Hear Updike Society member Yoav Fromer (author of The Moderate Imagination: The Political Though of John Updike and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism) in conversation with history professor Michael Kazin, whose most recent book was named an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review. The Zoom event is scheduled for April 18, 2021 from noon to 1:15, PST. To participate, register here.
Yesterday, on John Updike’s 89th birthday, Literary Hub published an article by Walker Caplan that noted how Updike, “with one notable exception, was an incredibly kind reviewer.” Those familiar with Updike’s work are probably wondering which one that might be: his review of Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, or Toni Morrison? Okay, so there’s more than one. The fact remains, Updike was an incredibly generous reviewer who first and foremost refused to criticize a writer for not writing the kind of book that the reader or reviewer might have preferred. Updike was so devoted to the idea of writers reviewing writers that he set forth his now-famous list of rules for reviewing books.
Caplan includes a handful of criticisms that range from an “it could be me” response—”The elder Trellis [from Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds] is kept immobilized in his bed by surreptitiously drug-induced sleep while his characters, including a number of American cowboys recruited from the novels of one William Tracy, run wild. At least, that’s what I think is happening.”—to the blunt: “Ray Finch, the hero of Norman Rush’s lengthy new novel, Mortals, finds many things annoying. . . . Iris and Ray have been married for seventeen years, and she gives signs of having the seventeen-year itch. This is less surprising to the reader than to Ray, who is perhaps the most annoying hero this reviewer has ever spent seven hundred pages with.”
In a Q&A with The Nerd Daily, Jennifer Dupee, author of the debut novel The Little French Bridal Shop, was asked, “Was there a moment in your writing career where you thought, ‘Okay, now I am officially a REAL writer?’ Can you tell us about that time in your life?”
Dupee responded, “I’m still not sure I feel like a REAL writer. It’s just something I’ve always done and will always continue to do. But I do have one small anecdote: My grandmother was friends with John Updike. When she died, we both spoke at her funeral. He came up to me afterward and praised my eulogy. In that moment, I felt a little like I’d arrived.”
Read the full interview.
We are saddened to report that Harlan L. Boyer, who graduated from Shillington High School in 1950 and was a classmate of John Updike’s, died on Monday, March 1, 2021. He was 88. Boyer, whose father was Updike’s art teacher at Shillington High School, was the only male childhood friend invited to play inside the Updike house at 117 Philadelphia Ave. Boyer said that he and young Updike mostly played in the dining room just off the side porch, and that a favorite pastime was setting up dominoes on the sideboard and then knocking them down. When told about a handful of marbles that were found under a loose floorboard in the Black Room adjacent to Updike’s boyhood bedroom, Boyer said that they never really played much marbles. Rather, they would shoot them with their slingshots. Updike, he guessed, probably shot at something from his bedroom window, then panicked and hid the marbles.
Boyer had a wealth of stories to share, and members of The John Updike Society will fondly recall his participation on the classmates panel at the society’s first conference in Reading, Pa. In the years that followed he was generous with his time, always willing to answer scholars’ questions about his relationship with “Uppy,” as he called the author back when they were children.
According to the Reading Eagle obituary, Boyer served as a U.S. Navy pilot during the Korean Conflict and later earned a Master’s in Guidance and Counseling, serving 12 years in the Governor Mifflin School District and 23 years at Schuylkill Valley School District before retiring in 1992. A 32 Degree Mason, Boyer had a passion for airplanes and in his later years enjoyed tending to his two acres of property. The society offers our sympathies to his wife Beverly, son Kirk, and daughter Kirstin. We will miss him too.
Class of 1950 panel from the 2010 conference (l to r): Moderator Jack De Bellis, Joan Youngerman, Jackie Hirneisen Kendall, Harlan Boyer, Jimmie Trexler
In his May 21, 2020 article on “The Philip Roth Archive,” Jesse Tisch described “A fan’s obsessive rummage through the letters and papers of the writer who died two years ago today” that “reveals a playful, funny, brilliant man.” The letters also reveal a great deal about the complicated relationship Roth had with fellow literary giant John Updike.
