Universidad de Alcalá scholar considers overlooked Updike short story

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Juan Manuel Camacho Ramos, of the Universidad de Alcalá, wrote an essay on “Tristan and Iseult,” an Updike short story that was published first in The New Yorker and later in his collection The Afterlife and Other Stories. “‘Tristan and Iseult’: John Updike’s Medieval Method or an Ancient Mirror for Modern Man” was recently made available online. Here is the link and the abstract:

“Updike began to explore the Tristan legend after reading Denis de Rougemont’s books Love in the Western World and Love Declared which he examined exhaustively in the early 1960s and, although he did not wholly agree with the entire content of Denis De Rougemont’s thoughts, it left a very deep impression on him. Consequently, Updike uses the story of Tristan and Iseult in three novels and several of his short stories mostly to deal with the issue of conjugal infidelity and to present the traditional themes of the legend like self-affirmation, social marginalization, indecision, despair, sexuality, life, and death in contemporary settings. In both his novels and short stories, Updike tries to modernize the legend dissecting marital conflict and generally showing adultery as the escape valve which will lead the lovers to the paradoxical world of unreal freedom where the mixture of intense passion and pain will finally threaten the family and the social order of the protagonists just like in the Tristan romances of old.”

Curiously, as Ramos noted, “The couple in this adaptation of the Tristan legend have nothing but a dental appointment in common. There is, moreover, no other objective explanation for Tristan’s attraction to Iseult apart from her motherly skills of caring for him and making him feel as if at home. . . . Magic is present in Updike’s ‘Tristan and Iseult’ to the extent that Tristan numbs his mind through fantasy creating a world where he can evade reality and live a dream. In ‘Tristan and Iseult’ Updike turns a dental appointment into a modernized medieval romance that happens solely in Tristan’s imagination. It contains a pathetic undertone that accompanies the story and is highlighted to the extent that Tristan is unaware of his own guile and Iseult remains ignorant of any event save her duty to remove the rot from her client’s mouth.”

Read the whole essay.

Martin Amis shared his thoughts on Jewish writers and alter egos

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Forward, a nonprofit independent Jewish publication, published an article (“Jewish writers not only inspired Martin Amis—they made him want to become part of the family”) by Benjamin Ivry about English novelist Martin Amis, who died on May 19 at age 73. Ivry wrote that Amis “looked to America as a promised land for literary achievement, and to U.S. Jewish writers as inspirational overachievers.

“In his essays, even when praising the non-Jewish John Updike, Amis did so because Updike ‘alone could hold his head up with the great Jews—Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Singer—it was entirely typical of him that, as a sideline, be became a great Jewish novelist too, in the person of Henry Bech, the hero of several of his books,” Ivry wrote.

“Amis embraced the notion that by inventing Jewish characters, a writer might indirectly attain Yiddishkeit. Indeed, Amis clearly identified with Updike’s supposed claim that ‘by developing a Jewish persona [he] was saying something like: “Look, I’m really Jewish too. We’re all Jewish here.”‘

“So unlike non-Jewish writers of an earlier generation like Capote or Vidal who reacted to Jewish achievement in American literature with antisemitic sarcasm, Updike (and by extension Amis) decided to assimilate with the Jews.”

Read the full article.

Rabbit, Run and 74 other novels lauded for last lines

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Jules Buono of The Literary Lifestyle published a list of “75 Famous Last Lines of Books That Make the Best Book Endings,” and John Updike’s title-specific last line of Rabbit, Run made the list . . . though you have to scroll down quite a ways to read Updike’s ending: “He Runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”

If Buono ever compiles a list of the best short story titles, odds are that Updike’s “Your Lover Just Called” will probably make the list.

In Memoriam: Ellen Gallagher

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A remarkable Berks County woman died on May 16, 2023. Ellen Lou Gallagher (Brownmiller) was a beloved teacher who touched many lives, but she was also a student, artist, musician, playwright, quilter, and “almost an astronaut when she was a Pennsylvania finalist for the Teacher in Space program in 1985,” according to her obituary.

Her son, Drew Gallagher, told The John Updike Society that Ellen had “three organizations that were very dear to her and one was the Updike Childhood Home.” In lieu of flowers, the family requested that donations be made to those three organizations: The Reading Symphony, The John Updike Childhood Home, or The Kurt Vonnegut Museum. “Or simply read a favorite book or listen to a show tune in her honor. Try to remember when love was an ember about to billow. When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. And so it goes.”

Born in West Reading on July 1, 1941, Gallagher graduated from Millersville State with a degree in education and added a Master’s degree from Temple University years later. “Ultimately she landed at Lorane Elementary School in Exeter as a fifth grade teacher. Her students will remember the annual incubation projects, waiting for the chicks to hatch in the classroom, and they will not forget learning what a million something looked like when they collected that many aluminum can pull tabs over many more school years than anticipated. There was a large ceremony at Lorane to commemorate the millionth pull tab and photos were taken and published in The Reading Eagle [where her late husband, Charles Gallagher, was longtime editor] before the tabs were recycled.”

