In Memoriam: Richard K. Hiester

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HiesterRichardCLR_20160205Richard K. Hiester died on Jan. 31, 2016 at the age of 86. Though he was employed for 35 years by Dana Corp. and though he was a U.S. Navy veteran who served during the Korean Conflict, he was perhaps best known in Berks County for his basketball prowess and for his nickname: “Rabbit.” John Updike, three years his junior at Shillington H.S., famously appropriated the nickname in creating his most famous fictional character, Harry Angstrom, the protagonist of four novels and a novella—two of which would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Memorials can be made to Heartland Hospice, 4 Park Plaza, Wyomissing, PA 19610, or Home Instead Senior Care, 881 Marcon Blvd., Suite 3700, Allentown, PA  18109. Other condolences can be offered on the website of Edward J. Kuhn Funeral Home, www.kuhnfuneralhome.com. The society offers its sincere condolences to his children, Brian D., husband of Kathleen Hiester, Wernersville, and Todd K. Hiester, Sinking Spring, and his grandchildren.

Updike quoted in review of Murdoch journal

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Screen Shot 2016-02-06 at 8.03.01 AMIn reviewing Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995 (Princeton Univ. Press) for the National Post, Robert Fulford cited John Updike prominently. His review begins,

“Dame Iris Murdoch, a much-admired novelist for several decades, was also a bold sexual adventuress. Perhaps she was a love addict before that term was popularized in the 1970s (and with it the 12-step program, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous). She had many lovers and a close attention to sex was crucial in her life and art.

“According to John Updike, love was for Murdoch what the sea was for Joseph Conrad and war was for Ernest Hemingway. Updike considered her the leading English novelist of her time and believed she learned the human condition through her relationships. Her tumultuous love life, he wrote, was ‘a long tutorial in suffering, power, treachery, and bliss.’ Updike believed that in reading her novels he could feel the ideas, images and personalities of her life pouring through her.”

“The intimate biography of Iris Murdoch,” by Robert Fulford

David Updike to talk at Belmont Public Library

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Screen Shot 2015-04-12 at 6.03.56 PMIn case you missed the talk on “Family Archaeology: Pictures, Objects, Words” that David Updike gave at the Third Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University, you can see him deliver that same presentation at the Belmont Public Library, 336 Concord Ave., Belmont, Mass., at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 25.

David, the oldest son of John Updike, is also an accomplished author, and books will be available for sale and signing after the presentation, which is succinctly described on the Library’s Web site: “David Updike combines family photographs with prose from John Updike’s stories and memoirs, in addition to excerpts from short stories written by John’s mother, to reveal important aspects of John Updike’s early life.”

For additional details, call the library at (617) 489-2000.

ALA Updike Society panel announced

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Screen Shot 2016-01-06 at 7.39.15 AMThe John Updike Society has proposed to sponsor a panel on “Updike in Context” at this year’s American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco.

Chair: Judith Newman, University of Nottingham

“What Does Secularism Smell Like? Political Theology and John Updike’s The Coup,” Scott Dill, Case Western Reserve University

“After the Thrill Is Gone: Updike after the Cold War,” Matthew Shipe, Washington University

“Updike’s Visions of the South: From the U.S. South in The Poorhouse Fair toward the Postcolonial Caribbean South,” Takashi Nakatani, Yokohama City University

ALA has a committee that reviews all proposals and we should be hearing from them shortly.

Writer summarizes his year spent reading Updike

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Yesterday The Christian Science Monitor printed a piece titled “My ‘Updike year’—why I appreciate the man more now than ever” in its Books/Chapter & Verse section. In it, Danny Heitman writes that he had made it a point to read as many of John Updike’s books as he could in 2015, but, being a slow reader, he “managed to read only a fraction of the Updike canon, poking around mostly in the personal essays and criticism collected in a half a dozen volumes, including Odd Jobs, Hugging the Shore and Picked-up Pieces.”

About the experience, he writes, “What I remember most vividly from my year of Updike isn’t a particular subject or turn of phrase; he wrote about everything from baseball to cemeteries to the postal service with precision, wit, and a mastery of language that defies easy summary. No, the most abiding memory of my Updike year is the heroic moderation of the man—his quiet insistence on teasing out an insight with subtlety and grace, never raising his voice. . . .

“That voice continues to be a tonic for me as I negotiate the noise of the headlines, the extremism of the political culture, the venom-tinged pronouncements of the Twittersphere. Updike’s been gone for seven years now, but his work endures, and we need it now more than ever.”

Heitman is a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana and the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.

What’s new in Updike scholarship?

