Updike Society acquires author’s typewriter

One day after what would have been John Updike’s 91st birthday, The John Updike Society acquired the Pulitzer Prizewinning author’s typewriter from his four children. The purchase was made possible by a donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, which provided the initial funding for the society to buy and restore The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.

The manual typewriter—an Olivetti Linea 88—was made in Great Britain in 1968-69, the year Updike moved with his family to London following the publication of Couples. It will be displayed in a case upstairs in the house at 117 Philadelphia Ave., where Updike lived from “age zero to thirteen” and where he said his “artistic eggs were hatched.” In the front bedroom of this house, at age eight, Updike used his mother’s portable Remington to type his first story, which began, “The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cozy cave fire.” According to biographer Adam Begley, Updike said, “I still carry intact within me my happiness when, elevated by the thickness of some books to the level of my mother’s typewriter, I began to tap at the keyboard and saw the perfect letter-forms leap up on the paper rolled around the platen.”

When the typewriter is installed at some point in the near future, it will instantly become the most important piece in this small museum, which celebrates Updike and the affection he felt for the house, the neighborhood, and Berks County. The John Updike Childhood Home is presently open Saturdays from 12-2 p.m. See the house website for more details about Updike and the house, which officially opened on October 2, 2021. The John Updike Childhood Home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was awarded a Pennsylvania Historic Marker.

Still Looking . . . Still Vermeer: Columnist wishes Updike could see new Vermeer exhibition

The new (and largest ever) Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam is apparently as hard to get tickets for as a football championship. A World Today News columnist recently said, “I had given up all hope of a ticket for Vermeer, until an attentive, art-loving one NRC reader managed to get my wife and me in after all, even without having to smash a window of the Riijksmuseum.”

Officer and Laughing Girl. 1657-58, oil on canvas. The Frick Collection, New York: Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.—from the Riijksmuseum press website

The writer lamented, in a column titled “Still Vermeer” (in apparent reference to Updike’s second published volume of art criticism, Still Looking),”If only John Updike, the American writer (1932-2009), could experience this exhibition. I mention him because of all literary writers he has been the greatest connoisseur and admirer of Vermeer. . . . Updike became interested in Vermeer as a schoolboy. He wrote a nice, autobiographical story about it: ‘The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.’ In it, a boy, together with his father, visits an older brother of that father in New York. The boy’s father is a passive man, the older brother is a successful businessman. It is the boy’s first visit to New York, where he wants to buy a ‘good book’ about Vermeer.

“The wealthy uncle listens to him skeptically and starts bragging about four paintings by Degas that he has hanging in his living room in Chicago. ‘Yes,’ says the boy, ‘but don’t Degas’ paintings remind you of colored drawings? When it comes to it to look to things in terms of paint, with a sharp eye, Degas can’t match Vermeer.’

“The uncle says nothing and the father apologizes: ‘That’s how he and his mother always talk. I can not reach it. I never understand any of it.'”

The writer talks about walking through the new exhibit and wondering what Updike had thought of his personal favorite, The soldier and the laughing girl . . . “a painting that seems made for Updike and his ‘lucid eye.'”

Aspen Times letter writer invokes Updike

Writing to the Aspen Times about the “doldrums of mid-January,” Andy Stone of Missouri Heights shared an Updike poem that he thought appropriate for seasonal contemplation:

Slum Lords
The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They’re never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of superrich is absence.
They like to demonstrate they can afford
to be elsewhere. Don’t let them in.
Their riches form a kind of poverty.

John Updike

Yahoo! feature identifies celebrities living with psoriasis

Surely there were more than 21 celebrities who had psoriasis, but a writer for news aggregate site Yahoo!’s “women’s health” section settled on that number . . . among them, John Updike (#20).

“The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet penned a 1985 essay for The New Yorker aptly titled ‘At War With My Skin,‘ where he addressed his struggles with the autoimmune disease. In his essay, Updike wrote, ‘Why did I marry so young? Because, having once found a comely female who forgave me my skin, I dared not risk losing her and trying to find another.'”

Read the entire article.

Blogger turns to Updike for Thanksgiving thankfulness

Patrick Kurp, who writes Anecdotal Evidence: A blog about the intersection of books and life, yesterday turned to Updike for his Thanksgiving post, “Give Thanks for Gradual Ceaseless Rot.”

“Everything I have is more and better than I deserve,” Kurp wrote. “I like expressions of gratitude for things that have never occurred to me. Take John Updike’s thankfulness for decomposition in ‘Ode to Rot’:

“All process is reprocessing;
give thanks for gradual ceaseless rot
gnawing gross Creation fine while we sleep,
the lightning-forged organic conspiracy’s
merciful counterplot.”

Read the full blog post.

North Carolina pastor considers Updike’s remarks on the resurrection

Raphael’s Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1502)

God’s Truth for Today published a short contemplation by Dr. Chris Simmons, a member of the pastoral team at Frye Regional Medical Center in Hickory on “Resurrection: Our Impossible Anchor — Faith and Values.” John Updike’s often-quoted “Seven Stanzas at Easter” were immediately invoked.

“At 28, novelist John Updike got to the bottom of the Resurrection,” Simmons wrote. “Updike would fear death throughout his life. His sober awareness of this surely led him to write “Make no mistake: if He rose at all / it was His body; / if the cells dissolution did not / reverse, the molecules / reknit, the amino acids reignite, / the Church will fall.”

