Dossier of the Muses, an International Journal of Literary Studies, announced that Vol. 2:1 (July 2023) will be devoted to John Updike. The journal is based at Govt. College for Women M.A. Road, Srinigar Cluster University, Srinigar, J&K India, and the editor-in-chief, Prof. (Dr.) Ruhi Jan Kanth, is still accepting submissions until March 15, 2023, with revisions of accepted papers due April 30. Before submitting to editor@ijlsdom.com, read the updated submission guidelines at ijlsdom.com
The John Updike Review Vol. 9: 2 (Winter 2023) is completed and will be distributed soon.
The issue features Victor Strandberg on “Updike’s Epitaph”; Sylvie Mathé, D. Quentin Miller, Peter J. Bailey, Robert Morace, and James Schiff on Self-Consciousness; plus essays from Bailey (“‘More Ironic Windows’: The Limits of Nostalgia in Updike’s My Father’s Tears), Donald J. Greiner (“U and I and Me: Rereading Nicholson Baker Reading Updike”), Haruki Takebe (“‘I’ll Get Urinary Impotence’: Updike’s Double Reference to Nabokov’s ‘Bluebeard in Ireland’.” Also included is a review by Greiner, “Edting Updike’s Revisions: Christopher Carduff and the Library of America.”
Editor Schiff reported that this issue of The John Updike Review is completed but delayed because of a printer paper shortage. Look for it in the hopefully near future.
The John Updike Review is published twice a year by the University of Cincinnati and the John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati, Department of English and Comparative Literature. The cover photo is of Updike at his office in Haven Hill (photographer unknown). The Review is included with membership in The John Updike Society. To join: https://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety/join.
Today The Salem News published a column (“Updike remembered 14 years later”) by sportswriter Gary Larrabee.
“It’s hard to comprehend that it’s been 14 years since one of our most famous and accomplished North Shore residents died,” the column began. “John Updike, of 675 Hale St., Beverly, died on Jan. 27, 2009, at Kaplan Family Hospice House, also known as Care Dimensions, in Danvers, less than two months shy of his 77th birthday.”
“Lung cancer was the culprit. Danvers was never so famous than in becoming the dateline of Updike’s death, read and spoken in newscasts around the world.
“He left behind his wife, Martha, four children, a golf game with which he constantly struggled for many years at his beloved Myopia Hunt Club, and an epic literary bibliography that garnered the Pennsylvania native global fame.
“As much as he savored the opportunity over many years to play the revered Myopia layout, he also got a kick, for years, playing our region’s public nine-hole courses, like Cape Ann and Candlewood.”
Larrabee recalled Updike’s prodigious output and wrote, “This scorecard does not include his one hugely popular book on his ruminations of the game he loved, Golf Dreams, and essays he wrote for the magazines published for the 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline and the 2001 U.S. Senior Open at Salem Country Club.
“The vast majority of these works were created from his gifted imagination in his two North Shore hometowns, first Ipswich, where he wrote in a small upstairs rental space downtown, and later in his Beverly Farms home where he wordsmithed overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.”
Read the whole column.
Aimed as a resource for creative writers and teachers of creative writing, Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories (David R. Godine, hardcover, 320 pages) will be published on April 25, 2023. The collection, edited by Andre Dubus III, features successful writers invited to talk about a pair of unforgettable stories in a brief essay. Joyce Carol Oates chose Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royale” and John Updike’s “A & P.”
“John Updike’s brilliantly condensed, intensely lyric homage to the voice of another contemporary, J.D. Salinger, has long been the Updike story most anthologized, as it is likely the Updike story that is the most readily accessible to young readers,” Oates wrote.
“Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, in its very brevity and colloquial lyricism, ‘A & P’ isn’t characteristic of Updike’s short stories, which tend to be much longer, richer in detail and background information, slower moving and analytical; this is a story told exclusively from the perspective of a teenaged boy, in the boy’s mildly sardonic voice—’In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.'”
Oates was the keynote speaker at the 2nd Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Suffolk University in Boston. Her novel, Blonde, was recently made into a movie.
