Category Archives: Updike’s Life & Times

Updike’s sartorial style on display in new coffee table book

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Everyone has a style, a “look”—even John Updike, who’s more famous for his elegant and erudite literary style. That style is on display in a new book by Terry Newman, Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, which comes out in hardcover on June 27, 2017.

From the HarperCollins website:

Discover the signature sartorial and literary style of fifty men and women of letters, including Maya Angelou; Truman Capote; Colette; Bret Easton Ellis; Allen Ginsberg; Patti Smith; Karl Ove Knausgaard; and David Foster Wallace; in this unique compendium of profiles—packed with eighty black-and-white photographs, excerpts, quotes, and fast facts—that illuminates their impact on modern fashion.

Whether it’s Zadie Smith’s exotic turban, James Joyce’s wire-framed glasses, or Samuel Beckett’s Wallabees, a writer’s attire often reflects the creative and spiritual essence of his or her work. As a non-linear sensibility has come to dominate modern style, curious trendsetters have increasingly found a stimulating muse in writers—many, like Joan Didion, whose personal aesthetic is distinctly “out of fashion.” For decades, Didion has used her work, both her journalism and experimental fiction, as a mirror to reflect her innermost emotions and ideas—an originality that has inspired Millennials, resonated with a new generation of fashion designers and cultural tastemakers, and made Didion, in her eighties, the face of Celine in 2015.

Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore examines fifty revered writers—among them Samuel Beckett; Quentin Crisp; Simone de Beauvoir; T.S. Eliot; F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; Malcolm Gladwell; Donna Tartt; John Updike; Oscar Wilde; and Tom Wolfe—whose work and way of dress bears an idiosyncratic stamp influencing culture today. Terry Newman combines illuminating anecdotes about authors and their work, archival photography, first-person quotations from each writer and current designers, little-known facts, and clothing-oriented excerpts that exemplify their original writing style.

Each entry spotlights an author and a signature wardrobe moment that expresses his or her persona, and reveals how it influences the fashion world today. Newman explores how the particular item of clothing or style has contributed to fashion’s lingua franca—delving deeper to appraise its historical trajectory and distinctive effect. Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore is an invaluable and engaging look at the writers we love—and why we love what they wear—that is sure to captivate lovers of great literature and sophisticated fashion.

HarperCollins pre-order link

Amazon pre-order link

 

Novelist’s best kiss: John Updike

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Rosanna Greenstreet of The Guardian recently played 23 questions with novelist Ann Patchett, whose novels The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, and State of Wonder were shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), and this interesting exchange popped up:

What was the best kiss of your life?
I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn’t the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.

Well, there’s a new spin on the old phrase kiss-and-tell. . . .

The rest of her responses are below:

“Ann Patchett: My best kiss? I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award.” 

New De Bellis book on Updike slated for summer release

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John Updike Remembered:  Friends, Family and Colleagues Reflect on the Writer and the Man, edited by Jack De Bellis, will be published this summer by McFarland Books and is now available to pre-order. The softcover volume features 53 remembrances that “present a prismatic view of the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and his work through anecdote and insight” as “interviews and essays from family, friends and associates reveal sides of the novelist perhaps unfamiliar to the public—Updike the high school prankster, the golfer, the creator of bedtime stories, the charming ironist, the faithful correspondent with scholars, the devoted friend and the dedicated practitioner of his craft,” as described on the McFarland website. List price is $29.95.

“Contributors include: his first wife, Mary Pennington, and three of their children; high school and college friends; authors John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates and Nicholson Baker; journalists Terri Gross and Ann Goldstein; and scholars Jay Parini, William Pritchard, James Plath, and Adam Begley, Updike’s biographer.”

De Bellis, who is Professor Emeritus of English at Lehigh University, was a founder of The John Updike Society and served on the board of directors from 2009-14. A member of the editorial board of The John Updike Review, he is best known among scholars for the books he has edited or written on Updike:

—John Updike, 1967-1993: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994)
—The John Updike Encyclopedia (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000)
—John Updike: The Critical Responses to the “Rabbit” Saga (Oak Knoll Press, 2003)
—John Updike: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1948-2007, co-authored by Michael Broomfield (Oak Knoll Press, 2008)
—John Updike’s Early Years (Lehigh University Press, 2013)

Book on famous stutterers includes chapter on Updike

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In Chapter 12 of Famous Stutterers, author Gerald R. McDermott begins,

“Until John Updike (1932-2009), no one had ever described stuttering with such dead-on precision. Once he compared it to a traffic jam. ‘I have lots of words inside me: but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.’

