The average writer isn’t typically mentioned in an article about pharmaceuticals, but of course Updike isn’t typical. Neither was Couples, his 1968 novel that explored the social and sexual consequences of the birth control pill—a free-love era medical advancement that nonetheless required a doctor’s prescription.
Now a birth control pill is being marketed as an over-the-counter drug, and a Flagler Live article about it uses Updike’s novel as an illustration, along with this caption:
“Welcome, she said, to the post-pill paradise, a light-hearted blasphemy that immensely relieved him,” Piet Hanema, the central character in John Updike’s Couples narrates as he is about to begin his affair with Georgene early in the 1968 novel that made Updike, and the pill, household items. (The italics are in the original text.) Updike loved the post-pill paradise phrase so much, he used it twice more and referred to it in subsequent interviews. But the true paradise may only be beginning.”
That this quote and the cover of Couples is employed in an article that’s not about the socio-sexual ramifications, but rather “the move toward over-the-counter birth control as an important step toward accessible and equitable reproductive health care for all Americans,” illustrates how that well-turned phrase—”post-pill paradise”—still captures the imagination.
In “The Definitive Ranking of Every Single Wes Anderson Character,” superfans Mark Asch, Charles Bramesco and Jesse Hassenberger took on the gargantuan job of considering how “Anderson collects things and people” and trying to assess the “many traits that make a Wes Anderson character memorable or quintessential to the filmmaker’s project—intellectual curiosity, reckless rambunctiousness, melancholy that clings like a fog, lovable selfishness, epigrammatic wit, sartorial fastidiousness, facial symmetry—” and rank the characters.
“One recurring theme of these blurbs will prove to be family; another will prove to be the lure of the past for Anderson and his characters. Meanwhile, a recurring theme of all the horrible A.I. art generated from a ‘[X] directed by Wes Anderson’ prompt that you may have seen chumming your Twitter feed recently is visual symmetry. In ‘The Guardians,’ a 2001 short story by John Updike, the protagonist, raised by two parents and two grandparents, ‘felt the four adults as sides of a perfect square, with a diagonal from each corner to a central point. He was that point, protected on all sides, loved from every direction.’ We meet many of Anderson’s characters already in mourning, sensing love’s enveloping geometry thrown out of balance, and seeking a return to the symmetry of their once-intact families. Everything is in its right place in every one of Anderson’s shots, but these ghosts [The Dead: Chas’s wife in The Royal Tenenbaums, Auggie’s wife in Asteroid City, Max’s mom in Rushmore, the Whitman patriarch in The Darjeeling Limited; Esteban in The Life Aquatic, everyone, eventually] remind us that this, too, is a temporary state.”
Ninety-three American writers have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction since the award was first given in 1918 to Ernest Poole for the novel His Family. Only four writers have won the prize more than once: Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams), William Faulkner (A Fable, The Reivers), John Updike (Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest), and Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys).
Erin McCarthy’s reasons for writing about “7 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelists” for Mental Floss aren’t divulged—only “here are a few other authors whose books have nabbed the prestigious prize”—but she reminds us of Updike’s response to Whitehead, who was nominated for his first Pulitzer in 2002 and won in 2017 and 2020, after Updike had died.
Updike said that Whitehead’s writing “does what writing should do. It refreshes our sense of the world.” Years later, the Pulitzer jury would echo that in calling The Underground Railroad “a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.”
Of Updike, McCarthy wrote, “John Updike, the author of more than 25 novels, won Pulitzers for two books in his series that follows ex-athlete Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom: Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), the latter of which ends with Rabbit’s death. In 1997, Updike described ending the series as ‘kind of a relief. … It wasn’t as sad for me as perhaps for some of my readers. Writers are cruel. Authors are cruel. We make, and we destroy.’ The character of Rabbit, Updike said, ‘opened me up. As a writer, I could see things through him that I couldn’t see by any other means.'”
What kind of person texts photos of their sexual body parts? Don’t pass judgment. The origin of “sexting” goes back at least to 1828 and the story of a “trailblazing miniature portrait artist named Sarah Goodridge and a lawyer named Daniel Webster.” The devil you say?
Goodridge was “smitten with Webster,” wrote Tom Taylor of Far Out Magazine, and “a passion blossomed between and her new favourite subject” as he posed for his portrait. But the artist painted something a little extra and she would “offer the world the first sultry private nude. Obviously, her breasts were far from the first to be cast in watercolour, but they were the first to be painted in a self-portrait fashion and sent off secretly to an admirer—in essence, the exact same as a modern ‘nude’.
“She daubed her bare chest—cast very skillfully in the 3D fashion of optics—and proud pink nipples on a 2.5 x 3.1-inch block of ivory. She then sent this off in a carefully concealed package to Webster who is said to have somehow lifted his desk without the use of his hands when he opened up according to his deputy sitting opposite who was subsequently chaperoned out of the room.”
