Writer recalls Wolfe’s feud with Updike and others

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Writing for The Telegraph days after Tom Wolfe died, Jake Kerridge recalls a feud between Wolfe and writers who dared criticize him in public reviews—among them, John Updike.

Kerridge sides with Updike and the others. “There are many reasons to mourn Wolfe, who has died aged 88. I can’t say that the thought that he won’t write any more novels is one of them,” admits Kerridge, who reviewed Wolfe’s last “bloated” novel, Back to Blood.

As for the feud with Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, which Kerridge says was “possibly more entertaining than anything the four of them actually published in the 1990s,”

“It began when Wolfe, who had made his name as a brilliant journalist, wrote an essay condemning modern American novelists for navel-gazing when they should be out researching and reporting on modern America.

“Norman Mailer then denounced Wolfe as a show-off, reserving his strongest contempt for Wolfe’s flamboyant dress sense,” and Wolfe “declared war, dismissing Updike (a year younger than himself) and Mailer as ‘these two old piles of bones.'”

Below is a link to the entire article, photo by The Telegraph staff:

“When writers knew how to fight: Tom Wolfe and the lost art of the literary feud”

New Serbian edition of Rabbit, Run to be published in June 2018

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Laguna, the largest publishing house in Serbia, announced the release of a second edition of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run in June 2018—39 years after the first edition of the novel was published in Serbian.

The first edition was published after Updike visited Serbia in 1978; the second is timed to take advantage of new interest in John Updike in Serbia as a result of the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, hosting the Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference, featuring Ian McEwan as the opening keynote speaker.

The translation is by Nevena Stefanović–Čičanović, the same as for the one published in 1979, with an afterword by Prof. Biljana Dojčinović, who is directing the Updike conference.

Dojčinović said that there is a very good chance the new edition of Rabbit, Run will be in bookstore windows when conference attendees are exploring Belgrade.

“John Updike,” for those who don’t read Serbian, is “Džon Apdajk.” Here’s a link to the announcement.

 

Janice Angstrom one of lit’s worst moms?

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For those who are tired of reading Mother’s Day tribute after tribute, here’s a list of bad moms compiled by Tina Jordan and Susan Ellingwood for The New York Times and published, ironically, on May 12, 2018–Mother’s Day:

“8 of the Worst Moms in Literature; Think your mother was harsh? These books will convince you that she deserves a Mother of the Year Award.”

Updike’s Janice Angstrom (Rabbit, Run) makes the list.

“‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s wife, Janice—often found ‘highball in hand, glued to the television set’—drunkenly allows their infant daughter to drown in the tub.'” There’s a link, too, if you’re a paid subscriber, to the Times‘ Nov. 6, 1960 review of Rabbit, Run by David Boroff, who calls it a “moving and often brilliant novel.”

Rabbit, of course, has to share the blame . . . so I guess that means he could turn up on a bad dad list come Father’s Day.

Horticulturalist gives a shout-out to literary greats

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Jim Chatfield, a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension, referenced T.S. Eliot and John Updike in his column, “Plant Lovers’ Almanac: Spring and its blooms have finally arrived.”

After alluding to Eliot’s famous reference to spring as “the cruelest month,” he wrote, of Updike,

“Dogwoods were important to one of my favorite writers, John Updike (1932-2009). In his 1965 autobiographical essay ‘The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood’ he wrote:

“‘When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree . . . was, in a sense, me.’

“This Shillington, Pa., tree was actually planted on John’s first birthday, according to his mother. John Updike wrote in 1965 that ‘My dogwood tree still stands in the side yard, taller than ever . . .’ and it still lives today.”

It might interest Prof. Chatfield to know that The John Updike Society is cultivating a cutting/graft taken from the still-thriving dogwood, since the tree has already lived longer than the typical pink dogwood. So when it does finally die, as all organic things must, a clone of it will grow in its place. Below is a photo of Updike’s dogwood, taken this past week by Dr. Susan Guay, director of The John Updike Childhood Home at 117 Philadelphia Ave. in Shillington.

Program announced for Updike conference in Serbia

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Professor Biljana Dojčinović, from the Dept. of Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, has released the final program for the upcoming Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference that will take place June 1-5, 2018.

JUS5 PROGRAM

Sixty-five people from 14 different countries will participate: 22 from the Republic of Serbia; 21 from the U.S.A.; three each from the U.K. and Japan; two each from Romania, Bulgaria, France, India, and the Republic of Ireland; and one each from Canada, Israel, Russian Federation, Georgia, and the Czech Republic.

The first conference the society will have held outside the U.S. is hosted by the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.

Featured speakers will be writer Ian McEwan, writer-scholar Alexander Shurbanov, and slate sculptor Michael Updike, the youngest son of John Updike.

Though registration is closed, people in the area may want to take note of the McEwan keynote and the closing panel hosted by the National Library of Serbia, both of which are open to the public.

At the membership meeting on the final day, society president James Plath will announce the location of the 2020 conference.

