Daily Beast writer considers Updike’s Seven Stanzas at Easter

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Screen Shot 2015-04-05 at 9.33.56 AMIn a Daily Beast think-piece titled “Did Updike Sell the Resurrection Short?” writer Matthew Sitman considers Updike’s poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”

“The poem gains new life of its own every year around this time. It inevitably flits across social media as Holy Week draws to a close, a very quotable addition to the Facebook feeds of America’s more literary Christians. Updike’s words circulate in more traditional ways, too, giving pastors and priests just the rhetorical flourish they need for their Easter nominees. This Sunday, many churchgoers who’ve never read a page of Rabbit, Run will nod along at Updike’s verse.

“The force of ‘Seven Stanzas,’ however, goes beyond its seasonal affiliation. After all, there are other poems about Easter. Perhaps Updike’s resonates because it seems attuned to the nature of belief in the modern world—or rather, it asks the modern believer what she is willing to believe. The poem forces the reader to answer for herself what really happened in that backwater of the Roman Empire in the days after Jesus was executed as a criminal. There can be, to use Updike’s word, no ‘sidestepping’ this issue. Are you ’embarrassed’ by this ‘miracle’ or not?

“This is a perennial question, the place where all quests for the historical Jesus give way to faith—or not—and Updike is wrong not to remind us of its stakes. But for all his theological sophistication, and despite my admiration for his literary gifts, Updike’s poem leaves me unsatisfied. It achieves its existential urgency by skirting the complexity and strangeness of what the Gospels actually tell us about the resurrection. The poem is a blunt instrument, jarring and powerful, but it obscures as much as it reveals.

“Updike asks us to leave aside figurative language and interrogate the Gospel accounts of the resurrection for their literal truth, if it really happened or not. When we read these passages, however, they also should interrogate us, unsettling our judgments about what we think we know and how we understand what it meant for Jesus to rise from the dead. They defy all our inevitable attempts to escape the uncertainty of real faith and reduce the resurrection to a pat story that does little more than comfort those who encounter it.”

Sitman thinks it is a “sense of wonder at the sheer perplexity of what Jesus was like after his resurrection that seems to be missing from Updike’s ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter.’ The problem is not that Updike challenges us to consider the strange idea that a man rose from the dead; it’s that what he holds before us isn’t strange enough. Whatever is going on in the Gospels, it seems to resist the efforts of those who want to assimilate the Easter story either through a literalism uncomfortable with paradox or by turning it into a somewhat embarrassing myth meant to inspire hope.”

Read the full article.

See also:  “A few minutes with Updike’s ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter,'” by Tom Grosh IV and a 2009 post recommended by Grosh, “On Easter and Updike” by David E. Anderson.

UC Observer on Begley’s bio and the Spirit of Updike

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Member John McTavish recently published a review-essay of Adam Begley’s biography that also considers Updike’s spirituality.

In “The Spirit of Updike,” which appeared in the Culture section in the online version of The United Church Observer—which, according to its masthead, is “the oldest continuously published magazine in North America and the second oldest in the English speaking world”—McTavish notes that “faith was more than a pleasurable habit for Updike. It was an antidote to ‘existential terror,’ as Begley puts it. Updike himself admitted as much in his memoir Self-Consciousness: ‘Perhaps there are two kinds of people: those for whom nothingness is no problem, and those for whom it is an insuperable problem, an outrageous cancellation rendering every other concern, from mismatching socks to nuclear holocaust, negligible.'”

“Religion is virtually omnipresent in Updike’s work,” McTavish writes. “But this doesn’t mean that Updike’s fiction forces a Christian message on the reader. On the contrary, he always believed that his basic duty to God was to write the most truthful and fullest books he could. ‘I don’t want to write tracts, to be more narrow in my fiction than the world itself is; I try not to subject the world to a kind of cartoon theology which gives predictable answers,’ he once reflected. Fallen clergy, self-centered philanderers: no one escaped Updike’s penetrating eye.

“Perhaps Updike’s finest religious story is ‘Pigeon Feathers,’ about a teenage boy’s quest for faith amid panic over mortality,” McTavish concludes. “The awesome complexity of the humble pigeon’s feathers distills Updike’s own philosophy of writing: ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due,’ as he phrased it; to celebrate reality, both human and divine.'”

Ipswich blogger commemorates an Updike milestone

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Gordon Harris has posted another Updike-related story on his blog, Stories From Ipswich and the North Shore, subtitled “An antiquarian almanac from historic Ipswich, Massachusetts–In the news since 1633.”

In “John Updike is elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters, April 1, 1964” Harris embraces Updike’s honor as the community’s in a brief commemoration.

Tulane writer-prof wins $20K John Updike Award

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tulanelitstarTulane professor and writer Zachary Lazar was announced as the winner of the John Updike Award, a $20,000 prize administered by the Academy of Arts and Letters.