The piece, now known as Beauty Revealed, is “renowned not only for its place in sultry history but also for its skill and forward-thinking liberation. While the effort may not have won Webster’s hand in marriage, as she may have intended, the pair remained devoted in some way” and the “legacy of her work lives on, as John Updike puts it in the essay ‘The Revealed and the Concealed’: ‘Come to us and we will comfort you, the breasts of her self-portrait seem to say. We are yours for the taking, in all our ivory loveliness, with our tenderly stippled nipples.’ But from less of a male gaze perspective, maybe she was just feeling horny, playful, and frankly, very creative.”
Updike’s essay “The Revealed and the Concealed” was not included in any of his three collected writings on art—Just Looking (1989), Still Looking (2005), or the posthumously published Always Looking (2012).
In spring 2023, Jay Brooks of the Brookston Beer Bulletin celebrated “John Updike’s Paean To The Beer Can” and included Updike’s often-anthologized Talk of the Town mini-essay on the Great American Container.
“He grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town that I did—Shillington—and we both escaped to a life of writing,” Brooks wrote. “Though I think you’ll agree he did rather better than I did with the writing thing, not that I’m complaining. I once wrote to him about a harebrained idea I had about writing updated Olinger stories from the perspective of the next generation (his Olinger Stories were a series of short tales set in Olinger, which was essentially his fictional name for Shillington). He wrote me back a nice note of encouragement on a hand-typed postcard that he signed, which today hangs in my office as a reminder and for inspiration.”
Brooks then shared Updike’s very short musings on the “Beer Can” and noted that “essentially, he’s lamenting the death of the old style beer can which most people considered a pain to open and downright impossible should you be without the necessary church key opener. He is correct, however, that the newfangled suckers were sharp and did cut fingers and lips on occasion, even snapping off without opening from time to time. But you still have to laugh at the unwillingness to embrace change (and possibly progress) even though he was only 32 at the time; hardly a normally curmudgeonly age.”
In Updike’s defense, he did end his mini-essay by saying, “What we need is Progress with an escape hatch.”
According to their website, “Day 1 with host Peter Wallace is the voice of the historic Protestant denominations. Through sermons, blogs, and video & audio resources, Day 1 proclaims God’s hope for a hurting and divided world. Formerly ‘The Protestant Hour.'”
“Though I highlighted it previously in Christianity Today, the book is so good, my recommendation bears repeating,” Cootsona wrote. “Updike’s novel explores how certain technologies—particularly films—have affected American perceptions of what is real and what is transcendent. In the first of four sections, (each follows a different generation of the same family), the early 20th century Presbyterian pastor Clarence Wilmot “felt the last particles of faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward.” This happens at the very moment that the silent film actress, the 17-year-old Mary Pickford faints while filming at local landmark Lambert Castle.
“Clarence finds he can no longer serve as a Minister of Gospel and literally cannot speak when he’s called to deliver sermons. Instead, he seeks transcendence in watching the technological marvel of the silver screen. So, if you’re ready for a bit of Updike’s normal palette of sexual and other transgressions, I think you’ll find that this initial episode begins an eloquent and challenging narrative of American life as the novel’s characters seek to live out faith—or perhaps lose it—in an increasingly technological 20th century.”
Given an article about the daiquiri, it would be reasonable for a lover of literature to expect to read about Ernest Hemingway and one of his two favorite Havana, Cuba bars: La Floridita, “Cradle of the Daiquiri cocktail.” The Floridita is here as a vintage photograph, but the writer mentioned isn’t “Papa” Hemingway, who is commemorated in a statue at that bar. Instead, the writer is John Updike.
In “The Spirits #17: The Cardamon Daiquiri,” Richard Godwin offered the recipe and added, “If you haven’t ever made a basic Daiquiri, please do so immediately – follow the recipe minus the cardamon. I figure with winter, you either need to lean into it or run away from it. Run away run away run away run away run away!” Which, of course, led him to Rabbit Angstrom.
“There’s a memorable double-date scene in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, where our protagonist Harry Angstrom orders a Daiquiri in a Chinese restaurant because both of the girls have. He imagines it will taste like limeade…and finds it does sort of taste like limeade, ‘riding like oil on a raw transparent taste.’ He has a few more and when he emerges, ‘the pavement is a shadow of the Daiquiri’s luminous transparence; he is light-hearted, and skips once, to get in step with the girl he adores.’
“Like Updike’s midcentury hero, the Daiquiri (rum, lime, sugar) is simple and direct but capable of the greatest lyricism. When its constituent parts are held in perfect harmony, something amazing happens. The dogs lose their bark; the eels cease to reel; oil paintings come to life. And then everything resets and goes back to normal and everyone forgets that ever happened. There is a luminous transparence around, though, if you care to look.”
The Centaur was a big deal in 1963. The novel, which dealt with classical mythology on the surface of an otherwise realistic narrative, earned John Updike the National Book Award. His third novel (following The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run) turns 60 this year, and the American Literature Association panel on “The Centaur at Sixty: Updike’s Ulysses” will be reprised with a slightly different cast at the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson this coming September.
As Stacy Olster noted in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, “Updike’s willingness to assign tremendous significance to his childhood home reaches a crescendo in The Centaur, a powerful attempt to mythologize the artist’s early portrait by returning, as James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), to ancient Greek stories.”
