It was a soft (and occasionally noisy) spring day in Shillington when a crowd of around 30 gathered on the side lawn of The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., in Shillington, Pa.
They came on Friday, March 18, to celebrate what would have been the author’s 90th birthday, to hear leading Berks County citizens read from Updike’s works, letters, interviews, and even poems the Pulitzer Prize-winning author wrote as a love-struck 10 year old.
And WFMZ 69 News was there to report.
John Updike was born 90 years ago on this date. To celebrate, John Updike Childhood Home Director of Education Maria Lester organized and hosted a reading featuring prominent Berks County residents. Watch the Facebook Live recording of the 90th Birthday Celebration at The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shillington, Pa., featuring readings from Updike’s works, interviews, letters, and even personal love poems written as a 10 year old in Shillington.
:01—Introduction and reading by Maria Lester, Director of Education at The John Updike Childhood Home (pictured)
4:54—Samantha J. Wesner, Senior Vice President Student & Campus Life, Albright College
17:18—Conrad Vanino, Shillington Councilperson and Fire Police Lt.
22:13—Charles J. Adams III, Editor, The Historical Review of Berks County
35:48—Bill McKay, Superintendent, Governor Mifflin School District
44:55—Melissa Adams, Executive Director, The Reading Public Library
49:10—Jackie Hirneisen Kendall, Updike’s classmate and first “crush”
53:55—Dave Silcox, Updike’s Berks County contact for 10 years
57:40—David W. Ruoff, former student and friend of Wesley Updike
1:01:00—Jack De Bellis, author of Updike’s Early Years, The John Updike Encyclopedia, and John Updike Remembered
John Updike, born this day in 1932, would have turned 90 today. From 1958-2009, Updike published roughly one book every year. He remains one of the most lauded American writers of the 20th century, being one of just four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, one of only a handful of creative talents to receive both the National Medal of Arts (1989, from Pres. George H.W. Bush) and the National Humanities Medal (2003, from Pres. George W. Bush) in White House ceremonies, and one of just four literary writers to appear on the cover of Time magazine twice.
Pictured (right) is the Alex Katz portrait of Updike that was featured on the second cover on October 18, 1982. Time had commissioned the portrait for the cover, and later donated it to the National Portrait Gallery, where it hangs in the 20th Century Americans exhibition on the third floor. The National Portrait Gallery also is home to the 1968 painting by Robert Vickrey (lower left) that appeared on the first Time magazine cover.
Updike was notoriously generous with his time—well known for responding to readers and spending time with groups large and small that wanted to hear him talk about writing and the state of literature in America. In that spirit, The John Updike Childhood Home will hold a special 90th Birthday Celebration reading just 90 minutes from now. Weather permitting, the reading will be held under the arbor at the side of the house; in case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors and the audience will be limited to the first 25 people who come to the event at 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shilington, Pa.
The 90-minute reading of Updike’s Pennsylvania-related works, organized and hosted by Director of Education Maria Lester, features prominent Berks County residents, some of whom knew Updike and members of the Updike family. Those unable to attend in person should check the John Updike Childhood Home Facebook page at 12 p.m. EST. The plan (technology permitting) is to stream the event on Facebook Live.
Featured readers: Samantha J. Wesner, Senior Vice President Student & Campus Life, Albright College; Conrad Vanino, Shillington Councilperson and Fire Police Lt.; Charles J. Adams III, editor of The Historical Review of Berks County; Bill McKay, Superintendent, Governor Mifflin School District; Melissa Adams, Executive Director, The Reading Public Library; Jackie Hirneisen Kendall, Updike’s classmate and first “crush”; Dave Silcox, Updike’s Berks County contact for 10 years; David W. Ruoff, former student and friend of Wesley Updike; and Jack De Bellis, author of Updike’s Early Years, John Updike Remembered, and The John Updike Encyclopedia.
Suzanna Bowling, who co-owns and publishes the newspaper Times Square Chronicles, penned and posted an article titled “Book Banning: What Is This Nazism?” that includes Updike’s Rabbit, Run . . . though other books on her list have sparked more outrage.
Bowling’s annotated list includes specifics on the bans, challenges, and restrictions that have been directed at such books as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Beloved, Of Mice and Men, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, A Farewell to Arms, Invisible Man, Song of Solomon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Jungle, and All the King’s Men. In other words, great, classic American literature.
Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, was “challenged in many communities,” banned in the cities of Rochester, Levittown, North Jackson, and Lakeland, and burned in Drake, N.D.
Rabbit, Run, by contrast, got off easy. It was banned in Ireland from 1962-67, restricted to high school students with parental permission in the six Aroostock County, Maine community high school llibraries, and removed from the required reading list for English Class at Medicine Bow Junior High School in Wyoming.
Though Banned Books Week isn’t until September 18-24, 2022, if you’re looking to get an early start on your reading or rereading list, here’s the full story. Bowling suggests that everyone might encourage their local bookstores (and for that matter, libraries) to show support for banned books during Banned Books Week.
Patricia Abbott’s Feb. 9, 2022 blog entry featured John Updike’s “Wife-Wooing” as the topic. Abbott wrote, “These are some of my favorite stories. You watch a marriage fall apart over the course of the collection. ‘Giving Blood’ is my favorite.
“Favorite line. ‘Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl.’ How I wish he had used ‘innocent’ instead of ‘ignorant’.”
The post sparked a lively exchange of comments, among them:
“In one of the later Maple stories, the wife wants to have sex with her husband and he says, ‘It’s too far to go.’ That line shocked me when I read it. John Updike was one of the best book critics of his era. Political correctness now relegates Updike to the trash heap,” a person named George wrote.
