Postponed Updike Society conference finally in the books

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Forty-seven members donned masks to see each other again at the 6th John Updike Society Conference in Reading and Shillington, Pa. from Sept. 30-Oct. 3—a conference that had been scheduled for 2020 but postponed because of COVID-19. With pandemic numbers still high, all attendees were required to submit proof of vaccination with their registration materials and urged to wear masks indoors.

The event was COVID-free, but the pandemic still cast a large shadow. More registrants and speakers than usual were forced to cancel, and any conference hiccups or glitches could be directly traced to COVID. But attendees looked past all that and reveled in each other’s company, happy to witness the dedication of the Pennsylvania Historic Marker and unveiling of the National Registry of Historic Places plaque at the John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., in Shillington. In the end, the consensus was that the conference—the second directed by Alvernia communications professor Sue Guay—was another memorable experience.

Because of COVID, organizers sought to “go small” and decided to spread things out over three locations. Alvernia University hosted the conference for Oct. 1 events and provided all bus transportation. New partner Governor Mifflin School District hosted sessions at the high school just blocks from the Updike house on Oct. 2, and the society stayed at the Courtyard Marriott Reading for morning sessions on Oct. 3. The “vibe” was good, and members who had been eager to attend the grand opening of the John Updike Childhood Home immediately after the marker dedication ceremony were impressed by what they saw . . . and later enjoyed a side-porch reception at the house.

Member Greg EplerWood and local historian George Meiser teamed on Friday to handle the microphone for a bus tour of Berks County Updike sites. At a stop at Weaver’s Orchards and the Plowville farmhouse, Ed Weaver talked about living in the farmhouse now and his memories of growing up with Updike children visiting the area. At a stop at the Plowville church and cemetery, Michael Updike led a group to the Hoyer and Updike family headstones and talked about the marker he made for his father. At a stop at the cemetery high above Shillington, described in an Updike poem, members walked to find some of the headstones mentioned. And of course the bus drove past the new “Rabbit Run” signs posted along the nearby highway.

On Saturday, an estimated 200 people turned out for the marker dedication ceremony and grand opening tours of the house. William Lewis spoke as a representative of the Pennsylvania Museum & Historical Commission, telling the crowd that getting “one of these” is no small feat.

Honored guests included State Senator Judy Schwank, Berks County Commissioner Michael Rivera, Shillington Councilman Alec Ernest, Shillington Mayor Andrew Hivner, Shillington Chief of Police Brett Hivner, Gov. Mifflin School District Superintendent Bill McKay and Asst. Superintendent Lisa Templin Hess, local historians Meiser and Myrtle Council, Updike house restoration expert Bob Doerr, former Updike classmates and neighbors Barbara Hartz and Joan Youngerman, and all four of Updike’s children: Elizabeth, David, Michael, and Miranda. As the line formed to have a first look inside the house, member volunteers answered questions and kept the crowd moving along, while remaining members followed John Updike Childhood Home education director Maria Lester on a walking tour of 5-Corners Updike-related sites—including Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, where the Updikes attended. Pastor Colleen Cox, of Grace Evangelical, offered the marker dedication invocation.

James Schiff, tapped by the Updike Literary Trust to edit a “selected letters” collection, delivered the opening keynote, while award-winning writer Max Apple was the closing keynote speaker.

For more photos, go to the John Updike Society and John Updike Childhood Home Facebook pages.

New Berks County signs honor Updike, Rabbit

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It’s only a tiny stream that begins in Shillington, cuts through Cumru Township for a short piece, then continues through adjacent Kenhorst. There it empties into the Angelica Creek. But now that tiny stream has a name and a sign that local environmentalists hope will discourage people from dumping trash there:  Rabbit Run.

The name was chosen from 20 suggested for an Earth Day contest, and the idea to name the stream was born in 2016 through conversations between founding members of the newly formed Angelica Creek Watershed Association and Governor Mifflin High School biology teacher Jennifer Stinson, who was faculty advisor to the student environmental club.

