The stacks at Harvard’s Widener Library are, I have come to believe, the best place to hide if you want to spend an afternoon reading uninterrupted but not alone. Widener has that rare charm conferred on a place only once it has been sufficiently drenched in history and filled with books—the most famous of which is certainly Harvard’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible, one of 48 still in existence. But Harvard is also home to a lesser-known literary artifact, stashed away in the school’s repository for rare books and manuscripts: an empty bag of Keystone Snacks corn chips that once belonged to John Updike.
Updike was not a hoarder the way some of the characters in his novels are (in Rabbit, Run, the Angstrom apartment is a “continual crisscrossing mess”). But he was still a collector of sorts, always in service of writerly research either directly (as with the bag of chips, part of the work that went into his Rabbit tetralogy) or indirectly (as with the various women he took to bed who were not his wife). Either way, the collecting showed up in the writing.
Selected Letters of John Updike, an immense new compendium of the American novelist’s personal correspondence spanning nearly seven decades, from the early 1940s to his death, in 2009, underscores the vanishingly short distance between Updike’s writing life and his actual life. Not that you need to read his private letters to see that—anyone who read Couples, or followed the very New England scandal it created, will readily understand that Updike wasn’t a writer who left any literary fruit unsqueezed. “An empty book is a greedy thing,” he once said in an interview. “You wind up using everything you know.”
Still, in the aggregate, Updike’s letters could constitute the outline for a never-published Updike novel. The writing is variously winking, earnest, desperate, oversexed, and ambitious.
Too many famous names flitter in and out of Selected Letters to list them all, but here is a small sampling: John Cheever, Erica Jong, Roger Angell, Norman Mailer, Italo Calvino, George Plimpton, Karl Shapiro, Lorrie Moore, Cynthia Ozick, Tina Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, Ian McEwan. In 1966, he writes to his father about having met John Steinbeck: “It all confirmed my impression that meeting authors is fun but essentially misleading; the best of Steinbeck is in the books and the real man is a rich insecure shell.” And Updike is, as ever, captivating on the page. He experiments with format: Lists are often deployed for comic effect, as are the occasional doodle, self-portrait, or caricature. An otherwise mundane detail can be, in his hands, stop-and-read-it-twice beautiful. “Do have a happy summer,” he writes to Mary Pennington, the woman who would become his first wife, in 1952. “Search out warm hollows of sand, sit with your face to the sea, arch your soft back and enfold with your hands the shells that remind you of me.”
[Read: The man who made off with John Updike’s trash]
His letters to Mary in this era are silly, intimate, and affectionate—bittersweet to read now, with the knowledge that their relationship was doomed. He addresses her, variously, as “Baby,” “My chicken,” “Moparopy,” “Sweet M,” “Dear Miss Pegasus,” “Mary, my love, my Mary!”; he signs off with declarations such as “I am indeed glad that I am capable of loving you, and do.” The same romantic spirit returns to his letters more than a decade later, as he is wooing Martha Bernhard, who would become his second wife. But now it has an edge, perhaps a vestige of the pain and failure of his first marriage. To Martha in 1974: “Flirt, fuck, is there so vast a difference? Tell me.” That same year, in a letter to Mary, he refers to himself as her “semi-ex-husband.” How Updike regarded and wrote about women has been the subject of much debate over the decades. Selected Letters offers the chance to see how he wrote to them.
It also gives readers the opportunity to witness him handling early questions about his writing on sex. Alfred Knopf suffered over Rabbit, Run, Updike’s second novel, before it was published, after Knopf’s lawyers cautioned him that it ran afoul of obscenity laws. Updike appealed to him wryly this way: “Since you are willing to publish the book as it is, it would be unforgivably gutless of me not to encourage you to do just that. I look forward to the book being published, and I even look forward to the fight if there is to be one. In the unhappy—however probable—event of a suit, I will do whatever you ask—1. Keep quiet. 2. Write pamphlets defending freedom of the press. 3. Testify in court. 4. Go to jail.” (He did eventually agree to some changes.)
Rabbit, Run is also the subject of possibly the most defensive exchange in the whole collection of correspondence. In a letter to his mother-in-law, who hated the book, Updike writes, “You wonder why I ‘had’ to write the book; I had to write it because writing is my vocation, and I chose to write this particular story because it contained in images that were alive for me a problem, or conflict, that seems real and important.” He concludes this way: “Honestly, I don’t ask you to read me. I send you the books as a token of my esteem and affection; you needn’t open them.”
Updike’s mother-in-law is not the only one to have objected to his portrayals of sex. Patricia Lockwood put it most memorably, and probably most accurately: John Updike “wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.” This awkward-crass mode does appear in his correspondence, especially in letters to his mistresses, several of which admiringly refer to the recipient’s “cunt.” (Maybe it’s just me, but I would have advised him to stick with a line more like this one, from a 1964 letter to Joanna Brown: “May I send you my love? Love is what I feel for you now, remote star whose light may never reach me.”)
Most of the collection is not the musing of a sex robot, thankfully, but a reminder of how utterly prolific—and, yes, talented—Updike was. I was reminded, for instance, that Rabbit, Run, “A&P,” and “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” were all published within roughly a year of one another. And Updike superfans will register a small thrill when encountering the letter below, to the New Yorker editor William Shawn in September 1960:
Dear Mr. Shawn:
I’m writing, right now, a short—perhaps ten or twelve or maybe fifteen pages—“Reporter at Large” piece on Ted Williams’ last game in Boston. Of course you may not want it; but I thought I’d warn you for what it’s worth. I’ll bring it down with me Wednesday.
