David Updike on Growing up Updike

Posted on January 5, 2015 by James Plath

David Updike, the current John Updike Scholar in Residence at Alvernia University, is featured in a new Alvernia Magazine article titled “Growing up Updike” (pp. 20-24).

In it, he talks about what it’s like being the son of one of America’s most celebrated authors and shares memories of one particular family trip to Pennsylvania, where his father “took us to see his old house in Shillington, but was too shy to knock and ask to go in,” so he “walked us back to the playing field [at the high school behind the house] and the shelter where he used to play roof ball,” David writes.

“Even at an early age I could sense his disappointment that we seemed to underappreciate these places which, for him, held such sweet emotional weight—the memory of childhood, of his being seven, or so, and sprinting out of the side door of his house [at 117 Philadelphia Ave.] to join his friends in the Pennsylvania twilight, to play a final game of roof ball.”

“It must have been a surprise to my parents, as it was to me, when I started to write short stories, and then odder still, had them accepted by The New Yorker. Photography, not writing, had been my preferred medium, and I knew well that my father had toiled for a decade or so—sending off countless cartoons, and spots, and light verse—before his poems were accepted by The New Yorker.

“I knew that my own success was somehow unjustified—unearned. I need not have worried, for in my mid-twenties things got more difficult, and I was languishing in New York, where I had moved for no very good reason . . . .”

Blogger shares Updike postcard

Posted on December 14, 2014 by James Plath

“Writing to Updike” is something that many readers and fans have done, and blogger Jeffrey Johnson has shared his own experience, complete with Updike’s response to his letter. Johnson notes Begley’s comment that Updike had mailed out “thousands of print-crowded three-by-five postcards” over his lifetime, and says, “Three of those thousands of postcards were addressed to me, one in response to each of three letters I wrote to Updike about his books.

“The first of those letters, written in the mid 80’s on my college electric typewriter, was a reflection on the novel Roger’s Version. The letter began with the thought that Updike might prefer that his readers would not bother to write back. The first line of the postcard sent from Updike–which landed in the general delivery box of the South Chatham Post Office and was handed across the counter to me–was, No, letters like yours written back are always welcome.

“A few years later, in response to comments I sent on his next novel S. which, like Roger’s Version, was an inspired reworking of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Updike sent a note:

An eye on Barth, Updike, and Baltimore

Posted on October 30, 2014 by James Plath

The Millions published an essay titled “When Updike Met Barth,” by Nathan Scott McNamara, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and serves as the Denis Family Curatorial Fellow for Special Collections Resource Center there. In the article, he includes Updike’s typed response. At the time, Updike was 34, and Barth was 36, but Updike was not inclined toward public speaking. But he accepted Barth’s invitation to come to Baltimore to do a reading.

“On Friday, April 18th, 1975, Updike arrived in Baltimore with, in his words to Barth, “A Martha Bernhard.” After he gave his talk, “The next morning, Barth and Shelley and Updike and Martha went on a literary tour of Baltimore. They visited Edgar Allan Poe’s grave. They went to the H.L. Mencken House. They got soft-shell crab for lunch. Then John and Martha got on a plane back to Massachusetts.”

“After Updike died, Martha, who married Updike in 1977, told Barth in a letter that this first trip was not only the beginning of her relationship with Updike, but also the occasion on which Updike changed his mind about readings. ‘He took to it,’ Martha wrote, ‘as he didn’t to teaching, and thus began a modest, but consistent reading schedule that he truly enjoyed.”

Reacting to this article, Baynard Woods contributed an item to the Wandering Eye page of Citypaper.com in which he details a 1967 trip to Baltimore that Updike made at the invitation of then-Hopkins’ prof John Barth.

The columnist writes, “Of course we’re always looking for literary bits about Baltimore, but the fascinating part of the Millions account is the long friendship that this trip inspired between two authors who, though as different as possible in style, immensely admired one another.”

The Other John Updike Archive shares more treasure

Posted on October 23, 2014 by James Plath

The Other John Updike Archive recently shared a torn and taped photo of Updike sitting in a boat, from the cover shoot for Hugging the Shore. But of great curiosity: Paul Moran has posted a photo of the shorts that Updike was wearing, along with the “cheap watch.” And he speculates why Updike would have held on to those particular items for so long, only to finally throw them out.

Here’s the link.

On writers and their would-be-writer moms

Posted on July 9, 2014 by James Plath

Today the National Post posted a story by “Barbara Kay: We all know about John Updike. But what about his mother?”

