In a review for TheGuardian [U.K.], “Skin by Sergio del Molino review—a meditation on psoriasis and the psyche; A sufferer writes about how the skin condition affected figures as diverse as Joseph Stalin, John Updike and Cyndi Lauper,” Houman Barekat notes that del Molino was 21 when he first experienced psoriasis symptoms.
Barekat summarizes the affliction: “a chronic autoimmune condition that causes an overproduction of epidermal cells, resulting in scaling on the surface of the skin” that “appear in red blotches that sometimes crack and bleed.” Barekat identifies the accompanying related symptoms—arthritis, back pain, chronic fatigue—and zeroes in on del Molino’s contrast between the way that the disease affected Stalin (and his two henchmen who also had psoriasis) and Updike:
“Conversely, on a happier note, Updike credited his psoriasis as the driving force of his talent, remarking in his memoirs that: ‘Whenever in my timid life I have shown some courage and originality it has been because of my skin.'”
Updike famously wrote about his psoriasis in “At War with My Skin,” which was first published in The New Yorker and then became one of the central essays in Self-Consciousness: A Memoir (1989). Handwritten jottings that appear to be the start of the essay are on display at The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.
Del Molino also referred to Updike in his Dec. 16, 2021 opinion piece that was published in The New York Times: “Very few dared to write in any depth about their illness. John Updike is one exception. He dedicated a novel and part of his memoirs to psoriasis, and it was thanks to those that I became aware of my own monstrous nature. I wrote a book to explain myself through these figures. My life, like theirs, is governed by my skin condition.” Part of that quote appears as well in del Molino’s first-person account written for Asharq Al-Awsat on Dec. 25, 2021 titled “What Makes Me a Monster.”
As 2021 was coming to a close and people were starting to anticipate doing things again given relaxed COVID restrictions, like going to movies and concerts again, Marc Chacksfield came up with a wish list of “brilliant” books that he thought would also make for great cinema. His ShortList article suggests:
1—The Secret History, by Donna Tartt 2—The Power of The Dog, by Don Winslow (a different novel from the Netflix film) 3—Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison 4—Not Fade Away, by Jim Dodge 5—We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin 6—Roger’s Version, by John Updike 7—The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai 8—The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates 9—Paris Trance, by Geoff Dyer
Of Roger’s Version, Chacksfield writes, “John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick was a big screen smash when it was adapted by director George Miller at the end of the Eighties. As such, it’s surprising that more of his novels haven’t been given the cinematic green light. Roger’s Version would be perfect—taking in middle age disillusionment, the sexual allure of a younger woman and questions pertaining to the existence of God. See, someone make it already!
John Updike’s two Time magazine cover portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery, but he’s also depicted on The Laureates of the Lewd, a 1993 pastel by Edward Sorel that was created as an original illustration for a Gentleman’s Quarterly article.
From the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution website: “Sorel’s three roguish satyrs—Gore Vidal, John Updike, and Philip Roth—were gamboling around the literary landscape making mischief and money in the late 1960s. As James Atlas pointed out in his Gentleman’s Quarterly article “The Laureates of the Lewd,” Updike’s 1968 book Couples, followed by Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the literary side of the Sexual Revolution to a new level of uncensored candor. American erotic life was out in the open again, in all its complexity and variety. But these books were as much about disillusionment as sex, reflecting the turmoil of generational conflict, a revolution in birth control, a controversial war, protests, assassinations, and race riots. Roth himself noted that if Portnoy’s Complaint had not appeared at the end of a decade ‘marked by blasphemous defiance of authority and loss of faith in the public order, I doubt that a book like mine would have achieved such renown in 1969.'”
The Guardian [U.K.] books section has an ongoing feature on “The books of my life,” and earlier this year comedian David Baddiel was featured.
David Baddiel (Photo: Pal Hansen/The Guardian)
The book that changed him as a teenager? “Ways of Seeing by John Berger, at 18. It introduced me to the idea that what we assume to be natural is often ideological. In the book, this is primarily about art (particularly how images of women in art are utterly encoded with the male gaze) but I took from it an understanding that nearly everything we create, indeed think, has an underlying unconscious ideological component.”
The writer who changed his mind? “John Updike. Again when I was 18, I read it without realising it was part of a sequence of books, Rabbit Is Rich. It converted me to the idea that, as Updike puts it, the job of art is to give the mundane its beautiful due—that if you are a good enough writer, your prose can make everything, even the most microscopic and ordinary things in life, rich and strange.”
