’ To extend the metaphor . . . the actual labor was brief and painless: he passed from unpublished college student to valued contributor in less than two months.

“If you’re a writer of any kind, you’re probably biting your hand right now. And I haven’t even gotten to what happened to Updike shortly afterward” (again, quoting from Begley):

“A letter from Katharine White [of The New Yorker] dated September 15, 1954 and addressed to ‘John H. Updike, General Delivery, Oxford,’ proposed that he sign a ‘first-reading agreement,’ a scheme devised for the ‘most valued and most constant contributors.’ Up to this point, he had only one story accepted, along with some light verse. White acknowledged that it was ‘rather unusual’ for the magazine to make this kind of offer to a contributor ‘of such short standing,’ but she and Maxwell and Shawn took into consideration the volume of his submissions . . . and their overall quality and suitability, and decided that this clever, hard-working young man showed exceptional promise.

“Updike was twenty-two years old. Even now, more than half a century later and with his early promise more than fulfilled, it’s hard to read this account without hating him a little. Norman Mailer—whose debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, appeared when he was twenty-five—didn’t pull any punches in “Some Children of the Goddess,” an essay on his contemporaries that was published in Esquire in 1963: ‘[Updike’s] reputation has traveled in convoy up the Avenue of the Establishment, The New York Times Book Review, blowing sirens like a motorcycle caravan, the professional muse of The New Yorker sitting in the Cadillac, membership cards to the right Fellowships in his pocket.’ And Begley, his biographer, acknowledges the singular nature of his subject’s rise:

“It’s worth pausing here to marvel at the unrelieved smoothness of his professional path . . . . Among the other twentieth-century American writers who made a splash before their thirtieth birthday . . . none piled up accomplishments in as orderly a fashion as Updike, or with as little fuss. . . . This frictionless success has sometimes been held against him. His vast oeuvre materialized with suspiciously little visible effort. Where there’s no struggle, can there be real art? The Romantic notion of the tortured poet has left us with a mild prejudice against the idea of art produced in a calm, rational, workmanlike manner (as he put it, ‘on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain’), but that’s precisely how Updike got his start.

Read the entire article.

On Taylor Swift’s groping and censoring Updike

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The August 15, 2017 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a Lingua Franca piece by Ben Yagoda titled “Of Cans and Cabooses” that begins and ends with the recent court case over singer Taylor Swift’s groping assault but also circles around to John Updike’s famous and frequently anthologized short story, “A&P.”

“The sensitivity and sometimes embarrassment over naming this body part goes way back. In 1960, John Updike submitted to the then-prudish The New Yorker a short story called “A&P,” which contained the line: “She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can.” His editor, William Maxwell, suggested changing can to butt, to which Updike replied:

You must be kidding about “butt.” It’s really just as crude as “can.” I think the real answer is “tail” — but every time I sit down to go over the proof of A&P, I choke up with the silly sacrifice of “can.”

“A compromise was reached in which the young lady was described as having a ‘sweet broad backside.’ Updike restored can when he published ‘A&P’ in a short-story collection.

“Updike’s comment about butt is interesting. I feel that over the past half-century-plus, the word has gotten less crude. I use it in mixed company, and in the classroom on the rare occasions that the topic comes up. But it’s still too informal for The New York Times,” Yagoda writes.

Musician cites Updike

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John Updike had a reputation for finding just the right word or phrase to describe something, and one of his spot-on descriptions was recently cited by Treble “zine” reviewer Jeff Terich.

In “Premiere: Biblical space out on new track ‘Fugue State,'” a review from the album The City That Always Sleeps, Terich notes its “tense build-up that releases with an atmospheric, almost shoegazey texture.”

Terich quotes the Toronto band‘s lead vocalist and bassist, Nick Sewell, who implies that Updike was an inspiration:

“We were determined to explore some new sounds for this record and ‘Fugue State’ definitely falls into that category. More than any other song on the record, it really operates with a sense of open space. That gave us plenty of room to experiment, specifically with the vocals which turned out to have a sort of morbid ‘Pet Sounds’ vibe.

“Lyrically, the song is a classic rumination on existential dread—the type you might have in the middle of the night after waking from a bad dream. There’s a poem by John Updike called ‘Perfection Wasted’ that I kept coming back to. It rides a fine line between dry, sardonic wit and tenderness. Definitely the qualities I was hoping to capture with ‘Fugue State.’”

“Perfection Wasted” was included in The Best American Poetry 2016, edited by Edward Hirsch and David Lehman.

Sportswriting anthology includes Updike

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It’s been out for quite a while, but it’s just come to our attention that John Updike is included in the sportswriting anthology Ted Williams: Reflections on a Splendid Life (Northeastern, 2003), edited by Lawrence Baldassaro and with a foreword by Dom DiMaggio.

As the Amazon description notes:

“It features thirty-five articles by celebrated sportswriters and best-selling authors, including Al Hirschberg (“Handsome Bad Boy of the Boston Red Sox”), Red Smith (“Ted Williams Spits”), Bud Collins (” ‘Saint’ Goes Marching In”), Peter Gammons (“Williams an Unquestioned Hit with Him”), Ed Linn (“The Kid’s Last Game”), John Updike (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”), Donald Hall (“The Necessary Shape of the Old-Timers’ Game”), John Underwood (“Going Fishing with the Kid”), Stephen Jay Gould (“Achieving the Impossible Dream: Ted Williams and.406”), and David Halberstam (“The Perfectionist at the Plate”). Taken together, the pieces offer a vivid mosaic of a true American great who is admired and respected as much by today’s ballplayers and fans as those of his own generation.”

From the Publishers Weekly review:

“A well-selected collection of articles about baseball great Ted Williams, this volume works on many levels. A slice of 20th-century American literature, it chronicles the evolution of sports journalism from Red Smith to Pete Gammons while showcasing selections from literary giants like John Updike and Donald Hall. Arranged chronologically, the collection works as a biographical collage and stunning account of the cyclical nature of American hero worship. Not surprisingly, several less flattering pieces on the cantankerous Williams are included, but instead of detracting from Williams’s legend they help present a comprehensive picture of a man so captivating that more than half this volume’s works were written after his 1960 retirement. Collectively, these articles tell readers almost as much about the featured writers as they do about the slugger himself. This is partly attributable to Williams’s image as the reluctant hero, but also to the fact that Williams courted both favor and disdain with his single-minded determination to make himself the world’s greatest hitter, fisherman, combat pilot and philanthropist, all pursuits as solitary as putting pen to paper. So many of the writers insert themselves into their stories as a means of explaining Williams’s complex personality that the underlying similarity between the slugger and the writers becomes a theme of the collection, exemplifying Williams’s irresistible lure for reporters, novelists, poets and even mathematicians. Thanks to this unprecedented connection between athlete and authors, this compilation stands as a fitting literary epitaph for a man who may never get one set in stone. Illus. not seen by PW.”