Updike collectors take note: The extensive collection of Michael Broomfield (of Broomfield & De Bellis bibliography fame) is for sale, item-by-item, from Clouds Hill Books in Montclair, N.J.
Whether you’re looking to add an item to your collection, buy something to donate to The John Updike Childhood Home, or just curious, the two attached lists also constitute a useful companion to the bibliography, as they give some indication of rarity . . . if selling price is a good barometer.
Boston radio’s Christopher Lydon has interviewed Updike on numerous occasions, and now he’s turned his admiration for Updike into “Open Source” conversations. In “John Updike and his Terrorist,” Lydon shares an interview he did with Updike about the post-9/11 novel and adds his own comments:
“Terrorist is cinematic and political—wonderfully so, as I read it. It may be as close to the movie Syriana as we’ll ever get from Updike.
“It’s not for me to vouch that he nailed every answer here. But I can report the huge pleasure for one reader—picking up a piece of our conversation recently on The Great American Novel—in ‘public’ fiction, masterfully made, encompassing the depressive high-school guidance counsellor Jack Levy, and the hateful Secretary of Homeland Security, whose name sounds like Haffenreffer; and at the center of it all, Ahmad Ashmawy Mullow at the brink of manhood, flickering between earnestness and extremism, trying to solidify a Muslim consciousness in what feels like a wasteland of selfishness and materialism.'”
On January 28, 2009, one day after Updike died, Lydon had paid tribute to the legendary writer who chose the Boston area for his home for his adult life, in “John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose”: “John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the Rabbit books—novels like A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and In the Beauty of the Lilies, and of course stories like ‘Pigeon Feathers’ about a boy’s crisis of faith, which ends in his famous meditation on the pigeons he’s shot, on orders, in his mother’s barn, and the irresistible beauty of the blue and gray patterns in their dull coloring.”
Dark web. Deep AI. Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? And one could picture it becoming so in an Updike novel . . . or at least something that leads to unintended consequences. Now you can “chat” with John Updike via Deep AI (artificial intelligence). Fans of Updike know how much he loved words and the physicality of words on the page and books in the hand, and know how much he even resented interviewers and biographers for “mining” his life. Certainly he would find this unsettling, wouldn’t he? Some readers will embrace this; others will not even want to click on this Pandora’s Box. But here it is.
Greg EplerWood reported that Rabbit Run, the section of a tiny not-quite-a-creek near Shillington named in honor of Updike’s second novel, has an uncommon resident: a yellow, freshwater sponge.
Last summer, Angelica Creek Watershed Association’s Jill and Stan Kemp sent an email to other members with news that they had discovered a strange yellow growth underneath one of the rocks. Suspecting it might be a seldom-seen freshwater sponge, they sent a sample to Carnegie Museum’s Marc Yergin, who studied it “Under the Microscope”—as Updike might have done. Yergin tentatively identified it as Eunapius fragilus.
Though Updike’s short story about microscopic life was a commentary on the New York literary scene, what the presence of a freshwater sponge in Rabbit Run means is that the association’s clean-up has already had a positive effect on the ecosystem.
“The presence of FW sponge indicates good water quality as they are extremely sensitive to any type of water pollution,” the Kemps wrote. “Sponges provide an important ecosystem service because they filter water all day, every day and help to clean things up like FW mussels or oysters in Chesapeake.”
The Kemps said they thought some of the improvements in the management of the riparian area might have helped this sponge to survive in Rabbit Run . . . a long, long ways from Bikini Bottom.
Photos are courtesy of the Kemps and Marc Yergin. The longish skeletal elements from the magnified sponge below are called “spicules.”
This time of year John Updike’s poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” is often reprinted and just as often pondered.
The most recent to tackle the poem is the Maverick Philosopher, who is listed among The Times of London’s 100 Best Blogs.
Bill Vallicella (aka Maverick Philosopher) writes, “Given what we know from yesterday’s Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s sense, and not ethical in the Dane’s sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.
“Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn’t do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men’s wives. Am I being fair?”
John MacDougall posted a May 1 2019 entry on his blog, The New Yorker and Me, titled “Updike on Van Gogh,” in which he draws attention to “Updke’s great posthumous essay collection Higher Gossip” and considers what he considers to be the two best pieces: “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” and “The Purest of Styles.” Both deal with van Gogh, MacDougall’s “favorite painter.”
