Category Archives: Updike in Context

Largest Vermeer exhibition opens in Amsterdam, will run until June 4

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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.”

References
Dibbits, Taco https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/press/press-releases/vermeer-exhibition-opens-at-rijksmuseum

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/

Szymborska, Wislawa “Vermeer.” https://jasongoroncy.com/2012/03/07/vermeer-by-wislawa-szymborska/

Updike, John. The Centaur. New York: Fawcett Crest, Ballantine Books, 1993.
——“Midpoint.” Collected Poems (1953–1993). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Other Sources

A Guide Through Vermeer narrated by Stephen Fry

A Guided Tour Through All of Vermeer’s Famous Paintings, Narrated by Stephen Fry

News about the Exhibition

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/arts/2023/02/14/johannes-vermeer-exhibition-amsterdam-rijksmuseum.cnn

https://www.european-traveler.com/netherlands/rijksmuseum-largest-vermeer-exhibition-ever-in-amsterdam-in-2023/

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Memoirist recalls father-Updike connection

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Recently The New York Times reviewed The Critic’s Daughter by Priscilla Gilman, and one passage in particular will be of interest to fans of John Updike:

“As a critic, Gilman was brilliant; he made the light in your head brighten by a few lumens. He was also a hanging judge. The New York Times critic John Leonard described his style as ‘confrontation criticism.’ He often got as good as he gave. John Updike zinged him on several occasions and gave an unpleasant lawyer the name Gilman in his novel S. These barbs only refreshed Gilman’s zeal for battle.”

Gilman’s memoir, released last week, is described at Amazon as “an exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity.” Her father was writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman, and her mother the renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit. Their marriage ended when Priscilla was 10 years old. “The resulting cascade of disturbing relations—about her parents’ hollow marriage, her father’s double life and tortured sexual identity—fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him”

2023 Quarry Farm Fellow to write about Updike and Twain

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James Plath, known in Updike circles as president of The John Updike Society and the editor of two volumes of Updike interviews, was named one of 11 Quarry Farm Fellows for 2023. He will receive $1000 and spend two weeks in the fall living alone at the main house at Quarry Farm, where he will conduct research and work on a comparative essay. As part of the process, every applicant needed a “sponsor,” and Donald J. Greiner, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus a the University of South Carolina, wrote in support of Plath’s proposal.

Plath described the essence of his project for the Quarry Farm Fellows website: “In 2002, Updike wrote the foreword to the Hesperus Press publication of The Diary of Adam and Eve, and what he said about Twain reveals much about himself and a connection with Twain that has yet to be explored—not so much as a literary influence as it is a literary kinship, a connection with a past literary figure who modeled attitudes and behaviors that spoke to Updike generations later. Updike notes that Eve’s Diary ‘makes a bold foray into female sexuality,’ and Twain seems to have been an inspiration for Updike in trying to write about female sexuality, as the latter does to a much greater extent in so many of his novels.

“Twain also modeled a successful writer who could straddle the popular and literary worlds, who could ‘sin boldly’ in his unabashed writing, who could have it both ways and write for profit and for literary posterity, and who not only embraced but relished the role of writer as spokesperson for American literature, culture, and social behaviors. Just as Hemingway noted a generation earlier that Twain’s public persona was key to the promotion of his writing, Updike too became conscious of Updike the writer as being a ‘character’ he would play in the public sphere. Such is the widespread influence of Twain that has yet to be documented in Updike studies—something that will be rectified as a result of this Quarry Farm Fellowship.”  

Quarry Farm, which overlooks Elmira, New York, was owned by Mark Twain’s sister-in-law, Susan Langdon Crane. Twain and his wife spent 20 summers living at Quarry Farm, where all three of their daughters were born and where he composed many of his books, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A year or so after Twain and Olivia’s first summer there, their hosts constructed a separate study built apart from the main house, allegedly so Twain would have a quiet place to write, but ostensibly because Mrs. Crane did not want him smoking cigars in his house while he worked.

“A smoke-free house is good,” joked Plath, who at one point was compiling a Conversations with Mark Twain volume for the University Press of Mississippi when another book of interviews rendered the project superfluous.

