Reading Updike on a Rainy Friday Night

I was dusting bookshelves today and as I went past my row of books by John Updike I had to pull a few off and look into them.

I really liked Updike’s stories and novels. My wife and I used to read the books together every summer for a number of years. I also admired Updike’s three pages per day writing requirement. He really worked at his writing.  It paid off. He had a 50+ year career and has 67 books listed on his Wikipedia bibliography that includes 21 novels, 18 short-story collections, 12 books of poetry, 4 children’s books, and 12 collections of non-fiction. Many of my favorite pieces of his fiction are found among his 186 short stories.

I wasn’t reading Updike in 1960. That was the year he was 28 (I was 7) and he published his second novel, Rabbit, Run.  The New York Times called the book a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion.” I would read it during the summer 0f 1968 after I had read a book of his stories, Pigeon Feathers, and then his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

The stories especially appealed to me, since I saw myself as a budding short story writer and was reading Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and other story writers too. I would go on to read almost all the stories and novels in chronological order of their publication. I wanted to write little, perfect stories like his “A&P.” I was a high school boy and immediately identified with Updike’s boy working at the checkout counter in an A&P supermarket when three young pretty girls walk in wearing nothing but bathing suits. That little plot unfolds quickly and tragically.

In my freshman year of college as an English major, I was assigned to read his newest novel, Rabbit Redux.  a sequel to the first Rabbit book.

I gave her my copy of the sexy Couples novel when we were dating, and we both read Marry Me when it came out and we were a few years from being married ourselves.  Updike chronicles many marriages and many uncouplings, some based on his own life story.

Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for two of the four Rabbit novels. There is also “Rabbit Remembered” a long story (or novella) that came later. Those tales chronicle Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex- high-school basketball star who first deserts his wife and son and then explores sexuality, marriage, parenting and also the time he is passing through in America.

I heard an interview he did at the time of his fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which chronicles the end of Harry’s life. It is a sad book about grandpa Harry in his Florida condo, still dealing with his son, Nelson, and his wife, Janice, and an 1989 America that is a post-Reagan time of debt, AIDS, and President Bush 41. It won him another Pulitzer Prize. What interests me in the interview and book is his own thoughts about death. (He died of lung cancer in January 2009.)

I found a video that has John’s son, David Updike, interviewed about being the child of a writer. David was (is?) a teacher and also a writer and I have enjoyed reading his work. I have his children’s books and his books of stories and they are very good. It certainly must have been more negative than positive to be the son of John Updike if you wanted to be a writer. I like in this video David’s decision that he would give up writing a piece of fiction if it meant hurting someone he cared about. I don’t think his father held that belief.

John Updike received much praise in his lifetime for his writing. He also was pretty strongly disliked by some of his fellow writers and by feminists. He was, like too many famous men I admire, not a very good husband or father. But I think even some of those who are not fans concede that his prose is beautiful, often poetic.

I came to John Updike’s poetry much later than the books and stories. I love reading poetry, and I like some of his poems, but I feel like his prose had more poetry in it than many of the poems. I have used a few of his poems on my poetry blog

I took this passage from Updike’s wonderful story “Pigeon Feathers” and broke the sentences into more “poetic” line breaks using his punctuation most of the time. This “found poem” is about what it means to be dead as seen by teenage David as he walks at night across his farm home to the outhouse and imagines a grave. As I said, his prose is so often poetic, that it is easy to hear the sentences as lines in a poem.

A long hole in the ground,
no wider than your body,
down which you are drawn
while the white faces above recede.

You try to reach them
but your arms are pinned.
Shovels pour dirt into your face.
There you will be forever,
in an upright position,
blind and silent,
and in time no one will remember you,
and you will never be called by any angel.

As strata of rock shift,
your fingers elongate,
and your teeth are distended sideways
in a great underground grimace
indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.

Start That Day Book

This is a short follow-up to my post about day books (AKA a book of days). Are you ready to start one? You don’t need to wait for the new year. It can be your poem-a-day book, but that is pretty ambitious. Or it can be like more traditional day books, recording events of the day.

You could use any notebook, but I am a big fan of bound books for these kinds of projects. One that I found online is specifically a day book blank book designed with 365 pages. Actually, the one I was looking at has pages numbered 1–366. Day 366 is for leap years, like 2024. It has 370 unlined pages so you can write and sketch and paste in pictures, plus a title page and three notes pages – one at the start for your intro and two at the end to wrap things up.

You don’t need a theme or special project to start recording your thoughts, memories, changes, and progress for 365 days. It could be for you but it could be a book to leave for someone else. Record the first year of a baby’s life.

The numbered pages can be a bit of motivation for keeping at the practice, though the blank page shouldn’t be frightening. I know someone whose day book is composed of all images hand drawn and cut out of magazines, mail, or found. Another friend did a gratitude journal as her daily prompt.

Another blank day book I found online has a lock on it. That reminds me of a diary my older sister had when I was a kid. The lock might have protected it but it also made the contents all the more appealing. Day books are not diaries. More almanac than a diary or intimate journal. More log book than confessional.

Not That Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:
read a lot and write a lot.”