MacDougall quotes from both essays, in particular paying notice to his favorite passage in “Uncertain Skills” that “contrasts van Gogh’s two pen copies of his superb Harvest in Provence.” Of Updike’s assessment that “The drawings brim with latent color” he writes, “That last line is inspired.
Last month The Atlantic delved into their archives and pulled out “The Labyrinth,” a poem by Jorge Luis Borges that was translated by John Updike and published in their April 1969 issue. Even the most ardent fans might find themselves thinking, on top of everything else, Updike was also a translator?
The “Book Marks” website celebrated what would have been John Updike’s 87th birthday with a list of early reviews to the “Rabbit” novels for which the author is most famous. Here are a few of them:
“Rabbit, Run is a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst. A modest work, it points to a talent of large dimensions—already prove in the author’s New Yorker stories and his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike, still only 28 years old, is a man to watch.”
“There is a great deal in Rabbit Redux, but only because John Updike has put it there. There is more activity than purposefulness: an intricate scheme of parallelisms with the moon shot; a rich (but in the end funked or slighted) sense of possible parallels between oral sex and verbalism or certain verbal habits; likewise a sense of parallels between the job of linotyping and the job of writing. The book is cleverer than a barrel full of monkeys, and about as odd in its relation of form to content. It never decides just what the artistic reasons (sales and nostalgia are another matter) were for bringing back Rabbit instead of starting anew; its existence is likely to do retrospective damage to that better book Rabbit, Run.”
“If Rabbit Is Rich has a
central theme it has to do with the one-directional nature of life:
life, always waiting to be death. Rabbit swans on down the long slide,
clumsy, lax and brutish, but vaguely trying.
“The technical problem posed by Rabbit is a familiar and fascinating one. How to see the world through the eyes of the occluded, the myopic, the wilfully blind? At its best the narrative is a rollicking comedy of ironic omission, as author and reader collude in their enjoyment of Rabbit’s pitiable constriction. Conversely, the empty corners and hollow spaces of the story fill with pathos, the more poignant for being unremarked.”
“Rabbit at Rest is certainly the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike’s longer novels. Its courageous theme—the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death we all carry inside us—is struck in the first sentence … This early note, so emphatically struck, reverberates through the length of the novel and invests its domestic-crisis story with an unusual pathos. For where in previous novels, most famously in Couples (1968), John Updike explored the human body as Eros, he now explores the body, in yet more detail, as Thanatos. One begins virtually to share, with the doomed Harry Angstrom, a panicky sense of the body’s terrible finitude, and of its place in a world of other, competing bodies: ‘You fill a slot for a time and then move out; that’s the decent thing to do: make room.’”
“The centerpiece of [Licks of Love]—and the one compelling reason to read it—is a novella-length piece called ‘Rabbit Remembered,’ a sad-funny postscript to Mr. Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels, which takes up the story of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s family and friends as they try to come to terms with his death and chart the remainder of their own lives.
“As in his last Rabbit novel, Mr. Updike writes with fluent access to Harry Angstrom’s world, chronicling the developments in his hero’s small Pennsylvania hometown with the casual ease of a longtime intimate. With compassion and bemused affection, he traces the many large and small ways in which Harry’s actions continue to reverberate through the lives of his widow, Janice, and their son, Nelson, and the equally myriad ways in which their decisions are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by their memories of him.
“Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year,” John Updike wrote in an essay that first appeared in the December 1989 issue of Golf Digest.
That essay was recently republished and can be read online now, as so many things can.
Updike’s writings on golf were famously collected in Golf Dreams (1997)
“The course itself—its ice-edged water hazards, its newly erected snow fences—seems grateful to be visited” . . . as golfers and Updike fans are to have this essay in its entirety pop up this December.
“You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland,” Updike wrote, exhilarated by the “boarded-up clubhouse” and “naked trees” and absence of crowds in colorful clothing: “just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet” with a “running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group,” Updike wrote.
Updike collectors take note: The extensive collection of Michael Broomfield (of Broomfield & De Bellis bibliography fame) is for sale, item-by-item, from Clouds Hill Books in Montclair, N.J.
“Terrorist is cinematic and political—wonderfully so, as I read it. It may be as close to the movie Syriana as we’ll ever get from Updike.