“I’m excited to work on this project partly because it feels like I’m taking up old business, and partly because the house isn’t open to the general public—only research fellows,” Plath said. “I love the idea of living and working where one of the great American writers lived and wrote.”

Will Updike’s ‘Marry Me’ catch on as a proposal prop?

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Back in 1995, John Updike helped Updike scholar James Plath propose to his wife, Zarina, by inscribing a copy of his novel Marry Me: A Romance and postdating it to the day that Plath was to get down on one knee at the top of the Empire State Building on a trip to New York City. A recent Daily Mail story on British journalist, writer, and TV personality Piers Morgan revealed that he too used Updike’s book when he popped the question:

“Piers proposed on a romantic trip to Paris in 2009 by presenting Celia with a book by her favourite novelist, American John Updike, entitled Marry Me.

“Previously he claimed he was planning to use a video recording he had prepared of singer Stevie Wonder ordering Celia to accept his proposal,” but went with Updike instead—proving, perhaps, that the pen is mightier than the piano?

Now that it’s been revealed a celebrity has used the Marry Me gambit, will it catch on as a proposal prop?

Arcadia article offers a witchcraft take on Updike’s Witches of Eastwick

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This sounds like a fun course: Witchcraft in Literature 101. You can take it, too, online, and for free from Arcadia, thanks to researcher-author Anna Artyushenko.

“Witchcraft takes on many forms and perspectives in various works of literature, Artyushenko wrote. “It finds its origins in folklore and myths, it carries the traits of gothic and horror, but it is also used in satire and comedy, and undoubtedly plays a major role in fantasy.”

Updike’s 1984 novel is the subject of the third post, “Social Commentary in The Witches of Eastwick“:

“All three witches possess some powers at the outset of the novel, but their abilities develop and turn darker with the arrival of Darryl Van Horne. It is never stated directly in the novel that the stranger who has arrived in Eastwick is the Devil. However, his nature is obvious, according to many remarks in the novel. Updike purposefully plays around the “stranger danger” trope, inviting the Devil to the small conservative town of New England. He ridicules the reception of the occult in the traditional Puritan society, though “God’s absence, presumably, opens the way for evil” in the novel (Verduin, 1985, p. 306). Van Horne is purposefully drawn to the witches and corrupts their powers. The women cannot escape the stereotypical pattern, as “in order to satisfy their extraordinary sexual appetite, the witches turn to a devil figure, Darryl Van Horne” (Loudermilk, 2013, p. 101).”

Wiccan magic circle

“Updike makes a reference to the Wiccan perception of magic, connecting it with nature, though his vision of witchcraft is “closely tied to both, carnality and mortality” (Antwood, 1984, para. 10). Updike sees nature not from a spiritual or ecological, but from a rational perspective: incapable of empathy towards humankind, and as inseparable from death and decay as it is from life and growth. In the novel Alexandra thinks that one of the major nature’s rules is “that there must always be a sacrifice” (Updike, 1996, p. 18). Jenny becomes this victim, sacrificed to the Devil. Updike makes a point that the male’s power is still greater, as later on the witches learn that they did not cast the curse out of their own free will and were controlled by Van Horne. The Devil in the novel acts as a trickster who manipulates the witches while they abandon their family duties in order to follow the path of the occult and magic, which leaves them with nothing but regret in the end.”

Read the entire article.

Yahoo! feature identifies celebrities living with psoriasis

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Surely there were more than 21 celebrities who had psoriasis, but a writer for news aggregate site Yahoo!’s “women’s health” section settled on that number . . . among them, John Updike (#20).

“The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet penned a 1985 essay for The New Yorker aptly titled ‘At War With My Skin,‘ where he addressed his struggles with the autoimmune disease. In his essay, Updike wrote, ‘Why did I marry so young? Because, having once found a comely female who forgave me my skin, I dared not risk losing her and trying to find another.'”

Read the entire article.

Updike included on American Purpose ‘favorite staff reads’ list

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American Purpose has a holiday tradition where editorial board members, contributing editors, and staff share their favorite reads from the past year. They call it “Turning the Page.”

