By Staff
John Updike was part of the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival's only double bill 15 years ago in May 1994.
Updike, who twice graced the cover of Time magazine, died Tuesday morning, Jan. 27, of lung cancer at a hospice near Boston. He was 76.
It came as a shock because I didn't know he was ailing.
He and Joyce Carol Oates visited Dowagiac on Monday, May 9 (her), and on Wednesday, May 11 (him). "Brazil" had just been released.
A pullout quote on the front page of the Dowagiac Daily News announcing back-to-back books on Feb. 28, 1994, states, "Updike, a reticent writer who accepts only two speaking engagements a year, agreed to speak in Dowagiac because this small community's devotion to the arts intrigued him."
Week in Revue also carried a farewell – to Spy magazine.
Updike attended Oxford as a Knox Fellow, returning from England to write for the New Yorker for three years as a columnist in the late 1950s.
He served as a member of the U.S./U.S.S.R. Cultural Exchange Program. A prolific writer, he published all types of written work, including poems, short stories, novels, prose, plays and satire, for which he won numerous awards, starting with the Rosenthal Award 50 years ago in 1959 for "Poorhouse Fair," his first novel. In 1964, "The Centaur" – a tribute to his father – won the National Book Award.
Updike earned the O Henry Award in 1966 for "The Bulgarian Poetess." His greatest success came in 1981 when he received the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal for Literature and the National Book Critics Circle Commendation for "Rabbit is Rich," the final volume of what was then a trilogy.
In 1981, he also published "The Witches of Eastwick," which Time named one of the five best works of fiction that year. It became a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer.
A common theme in Updike's work was a religious searching that grows from a character's despair, a quest during which doubt and faith contend.
The natural world vying with the supernatural world is another theme in his works.
Updike asserted the need for religious faith. He believed we lived in a world with little faith and boundless doubt, making piety necessary for a complete life. Updike also conveyed compassion for the human condition in his novels.
That stemmed, he said, from his own experience of despair.
"I've touched a kind of bottom, when I've felt that existence itself was an affront to be forgiven."
Anyone who saw him at Dogwood will surely remember the delight he took in mastering the correct pronunciation of Doe-Wah-Jack.
His dinner came from China Garden, which had just opened that January, and he was driven around the community, remarking how "jolly" Gray's house on Orchard Street, then painted in multiple hues, looked.
Updike grew up in a small town, Shillington, Pa., with asthma and a stutter. At Harvard, which he attended on a full scholarship and graduated from summa cum laude in 1954, he ran the humor magazine and dabbled in cartooning.
I just learned Jan. 28 that he penned a poem for Rich Frantz's 49th birthday.
His words flowed like poetry.
I own six of his books, second only to the founding father of Dogwood authors, Kurt Vonnegut. I flipped open his short story collection "Pigeon Feathers" and read about a Massachusetts fellow who returns to the town he grew up in in Pennsylvania. It's set in the office of an eye doctor, who "fills his little rooms with waiting patients and wanders from one to another like a dungeon-keeper."
He "looked down the hall to where a white splinter of secretary showed." Eyelashes lie "scattered on his cheeks like insect legs." That's in two pages.
Updike and Rich and Teri's daughter, Aislinn, Dowagiac's 2008 valedictorian, shared a March 18 birthday with the late George Plimpton.
Updike won another Pulitzer Prize for his fourth Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom novel which kept tabs on suburban life over a three-decade span.
Norman Mailer, who followed him to Dowagiac in 1997, criticized Updike as the kind of author appreciated by readers who know nothing about writing.
Last year, judges of Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize awarded Updike lifetime achievement honors.
In "Requiem," a poem that will be published in his "Endpoint" collection in September, Updike mused about his "overdue demise" being received with "a shrug and tearless eyes."
No shrugs here.
E-mail him at john.eby @leaderpub.com.