Wednesday Spill: Hunting For The Whereabouts Of An Updike Moment

I’ve always thought of John Updike as a sort of honorary New Yorker cartoonist. He was Thurber inspired early on in life (and mass media cartoons inspired as well). By the time he went to Harvard he aspired to become a New Yorker cartoonist. As he said in a PBS documentary: “I got into The New Yorker. I didn’t become James Thurber, but then nobody else could.”

Here then is a short excursion into Updike territory that has nothing to do with New Yorker cartoons, but a lot to do with my interest in the writer who didn’t become Thurber.

______________________________________________________________________

Hunting For The Whereabouts Of An Updike Moment

Gearing up for the book of John Updike letters coming out in October I thought I’d once again travel through Adam Begley’s terrif Updike. Curiosity took me on a hunt when I came across this sentence on page 426:

“A decade later, when he came across a well-thumbed copy of S in a small public library in the Hudson Valley, he remembered how he had put his ‘heart and soul’ into the heroine and concluded that the novel had at last been ‘recognized.'”

It was the “…small public library in the Hudson Valley…” that sent me scampering to Google. As I live in the Hudson Valley and am acquainted with a number of its libraries, I figured I’d be able to (hopefully!) quickly zero in on which library Updike visited. Researching the Peter Arno biography i wrote, I quickly learned things just don’t go as smoothly as you might think when on a fact-finding mission.

The “Notes” in Begley’s Updike biography indicate the “…small public library…” passage was sourced from Updike’s Odd Jobs, page 761. I headed right to Odd Jobs, page 761, but the passage wasn’t there. Dead end. It happens (my biography of Peter Arno has its share of “issues.”). I briefly considered writing Mr. Begley, but decided that this was too small a “thing” for him to be troubled with. A day or two went by. I tried to let the hunt go. Then, this afternoon, having worked on cartoons for hours, and in need of a break, I sat next to the Updike section of our bookshelves and thought for a moment. What if the page number 761 was correct, but the book title was off. I began looking through Updike’s various hefty collections, beginning with Higher Gossip: zip. Due Considerations: zip. More Matter…bingo! There, on page 761 is this from Updike’s “Me and My Books” — it was originally published in The New Yorker, February 3, 1997:

“On one steel shelf, in a Hudson Valley town with its own tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge near the library door…”

I began thinking about the Hudson Valley libraries I was familiar with. None of them fit Updike’s description. So back to Google and to the list of libraries lining the Hudson Valley. Using Google maps (aerial view) I was able to easily see if any library was that close to water. I struck out with perhaps twenty or so libraries, when I saw this location in Marlboro, New York:

And then using the street view, there it was, exactly as Updike described it: “tributary creek gurgling over a dam and under a bridge.” This scene is directly across from the Gomez Mill House.

The “matter” solved, it was back to cartoonland for me.