In it, she talks about her friend, David Siegel, an “evolving short-story writer” and his experience taking an Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer class from Robert Anthony Siegel in which a classmate was Siegel’s own 75-year-old mother, and that leads her to consider the relationship that Updike had with his own mother, also an aspiring writer who was published late in life after her son’s success, but who worked at becoming a writer when he was still a young boy.

“Perhaps Linda’s greatest gift to her son was her unconditional respect for the artist’s obligation to speak his own truth without regard to the feelings of those he writes about,” Kay writes.

Beam us up, Michael

Posted on July 3, 2014 by James Plath

Michael Updike recently got a chance to look inside the Polly Dole House at 26 East Street in Ipswich where his father and family lived from 1958-1970, because the current tenants were moving out. And he took the opportunity to snap a photo of the nut and washer in the summer beam that his father described in an essay for Architectural Digest, “John Updike: The Houses of Ipswich,” which Begley cites in his biography:

“In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point the whole house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.”

Omnivoracious features Updike trivia

Posted on June 22, 2014 by James Plath

It’s come to our attention that in April, to promote Adam Begley’s biography, Updike, Begley supplied the readers’ website Omnivoracious with a brief bit of trivia: “Five Things You Didn’t Know About John Updike.”

But my guess is that most members will know the first and third “fun facts,” and anyone who attended the Second Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Boston will know the fourth one, and, if they were paying attention, the fifth!

Updike materials exhibited at the Houghton Library through May 31

Posted on May 29, 2014 by James Plath

The Houghton Library at Harvard University is the main repository for Updike materials, and through May 31 you can catch a glimpse of those materials in a ground floor exhibition (Chaucer Case). Here’s the description:

John Updike was in many ways an ideal Harvard student. He worked diligently at his studies, as evidenced by the marginalia recorded in the books he used in class (he graduated summa cum laude in 1954); he was an active member of the Harvard Lampoon, and served as president (nearly two-thirds of each issue during his senior year are attributed to him); he also remained a loving son, regularly writing amusing letters home to his parents in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Although Updike originally envisioned a career as an artist, there is evidence of the emerging professional writer; as a student, Updike received high marks on work that he would later submit to The New Yorker and other publications.

Updike began depositing his papers at Houghton Library in 1966; the collection was purchased by the library following his death in 2009. Updike meticulously shepherded his work through every stage of its publication, and the collection includes multiple drafts, prints and proofs of his novels, short stories, poems and essays, correspondence with colleagues, family, and friends, and Updike’s own copies of his books as well as books by other authors from his library.

The exhibition will be on display May 27, 28, 30 and 31. Click here for library hours.

Boston’s North Shore responds to Begley bio

Posted on May 29, 2014 by James Plath

This morning The Boston Globe printed an article titled “Updike found ‘the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America’ on North Shore,” in which residents who knew Updike react to what biographer Adam Begley had to say about that chapter in Updike’s life, and Begley is quoted as well. “My feeling is that Martha and John drew up the drawbridge,” Begley writes of the Beverly Farms move.

There’s also a sidebar on “Updike’s North Shore homes” that has no text to speak of—just a briefly annotated list of addresses where John Updike lived from 1957-2007, with Adam Begley’s biography of Updike cited as the source.

Though the purpose of the articles aren’t stated, it’s clear that there’s plenty of interest in Updike and just as much pride that he called the Boston North Shore home for 50 years:

Little Violet, Essex and Heartbreak roads, Ipswich (1957-58)—The wood-frame cottage Updike and first wife Mary rented when they first moved to town.

Polly Dole House, 26 East St., Ipswich (1958-70)—Historic 17th-century home near downtown Ipswich, upgraded considerably while Updike lived there (pictured).

50 Labor-in-Vain Road, Ipswich (1970-74)—Larger home the Updikes and their four children lived in until John and Mary’s separation.

58 West Main St., Georgetown (1976-82)—After a brief stint living as a bachelor in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, Updike moved to Georgetown to be nearer his children.

675 Hale St., Beverly Farms (1982-2007)—The stately home near the water where Updike and his second wife, Martha, spent their later years together.

Let the literary pilgrimages begin. What other outcome could there be for an article like this?

Happy Birthday, John

Posted on March 18, 2011 by johnupdikesociety

Today would have been John Updike’s 79th birthday. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years since his passing..

In February, 2009, Charles Osgood paid tribute to Updike in a nice CBS video look back at his career, including interview clips. It bears re-watching, especially today. Here’s the link.

THE JOHN UPDIKE SOCIETY

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

Category Archives: Updike’s Life & Times