2023 Quarry Farm Fellow to write about Updike and Twain

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James Plath, known in Updike circles as president of The John Updike Society and the editor of two volumes of Updike interviews, was named one of 11 Quarry Farm Fellows for 2023. He will receive $1000 and spend two weeks in the fall living alone at the main house at Quarry Farm, where he will conduct research and work on a comparative essay. As part of the process, every applicant needed a “sponsor,” and Donald J. Greiner, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus a the University of South Carolina, wrote in support of Plath’s proposal.

Plath described the essence of his project for the Quarry Farm Fellows website: “In 2002, Updike wrote the foreword to the Hesperus Press publication of The Diary of Adam and Eve, and what he said about Twain reveals much about himself and a connection with Twain that has yet to be explored—not so much as a literary influence as it is a literary kinship, a connection with a past literary figure who modeled attitudes and behaviors that spoke to Updike generations later. Updike notes that Eve’s Diary ‘makes a bold foray into female sexuality,’ and Twain seems to have been an inspiration for Updike in trying to write about female sexuality, as the latter does to a much greater extent in so many of his novels.

“Twain also modeled a successful writer who could straddle the popular and literary worlds, who could ‘sin boldly’ in his unabashed writing, who could have it both ways and write for profit and for literary posterity, and who not only embraced but relished the role of writer as spokesperson for American literature, culture, and social behaviors. Just as Hemingway noted a generation earlier that Twain’s public persona was key to the promotion of his writing, Updike too became conscious of Updike the writer as being a ‘character’ he would play in the public sphere. Such is the widespread influence of Twain that has yet to be documented in Updike studies—something that will be rectified as a result of this Quarry Farm Fellowship.”  

Quarry Farm, which overlooks Elmira, New York, was owned by Mark Twain’s sister-in-law, Susan Langdon Crane. Twain and his wife spent 20 summers living at Quarry Farm, where all three of their daughters were born and where he composed many of his books, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A year or so after Twain and Olivia’s first summer there, their hosts constructed a separate study built apart from the main house, allegedly so Twain would have a quiet place to write, but ostensibly because Mrs. Crane did not want him smoking cigars in his house while he worked.

“A smoke-free house is good,” joked Plath, who at one point was compiling a Conversations with Mark Twain volume for the University Press of Mississippi when another book of interviews rendered the project superfluous.

“I’m excited to work on this project partly because it feels like I’m taking up old business, and partly because the house isn’t open to the general public—only research fellows,” Plath said. “I love the idea of living and working where one of the great American writers lived and wrote.”

Will Updike’s ‘Marry Me’ catch on as a proposal prop?

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Back in 1995, John Updike helped Updike scholar James Plath propose to his wife, Zarina, by inscribing a copy of his novel Marry Me: A Romance and postdating it to the day that Plath was to get down on one knee at the top of the Empire State Building on a trip to New York City. A recent Daily Mail story on British journalist, writer, and TV personality Piers Morgan revealed that he too used Updike’s book when he popped the question:

“Piers proposed on a romantic trip to Paris in 2009 by presenting Celia with a book by her favourite novelist, American John Updike, entitled Marry Me.

“Previously he claimed he was planning to use a video recording he had prepared of singer Stevie Wonder ordering Celia to accept his proposal,” but went with Updike instead—proving, perhaps, that the pen is mightier than the piano?

Now that it’s been revealed a celebrity has used the Marry Me gambit, will it catch on as a proposal prop?

Updike’s three witches make third on this best-of list

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A website named Otakukart just published an article by Arnab Ray on the “45 Best Magical Witch Movies That You Should know,” and wouldn’t you know it, George Miller’s 1987 adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick was the third film listed.

“When a desire comes true at a price, and a male protagonist enters their lives, three lonely and sex-deprived women (Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer), who have all lost their spouses, meet together once a week for drinking.

“This 1987 dark fantasy-comedy movie, which George Miller directed, is based on a novel written by John Updike. The movie is very fun to watch and will never leave you bored for the sake of establishing plot points.”

