John Updike juggles three apples in Ipswich, Mass., September 1966. Photo courtesy of Truman Moore//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
On January 27, American novelist John Updike died of lung cancer in Danvers, Mass, only a few months after the publication of
The Widows of Eastwick, the sequel to his renowned The
Witches of Eastwick (later made into a movie of the same name and a West End musical). ‘A lyrical writer of the middle-class man’, as he is being labeled in an obituary in
The New York Times, he will above all be remembered as the writer of the so- called Rabbit series (
Rabbit, Run;
Rabbit Redux;
Rabbit Is Rich;
Rabbit At Rest; and
Rabbit Remembered). The series is testimony to Updike’s craftsmanship and a memorable sketch of American middle-class life in suburbia, embodied by the fallen basketball player and middlebrow citizen Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom.
Over the course of his writing career, Updike published over 60 publications, excluding his short stories, reviews and poems which have appeared in the
New Yorker since the late 1950s.Two of the Rabbit books earned him Pullitzer Prizes. He also received the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, won the American Book Award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Also in 2006, he received the Rhea Award for the short story. On top of that he was one of very few Americans to have received both the National Medal of Art (in 1989, awarded by President George H. W. Bush), the National Medal for the Humanities (which he received from Bush Jr. in 2003). Ironically, the chronicler of suburban adultery was also awarded the Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award by the British Literary Review in November last year.
As pointed out on the webpages of the
New Netherland Institute, John Updike is of a distant Dutch background. His ancestors came to the United States in the seventeenth century. Their Dutch name was Op de Dijk, which has over time been changed to Updike and in some cases to Opdike.
In his memoir,
Self Consciousness (1989), Updike wrote a letter to his two biracial grandsons Anoff and Kwame, about the Updike family history, and asks that they not be ashamed of their skin. (His grandsons are half black). In this book he also traces his own heritage, and in 2006 he kindly permitted us to reprint that part in the yearbook
The Low Countries. In this excerpt, entitled ‘Such is our proud, though oft-diluted, Dutch heritage’, he describes how the Updikes came to the ‘American Eden’ in two installments. This is how he ends this story:
Louris Jansen op Dyck had begot Johannes Opdyck, who begat Lawrence Updick (1675-1748), who begat John Updike (1708-90), who begat Peter (1756-1818), who begat Aaron (1784-1861), who begat Peter (1812-66), who begat Archibald (1838-1912), who begat Hartley (1860-1923), who begat Wesley (1900-72), who begat me (b.1932), who begat Elizabeth (b. 1955), who begat you (b. 1985, 1987). On your mother’s side, then, you are thirteenth-generation Americans, offspring of a favored white minority. The Dutch colony had lasted a mere forty years; after it surrendered in 1664, without a shot being fired, the English Governor was instructed to treat the several thousand Dutch inhabitants generously, letting them keep their lands, language, and religion. Soon they were intermarrying with the English and forgetting their Dutch. It was an easy assimilation.
And you, my grandsons, how will you fare here?
A rhetorical question coming from a writer who mapped his patchwork nation's everyday mysteries and who died exactly one week after ‘a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant’ took the presidential oath.
Subscribe