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Blessed Man" is a tribute to Updike's tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life ("O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection")..
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Adam Begley |
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A]s Norman Mailer pointed out decades ago, and Philip Roth not long afterwards, niceness is the enemy. Every soft stroke from society is like the pfft of an aerosol can as it eats up a few more atoms of our brain's delicate ozone, and furthers our personal cretinization.
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Adam Begley |
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Even more than black death he dreaded the gaudy gate: the mask of sweet red rubber, the violet overhead lights, the rattling ride through washed corridors, the steaming, breathing, percolating apparatus, basins of pink sterilizer, the firm straps binding every limb, the sacred pure garb of the surgeons, their eyes alone showing, the cute knives and angled scissors, the beat of your own heart pounding through the burnished machinery, the gre..
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Adam Begley |
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Barth was possibly the less efficacious of the two remedies. A bracingly stringent Calvinist, he did supply Updike with one of the enduring tenets of his personal creed (the idea that God is "Wholly Other": "We cannot reach Him, only He can reach us"), and he did become, in the sixties, Updike's favorite theologian ("Ipswich belonged to Barth")--but as Barth himself insisted, theology cannot protect faith from doubt. For Updike, it was one ..
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Adam Begley |
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White encouraged Updike's equally scrupulous commitment. They bonded over dashes, colons, and commas--most amazingly in an exchange of letters in the last two months of 1954 concerning two poems, "The Sunflower" and "The Clan." She wanted to make his punctuation consistent; he wanted to make his light verse flow in a manner pleasing to the ear and the eye. When he suggested changes to the proof of "Sunflower"--literally begging for a colon ..
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Adam Begley |
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What they love is love and being in love." They are in the grip of"
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Adam Begley |
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With his "romantic weakness for gags"--inherited from his father, along with his talent for pratfalls--Updike was a willing participant in the Lampoon's elaborately orchestrated "social frivolity." During his Fools' Week in February 1951, he starred in a stunt he remembered with what seems today somewhat misplaced pride; he called it his "one successful impersonation." Disguised as a blind cripple selling pencils, he stationed himself in fr..
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Adam Begley |
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And, most ambitiously, Updike dreamed up an absurdist spectacle (not unlike the drama of the blind cripple and the priests) that drew a large and appreciative lunchtime crowd to a street adjacent to the Yard: a fool disguised as an old man driving an ancient jalopy was hit from behind by a car packed with fellow fools; the old man jumped out and swore at the others in Italian, whereupon they poured from their car carrying sledgehammers and ..
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Adam Begley |