SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN UPDIKE, edited by James Schiff
One drawback of John Updike’s letters, collected now for the first time, is that he never found a worthy epistolary sparring mate, the way Coleridge found Wordsworth, Nabokov found Edmund Wilson, de Beauvoir found Sartre and Ralph Ellison found Albert Murray. This collection lacks the vigorous pleasures — as Updike wrote, in a different context, to his first wife — of “a pingpong match played on a table 500 miles long.”
His primary correspondent, especially during the first half of his life, was his mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who was also a fiction writer. She bombarded him with letters from back home in small-town Pennsylvania. He was always four or five in the hole to her. Guiltily, he tried to keep up. His letters to her are ardent and perceptive, as is made plain in the new collection, “Selected Letters of John Updike,” edited by James Schiff. But there are things a boy does not tell his mother.
Updike’s friend John Cheever might have plugged this gap, but we’ll never know; Cheever, as if to spite literary history, didn’t hang on to incoming letters. Schiff estimates Updike typed some 25,000 letters and postcards over the course of his life. He neglected to keep carbons and used whatever paper was handy. (“I am pleased to see we share a lack of official stationeries,” he wrote to Alice Munro in 2006, reveling in the reverse snobbery.) He didn’t think much of these missives, or so he said. He told his editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, that “my letters are too dull to be dredged up.”
Surely, he knew better. Some 700 of them have been resurfaced by the indefatigable Schiff, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the founding editor of The John Updike Review. Despite Updike’s distance-creating geniality, what an enormous and beneficent bounty these letters are for anyone who cares about this country’s literature during the last half century.
These letters trace Updike’s life (1932-2009) and, because they are so approachable, are not a bad introduction to his work for a young person who has not read him. I liked them for the opposite reason. I’ve read Updike closely and (mostly) with sharp pleasure my entire life — he was our roomy, middle-American Henry James — and I zeroed in on all the things that were revelations to me.
Come for the gossip, the testy letters to Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and others who, he felt, had unfairly criticized him. (Reviews “are all a species of stupidity, even when they are not stupid,” he wrote in 1970, before he began to write them regularly himself.) Or for his observation in a 1992 letter about Tina Brown, who’d become the editor of The New Yorker: “What she has done to the magazine in her first two issues shouldn’t happen to a dog.” He would later moderate his position on Brown’s tenure. He was protective of the magazine that had been his home since he was in his early 20s.
It’s always memorable when this well-disposed man shows a bit of fang. He kept an animus against Princeton, for example, for denying him admission, and against the poet Archibald MacLeish for turning him down for an advanced writing course at Harvard. MacLeish, Updike wrote, was “a bit of a stuffed shirt to me: a tall man’s head on a short man’s body, our slightly too self-aware link with living literature.”
He got on more than well with his New Yorker editors William Maxwell, Katharine White, William Shawn and others, though he was miffed with the poetry editor Howard Moss for cutting too many of his best lines. He was also unhappy with a later poetry editor, Alice Quinn, who he felt had dropped him. Roger Angell accidentally left off the last sentence of one of Updike’s stories and rejected other pieces for reasons Updike found inscrutable.
You sense the slate beneath the purling surface current in his comment to Angell: “Your turning down a story doesn’t make it any worse, any more than your taking it makes it better; so the effort, to please and challenge myself, remains the same.” Young fiction writers, tack this sentence on a card above your laptops.
He resisted the magazine’s attempts to tame his language, especially on sexual matters, and he pushed back against Knopf for the same reason. He did not always win.
Come for the love letters, dedicated to wives (Updike married twice) and to lovers he freely took, especially near the end of his first marriage. These are wonderfully filthy. “Will I ever be able to suck hard enough to please you?” is a rare line that can be printed here. Sexual dysfunction is recounted. He wrote to one lover that he planned to buy “Superballs” for a son’s birthday present, then joked about how his own were not so super during a recent encounter.
