Gordon Harris has posted another Updike-related story on his blog, Stories From Ipswich and the North Shore, subtitled “An antiquarian almanac from historic Ipswich, Massachusetts–In the news since 1633.”
In “John Updike is elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters, April 1, 1964” Harris embraces Updike’s honor as the community’s in a brief commemoration.
An Ipswich blog recently posted a Gordon Harris story about the Polly Dole House at 26 East St. in Ipswich, Mass., where Updike once lived. The post quotes an article that Updike had written about the house for Architectural Digest that was reprinted in Picked-Up Pieces.
“The house I and my wife and four children lived in was called, on a plaque beside the front door, the Polly Dole House and given a date of 1686, though one expert sneeringly opined that dating it prior to 1725 would compromise his integrity.
“A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. The gables are on the sides. The windows were originally small, with fixed casements and leaded diamond panes. The basic plan called for two rooms over two, the fireplace opening into each room; a later plan added half-rooms behind, creating the traditional saltbox shape. Inside the front door—at least our front door—a shallow front hall gave onto an exiguous staircase squeezed into the space left by the great brick core at the heart of the house. The fireplace, with its cast-iron spits and bake ovens, had been the kitchen. The virgin forests of the New World had contributed massive timbers, adzed into shape and mortise-and-tenoned together, and floorboards up to a foot wide.
“The Polly Dole House had a living room so large that people supposed the house had originally been an inn, on the winding old road to Newburyport, which ran close by. Polly Dole was a shadowy lady who may have waited on tables; we never found out much about her, though local eyebrows still lifted at her name. The big room, with its gorgeous floorboards, was one you sailed through, and the furniture never stayed in any one place. The walk-in fireplace, when the three-foot logs in it got going, singed your eyebrows and dried out the joints of any chair drawn up too cozily close. In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point the house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.
“The decade was the sixties, my wife and I were youngish, and the house suited us just fine. It was Puritan; it was back-to-nature; it was less is more.”
Harris clears up the date: “This salt box house was built in 1720 and has elements from a previous house built in 1687. It has a large front living room with a low ceiling, wide board floors and a ‘walk-in’ fireplace.
“The long ‘summer beam’ in the middle of this room is suspended by a cable to the peak of the roof. The left side is smaller than the right, suggesting that it may have been originally built as a ‘half house’ with the right side and the left addition added later.
“The house was built for Deacon John Staniford (1648-1730) and his wife Margaret, the daughter of Thomas and Martha (Lake) Harris. John Staniford bears the title of Mr. in his young life, and Deacon in his old age. He was said to be a man of intellectual qualities and ‘much occupied with duties which require legal knowledge.’
“Thomas Franklin Waters writes in Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ‘Capt. Jeremiah Staniford inherited the homestead of his father, Capt. John Staniford. Daniel Staniford received the homestead and sold to Nathaniel Lord 3d, March 5, 1811. Nathaniel Lord sold to two women, whose names are well remembered, Lucy Fuller and Polly Dole, April 29, 1837. The administrator of Lucy Fuller’s estate sold to Daniel S. Burnham, Aug. 23, 1865.’”
U.R. Bowie, who taught Russian literature for 30 years at Miami University and now writes a blog, recently shared a response from Updike to his questions about Charles D’Ambrosio (Up North), Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts (Closer), Woody Allen (Match Point), literary fiction, fluency in Russian, Philip Roth, Zuckerman, Zuckerman’s prostate gland, “etc.”
Here is Updike’s response to his 2006 letter:
Danny Heitman wrote a piece for The Magazine of The Weekly Standard about “Darkness Visible: L.E. Sissman, poet in a gray flannel suit” in which Updike is mentioned. The news “peg” is the final season of Mad Men, and Sissman is evoked as an example of “a real-life advertising executive in the 1960s, who appeared to survive the experience with his soul intact—even deepened.
“Along with his advertising career in Boston, where, over the years, he worked as a creative vice president at two leading firms, Sissman built a national reputation as a man of letters, penning book reviews for The New Yorker, a regular first-person column for The Atlantic, and several books of poetry. John Updike was a big fan, admiring Sissman’s literary work as an expression of ‘amiable, attentive intelligence.’ Other contemporary admirers included fellow poets Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, and Howard Moss. The writer behind Sissman’s poems and essays seemed centered, charming, humane. ‘A sensible, decent man: that is the voice,’ Updike said of his friend.”
“Sissman reflexively avoided the bland generality in favor of the telling particular, which is why Updike, another master of precise observation, liked him so much. ‘When he evokes a city, it is Detroit or New York or Boston; there is no confusing the tint of the pavements,’ Updike wrote. ‘When he recalls a day from his life, though it comes from as far away as November 1944, it arrives not only with all its solid furniture but with its own weather—in this case, ‘thin, slate-colored clouds sometimes letting through flat blades of sun.’ '”
In “Beautifully Mundane: 10 Bits of Everyday Wisdom from John Updike,” Biographile fills its this week in history column with Updike quotes in honor of the author’s upcoming March 18 birthday—what would have been his 83rd.
Noting Updike’s often-stated goal of trying to “give the mundane its beautiful due,” Biographile has “pulled together some of his most illuminating quotes that are sure to inspire you to view at least one small piece of your life a little more beautifully.”
1. “Halfway isn’t all the way, but it’s better than no way.” (Rabbit Redux, 1969)
2. “Looking foolish does the spirit good.” (Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989)
3. “You don’t stop caring, champ….Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.” (Rabbit is Rich, 1981)
4. “Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct’s always to do the opposite. It’s got me into a lot of trouble, but I’ve had a lot of fun.” (Rabbit at Rest, 1990)
5. “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there.” (Rabbit Run, 1960)
6. “No act is so private it does not seek applause.” (Couples, 1968)
7. “The size of a life is how you feel about it.” (Rabbit Remembered, 2000)
8. “When you feel irresistable, you’re hard to resist.” (Rabbit at Rest, 1990)
9. “Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.” (Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989)
10. “Any decent kind of world, you wouldn’t need all these rules.” (Rabbit Redux, 1969)
The Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia published a reprint of a John Patrick Grace column titled “Want to feel better and live longer? Slow down a bit” in which Grace quotes Updike:
“John Updike, the novelist, was asked a few years ago why he was publishing yet another rambling novel of New England life, some 500 pages. ‘Who has time to read novels that long anymore?’ the questioner said.
“Updike replied, more or less in this vein: ‘That’s just it. People need to slow down their lives and take time to read a good long book. That’s exactly why I write novels of that length.’
“Does that make sense? Well, then, slow the heck down and read a good book.”
John Patrick Grace is a book editor and publisher. He lives in Huntington.