The September 11, 2014 issue of The New Yorker included a piece titled “Reacting to September 11th,” which tells of the first issue published after 9/11 in which “Updike and eight writers grappled with the September 11th attacks.”

“‘A four-year-old girl and her babysitter called from the library, and pointed out through the window the smoking top of the north tower, not a mile away.’ That’s how John Updike found out about 9/11, according to the Talk of the Town story he wrote for the September 24, 2001 issue of this magazine.”

Updike’s complete September 24, 2001 column is available online here.

“From the viewpoint of a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting some kin, the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception,” Updike wrote.

“As we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame (an intervening building had hidden the approach of the second airplane), there persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolized would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage.

“And then, within an hour, as my wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building’s roof, the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air. We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling.”

The featured poem for August 31, 2014 on The Writer’s Almanac, with Garrison Keillor, was Updike’s poem “August,” from A Child’s Calendar. Here’s the link.

The Internet is full of new news and old, and what surfaced on August 13, 2014 was a piece from the New Republic archives, “John Updike Beautifully Explains How Difficult It Was To Read John Cheever’s Tortured Journals.”

“A journal,” Updike writes, “even when cut to 5 percent of its bulk, reflects real time, where we can experience how sluggishly our human adventure unravels and how unprone people are to change. In a novel, Cheever’s alcoholism would have been introduced, dramatized in a scene or two, and brought to a crisis in which either it or he would have been vanquished. In these journals, the decades of heavy drinking, of hangovers and self-rebukes and increasingly ominous physical and mental symptoms, just drag on.”

Updike adds, “To speak personally, this old acquaintance and longtime admirer of Cheever’s had to battle, while reading these Journals, with the impulse to close his eyes. They tell me more about Cheever’s lusts and failures and self-humiliations and crushing sense of shame and despond than I can easily reconcile with my memories of the sprightly, debonair, gracious man, often seen on the arm of his pretty, witty wife.”

One begins to understand, rereading this in the context of Adam Begley’s recent biography, why Updike was so adamantly opposed to literary biography.

The Ontario Review, edited from 1974-2008 by the late Raymond J. Smith, husband to Joyce Carol Oates, has archived its journal and among the publications is John Updike’s poem “In the Cemetery High Above Shillington,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 1994 issue. You can download the poem and read it here.

Here is the link to the National Endowment for the Humanities 2008 Jefferson Lecture by John Updike:

Webcast intro, lecture, and slideshow

“The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art?”