Board member Adam Garfinkle, who is also founding editor of The American Interest and serves on the board of advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, chose John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies as his favorite read of 2022.

“John Updike’s 1996 bestseller In the Beauty of the Lilies has become part of the pantheon of fictive meditations on the thick sinews of Protestant Christianity that run deep and wide within the American body social and politic,” wrote Garfinkle, a former speech writer for secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

“It tells a multigenerational family tale starting in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1905 and ending four generations and eighty years later in a Waco-like conflagration near Bighorn, Colorado. When I read the book a quarter century ago I marveled at Updike’s storytelling skills despite being unable to bond emotionally with any of the characters—rather like how I have since felt about Marilynne Robinson’s multigenerational Christological stories spread out in multiple books.

“This year’s deliberately slower second reading collided with my more mature ruminations on the wider topic of Protestantism’s shaping of a nation rushing through time, and itself being reshaped in the process. The collision revealed more of Updike’s prophetic shrewdness amid his formidable literary skills than I discerned the first time around. Now that we live truly in an age of spectacle, something still inchoate in 1996, the dancing demons and angels of the Protestant bequest to America appear far more vivid to me. The book didn’t change as time passed, but the reader did.”

Updike scholar George Hunt on the meaning of Christmas

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Updike fans know the name George Hunt from his early monograph, John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art, but Hunt was also an ordained Jesuit priest who served as literary editor and then editor-in-chief of America magazine for 14 years. The current editor, James T. Keane, remembers Hunt and his associations with people like Updike and former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent in an article that draws heavily from Jesuit Father Hunt’s own words.

You’ll want to read the entire article, which also has a link to the essay “John Updike” Suspicious of Santa but fond of Christ.” We’ll end this post with pullout quotes from the article:

“George Hunt: If it is true, as Aquinas said, that God created the world at play, then a fortiori God was definitely at play—partying—when he re-created that world in the image of his Son.”

“George Hunt: What kind of an earth shall we pass on to our children? Shall it be one in which the Word would wish to be enfleshed?”

“George Hunt: As Karl Rahner reminds us, the Word in the announcement means: I love you. Our answer must be an echo of that word: Yes, I heard, I will be there at your party.”

Blogger turns to Updike for Thanksgiving thankfulness

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Patrick Kurp, who writes Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life, yesterday turned to Updike for his Thanksgiving post, “Give Thanks for Gradual Ceaseless Rot.”

“Everything I have is more and better than I deserve,” Kurp wrote. “I like expressions of gratitude for things that have never occurred to me. Take John Updike’s thankfulness for decomposition in ‘Ode to Rot’:

“All process is reprocessing;
give thanks for gradual ceaseless rot
gnawing gross Creation fine while we sleep,
the lightning-forged organic conspiracy’s
merciful counterplot.”

Read the full blog post.

Nobel laureate cites Updike influence

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Turkish novelist and playwright Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, is now his country’s best-selling and most prominent writer. His books have sold more than 13 million copies internationally, with Snow, a novel that captures the sociopolitical milieu of 21st-century Turkey, drawing extra attention for its narrator, whom readers are meant to interpret as Pamuk himself.

Pamuk talked with The Saturday Paper writer Amal Awad about his most recent novel, Nights of Plague, which he began before the pandemic and which Awad described as a “historical murder mystery set on the imaginary Mediterranean island of Mingheria during an epidemic” of bubonic plague, adding “it’s Pamuk’s Moby-Dick, weighing in at nearly 700 pages.”

During their interview, Awad said that they talked “about criticism—both literary and hate speech—how the Turkish media is full of people expressing their hatred of him. ‘They haven’t read anything [I’ve written] and I’m proud to say that,’ Pamuk says, laughing. ‘If a literary criticism hurts, there are two criteria. One, it damages economically, the book won’t sell; that is very bad. And the other is you actually have a high opinion of this person and you want his approval.’

“Pamuk rarely worries about the latter nowadays,” Awad wrote, “but he says he has benefited from literary criticism and acknowledgment from his elders throughout his life. ‘John Updike made me famous in the United States,’ he says. ‘A critic who is 30 years older than me, made me in Turkey. There’s always been good, nice critics.'”

Read the whole article.