As an article in The Times-Picayune notes, “Lazar is the third writer to win the biennial Updike award, which recognizes mid-career authors who have demonstrated consistent excellence. Martha Updike established the award in memory of her husband, the writer John Updike (1932-2009). Past winners of the Updike award include Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan and the poet and dramatist Tom Sleigh.

“The Updike award caps a grand year for Lazar, whose third novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, (Little, Brown, $25) earned critical raves when it appeared in April 2014. The New York Times added an additional feather in December, when it put the novel on its list of “100 Notable Books of 2014.”

Reading columnist thinks Rabbit a four-part bummer

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Screen Shot 2015-03-23 at 8.00.38 AMIn a Reading Eagle column titled “My 2 cents: ‘Rabbit’ series a four-part bummer,” columnist Andrew Wagaman makes it clear that he’s no fan of the tetralogy. But he also clears up some matters that have had locals festering for decades now.

“Updike created a crude, misogynistic narcissist whose belief in his own immortality gradually sours. The downfall is at times hilarious but also excruciating. Any hope for redemption—a son, a bank account—serves only as a prop for more pratfalls. His dying words, ‘It isn’t so bad.'”

“After my first column, I heard from some that I should quit the series because Updike basically spits on Berks County, where he was born. While Updike sets most of the series in Berks and describes it vividly, he’s really skewering the entire nation, at least its hubris and excess.

“Thought-provoking? Yes. A four-part bummer? Absolutely. Finishing it isn’t so bad.”

 

Addendum:  Society member and John Updike Childhood Home patron Bruce Moyer submitted the following humorous pastiche in response:

Bouvier sickened by Updike book!

bouvier

 

After his first bite, he heard from some that he should quit because Updike’s books
are less than tasteful. As he continued to devour it, against all those “learned” men
who had advised against doing so, he did become sickened. However, his opinion,
as noted was, “Finishing it isn’t so bad.”

Ipswich blog tells the history of a former Updike residence

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Screen Shot 2015-03-21 at 7.19.49 PMAn Ipswich blog recently posted a Gordon Harris story about the Polly Dole House at 26 East St. in Ipswich, Mass., where Updike once lived. The post quotes an article that Updike had written about the house for Architectural Digest that was reprinted in Picked-Up Pieces.

“The house I and my wife and four children lived in was called, on a plaque beside the front door, the Polly Dole House and given a date of 1686, though one expert sneeringly opined that dating it prior to 1725 would compromise his integrity.

“A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. The gables are on the sides. The windows were originally small, with fixed casements and leaded diamond panes. The basic plan called for two rooms over two, the fireplace opening into each room; a later plan added half-rooms behind, creating the traditional saltbox shape. Inside the front door—at least our front door—a shallow front hall gave onto an exiguous staircase squeezed into the space left by the great brick core at the heart of the house. The fireplace, with its cast-iron spits and bake ovens, had been the kitchen. The virgin forests of the New World had contributed massive timbers, adzed into shape and mortise-and-tenoned together, and floorboards up to a foot wide.

“The Polly Dole House had a living room so large that people supposed the house had originally been an inn, on the winding old road to Newburyport, which ran close by. Polly Dole was a shadowy lady who may have waited on tables; we never found out much about her, though local eyebrows still lifted at her name. The big room, with its gorgeous floorboards, was one you sailed through, and the furniture never stayed in any one place. The walk-in fireplace, when the three-foot logs in it got going, singed your eyebrows and dried out the joints of any chair drawn up too cozily close. In the middle of the summer beam, a huge nut and washer terminated a long steel rod that went up to a triangular arrangement of timbers in the attic; at one point the house had been lifted by its own bootstraps. I used to tell my children that if we turned the nut the whole house would fall down. We never tried it.

“The decade was the sixties, my wife and I were youngish, and the house suited us just fine. It was Puritan; it was back-to-nature; it was less is more.”

Harris clears up the date:  “This salt box house was built in 1720 and has elements from a previous house built in 1687. It has a large front living room with a low ceiling, wide board floors and a ‘walk-in’ fireplace.

“The long ‘summer beam’ in the middle of this room is suspended by a cable to the peak of the roof. The left side is smaller than the right, suggesting that it may have been originally built as a ‘half house’ with the right side and the left addition added later.

“The house was built for Deacon John Staniford (1648-1730) and his wife Margaret, the daughter of Thomas and Martha (Lake) Harris. John Staniford bears the title of Mr. in his young life, and Deacon in his old age. He was said to be a man of intellectual qualities and ‘much occupied with duties which require legal knowledge.’

“Thomas Franklin Waters writes in Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ‘Capt. Jeremiah Staniford inherited the homestead of his father, Capt. John Staniford. Daniel Staniford received the homestead and sold to Nathaniel Lord 3d, March 5, 1811. Nathaniel Lord sold to two women, whose names are well remembered, Lucy Fuller and Polly Dole, April 29, 1837. The administrator of Lucy Fuller’s estate sold to Daniel S. Burnham, Aug. 23, 1865.’”

