Updike's Ashes

John Updike died of lung cancer at age 76 in January. I have yet to write a Rest in Peace post for him, as I have for Tim Russert, Buddy Holly, Les Paul, and Dick Kemp, truck collector extraordinaire.

It was hard for me to come up with anything to write about this literary giant at the time of his death. For one thing, detailed obituaries are available from many major news outlets, and I don't need to rehash the details of his life . For another, his writing has resonated with me since I first picked up a copy of The Centaur on a trip to a continuing medical education meeting in Philadelphia in the 1980s, and I am saddened that his voice has been silenced.

I see this post not as a formal eulogy, but as a collection of random thoughts about Updike. Well, let's face it--this blog is nothing but a collection of random thoughts. Why should this post be any different?

Somewhere around here, I have a photo taken of me with John Updike at a reception following a lecture and reading he gave at the Dogwood Festival in Dowagiac, Michigan. I could have sworn I stuck the picture in the copy of the novel Brazil he autographed for me that night, but it's not there now. Someday, I hope it will turn up, in which case, I'll scan it and post it. One of the poems he read that night had to do with a Memorial Day celebration in a small town, and I have attended many of those. I find it awkward to try to come up with something to say to an author at a book signing, so I seized on that poem as something I could talk to Updike about, which I did when my turn came. He was very gracious and told me how his father had dressed up as Uncle Sam for a Memorial Day parade.

I've been thinking about Updike a lot since I read that his alma mater Harvard University has acquired his papers recently. As usual, one online discovery led to another, and I found out that a volume of his poems was published after Updike's death, so I bought the audiobook Endpoint from iTunes. Since the audiobook is abridged, I thought I should buy a printed copy. Then, driving between hospitals the other day, I decided to stop by a branch library to take have a few minutes respite before going back to work. In the unlikely event any of my partners should read this post, please note that I carry my lunch, and virtually never take a break to go to the doctors' dining room, so I'm entitled to ten minutes at the library. Not really expecting to find Endpoint on the shelf, I searched for Updike materials, and there it was, so I checked it out, along with Beowulf on the Beach (recommended highly by my son), Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript with photos by Barry Feinstein and text by Bob Dylan, and a CD of Bruce Hornsby's appearance on Marian McPartland's PIano Jazz radio show (which by the way is a great CD).

In further online meanderings I found out that Updike had been cremated and part of his ashes were scattered near the graves of his parents at the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Shillington, Pennsylvania, where he lived till age 13.

Now comes the weird part. Last night at choir practice at our church, I read the fine print above the title of one piece of sheet music we worked on, which said it was written for the 100th anniversary of the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Shillington, Pennsylvania! It's a town of 5000 people. It's over 600 miles from where I live. Yet there I was, holding a piece of music written to commemorate the church where Updike's ashes were spread. Uncanny coincidence, or an example of Jungian synchronicity?

Updike on "Bad" Presidents

I don't often reread books. I have such a huge backlog of partially read and unread books that I feel I'm just getting further behind by going back to a book I've read before. However, my recently acquired interest in the life of Franklin Pierce has inspired me to reread John Updike's Memories of the Ford Administration. The novel's protagonist, like Updike, writes about James Buchanan. Franklin Pierce beat out James Buchanan, among others, for the Democratic nomination for President in 1852 (on the 49th ballot). Buchanan was the Democratic candidate and went on to win the election when Pierce was not offered the nomination in 1856. Another interesting connection between Pierce and Buchanan is that Buchanan's long-time room mate, William Rufus deVane King, was elected Pierce's vice-President. He and his alleged homosexual relationship with Buchanan will be the subject of another post.

Updike, through his protagonist, Alfred L. Clayton, wrote the following about Buchanan and the other "bad" Presidents leading up to the Civil War:

The challenge is, for the historian, to love the unlovable. . .He (Buchanan) tried to keep peace. That whole decade of Presidents did, Fillmore and Pierce and Buchanan--try, I mean--and they succeeded, they did keep the South placated, and in the Union, which was important, since if war had come in 1850 instead of 1860, the outcome might have been very different; the South had all its assets in place--the military tradition, the great officers, the down-home patriotism, King Cotton--and the North still needed to grow. And precious little thanks they've got from history for it--the doughface Presidents.

The term doughface was applied to northerners sympathizing with the south. Pierce has been accused of being pro-slavery, which is probably unfair. He was a Jacksonian Democrat and strict constructionist who believed the Constitution allowed slavery, but stated he personally was opposed to it.

Perhaps, as Updike's character suggests, we should love the unlovable and thank Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan for delaying war until the North was in a position to win. Interestingly, it was Jefferson Davis, Pierce's Secretary of War, who did much to build up the U.S. military before secession, when he became president of the Confedrate States of America.

Franklin Pierce the Obscure

It probably has something to do with the fact that I am in my fourteenth hour of reading X-rays, CTs and ultrasounds on call today. I don't know how else to explain this post. I would do almost anything, read almost anything, Google almost anything to get away from the images of the huddled masses in the ERs and ICUs, yearning to have their brain hemorrhages, belly abscesses, and clotted veins diagnosed by yours truly. Actually, the afflicted have no idea who I am, nor will they ever, until they see my name on their bill, for radiologists labor for the most part in obscurity in front of computer monitors. So, for respite between cases, I have been surfing the web for material on the Marx brothers. They are cited as an area of interest in my Blogger profile, but I have not written about them yet. My search took me to David Holzel's zine The Jewish Angle, where he talks about being inspired by Groucho, and his plaster statue of Groucho, like the one I have.
In fact, I have plaster statues of Harpo and Chico as well. Harpo was a wedding present almost thirty-five years ago, and the other brothers were added soon after. From Holzel's site, I linked to The Franklin Pierce Pages, authored by Holzel, Benjamin Bratman, and Todd Leopold. Here, an unusual convergence of items from my recent posts occurred in Bratman's article "Wrested From the Jaws of Triviality." To wit:

Pierce had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president the only nationally elected American official ever to be sworn in on foreign soil. Pierce also had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president a man who never worked one day in the job. William Rufus de Vane King was terminally ill with tuberculosis when he was nominated and subsequently elected as vice president. (This begs the question, why was he selected?). He was sworn in in Cuba where he was seeking medical treatment. Less than a month later, he died, never having assumed his duties.

Ah ha! An example of the modern usage of "begs the question," which I had condemned in recent posts.

Also from Bratman's article:

Pierce’s salad days were clearly in college at Bowdoin College in Maine. There, he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later became a writer and author of The Scarlet Letter, as well as one of Pierce’s closest friends and advisors.

Wow! Another of my newfound obsessions--Nathaniel Hawthorne! Bratman doesn't mention that Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, and was rewarded with the American consulship to Liverpool after Pierce was elected. Hawthorne stayed at the post from 1853-57. Also of note, Hawthorne died on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce in 1864.


Who knows, I may now become obsessed with Franklin Pierce. After all, writing about an obscure president (James Buchanan) paid off for John Updike in his play Buchanan Dying and his novel Memories of the Ford Administration.