Quote of the Day (John Updike, on How ‘Wickedness Was Like Food’)

“Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.” — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), The Witches of Eastwick (1984)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1987 film adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick, with Jack Nicholson—in a supreme bit of typecasting—as Daryl Van Horne, an audacious, rascally devil.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on a Happy Golfer)

“He began to get pars, as the whitecaps flashed on one side of the links and on the other the wine-red electric commuter trains swiftly glided up to Glasgow and back. This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort." — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), "Farrell's Caddie," originally printed in The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1991, reprinted in Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996)

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on a Rainy Night)

“Cars licked by on the asphalt, the streetlights overhead burned sulphurously, silhouettes in slickers and parkas once in a while walked by.” — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), on a rainy night in his hometown of Shillington, PA, in Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)

I thought of this quote last night, as a gulley formed by a rainstorm poured down my street and the wind lashed against my house. I was grateful to be inside.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on ‘A Man of No Plausible Address’ at Christmas)

“A man of no plausible address, with no apparent source for his considerable wealth, comes down the chimney after midnight while decent, law-abiding citizens are snug in their beds—is this not, at the least, cause for alarm?”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Updike (1932-2009), The Twelve Terrors of Christmas (2006)

The accompanying image, of a man dressed as Santa Claus on his sleigh aboard a holiday train in Chicago, was taken on Nov. 23, 2012.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, Inside the Mind of an Unusual Lifeguard)

“Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the colour of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teenage satellites assure me, a delightfully edible appearance. My legs, which I myself can study, cocked as they are before me while I repose on my elevated wooden throne, are dyed a lustreless maple walnut that accentuates their articulate strength. Correspondingly, the hairs of my body are bleached blond, so that my legs have the pointed elegance of, within the flower, umber anthers dusted with pollen.”—American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), “Lifeguard,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Aug. 24, 1960, reprinted in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962)

Okay, I don’t think Sam Elliott (pictured) is what John Updike had in mind for his cerebral lifeguard. As a matter of fact, after seeing him in prominent roles in westerns as his hair turned gray and his skin grew more weather-beaten, I have trouble thinking of him in the title role of the film Lifeguard. But at its release in 1976, he—like all of us alive then—was far younger than now.

In an case Elliott is, for me, a far more palatable option than perhaps the most famous image of a male lifeguard: David Hasselhoff of Baywatch. Over the years, “The Hoff” has generated enough publicity without requiring any more from me, thank you.

By the way, for those of you wondering: the Elliott movie was not an adaptation of this Updike short story. The film, with a script by Ron Koslow, actually has something that at least passes for a plot. In contrast, Updike’s offers a Joycean reverie that delights in language and—naturally, given its divinity-student narrator—features an epiphany:

“We enter the sea with shock; our skin and blood shout in protest. But, that instant, that leap, past, what do we find? Ecstasy and buoyancy. Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.”

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on How ‘Every Day and Season Has Its Beauty and Its Uses’)

“Also like my late Unitarian father-in-law am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather—that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and the day is a pageant of clouds.” — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)

I took this photo eight years ago yesterday, looking across the Hudson from Fort Tryon Park in New York.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on the ‘Rainbow Edge’ to Prose)

“I suppose, yes, I do find it easier to write than some writers, and maybe harder than some others, because I'm aware of the need to write--especially in a time when there are so many alternative claims on our entertainment budget….All that, I think, makes it more urgent than ever that a book be more than just the news, that it be the news plus something extra, some shiver, some rainbow edge to the prose. You can't really control your writer’s voice. It’s a lot like your handwriting—you can't stop it. You can try to alter it, but it always comes out as you. My prose tends to come out as me, and I know it turns off people, because I really ask you to read a little slower than maybe you read the newspaper—but my feeling is that's what makes a book different than a newspaper and more lasting.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), “A Conversation With John Updike” (interviewed by Leonard Lopate on C-Span, Nov. 28, 2000), edited and reprinted in Leonard Lopate, “Interview: The Writing Life and Times of John Updike,” The Writer, 2001

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Exiting a High School to the Snowstorm Outside)

“What a crowd! What a crowd of tiny flakes sputters downward in the sallow realm of the light above the entrance door! Atoms and atoms and atoms and atoms. A furry inch already carpets the steps. The cars on the pike travel slower, windshield wipers flapping, headlight beams nipped and spangled in the ceaseless flurry. The snow seems only to exist where light strikes it.”— American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), The Centaur: A Novel (1962)

Snow was common in the rural Pennsylvania area where John Updike grew up and where his early novel is set. I can still recall times seeing snowflakes as I stepped out of the gym of my high school in northern New Jersey in the 1970s. 

But over the last few years, it has become a rather unusual sight. Earlier this week, TV meteorologists were telling us that there were only five inches of snow for the entire winter last year in Central Park.

The snowstorm that blew through late Wednesday into Thursday, the biggest in this area of the Northeast in the last five years, has more than made up for that total already. Updike’s description hints at the danger in such a dangerous storm, but it is overwhelmed by the lyricism of this passage.

In the same way, it is lovely to look out at snow, and even more so to write about it—but, at a certain age in life (which I’m afraid I have reached), not so much to be in the midst of it—steering one’s car if one needs to drive, shoveling as bitter winds blow about you, shoveling again when city plows push the snow back into the driveway and sidewalk you’ve struggled to clear, and walking gingerly on streets that have iced up overnight.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Ted Williams’ Last At-Bat)

“The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky."—American fiction writer and essayist John Updike (1932-2009), "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 1960

Sixty years ago today, Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams accomplished something that most players desire desperately but can’t achieve: retire on top, with a home run in their last at-bat. John Updike’s account of this game is one of the classic baseball articles.