Gallagher spent summer 1981 teaching children on the island of Majuro in the Marshall Islands and was an inspiration for a character in the young adult novel Me and Marvin Gardens, written by one of her former students, A.S. King.

Perhaps most remarkably, when she retired she had two goals: “learn to quilt and to play the violin. She was successful at both. As a member of the Reading Philharmonic Orchestra, she played the violin until she was unable and then became the narrator for their concerts up until her death.”

The John Updike Society is touched that a person who loomed so large in so many lives thought enough of John Updike and our little childhood home museum to name us as a donation beneficiary. Even in death, she continues to make a difference and set an example. Our deepest sympathies go out to her sons Drew and Thomas, her daughter Julie Stern, and their families.

Updike Society sponsors ALA panel on The Centaur

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The Centaur was a big deal in 1963. The novel, which dealt with classical mythology on the surface of an otherwise realistic narrative, earned John Updike the National Book Award. His third novel (following The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run) turns 60 this year, and the American Literature Association panel on “The Centaur at Sixty: Updike’s Ulysses” will be reprised with a slightly different cast at the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson this coming September.

As Stacy Olster noted in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, “Updike’s willingness to assign tremendous significance to his childhood home reaches a crescendo in The Centaur, a powerful attempt to mythologize the artist’s early portrait by returning, as James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), to ancient Greek stories.”

Updike had told Charlie Reilly in 1986, “For The Centaur, I had Ulysses in my head at all times.” Eight years earlier Updike had remarked that “the book had its origins in a little children’s book of Greek mythology which my ex-wife had as a girl and which I was just reading around in. Somewhere in it, I came across this variant, this footnote almost, to the Centaur myth. . . . And I thought, well, this is an unusual myth, especially in the sense that so few Greek myths involve the idea of sacrificing or laying down one’s life for another. . . . So, I began with the myth, and then my own father very naturally attached himself to it because he sort of loomed as a centaur in my own life at that time. The novel really took off with the myth, and for that reason the myth is really in the foreground of the novel, not in the background as in Ulysses.”

The ALA conference panel in Boston featured (l to r) Peter Bailey, Jim Plath, David Updike, and Olga Karasik-Updike. David brought his mother’s first edition of The Centaur, which had inside it a telegram of praise from one of the Soviet Union’s most famous writers—a note that Karasik-Updike read and contextualized for the audience.

Martin Amis’ Updike tribute recalled

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Lisa Allardice of The Guardian wrote a profile of Martin Amis (“‘Damn, that fool can write’: how Martin Amis made everyone up their game”) that was published on May 22, 2023 and featured an anecdote involving Amis’ response to John Updike’s passing.

“Back in 2009, I called Amis – as editors all over the world would have been calling or emailing leading writers on Saturday night – to ask if he might write a tribute to the American novelist John Updike, who had just died. Time was tight and we were aiming high, but as with every major (and not so major) event at that time, Amis was the writer everyone was after. And on Updike, the last postwar American literary giant? It had to be him. Happily, he felt a duty to contribute to what Gore Vidal called ‘book chat.’ ‘Call me back in 10 minutes,’ he said in his unmistakable transatlantic drawl (he hadn’t yet made America his permanent home). . . .”

“OK, so he had written at length about both Updike and Ballard before. And he was routinely invoked as a successor to both. . . . But to go back to 2009 and Amis’s closing words on Updike: ‘His style was one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality. Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself, “How would Updike have done it?” This is a very cold day for literature.’

“And so it is today. Younger writers will ask: ‘How would Amis have done it?’ He was exceptionally sui generis.”

Amis, who died in 2023, was best known for his novels Money, London Fields, and Time’s Arrow.

Updike typewriter now at the Childhood Home museum

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John Updike’s Olivetti Linea 88—”the only manual typewriter he used regularly from 1969-2009,” according to his son, David Updike—is now on display at The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., Shillington, Pa.

The Childhood Home museum is owned by The John Updike Society, a 501c3 organization devoted to promoting Updike’s works. With Dr. Maria Lester as director, the museum is staffed by dedicated Updike lovers who live in the area.

The typewriter, acquired from Elizabeth Updike Cobblah and David, Michael and Miranda Updike, instantly became the crown jewel of the museum’s holdings. According to David, his father had bought/brought a white Adler typewriter to London in September 1968, but it “seemed inadequate—not sturdy enough. . . . A typewriter salesman came to the house, sold him on this Olivetti Linea 88, which he then bought and used for the rest of the year there.”

“It was big and heavy,” David said. “At the end of the school year, the green Citroen was being shipped across the ocean to us, and he had the idea to put the typewriter in the car too: thus, it made the voyage back to America, and my father used it for the rest of his life: Ipswich, Georgetown, Beverly Farms, and typed tens of thousands (I would guess) poems, short stories, letters, postcards, notes, many of which will soon be in the collection edited by Jim Schiff.