The ACWA is a program of Berks Nature (BerksNature.org), a non-profit organization devoted to land preservation, water protection, community gardens, education programs, and partnerships that connect people to nature and maintain the natural beauty of Berks County. The ACWA, which has removed over 120 tires and tons of trash from the creek’s edge, has found that naming creeks can make a difference—even with tiny watershed runs like this section that parallels John Glenn Ave. to the south and continues past Highway 625 to New Holland Road.

Once the name “Rabbit Run” was selected, in order to get it officially named by the U.S. Government, the ACWA had to obtain permission and support letters from the three municipalities involved. The association also sought and received a similar letter of support from the Berks Planning Commission. All of this documentation was submitted to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, an office in the U.S. Geological Survey, which approved the naming in May 2018.

When the sign erection comes just one week from another Updike-related sign unveiling. The John Updike Childhood Home will host a Pennsylvania Museum & Historical Commission Marker Dedication Ceremony at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 2, to which the public is invited. At that event, a National Registry of Historic Places plaque also will be unveiled at the house on 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington. Here is the story that appeared in the Reading Eagle:

Rabbit-Run-storyDownload

Latest John Updike Review spotlights Labor-in-Vain tennis court

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John Updike Society members who attended the second biennial conference in Boston got to tour Updike’s Labor-in-Vain house and see the tennis court that John and Mary Updike used for recreation. The recently published John Updike Review (Vol. 8, No. 2) features an essay on that court—”A Short History of a Tennis Court”—and photos (including the cover) by David Updike.

Also in this issue is an essay by Cornelius Dieckmann, “Too Old to Be Educated: John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy as Post-Bildungsroman,” which won the Fifth Emerging Writers Prize from the John Updike Review.

Other essays are from James Plath and Thushara Perera (“A Scientific Explanation: The Physics of Marriage and Divorce in Updike’s ‘Here Come the Maples'”), Peter J. Bailey (“Suzie Creamcheese, Alma DeMott, and the Untranscendent Stardom of In the Beauty of the Lilies“), and Donald J. Greiner (“John Updike’s Blurbs: The Art of Promoting a Writer”). Perera is a physicist now working for NASA in Washington.

This issue, “Harv Is Plowing Now” is the subject of the “three writers on” feature that’s unique to the review, with Updike’s reprinted short story followed by contributions from James Schiff, David Lerner Schwartz, and Jason Namey.”

The John Updike Review is published twice yearly by the University of Cincinnati and The John Updike Society and is included with membership in the society (print copy for U.S. members, digital copy for international members). It is also available electronically and, for institutional subscriptions, through EBSCO. The journal is produced by editor James Schiff and managing editor Nicola Mason at the University of Cincinnati.

Time to register for the 6th Biennial John Updike Society Conference

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COVID-19 scuttled the 2020 conference, but while the situation remains fluid the John Updike Society board has decided to move forward with the conference, which will be scaled back to a 2.5 day event with no long day trip, held Oct. 1-3 with most people arriving the day before the conference begins. The conference is hosted by Alvernia University in Reading, Pa., with Sue Guay serving as conference director. Please note that the society board decided the responsible thing to do was to require all conference registrants to be fully vaccinated; Masks will also be required for indoor sessions except when eating or at the microphone (See registration packet at the end of this post).

The conference celebrates the Grand Opening of The John Updike Childhood Home, with its 10 rooms of wall hangings, furniture, and 10 cases of unique exhibits that people can peruse for the first time. The conference also coincides with a 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, Pennsylvania Historic Marker Dedication Ceremony and the unveiling of the National Historic Registry Plaque.

OTHER CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS:

James Schiff will deliver a Friday evening keynote on the Updike letters project, with slides of some of his “finds” and a walk-through of the challenges that the massive undertaking posed.

