Odd Jobs
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* Augmented, in November of 1989, by the narrowly posthumous publication of another collection, The Predator (Ticknor & Fields).
† By a coincidence truly uncanny, my Shillington High School classmate Barry Nelson, in the April 1984 issue of Governor Mifflin Area History, wrote at length of “Pow-Wows and Faith Healers in the Mifflin Area” just as my novel was being published. The “witch doctor” in Grille was identified as Harry C. Ohlinger, a Reading native and weaver by trade who died in 1955 at the age of sixty-two; he had lived in Grille, opposite the Center Hotel, since 1938, and had begun to practice his healing arts before then, at a farmhouse near Angelica on Candy Road, in Cumru Township. He was a Bible-reading, prayerful man, some of whose cures were simply traditional faith healing. Some were a bit stranger: “A woman who ran a farm in Maxatawny thought she had a jinx on her. He told her to put an ace of spades in a milk bucket, and milk a cow’s milk into it. This broke the hex or spell.” People lined up on his porch to see him, waiting two or three hours; he never charged money and was instead paid with “donations, whiskey, food, or knick-knacks.” One satisfied customer recalled, “He cured my wife’s back in three visits. He put his hand on your body, said something, and you could feel something happening.” In Shillington, the widow of the pow-wow doctor Ellsworth Mohn remembered, “Ells would sit in front of you and he’d cup his left hand and hold it out like he was receiving something, holding it palm up. He took his right hand in a sweeping move across the inflammation in a catching motion, blew into the right hand, and slapped it into his upper hand. He would do this three times.” Mohn always said his spells in “Dutch” (Pennsylvania German) and had learned how to pow-wow from a Mammy Bitting, also of Shillington. A sexual curiosity of the art of pow-wowing is that only a woman can teach it to a man, and vice versa. “The prayers are passed on by word of mouth. They must be memorized. There is no hexerei involved. The prayers are from the Bible.” Yet some of the cures cited are distinctly elaborate: to cure a sick baby, a mother is instructed “to take the baby’s shirt off, turn it inside out, and pinch it in the attic door over night.” And: “Another story involved a small baby that cried constantly. The mother tried to quiet the child, but the crying got worse. Finally, in frustration, she said, ‘Enough! I’m going to do something about this!’ She placed a bucket of hot water in the middle of the parlor and placed a burning hot poker into the water while reciting a prayer. The next day a woman in the same town was scalded to death. This woman had visited the mother and had given the mother and her family something to eat. She was really putting a hex on them.”
‡ She seems to be present thrice: once as Richie (“of great price”), secondly as Paula, and thirdly—well, why does Esther’s weight at last swell to over a hundred pounds?
§ Not the first such overestimation in my mother’s life. A child when her grandfather died, she remembered in her short story “Translation” how “The church was strangely warm and empty, as railroad stations sometimes are after a train has passed, and much of the food that the caterer had brought to our house to make a feast for my grandfather’s friends had to be taken away.”
TO MARTHA
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines and publishers, who first printed the pieces specified, sometimes under different titles and in slightly different form:
THE NEW YORKER: “Five Days in Finland at the Age of Fifty-five,” “First Wives and Trolley Cars,” “Mr. Volente,” “John Cheever—I,” “Emersonianism,” “Howells as Anti-Novelist,” “Many Bens,” the introductions to Mikhail Prishvin’s Nature’s Diary and to Franz Kafka’s Complete Stories, the two pieces of “Notes and Comment” in the appendix, and eighty-eight of the book reviews, including sixteen first published as “Briefly Noted.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: “Hymn to Tilth,” “Was B.B. a Crook?”, “The Bimbo on the Barge,” “Bull in a Type Shop,” the introduction to Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, and the material on this page and this page.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: “Books into Film.”
THE BOSTON GLOBE: “Overboard on Overboard,” “The Boston Red Sox, as of 1986,” and “Can Architecture Be Criticized?”
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: “How Does the Writer Imagine?”, “Should Writers Give Lectures?”, and the introductions to William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer and to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.
THE NEW REPUBLIC: Introduction to Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara.
THE ONTARIO REVIEW: “The Parade.”
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST: “Fictional Houses,” “A Sense of Transparency,” and “Is New York City Inhabitable?”
ESQUIRE: “Edmund Wilson,” “Popular Music,” “The Importance of Fiction,” and the response on this page.
HARPER’S MAGAZINE: “Twisted Apples.”
VOGUE: “Mother” and “High Art Versus Popular Culture.”
COSMOPOLITAN: “Women.”
LEAR’S: “Spirituality.”
“W”: “Beauty.”
SPORT: “Ted Williams, as of 1986.”
POPULAR MECHANICS: “Our National Monuments,” titled “Sacred Places.”
NEW ENGLAND MONTHLY: “A Short and Happy Ride” and “The Fourth of July.”
MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW: “The Female Body” and the response on this page.
TV GUIDE: “Being on TV—I” and “Being on TV—II.”
CORRIERE DELLA SERA: “A Nameless Rose” and “Mr. Palomar.”
LIBÉRATION: Answer to “Pourquoi écrivez-vous?”
LIFE: “John Cheever—II”
PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC.: Introduction to Nature’s Diary, by Mikhail Prishvin. Introduction copyright © 1987 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” and Introduction to The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene. Introduction copyright © 1990 by John Updike.
THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB: Introductions to Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen, and Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara.
VINTAGE BOOKS: Introduction to Indian Summer, by William Dean Howells. Introduction copyright © 1990 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
SCHOCKEN BOOKS: Foreword to Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories edited by Norm Nahum and N. Glatzer. Originally published in The New Yorker in 1983. Foreword copyright © 1983 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books, published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING CO.: Introduction to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, by Karl Barth. Copyright © 1986 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
ADDISON-WESLEY CO.: “The Fourth of July,” in the anthology Summer, copyright © 1990 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc.
LORD JOHN PRESS: Foreword to Jester’s Dozen. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
SYLVESTER & ORPHANOS: “John Cheever—III.”
POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE: “Writers as Progenitors and Offspring.”
BOOKENDS: “I Was a Teen-Age Library User.”
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: “A Book That Changed Me.”
SPECIAL REPORT: “Harvard Yard.”
HARVARD GAZETTE: “I had a lot to learn when I came …”
HARVARD MAGAZINE: Answer to “What is your favorite spot in and around Harvard?”
HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Preface to the catalogue of an exhibit of my own papers in Houghton Library.
THE FRANKLIN LIBRARY: The forewords for The Witches of Eastwick, Roger’s Version, and Rabbit at Rest are copyrighted 1984, 1986, and 1990 respectively by The Franklin Library, Franklin Center, PA, for exclusive use in its Signed First Editions of those books. The Forewords have been reprinted in this edition by special permission of The Franklin Library.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Expanded version of remarks on artistic freedom. Shorter version published in the PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS A
ND LETTERS (Second Series, No. 40).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS INC.: Excerpt from “Traveler’s Song” from The Fox of Peapack by E. B. White. Copyright 1938 by E. B. White. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC.: “Résumé,” copyright 1926, renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker, “Garden Spot,” copyright 1931, renewed 1959 by Dorothy Parker, from The Portable Dorothy Parker edited by Brendan Gill. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
JOEL WHITE: “A Forward Glance O’er the Obituary Page” by E. B. White. The New Yorker, August 28, 1948. Reprinted by permission of Joel White.
Books by John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963)• Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)
PLAY
Buchanan Dying (1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)
PHOTO: © MARTHA UPDIKE
JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.