2009 John Updike (1932-2009)

2009   John Updike (1932 - 2009). “Forty Years of ‘Peacenjustice,’” Mennonite Central Committee, Ervin Stutzman’s Eastern Mennonite University consultation, Polyglossia editors, Chris Huebner, Mennonite Publishing “workers”; Gloria leaves Spanish teaching. 

Late at night on January 26, 2009, I was reading The Widows of Eastwick. The next day I learned that the author of that novel, John Updike, had died. His death felt like losing a college friend with whom one made an annual contact, a good neighbor who came to see us once a year. Daughter Elizabeth had bought me a copy of Widows for Christmas. An Updike book was often a Christmas gift, an easy choice, since he turned out at least one book a year—all told more than 50 books, which included 28 novels; other titles included 13 short stories, 10 poetry volumes and assorted collections of his prose. 

Part of Updike’s appeal was that we aged with him. I read him first as a Malone College student in the 1960s when he appeared on the cover of Time. He wrote of high school romance, young married life choices, mid-life angst and the regrets of older years. His most awarded four books, the Rabbit novels, have Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dying at age 57. Death was never far away, even in youth.  Religiously, Updike was appealing because he also had the hope of the Resurrection. A confessing Christian, he imbibed the Lutheranism of his youth, read the theologian Karl Barth as a young adult and remained an orthodox C.S. Lewis-type Christian to the end. Although he seldom wrote extensively of his Christian beliefs, his characters and narrators were often religiously articulate.

Updike wrote of sex, and many of us got started on Updike because he was one of the most explicit writers of sex of our generation; he was the Hebraic Song of Songs poet for Baby Boomers. I read his short stories before reading Couples, that novel of the free-wheeling, loving and angry ’60s. During this year 2009, Gloria and I did our Labor Day US Open Tennis weekend, and one night went to see the Broadway revival of “Hair” at the Al Hirschfield Theater, the musical of sixties’ romantic freedom and youthful rage. I found myself sitting beside a mid-western 14-year-old and her grandmother; she sang along to “Hair’s” lyrics as sweetly as though we were at “The Sound of Music.” I felt old and sad and remembered the tragedies of Vietnam and Updike’s families.  

But I liked Updike and his families. In an epoch when writers and our imagination became fascinated with the minority experience—talented Jews, exotic immigrants, angry Blacks and Latin American revolutionaries—Updike found inspiration in our suburbs, in the domesticity of the split-level house. While most writers pursued the heroic and the absurd, Updike described the seasons, such as the fall, in The Witches of Eastwick: “There comes a blessed moment in the year when we know we are mowing the lawn for the last time.” People of the Pennsylvania farmlands, where he was born in 1932, and the Northeastern suburbs, where he lived most of his adult life, populate his stories.

John Updike seemed like one of our friendly non-Mennonite neighbors, having grown up in Shillington, south of Reading. In his Pennsylvania stories one might meet a Mennonite doctor or visit a conservative Mennonite-owned store. Sometimes Amish appeared in a story or poem. Updike described more than he disturbed. Although vaguely liberal in his politics, he never seemed to need to carry his politics on his sleeve, much as he did not do this regarding his Christian beliefs. He remained civil, decent, ironic and mannerly.

If Updike and we sinned, he seemed to regret it and went to church every Sunday; a generous God of grace was still around. One could think of worse neighbors. In fact, I was thinking of my own neighbors, my neighbors in western Pennsylvania, in the church and in the world. Hence, I wrote a goodbye to my Mennonite institutional neighbors with a piece called “Forty Years of ‘Peacenjustice.’” I think it grew out seeing a draft of what Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) called New Wineskins in which the term was all over the pages, a tired cliché. On May 14, I sent MCC a note noting peace and justice had been around for about four decades (hardly new) and many constituents were still using sturdy terms like generosity, service, compassion and charity.

Another event which elicited the reflection was attending a peace consultation with the seminary dean Ervin Stutzman at Eastern Mennonite University and reflecting on the quiet conservative exodus among the Mennonites during my lifetime. Stutzman had assembled an unusual mix of conference leaders, traditional nonresistants, mediation experts, academic theologians and political pacifists. I drove down to Harrisonburg, Virginia, with John Roth and some Goshen, Indiana, people.

I was especially encouraged to see people such as the theologian Peter Dula who stayed away from most of our meetings because of a new baby. I suppose more accurately, I was encouraged not to see him; I liked his priorities. Then I met a professional mediation trainer Lisa Schirch who had gained some fame or perhaps notoriety for giving sessions at the Pentagon. It seemed to me that mediation arts were a valid learning skill whether in business, the military, the streets or the church. And finally I met my old one-time inquisitor David Brubaker who reminded me of our earlier meeting in the second floor of the Kingview Mennonite meetinghouse when I was being investigated (2003). He smiled and said that it was good to meet under happier circumstances.

