Updike Society acquires author’s typewriter

Posted on March 21, 2023 by johnupdikesociety

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

Posted on March 5, 2023 by johnupdikesociety

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

Posted on February 25, 2023 by johnupdikesociety

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

Posted on February 14, 2023 by johnupdikesociety

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

Posted on February 3, 2023 by johnupdikesociety

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.

Yahoo! feature identifies celebrities living with psoriasis

Posted on January 2, 2023 by johnupdikesociety

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

Posted on December 28, 2022 by johnupdikesociety

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.

New Yorker Cartoonists blogger spills the contents of their Summer Library

Posted on August 17, 2022 by johnupdikesociety

For his August 16, 2022 post at Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News, History, and Events, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin began,

“For the past twenty-seven summers, my wife, Liza Donnelly, and I have gone to the same Downeast home, and over those years, have built a small library of books, some New Yorker-centric (but many having nothing to do with the magazine).” Depicted in the photo are “most of the books either brought here or bought here at library book sales.”

“Occasionally,” Maslin confessed, “I take a book back to New York,” depriving their growing summer library of the volume—such as James Thurber’s The Seal in the Bedroom, which flippered back with them last year at summer’s end.

“The titles by Liebling, Benchley, Capote, Beattie are like good friends,” Maslin wrote. “I enjoy seeing them, being around them. Adam Begley’s Updike biography came up with us this year. I’m on my third read through, visiting parts I just had to experience again (last night I re-read the part about Updike driving into Manhattan to meet William Shawn for the very first time, but having to delay the meeting by a day because he (Updike) got lost somewhere in the vicinity of the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey). Someone should do a collection of pieces about Updike driving. About a decade ago, at a library sale up near the Canadian border, I found a first edition of Updike’s Rabbit, Run (still dust-jacketed) for about 75 cents. That too went back to New York to sit on the Updike shelf.”

Read the entire post

Historic Ipswich marks the Updike years

Posted on July 16, 2022 by johnupdikesociety

Shillington, Pa. isn’t the only community that’s able to claim John Updike as a “native son.” Ipswich, Mass. also deserves a share of the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and Gordon Harris of HistoricIpswich.org explains why:

The Updikes lived in the Ipswich area for 17 years in three different houses, where John and Mary were active in community affairs and Updike was working in Ipswich when Couples put him on the cover of Time magazine and in the international spotlight.

“Like Ipswich, Tarbox [the town named in Couples] was a small coastal town founded in 1634. Its streets were lined with 17th century saltboxes, the downtown street had three banks and a Woolworths.”

Harris notes that Updike, at the age of 32, became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Below, far right, Updike participated in the Ipswich 17th Century Day pageant.

Marking John Updike’s passing

Posted on January 27, 2022 by johnupdikesociety

Thirteen years ago, on Jan. 27, 2009, BBC-radio phoned John Updike Society president James Plath to get his reaction to Updike’s passing.

“What?”

It was shocking news to Plath, whose on-air response was less than composed.

Updike’s death from lung cancer was a surprise to many who loved and looked forward to reading a new book from him every year for the previous five decades.

The Telegraph (U.K.) called him “one of America’s greatest and most prolific literary icons, acclaimed for his precise, intimate style of writing,” while the BBC acknowledged that “John Updike’s novels, magisterial dissections of the soul of post-World War II middle America, placed him at the very pinnacle of his profession. . . . Whether writing novels, short stories, essays, or poems, John Updike’s work always seemed to find the pulse of modern America.” Closer to home, The New York Times praised Updike for being “kaleidoscopically gifted” and called him “the great chronicler of middle-class America . . . . America’s last true man of letters.”

Today, on the anniversary of his death, it might be a good idea to pull a favorite Updike book off the shelf and reread a favorite passage or two.

For a writer, that seems like the perfect toast.

THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

Celebrating one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century

Category Archives: Updike’s Life & Times