dual personalities

Tag: John Updike

May 14, 2019

“Happy Soap saved my life.”*

by chuckofish

Screen Shot 2019-05-13 at 1.36.27 PM

Doris Day died. Even though she was 97, I am still very sad. I have written about DD before. She was one of those people who was really good at everything she did–exceedingly competent. She could sing, she could dance, she was funny, and she always looked great–perfectly groomed–doing it. And you didn’t hate her either, because she didn’t appear to take her beauty too seriously.

She made everything look easy and I think that’s one of the reasons she was always underrated and never won an Academy Award etc. And she didn’t wear her suffering on her sleeve. She had a work ethic.

Well, her life has been picked apart and criticized and psychoanalyzed by many, many people–some of them the kind of fans who resent it when the object of their passion declines to be interested in them or even pretend to care anymore. Why should she? She retired thirty-something years ago. Let it go.

A couple of old guys were talking about Doris in the hallway of my flyover institute yesterday. They were saying how much they had loved her back in the day. One of them said, “I always thought she would have liked me, if we ever met…” Yes, Terry, you would have had a shot with Doris Day…but that was one of the secrets of her success, right? She seemed attainable!

Well, she brought a lot of joy into my life and she will continue to entertain people long after her death.

By the way, John Updike was a big fan too. She fascinated him and he wrote a novel whose main character is based on her–In the Beauty of the Lilies, published in 1996. And he wrote this poem:

HER COY LOVER SINGS OUT

Doris, ever since 1945,
when I was all of thirteen and you a mere twenty-one,
and “Sentimental Journey” came winging
out of the juke box at the sweet shop,
your voice piercing me like a silver arrow,
I knew you were sexy.

And in 1962, when you
were thirty-eight and I all of thirty
and having a first affair, while you
were co-starring with Cary Grant in That Touch of Mink
and enjoying, according to the Globe,
Doris’ Red-Hot Romp with Mickey Mantle,
I wasn’t surprised.

Now in 2008 (did you ever
think you’d live into such a weird year?)
when you are eighty-four and I am seventy-six,
I still know you’re sexy,
and not just in reruns or on old 45 rpms.
Your four inadequate husbands weren’t the half of it.

Bob Hope called you Jut-Butt, and your breasts
(Molly Haskell reported)
were as big as Monroe’s but swaddled.
Hollywood protected us from you,
they consumed you, what the Globe tastefully terms
the “shocking secret life of America’s Sweetheart.”

Still, I’m not quite ready
for you to breathe the air that I breathe.
I huff going upstairs as it is.
Give me space to get over the idea of you –
the thrilling silver voice,
the gigantic silver screen. Go
easy on me, Clara, let’s take our time.

–John Updike in “Endpoint and Other Poems”

Screen Shot 2019-05-13 at 10.57.17 AM.png

Into paradise may the angels lead you, Doris. At your coming may the martyrs receive you, and bring you into the holy city Jerusalem.

(Mark your calendar for June 9 when TCM will show Doris Day movies all day.)

*Beverly Boyer (Doris Day) in The Thrill of It All (1963)

5 Comments
May 18, 2017

My mother remembers the day as a girl

by chuckofish

fad3fbee56f9f002c84c5a167b68f00d.jpg

Our last connection with the mythic.
My mother remembers the day as a girl
she jumped across a little spruce
that now overtops the sandstone house
where still she lives; her face delights
at the thought of her years translated
into wood so tall, into so mighty
a peer of the birds and the wind.

Too, the old farmer still stout of step
treads through the orchard he has outlasted
but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped
apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood
planted to mark my birth flowers each April,
a soundless explosion. We tell its story
time after time: the drizzling day,
the fragile sapling that had to be staked.

At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,
freshly moved in, freshly together,
transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door
gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.
One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.
The other lives on and some day will dominate
this view no longer mine, its great
lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,
its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.
Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,
and remember and marvel to see
our small deed, that hurried day,
so amplified, like a story through layers of air
told over and over, spreading.

–John Updike, born on this day in 1932

2 Comments
January 27, 2015

Bull’s eye

by chuckofish

JOHN UPDIKE

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

–John Updike

Today is the anniversary of John Updike’s death in 2009. So tonight I shall raise a glass to this acclaimed writer and fellow Episcopalian. How about you?

I went to see John Updike speak at my flyover university back in the nineties. I didn’t work there then, but I walked over from the church where I did work which was (and is) a few blocks away. Graham Chapel was packed and I was sitting pretty far in the back. He was unpretentious and generous. A good guy–I could tell.

2 Comments
March 12, 2013

Thought for the day

by chuckofish

“Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. This formulation (knowing what we know of the universe’s ghastly extent) is more incredible, to our sense of things, than the Old Testament hypothesis of a God willing to suffer, coddle, instruct, and even (in the Book of Job) to debate with men, in order to realize the meager benefit of worship, of praise for His Creation. What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here.”

Updike_2

–John Updike

Seek him who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth: The Lord is his name. Amos 5:8

5 Comments
December 20, 2012

An Updike poem for thursday

by chuckofish

This poem is titled “January”, but it describes December just as well I think.

The days are short,
The sun a spark
Hung thin between the dark and dark.

Fat snowy footsteps track the floor.
Milk bottles burst outside the door.
The river is a frozen place
Held still beneath the trees of lace.
The sky is low, the wind is gray.
The radiator purrs all day.

-John Updike-

I grew up with radiators in an old house. They purred, but they were also known to bink and bonk and rattle, weren’t they? In my first house as a married person, we had radiators and I remember worrying that their audible antics might wake up a sleeping baby!

The boy and daughter #1 playing in front of a big ol' radiator.

The boy and daughter #1 playing in front of a big ol’ radiator.

Our house now has forced air heat. It turns on and off and blows quietly. I guess this is progress.

[We are expecting snow this afternoon, so, as usual, the local TV weather people are all in a tizzy. Daughter #1 is flying in from NYC, so let’s pray that she doesn’t get sidelined in Wichita (or anywhere else)!]

8 Comments
September 5, 2012

In case you haven’t noticed

by chuckofish

It’s September!

The summer, of course, is not officially over, and, yes, it was 93-degrees yesterday and they’re saying it’ll be 96-degrees today. But it is September.

Oh boy. Ol’ John Updike covers a lot about September in this poem:

“The breezes taste
Of apple peel.
The air is full
Of smells to feel-
Ripe fruit, old footballs,
Burning brush,
New books, erasers,
Chalk, and such.
The bee, his hive,
Well-honeyed hum,
And Mother cuts
Chrysanthemums.
Like plates washed clean
With suds, the days
Are polished with
A morning haze.”

Yes indeed. Soon it will be time to get out the sweaters and the black tights. Maybe someday soon we will be able to open a window at home and in the car! I shouldn’t get carried away, but October is just around the corner.

What are you looking forward to?

5 Comments