Category Archives: Updike’s Life & Times

Fairway Philosophy blogger focuses on Updike the golfer

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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.

Inquirer spotlights John Updike Childhood Home

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When John Updike was still alive, writer William Ecenbarger convinced the famed novelist to drive with him through Berks County to visit childhood haunts. That account first appeared in The Inquirer Sunday Magazine on June 12, 1983, and was reprinted in part in the first chapter of Adam Begley’s biography (Updike, HarperCollins 2014) and in full in John Updike’s Pennsylvania Interviews (Lehigh University Press, 2016).

Recently Ecenbarger returned to Shillington to write about Updike again—this time to see for himself how Updike’s beloved childhood home looks now that it has been turned into a museum.

In “Step inside Pulitzer Prize-winner John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pa.,” which appeared in the Sunday, April 2 Inquirer, Ecenbarger wrote, “The house in Berks County, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been professionally restored to look as it did during Updike’s days here but the ‘John Updike Childhood Home’ museum is still a work-in-progress. They just received an Olivetti manual typewriter that was used by Updike.”

Ecenbarger added, “There are 10 rooms of exhibits, many with explanatory storyboards: Items owned by the Updikes and original to the house. His high school transcript shows nearly all A’s except physical education. Copies of The Chatterbox, the high school newspaper to which Updike contributed many articles. . . . Smiling down from the living room wall is a portrait of Updike done by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson, Edward.”

Ecenbarger wrote, “Updike was inconsolable when, at his mother’s insistence, the Updikes moved from 117 Philadelphia Avenue to a farm owned by her family. He wrote in a poem, ‘We have one home, the first.'” This home, once a source of pride for Updike, is now a source of pride for the community. Thanks to the efforts of director Maria Lester, close to 800 Berks County students toured the house last year to learn about one of Berks County’s most famous and accomplished residents. But Ecenbarger was right: the museum still is a work in progress. Seven new exhibit cases of unique items will be added within the next several months—reason enough to visit and revisit the place where Updike said his “artistic eggs were hatched.”

Writer recalls golfing with Updike, wants less AI, more Updike

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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.

Updike Society acquires author’s typewriter

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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.

Updike 2002 reading, remarks at Illinois Wesleyan University reveal insecurity

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Updike, flanked by IWU President Minor Myers, jr. and Provost Janet McNew

On February 11, 2002, John Updike was asked to deliver remarks to commemorate the opening of the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. That Founders’ Day Convocation, now online, presents a view of Updike that would be repeated many times over: a much admired literary giant receiving, somewhat shyly and awkwardly, an honorary degree and delivering remarks that almost always included a reading of his own work.

On this occasion Updike read from a bound proof of his Collected Poems. But after a poem about a college appointment that “some august professor” had scheduled, then forgotten, Updike remarked, “I always had the feeling that I was somehow not, try as hard as I might, not quite pleasing to Harvard. I went there and was grateful and was stunned and I imbibed the New England magic and I met my future wife, and was president of the Harvard Lampoon, and got a good degree and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa, and yet I felt it all, in Harvard’s eyes, wasn’t quite enough. There was something un-Harvardian about me. . . . I was inexorably gauche in the eyes of Harvard.”

Updike received dozens of honorary degrees during his long writing career, but most of them seem to have vanished or were discarded, while others turned up for sale in independent bookstores—the going rate, according to a Houston Chronicle article, being $750. But the whereabouts of this particular degree is indeed known.

The tube Updike was handed containing his Illinois Wesleyan Degree is in the collection of The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa., and will soon be added to new displays in the upstairs room that was once his maternal grandparents’. The room’s theme: The Writer’s Life.

Choate Bridge Pub in Ipswich to host Updike event

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John Updike made Ipswich internationally famous, and the small north shore town near Boston will acknowledge his impact on April 28, 2023 with a plaque and celebration.

When John Updike first moved to Ipswich he wrote in a home office at the Polly Dole House, but then found an office above The Dolphin restaurant. There he composed many of his acclaimed literary works, including Of the Farm, Rabbit Redux, “A & P,” “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” The Centaur, Couples, Midpoint, A Month of Sundays, and Bech: A Book.

While in Ipswich, Updike also helped write Something to Preserve: A report on Historic Preservation in America’s best-preserved Puritan town, Ipswich, Massachusetts—published in 1975 by the Ipswich Historical Commission, of which he was a member. Now that same commission will erect a plaque commemorating Updike’s literary impact and contributions to the community.

