Updike, flanked by IWU President Minor Myers, jr. and Provost Janet McNew
On February 11, 2002, John Updike was asked to deliver remarks to commemorate the opening of the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. That Founders’ Day Convocation, now online, presents a view of Updike that would be repeated many times over: a much admired literary giant receiving, somewhat shyly and awkwardly, an honorary degree and delivering remarks that almost always included a reading of his own work.
On this occasion Updike read from a bound proof of his Collected Poems. But after a poem about a college appointment that “some august professor” had scheduled, then forgotten, Updike remarked, “I always had the feeling that I was somehow not, try as hard as I might, not quite pleasing to Harvard. I went there and was grateful and was stunned and I imbibed the New England magic and I met my future wife, and was president of the Harvard Lampoon, and got a good degree and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa, and yet I felt it all, in Harvard’s eyes, wasn’t quite enough. There was something un-Harvardian about me. . . . I was inexorably gauche in the eyes of Harvard.”
Updike received dozens of honorary degrees during his long writing career, but most of them seem to have vanished or were discarded, while others turned up for sale in independent bookstores—the going rate, according to a Houston Chronicle article, being $750. But the whereabouts of this particular degree is indeed known.
The tube Updike was handed containing his Illinois Wesleyan Degree is in the collection of The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa., and will soon be added to new displays in the upstairs room that was once his maternal grandparents’. The room’s theme: The Writer’s Life.
Updike, as painted by Katz, appeared on the cover of Time after he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Is Rich. “Speaking of Katz—the Oct. 18, 1982, cover of novelist John Updike also created an interesting pairing. Painter Alex Katz, whose work generally flattened the subject’s perspective and reduced the features, was commissioned to paint Updike, whose fans were not all pleased with the result: “What a washed-out portrait of Updike on the cover!” one reader complained. But Katz offered some advice to viewers of art: “You can wreck a painting very easily,” he noted, “if you get obsessive about likeness.”
Updike had previously appeared on the April 26, 1968 Time magazine after Couples was published and drew attention to the “post-pill paradise” of suburban America.
The new (and largest ever) Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam is apparently as hard to get tickets for as a football championship. A World Today News columnist recently said, “I had given up all hope of a ticket for Vermeer, until an attentive, art-loving one NRC reader managed to get my wife and me in after all, even without having to smash a window of the Riijksmuseum.”
Officer and Laughing Girl. 1657-58, oil on canvas. The Frick Collection, New York: Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.—from the Riijksmuseum press website
The writer lamented, in a column titled “Still Vermeer” (in apparent reference to Updike’s second published volume of art criticism, Still Looking),”If only John Updike, the American writer (1932-2009), could experience this exhibition. I mention him because of all literary writers he has been the greatest connoisseur and admirer of Vermeer. . . . Updike became interested in Vermeer as a schoolboy. He wrote a nice, autobiographical story about it: ‘The Lucid Eye in Silver Town.’ In it, a boy, together with his father, visits an older brother of that father in New York. The boy’s father is a passive man, the older brother is a successful businessman. It is the boy’s first visit to New York, where he wants to buy a ‘good book’ about Vermeer.
“The wealthy uncle listens to him skeptically and starts bragging about four paintings by Degas that he has hanging in his living room in Chicago. ‘Yes,’ says the boy, ‘but don’t Degas’ paintings remind you of colored drawings? When it comes to it to look to things in terms of paint, with a sharp eye, Degas can’t match Vermeer.’
“The uncle says nothing and the father apologizes: ‘That’s how he and his mother always talk. I can not reach it. I never understand any of it.'”
The writer talks about walking through the new exhibit and wondering what Updike had thought of his personal favorite, The soldier and the laughing girl . . . “a painting that seems made for Updike and his ‘lucid eye.'”
Shortly after John Updike died, Radio National of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked Updike scholars Avis Hewitt, James Plath, and James Schiff to talk about Updike’s “unparalleled legacy of writing that combined an abiding interest in sex with a profound belief in God.”
That broadcast, which aired on Sunday, March 1, 2009, is now available online. Here is the link.
John Updike made Ipswich internationally famous, and the small north shore town near Boston will acknowledge his impact on April 28, 2023 with a plaque and celebration.
When John Updike first moved to Ipswich he wrote in a home office at the Polly Dole House, but then found an office above The Dolphin restaurant. There he composed many of his acclaimed literary works, including Of the Farm, Rabbit Redux, “A & P,” “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” The Centaur, Couples, Midpoint, A Month of Sundays, and Bech: A Book.
