New De Bellis book is now available

If you haven’t already pre-ordered a copy, you can go to Amazon right now and get a copy of John Updike Remembered: Friends, Family and Colleagues Reflect on the Writer and the Man, edited by Jack A. De Bellis.

The Amazon “Look inside” link gives a full rundown on the contents. The book features 19 interviews with Updike’s classmates (from kindergarten through high school), four essays on Updike’s time at Harvard and his early years as a writer, two essays on Updike in Ipswich, 25 personal reminiscences from “writers, fans, friends,” three reminiscences from Updike’s children, and a reprinted transcript of the Updike Family Panel from The John Updike Society’s first conference at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa.

De Bellis (pictured) is best known in Updike studies for writing The John Updike Encyclopedia and for compiling, with Michael Broomfield, the definitive Updike bibliography.

The Poorhouse Fair: A retro review

The county alms house was located just a few blocks from The John Updike Childhood Home, and it famously provided the inspiration for Updike’s first published novel. In a review of it, published in Commentary on March 1, 1959, David Fitelson wasted no time in pronouncing it a failure. His review begins,

“John Updike, one of the more talented of the New Yorker‘s resident storytellers, has had a hearty but not very successful try at a first novel. The failure of The Poorhouse Fair lies largely in its adherence to established New Yorker conventions regarded in many quarters as rather OK. One does not mind the OK archness and urbanity that occasionally creeps into Updike’s prose. He has a genuine way with words and usually rises above that. Other OK things, however, are more disturbing: in particular, a rather mannered way of exploring character, and a distaste-for-the-sight-of-blood daintiness that he shares with certain other New Yorker contributors (e.g., John Cheever and Harold Brodkey). Most disturbing is that New Yorker-like critical remoteness which enables one to be awfully aware of, say, the ‘ridiculous’ build-up in nuclear armaments, and then (having exercised one’s social conscience) to go on to chuckle at the ‘ridiculous’ oversight of an Iowa proofreader. In being aware of impending perils, one is relieved of responsibility for heading them off: in being aware of the existence of ideas, one is absolved from thinking about them.”

Here’s the full hatchet job.

Updike on the ghost particle of the universe

In an article titled “In search of the neutrino, ghost particle of the universe,” The Guardian turned to John Updike again.

“Every second,” Robin McKie writes, “billions of neutrinos pass through our bodies. The sun sends trillions streaming across space every minute. Uncountable numbers have been left over from the Big Bang birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago.

“In fact, there are more neutrinos in the universe than any other type of particle of matter, though hardly anything can stop these cosmological lightweights in their paths. And this inability to interact with other matter has made them a source of considerable frustration for scientists who believe neutrinos could bring new understandings to major cosmological problems, including the nature of dark matter and the fate of our expanding universe. Unfortunately, the unbearable lightness of their being makes them very difficult to study.”

The article notes, “Three different forms of the particle are now known to exist: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino and until relatively recently it was thought that none of them had any mass at all. They were the ultimate in ephemeral ghostliness, a bizarre situation that was celebrated by John Updike in his poem, ‘Cosmic Gall.'”

Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Updike’s baseball poem recalled

A blogger on The Nature of Things posted an entry titled “Houston, we have a World Series champion! in celebration of the team’s (and city’s) first World Series championship.

“Baseball is a game that will break your heart two times out of three,” Dorothy Borders writes. “But, oh, that third time is worth waiting for.

“John Updike knew and loved the game and explained it best of all. Let’s give him the last word and then, let the off-season begin!”

Baseball

by John Updike
It looks easy from a distance,
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

The grass, the dirt, the deadly hops
between your feet and overeager glove:
football can be learned,
and basketball finessed, but
there is no hiding from baseball
the fact that some are chosen
and some are not—those whose mitts
feel too left-handed,
who are scared at third base
of the pulled line drive,
and at first base are scared
of the shortstop’s wild throw
that stretches you out like a gutted deer.

There is nowhere to hide when the ball’s
spotlight swivels your way,
and the chatter around you falls still,
and the mothers on the sidelines,
your own among them, hold their breaths,
and you whiff on a terrible pitch
or in the infield achieve
something with the ball so
ridiculous you blush for years.
It’s easy to do. Baseball was
invented in America, where beneath
the good cheer and sly jazz the chance
of failure is everybody’s right,
beginning with baseball.

John Updike: a literal man of letters

Writers write. And the great ones were often great at correspondence. Like Ernest Hemingway, John Updike wrote for popular publications of his day, and like Hemingway he was a proliferate letter-writer. How MUCH of a letter-writer is now coming to light, as people have begun to respond to scholar James Schiff‘s call for Updike letters.

As Schiff told The Guardian, “While it is hardly surprising that he carried on a correspondence with editors, translators, publicists, critics, journalists and fellow writers, what is remarkable is how often and generously he responded to letters from readers, fans and complete strangers.”

Schiff said Updike even responded to “a stranger who asked him to write a note of encouragement to his nine-year-old son who suffered from psoriasis,” a condition Updike shared and wrote about in his essay “At War with My Skin.” Schiff speculates that Updike’s experience as a teenager requesting samples of work from his favorite cartoonists might help to explain his own “pay it forward” attitude toward correspondence.