Unsurprisingly, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is banned in many schools. But so is George Orwell’s Animal House, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—all books, like Rabbit, Run, that were once taught in schools without protest.
But when books like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Bill Martin Jr./Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web also make the banned books list, it sends a message more disturbing than the act of censorship: it’s sad proof that American minds are narrowing more than ever before.
Literary Hub is no stranger to John Updike, and a recent article, “From Eve Babitz to Raven Leilani, Readings on Solipsistic, Transformative Love” by Lillian Fishman, includes John Updike’s Couples.
Of the novel, Fishman writes, “A novel apparently about sex, Couples is actually about something much more interesting: how adultery itself—’its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master’—can breathe life into a prematurely settled existence. Though he describes a number of affairs among the couples of Tarbox, Updike follows most closely behind Piet, whose womanizing is never premediated but who falls into one affair-adventure after another, believing his talent is that he genuinely loves every woman he touches. Sincere and special in the way it expresses how we explain ourselves to ourselves, and deeply forgiving of our failings, especially when they occur in the service of reanimating a life.”
Other novels referenced and recommended are Luster: A Novel (Raven Leilani), Simple Passion (Annie Ernaux), Slow Days, Fast Company (Eve Babitz), Self-Portrait (Celia Paul), Seven Years (Peter Stamm), Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (Kathleen Collins), and Pure Colour (Sheila Heti).
Fishman is the author of Acts of Service, available from Hogarth Press.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, based at the University of Arizona and published online by Johns Hopkins University Press, included an important essay on Updike in the Volume 77: 4 (Winter 2021) issue: “John Updike: ‘Museums and Women,’ Women as Museums,” by Robert Milder, a member of The John Updike Society. The storied journal, which has been published since 1945, is edited by Lynda Zwinger and is based in Tucson, Arizona, where the society will meet for its 7th Biennial Conference in October, 2023.
Abstract: Written in 1962 and published in five years later, “Museums and Women” is a series of vignettes featuring each of the most important women in his Updike’s life through that time: his strong-willed, mercurial mother; the schoolgirl its hero decides he loves; the Radcliffe student (a version of Updike’s Mary Pennington) he would marry; and the lover for whom he, like Updike, would nearly leave his wife. Beyond its status as an autonomous work of fiction, “Museums and Women” is a matrix for Updike’s semi-autobiographical treatments of love, sex, marriage, and infidelity. Focusing on “Museum and Women,” the essay moves outward to consider Updike’s life and work in thematically related writings across his career: stories of the 1960s and beyond, Marry Me: A Romance, Of the Farm, Couples, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, and Villages, a late novel comprising a reassessment of his life as it was shaped by his relationships to women.
Milder, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests are 19th and 20th century American authors.
At the annual membership meeting, this year held at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago on Friday, May 28, society president Jim Plath announced that the board has decided to postpone The John Updike Society’s scheduled 2023 conference in the Republic of Georgia, due to uncertainty in that part of the world as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Many of our members expressed deep disappointment that we won’t be going to Georgia in 2023, but with Putin being such an aggressor and such an unstable man, we thought the responsible thing to do was to postpone that conference at Akaki Tsereteli State University until 2025, when it will be the society’s 8th biennial conference,” Plath said. Which is to say, the society’s Georgia adventure will still happen, but at a time when people can feel comfortable again about flying to a country that borders Russia.
The Updikes’ condo
TUCSON, ARIZONA was announced as the site of the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference, where members will have “A Desert Encounter.” Updike wrote that New Yorker story about losing his prized hat (which is now on display at The John Updike Childhood Home museum) in the parking lot of his desert condo.
Members who attend the conference will not only get to see the parking lot and condo where John and Martha Updike lived for several months each year the last six or so years of his life; they’ll get to see the inside and experience the views that Updike did when he wrote on his patio every morning. And attendees will be able to enjoy a reception at the Skyline Country Club some 150 yards away, where Updike golfed (yes, another Rabbit Open best ball tournament is a possibility) and where John and Martha frequently ate.
Saguaro National Park
There are other Updike sites in the area (like a historic inn where the Updikes always went for his birthday dinner), but an added bonus for scholars and teachers of contemporary American literature is that Tucson is also a big David Foster Wallace site (Wallace graduated from the University of Arizona MFA program in 1987), and we might visit some of those. Among other topics, a Call for Papers will invite comparative essays on Updike and Wallace.
