Category Archives: Updike Quoted

Christopher Lydon considers John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’

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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.”

Updike mentioned in review of Diana Evans essay collection

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British writer Diana Evans has written four acclaimed novels and, more recently, a collection of essays titled I Want to Talk to You and Other Conversations. In Alex Clark’s review of the book, John Updike surfaces as an influence:

“Thinking about Rhys and her peripatetic, rackety life leads Evans to interrogate the ways in which writers of fiction might reach their own particular method of ‘psychological enunciation.’ It’s a delicious counterpoint to Evans’s fondness for John Updike; crediting his novel Couples with influencing Ordinary People, she describes what might legitimately be called a guilty pleasure, weighing the erasing masculinity of his work against the sentences ‘like hot-air balloons drifting through a dazzling harlequin sky.’ It was also being alive to the domestic ease of the married protagonists of Couples that sparked Evans to ask: ‘How often do middle-class black people in books get to just live in their damn houses and open and close their wardrobes and be aware of each other’s fingertips?'”

New Yorker at 100 also celebrates editorial battles

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The New Yorker is taking the entire year to celebrate its centennial, and deservedly so. John Updike, whose first major publications were in those New Yorker pages, turns up quite a bit in the article by Jill Lepore on “The Editorial Battles that Made The New Yorker.” John Updike Society’s Dave Lull culled the sections that deal with Updike:

1—”Early in Adam Gopnik’s stint as a New Yorker editor, he got a draft of a piece from John Updike. It was perfect, so he set it aside. Soon, he got a typewritten postcard from Updike:
Dear Adam,
The piece recently submitted was
a) deemed unacceptable,
b) in need of significant rewriting,
c) lost behind a radiator.
John
Updike—even Updike!—had been feverishly awaiting a reply, Gopnik realized. ‘Was anything wrong with the Auden review?’ Updike once queried Shawn, scratching at the editorial door like a cat left outside for the night. ‘There has been an ominous gap since I turned it in.’ He wrote constantly, and brilliantly, submitting fiction, poetry, and criticism to the magazine over six decades. He got plenty of rejections, and sometimes, like every other self-loathing writer, he all but asked for them. ‘I enclose a disk,’ Updike once wrote to Finder, ‘but if you and Remnick are too let down, I will certainly understand.’”
2—”White later wrote to Updike, ‘Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ Updike once expressed the same kind of exasperation about a Nabokov novel: ‘There seem to be a lot of hostile parentheses.’”
3—”There’s a reason that Updike fretted so much. Other magazines print most of what their established contributors submit; from the start, The New Yorker refused to do that, rejecting submissions even from its star writers—sometimes for years—leaving many of them, especially fiction writers, in precarious financial straits.”
4—”In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you’re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: ‘Roger had a trick, when John hadn’t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.’”
5—”Updike never saw that pasture. ‘I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,’ he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. ‘They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.’ He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.”

The Biblio File retro-reminds of Updike ‘Just Looking’

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Nigel Beale, of The Biblio File podcast, posted an entry a while back reminding followers that “Updike the essayist is always worth reading.” It’s the Jan. 1990 issue of Art & Antiques, in which an interview showcases Updike’s response to a photo from Life magazine of a young woman dancing to celebrate Hawaii’s statehood.

Asked what struck him about the photo enough to write about it, Updike responded, “The word Wahine, for one thing—proving that captions matter. “The young woman’s beauty, for another—her svelte midriff, her exposed navel, her perfect teeth, her cluster of earrings, her fishnet stockings with their hint of whorishness. The expression on her face, between glee and agony. The sea of faces behind her. Her curious aloneness in front of that sea, facing the other way, on what appears to be an otherwise deserted stage. Is she one of a chorus line? Whence comes the music she is swaying to, the rhythmic impetus hoisting one dainty heel up from its slipper and swirling the threads of her skirt and her bra? What force has all but shut her eyes? The camera has caught a Dionysian mystery; it has caught ecstasy.”

Updike’s full rumination on this particular artwork and others can be found in Just Looking, the first of three volumes of his art criticism.

Writer recalls lunch with Updike

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Writer Clyde Haberman posted on social media yesterday that the death at age 92 of André Soltner, “the great chef who presided over Lutece in New York,” reminded him of a lunch he had there with John Updike.

“In 1996 I interviewed John Updike there, a restaurant he chose because it was near his publisher, Knopf. ‘There was sort of a symbiosis between the Knopf editorial board and Lutece,’ Updike said. Then he added, ‘I’ve never felt comfortable in here. I feel gourmet food is sort of wasted on me.'”

In “At Lunch With/John Updike; On Reading, Writing and Rabbit,” which appeared in The New York Times on March 6, 1996, Haberman wrote, “A sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice will do for lunch when [Updike] is at home, on 11 isolated acres in Beverly Farms, Mass., about 25 miles north of Boston. At this point, Mr. Updike said, he has to watch his waistline almost as much as his language.