“At some point, he started to write longer letters on a word processor, but continued to use this one for shorter communications, all the way until January, 2009. It was in fine working order, and as you see it was serviced by a fellow in Beverly, Mass.”

Next to the typewriter is Updike’s dictionary, which he kept near his typewriter—a habit, no doubt, picked up from his mother. Linda Updike’s dictionary is also on display at the house.

Updike event in Ipswich features a plaque and “tats”

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It was a long time coming, and Linda George Grimes, the woman who spearheaded the campaign to honor John Updike with a plaque, was not there to see the fruits of her labors. She passed away in March at age 66. But the Ipswich Historical Commission took over and Ipswich finally recognized its most famous resident on April 28, 2023.

The plaque, which was mounted next to the Caldwell Building entrance that Updike took to reach his second-floor office, reads: “From 1960 to 1974, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike had an office in the Caldwell Building, where he wrote many acclaimed literary works, including ‘A&P,’ Bech: A Book, The Centaur, Couples, ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ Midpoint, A Month of Sundays, Of the Farm and Rabbit Redux.”

Couples, a 1968 novel, caused a stir in Ipswich because of its scandalous content: wife swapping. Some locals recognized themselves in the book, and the Updike family decided to spend the next year in London. Fittingly, there was just the slightest hint of scandalous behavior at the plaque unveiling, as grandchildren Trevor and Sawyer Updike proudly posed alongside the plaque to show matching tattoos of the self-portrait caricature their grandfather had drawn to accompany his Paris Review interview. The tattoos were on their thighs, which, of course, required that their trousers be dropped in order to show them off.

Trevor Meek covered the event for The Local News. Read the full story and see photos of the event.

Where everybody knows your name: Updike on Cheers?

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John Updike never made a personal appearance on the long-running CBS-TV series Cheers, but the two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner was referenced several times in a Season One episode.

Cheers: The Complete Series Blu-ray was released on April 25, 2023, and as fans re-watched one of TV’s smartest sitcoms they heard Updike’s name mentioned several times in Episode 12: “The Spy Who Came in for a Cold One,” which aired Dec. 16, 1982. Earlier that year, in April, Updike had been announced as winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, honored for Rabbit Is Rich. In this episode, an eccentric (guest star Ellis Rabb, pictured below) visiting Cheers first pretends to be a spy, and then a writer. Thinking the man a literary prodigy, intellectual (read: snobbish) waitress Diane rushes to the phone to call someone in the publishing industry that she knows, and we get the following one-sided phone conversation:

“Yes. May I speak to him?

This is Diane Chambers.

He’s chatting with John Updike?

Well, interrupt.

No, I’m not kidding. I have something that makes Updike seem like small pommes de terre.”

Cheers was set in a bar near Boston Common that was run by former Red Sox pitcher Sam Malone (Ted Danson), whose baseball career had been derailed by alcoholism. With a great ensemble first-season cast that featured Shelley Long, Nicholas Colasanto, George Wendt, and John Ratzenberger, Cheers quickly grew on fans.

Cheers was created by James Burrows, Glen Charles, and Les Charles. Directed by Burrows, it was written mostly by the trio—though this particular episode was penned by David Lloyd.

Even with turnover in key roles, Cheers won 28 Primetime Emmys over its 11-year run and finished as a Top-10 TV show for eight of those years.

Fairway Philosophy blogger focuses on Updike the golfer

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Fairway Philosophy blogger Matthew Chominski had Updike on the mind this past week. Two of his posts were devoted to Updike the golfer.

In an April 27, 2023 post, “Golf and the Shortness of Life,” Chominski wrote, “The great American author and golf devotee was once in the presence of a young woman who informed him that life was too short ‘for crossword puzzles and for golf.’ His responsory ruminations are worth quoting at length:

“‘The nature of humankind must be considered before we decide what life is too short for. Is it too short for sex, for instance, or is sex its business? Men and women need to play, and it is a misused life that has no play scheduled into it. Crossword puzzles, even, have a fit place in some psychological budgets. With them, as with golf, we set ourselves to solve a puzzle nature has not posed. Nothing in natural selection demands that we learn how to beat a small ball into a hole with a minimum number of strokes. . . . The great green spaces of a golf course remember the landscape in which the human animal found his soul. Certainly the sight of our favorite fairway wandering toward the horizon is a balm to the eyes and a boon to the spirit. Our mazy progress through the eighteen is a trek such as prehistoric man could understand, and the fact that the trek is fatiguingly long constitutes part of its primitive rightness.'” Read the whole post.

Then, on an April 29, 2023 post titled “Golf’s Peculiar Bliss,” Chominski reminded golfers and Updike fans of a video clip in which John Updike was filmed on his home course, Myopia Hunt Club, intercut with footage and a voiceover of Updike reading from his golf essays.