“Their relationship is hard to categorize, not a friendship, exactly, nor merely an acquaintance,” Tisch wrote. “For all their similarities—two literary grandees of the same generation, both precocious, prolific, obsessed with male desire and waning potency—they were strikingly different. Religious and secular. Serene and intense. High style and vernacular. Whereas Updike poured out novels, Roth, a plebeian laborer, assembled them brick by brick. To say that writing was pleasure for Updike and torture for Roth is to overstate things only slightly.
“The Roth-Updike letters reveal a deeper, more complex relationship than I had known about. Despite their differences, Roth admired Updike extravagantly, both as a novelist and a critic. “There’s no other writer (which is to say no one at all) in America whose high opinion means more to me than yours,” Roth wrote Updike in 1988. Roth pored over Updike’s reviews of his books, taking them to heart even when he didn’t agree: ‘take a look at page 181 of The Anatomy Lesson,’ he urged Updike in 1984. ‘My answer to the last paragraph of your review.’
“Somehow, despite their mutual respect and occasional get-togethers, the friendship never deepened. Roth’s half of the correspondence is warm and funny (another difference: Roth was far funnier), his fondness tinged with envy. ‘Reading you when I’m at work discourages me terribly—that fucking fluency!’ Roth wrote Updike in 1978. That wasn’t the only source of envy. ‘He knows so much, about golf, about porn, about kids, about America,’ Roth told David Plante. ‘I don’t know anything about anything.’ Indeed, one picks up on a subtle antagonism to Roth’s joshing. ‘Poor Rabbit. Must he die just because you’re tired?’ he needled Updike in 1990. More than once, Roth bristled at Updike’s criticism. He couldn’t understand Jewish novels; he had no comprehension of Jewish history or the Jewish psyche. ‘We are in history up to our knees,’ he told an interviewer, dismissing Updike’s review of The Anatomy Lesson.
“To some degree, both men were guarded and self-protective. Updike’s shield was amiability; Roth’s was humor and flattery. Of the two, Roth seemed more eager to pursue a deeper friendship. Roth professed ‘affectionate sympathy and something even more than that’ to Updike in 1991, yet sensed a certain resistance, a studied aloofness, on Updike’s part. Any chance for friendship was ruined by Updike’s incisive criticism of Roth’s novels. Reviewing The Anatomy Lesson, Updike complained of ‘the grinding, whining paragraphs’ and suggested that ‘by the age of fifty a writer should have settled his old scores.’ That rankled. In 1993, Updike delivered several sharp blows to Roth’s ego in the process of criticizing Operation Shylock (final verdict: Roth was ‘an exhausting author to be with’). The final blow came in 1999, when Updike, writing in The New York Review of Books, endorsed Claire Bloom’s vindictive memoir of her relationship with Roth. That did it: Roth was furious; the men never spoke again. Late in life, his wounds somewhat healed, Roth would claim to regret their estrangement. ‘I think you are next after Gordimer,’ he wrote Updike in October 1991. Of course, neither would follow Gordimer, which proved another lasting connection between the men—America’s greatest nonwinners of the Nobel Prize.”
The fascinating article based on letters from the Philip Roth Archive covers a lot more ground than this. Here’s the link.
Round-up stories are popular features, and for an article that appeared in Nylon Kristin Iversen rounded up 25 writers and asked them what book inspired them to want to be a writer.
“For me,” responded Siobhan Vivian, author of Stay Sweet, “that book was Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which I read during my first semester of undergrad. I was studying to be a screenwriter, and most of my classes were about film but I took a narrative fiction class as an elective, and this was the first book we were assigned.
“I loved how dark and sexy it was, how Rabbit—the protagonist—stayed unlikeable and irredeemable and petulant to the very end. It was unlike anything I’d been assigned to read in high school, a big beautiful middle finger to an English department cannon. And the prose is so lovely, I can still quote lines of description from memory.
“Reading it made me want to subvert expectations, break rules, be a little naughty . . . unsurprising, as I’ve always had a soft spot for bad boys.”
Read the full Nylon article.
Born in 1946 in Ressen,Bulgaria, Dimitri Vojnov is a well-known artist (oils, acrylics, pastels, sculptures) living in Germany who is recognized by The Europa Authentica Cultural Organization as a Magister Artis.
In 2020, he published a collection of short-short stories and illustrations, Ready for New York (Norderstedt, Germany: Kelkheim, 2020). One of the stories is devoted to John Updike, whom Vojnov said “was a great inspiration to me.”
His website features a poem that in English reads, “I have pledged myself to painting, / like a monk to his church. / I do not preach, I confess. / I am not a painter, / I am a confessor”. Below is that story, “John Updike: Our Sex Instructor.” Ready for New York, is available in an Amazon Kindle edition.
The Hastings Tribune‘s Rich Heldenfels (Tribune News Service, Nebraska) was asked by a reader, “Do you know of any plans to make (remake) a film based on any John Updike novels?”
Heldenfels replied, “I do not know of any plans. There have been a few adaptations of the works of Updike, one of the most admired American writers. There’s a 1970 movie of his novel Rabbit, Run, with James Caan, TV-movie Too Far to Go (1979) from Updike short stories, movies and TV productions inspired by the novel The Witches of Eastwick and a few shorter productions.
“Shortly after Updike died in 2009 at the age of 76, Scott Timberg pondered Updike’s ‘dozens of novels and several hundred short stories’ for TheWrap.com and saw several reasons why Updike did not make it to the movies much. One was style: ‘His writing is so visual, at the level of image and metaphor, it’s almost redundant to put it into a visual medium.’ In addition, ‘The “American small town, Protestant middle class” as he described his milieu, has not been of very big interest, personally or cinematically, to the Hollywood establishment.’ (The Witches of Eastwick with its supernatural element was thought more accessible for audiences.) Nor has Updike had a film-industry champion eager to put his work onscreen the way some other writers of his era have, Timberg wrote.
John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” is widely regarded by sportswriters and sports fans everywhere to be the best piece of sports writing ever done by anyone. Hall of Fame sportswriters have said as much, though the essay’s monumental status was no doubt helped by Ted Williams. The Bosox slugger hit a home run in his very last career at-bat, and Updike was in the stands to memorialize the moment with what became one of his most famous pieces of prose.
But blogger Roger W. Smith was not as impressed:
“What is wrong—in my ‘contrarian’ opinion—with Updike’s piece?
It is too long (it needs pruning)
It is too fine (typical of New Yorker pieces); too ‘literary and (at times) too flowery.
It is the work of a brilliant, undeniably talented writer whose dazzling performance—like that of some virtuosos—comes between you and the subject matter, i.e., the focus of the piece: the great baseball player Ted Williams, his last game.
One tires of Updike’s verbal pyrotechnics, his asides (authorial interventions, commentary).
Is this reportage or an essay? Updike tried to do both. I think it was a mistake.
‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’ is regarded as a classic. I would say, ‘Great effort.”
New Yorker writer Ved Mehta died on January 9, 2021 at the age of 86, a venerable writer who became an American citizen in 1975 and whose opus magnum was an 11-volume autobiography. He was a meticulous wordsmith (each New Yorker piece was read 16 times) who, according to a National Herald (India) obituary, would work on close to a hundred drafts of every chapter before sending it off to the publisher.
“Now people don’t know how to write letters,” he once complained. “I think hardly anyone writes formal prose these days. John Updike was the last writer I know who wrote formal prose. By formal prose I mean writing that is elegant, precise, clear. Now the writing has become quite a bit like schoolgirls writing to their mums—letters about what’s going on in their schools. It’s different,” the obituary quoted him as saying.