“He painted a picture of facial tics that will make any relative of a stutterer groan with recognition.
Viewing myself on taped television, I see the repulsive symptoms
of an approaching stammer take possession of my face—an
electronically rapid flutter of the eyelids, a distortion of the mouth
as of a leather purse being cinched, a terrifying hardening of the
upper lip, a fatal tensing and a lifting of the voice

“All stutterers will nod knowingly when they hear him refer to that ‘untrustworthy’ part of himself that ‘can collapse at awkward or anxious moments into a stutter.’ They might smile at his philosophical conclusion that stuttering is a sign of the ‘duality of our existence, the ability of the body and soul to say no to one another.’ Or his reflection that a stammer is the acknowledgement of unacknowledged complexities surrounding even the simplest of verbal exchanges.”

Other famous stutterers included in the book are Moses, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Joshua Chamberlain, King George VI, Winston Churchill, Byron Pitts, Marilyn Monroe, John Stossel, and Annie Glenn.

Amazon link

De Bellis featured in WDIY interview

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jackdebellis-webJohn Updike Society cofounder and former director Jack De Bellis, whose John Updike Encyclopedia and John Updike’s Early Years have been indispensable for Updike scholars, was featured in an interview on WDIY, Lehigh Valley’s Community NPR Station, on Dec. 6, 2016.

Asking the questions was Lehigh Valley Discourse host John Pearce.

Here’s the audio link.

Updike wrote to oppose John Lennon deportation

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screen-shot-2016-12-11-at-6-38-17-pmA City Pages article on music by Jay Boller titled “Hey Prude: How one penis-fearing Minnesotan tipped the FBI to John Lennon” tells of the reaction that started an FBI file that grew until it deportation became a threat for the former Beatle. Featuring himself and mate Yoko Ono naked on the album cover for Two Virgins (1968) was only the beginning. It was his anti-war voice that was the loudest and his involvement with experimental drug-use that gave the FBI its opening.

However, “Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan would join dozens of rational stars—including Jasper Johns, Joan Baez, and John Updike—in writing letters of support for Lennon to the INS, which began deportation efforts in 1972.

For the whole story, click here.

Golf dreamers (and writers): a North Shore man remembers Updike

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updike-shem“I met John Updike in 1980, at a PEN/New England gathering,” recalled Dr. Steve Bergman, Professor of Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School. “I was shocked to see him–I’d never met a writer before. I overheard him telling Tim O’Brien the writer that he wanted to play golf that week and would Tim be interested? Tim said yes. They needed another for a foursome,and I introduced myself, and was accepted,” Bergman wrote on his blog, Samuel Shem: Conversation, Events & Book Talk. Shem is his pen name.

“Over the years, I would say we became best friends. Not that John would show much feeling, really, but I would often ask him to read something I was working on, and he’d talk about his work–and he used a character named Toby Bergman, editor of the local paper in Witches of Eastwick, who ‘breaks his leg’ (Bergman my real name) and in my next novel, The Spirit of the Place, there was, in return, one “Toby Updike, editor of the local paper, who breaks his leg.” Marvelous man.

Bergman concluded, “In a rough time, when he hadn’t heard from me in a while, he would always call–to talk about golf, or when we could next lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club (I was a member and they had a great buffet). He scheduled the next drop-off of a few cartons of his memorabilia at the Houghton Library just across the street, so it was convenient. I have this photo on my desk, of him and me in golf gear. I miss him to this day.”

You can “read up” on Bergman-Shem at Goodreads.

On word processing and writing habits

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The Atlantic‘s Robinson Meyer contributed a piece on “How to Write a History of Writing Software,” subtitled “Isaac Asimov, John Updike, and John Hersey changed their writing habits to adapt to word processors, according to the first literary historian of the technology.” Meyer interviewed University of Maryland English professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, who has just published the first book-length history of word processing, Track Changes.

“It is more than a history of high art. Kirschenbaum follows how writers of popular and genre fiction adopted the technology long before vaunted novelists did. He determines how their writing habits and financial powers changed once they moved from typewriter to computing. And he details the unsettled ways that the computer first entered the home. (When he first bought a computer, for example, the science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov wasn’t sure whether it should go in the living room or the study.)

381b75cb92d30e801cc36925695d80ef“His new history joins a much larger body of scholarship about other modern writing technologies—specifically, typewriters. For instance, scholars confidently believe that the first book ever written with a typewriter was Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain. They have conducted typographical forensics to identify precisely how T.S. Elioit’s The Wasteland was composed—which typewriters were used, and when. And they have collected certain important machines for their archives.”