This past month, after much hesitating, I read Stephen King’s novel, Billy Summers. I looked up which books of his have sold the most copies and it looks like The Shining leads the list, followed by Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Misery, Pet Sematary, Salem’s Lot, The Dark Tower series, and The Green Mile. Of those, I have read one and seen movie versions of three. I don’t think that qualifies me as a fan and certainly not as a King fanatic.

As you’ll see, my favorite Stephen King is not the famous mystery, horror writer that people know. Not that Stephen King. If you asked me what are my favorites by him, my short list would include the short stories “Stand By Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption” which are two that many people would not know were written by him. Both became quite beloved films.

From the top 10 list, The Green Mile is the only one I have read and I only read it after seeing the movie. I recall when it was originally published in 1996 that it came out in six self-contained monthly installments. That seemed like a Charles Dickens experiment or a publishing gimmick which I found unappealing. I read the volume that combines all six parts, but in 1966 the individual volumes were all on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously, so I guess it was a good idea. The movie came out three years later directed by Frank Darabont who was known for some horror-ish films but also directed The Shawshank Redemption. The performances by Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan were excellent and so it sent me to the book, which returned to the bestseller list with the movie’s release.

I was able to borrow the audiobook of Billy Summers. I prefer that medium for most of my book reading these days. I used to listen to books on tape or on CDs during my car commuting days. Now, I listen on walks and while working outside in the garden.

I was first interested in King after I found out that he had been an English teacher like myself and was writing in his free time. I had seen a story or interview years ago that said he was frustrated and blamed teaching time for his lack of getting published. I did that too back in the day. His wife made a deal with him that he could take a year off from teaching to write and submit his manuscript. If he succeeded, great. If not, he would go back to teaching. Carrie was published. Goodbye to teaching. I searched for that origin story a bit online and didn’t find it, so maybe I imagined it.

Carrie is a horror and supernatural novel and I think qualifies as gothic fiction. He originally meant it to be a short story since that was all he was getting published. He wrote a longer novella version that he didn’t think was good. When he was writing this novel, he was living in a trailer in Hermon, Maine with his wife Tabitha and two children. He was teaching at Hampden Academy. He had published short stories in some “men’s magazines.” His wife and others rescued the manuscript by making suggestions for changes. It became an epistolary novel with “official” reports and has a framing device consisting of multiple narrators. The book sold so-so in hardcover but much better in paperback editions and much much better when the film came out in 1976. That’s when I discovered King.

The last King novel I read before Billy Summers was 11/22/63. A friend who is a big King fan recommended it because he knows 1) I love time travel stories 2) I’m still fascinated by the Kennedy assassination. This is a book King apparently thought about a long time ago but he didn’t feel he was ready to write. The short description is that it is about a man who goes back in time to save JFK. Of course, it is way more complicated than that. (I wrote about the book in an earlier post.) It is a love story too. To travel in time here is easy but to actually get to 11/22/63 and stop the assassination is not easy.

It’s a long book and I always think his long novels need some cutting. The love story of Jake, Sadie, and her ex-husband could be a novel by itself. I wasn’t a fan of the ending, but overall I did like the book. That’s my mixed recommendation, but I would recommend it if you meet one or both of my time travel and JFK interests.

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story.
When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

But my favorite King book isn’t fiction. It is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This short book (right there not typical of King) is, as the title says, both a memoir and a craft book. His advice comes from his life, starting with childhood and into his established writing time. King had a near-fatal accident in 1999 and it is very much linked to his writing which is linked to his recovery.

This book got great reviews and I would add my own recommendation to those reviews. As King was recovering (and at first he could not physically do any writing), he did a lot of thinking about writing and his life. That’s why the book is a memoir about writing. It does have a lot of advice in “toolkits” about writing and even about a good life.

Is it worth reading if you don’t consider yourself a writer? I think so. I think it can be inspiring, even if all you plan to write is a journal for yourself. Can we all be “writers?” He says “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

An Autumn Sunday

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

A lazy autumn Sunday afternoon.  I slept rather late. I woke up to the smell of croissants my wife was baking – which is better than any alarm clock. Drank three cups of good coffee. I glanced at the news but it started depressing me, so I worked on one of my short poems about the day because that is like this blog – a bit of escape into words.

It was chilly his morning. Less than 50 degrees. That’s fine sweater weather. I went out to check on the tomato plants that I covered yesterday to try to get a few last cherry tomatoes. The covers were puffing in the wind like Halloween ghosts.

Halloween is my least favorite holiday. – though I seem to write about it here rather often.
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

There were some interesting patterns of fallen leaves in different colors. The acorns and a few pine cones are arranged by serendipity, squirrels, and chipmunks on the deck. Some sticks fell with the wind last night and they almost formed a wreath.

Then I went inside for some lunch and scrolling through my tumblr feed I saw a post about “land art.”

I wrote a bit about this in the past – art made from the materials nature offers and made in nature and allowed to dissolve, decompose or disintegrate naturally. Some names associated with this form are Andy Goldsworthy, Ludovic Fesson, Jeremy Underwood, Lizzie Buckmaster Dove and Emily Blincoe.