As seen in this passage, Updike endowed the last homer of the Hall of Famer’s 521-HR career with mythic majesty. He did the same thing in evoking how the 42-year-old Williams, who had quarreled with the press and even fans throughout his career, stayed true to form, refusing to tip his cap or come out of the dugout to acknowledge the wild cheering from the roughly 10,000 fans in Fenway Park after his eighth-inning blast.

Updike summed up the disdain of “The Splendid Splinter” simply, in perhaps the most quoted line of the piece: “Gods do not answer letters.”

This Day in Literary History (Danner, Moriarty Shine in TV Adaptation of Updike Stories)

March 12, 1979—Overlooked because of an American Film Institute tribute to Alfred Hitchcock broadcast on CBS was another career summary of a sort—and, in the bargain, one of the finest television movies ever made—running at the same time on NBC: Too Far to Go, an adaptation of heavily autobiographical short stories by John Updike depicting the gradual disintegration of the two-decade marriage of Richard and Joan Maple.

Critics heaped so much praise on the family drama starring Michael Moriarty, Blythe Danner, and Glenn Close (in a couple of brief but significant scenes) that two years later, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios arranged to have the production released on the big screen with only a few changes (a new musical score by Elizabeth Swados and a few scenes edited out for TV). 

Lacking the high-profile casting and bigger budgets of contemporary films like Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People and Shoot the Moon, Too Far to Go still holds its own with them as a painfully honest dissection of a fracturing upper-middle-class WASP family. 

In his prolific career spanning nearly a half century, Updike wrote more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections, even a play. You would think that a number of those would have been filmed. 

But, like contemporary Philip Roth, Updike could count only about a half dozen properties adapted for the large or small screen: the little-remembered, James Caan-starring 1970 movie Rabbit, Run; public television showings of the short stories "The Music School," "Pigeon Feathers," and "A and P"; and the much-ballyhooed but cartoonish 1987 movie The Witches of Eastwick, with Jack Nicholson chewing up every bit of scenery in sight as satanic Daryl Van Horne.

That slender track record makes this unexpectedly successful adaptation all the more striking, then.

In effect, this collection functions as Updike’s version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. Melodrama is blessedly absent, though the couple’s serial infidelities figure throughout. Updike demonstrates that impulses, acted on or not, make all the difference to a couple and to those (especially children) in their orbit.

Reaction was overwhelmingly positive to the lithe and luminous Danner, somewhat less so to Moriarty. In fact, David Denby of New York Magazine wrote: “Pale as Banquo’s ghost, slender but puffy, with no visible eyebrows…, he talks in a cobwebby, fey manner that sounds like Daniel Patrick Moynihan imitating Truman Capote.”

Updike himself, speaking at a library showing of the film 20 years later, allowed that his opinion of Moriarty’s performance had risen upon this second viewing. Even though Danner’s character also commits multiple affairs, audience sympathy shifts decidedly toward her at the expense of Moriarty. 

If what ended up in the final product turned out to be so acute, it might have been because several of its collaborators had experienced something like these events: not just Updike, but also Moriarty and director Fielding Cook had recently undergone wrenching divorces.

The writer of the teleplay, William Hanley, used the Maples’ impending divorce as the central narrative device, with frequent flashbacks to show them in both happy times and moments when the fractures in the marriage began to show. What makes all this so moving is that, despite how they miscommunicate, wound, and ultimately betray each other, some residue of affection and love remains.

Part of creating a teleplay or screenplay involves not just what to include, but what to leave out. For instance, one of Updike’s stories, “Marching Through Boston,” about the couple’s participation in a civil-rights demonstration spearheaded by the visiting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would, if included, have dated the action indelibly, and an annoyed Richard’s resort to African-American dialect at one point would have been politically incorrect.

On the other hand, several other scenes work as well on film as they did on the printed page: 

*An early scene, set in Greenwich Village when the Maples are only married a few years, when Moriarty accompanies family friend Rebecca (played by Glenn Close, in her first film credit) back to her apartment and manages to barely put aside temptation; 

*Another when Danner’s Joan explains how “the properly equipped suburban man” has a wife, a mistress, and a “red herring”; 

*And a searing scene toward the end, when Moriarty’s Richard falls emotionally apart when the couple break the news of their separation to their children.

A book tie-in to the TV film, featuring the same title as the made-for-television movie, collected the stories for the first time. Thirty years later they were reassembled and renamed as The Maples Stories, featuring a foreword by Updike and a coda, the story “Grandparenting,” which catches up on the divorced couple—remarried to new partners—as they witness the birth of their elder daughter’s son.

I had heard about the film long ago but never had a chance to watch it at the time. I was reminded of it when I came across the 1956 short story that began the saga, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," in a very fine New Yorker anthology, Wonderful Town, and I resolved to see the movie at long last. 

It was not easy for me to find this film. I can’t recall any TV listings for it in the last 20 to 30 years, either on network TV or cable stations. I finally found one DVD copy in my suburban library system. Ideally, it would make for great viewing on my local PBS station, Channel 13, in its Saturday night “Reel 13” series of classics and independents.

Oh, heck, just make it easy on yourself. Buy a copy of this made-for-TV gem on Amazon. You won’t regret it.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on ‘The Rich Above You’)

"No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television." —John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (1990)

That quote explains a lot about the current election and its discontents, doesn’t it?

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on a Christmas Caroler)

"Surely one of the natural wonders of Tarbox was Mr. Burley at the Town Hall carol sing. How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became Good King Wenceslas..."--John Updike, "The Carol Sing," from Christmas Stories (Everyman's Library), edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (2007)

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Dreams)

"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." —John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989)