The closing keynote will be by Max Apple, an award-winning writer whose works include The Oranging of America, Free Agents, and The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories. Apple frequently turns up in the same anthologies and “Best of” collections as Updike, and, in fact, the Jewish Journal wrote, “Max Apple’s people are the folks you might see having lunch at a local diner . . . a John Updike without Protestants.”

Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, David Updike, Michael Updike, and Miranda Updike will appear on a panel, “The Truth Behind The Maples Stories Fictions”; Updike society member and Updike family friend Carole Sherr will talk about “Remembering John & Linda Updike”; and a session on “Updike’s First Wife” will feature Updike classmate Mary Ann Moyer, who was Updike’s “stage wife” in two plays at Shillington High School. Moderator: James Plath.

The conference also will feature walking tours of Shillington Updike sites and a bus tour of the area, with stops at the Pagoda, Robeson Evangelical Lutheran (Plow) Church and Cemetery, and Weaver’s Orchards to see the Plowville farmhouse.

Unique to this conference is that Friday will be spent at host Alvernia University, Saturday at the John Updike Childhood Home and Governor Mifflin Schools just across the street from the house, and Sunday at the conference hotel, the Couryard Marriott Reading.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

August 12—Last day that academic proposals, Schiff Travel Grant applications, and requests to moderate a session will be accepted. See registration packet below for details.

September 2—Last day to book a hotel reservation and to register for the conference without a late fee. Again, see registration packet below for details.

6TH CONFERENCE REGISTRATION PACKETDownload

Writer questions literary Cancel Culture

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In recent years, males who have taken advantage of women have been toppled amid cries of “toxic masculinity,” and Confederate statues and monuments have been removed because of “cancel culture.” But in his Spectator essay “Read Ray Bradbury before he’s canceled,” associate editor Ron Liddle questions whether the backlash against writers for alleged sexism or racism isn’t somewhat like pushes from the other side of the political arena to ban books from school libraries. His essay raises other questions: Should writing about a fictional man who abuses women or spouts racist things be treated the same as a flesh-and-blood man who abuses women or says racist things? Can a male write about a misbehaving male protagonist? Should a writer be held accountable for a character’s behavior? When it comes to art, is censorship ever justifiable? If so, when, and under what circumstances? And what about inconsistencies? Why are older novels that feature sexist male protagonists not held in the same contempt as those from a more recent past? Is “cancel culture” driven by personal crusades?

Although Liddle focuses on Bradbury, Updike also factors into the discussion. “Frankly, it’s a wonder we are allowed to read [Bradbury] at all. But that’s where Fahrenheit 451 got it right. After reading Bradbury I moved on to Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike — especially Updike, another small-town writer. These people seemed to me giants of literature and yet I suspect you will have to search high and low to find them on a university syllabus, so comprehensively have their reputations been trashed for political reasons.

“Updike, an almost lifelong registered Democrat, is loathed for his supposed misogyny and racism,” Liddle writes. “I read an academic article recently supposedly in support of Updike: it said he should be read because we needed to know what a vile bastard he really was. Saul Bellow is canceled because he became a bit gamy about the neighborhood gangs in Chicago, and also for Henderson the Rain King and Mr Sammler’s Planet, which are considered terribly racist. And Philip Roth? Hell, even his biographer has been canceled. Maybe we ought to memorize a book or two from each of these wonderful writers, in order to keep the memories alive. I’ll take Updike’s Couples, if that’s OK — I already know most of it by heart. It’s late now. There’s a wind whipping up and the distant sound of thunder carrying the whiff of autumn. I am no longer 15 years old. But I might still hunker down between my sheets with Bradbury, comforted by the tales of the weird and ominous stuff going on just outside.”

Updike makes a Five Great Books reading list

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In a Husteust.com article that begins with a quote from Game of Thrones‘ Tyrion Lannister (“A mind needs books as a sword needs a sharpening stone”), “Five books you should read this year” are recommended:

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike

Of the Updike selection, the site says, “In terms of sheer skill, Updike is the ultimate master of the late 20th century. His sentences are astonishingly brilliant and his command of the language is almost nil.”