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Screen Shot 2016-01-27 at 8.11.18 AMTwo essays on Updike scholarship have come to our attention, one newly discovered and the other newly published:

Newly discovered:

“Fire, Sun, Moon: Kundalini Yoga in John Updike’s S.: A Novel,” by Sukhbir Singh, in The Comparatist 38 (October 2014): 266-96, published by The University of North Carolina Press. Full text

Newly published:

“Modernist Narrative Techniques and Challenges of Humanity: John Updike in European Perspective,” by Biljana Dojčinović, in From Humanism to Meta-, Post- and Transhumanism Vol. 8. Ed. Irina Deretic and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016. Synopsis-Contents

 

 

 

Globe columnist ponders Updike and eternity

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Today, Jan. 25, 2016, Boston Globe Columnist Alex Beam considered Updike’s last poem, “Fine Point,” a meditation on the 23rd Psalm and interviewed Martha and David Updike to ask them about John’s belief in God and the hereafter.

According to Martha, in hospice care “he always had the Book of Common Prayer on our bed—he knew it very well.” She added, “John always believed that there was evidence of God’s work in the world.”

David, meanwhile, was quoted as saying, “I certainly think he wanted to believe, have complete faith, but there remained a seed of doubt, or fear.”

Here’s a link to the whole column and a spin-off story on WBGH News.

In Memoriam: Gerald “Jerry” Potts

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PottsGeraldCLR_20160120We are saddened to report the sudden death January 18, 2016 of Gerald R. “Gerry” Potts, a  classmate of John Updike’s who was a four-sport athlete at Shillington High School (football, basketball, track, and baseball). He was 85.

Potts, who graduated ahead of Updike and the Class of 1950, kept in touch with Updike later in life, especially after the Reading Eagle published a story naming him as a possible model for Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Updike sent him a postcard saying, no, he wasn’t, and Potts, who believed in the society’s mission, donated his Updike letters to the Updike archive at Alvernia several years ago.

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 8.44.40 AMPotts retired in 1980 but has been an active community member for all of his life, serving on the Shillington Borough Council, the Shillington Zoning and Planning Commission, and the Governor Mifflin School Board, among other organizations.

Here is his obituary. Potts is pictured (left) on his front porch in 2011 with Dave Silcox, Updike’s Shillington contact in whose dining room the first formative meeting of the society took place. The society offers sincere condolences to his wife, Shirley, and children Lori, Richard, and Andrew, all of Shillington.

Services will be 9:30 a.m. at the Edward J. Kuhn Funeral Home, 739 Penn Ave., West Reading. Contributions may be made to Governor Mifflin School District, ℅ Funds for Future Athletic Endeavors, Attn: Pat Tulley, Athletic Director, 10 S. Waverly St., Shillington, PA  19607.

Author Strout names Updike book childhood favorite

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Screen Shot 2016-01-15 at 7.34.29 PMEntertainment Weekly often finds ways to enliven interviews, and in “Books of My Life: Elizabeth Strout on Madame Bovary, The Journals of John Cheever, and other favorites,” writer Isabella Biedenharn asked Strout to name the book she loved in school (Madame Bovary), a novel she read in secret (The Man Who Had Everything), the book that “cemented” her as a writer (the works of Alice Munro and William Trevor), the book that changed her life (The Journals of John Cheever), a classic she’s never read (The Grapes of Wrath), and her favorite book as a child:

Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, by John Updike. For each answer she offers a brief explanation, and here’s what she had to say about the Updike book:

“I was probably around 8 when I found a copy of it on our coffee table. I am sure much of it I didn’t understand, but I had a real sense that this was how grown-ups were, and I was thrilled by it.”

Strout is the author of such books as My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel, (2016), The Burgess Boys: A Novel (2014), Olive Kitteridge (2008), Abide with Me: A Novel (2007), and Amy and Isabelle: A Novel (2000).

Updike-edited gift recalled

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Screen Shot 2016-01-06 at 8.56.22 AMIn the online “Books: The gift I’ll never forget” section of The Guardian, Sloane Crosley recently shared “The book that reminded me America could be magical too.”

It was 1999 and Crosley, who was studying in Scotland and reluctant to leave, recalled how she “fell in love with Edinburgh so intensely” that she “literally fell (first night, Victoria Street, knees skinned). A magical place that smells of salt, hops and sewage, and features a sizable castle sticking up in the middle, Edinburgh was mind-blowing to a young American.”

She talks about how her parents, never good gift-givers, found the perfect way to welcome her home. “There, waiting on my bed, was a 775-page brick of a book. The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and inscribed by my father: ‘Welcome to America – we’re not so bad.’

“I had not spoken to my parents about how sad I was to leave Scotland. I had barely spoken to them about how much I loved it. But still, they knew. Not only that, they acted on that knowing without laundering it through their own impulses. They did not buy me thistle-patterned linens or play bagpipe recordings. This was a gift truly for me; 100 reminders of why home was still beautiful and funny and complex.”