The John Updike Society thanked the volunteer docents that keep the John Updike Childhood Home running every weekend by treating them to a dinner at Victor Emmanuel, a local club. The idea for the dinner came from director Maria Lester, who organized the fete with help from the home’s very first docent, Dave Ruoff. Docents make small museums “work,” and the society is grateful for ours: Charlie Adams, Jill Koestel, Ken Krawchuk, Maria McDonnell, Sara Peek, Travis Peek, Paige Sechler, Linda Sepeda, Liz Siegfried, Susan Weiser, and Ruoff and Lester, who also give tours. Welcome too to three brand-new docents: Bob Fleck, Nancy Kennedy, and Shpresa Ymeraj.
For the second year, The John Updike Childhood Home sponsored a Christmas ornament contest for area youths, with the winners prominently displayed on the Updike house tree in the parlor. In case you didn’t get to visit the museum when the tree was up, at least you can see this year’s winners. Congratulations to secondary school winner John Serrano, an 11th grader at Wyomissing Area School District and a welding student at Berks Career and Technology Center, for his stylized cut-out rabbit, and to elementary school winner Laasyda Sri, a 4th grader at Governor Mifflin Elementary School.
We were saddened to learn of the death of John Updike Society member Richard Davison, who passed away peacefully at his home on Jan. 19, 2023. He was 88. Richard was a charter member of the society and attended the first four conferences in Reading, Pa., Boston, and Columbia, S.C. with his wife, Dr. Milena Davison.
Those who didn’t know him often did a double-take because of his slight resemblance to Updike, and he took delight in telling the story of when he first met Updike. The latter immediately saw the resemblance and joked that it was like looking into a mirror. They decided that Richard, who was shorter than the author, was “John Updike, Jr.”
Because of the resemblance, Richard, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, offered to read from Updike’s work at the society’s first conference in Reading. He thought it might be fun, and it was. As the featured reader for the closing dinner at Jimmie Kramer’s Peanut Bar Restaurant in Reading, which Updike frequented when he was a junior working as a copy boy at the Reading Eagle across the street, Richard read from Rabbit, Run and Updike’s writings about Shillington and Reading. Always willing to help, Richard donated to support the society’s mission and also moderated a conference session in Boston. He was the embodiment of the “gentleman scholar,” who enjoyed talking about literature and was always gracious.
In addition to his being active in the Updike society, the Legacy obituary noted that Davison was a past president of the Frank Norris Society and also a member of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald societies. He published on a wide range of authors, including Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Stephen Crane, Hart Crane, Fitzgerald, Robert Penn Warren, Steinbeck, Albee, Salinger, and Hemingway. A passionate theater-goer as well, he co-edited two books on theater with Jackson Bryer and shared his passions with students. He was honored in 2001 with the University of Delaware College of Arts and Science Teaching Award.
During a distinguished career Richard was also a visiting professor at Washington College and at universities in Essen and Cologne, Germany. Additionally, he directed the English Graduate Program at Seattle University during his tenure there, and in 1966 he hosted 39 episodes of a TV series on Literature and Life. The two naturally went together for Richard, and the Updike Society is richer for his having been a member. He will be missed, and we offer our deepest condolences to Milena and the couple’s three children and one grandchild.
Books of Brilliance asked Irish actor Cillian Murphy (Inception, The Dark Knight, Breakfast on Pluto, Peaky Blinders) to name his 10 favorite books. Murphy, who won a Best Actor Irish Film and Television Award for playing a young trans woman in Breakfast on Pluto, told Books of Brilliance, “I’m less interested in the good man’s life, I’m more interested in the conflicted man’s life or the contradictory man’s life.” That has applied to his choice of roles as well as his choice of reading. Cillian’s 10 favorite books:
—The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy
—The Butcher Boy, by Patrick McCabe
—The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
—Jeff in Venice, Death in Varnasi, by Geoff Dyer
—Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter
—Eclipse, by John Banville
—”Rabbit” series, by John Updike
—The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
—The Grass Arena, by John Healy
—Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara
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.”
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?