While in Ipswich, Updike also helped write Something to Preserve: A report on Historic Preservation in America’s best-preserved Puritan town, Ipswich, Massachusetts—published in 1975 by the Ipswich Historical Commission, of which he was a member. Now that same commission will erect a plaque commemorating Updike’s literary impact and contributions to the community.
According to the Ipswich Local News story “Ipswich finally gives Updike his due” by Trevor Meek (Feb. 24, 2023), on Friday, April 28, the commission will unveil a commemorative plaque on the Caldwell Building at 15 South Main St., where Updike wrote in “the now-vacant suite #5 on the second floor” in a “smoky office.” Michael Updike told Meek, “We’d visit him often, in the days when you could still walk around town unsupervised as a six year old. A lot of times, we’d go there as he was about to have lunch at the Dolphin restaurant.”
The Dolphin closed down many years ago, but in its place is the Choate Bridge Pub, “located directly below suite #5.” The pub will host the celebratory event, which will feature a reading of “A & P” (a store no more, but a building still to be seen in Ipswich). In addition, a special menu will include Updike’s preferred lunch, which Michael said was “a pastrami sandwich with a side of pea soup.”
Rachel Meyer, treasurer of the IHC, said that there might even be an Updike cocktail available for the event, one named after Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. But the IHC is “still negotiating the finer points of the event with the pub.”
The April 28 event will give Updike fans an excuse to travel to Ipswich and also enjoy seeing the exterior of the Polly Dole House, the old A & P, the setting for “The Hillies,” and the site of the first church in Ipswich that featured so prominently in Couples.
“Updike’s work defines this town,” Meyer said. “It’s part of a greater literary legacy too. This is one of the places that Anne Bradstreet—America’s first published poet—lived.”
Greg EplerWood reported that Rabbit Run, the section of a tiny not-quite-a-creek near Shillington named in honor of Updike’s second novel, has an uncommon resident: a yellow, freshwater sponge.
Last summer, Angelica Creek Watershed Association’s Jill and Stan Kemp sent an email to other members with news that they had discovered a strange yellow growth underneath one of the rocks. Suspecting it might be a seldom-seen freshwater sponge, they sent a sample to Carnegie Museum’s Marc Yergin, who studied it “Under the Microscope”—as Updike might have done. Yergin tentatively identified it as Eunapius fragilus.
Though Updike’s short story about microscopic life was a commentary on the New York literary scene, what the presence of a freshwater sponge in Rabbit Run means is that the association’s clean-up has already had a positive effect on the ecosystem.
“The presence of FW sponge indicates good water quality as they are extremely sensitive to any type of water pollution,” the Kemps wrote. “Sponges provide an important ecosystem service because they filter water all day, every day and help to clean things up like FW mussels or oysters in Chesapeake.”
The Kemps said they thought some of the improvements in the management of the riparian area might have helped this sponge to survive in Rabbit Run . . . a long, long ways from Bikini Bottom.
Photos are courtesy of the Kemps and Marc Yergin. The longish skeletal elements from the magnified sponge below are called “spicules.”
Biljana Dojčinović, University of Belgrade, recently published this critical notice of the most comprehensive Vermeer exhibit ever assembled, which she was kind enough to translate for us:
The largest Jan Vermeer’s exhibition has been opened in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on February 10, 2023:
“The 28 Vermeer paintings are presented in a spacious setting that spans all ten galleries of the museum’s Phillips Wing. In 11 thematic sections, the exhibition brings visitors closer to Vermeer and offers rich insights into the life and paintings of Vermeer, including: early ambitions, first domestic interiors, balance between the indoor and outdoor worlds, the letters, musical seduction, outlook on the world and inner values,” says Taco Dibbits, General Director of the Rijksmuseum.
This, largest ever, exhibition of Vermeer will be open until June 4th, 2023.
The “master of light” had a great impact on John Updike and his fiction, as pointed out in James Plath’s seminal article “Verbal Vermeer: Updike’s Middle-Class Portraiture.” Plath named Updike a Verbal Vermeer when exploring the visual aspects of Rabbit novels. The phrase itself is an ingenious way to describe Updike’s complete opus. The alliteration and assonance (Verbal Vermeer) point to the poetical aspects of the pun, while its meaning connects the medium Updike uses (words) with his favorite painter – Vermeer – mentioned many times especially in his early work.