The flock, you say – Mr. Updike’s Penguins

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Sculptor Michael Updike loves a good joke, and so, apparently, does Newbury, Mass., where John Updike’s son makes his home. The Newburyport News posted a piece titled “Joppa’s penguins go into hibernation”—about four “beloved and iconic penguins that have shown up at Joppa Flats during the summer months” and “make their way ‘south’ to Updike’s home, for the winter.”

Reporter Ashlyn Giroux asked Updike about the penguins, and got the full story.

“The kids were sort of middle childhood, like 8 and 10, and we were coming back from a soccer game in Lynn or Revere, one of those places, and we stopped at Newbury Comics and somehow, probably as an impulse buy, I thought we’d buy the penguin along with the Yugioh cards, and so we had this penguin and I said ‘Oh, I really should put it on an iceberg and put it out there,’ said Updike. The kids didn’t really respond much, and then I thought, ‘I don’t wanna be that dad who makes a promise or says something and doesn’t follow through.’ So, I went and got three more penguins and built the iceberg out of styrofoam and then put it out there, and the kids sort of looked at it for three seconds and went back to what they were doing.”

After moving to Newbury, Giroux said Updike put the penguins out on the marsh behind his home to the amusement of a few neighbors.

“When I moved down here to Newbury, I brought the penguins and said ‘OK that’s the end of that.’ But, all my former neighbors on Water Street kept saying ‘where are the penguins? We want the penguins back!’ So I just started putting it in in the spring and taking them out every fall, and it’s something that just I do,” he said.

Read the full story.

Aspen Times letter writer invokes Updike

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Writing to the Aspen Times about the “doldrums of mid-January,” Andy Stone of Missouri Heights shared an Updike poem that he thought appropriate for seasonal contemplation:

Slum Lords
The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They’re never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of superrich is absence.
They like to demonstrate they can afford
to be elsewhere. Don’t let them in.
Their riches form a kind of poverty.

John Updike

Library of America Updike volume now available ahead of distribution date

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Library of America has just published the fifth and final volume in the John Updike: Novels series: John Updike Novels 1996-2000, containing In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, and Rabbit Remembered. Not available in bookstores until March 13, the volume is now on sale through the LOA webstore for $32 plus free shipping—29 percent off the $45 retail price.

In addition, the complete LOA five-volume set, John Updike: Fifteen Novels (five individual volumes, not a boxed set) is on sale now at the webstore for $145 plus free shipping—34 percent off the $225 retail price.

Series editor Christopher Carduff said “there are indeed more LOA Updike volumes to come. None are as yet scheduled, but stay tuned.”

We will.

Arcadia article offers a witchcraft take on Updike’s Witches of Eastwick

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This sounds like a fun course: Witchcraft in Literature 101. You can take it, too, online, and for free from Arcadia, thanks to researcher-author Anna Artyushenko.

“Witchcraft takes on many forms and perspectives in various works of literature, Artyushenko wrote. “It finds its origins in folklore and myths, it carries the traits of gothic and horror, but it is also used in satire and comedy, and undoubtedly plays a major role in fantasy.”

Updike’s 1984 novel is the subject of the third post, “Social Commentary in The Witches of Eastwick“:

“All three witches possess some powers at the outset of the novel, but their abilities develop and turn darker with the arrival of Darryl Van Horne. It is never stated directly in the novel that the stranger who has arrived in Eastwick is the Devil. However, his nature is obvious, according to many remarks in the novel. Updike purposefully plays around the “stranger danger” trope, inviting the Devil to the small conservative town of New England. He ridicules the reception of the occult in the traditional Puritan society, though “God’s absence, presumably, opens the way for evil” in the novel (Verduin, 1985, p. 306). Van Horne is purposefully drawn to the witches and corrupts their powers. The women cannot escape the stereotypical pattern, as “in order to satisfy their extraordinary sexual appetite, the witches turn to a devil figure, Darryl Van Horne” (Loudermilk, 2013, p. 101).”