According to the Ipswich Local News story “Ipswich finally gives Updike his due” by Trevor Meek (Feb. 24, 2023), on Friday, April 28, the commission will unveil a commemorative plaque on the Caldwell Building at 15 South Main St., where Updike wrote in “the now-vacant suite #5 on the second floor” in a “smoky office.” Michael Updike told Meek, “We’d visit him often, in the days when you could still walk around town unsupervised as a six year old. A lot of times, we’d go there as he was about to have lunch at the Dolphin restaurant.”

The Dolphin closed down many years ago, but in its place is the Choate Bridge Pub, “located directly below suite #5.” The pub will host the celebratory event, which will feature a reading of “A & P” (a store no more, but a building still to be seen in Ipswich). In addition, a special menu will include Updike’s preferred lunch, which Michael said was “a pastrami sandwich with a side of pea soup.”

Rachel Meyer, treasurer of the IHC, said that there might even be an Updike cocktail available for the event, one named after Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. But the IHC is “still negotiating the finer points of the event with the pub.”

The April 28 event will give Updike fans an excuse to travel to Ipswich and also enjoy seeing the exterior of the Polly Dole House, the old A & P, the setting for “The Hillies,” and the site of the first church in Ipswich that featured so prominently in Couples.

“Updike’s work defines this town,” Meyer said. “It’s part of a greater literary legacy too. This is one of the places that Anne Bradstreet—America’s first published poet—lived.”

Memoirist recalls father-Updike connection

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Recently The New York Times reviewed The Critic’s Daughter by Priscilla Gilman, and one passage in particular will be of interest to fans of John Updike:

“As a critic, Gilman was brilliant; he made the light in your head brighten by a few lumens. He was also a hanging judge. The New York Times critic John Leonard described his style as ‘confrontation criticism.’ He often got as good as he gave. John Updike zinged him on several occasions and gave an unpleasant lawyer the name Gilman in his novel S. These barbs only refreshed Gilman’s zeal for battle.”

Gilman’s memoir, released last week, is described at Amazon as “an exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity.” Her father was writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman, and her mother the renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit. Their marriage ended when Priscilla was 10 years old. “The resulting cascade of disturbing relations—about her parents’ hollow marriage, her father’s double life and tortured sexual identity—fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him”

Sportswriter marks the anniversary of Updike’s passing

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Today The Salem News published a column (“Updike remembered 14 years later”) by sportswriter Gary Larrabee.

“It’s hard to comprehend that it’s been 14 years since one of our most famous and accomplished North Shore residents died,” the column began. “John Updike, of 675 Hale St., Beverly, died on Jan. 27, 2009, at Kaplan Family Hospice House, also known as Care Dimensions, in Danvers, less than two months shy of his 77th birthday.”

“Lung cancer was the culprit. Danvers was never so famous than in becoming the dateline of Updike’s death, read and spoken in newscasts around the world.

“He left behind his wife, Martha, four children, a golf game with which he constantly struggled for many years at his beloved Myopia Hunt Club, and an epic literary bibliography that garnered the Pennsylvania native global fame.

“As much as he savored the opportunity over many years to play the revered Myopia layout, he also got a kick, for years, playing our region’s public nine-hole courses, like Cape Ann and Candlewood.”

Larrabee recalled Updike’s prodigious output and wrote, “This scorecard does not include his one hugely popular book on his ruminations of the game he loved, Golf Dreams, and essays he wrote for the magazines published for the 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline and the 2001 U.S. Senior Open at Salem Country Club.

“The vast majority of these works were created from his gifted imagination in his two North Shore hometowns, first Ipswich, where he wrote in a small upstairs rental space downtown, and later in his Beverly Farms home where he wordsmithed overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.”

Read the whole column.

from the Myopia Hunt Club website

Yahoo! feature identifies celebrities living with psoriasis

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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.

Ipswich Historical Commission approves Updike plaque

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Stewart Lytle, reporting for The Town Common, writes that the Ipswich Historical Commission “is preparing to erect a plaque to honor the prolific author on the door of the Caldwell Building, which houses the Choate Bridge Pub. The owner, the John T. & Priscilla Coughlin Trust, has agreed to installing the plaque.” Pictured are Updike Society members visiting the location during the 2nd Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Boston.

While living in Ipswich, Updike was a member of the Ipswich Historical Commission and even helped write a book on Ipswich for the commission, Something to Preserve: A Report on Historic Preservation in America’s best-preserved Puritan town, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Couples landed Updike on the cover of Time magazine

“The exact position of the plaque—above or beside the door—has not been decided. Nor has the inscription been written by commission vice chair Rachel Meyer.

“The building is already on the National Registry, but most passersby know nothing of Updike renting an office” on the building’s second floor, where he wrote Couples, Rabbit Redux, and other novels and short stories.

Here’s a PDF of the entire Town Common story.