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.
Richard and Milena at the 4th Biennial JUS Conference in South Carolina
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.
Society members at the 3rd Biennial Conference pose in front of the Updikes’ Plowville farmhouse. Richard and Milena Davison are in the back row, third and fourth from the left.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