Kirschenbaum says that while he can’t say for certain which writer was first to compose using a word processor or computer, notable candidates are science-fiction author Jerry Pournelle and author John Hersey, who edited Hiroshima on a keyboard and used to computer to generate camera-ready copy.

“Another interesting story that’s in the book is about John Updike, who gets a Wang word processor at about the time Stephen King does, in the early 1980s. I was able to inspect the last typewriter ribbon that he used in the last typewriter he owned. A collector who had the original typewriter was kind enough to lend it to me. And you can read the text back off that typewriter ribbon—and you can’t make this stuff up, this is why it’s so wonderful to be able to write history—the last thing that Updike writes with the typewriter is a note to his secretary telling her that he won’t need her typing services because he now has a word processor.”

Pictured: Stock photo of typical Wang word processor from the 1980s.

 

John Updike, Accidental Conservative?

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Screen Shot 2016-04-17 at 9.00.17 PMEchoing a critical essay that Society member Yoav Fromer wrote, Con Chapman explores the circumstances surrounding Updike’s hawkish Vietnam War stance in “John Updike, Accidental Conservative,” posted April 12, 2016 on Easy Street: a magazine of books and culture. He also provides additional context.

“The Times, in a particularly dishonest bit of sleight-of-hand, said that Updike was the lone American writer in the collection [Authors Take Sides on Vietnam] who was ‘unequivocally for’ the United States intervention in Vietnam. This was untrue; novelist James Michener, who had spent much time in Asia, was more forthright in his defense of the American presence there than Updike….”

Ironically, as Chapman notes of Updike, “Had he not been summering on Martha’s Vineyard he would have been busy, he recalled later, and probably wouldn’t have answered the query, which was designed to elicit responses that could be assembled into a book of the sort that had been put together three decades earlier from writers’ reactions to the Spanish Civil War.

“Instead, he composed a thoughtful response that considered both sides of the question; he was, he wrote, uncomfortable about what he called America’s ‘military adventure’ in South Vietnam, but he doubted that the Viet Cong, who used force to rule the peasants of the country, had a ‘moral edge’ over the United States. He said the country needed free elections, and if they chose Communism the U.S. should leave, but until that time he did ‘not see that we can abdicate our burdensome position.'”

Chapman concludes, “In the long run, the controversy didn’t hurt Updike, who was unceasingly productive to the end of his life, but in the short run it cost him. Within a few months his tenure as a writer of unsigned ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces for The New Yorker ended when his editor objected to the tone of a piece that suggested, when Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election in 1968, that the President ‘might have been right after all.’ Updike acquiesced in a suggested revision, then decided to leave the column ‘to other, more leftish hands.’

“History has, of course, proven Updike right…,” Chapman concludes.

Author: Dying writers left things messy, unresolved

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VioletHourIn a New York Times article to promote her new book The Violent Hour: Great Writers at the End, Katie Roiphe talks about the false notion that “when someone is dying, a new, honest, generous space opens up; that in the harrowing awfulness of dying there is a directness, an expansiveness, a loosening of inhibitions, the potential for things to be said that could not be said before. But if one does actually manage to pull off a last conversation, what can it be but a few words in a lifetime of talk?”

Roiphe featured John Updike in her book and includes remarks about Updike here as well:

“I talked about John Updike’s death with his ex-wife, Mary. She told me that there were questions she wanted to ask him that only he could answer. I heard this over and over. There were questions the bereaved wanted to ask. There were mysteries or confusions that could be cleared up if only they could have engineered that last conversation.

“Updike actually wrote about this. In Rabbit at Rest, as Rabbit Angstrom lies dying, he sees on his son’s face, ‘some unaskable question.’ Rabbit feels sorry for everything he has put the kid through, his various ebullient and destructive flights from the family, for instance, but he can’t quite muster that thought into words. His son looks at him expectantly. The last conversation is perhaps just the feeling that there is something more to say.”

Here’s the full article.

Roiphe was also featured on NPR, and quoted in a story titled “With Fear, Determination And Poetry: How Great Writers Face Death,” which features an audio link as well.

“On John Updike, who wrote poems in the hospital after being diagnosed with lung cancer

It was amazing. He had very little time — just weeks before he was dead. I actually went up and looked at the manuscripts and you can see in his handwriting how arduous it was. At that last moment, when most people would just be watching television or railing against the universe, that was what he did and I found it very moving. …

The poems have a sort of quality of reporting — that he’s bringing news. And he talks about writing as turning pain into honey, which I find a really beautiful way to think about what writers do: taking this incredibly awful — maybe the most awful thing that can happen to you — and turning it into honey just with words.”