Book on famous stutterers includes chapter on Updike

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.”

Cancer Today spotlights Updike

Cancer Today, the publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, featured “A Storied Life” by writer Sue Rochman in the Winter 2015-16 issue, which is also available online. In it, Rochman details how “literary realist John Updike used the scaffold of his own life, including his lung cancer diagnosis, to explore the shared experiences of our time.”

Screen Shot 2016-03-02 at 9.43.10 PMShe writes, “Not only did he write in many forms, Updike wrote all the time, producing on average a book a year. That didn’t change after he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008. He spent the months before he died writing poems on facing mortality, many of which were published in his collection Endpoint and Other Poems.

Lung cancer, Rochman reports, “is divided into two main types: small cell, which makes up about 15 percent of all diagnoses and non-small cell, which accounts for about 85 percent.

“It’s not widely known what type of lung cancer Updike had. It is known that he began to have some breathing problems in the summer of 2008. The initial diagnosis was bronchitis. When the cough didn’t clear, he was told it was pneumonia, a diagnosis he described as ‘oblong ghosts, one paler than the other on the doctor’s viewing screen’ in a poem dated Nov. 6. Two weeks later, as Thanksgiving approached, Updike spent five days at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, undergoing the tests that led to his lung cancer diagnosis.

“A misdiagnosis of pneumonia is ‘unfortunately, a common scenario,’ says medical oncologist Joan Schiller, deputy director of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. ‘Pneumonia is a heck of a lot more common than lung cancer, so it’s understandable that someone with a cough would be treated for pneumonia and then later find out it is lung cancer.’

“When people die so quickly from cancer, it is often assumed the disease spread quickly. That can and does happen, but another common reason for a late lung cancer diagnosis is that it can be hard to know it’s there. ‘One reason is that the lungs don’t have a lot of nerves, so it doesn’t cause pain—and you can’t see it,’ says Schiller. Still, she says, even for lung cancer, Updike’s two-month span from diagnosis to death was unusually quick.

“Updike’s cancer was treated with chemotherapy. Were he diagnosed today, says Gregory A. Masters, a medical oncologist specializing in lung cancer at Christiana Care’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center in Newark, Delaware, he might have had more options.

“‘Instead of having everyone with stage IV lung cancer get the same chemotherapy,’ says Masters, ‘we now see if the patient has one or more of the specific gene alterations that allow us to use a targeted therapy. If they do, we can give them a treatment that is more effective, less toxic and that will control the tumor for more time.'”

Here’s the complete article, which also offers a career summary of Updike and his literary importance.

Franzen on The Birth of The New Yorker Story

in an essay “drawn from The ’50s: The Story of a Decade, an anthology of New Yorker articles, stories, and poems” published the last week in October, Jonathan Franzen considers the writers and stories that came to characterize the magazine’s fiction.

“Along with John Updike and Ann Beattie, Cheever was the paradigmatic ‘New Yorker story’ writer, Franzen says, adding, “While Cheever and Updike were creating the main template for the New Yorker story, regional variants were flourishing.”

“The Birth of ‘The New Yorker Story'”

Fluff piece cites Rushdie-Updike feud

In “‘As usual, words fail him’—6 great literary feuds,” a glorified “list” story meant to entertain, The Telegraph’s Morwenna Ferrier and Rupert Hawksley offer a fluff piece that doesn’t go into much detail and didn’t involve much research. But it’s worth noting that Updike gets a mention:

Salman Rushdie vs John Updike

“Rushdie, as we know, is no stranger to controversy, but his battle with John Updike tops all his feuds.

“In 2006, Updike denounced Rushdie’s novel, Shalimar the Clown, writing ‘Why, oh why did Salman Rushdie, in his new novel call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls?.’ Rushdie responded to Updike’s query in The Guardian: ‘Why, oh why… ? Well, why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called “John Updike”.’ He went on to describe Updike’s latest, Terrorist, as ‘beyond awful,’ and suggested Updike should ‘stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do.’ Because what’s a little quibbling between literary giants…”