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Our recent big snowstorm in the NE reminded me of John Updike’s ‘Unstuck’, a wonderful story of a young married couple who must work together to free their car from a snow bank. You can find it in Trust Me and later collections. I’m always impressed by his ability to bring the physical and emotional details of domesticity into such clear focus.

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The Selected Letters of John Updike was recently published. It includes many photographs that are new to me. I’ve missed seeing his books in bookstores and his entertaining and gracious appearances on television, but I feel lucky that he left us so much to enjoy.❤️

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Roger’s Version by John Updike. Updike presents an entertaining debate on whether we can and should prove God’s existence. Dale Kohler, a computer science student, believes he can, with adequate resources, prove the existence of God using the available scientific knowledge and computers. On the other hand, Roger Lambert, Professor of Divinity, feels that God can only be known through faith. It’s a interesting exercise, but the strength of the book is Updike’s depiction of Professor Lambert and his domestic life: his second marriage to a younger, bored wife, their teenage son, and the appearance of a real hot mess of a niece, a single mother in straightened circumstances. Updike’s keen observations of the characters and their moral decrepitude are very good. Updike is indeed a master chronicler of the American middle class in the late 20th century. On the negative side, there’s a fair amount of abstruse science, mathematics, cosmology and sexual segments that seemed gratuitously pornographic.

Memorable passages:

Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned. In the 16th century astronomy, in the 17th microbiology, in the 18th geology and paleontology, in the 19th Darwin’s biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the lumber pile. Barth had been right: totaliter aliter. Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured.

Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her. For all her exertions, it never was…. I hoped she would mistake my failure to answer for her own hardness of hearing. But, then these Brahmins are so thickly armored in their own rudeness as to feel hardly any rudeness produced by others.

Why, with a living room, a library, and his own good size bedroom at his disposal, Richie insisted on doing his homework on the very surface where his mother was trying to arrange placemats and dinner plates, while a 10 inch Sony crackled and chattered not a foot from his face, I couldn’t imagine. Or so I said, in repeated admonition. Of course I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is – it’s irresistible charm – a fire.

You sleep with someone in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.

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A beautiful special edition of Trust Me. Slipcase and end papers photogram: Partridge, 1850s, by Anna Atkins.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/feb/01/john-updike-interview-amis-martin

Martin Amis speaking of Updike:

“In his perceptions he is almost dementedly sensual: tactile, olfactory. He cowers under a cataract of sense impressions. His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet bowl with the same peeled-eyeball intensity. The brain itself is serendipitous and horrendously encyclopaedic; he knows about home-improvement ("20 feet of 2 inch pine quality knotless stock, a half pound of 1½inch finishing nails"), music, cars ("padded tilt steering wheel, lumbar support lever for adjustable driver comfort, factory-installed AM/FM/ MPX'"), trees, computers, painting ("she halts in the pose of Michelangelo's slave, of Munch's madonna, of Ingres' urn-bearer"), boats ("Arthur's newly bought gaff-rigged Herreshof 12½"), photosynthesis ("the 5/6 of the triosephosphate"), pornography, theology, nuclear physics, linotyping, gold futures, aerodynamics, Africa, cookery, cosmogony and I don't know what-all else.”

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Portraits at the Updike childhood home museum

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I enjoyed a visit to John Updike’s childhood home and museum in Shillington, PA today. The house at 117 Philadelphia Avenue is more spacious than it appears from the street with its high, airy ceilings. It was recently renovated to return it to the way it was during Updike’s childhood. I imagined the precocious boy playing in and around the house and reading to the sound of his mother’s typewriter. The now empty rooms made me feel melancholy. There aren’t as many displays and artifacts as I had imagined, but it hasn’t been long since it opened, and I trust the spaces will fill out over time. In fact I learned that there are holdings that haven’t been displayed or even archived yet, and items are still being purchased. The grave site is located at the Plowville Lutheran cemetery. The headstone was carved by Updike’s son, Michael. It stands next to graves of his parents Linda and Wes and maternal grandparents, and a great grandparents’ grave is nearby. I also saw the Plowville farmhouse where the Updikes lived after leaving Philadelphia Avenue house. I met two gracious gentleman today who were friends of John Updike and his family. One showed me the house and even thoughtfully provided a few local snacks to try. The other gentleman invited me to his home and showed me his Updike books and interesting ephemera. He extended his courtesy by driving me to various places around town related to the author. Finally he gave me some gifts to enjoy. A memorable day.

“Perhaps we meet our Heaven at the start and not the end of life.” -John Updike, Endpoint

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themaninthegreenshirt

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.” - John Updike, Rabbit, Run

biboocat

themaninthegreenshirt: “Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.” - John Updike, Rabbit, Run Great photo. Makes me want to go out for some chowdah.

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thebluefilm

Updike

biboocat

John Updike, you are missed.

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Missing John Updike on the anniversary of his death on this day 2009.

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117 PHILADELPHIA AVENUE SHILLINGTON, PENNSYLVANIA

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didierleclair

The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and he does it without destroying something else John Updike

L’artiste apporte quelque chose au monde qui n’existait pas avant et il le fait sans détruire quelque chose d’autre John Updike

biboocat

The following Wiki link on John Updike includes the author’s impressive bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike

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millionsmillions

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.” - John Updike

biboocat

millionsmillions: “From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.” - John Updike

#john updike #quote