Clearly, the last part of that compliment doesn’t express what the author thinks it might. Which reminds us: the actual quote from Tyrion Lannister is, “My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind . . . and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much. . . .”

U and F

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Anything goes these days when it comes to online journalism, partly because so much of what passes for news is opinion posted by untrained non-professionals, but also partly because times have changed.

Just not The Times. Though a recently posted Medium story concerned The New York Times, it’s doubtful that the beacon of the news-gathering profession would run the headline “A Brief History of ‘Fuck’ in The New York Times.” But there it is, casually screaming at you with the subhead “Also fucked, fucking, fucker, motherfucker, and Airbnfuckingbs.”

As Updike fans might imagine, the author who helped push the boundaries of acceptability in literary fiction and poetry factors into the discussion. But he wasn’t the first to slip a naughty word past Times editors.

“As it turns out, a majority of the Times’ fucks over the years have slipped in by means of book excerpts, mostly novels—including what appears to be the first, in 1984, from John Irving’s A Widow for One Year: ‘Yet not even then would he regret having fucked Ruth’s mother.’ According to my archival search, the second fuck didn’t appear for another 13 years, until 1997—a John Updike character recalling that when he was ‘courting’ his wife he’d been ‘attracted to her way of saying “fuck” instead of a softer expression.’ The third appearance, in 1998, is the first figurative use—funny, given that it’s from the special prosecutor’s report on President Clinton’s sex scandal, Monica Lewinsky recorded saying she wished he would ‘acknowledge . . . that he helped fuck up my life.'”

Writer Kurt Andersen did not say what naughty word(s) he intends to search next.

Book explores Updike and others as religious writers

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Books published during the COVID quarantine tend not to be on anyone’s radar, but one of them just came to our attention: Listening for God: Malamud, O’Connor, Updike & Morrison, by Peter C. Brown (Mercer University Press, 2020).

Of course, Brown isn’t alone in considering Updike as a religious writer. The very first monograph on Updike, Alice and Kenneth Hamilton’s The Elements of John Updike (1970), heavily weighed the Protestantism that underscored much of Updike’s fiction, and James Yerkes’ John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (1999) broached the subject from a variety of perspectives. More recently, another Mercer University Press publication, Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories, by David Crowe, explored the religious-philosophical implications of Updike’s Richard and Joan Maple stories.

If you’re wondering if there’s anything left to say, in literary scholarship the answer is almost always yes. That’s certainly the case with this book by Brown, who taught philosophy and Great books for 40+ years at Mercer University.

As the press release for this volume points out, “Peter Brown offers a highly interdisciplinary examination of these four authors who represent four different faith traditions within Judeo-Christianity: Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and syncretistic (blending Africanist creole beliefs with Catholicism). All subversive writers, they work in extraordinary ways to undermine their own stories and open us, their readers, to something more, something that transcends time and fate.”

The key phrase here is “undermine their own stories,” and Brown is careful to draw a distinction between the protagonists, the narrator, and the author, and to note how these authors interrogate religion with their own brand of dialectical approach. He’s careful to draw a distinction between Updike and his alter ego, Rabbit Angstrom.

The Updike chapter, “Updike’s Secular Pilgrims,” has a title that may seem familiar to readers well-versed in Updike criticism. But Brown finds more to say. He focuses on the Rabbit novels and novella. “What is Rabbit’s problem?” Brown asks in the subtitled section dealing with the first novel. “He is looking within for a vaguely remembered God.” Brown asks, “What are we meant to think of Rabbit? The question is inescapable—Updike insists that we ask it.” While considering the conundrum of God’s judgment, Brown posits, “It’s not the content of the judgment that matters or its casuist application; it’s the vertical dimension it opens in Being: the Sacred. Updike defeats every attempt to bring Rabbit within the ordinary gambit of right and wrong—without abandoning him to the worship of his own worst (or best) instincts.”

