Playboy writer tells of Updike refusal

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Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 9.16.14 AMThe August 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine contains this letter from writer Lawrence Grobel telling of Updike’s refusal to grant him an interview for Playboy:

Rabbit, Refuse

In his review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike [“Agreeable Angstrom,” June], Jonathan Dee writes that Updike’s “life consisted of saying yes to everything, and of questioning nothing.” I read that with amusement, remembering how I tried, for years, to get Updike to agree to a Playboy interview with me. I corresponded with him about it and went to see him when he gave a talk at the Los Angeles Public Library. I had previously done interviews with James A. Michener, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Saul Bellow, and I thought just mentioning these writers would clinch the deal, but when I said to Updike, “Saul Bellow agreed,” he just looked at me and smiled wryly. “Yes, I read it,” he said.

Lawrence Grobel
Los Angeles

Stage version of Roger’s Version lauded

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In a review that was published in The Tennessean on May 31, 2014, Amy Stumpfl wrote that the world premiere of the Blackbird Theater stage adaptation of Roger’s Version “captures Updike’s intoxicating brand of intellectualism and moral ambiguity with aplomb.

“Written and directed by Blackbird Artistic Director Wes Driver, this engrossing adaptation pits a self-satisfied divinity professor named Roger Lambert against Dale Kohler—an evangelical grad student who believes he can prove God’s existence through computer science. . . .

“Fairly heady stuff, to be sure. But don’t be intimidated by all the intellectual wordplay. Like most of Updike’s work, ‘Roger’s Version’ is firmly rooted in the physical world, taking on everyday issues of professional rivalry, resentment, sexual urges and marital discord.”

Here’s the full review. Below are photos of David Compton as Roger and Kristopher Wente as Dale, Wente with Corrie Miller (Esther Lambert) and Amanda Card, “the unlikely object of Roger’s guilty lust.” The photos come courtesy of Greg Greene, Managing Director for the Blackbird Theater.   Continue reading →

TLS letter writer responds to the Begley bio

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Dale Salwak, who teaches in the English department at Citrus College in Glendora, California, wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement editor that was published on June 27, 2014:

Updike’s real self

Sir, – Near the end of his review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike (June 13), James Campbell wonders how Updike would have reacted “to seeing the ‘sadly prurient’ details of his moral and mortal failings laid out on page after page so soon after his death in 2009”. In the foreword to his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) Updike answers that question. He would be repulsed: “to take my life, my lode of ore and heap of memories, from me!” And in a later piece, “The Man Within”, published in the New Yorker (June 26 and July 3, 1995), he adds: “The trouble with literary biographies, perhaps, is that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one”.

DALE SALWAK
Department of English, Citrus College, 1000 West Foothill Boulevard, Glendora, California 91741.

On writers and their would-be-writer moms

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Today the National Post posted a story by “Barbara Kay: We all know about John Updike. But what about his mother?” 

In it, she talks about her friend, David Siegel, an “evolving short-story writer” and his experience taking an Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer class from Robert Anthony Siegel in which a classmate was Siegel’s own 75-year-old mother, and that leads her to consider the relationship that Updike had with his own mother, also an aspiring writer who was published late in life after her son’s success, but who worked at becoming a writer when he was still a young boy.

“Perhaps Linda’s greatest gift to her son was her unconditional respect for the artist’s obligation to speak his own truth without regard to the feelings of those he writes about,” Kay writes.

Theater critic bristles at the maleness of Updike’s work

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In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible, critic Ingrid D. Rowland bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible.”

That led her to take exception with Updike’s “irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones ‘haunches'” and to name him, along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as standard bearers for the “apogee” of novelists whose works command a largely male readership. Here’s what she wrote in response to fellow theater critic Quentin Letts:

“Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers’ irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones “haunches”)—or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Yaël Farber, The Crucible’s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed “artistic license” in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.”

“The Witches of West End”

Radio Open Source uploads David Updike clip

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DavidUpdikeRadio Open Source, which recently uploaded a podcast featuring Adam Begley intercut with John Updike audio quotes, also uploaded “From WHAT MAKES RABBIT RUN?: David Updike on being a writer’s child.” The clip only runs a minute and a half, but Updike enthusiasts might appreciate seeing the difference in philosophy between Updike and his son, who is also a writer.

David Updike is the author of numerous books, among them Old Girlfriends: Stories, of which Kirkus Reviews noted, “Thoughtful work from a writer clearly unintimidated by the family name.” And a reviewer for Elle wrote, “David Updike does himself—and his late father, John—proud with his second collection, Old Girlfriends . . . these 10 ruminative stories set in New England sport a winning sense of whimsy, quiet surprise, and fresh, frank sensuality.”

NY Times Magazine essayist invokes Updike

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Screen Shot 2014-07-06 at 9.50.10 AMIn an essay titled “794 Ways in Which BuzzFeed Reminds Us of Impending Death” (NY Times Magazine, July 3, 2014), Heather Havrilesky invoked John Updike:

“The next summer, after a long year spent adjusting to life without my dad in the house, I happened to pick up John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Is Rich.’ Perhaps given the timing, it was the first novel that felt real and relatable to me, like a ticket straight into the bloodstream of another human being. And no wonder — Updike knew exactly how the intrusions of pop-culture minutiae had the power to evoke the cheery dread of Middle America.   Continue reading →

Daily Beast picks Updike as a Best Biography

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In selecting “The Best Biographies of 2014 (So Far),” The Daily Beast noted, “Only half way into 2014, historical biographies are already having a banner year. Adam Begley’s Updike—a ‘superb achievement’ and ‘brilliant new biography’—is perhaps the most lauded title so far this year in any genre, Ramachandra Guha’s just-published Gandhi Before India is garnering similar buzz, and an armload of other big bios are making waves.”

Of Updike, they wrote:

“The reviews of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike—the prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, poet, and serial philanderer—approach universal acclaim. Wall Street Journal: ‘Begley has a great many strengths—concision, eloquence, an eagle eye—and few of the usual shortcomings.’ Washington Post: ‘[A] convincing interpretative biography, one characterized by suavity, wit, and independent judgment throughout.’ Newsday: ‘Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy and grace, it is a model of first-rate literary biography.’ New York Observer: ‘[A] monumental treatment of a towering American writer.'”

WBUR presents The John Updike Radio Files

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Screen Shot 2014-07-04 at 8.46.43 AMRadio Open Source, “arts, ideas & politics with Christopher Lydon,” yesterday posted “The John Updike Radio Files,” which includes a video clip of Lydon interviewing Updike “on the occasion of his second Pulitzer win in 1991 for Rabbit at Rest, from The Ten O’Clock News.”

Adam Begley is also featured. “We’ve discovered some old gems in our radio archives and sprinkled them through a conversation with John Updike’s biographer, Adam Begley, for our show this week.

“Begley talks about Updike’s Pennsylvania boyhood, his wives and lovers north of Boston, his children, his spiritual life, his voracious reading, his travels—and how he created the most graceful prose of our time by cannibalizing all of it for his art.”