He was usually up front about these affairs. Shortly before their marriage in 1977, he confessed to Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he would spend the rest of his life, about having an apparent threesome. In another sort of accounting, he tells her that she is the 13th woman he slept with. The divorce letters to his first wife, Mary Pennington, are a painful reckoning. Mary once knocked Martha to the floor at a neighbor’s house.
Come to hate-read, if you suspect Updike’s letters will be an electric subset of what might best be termed dead white mail. You will mostly be disappointed, though Updike was a man of an earlier era, and a colonoscopy of such creatures generally turns up polyps. Witness his comment about Edna O’Brien’s novel “Night,” which he admired: “It seemed to me a beautiful brilliant book, although a bit like being inside a cow’s vagina during a warm May rain. Awfully liquid, somehow, her vision. Miss O’Brien’s.”
Or this one, to Mary during their estrangement before their divorce: “I am left with the sad possibility that women who suit me sexually are necessarily crazy.” He was an imperfect father and grandfather. There are more arrows in Updike than St. Sebastian, and this book will help add a few more.
Come to watch him cope with the aftermath of fame, which arrived in full when his novel “Couples” (1968), about infidelities in a wealthy Boston suburb, landed him on best-seller lists and the cover of Time magazine. The sale of the film rights made him, for the first time, truly wealthy. He began to get what Saul Bellow in “Herzog” called “heavy mail.” Nike started sending him free shoes, because he’d innocently worn a pair in a photograph.
There are invitations to Lillian Hellman’s place on Martha’s Vineyard, and to a party about which he writes, “maybe C*A*R*L*Y S*I*M*O*N will be there!!!!!” It seems she was: This book contains a photo — the photos in this book are uniformly excellent — of the pair seated across from each another in lawn chairs. At a separate party, attended with Kurt Vonnegut in 1983, he spied Jacqueline Onassis “sitting on the lawn like a rose among lily pads.”
Philip Roth wrote to Updike, this book tells us, to comment on Updike’s 1981 novel “Rabbit Is Rich”: “Nothing as wonderful has happened in this country since Jackie Kennedy got up on water skis.” Roth was among Updike’s more regular literary correspondents, though Updike’s largely negative review of Roth’s 1993 novel “Operation Shylock” in The New Yorker sent Roth into an emotional tailspin and into therapy. Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Nicholson Baker and Ian McEwan also traded letters with Updike.
He mostly led a settled life, agreeing with Flaubert’s assessment that a writer should live as ordinarily as a bourgeois in order to be fierce and original in the work. But it’s not as if nothing happened to him. These letters recount his breaking a leg while playing touch football, driving a car into a telephone pole, surviving a helicopter crash, being struck by a car and “dragged some feet on the bumper” and getting violently mugged in Spain in 2002, requiring nine stitches on his head.
Updike left a long tail. He wrote more than 60 books, a stupefying number — novels, poetry, books of stories, essays and criticism, a memoir, a play, and books for children. You may wonder what possibly there is left for him to say. The answer these letters provide is, well, almost everything.
Martin Amis once described Updike as “a NORAD of data gathering,” and many of this book’s most genuine pleasures are everyday ones, in which we get to watch that data gathering in something close to real time. Updike recounts building a coop for his daughter’s chicken, owning a one-eyed cat and wayward sheep and too many dogs, dealing with babies (“Eating, I should think, plays a large part in their dreams”), listening to the Supremes, coping with a water-bed leak, creating a board game that became a favorite of his children and crying on an airplane while watching “The Way We Were” because, as he told Mary, it reminded him of “the way we were.”
His was a self-replenishing vision. And the words were there from the start. His earliest letters, written while in his teens, are preternaturally verbal.
“Letters are the great fixative of experience,” Janet Malcolm wrote in her book about Sylvia Plath. “Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared.” Updike’s letters sing because he cared so intensely, even in this tossed-off form, about getting the words right.
SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN UPDIKE | Edited by James Schiff | Knopf | 874 pp. | $55
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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