Category Archives: Updike’s Life & Times

Poetry blog offers advice and an Updike morsel

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That morsel would be a tiny bit of oatmeal cookie, as it turns out.

The Sept. 10, 2024 entry on the Best American Poetry blog by Nin Andrews features “Advice to Young Poets and a Poem by Kelli Russell Agodon” . . . but also a brief note on writers’ habits that includes Updike:

“Like Timothy Touchett, I enjoy studying other writers’ habits. I want to know what kinds of sorcery they employ. As a result, I can tell you that John Updike ate so much when he wrote, he didn’t like to go out to lunch and worried about his figure. He was partial to oatmeal cookies. Joan Didion edited at the end of the day with a drink in hand (Liquor, of course, played an important role for a lot writers—no need to list them all here.) John Ashbery enjoyed a nice cup of tea and classical music when he wrote, which was usually in the late afternoon. Charles Simic enjoyed writing when his wife was cooking. Eudora Welty could write anywhere—even in the car— and at any time, except at night when she was socializing. Flannery O’Connor could only write two hours a day and her drink was Coca Cola mixed with coffee. Simone de Beauvoir wrote from 10AM-1PM and from 5-9PM. Louise Glück found writing on a schedule “an annihilating experience.” A. R. Ammons wrote only when inspiration hit—he compared trying to write to trying to force yourself to go the bathroom when you have no urge. Anne Sexton took up writing after therapy sessions. Jack Kerouac had various rituals at different times—one was writing by candlelight, and another was doing “touch downs” which involved standing on his head and touching his toes to the ground. Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf wrote standing up. Wallace Stevens composed poems while walking to work. Gabriel García Márquez listened to the news before writing.  Amy Gerstler sometimes listens to recordings of rain while writing. I tried that once, and the rain put me into a deep and dreamless sleep.”

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 second Ipswich residence lists for sale

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The Local News reported that J. Barrett Realty just listed the Polly Dole house on 25 East Street—the second house John and Mary Updike lived in after they moved to the Ipswich area—for sale at $729,000. It’s the first time the house has been listed in 30 years.

Photo: J. Barrett Realty

The Updikes bought the house in 1958, a year before his first novel (The Poorhouse Fair) and first short story collection (The Same Door) were published by Knopf. The purchase, he told a New Yorker editor, made him feeling “quite panicked” because of mortgage payments that, for a writer still trying to establish himself, could be burdensome.

As Local News reporter Trevor Meek wrote, fictional versions of the Polly Dole house appeared in many of Updike’s short stories, “most notably in the ‘Maples Stories’ that trace the doomed-to-fail marriage of recurring characters Joan and Richard Maple,” and the “house inhabited by Angela and Piet Hanema, central characters in Updike’s controversial novel Couples (1968), also seems to be based on the East Street home.” Publication of the latter caused a row in Ipswich because people in this small North Shore town recognized elements of themselves in the novel, prompting the Updikes to move to London for a year to let things calm down.

In 1969, John and Mary sold the Polly Dole house to Alexander and Martha Bernhard. Meek quoted biographer Adam Begley’s succinct summary of what happened next:  “Soon, the Bernhards were part of the gang, and several years later John and Martha launched into an affair that broke up both marriages.”

Photo: J. Barrett Realty

Updike had jokingly told his young children that a big nut on the ceiling that had been turned to straighten the house was holding the house together, and if it was loosened the whole house might collapse. “Once we moved, the fact is, things fell apart,” Updike wrote in Architectural Digest.

According to the Historic Ipswich, the Polly Dole house has “elements from 1687, but acquired its current form in 1720.” Meek noted, “At 2,942 square feet, it sits on 0.24 acres and is being advertised as a multi-family home with two separate side-by-side units. The house last sold in 1995 for $238,000, according to property tax records.”

A look at writers looking on National Windows Day

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This National Windows Day (that’s a thing?), renowned photographer Jill Krementz shared some of the photos she took of writers by windows. Updike is among them, and so is Joyce Carol Oates, the keynote speaker at the 2nd John Updike Society Conference in Boston. All of the black-and-white photos are quite striking. Have a look!

(Pictured:  Photo of Chicago through a Field Museum window, taken by James Plath during the 2024 ALA Conference)

Novelist Spotlight podcast focuses on Updike, features Schiff

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On May 3, 2024, the “Novelist Spotlight: Interviews and insights with published fiction writers” blog looked in the rear-view mirror to discuss a writer who, according to host and novelist Mike Consol, wrote more beautifully in English than anyone else.

“Novelist Spotlight #153: The great John Updike, revisited by James Schiff” covers a lot of ground. Schiff, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and the editor of The John Updike Review, responds to such questions as his personal attraction to Updike, the early charge that Updike was big on style and small on content, backstories to Rabbit, Run, Updike’s attraction to art, Updike’s juggling of work and family, the thousands of letters Updike wrote, his time at Harvard, his sexually frank and graphic language, the Couples years, his alleged feud with Tom Wolfe, and, of course, Updike’s choice of subject matter.

