Writing for The Telegraph, Martin Chilton considers the legacy of John Cheever and cites Updike in the process:
“As his contemporary John Updike put it: ‘John Cheever was often labelled as a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia. Only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it.”
“John Cheever: ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs’
The article was posted on October 15, 2015.
Anne Tyler, whose novel A Spool of Blue Thread made the Man Booker 2015 shortlist, referred to Updike in remarks that appeared in The Guardian. She says that “with each new scene I have an uncomfortable sense of making it up, of ordering them about willy-nilly. Oh, what a silly, artificial business novel-writing is, I’ll think. Who am I kidding, here? And I glance at the John Updike poem that I keep above my desk, ‘Marching Through a Novel’ where he likens his characters to meek foot soldiers blindly following his orders. Poor dears. I pity them.
“But gradually, new layers develop. I did plan for Denny to marry but I didn’t know exactly whom he married, and once I see her, I smile. I’m intrigued by Stem’s wife Nora: she’s as mysterious to me as she is to the rest of the family, and I perk up whenever she enters a scene.
“Then I find out that the mother of the family used to have one of those bad-boy boyfriends when she was in her teens. Why, I had no idea! I have to go back to an earlier section to drop in a couple of references to him. (Or, as John Updike put it, to ‘develop a motive backwards to suit the deed that’s done.’) This is why I love rewriting: each new draft reflects more of those extra layers that I hadn’t foreseen at the start.
On October 1, 2015, Literary Hub published “The Life and Times of Alfred A. Knopf” by Chip McGrath, excerpted from a special edition history on the occasion of the company’s 100th anniversary. Since, as McGrath points out, Updike was “the last great acquisition of the Alfred era,” he is well represented.
John Updike once compared Alfred A. Knopf to “a cross between a Viennese emperor and a Barbary pirate,” McGrath writes.
“[Knopf’s] correspondence was hearty and businesslike and seldom ventured to make editorial suggestions. (A good example is the letter he wrote to Updike in 1967 after reading Couples. He called the novel a ‘lollapalooza,’ and then shrewdly suggested that at his own expense Updike hire a lawyer in case any of Updike’s friends or neighbors thought they recognized themselves in the book. Updike, incidentally, was the last great acquisition of the Alfred era, and despite their age difference, the two men hit it off immediately, not only because Knopf happily picked up Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair—after Harper dithered over it for months, suggesting first one revision, then another—but out of a shared love of typography.)”
“I love books physically,” Knopf wrote in his 1917 catalog, and “in 1965, when Knopf celebrated its 50th anniversary and was widely recognized for its distinguished record, it was Alfred who got most of the praise. The Typophiles, an organization that encouraged the appreciation of fine typography and bookmaking, published a two-volume Festschrift in his honor, with tributes from writers like John Hersey, Paul Horgan, John Crowe Ransom, and Updike.
Photo: Carl van Vechten.
Esquire keeps cranking out the lists, and Updike keeps making them.
This time it’s “49 Great Lines from Classic Esquire Short Stories”—though how “great” some of the lines are is highly debatable.
Updike’s line, at least, holds its own:
“There wasn’t that tireless, irksome, bright-eyed hope women kept fluttering at you.” —John Updike, “The Rumor,” June 1991
Here’s a link to the complete short story.
Writer Ann Beattie agreed to share the keynote speaker duties at the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University with her painter-husband Lincoln Perry because she was an Updike supporter and Updike was a supporter of hers.
A Vogue article about her new collection, The State We’re In: Maine Stories, reminds us of that connection. Journalist Megan O’Grady writes, “As John Updike told her when they first met, ‘You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.”
He was talking about what O’Grady described as her stories’ “open-ended capaciousness, so unlike the deterministic, epiphany-shaped prose that has defined the short form.”
Just as Updike’s characters aged, so have Beattie’s. They’re “mostly older and less cool these days: They order crackers from Amazon; they’ve been through divorces or estrangements and are on second or third attempts at life. They have a sense not of the ending but of an ending. The result is a newfound ephemerality—a fledgling bird found in a recycling bin, and unexpected pregnancy, an attempted suicide,” O’Grady writes.
Here’s the entire article: “Wandering Beyond the Page: Ann Beattie on Her New Collection, The State We’re In.”
They say it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, and the often decorous John Updike probably wouldn’t have had anything negative to say about the recent death of E.L. Doctorow. But Updike is no longer among us and Bruce Weber, writing for The New York Times, quoted Updike’s comparatively nasty assessment of Doctorow’s historical novels in the obituary “E.L. Doctorow Dies at 84; Literary Time Traveler Stirred Past Into Fiction”:
“Perhaps the most telling review came from John Updike, who was prominent among a noisy minority of critics who generally found Mr. Doctorow’s tinkering with history misleading if not an outright violation of the tenets of narrative literature. Updike held Ragtime in especial disdain.
“’It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game,’ he wrote in The New Yorker, going on to dismiss several other Doctorow books before granting their author a reprieve.
“’His splendid new novel, The March, pretty well cures my Doctorow problem,’ Updike wrote, adding, ‘The novel shares with Ragtime a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up close, and finally receding over the horizon.
“’Reading historical fiction,’ Updike went on, ‘we often itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get to the facts without the fiction. But The March stimulates little such itch; it offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide. Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.'”
John Updike Society board member Biljana Dojčinović was featured on RTS (Radio Television of Serbia) in a program of culture titled “Metropolis,” about Sylvia Plath.
In it, around the 28-minute mark, she reads (in her Serbian translation) the beginning and end of Updike’s poem, “Upon Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home.”
Here are the YouTube link and some screen grabs.
The Telegraph today paid a 100th birthday tribute to “Saul Bellow: ‘American writer supreme.'”
The story is a round-up of comments culled from remarks that writers and critics have made about Bellow over the years, including John Updike:
“Saul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist.”
John Updike Society members may know Andrew Moorhouse from the last two conferences he attended, at which he modestly suggested he was not an academic but “only” an Updike fan, a reader, and a lover of books.
But it turns out that his love of books has made him one of the most respected fine press publishers in the United Kingdom. And John Updike inspired him.
“The American author John Updike said: ‘A book is beautiful in its relation to the human eye, to the human hand, to the human brain and to the human spirit,’ and it is this quote which encouraged me to get involved in Fine Press publishing,” Moorhouse wrote in an article that appeared yesterday in The Irish Times: “Michael Longley’s Sea Asters: publishing as a work of art.”
In the article, Moorhouse talks about how he started Fine Press Poetry in 2013 and how his first three books—two featuring British poet Simon Armitage and this third release, Michael Longley’s Sea Asters, illustrated by the author’s artist daughter—came to be. The article also contains several poems by Longley, who was recently announced as winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.
Moorhouse’s forthcoming publication is Andrew Motion’s Ted Hughes Award-winning Coming Home poems. Fine Press Poetry, which specializes in creating letterpress editions of poems accompanied by illustrations by wood engravers and artists, is based in Rochdale, England.
