Word: ipswichers
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There are those who say that all John Updike did was take the soft-cover happenings in Ipswich, Mass., and put them between the hard covers of his latest novel, Couples. But the good folk of Ipswich either don't think so or couldn't care less. For there was John, in Pilgrim costume, at "17th Century Day," commemorating the founding of Ipswich in 1633. He read the introduction to a 30-minute pageant he wrote depicting the place as it was back when, noting that there the "Puritan flame burned brightest." Then he sat in with...
Clearly, Couples was not drawn entirely from his imagination. Tarbox, says Updike, is purely fictional, "with only a touch of the Ipswich marshes peeking through." Still, it is worth
Above and behind his reverence which extends to oral encounters between Piet and Foxy-looms Updike's central metaphor. He finds in sex an expression of his own Piet-like quest to recapture the past. Nostalgia suffuses him, goads him, at times frightens him. At home, in Ipswich, Mass., Updike spends hours leafing through boyhood photograph albums. "I find old photographs powerful," he says. "There's a funny thing about the way the flux of time was halted at this particular spot. You just can't get back...
Swinger & Bum. After the Updikes moved to Ipswich in 1957, John found himself more than ever in thrall to his homeward-looking vision. So many short stories flowed from his reservoir of nostalgia that he collected eleven of the best in a volume called Olinger Stories-Olinger being "audibly a shadow of Shillington," Updike wrote, and yet something other. "The surrounding land is loamy, and Olinger is haunted-hexed, perhaps-by rural memories, accents and superstitions. It is beyond the western edge of Megalopolis, and hangs between its shallow hills enchanted, nowhere, anywhere; there is no place like it. Olinger...
...Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts...