For Father’s Day The Wall Street Journal published a roundup by Lee Siegel on “Portrait of the Artist as a Great Father; The cliché about famous creative types is that they’re self-obsessed and withdrawn. Less familiar—but more plentiful—are the stories of paternal affection that flows from artistic bounty.”

In it, Siegel rebuts the cliché of the “bad artist father:  icy, hurtful, self-obsessed. Withdrawn into impenetrable creative isolation—so the stereotype goes—these parental monsters punish any attempted breach of their solitude by inflicting lifelong trauma on those closest to them.”

Siegel writes, “Here is David Updike, son of the novelist John, remembering that when he and his siblings ‘appeared unannounced, in [their father’s] office—on the second floor of a building he shared with a dentist, accountants and the Dolphin Restaurant—he always seemed happy and amused to see us, stopped typing to talk and dole out some money for movies. But as soon as we were out the door, we could hear the typing resume, clattering with us down the stairs.”

Among the other examples of creative fatherly love provided in the story is Henrik Ibsen. “So devoted was he to his only child, Sigurd, that when the boy was told, to his despair, that law school in Norway would not accept credits from the German gymnasium he had attended, his angry father moved the family to Rome, in part so that his son could complete his law degree there. Sigurd later became Norway’s prime minister.”

Tenderness is cited in Bernard Malamud, whose letter to a friend reflects how enchanted he was by his seven-year-old child:  “Yesterday . . . I took Janna to the bank of a river she likes. She waded in the cold water, scooped up minnows with a strainer and learned how to skim flat rocks across the water . . . . As I sat on a log by the river, watching her yesterday, it was as if I were reading a long poem, every line full of beauty.”

There’s a bit of romanticizing going on in the article, as Siegel says, “There seems to be some mystical bond, especially between artist-fathers and their artist children, something particularly profound in sharing the gift of creativity with the parent who helped to create you.” A fuller study with more than single examples per author would no doubt reveal a more complex “portrait.” But what kind of Father’s Day reading would that make?

Read the full article.

In “Recalling Sighting John Updike: The A&P of the Mind,” Martin Mugar writes about a pilgrimage he took to Ipswich hoping to get a glimpse of John Updike. Instead of meeting the author, he became involved in a fender-bender near the Ipswich firehouse and got a lesson on Updike and local history. “The accident had thrust me into the middle of a small community of Ipswich ‘locals’.”

Mugar asked if they had known “their famous Ipswich resident John Updike. Yes! they knew of him and saw him around town. The fireman asked me if I knew that the Rite Aid [now CVS] down the street had once been the A&P, that was the locale of one of his best known short stories.”

He tells how he went home and read the story. “It was a good read. The first time around I found the conformity/non-conformity take a little stale. The corporate versus sexual dichotomy may have been part of the early percolation of the sexual revolution and carried more psychic impact when the work was first published.

“A split that was less pronounced in the story but indelibly there was that the girls were upper class. Sammy, the nineteen-year-old townie, was aware of it in the way they moved and talked and in the choice of hors d’oeuvres that they were picking up for their parents’ cocktail party. . . . Clearly, Updike was impressed by their demeanor that radiated self confidence. In the end the narrator . . . quits his job in protest of the boss’s embarrassing the girls for walking into his store half-naked. Sammy may have hoped they would have noticed but like the rich in The Great Gatsby they move on unaware of the effect they have had on others.”

Updike, he appreciates, “created a world for himself held up by incisive description and cultural insights. In the last lines of the story it forbodes a lifetime that is described as going to be hard. Could it be because he will always be on the outside looking in, never fully owning or identifying with the setting in which his description takes place? For the corporation the world is a site for the display of its brands. The artist is a competitor in this realm but his only power comes from the fertility and staying power of imagination, not his bank account.

“However, we can say Updike has had the last word: his A&P of the mind still exists whereas the original is long gone.” Pictured is the Ipswich Rite Aid that was the setting for John Updike’s frequently anthologized short story, “A&P”.

Read the full essay.