Updike’s ‘Little Violet’ Ipswich home is for sale

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If you’re a John Updike fan and an old house fan—this one was built in 1832—and if $850,000 is within your budget, you should know that J. Barret & Co. recently listed the property at 68-70 Essex Road for sale.

The house was known as “Little Violet” when Updike and first-wife Mary lived in the house for 10 months before buying the Polly Dole House on East Street in Ipswich. It was their first residence in Ipswich, where the town commemorated Updike’s presence with a plaque on the side of the Choate Bridge building where he maintained a second-floor office years later.

As a Local News story points out, Updike turned a marble-floored room at the back of Little Violet into a study where he wrote. The article notes that Updike’s first chore at any house he bought was to make sure the mailbox or mail slot was fully functional and accessible. He wrote a poem about “Planting a Mailbox” first thing after moving into Little Violet.

Keillor on leaving home, mementos, and Updike

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Keillor at the 2016 Updike conference with society president James Plath

The New Hampshire Union Leader recently published “Garrison Keillor: The art of leaving home.” Keillor, who was the keynote speaker at the 4th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, S.C., wrote, “The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glassing sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well.”

Keillor wrote that he kept “artifacts of a long life. . . . I kept all these and other souvenirs. I never listened to the show [A Prairie Home Companion] myself and I have no memorabilia from it. It would only give me remorse that the show wasn’t better than it was. John Updike told me once that he rather enjoyed reading his early work but then he was a naturally cheerful man, rare for an author. Critics resented him for that and gave him grudging reviews; they preferred writers who had suffered, been imprisoned, exiled, or at least had abusive fathers. John was too American. There wasn’t much Russian or Spanish about him. He wrote because he was good at it and he knew it.

“And now in my old age I’ve found useful work as a stand-up cheerleader for adult cheerfulness, the basic goodness of life, a counter-voice to the diversity cops and agony aunts who’ve taken over publishing, journalism, public radio and TV, and much of academia. DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is stupidity on toast; the real problem with MacWoke is its penchant for dismal pessimism, its humorlessness. I grew up with fundamentalists who looked forward to the end of the world and now progressives do too.”

In a March 13, 2024 column for the New Hampshire Union Leader, “Mature man available for speaking, easy terms,” Keillor cited Updike again:  “And my hero John Updike, back in the days of White Male Authorship, got me into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of only three humorists in the club, which looks darned good on my résumé. People from my hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, look at that and think, ‘Him? He didn’t even make National Honor Society in high school. He got a B minus in English and even that was generous.'”

Poet considers Updike, her father, and truth in fiction (and vice versa)

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Poet Molly Fisk published an essay on “John Updike, His Stories, and Me” in the Oct. 25, 2021 issue of Harper’s Bazaar that shares some Updike family history and confronts the issues of truth in fiction . . . and fiction in truth.

“Almost exactly three years after my dad’s death, a short story by Uncle John appeared in The New Yorker called “Brother Grasshopper.” Everyone who knew me and my family knew that my uncle was John Updike. He married my mother’s older sister, Mary, when they were in college, and we Fisks spent every summer back East in Ipswich or Vermont or on Martha’s Vineyard with the Updikes. Each couple produced four children at regular intervals, so we had nearly parallel cousins. If you’ve read Couples or The Maples Stories, you know the general scene: beaches, chaos, shucking corn, tennis and cocktails, adultery. There were the usual family spats now and then, but as a child, I always thought of the four adults as good friends.”

But after “Brother Grasshopper” was published, Fisk’s answering machine blew up with messages asking if she’d seen the story and if she was “okay.” So she went out and bought a copy of the magazine to read Updike’s latest.

“There were all our family stories: driving home from Crane Beach jammed into the Ford Falcon with dripping ice cream cones that Irving cheerfully told us to throw out the window, so we did. There was the one wild one about Irving going missing just before my parents’ wedding and John finding him taking a bath in the brook. There was even the terrible saga of my dad’s climb on Mont Blanc when he was 20, where two of his friends died. John reset the event in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and killed only one.”

What shocked Fisk was that Updike had “written an essentially nonfictional story about my dad, changing only his name (to Carlyle), and then made him a producer of pornography. I was mortified.”

Read the rest of the article.

Ipswich humorist shares his Updike dream

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Updike had his Golf Dreams, and Bob Waite, who writes for The Local News in the North Shore area, had his own Updike dream to share with readers on July 13, 2023.

“In the dream, I discovered an unpublished John Updike manuscript titled Threesomes in his old office above the Choate Bridge Pub.

“My excitement was palpable. Could this be the long-awaited sequel to Couples, Updike’s 1968 novel chronicling the intertwining of 10 couples in a town called Tarbox? A town that bore a striking resemblance to Ipswich?

“Couples also bore a passing resemblance to another New England-set potboiler, Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place, which came out when Mia Farrow was as pre-teen and Woody Allen was still funny. Except Couples was better written and more explicit.”

Read the full article.