Category Archives: Updike’s Life & Times

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.

New Yorker Cartoonists blogger spills the contents of their Summer Library

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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

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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

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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.

Updike’s beloved dogwood tree, in bloom

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.

Updike’s first New York Times mention came in a parenting article

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Photo:  Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

Here’s a fascinating bit of trivia:  John Updike—reviewed and interviewed at least as much and probably more than any other writer—first appeared in The New York Times not in connection with his writing, but rather his parenting.

Way back on March 2, 1958, Dorothy Barclay compiled an article on “The Magic World of Words” that appeared in The Times.

The public was reminded of this by a recent article, “John Updike on Parenting, Agatha Christie in the Gossip Pages: First Mentions of Famous Authors in The Times.”

“Not long before his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published, Updike—already an acclaimed short-story writer—was featured in a parenting article, ‘The Magic World of Words,’ which discussed the best ways to spark a child’s love for language. Updike, the father of toddlers, told the paper in 1958, ‘When children are picking up words with rapidity, between 2 and 3, say, tell them the true word for something even if it is fairly abstruse and long. A long correct word is exciting for a child. Makes them laugh; my daughter never says “rhinoceros” without laughing.’”

Blogger: Updike’s Thurber Dog Went to Harvard

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Pets weren’t allowed in the dorm when John Updike went to Harvard in the fall of 1950, but he took his dog anyway . . . that is, James Thurber’s drawing of a dog made especially for young Updike, whose first ambition was to become a cartoonist. Updike had written a fan letter to the famed cartoonist asking for a drawing to hang on his bare wall, and Thurber obliged.

Last week the Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events blog featured Updike’s Thurber cartoon, courtesy of Miranda Updike; this week, the blog adds a letter that Updike had written home to his parents and other “Plowvillians,” provided by Michael Updike.

In that letter dated September 29, 1952, young Updike writes, “This room is always cold and in shadow, for it faces the moon, whereas last year’s room faced the sun. I have the window open to admit the warmth. Coming in to our room is like entering a cave, dank, mossy, but without drawings (beyond Thurber’s) on the wall . . . .”

Read the entire letter and blog post.

 

 

New Yorker cartoonist blog features Updike’s Thurber

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New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin posted an entry today on Ink Spill: New Yorker Cartoonists News and Events titled “Updike’s Thurber.” In it,  readers get a rare glimpse of the cartoon dog that Thurber drew especially for a young ‘tween fan named John Updike (courtesy of Miranda Updike).

“For those of us who treasure Thurber’s art, there is I would suggest, nothing  more wonderful than a Thurber drawn dog. In Updike’s Introduction to Lee Lorenz’s The World of William Steig, he tells us that in 1944, when he was 12 years old, he wrote Thurber a fan letter. Thurber responded with the drawing you see at the top of this post”.

In musing about the relationship between Updike and Thurber, Maslin shared his “favorite Updike description of Thurber’s art: ‘…oddly tender…a personal art that captured in ingenous scrawls a modern man’s bitter experience and nervous excess.'”