“Updike realized that the scandal of the resurrection, that a human could raise the dead, had to be true or the faith had to be abandoned. He wouldn’t want to make a metaphor out of it or redefine it or make it less of a stumbling block. He seems to have believed that he could only be saved from eternal death by a Savior who had conquered it himself,” Simmons wrote.

Read the whole meditation.

Flashbak considers Updike’s thoughts on death and writing

On September 18, 2022, Flashbak (Everything Old Is New Again) posted “John Updike On Death, Writing And the Last Words,” in which Paul Sorene gave some thought to Updike’s memoir and the relationship between the author’s preoccupations with writing and death.

“Memory is like the wishing-skin in fairy tales, with its limited number of wishes,” Updike wrote, prompting Sorene to wonder, “Can writing preserve memories and keep death at bay? Who gets to tell Updike’s story after he’s gone, and how will he be remembered?”

Sorene, quoting liberally from Self-Consciousness, noted that “Updike saved almost everything. His papers, stored at Harvard, include his golf scorecards [the John Updike Childhood Home has several of these on display], legal and business records [the JUCH also has his travel log, many of his cancelled checks, and a number of business correspondences with publishers], fan mail, video tapes, photographs, drawings [plenty of those on display at JUCH], and rejection letters. Was saving and preserving the past done so we could remember him, and he could better remember himself, and try again?”

That interesting question prompts another: What is the relationship between the collecting impulse, the writing impulse, and the impulse to somehow live forever?

McEwan talks about the assault on Rushdie and on literary reputations

Lisa Allardice recently interviewed Ian McEwan for The Guardian (“Ian McEwan on ageing, legacy and the attack on his friend Salman Rushdie: ‘It’s beyond the edge of human cruelty'”). The occasion was the release of Lessons, the new novel by McEwan, who was the keynote speaker at the 5th Biennial John Updike Society conference at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

McEwan at the University of Belgrade

The nearly 500-page novel, which mentions the fatwa against Rushdie, is “far longer than McEwan’s characteristically ‘short, smart and saturnine’ novels, as John Updike summed up in a 2002 review of Atonement,” Allardice wrote. “McEwan’s ambition with Lessons, his 18th novel, was to show the ways in which ‘global events penetrate individual lives,’ of which the fatwa was a perfect example. ‘It was a world-historical moment that had immediate personal effects, because we had to learn to think again, to learn the language of free speech,’ he says.”

“Billed as ‘the story of a lifetime,’ it is in many ways the story of McEwan’s life. ‘I’ve always felt rather envious of writers like Dickens, Saul Bellow, John Updike and many others, who just plunder their own lives for their novels,’ he explains. ‘I thought, now I’m going to plunder my own life, I’m going to be shameless.'”

“‘I’ve read so many literary biographies of men behaving badly and destroying their marriages in pursuit of their high art. I wanted to write a novel that was in part the story of a woman who is completely focused on what she wants to achieve, and has the same ruthlessness but is judged by different standards,’ he explains. ‘If you read Doris Lessing’s cuttings they will unfailingly tell you that she left a child in Rhodesia.'”

Asked whether, at age 75, he worries about his legacy, McEwan responded, “I’d like to continue to be read, of course. But again, that’s entirely out of one’s control. I used to think that most writers when they die, they sink into a 10-year obscurity and then they bounce back. But I’ve had enough friends die more than 10 years ago, and they haven’t reappeared. I feel like sending them an email back to their past to say, ‘Start worrying about your legacy because it’s not looking good from here.'”

Allardice wrote, “He was greatly saddened by what he describes as ‘the assault on Updike’s reputation’; for him, the Rabbit tetralogy is the great American novel. Saul Bellow, another hero, has suffered a similar fate for the same reasons, he says. ‘Those problematic men who wrote about sex—Roth, Updike, Bellow and many others.'”

“We’ve become so tortured about writing about desire. It’s got all so complex,’ he says. ‘But we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Desire is one of the colossal awkward subjects of literature, whether it’s Flaubert you’re reading or even Jane Austen.'”

Read the whole interview.

Dallas columnist invokes Updike in writing about infamous conspiracy theory

On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, the Dallas Observer‘s Jim Schutze wrote a column titled “Umbrella Man, Umbrella Man, Please Stay Away. Don’t Come to Dealey on JFK Day.” The title itself is pure, poetic, fun with language, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Updike turns up.

“Louie Steven Witt, are you still out there somewhere, alive? Would you tell me if you were? You know you’re back in The Dallas Morning News this morning, but only as a ghost,” Schutze began. Witt was identified as the “umbrella man” during the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. The umbrella man was one of the closest bystanders when the assassin’s bullet struck President Kennedy, and the only one in the area with an umbrella who was opening and closing it. A signal?

“You have something in common with the old rich Dallas people sponsoring the 50th whatever-it-is-this-year. A half century ago all of you were abducted and transported into the bizarre quantum universe of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. When he wrote about you in particular, Mr. Witt, in The New Yorker in 1967, the late great novelist John Updike described the alternative reality that consumed you as ‘a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth.”

Read the whole article.

World Mosquito Day prompts return to Updike poem

The blog Flowers for Socrates said August 20 was World Mosquito Day, and if you missed out on your usual celebration (ahem), here’s an Updike poem on the subject that blogger Nona Blyth Cloud posted that day.

Updike had us at “I was to her a fragrant lake of blood / From which she had to sip a drop or die / A reservoir, a lavish field of food”.

“The Mosquito” was first published in the June 11, 1960 edition of The New Yorker.