 

A liberal view of John Updike’s genius

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Chet Raymo recently published a short essay on “Updike” for the “Opinion-Liberal” section of Before It’s News in which he begins,

“‘Ancient religion and modern science agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.’ I am quoting John Updike, who probably understood science better than any other major literary figure. He had an oarsman’s grip on religion, too. Add women—their unaging beauty, their desirability—and you have the Holy Trinity of his work.

“I don’t believe I took note here of Updike’s passing in 2009, at age 77. I should have. We were near enough contemporaries. We shared foibles, frailties and preoccupations. Our geographic trajectories were not dissimilar. I could not, of course, hope to equal his huge talent, but I followed along behind as he bounded rabbity ahead.
“I have just read his posthumous collection of stories, My Father’s Tears.* The names change, as usual, but the protagonists are the same, that is to say, some transmogrification of Updike himself. And, as usual, in these final stories science, religion and women figure strongly, but now shadowed by the encroachments of old age and death.”
Raymo discussses Martin Fairchild, Updike’s character from “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe” from that collection, and concludes, “Giving praise. Paying attention. Updike did that in spades. I can’t remember where, but in some much earlier work, perhaps the same essay from which I gleaned the initial quote, he said this: ‘What we certainly have is our instinctual intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our delight and wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here’.”

Cartoon caption contest writer goes all-Updike

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A blogger who identifies himself only as Docnad on his blog, Attempted Bloggery, has published an Updike-inspired caption to a Benjamin Schwartz cartoon—his entry in the March/April 2018 Moment Cartoon Caption Contest. As he writes, “Moment is a magazine of Jewish news and culture.”

Why not have an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there?”
“How come Old MacDonald never wanted borscht?”
“You mean you really don’t care that it’s rabbit season?”
“Rabbi Angstrom? Rabbit Angstrom here. I’m afraid neither
one of us lives up to John Updike’s conception.”
“Dig, man, dig! Save a hand puppeteer!”
“We’ve had seven litters—what we call mitzvahs!”
“Here’s my impression of Bugs Bunny reading Rabbit, Run: ‘Eh… What’s Updike?'”
“How much might it be worth to you if no one were to
disturb your crops through, say, Sukkot.”

(Note from the blogger:  “Pigs and rabbits are never kosher. Borscht is made from beets. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is the protagonist of John Updike’s four Rabbit novels. His appearance in two of my submitted captions was the result of a suggestion—a challenge really—by fellow caption contestant Gerald Lebowitz. A mitzvah is literally a commandment, but in common usage it’s a good deed to perform. Sukkot is the harvest festival.”

In Memoriam: Pavel Šrut

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Radia Praha reported on May 2, 2018 that Czech Republic author Pavel Šrut died a week ago and was laid to rest at the age of 78.

“Mr Šrut was one of the Czech Republic’s most respected authors of poetry and books for children. His popular trilogy Lichožrouti or Oddsockeaters won him the Magnesia Litera Award for literature.

“Apart from his work for children, he was also a translator from English and Spanish. His translations include books of Robert Graves, D.H Lawrence and John Updike.

“He also authored lyrics to many songs, including hits sung by Michal Prokop, Vladimír Mišík and Petr Skoumal.”

Best Pennsylvania author? Need you ask?

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Pop Sugar released a list of “50 Authors From 50 States — Here’s What to Read From Each of Them,” and to no one’s surprise John Updike was the author from Pennsylvania that they recommended to readers, and Rabbit, Run was the book they specifically named.

“John Updike was born in Reading, PA,” they write (West Reading, actually), “and raised in the nearby town of Shillington. Updike’s childhood in Berks County, PA, later served as the influence for his Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, including Rabbit, Run.”

Updike the benchmark for magical prose?

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A story from The Guardian, “Book clinic: which current authors produce the most magical prose,” uses Updike as the lead-in and apparent benchmark for prose that sparkles. As the subtitle suggests, “The supernatural, witchcraft or sex can be spellbinding, while others conjure gold from the everyday human struggle.”

Writer Amanda Craig begins with a question from a Beijing reader: “John Updike described himself as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Who today delivers the most magic in their prose?”

She responds, “Magic may be evoked in many ways and Updike did it both in the sense of mixing the mundane with the supernatural (The Witches of Eastwick) and in conjuring contemporary fiction whose realism is threaded through with hypnotic lyricism (the Rabbit novels, Couples, etc).”

She recommends Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, AS Byatt’s Possession and short stories, and then, comparatively, two others:

“If it is Updike’s realist magic you are after, then Meg Wolitzer is, like him, a lyrical chronicler of love and marriage – but unlike Updike, brilliant at female characters as well as male ones. Her descriptions in The Interestings and The Female Persuasion of loneliness, love, growing maturity and reading itself evoke quotidian joys and sorrows with humour, generosity and hope.

“Diana Evans is another superb domestic realist. Her new novel, Ordinary People, contains some of the best descriptions of happy and unhappy sex I’ve read since Ian McEwan’s Atonement. She writes about black south Londoners struggling with young families, ambition, adultery and disappointment with the wry insights Updike gave to his white east coasters.”