By the time of Rabbit Redux, Brown argues, “Rabbit as ‘Christian’ everyman fits the parody. He is burdened with a Biblical sense of sin and been told (in that long ago Sunday school) that salvation/resurrection is promised. Unable to find his own way to the Celestial City of deliverance, instead he follows a ‘shining light’ that only he sees and leaves his wife and children to pursue it.”

With Rabbit Is Rich, Brown suggests that Kruppenbach’s question to Jack Eccles resonates: “How does God see all this? In 1980, America is Updike’s Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no redeeming factor ….” But in Rabbit at Rest, “Updike nudges Rabbit onto a larger stage, not just the evolving tragi-comic setting for his picaresque antics in the first three novels, but a secular world remorselessly molding him from the inside out . . . as he struggles nevertheless to shape a moral realm within his kingdom of self. Whatever it was in Rabbit that sustained Updike’s attention over three decades and four novels rises toward a kind of tragic nobility as he grapples with his mortality and with his son, his only hedge against mortality.”

Such insights resonate even more when read against the conclusions that Brown draws about the fictions of Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison. It’s a welcome addition to Updike studies.

The book, in hardcover, is 255 pages long, priced at $35. Here’s the Amazon link.

Listen to a lecture on the Updike story Separating

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The past two years have seen a huge jump in online classes, with an equally large number of asynchronous courses and assignments. You can watch/listen to Dr. John Pistelli‘s interesting lecture on Updike and “Separating” on YouTube. It’s part of his English 1201W: Contemporary American Literature course that was offered spring 2021. “Separating” is the Updike story included in the main textbook for the course, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E: Literature Since 1945, Ninth Edition. Pistelli says that he doesn’t “care much about” the story—”I don’t think it’s Updike’s best work.”

Pistelli calls Updike a polarizing writer—you either love him or you don’t. “I actually like Updike, so I understand the critiques of him.” Pistelli considers Updike a “lyrical realist” and asserts that there’s “no critique in Updike”—that everything is described more or less without judgment being passed. He also sees in Updike a tendency towards sentimentality and what he terms “a laziness of intellect” that helps to explain the response of critics who see Updike as a stylist without much to say.

Pistelli is a lecturer at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Modern British and American fiction, history/theory of the novel, Modernism, and fiction writing.

In Memoriam: Dennis B. Ledden

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We are saddened to learn that Dr. Dennis B. Ledden, a society member who was to have presented his paper on “Hemingway, Masculinity, and John Updike’s ‘Twin Beds in Rome’” at the upcoming 6th biennial conference, died of cancer on April 1, 2021.

Dennis’s main scholarly pursuits were the works of Hemingway and Faulkner, but in recent years he expanded his interests to include Updike. His scholarship has been published in numerous university journals, even though he came to academia late in life.

Dennis, of Butler, Pennsylvania, graduated from Penn State University Park, served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era and afterwards the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, then taught at Butler Intermediate H.S. for nearly 30 years. After retiring, he earned a Ph.D. in literature from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and taught as an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State.

He is survived by his wife, Yong Hui Ledden of Butler; son Dr. Brian Ledden and family of Pensacola, Fla.; and daughter Alicia Ledden Heine and family of the San Francisco Bay area.

Dennis was quietly passionate about literature, and members who attended the 3rd Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Reading/Shillington may recall having wide-ranging discussions with him. He enjoyed the fellowship of fellow Updike enthusiasts so much that he and Yong Hui both attended the 4th Biennial J.U.S. Conference in Columbia, South Carolina. Our deepest sympathies go out to his family. He and his positive energy will be missed.

Pictured below: Closing banquet at the 4th conference. Clockwise from Don Greiner (back of head): Peter Bailey, Fran Bailey, Richard Androne, Yong Hui Ledden, Dennis Ledden, Robert Morace, and Ellen Greiner.