Updike had told Charlie Reilly in 1986, “For The Centaur, I had Ulysses in my head at all times.” Eight years earlier Updike had remarked that “the book had its origins in a little children’s book of Greek mythology which my ex-wife had as a girl and which I was just reading around in. Somewhere in it, I came across this variant, this footnote almost, to the Centaur myth. . . . And I thought, well, this is an unusual myth, especially in the sense that so few Greek myths involve the idea of sacrificing or laying down one’s life for another. . . . So, I began with the myth, and then my own father very naturally attached himself to it because he sort of loomed as a centaur in my own life at that time. The novel really took off with the myth, and for that reason the myth is really in the foreground of the novel, not in the background as in Ulysses.”
The ALA conference panel in Boston featured (l to r) Peter Bailey, Jim Plath, David Updike, and Olga Karasik-Updike. David brought his mother’s first edition of The Centaur, which had inside it a telegram of praise from one of the Soviet Union’s most famous writers—a note that Karasik-Updike read and contextualized for the audience.
Fairway Philosophy blogger Matthew Chominski had Updike on the mind this past week. Two of his posts were devoted to Updike the golfer.
In an April 27, 2023 post, “Golf and the Shortness of Life,” Chominski wrote, “The great American author and golf devotee was once in the presence of a young woman who informed him that life was too short ‘for crossword puzzles and for golf.’ His responsory ruminations are worth quoting at length:
“‘The nature of humankind must be considered before we decide what life is too short for. Is it too short for sex, for instance, or is sex its business? Men and women need to play, and it is a misused life that has no play scheduled into it. Crossword puzzles, even, have a fit place in some psychological budgets. With them, as with golf, we set ourselves to solve a puzzle nature has not posed. Nothing in natural selection demands that we learn how to beat a small ball into a hole with a minimum number of strokes. . . . The great green spaces of a golf course remember the landscape in which the human animal found his soul. Certainly the sight of our favorite fairway wandering toward the horizon is a balm to the eyes and a boon to the spirit. Our mazy progress through the eighteen is a trek such as prehistoric man could understand, and the fact that the trek is fatiguingly long constitutes part of its primitive rightness.'” Read the whole post.
Then, on an April 29, 2023 post titled “Golf’s Peculiar Bliss,” Chominski reminded golfers and Updike fans of a video clip in which John Updike was filmed on his home course, Myopia Hunt Club, intercut with footage and a voiceover of Updike reading from his golf essays.
In an opinion column (“Take That, ChatGPT!”) written for Boston Magazine, John D. Spooner voiced his reaction to a new artificial intelligence writing program and cited Updike as an example of “some things that only a human can do well. Writing is one of them.”
“John Updike was one of my gods,” Spooner wrote. “In my view, Updike was the greatest man of letters in America from the 1960s through the 1990s. He wrote novels and short stories. He wrote poems and essays. When he was president of the Harvard Lampoon, there were times when he wrote the entire issue. And illustrated it as well. He had gone to Oxford to study drawing. One of his classic pieces described Ted Williams’s last baseball game. ‘The Kid’ would never tip his hat to the crowd after a home run. He just ran the bases, with no expression and his classic, easy stride. Williams hit a home run that last day. He never acknowledged the fans. Updike wrote, ‘Gods do not answer letters.’ One of the greatest lines ever to describe an athlete.
“Amazingly, this most erudite of authors loved golf. A mutual friend arranged a game at Updike’s course, where they both belonged. I was excited about what I could ask him about his books, his life, and his insights on writing. But on the course, Updike was all business. It wasn’t ‘a good walk spoiled.’ It was his focus on the game, his game, and not about my favorite sport, ‘shootin’ the breeze.’ It was a drizzly day on the North Shore of Boston. Updike was polite, a gentleman on the course, long pants in the summertime. His swing was a manufactured one as if he had spent a lot of money on a lot of lessons, and it produced a routine with a lot of parts—a routine he completely focused on. We played for a few dollars, two players against two. The rain came down harder and harder, with no chance to ask my hero anything related to writing.
“We kept playing in the rain. Updike seemed, on every shot, to be replaying the lessons he had taken. The friend who had invited me to play said, ‘John is a focused dude. He goes through his routine like there’s no one else here. And he wants to win.’ My glasses were fogged up from the rain. Now I know that Updike was not going to give me any creative secrets, which, of course, I resented. So I did not want to fork over any money to my hero. My host, who was a really good player, said to me, ‘If we lose, it’s your fault.’
“We came to the 18th hole all even. Updike had a three-foot putt to win the match. It curled around the cup. And stayed out. I won two dollars, carried over from the front nine.
“We all shook hands and had a beer in the clubhouse. I figured that now was my chance to ask him about his writing life. But he tossed down his beer, got up, and said, ‘Nice playing with you, gentlemen.’ Updike walked out of the club bar. Gods do not answer letters.”
Updike’s favorite typewriter, a manual Olivetti Linea 88 made in Great Britain circa 1968-69. It will soon go on permanent display in The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shillington, Pa.