I suppose you could look at this day as a wasted one. I didn’t accomplish anything “significant” so far today. Still, I feel like I am one point in a very large circle of Sunday afternoon people looking at autumn all over this top half of our world. It is a good feeling. That is an accomplisgment.

By Evie Shaffer on Pexels.com

Old Man Hemingway

Henry “Mike” Strater and Ernest Hemingway with an “apple-cored” marlin. Bimini, Cat Cay, 1935. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Public Domain

In September 1952, Ernest Hemingway’s last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, was published. It was the last novel published during his lifetime and it was cited when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

I read that book in eighth grade. I had an overly ambitious or optimistic English teacher who had bought copies of that novel and Steinbeck’s The Pearl and The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Orwell’s Animal Farm and other “short books (novellas) by great authors.” She wanted to introduce us to literature and famous writers before we went to high school. I read all of them that year. I didn’t understand all of what I read, but it was influential. And she loved me for reading them.

It worked with me. I went on to read several other books by those two writers on my own that year and many others in the years that followed. I recall liking The Red Pony as I was going through a horseback riding phase and the other two books seemed a bit preachy to me. I went back to all three books eventually and Hemingway’s novel now is the one that is the strongest.

Ernest Hemingway had been working on a very long novel that he called The Sea Book. It was inspired by that WWII period when he was on his Pilar fishing boat looking for submarines in his attempt to be part of the war. That original manuscript was in three sections: “The Sea When Young,” “The Sea When Absent,” and “The Sea in Being.” It had an epilogue about an old fisherman.

Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970). Hemingway also mentions the real-life experience of an old fisherman that seems almost identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in “On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter” published in Esquire magazine in April 1936.

He wrote more than 800 pages of The Sea Book and rewrote them more than a hundred times, but the book still didn’t seem finished. Finally, he decided to publish just the epilogue on its own which he called The Old Man and the Sea.

The novella begins, “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” It tells the story of Santiago who catches the biggest fish of his life, only to have it eaten by sharks before he can get back to shore.

The Old Man and the Sea was written while Hemingway was living in Cayo Blanco, Cuba, and Santiago is an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.

Ernest Hemingway – via Wikimedia

I have always thought that this old man’s struggles had to be connected to Hemingway’s own struggles as a writer and with the deep depression at the end of his life. Without getting all literary symbols about it, I think the marlin is his writing career as he tries to bring in one more “big book” and goes a long time without doing so. The little book he does publish is good but, like the remains of the marlin that makes it back to Cuba, it is just a part of a much larger work.

The novella is not my favorite Hemingway writing, but it is a good first read for someone who has not read him and wonders why he is considered such an important American writer.

Hemingway’s Last Decade and Last Day

In 1950, Ernest Hemingway had been working on a long novel tentatively titled The Sea Book. The writing was difficult and he felt his abilities were diminished. He only published a section of the manuscript during his life as The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Despite the fact that the book was well-reviewed and won the Pulitzer Prize, he was disappointed with himself for only being able to finish that short novella.

In 1953, while in Africa, a plane he was in collided with a flock of birds and crash-landed on the shore of the Nile River. Hemingway sprained his shoulder but boarded another plane which also crashed, this time fracturing his skull and cracking two discs in his spine, and causing internal bleeding.

The crashed plane wasn’t immediately located and Hemingway was reported dead by the press. He later said that he strangely enjoyed reading the obituaries in a Tom Sawyer-ish way and he saved newspaper clippings in scrapbooks.

The injuries never fully healed and he increased his alcohol consumption as a way to self-medicate. He wrote a lot but published none of it.

A trunk of old manuscripts and notebooks from his days in Paris gave him the rough materials to write his memoir A Movable Feast which was published posthumously in 1964. It is often considered his best book of non-fiction. Still, he was disappointed in it when he finished the manuscript because he was not writing fiction and the book was the result of reworking old material. He was a harsher critic of his writing than some who did for their livelihood.

He battled insomnia, pain, depression, and failing eyesight in his last decade. He was losing his hair and was very vain about that and about getting old in general.

He became very paranoid and was convinced that he was under FBI surveillance. His wife thought he was losing his mind. Ironically, it was revealed much later that he actually was under FBI surveillance.

He entered the Mayo Clinic and was given electroshock therapy which did not help and probably made things worse.  The treatment affected his memory and made writing even more difficult. He believed that he was only alive in order to write and that if he could not write, there was no point in living. He talked frequently about suicide.

Back in 1928, Ernest had received a cable telling him that his father had committed suicide by shooting himself. He was devastated, particularly because he had earlier sent a letter to his father telling him not to worry about his financial difficulties. That letter arrived minutes after the suicide. He commented at the time that “I’ll probably go the same way.”^[*]

Ernest Hemingway’s behavior during his last decade was similar to his father’s final years and it has been suggested that his father may have had the genetic disease hemochromatosis, in which the inability to metabolize iron culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirm that Ernest’s own hemochromatosis had been diagnosed in early 1961.^[*] His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide.

On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway got up early, loaded his favorite shotgun, and shot himself.

Updated Post – originally posted 2013