Rick responded, “It’s all the amateur ‘critics’ on social media who should be reviled and put on the trash heap. I liked Rabbit Run, Of the Farm and The Witches of Eastwick. I haven’t read any short stories by him.”
Thirteen years ago, on Jan. 27, 2009, BBC-radio phoned John Updike Society president James Plath to get his reaction to Updike’s passing.
“What?”
It was shocking news to Plath, whose on-air response was less than composed.
Updike’s death from lung cancer was a surprise to many who loved and looked forward to reading a new book from him every year for the previous five decades.
The Telegraph (U.K.) called him “one of America’s greatest and most prolific literary icons, acclaimed for his precise, intimate style of writing,” while the BBC acknowledged that “John Updike’s novels, magisterial dissections of the soul of post-World War II middle America, placed him at the very pinnacle of his profession. . . . Whether writing novels, short stories, essays, or poems, John Updike’s work always seemed to find the pulse of modern America.” Closer to home, The New York Times praised Updike for being “kaleidoscopically gifted” and called him “the great chronicler of middle-class America . . . . America’s last true man of letters.”
Today, on the anniversary of his death, it might be a good idea to pull a favorite Updike book off the shelf and reread a favorite passage or two.
For a writer, that seems like the perfect toast.
Shelf Awareness reports that owners of The Book Shop of Beverly Farms has started a biweekly podcast they’re calling “John Updike’s Ghost,” which “features casual discussions between the store owners–siblings Hannah Harlow and Sam Pfeifle–about what they’re reading, running the store, how they match books with readers and more. Harlow and Pfeifle bought the store two years ago.
“These are the kinds of conversations we have with people who come into the shop all the time,” Pfeifle told Shelf Awareness. “People think you have to read hard books, or that you have to finish everything you start, or that long books are too intimidating. We want them to hear that we read romances and mysteries, too, and that we think some books aren’t working for us at all and just put them down all the time. And reading books should be fun! It shouldn’t feel like work,” Pfeifle said.
The article noted that the podcast is named after Updike because “the store thinks of him as its ‘patron saint.’ The owners explained: “As a long-time resident of Beverly Farms, the Book Shop was his local source for books, and he frequented the spot, which first opened in 1968. As Harlow and Pfeifle learn more about his role in the community, his philosophy on reading and writing, and the way his catalog stands up to contemporary scrutiny, Updike’s presence really seems to resonate through the Shop.”
In a post titled “The Despair of Atheism and the Hope of Christianity” on his Thinking on Scripture blog, Dr. Steven R. Cook wrote,
“Consider also this view of death by the atheist John Updike, from his novel, Pigeon Feathers:”
Wait. The atheist John Updike?
It’s easy enough for non-literary folks to confuse a short story collection with a novel, but confusing a writer almost universally hailed as a Christian writer with an atheist? Let’s be clear here. Though dictionaries define “atheism” as simply “disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods,” it must necessarily involve something more extreme—a rejection of God or the existence of God, perhaps, or else all of Christendom are atheists. For who hasn’t had at least one moment of fearful doubt, the frightening kind of “What if there is no God?” thought that threw deep thinkers like the existentialists into the throes of despair? Didn’t Christ also experience a moment of despair and lack of faith while dying on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Below is the passage that Dr. Cook was introducing:
“Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you were drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt in your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, an unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.”
This was 14-year-old David Kern during his moment-on-the-cross despair. Later in the story, however, David experienced an epiphany and a return to faith . . . and to hope.
The John Updike Society has so many members who are ministers precisely because Updike—a Lutheran who married a minister’s daughter—is a Christian writer who writes honestly about what it really means to be a Christian and to wrestle with doubts. Even the admission of doubt is an act of faith, for doubt is uncertainty, not disbelief. As many Updike scholars have observed and even Wikipedia noted, “Updike’s novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader….”
“Updike’s faith is Christian,” Bernard A. Schopen wrote some 16 years after Pigeon Feathers was published in book form, “but it is one to which many of the assumptions about the Christian perspective do not apply—especially those which link Christian faith with an absolute and divinely ordered morality.” In Updike’s fictional world, faith is not absolute, nor is it constant. It is perpetual, but broken (balanced?) by doubts that occupy his heroes as they hope for grace.
As Updike wrote in the November 29, 1999 New Yorker, “Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. At the end of the millennium, and of a century that has the Holocaust at its center, the reasons for doubt in God’s existence are so easily come by….” Wavering faith is the rule in Updike’s fictional world, not the exception. But wavering faith and atheism are not the same.
Last week Literary Hub ran an article “On Reimagining the Infinite Dramatic Scope of Shakespeare and His Immortal Characters,” in which Kathryn Barker recommended “five cracking titles that rework the Bard’s famous plays.”
It will come as no surprise to fans of John Updike that Gertrude and Claudius made the list. Of Updike’s imaginative historical novel, Barker wrote, “Shakespeare’s play Hamlet kicks off with a powder-keg dynamic for its titular character—his father is dead and his mother has married his uncle. But how did things get so complicated? In Gertrude and Claudius, Updike explores the lives of Hamlet’s mother, father, and uncle before the Prince of Denmark vowed his revenge and took center stage. A prequel that ends just after the start of Shakespeare’s play, this ambitious novel gives insights into characters who—in the original text—were largely supporting.”
Other novels that made the list: I, Iago by Nicole Galland; Ophelia by Lisa Klein; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard; and I Am Juliet, by Jackie French.
Barker might have included her own Waking Romeo, now available from Amazon, because it too is a retelling of a Shakespeare classic.