“‘There’s no disguising the fact that a writer’s life is a sedentary one and prone to incessant snacking if you work at home,’ he said. ‘The little break of going down to get another oatmeal cookie is almost irresistible. So I try to make up for the cookies by not eating much at lunch.’

“Even when he was a boy in Shillington, Pa., outside the working-class town of Reading, literature and food converged. ‘I was a great peanut-butter lover from childhood on,’ he recalled. ‘The way I used to read was, we had an old sofa in the house, and I’m make a sandwich consisting of peanut butter and raisins. You’d eat one of those while you read John Dickson Carr or some other mystery writer, or James Thurber of Robert Benchley. In that way, many a happy afternoon went by.'”

Despite Updike’s talk of watching his caloric intake, Haberman wrote, “Let it be noted that he held up fine under the gustatory strain of Lutece, polishing off a serving of grouper after a cup of pumpkin soup and a puff pastry of sweetbreads and spinach. He did draw the line at dessert.”

In his 1-19-25 social media post, Haberman remarked, “That lunch with Updike . . . was one of those times when I enjoyed myself thoroughly and marveled that I actually got paid for such moments. I felt the same after interviewing Umberto Eco in Bologna a few years earlier.”

Old Updike news is still Updike news

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Boston’s North Shore newspaper, The Local News, dipped into the area’s Updike past for a Dec. 24, 2024 installment of “This Week in Ipswich’s Old News (Dec. 19-25). Here’s the entry from current News editor Trevor Meek:

December 24, 1964

Author John Updike returns to Ipswich after a two-month trip to the Soviet Union, which was arranged through the State Department’s cultural exchange program.

He was joined on the trip by author John Cheever.

“We have ‘boy meets girl’ novels. Well, in the Soviet Union, it was ‘boy meets tractor,’” Updike said.

“The Russians, he noted, were naturally hospitable, and he said Americans were ‘the only people in the world that the Soviets feel they can talk to as equals.’” (Ipswich Chronicle)

Updike’s take on Jong’s Fear of Flying

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As part of their feminist classics series which looks at influential books, The Conversation featured an article on “Sex, zips and feminism: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying has a joyful abandon rarely found in today’s sad girl novels” in which John Updike was quoted.

“Interestingly though, another male writer, John Updike, helped Jong’s rise up the bestseller list. Even so, his compliments can read as backhanded as Goodlove’s:

It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose.

“Updike favourably links Jong with great male writers J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth, while carefully distinguishing her from the more disagreeable women’s liberationists:

Fear of Flying not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of ‘raised’ feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint.

“Pull quotes from Updike’s review featured on the novel’s second edition (the one I have been reading), along with a new cover: a luscious 70s serif typeface in black and orange on a yellow background that blatantly copies the 1969 cover of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.”

New Yorker Cartoonists note Updike-Roth connection

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Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events posted an October 14, 2023 item about the “Roth Art on Updike’s Desk”:

“When I interviewed Arnold Roth in 2016, we spoke about the cover art he provided for John Updike’s Bech series. Last night I cam across this 1983 Time Magazine ad and was pleased to spot a stack of Arnie’s Bech Is Back art on Updike’s desk.

“On the top of the pile is what looks to be a proof, and just below it, looks very much like original art (Updike had all three Roth Bech cover originals in his collection).”

See photos and read more.

Imaginative Conservative writer contemplates ‘wokeness’ and Updike

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In “John Updike’s ‘In the Beauty of the Lilies’: The Children” (The Imaginative Conservative, Aug. 19, 2023), Daniel J. Sundahl began with two quotes from Updike:

“As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I’m too Christian for Harold Bloom’s blessing. So be it,” and “The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been blamed and broken and half-blinded by the scandal of life, is such the existentially godless man.”

Mid-way through his essay, Sundahl remarked, “Of course there’s religion and then there’s religion and there are books and there are dirty books. . . which raises the question: Can one write about life, even life’s carnality and concupiscence, while maintaining Christian aspects?” He also, of course, attempted to answer his own question in a classical, meandering way, prompted by the last words (“the children”) of Updike’s novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies.

“I became fond over the years of the many contradictions regarding parents’ expectations about religion and literature, which included a smallish broo ha ha with a fundamentalist father when he learned his daughter would be reading a John Updike novel in an upper division American Literature course devoted to American Contemporary Fiction—the father arguing that although he had never read Updike he believed him scandalous and a writer of titillating, stylized pornography. Those are my words not his . . . which was singular: ‘dirty.’

“And he has a point and a good one, and I am not without empathy. As with many writers whose personal life and writings own a certain kind of ‘smudginess,’ greasy fingers on the pages, Updike is no exception. His embrace of realism as an artistic criterion (often concerning the breakdown of a marriage) is often passé these days and with gray humor. One question that emerges is whether a narrative Updike presents to his readers is a full and authentic report of human experience, which includes the particulars of the times and places of the narrative’s action, which would argue that Updike is a formal realist. Like his characters, he also put himself through many personal hardships. He had faults, and they were ‘smudgy’ and blurred.”

Read the whole essay.