Vermeer is for the first time mentioned in Updike’s fiction in the early story “Lucid Eye in Silver Town,” in which a boy travels with his father to New York hoping to buy a book on Vermeer. In Updike’s second novel, The Centaur, published in 1963, the young protagonist, Peter Caldwell, wants to become a painter, and not “just any” painter, but Vermeer himself:
“In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and may skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. “ (Updike 1993: 62)
In the poem “Midpoint” Vermeer is grouped with some other painters and visual artists, including Walt Disney:
Praise Disney, for dissolving Goofy’s stride Into successive stills our eyes elide; And Jan Vermeer, for salting humble bread With Dabs of light, as well as bricks and thread. (Updike 1995: 96)
In the essay “Verbal Vermeer,” Plath names domesticity – i.e., the importance of objects which are equal to humans, the usage of light and the phenomena of “dynamic stasis” – as methods that Vermeer and Updike had in common. Domesticity refers to the people Vermeer had presented at his canvases: the cozy life of middle class in the 17th century Delft, in what was later named genre painting. Plath emphasizes the importance of objects, which were not merely a background for Updike:
Because he treated objects and humans equally, the former acquired a sense of importance, and the latter a kind of memorialized stasis – each “favored” by the artist’s even, modulated light. (Plath 1998: 208)
James Plath argues that Updike makes the traditional archetypal connection of light with the truth, deliverance, knowledge, and transfiguration – in contrast to darkness and shadows. Thus the usage of light is actually a connection with the Creator: both Vermeer and Updike like to dwell at the first and most sensual level of creation, the moment closest to the birth of an object (see Plath 1998: 221). According to Plath, light also means present. Further, he de- scribes the present tense as something like “dynamic stasis.”
The similar effect is poetically presented in Wislawa Szymborka’s poem “Vermeer”[1] :
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl the World hasn’t earned the world’s end.
(translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)
1] Wislawa Szymborska, the Literature Nobel Prize winner for 1996, was a great friend of Blaga Dimitrova, the poet who had been the prototype for Updike’s 1965 story, “The Bulgarian Poetess.”
Plath, James. “Verbal Vermeer: Updike’s Middle-Class Portraiture.” Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Ed. Lawrence R. Broer. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998. Online at https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/eng_scholarship/42/
Updike, John. The Centaur. New York: Fawcett Crest, Ballantine Books, 1993. ——“Midpoint.” Collected Poems (1953–1993). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Saumyaa Vohra, writing for the “Sex” section of GQ magazine, recommended “7 best erotic novels to read right now”—the right now, given the timing of the post, presumably being Valentine’s Day.
Number 1 on the list was Luster by Raven Leilani, followed by Carnage (Sarah Bailey), You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (Akwaeke Emezi), Set (Alexandria House), Call Me By Your Name (André Aciman), What Belongs to You (Garth Greenwell), and John Updike’s Couples.
Of Couples, Vohra wrote, “The former New Yorker writer, poet and Pulitzer Prize winner truly knows how to use the written word to its full potential; and this 1968 novel about a licentious circle of ten couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox is proof of that skill. Rife with historical events of the time (which make the book one with deeper value than simply being smutty indulgence–because one would expect no less from Updike), the book is enjoyable and incredibly hot, going into sexual detail that was unusual for its time but still holds up. And, like any good erotic novel from the days of yore, caused a tonne of controversy at the time.”
Recently The New York TimesreviewedThe 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”
We are saddened to belatedly learn of the death of Lawrence R. Broer, who died at age 84 in his Tampa, Fla. home on Nov. 30, 2022. As his obituary notes, “He was an internationally acclaimed scholar of modern and postmodern literature,” and while he published extensively on Hemingway and Vonnegut, Updike society members know him from his edited collection of critical essays Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Novels (U. of Alabama,1998). Larry was also the author of Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy (U. of Alabama, 1973), Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (U. of Alabama, 1989), and Vonnegut & Hemingway: Writers at War (U. of South Carolina, 2011). With Gloria Holland he edited Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (U. of Alabama, 2004), and charter Updike Society members will remember that Larry served on the very first society-sponsored panel at the 2009 American Literature Association Conference in Boston.
Larry taught at the University of South Florida from 1965-2003, when he retired. At USF he received the Theodore and Vanette Askounes-Ashford Distinguished Scholar Award and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He was also a Fulbright fellow, lecturing at the University of Paris in 1981 and 1984, and from 2018-22 he was a Fulbright Specialist.
His academic friends might not know this, but Larry was also athletic, taking pride in being able to quarterback the USF Faculty Football Team and participate in senior softball leagues into his 80s.
The society extends its sympathies to his partner, Béatrice Frouté De Domec, sons Joshua and Wesley Broer, and stepson Ashkahn Ardalan. Academia has lost a powerful voice and a generous mentor to up-and-coming scholars.
