When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York
but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
-- John Updike
but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
-- John Updike
There must be, then, a library just a little east of Kansas that is well-stocked in author aisle "U." Because as a young man John Updike made it a goal of his that he would publish a book a year. It turns out that he did miss a year or two, but made up for the misses with many more hits, to the admiration of enthusiasts, bewilderment of observers, and irritation of detractors, as he published 75 books from 1958-2013. It is true that some of those 75 titles were collections of stories, essays and poems that had appeared in earlier editions. Still, it is quite a number, like a career sports record no other athlete will ever surpass or, even when blessed by Olympian gods and goddesses, match. Addressing Updike's publishing record, Louis Menand in The New Yorker, April 28, 2014, recalled, "David Foster Wallace once asked, quoting, he said, a friend, 'Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?' Not, apparently, if he could help it."
Biographies  |
| Tonight's reading assignment? Tomorrow's? Well, for someone, somewhere, in Updike's imaginary place, "a little to the east of Kansas." |
American Academy of Achievement
John Updike Society
National Endowment for the Humanities
The Poetry Foundation
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| Chief claims he wears a Large. Not true. All his friends know he is an XXL. His other unsuccessful deceptions: he has never met, nor read John Updike. |
[Highly Recommended.] John Updike talks with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour (10 mins.)
Updike talks about his 'Rabbit' novels with Charlie Rose (3 mins.)
[Highly Recommended.] The Paris Review: The Art of Fiction, number 43 (Winter 1968)
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| Photograph of check discovered at Famous Celebrity Autographs dot Com |
Articles About
[Highly Recommended.] John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76 (The New York Times, January 28, 2009)
AN APPRAISAL: A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries (The New York Times, January 27, 2009)
[Highly Recommended.] John Updike's Animated Ambitions (Updike's interest in drawing is discussed.) (The Guardian, March 19, 2004)
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| Updike self-portrait from the mid-1990s. Details about it appear in an article by Lawrence Grobel. |
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| Updike drew the above illustration for The Lampoon, a student publication at Harvard, where he graduated in 1954. The Harvard Gazette recalls Updike's student days. More examples of Updike's drawings can be found here. |
John Updike’s Mighty Pen (The New York Times, January 31, 2009)
John Updike, who died on Tuesday at 76, was our Trollope and our Proust both. Though a brilliant man, he was not a novelist of ideas. His best character, Rabbit Angstrom, had trouble making sense of his own life, let alone the lives of those around him. Nor did Mr. Updike have a reformer’s zeal or a dreamer’s vision. His gifts were his eye and his sensibility, which enabled him to describe, with an exactitude bordering on love, how the world looked and what it felt like to make your way in it.
He was the great chronicler of middle-class America, and hundreds of years from now, if people still read, they will read the Rabbit books to learn what that perplexing age, the 20th century, was really like.
Mr. Updike was also America’s last true man of letters, an all-purpose writer and a custodian of literary culture. He wrote more, and in more different genres — stories, novels, poems, essays, reviews, occasional journalism — than anyone since Henry James, and it’s hard to imagine how he can be replaced. Who has the energy, or the eyeballs, for that much reading?
In many ways, though, Mr. Updike was an unlikely man of letters. He lived a quiet, burgherly life in a seaside Boston suburb and seldom went to literary parties. He dropped by New York now and then to visit museums and see relatives, but he never stayed long. He didn’t teach; he almost never gave blurbs; he belonged to no literary school or faction. His idea of a reward after a morning’s work was not lunch or drinks with other writers but a round of golf with his buddies.
Mr. Updike kept in touch with the literary world mostly by mail. He was a regular at the post office and eagerly awaited the arrival every day of the FedEx truck. He was old-fashioned in promptly and politely answering letters, and his correspondence was like the man himself: stylish, charming, gently self-deprecatory. Starting when he was in his late 50’s, it sometimes amused him to pretend to be a fogey and a valetudinarian. His submissions to The New Yorker, where I used to edit him sometimes, were often accompanied by a little note declaring that the enclosed was not very good and would probably be his last, because the well was going dry, the tank was empty, the field was fallow. In fact, until the very end of his life Mr. Updike was remarkably youthful, and he filed his last piece with the magazine just weeks before he died.
If, like me, you were lucky enough to share Mr. Updike’s enthusiasm for golf, you got periodic reports on the woeful state of his game and his hope, never diminished, of turning it around. He was a tireless sharer of “tips” — the little swing thoughts golfers use to trick their bodies into temporary compliance.