Ervin Stutzman was finishing his book entitled From Nonresistance to Justice: The Transformation of Mennonite Church Peace Rhetoric, 1908-2008. But unlike many of the triumphal approaches on this journey from biblical nonresistance to political justice (as in left-wing politics), Stutzman explored the losses as well as the gains of this movement. It reminded me that in my years of publishing there were few manuscripts which gave an argument for biblical nonresistance or which noted the paradoxes and dilemmas of the modern pacifism and justice project.

So I thought, until I met some young writers such as the newly babied (above) Peter Dula, the Canadian Chris Huebner, and the ex-Holmes Countian Peter Blum, all of whom were reflecting on John Howard Yoder in what I discovered was a nuanced approach to pacifism, theology, politics and culture. I invited Huebner to begin a Herald Press series which he called Polyglossia. The editors were Huebner, Dula, Jennifer Graber, and Alexander Sider, all of whom had studied at Duke University with Stanley Hauerwas. Graber, then teaching at the College of Wooster, also turned up as a great song leader at the Oak Grove congregation where daughter Hannah and Anson Miedel attended.

Our annual meetings--such as they were-- convened at informal settings during the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. No minutes were taken but clearly Huebner was the leader of the group and would work with me on what should be published beginning with his own first book which we called A Precarious Peace.

Huebner looked like a unwashed character in a Mark Twain novel and often gave several contradictory points of view, assuming no center and universals. Still, when he was finished, you had the feeling that he was sane and could be trusted as an orthodox Christian, a good Mennonite and a pacifist. He would talk or write in long sentences and even longer paragraphs with many modifying and qualifying descriptors. But what redeemed him was a total lack of pretense and little interest in the polemical and political posturing so endemic to people who write in this field.

I edited his first book relying on my old expository and journalistic basics of shortening words, sentences and paragraphs. I don’t think he appreciated it, but I took some consolation in A Precarious Peace being the best book in the series. The Polyglossia series went through several titles and seems to have ended after my tenure, no doubt helped along by a new round of revelations regarding John Howard Yoder’s bizarre sexual appetites and predatory behavior.   

My other neighbors were near at hand in western Pennsylvania sitting around a heavy circular table in the library of the Mennonite Publishing House. If Ron Rempel of Waterloo, Ontario, and Phil Bontrager of Archbold, Ohio, took good care of publishing at the executive and board level, and they did, I had a new appreciation for the “workers” (as we used to say) at ten o’clock each morning when I joined them for coffee. Sandra Johnson, Betty Dzambo, Barbra Barozzina, among others discussed publishing and also our families, our pets, and the TV show “Dancing with the Stars,” in other words the goings on about Scottdale. They reminded me that life is lived quite close to the bone, and I learned why after forty years, Gloria and I were living in western Pennsylvania; it was our base.  

I had always thought we lived here for professional and church reasons, because of this historical accident placing Mennonite Publishing House in Scottdale, Pennsylvania. Now, I recognized that we also lived here because we enjoyed it, the community, the people, the churches, the neighbors, the schools and the land. It was home to us and our children. I ordered 50 Barred Rock chicks, and Gloria planted a big garden. Our old mentors for local involvement H. Ralph Hernley had died March 15, 2008, and Elizabeth Sieber Hernley had long since moved to Indiana. But their memory lived on, at least for me. Several friends suggested I run for the school board again which I did and won an election.

The same summer I left publishing, Gloria left Connellsville High School after 26 years. Her  Spanish honors students gave her a bouquet of flowers according to the local paper which had the story and a photo of the students. There was no photo of Gloria, and her quiet departure was all Gloria, needing little ceremony or outward affirmation. She had skipped her graduation ceremonies from Seton Hill College, as well as her graduation from the University of Pittsburgh (MA). She attended no parting teacher events. It was summer time, flowers, sunshine, grand children, and even a new job, but that can come in 2010.

Most of this comes from my personal files and journal of 2009. The section on John Updike is from “John Updike: A Good Neighbor,” which appeared in The Mennonite (April 21, 2009, 30). “Forty Years of ‘Peacenjustice’” appeared  webhttp://www.themennonite.org/issues/12-21/articles/WEB_EXCLUSIVE_Forty_years_of_Peace_and_Justice   Blogger Tim Nafziger wrote a  response: “Miller’s Misnomer.”  Gloria’s departure from Connellsville High School was noted in the Connellsville Daily Courier (June 9, 2009, A6).