Wiccan magic circle

“Updike makes a reference to the Wiccan perception of magic, connecting it with nature, though his vision of witchcraft is “closely tied to both, carnality and mortality” (Antwood, 1984, para. 10). Updike sees nature not from a spiritual or ecological, but from a rational perspective: incapable of empathy towards humankind, and as inseparable from death and decay as it is from life and growth. In the novel Alexandra thinks that one of the major nature’s rules is “that there must always be a sacrifice” (Updike, 1996, p. 18). Jenny becomes this victim, sacrificed to the Devil. Updike makes a point that the male’s power is still greater, as later on the witches learn that they did not cast the curse out of their own free will and were controlled by Van Horne. The Devil in the novel acts as a trickster who manipulates the witches while they abandon their family duties in order to follow the path of the occult and magic, which leaves them with nothing but regret in the end.”

Read the entire article.

Yahoo! feature identifies celebrities living with psoriasis

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Surely there were more than 21 celebrities who had psoriasis, but a writer for news aggregate site Yahoo!’s “women’s health” section settled on that number . . . among them, John Updike (#20).

“The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet penned a 1985 essay for The New Yorker aptly titled ‘At War With My Skin,‘ where he addressed his struggles with the autoimmune disease. In his essay, Updike wrote, ‘Why did I marry so young? Because, having once found a comely female who forgave me my skin, I dared not risk losing her and trying to find another.'”

Read the entire article.

Time magazine retro reviews: Telephone Poles and Of the Farm

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It’s always interesting to look back at early reviews of an author’s work.

Time magazine’s Nov. 1, 1963 review of John Updike’s volume of poetry, Telephone Poles, noted that “Updike has neither [Ogden] Nash’s bewildered air of good sense wrapped in metrical nonsense nor [Morris] Bishop’s malicious delight in destroying his targets in a single, whiplashing line. His tone is more urbane and more lyrical, a bit reminiscent of Britain’s John Betjeman.”

Two years later, in their Nov. 12,1965 issue, Time reviewed Updike’s Of the Farm and warned readers that Updike’s fourth novel “will disappoint those admirers who have been waiting hopefully for a major talent to produce a major work. Instead of expanding, the Updike compass seems to be narrowing, as if its wielder were desirous of proving that he can, if need be, engrave his graceful arabesques on the head of a pin. Of the Farm barely qualifies as a novel; it is too brief, inactive, and unambitious. But as a delicate cameo that freezes three people in postures that none of them finds comfortable, it is almost faultless. Its achievement is that with incredibly economical means, it suggests that each of these people will change, develop, shift in their relations to each other and makes the reader wonder what their future will be. Its failure is that Updike never explores that future.”

Updike included on American Purpose ‘favorite staff reads’ list

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American Purpose has a holiday tradition where editorial board members, contributing editors, and staff share their favorite reads from the past year. They call it “Turning the Page.”

Board member Adam Garfinkle, who is also founding editor of The American Interest and serves on the board of advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, chose John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies as his favorite read of 2022.

“John Updike’s 1996 bestseller In the Beauty of the Lilies has become part of the pantheon of fictive meditations on the thick sinews of Protestant Christianity that run deep and wide within the American body social and politic,” wrote Garfinkle, a former speech writer for secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

“It tells a multigenerational family tale starting in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1905 and ending four generations and eighty years later in a Waco-like conflagration near Bighorn, Colorado. When I read the book a quarter century ago I marveled at Updike’s storytelling skills despite being unable to bond emotionally with any of the characters—rather like how I have since felt about Marilynne Robinson’s multigenerational Christological stories spread out in multiple books.

“This year’s deliberately slower second reading collided with my more mature ruminations on the wider topic of Protestantism’s shaping of a nation rushing through time, and itself being reshaped in the process. The collision revealed more of Updike’s prophetic shrewdness amid his formidable literary skills than I discerned the first time around. Now that we live truly in an age of spectacle, something still inchoate in 1996, the dancing demons and angels of the Protestant bequest to America appear far more vivid to me. The book didn’t change as time passed, but the reader did.”