Mr. Updike kept in touch with the literary world mostly by mail. He was a regular at the post office and eagerly awaited the arrival every day of the FedEx truck. He was old-fashioned in promptly and politely answering letters, and his correspondence was like the man himself: stylish, charming, gently self-deprecatory. Starting when he was in his late 50’s, it sometimes amused him to pretend to be a fogey and a valetudinarian. His submissions to The New Yorker, where I used to edit him sometimes, were often accompanied by a little note declaring that the enclosed was not very good and would probably be his last, because the well was going dry, the tank was empty, the field was fallow. In fact, until the very end of his life Mr. Updike was remarkably youthful, and he filed his last piece with the magazine just weeks before he died.
If, like me, you were lucky enough to share Mr. Updike’s enthusiasm for golf, you got periodic reports on the woeful state of his game and his hope, never diminished, of turning it around. He was a tireless sharer of “tips” — the little swing thoughts golfers use to trick their bodies into temporary compliance.
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| Updike self-portrait, date unknown. |
What other writers, young and old, prized most about Mr. Updike was his prose — that amazing instrument, like a jeweler’s loupe; so precise, exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless. If there were a pill you could take to write like that, who wouldn’t swallow a handful? Equally inspiring was his faith in the writing itself. He toyed once or twice with magic realism, but the experiment never really worked and he gave it up. Though he loved Jorge Luis Borges, he didn’t in his own work go in for Borgesian mirror games, and he was free from the postmodern anxiety about the fictiveness of fiction, the unreliability of language. He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record experience and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn’t quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did.
And other writers surely admired — and maybe envied a little — Mr. Updike’s success, his ability to make a living just from the fashioning of sentences, without selling out himself or others. He seldom took an advance and he never tailored his work to suit the fashion. The literary life as he led it seemed a higher calling, not a grubby one. Charmed as it sometimes seemed, though, his career had its ups and downs. Not all his efforts were successful, and he took his share of lumps from the critics, especially in the later years. But he got up every day uncomplaining and went to his desk with joyful industriousness. He had a faith in the literary enterprise that was noble and touching.
Secretly, what almost every writer wanted was Mr. Updike’s attention and good opinion. He was a prodigious reader, and communicated to the world at large mostly by means of his essays and reviews — generous, judicious, thoughtful. Praise from Mr. Updike meant something, and not just abstractly. Favorable notices from him gave huge boosts to the careers, for example, of Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer. Mr. Updike couldn’t read everyone, of course. He was a father figure with far too many children all craving his notice, and yet he awarded his favors so evenly that it was hard to complain. A writer could always daydream: Maybe he’s reading my book this very minute. I wonder what he thinks.
Every now and then, if something in a magazine caught Mr. Updike’s eye, he would send the author a little fan note, often typed on a postcard with his name and address hand-stamped in blue ink. He also had a stamp he used to address all his correspondence to Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. There was something endearingly quaint about these little inky imprints — a legacy perhaps of a Depression boyhood and a lifetime habit of efficiency — but they also reflected his enduring fascination with the magic of print.
to read the above article on its website, go to "John Updike’s Mighty Pen" (The New York Times, January 31, 2009)
to read the above article on its website, go to "John Updike’s Mighty Pen" (The New York Times, January 31, 2009)
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| Pictured above is an example of Updike's own careful edits to what would become the first page of his novel Rabbit at Rest, the fourth volume in his 'Rabbit' tetralogy. To read more about his working manuscripts, books and other papers related to his life and writing career now held at Harvard, his alma mater, visit this site. |
"Remembering Updike" by Joyce Carol Oates
The New Yorker
January 28, 2009
Posted by Joyce Carol Oates
John Updike was a slightly-older classmate in a vast high school populated by not-prosperous rural youths in some netherland of the nineteen-fifties. Of course, John was president of this class; no doubt I was secretary. I’ve been reading John’s work since I became an adult and can only content myself with the prospect of rereading his work through the remainder of my life. I think there must be a story or two, and even one of his more slender novels, which, unaccountably, I have not yet read. My students love “Friends from Philadelphia,” which was John’s first published story in The New Yorker. What a seemingly artless little gem! My students are stunned by it and by the fact that John wrote it when he was hardly older than they are.
We’d met a number of times—my (late) husband, Raymond Smith, and I visited John and Martha in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, on several very nice occasions. John was always gracious, warmly funny, kind, and bemused—and of course very bright, and ardent, when it came to literature. When he gave a brilliant talk and reading at Princeton some years ago, I was pleased to introduce him to a large, packed auditorium. I teach his lovely short stories all the time—his language is luminous, sparkling, and glinting, with a steely sort of humor. I never knew how serious John was about his Christian faith—or, rather, the Christian faith—though some sense of the sacred seems to suffuse his work like that sort of sourceless sunshine which illuminates an overcast day. I will miss him terribly, as we all will.
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