Although The Writer’s Almanac featured a poem by Tom Hennen yesterday, unabashed Updike fan Garrison Keillor still remembered the author’s birthday with a nice long biographical summary, lest anyone forget:

“It’s the birthday of writer John Updike (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1932). His father was a high school teacher, and his mother aspired to be a writer; Updike said: ‘One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk. I admired the writer’s equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in.’ As a boy, Updike wanted to be a cartoonist, not a writer. He cut out comic strips and sent fan letters to cartoonists, drew caricatures of classmates, made posters, and tried to draw cartoons like the ones he saw in his family’s copy of The New Yorker. As a teenager, he sent his cartoons to major magazines, including The New Yorker, and although he didn’t publish any there, he did earn five dollars selling a cartoon to a dairy journal. He went to Harvard, where he joined the staff of The Harvard Lampoon as a cartoonist, but ended up writing too. By graduation, he was fairly certain that he would become a writer instead of an artist. He said of writing: ‘It took fewer ideas, and I seemed to be better at it. There is less danger of smearing the ink.’

“Despite his intentions to become a writer, he got an art scholarship to study at Oxford. He was newly married, and he and his wife moved to England, where their first daughter was born. While he was at Oxford, he met E.B. and Katherine White, who were vacationing in England. They convinced him to apply for a job at The New Yorker, so after his time at Oxford, he moved to Manhattan to work as a staff writer for the magazine, writing the ‘Talk of the Town’ column. He was not a big fan of life in the city — he said, ‘The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect.’ Two years later, the Updikes had a second child and decided to leave New York and move toIpswich, Massachusetts. Updike had just turned 25 years old.

“Soon after his move, he published his first books: a book of poems, The Carpentered Hen (1958); a novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959); and a book of short stories, The Same Door (1959). Another son was born in 1959, and a daughter 19 months later. Despite the success of those early years — in 1960 he published Rabbit, Run, the first of his great books featuring Rabbit Angstrom — he underwent a spiritual crisis. He said, ‘These remembered gray moments, in which my spirit could scarcely breathe, are scattered over a period of years; to give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men’s wives.’

“After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: ‘Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.’ He wanted to publish about one book a year, and took Sundays off for church, although later in his career he sometimes worked on Sundays too. In 2008, he said, ‘I’ve become a beast of the written word, a monster of a kind, in that it’s all I can do.’

“Updike published more than 60 books in his lifetime, including 28 novels. His books include Couples (1968), Rabbit is Rich (1981), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and The Complete Henry Bech (2001).

“He said: ‘At the point where you get your writerly vocation you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.'”

“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:

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.

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.