Yours,
John Updike
Such letters are literary history in their own right—a superstar writer pitching what would become one of his most beloved essays to a legendary editor—but also let the reader bask in the relief that of course Shawn accepted the essay in question, which all these decades later contains, in the lede, what is still probably the best description in all of sportswriting: “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”
Updike’s lifelong obsession with The New Yorker is one of two constants across his letters. Mostly this takes the form of him expressing his desperation to be published, and his impatience with rejection—what’s remarkable is not that rejection stirs doubt in him, because it usually does not, but that he sees rejection as merely an impediment to his own inevitable success.
In June 1952, he writes to Mary that “the ice” at The New Yorker has thawed: “They snappily returned my first story of the summer with a strangely reassuring rejection slip,” he writes. “I always feel happier when I’ve received one, for some damn perverse reason.” A month later, he’s grumpier about the latest rejection. “I’m not getting younger, and my resilience is stiffening. It takes a lot out of one’s confidence and a bit of peculiar courage to trot obediently upstairs, a reject clutched in your hand, and start work on something else that you know in your heart won’t be any better than the thing rejected.” He goes on: “True, I am twenty, but I have, since I was sixteen, received about three hundred rejection slips, at least a hundred from The New Yorker, and I’m getting tired of them.” When The New Yorker finally accepted one of his poetry submissions, he sent word to his parents by telegram, on July 15, 1954. (“Duet, With Muffled Brake Drums” would appear in print some weeks later.)
Success did spook him a little, at least at first: “All in all,” he writes to his parents soon after the poem is accepted, “the last two months have been so replete with blessings that I feel somewhere an ax is going to fall. Of nights I have been thinking about death and eternity and scaring myself crazy, like I used to do when much smaller. Idleness seems to breed awareness of one’s own transience.”
The other constant in Selected Letters is Updike’s mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, a writer herself, and their rolling conversation about literature and life. Updike repeatedly said that he never would have imagined becoming a writer if not for his mother’s example. And he seems in some ways most himself when he is writing home to her and the other “Plowvillians,” as he often addresses them, a reference to Plowville, the Pennsylvania farm town where his parents and maternal grandparents lived.
But what comes through most of all in this book is Updike’s specific blend of ambition and playfulness. Take for example the one week, in March 1955, when he signed all of his letters using names of past American presidents. (Otherwise he often signed off to loved ones as “Johnny.”) Updike wanted to get his hands on the world. He could charm people easily, and he knew it. And besides, he was fairly easily charmed back.
[Read: Licks of love in the heart of the Cold War]
Upon the birth of his first child, a daughter, in April 1955, he enclosed a lovely sketch he’d made of his sleeping infant. “I cannot begin to tell you what a charming person this Elizabeth Pennington Updike is,” he writes to his parents. “Naturally, I have only given the other babies in the ward a passing look, but that look was enough to assure me that they are a pretty poor lot. Some of them look like mandarins, some like large eggs with a face drawn on, some (two premature twins) like rats saved from drowning. The baby next to Elizabeth is very naughty; he cries all the time, like a machine; you can beat time to him. Liz, though, is very quiet. In the two hours I’ve spent with her, she has only made a few crying noises. The minute after I finished this drawing, she squeaked and threw up all over herself. You can imagine how I felt.” He concludes the letter with more mundane news: “Meanwhile, the world plods on. The NYer has rejected some things of mine, all of which deserved to be, and in a very cordial way.”
Note that Updike, on the day he became a father, was still thinking about what The New Yorker did or didn’t want from him. This made him not a careerist, but rather a devoted fan of a proudly literary magazine, eager to join, in its pages, the writers he most admired, an attitude he carried with him until the end. In the weeks before his death, he put it this way in a letter to David Remnick: “I fell in love with The NYer when I was about eleven, and never fell out, and never got used to the heavenly sensations of being in print there.”
Throughout Selected Letters we get to know his favorite books (James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times; D. W. Brogan’s The American Character; Henry Green’s Loving, Living, Party Going; Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; Miguel Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life; Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Kafka’s The Castle; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) and his favorite writers (Hemingway, Proust, Melville, Shakespeare, Joyce, Nabokov, Cheever, Thurber). And we see a man trying to sort out what it means to live a writing life, and what will become of writing and reading anyway. In his last years, Updike lamented that “the print revolution, beginning with Gutenberg, assigned value to precision and individuality. The Internet is characterized by imprecision and groupthink—an illusion of fellowship is created without the reality of physical presence and copyeditors. It seeks the end of authorship.”
One of my favorite letters in the book is concerned with these same questions—what to make of literature, who leaves a mark, and why. Updike wrote this particular letter, in September 1960, to Warner Berthoff, then a professor of English at Bryn Mawr College (and later a professor of Melville at Harvard). Too much of literary history, Updike writes to Berthoff, is modeled on biology when it is really more like geology. “There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn,” Updike writes. He continues: “And not only is the creation of masterpieces haphazard, but to a lesser degree our designation of them is. The canon of taste is volatile, though it may be some years before someone realizes that the blood has gone out of, say, Galsworthy or—blasphemy—Goethe.”
Most writing results in nothing much at all, he concludes. “In fact, the only continuous literary conveyor is the vast simmering stream of toiling mediocrity which now and then breaks forth into a fester which we are pleased, often for very selective if not perverse reasons, to admire. To thread literary history through its great names is to construct Europe from the tips of the Alps. The mark of a great writer is just this, that he cannot be followed.” It’s the postscript of this one that gets me most: “And anyway, what is tradition but a set of the best books, to be had in any public library across our glorious land?” After all, John Updike was a writer, one of the all-time greats. That’s all he ever wanted to be. But first, and forever, as Selected Letters makes clear again and again, he was a reader.