“Though some of his letters and postcards are perfunctory and mundane, the large majority reveal his attempt to say something witty, funny, or clever,” The Guardian article notes.

Schiff is still gathering letters for a volume of collected letters to be published in 2021. If you have any, send a scan or photocopy to updikeletters@gmail.com.

Random House to release digitalized Updike audio books

On Tuesday, October 24, Penguin Random House Audio Publishing will release downloadable three-hour audio books of John Updike’s short story collection Trust Me and his writings on golf, Golf Dreams—both volumes digitalized versions of analog cassette packages first issued by Random House Audiobooks in 1987 and 1996, respectively.

Both Trust Me and Golf Dreams are abridged, adapted, and narrated by John Updike.

Trust Me track list

  1. Trust Me
  2. Deaths of Distant Friends
  3. Pygmalion
  4. The Lovely Troubled Daughters
  5. Still of Some Use
  6. Poker Night
  7. The City
  8. Getting into the Set
  9. Learn a Trade

Golf Dreams track list

  1. Preface
  2. Golf Dreams
  3. Tips on a Trip
  4. The Pro (short story)
  5. Swing Thoughts
  6. Intercession (short story)
  7. Golf as a Game of the People
  8. Golfers (poem)
  9. Upon Winning One’s Flight in the Senior Four-Ball (poem)
  10. The Trouble with a Caddie
  11. The Big Bad Boom
  12. The Camaraderie of Golf (I)
  13. The Camaraderie of Golf (II)
  14. The Bliss of Golf
  15. Moral Exercise
  16. Television Golf
  17. Is Life Too Short for Golf?
  18. December Golf

Here is the link.

Other audiobooks currently available from Penguin Random House Audio Publishing are The Afterlife and Other Stories and Selected Stories—both of them also abridged, adapted, and narrated by John Updike.

 

 

Clouds Hill Books lists new Updike items for sale

With their website under construction, Clouds Hill Books of Village Station, N.Y. has emailed their John Updike – Fall 2017 List to people on their mailing list. We post it here as a courtesy to those who collect Updike.

Since we notice that many of the items come from the collection of one of The John Updike Society members, we wanted to remind everyone that the Society has been actively seeking DONATIONS of archival and Updike-related materials. Selling your collection puts items in the hands of individual collectors and deprives the public; donating your collection (or even just some of the more significant or appropriate items) to The John Updike Society for The John Updike Childhood Home makes those items available to researchers and also rotational display at the house, so that future generations can appreciate and benefit from the items you’ve collected. An additional option is to donate items to the archive at Alvernia University that the society began and subsequently donated to Alvernia before the childhood home was purchased and turned into a museum and literary center.

To make arrangements to donate to The John Updike Society, contact James Plath, jplath@iwu.edu.

To make arrangements to donate to The John Updike Collections of the Alvernia University Archives and Special Collections, contact Sharon Neal, sharon.neal@alvernia.edu.

Both organizations are 501 c 3 tax-exempt non-profits, and your donations to either of them are 100 percent tax deductible.

You spent your life collecting Updike; keep your life entwined with Updike by donating your collection so that your name can be forever linked to Updike and the items you donated.

Updike 1978 Serbian interview translated

The John Updike Society will hold its 5th biennial conference in Belgrade, Serbia the first week of June 2018, and all are welcome to attend (registration information). The conference celebrates Updike abroad, Updike in translation, and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Couples. This interview on “Where the Couples Are Today” covers all three of those bases:  it was conducted in Belgrade, it’s newly translated, and it focuses on Couples.

Updike gave the interview to the daily Politika while he was in Belgrade in October 1978, and it was published on the 19th. The interview was translated recently by Jasna Todorovic, a doctoral student of John Updike Society board member Biljana Dojcinovic. Below are the pages as they were published. Here is the translation: WHERE THE COUPLES ARE TODAY

Scholar takes Updike to task for his portrayal of Islamism in Terrorist

Updike’s portrayal of Islamism in Terrorist has generally been praised, but a dissenting voice appears in “The (Mis)Representation of Islam in John Updike’s Terrorist,” a critique by research scholar Abdul Haseeb, Dept. of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Lucknow, U.P. India that was published in IJELLH, the International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities.

His abstract:

In the post 9/11 literary scene there occurred an increased number of publications of novels that discussed the various types of Islamism (Political Islam) and have explored the complex relationship between the West, which is proud of having a secular world, and the East, especially the Muslim world, accused of fostering religious terrorism against the secular world. It is not surprising to find a long list of such novels as it is the general perception that the 9/11 attacks are the outcome of the complex relationship between the West and the Muslim world. These novels pick Islam as their subject showing its implications on both the people of the West and the Muslims themselves who are introducing Islam to the West, or they choose one or a group of Muslim youths who carry a fundamentalist ideology of their religion and dare to counteract the godless, materialistic West. The present paper is a modest attempt to expose how John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) has projected Islam as the root-cause of terrorism and its teachings as the springhead of extremist ideology.

Here is the link to a link to view the full paper.

Dictionary Updike: Feign

Laugh-In used to punningly ask viewers to look something up in their Funk & Wagnall’s, but in an example of Updike turning up in the most unlikely places the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists a sentence from Trust Me (1987) as an example of the usage of “feign” in a sentence.

Who knows how many more entries we might find examples from an American writer with an astoundingly vast vocabulary?