Stories From Ipswich and the North Shore

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Russian lit expert shares Updike’s response to this and that

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photoU.R. Bowie, who taught Russian literature for 30 years at Miami University and now writes a blog, recently shared a response from Updike to his questions about Charles D’Ambrosio (Up North), Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts (Closer), Woody Allen (Match Point), literary fiction, fluency in Russian, Philip Roth, Zuckerman, Zuckerman’s prostate gland, “etc.”

Here is Updike’s response to his 2006 letter:

classical-russian-literature.blogspot.com

Updike mentioned in L.E. Sissman reconsideration

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Danny Heitman wrote a piece for The Magazine of The Weekly Standard about “Darkness Visible: L.E. Sissman, poet in a gray flannel suit” in which Updike is mentioned. The news “peg” is the final season of Mad Men, and Sissman is evoked as an example of “a real-life advertising executive in the 1960s, who appeared to survive the experience with his soul intact—even deepened.

Screen Shot 2015-03-20 at 7.06.49 AM“Along with his advertising career in Boston, where, over the years, he worked as a creative vice president at two leading firms, Sissman built a national reputation as a man of letters, penning book reviews for The New Yorker, a regular first-person column for The Atlantic, and several books of poetry. John Updike was a big fan, admiring Sissman’s literary work as an expression of ‘amiable, attentive intelligence.’ Other contemporary admirers included fellow poets Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, and Howard Moss. The writer behind Sissman’s poems and essays seemed centered, charming, humane. ‘A sensible, decent man: that is the voice,’ Updike said of his friend.”

“Sissman reflexively avoided the bland generality in favor of the telling particular, which is why Updike, another master of precise observation, liked him so much. ‘When he evokes a city, it is Detroit or New York or Boston; there is no confusing the tint of the pavements,’ Updike wrote. ‘When he recalls a day from his life, though it comes from as far away as November 1944, it arrives not only with all its solid furniture but with its own weather—in this case, ‘thin, slate-colored clouds sometimes letting through flat blades of sun.’ '”

Garrison Keillor remembers Updike’s birthday

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Although The Writer’s Almanac featured a poem by Tom Hennen yesterday, unabashed Updike fan Garrison Keillor still remembered the author’s birthday with a nice long biographical summary, lest anyone forget:

“It’s the birthday of writer John Updike (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1932). His father was a high school teacher, and his mother aspired to be a writer; Updike said: ‘One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk. I admired the writer’s equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in.’ As a boy, Updike wanted to be a cartoonist, not a writer. He cut out comic strips and sent fan letters to cartoonists, drew caricatures of classmates, made posters, and tried to draw cartoons like the ones he saw in his family’s copy of The New Yorker. As a teenager, he sent his cartoons to major magazines, including The New Yorker, and although he didn’t publish any there, he did earn five dollars selling a cartoon to a dairy journal. He went to Harvard, where he joined the staff of The Harvard Lampoon as a cartoonist, but ended up writing too. By graduation, he was fairly certain that he would become a writer instead of an artist. He said of writing: ‘It took fewer ideas, and I seemed to be better at it. There is less danger of smearing the ink.’

“Despite his intentions to become a writer, he got an art scholarship to study at Oxford. He was newly married, and he and his wife moved to England, where their first daughter was born. While he was at Oxford, he met E.B. and Katherine White, who were vacationing in England. They convinced him to apply for a job at The New Yorker, so after his time at Oxford, he moved to Manhattan to work as a staff writer for the magazine, writing the ‘Talk of the Town’ column. He was not a big fan of life in the city — he said, ‘The place proved to be other than the Fred Astaire movies had led me to expect.’ Two years later, the Updikes had a second child and decided to leave New York and move toIpswich, Massachusetts. Updike had just turned 25 years old.

“Soon after his move, he published his first books: a book of poems, The Carpentered Hen (1958); a novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959); and a book of short stories, The Same Door (1959). Another son was born in 1959, and a daughter 19 months later. Despite the success of those early years — in 1960 he published Rabbit, Run, the first of his great books featuring Rabbit Angstrom — he underwent a spiritual crisis. He said, ‘These remembered gray moments, in which my spirit could scarcely breathe, are scattered over a period of years; to give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men’s wives.’

“After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: ‘Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.’ He wanted to publish about one book a year, and took Sundays off for church, although later in his career he sometimes worked on Sundays too. In 2008, he said, ‘I’ve become a beast of the written word, a monster of a kind, in that it’s all I can do.’

“Updike published more than 60 books in his lifetime, including 28 novels. His books include Couples (1968), Rabbit is Rich (1981), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and The Complete Henry Bech (2001).

“He said: ‘At the point where you get your writerly vocation you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.'”