The board thought that the first week in October would be the best time to visit the American Southwest, so “save the date.” More details will be forthcoming. At every conference, the society organizes day trips so attendees can experience the local culture and history, and of course those trips will continue.
Five properties in Tombstone are listed on the National Register of Historic Places
One possible day trip would be to experience Tombstone, which, with Dodge City, are the most iconic towns of the Old American West. It’s an hour-and-a-half drive that would give attendees a chance to see more of Arizona. There’s also the nearby San Xavier Indian Reservation of the ToHono O’odham Nation, which has a casino we might wish to visit in addition to the more cultural aspects to be experienced.
Other possible attractions: Saguaro National Park (home to the nation’s largest cacti); The University of Arizona(located in Tucson), which TripAdvisor lists as a local site worth visiting; the Mount Lemmon Skycenter observatory (Elevation 9,157 feet; Arizona is famous for its “stellar” stargazing), which features two of the largest telescopes available for public viewing in the Southwest, plus a possible SkyRide up the mountain which offers stunning views of the mountains surrounding Tucson; and the Titan Missile Museum (aka Air Force Facility Missile Site 8, a former ICBM site—now a National Historic Site) located 25 miles south of Tucson. It’s a National Historic Landmark and the only Titan II complex to survive from the late Cold War period.
San Xavier del Bac Mission
Then there’s the San Xavier del Bac Mission, the oldest intact European structure in Arizona and another National Historic Landmark, built from 1783-1797; St. Augustine Cathedral; the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum(highly recommended by English faculty at UA), which offers an impressive array of flora and fauna; the Tucson Botanical Gardens, with its flowers and butterflies; and a Sonoita Valley Wine Tour, since wine-tasting is popular in the area. On the low-key side there are historic districts to walk through in Tucson, and a Sunday morning Rillito Park Farmer’s Market.
But there are a lot of additional sites that have historical significance. The board looks forward to having another adventure with our members!
Recently published, The John Updike Review 9:1 (Winter 2022) features four new essays, three writers on Toward the End of Time, and one review:
“John Updike, Robert Frost, and the Momentary Stay against Confusion” by Donald J. Greiner
“Persisting through Changing Ideologies: Translations and Receptions of John Updike in Russia” by Olga Karasik-Updike
“Digging Deep and the Value of the Superficial: Antinomies of My Father’s Tears” by Peter J. Bailey
“The Placidity of Aging in Updike’s ‘The Road Home’ and ‘The Full Glass'” by Pradipta Sengupta
“Updike’s Toward the End of Time: A Meditation on Aging, Imagining Other Worlds, and the Landscape of Haven Hill” by James Schiff
“Branching Fictions in Updike’s Toward the End of Time” by Marshall Boswell
“A Year of Perfect Eyesight Revisited: Rereading Toward the End of Time” by Biljana Dojčinović
“Body, Mind, and Soul in the Student-Teacher Dyad (Rev. of Pedagogic Encounters: Master and Disciple in the American Novel after the 1980s, Aristi Trendel) by Sue Norton
The journal, edited by James Schiff and Nicola Mason, is published twice annually by the University of Cincinnati and the John Updike Society and is based at the University of Cincinnati, Department of English and Comparative Literature. Copies of the issue are included with membership in the society, with members living the U.S. receiving physical copies and those abroad receiving digital copies. Institutional subscriptions are also available. Contact James Schiff (james.schiff@uc.edu) for further information.
A second collaborative collection of essays by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan in Switzerland. Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Textscontains an essay on “John Updike in Serbia” by Biljana Dojčinović and Nemanja Glintić. Other writers covered in the book include Octavia Butler, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Donald Barthelme, Gloria Anzaldúa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Danzy Senna, Marilynne Robinson, Jesmyn Ward, William T. Vollmann, Toni Morrison, and Charles Yu. Also included is an additional resource provided by Norton: “Incorporating One’s Own Literary Criticism into the Curriculum: The Teachable Essay via John Updike’s Short Stories.” The book is also available as a Kindle edition.
From the publisher: This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.
Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University in Reading, Pa. He is the author or editor of 20 scholarly books, including Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and Victorian Environmental Nightmares (2019). Sue Norton is Lecturer of English at Technological University Dublin, Ireland. She has published numerous articles and essays on topics in American literature as well as on classroom practice. Together they edited European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018).
