Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
One day in the fall of 1951, when he was a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate, John Updike sat down to write a letter home. “Dear Family,” he wrote, “I received Mother’s letter today and was concerned to discover that I have not been handling my correspondence properly. Under the impression that I have been the most diligent of scribes, it startled me to be informed that the controversy had expanded beyond the family circle…and perhaps I had better tackle it.” Not only had young John not written as much as he thought he had; his mother (who was his true soulmate) was now feeling self-conscious because she had written three letters to his every one. Two perfect paragraphs follow these opening sentences, addressing the situation as John has been led to believe the folks back home are experiencing it, after which he writes:
In re-reading my letters I am conscious of an overwordiness that might strike you as supercilious, but believe me it is only the attempt of an over-Latinized vocabulary trying to express itself rapidly. In fact that very sentence sounds pretty obnoxious, but I didn’t mean it that way.
Then comes a three-page account of his student days at Harvard, all of it written in sentences that sound just like the ones I’ve quoted.
Updike wrote this letter for the next 50 years. He wrote it to his family, his first wife, his magazine editors and book publishers; he wrote it to his children, his fans, his friends and acquaintances, his fellow writers. What I mean by that is this: The tone of voice in which these letters are written is singularly overriding; because of it, regardless of the content or the recipient (whether young or old, famous or obscure), they all sound pretty much alike. As the years went on, this voice achieved ever greater ease with itself. It became open, amiable, self-assured, wonderfully lucid, and brilliantly organized; it was also emotionally impenetrable. At almost no time, in reading these letters, do we stumble on a risky bit of soul-searching, a disheveled piece of self-knowledge, an inappropriate confession. At all times, we are in the presence of a writer who never loses sight of his gift for composition.
John Updike was born in 1932 in the country town of Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father was a gentle soul who taught high-school math, his mother a woman who grew up on a farm not far from Shillington and was possessed of literary ambitions. When John was 13 years old, she made the family move back to the farm where her parents still lived and where John, adored beyond measure by all four adults, would live until he left for Harvard.
At school, Updike embraced his gift for writing, already long in evidence, developing it with a steady stream of poems, stories, and criticism. He also met and married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe art student with whom he would live for 21 years and father four children. In these years, he also made his initial contact with The New Yorker, the magazine that would become his permanent publishing home.
A year after graduation, John and Mary lived in New York while he worked for The New Yorker, but after less than two years they moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a coastal town 45 minutes from Boston, where they spent the rest of their years together and Updike discovered the environment in which he would flourish (middle-class Protestant suburbia) as a man and a writer—especially as a writer “giving the mundane its beautiful due.”
In his mid-40s, Updike underwent a crisis of sexual restlessness that led to a series of suburban adulteries that resolved themselves when he fell into a passion for Martha Bernhard, an Ipswich neighbor, and left Mary to marry Martha, with whom he would live for the next 30 years in a town not far from Ipswich. During these years, Updike wrote 23 novels, 18 collections of short stories, 12 of poetry, and 14 of nonfiction. He also collected some 30 or 40 awards and prizes that anointed him a major American writer. And, of course, he also wrote the 800 pages that make up Selected Letters of John Updike.
Updike’s pose of self-assurance, from an astonishingly early age, is really remarkable. Sometimes it makes him wise; mainly it makes him pompous.
At the age of 20, preparing to marry Mary Pennington, a young woman of superior character who has assured him that, young as they are, together they can manage a responsible married life, Updike writes to her:
You are very brave, Mary, but no amount of courage can make a hothouse flower a scrub oak. [I read this sentence twice.] Do not expect of yourself feats of endurance and drudgery, we must look to the children of misery for those admirable qualities. Nothing nags me more than the realization that I shall have to demand some of both from you; let’s pray to God I ask no more than you have.
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Although the subject here is the young John’s anxiety, he in fact sounds like a Puritan father instructing a daughter as the Mayflower is about to land. Oddly enough, by the same token, a year later, at 21, he writes a letter to the family in which he repeats in detail a destructive critique of his poetry—a teacher is telling him his poems lack authenticity—but ends, a bit smugly, “I don’t think criticism gets much fairer, or more perceptive.” Throughout his life, Updike sent his family detailed reports on almost every bit of attention his work received, negative or positive, because he himself couldn’t get enough of it (the attention, that is), and he knew they certainly couldn’t.
Updike often said that, like most people, he wanted to know himself more openly and honestly than he did, but in fact, again like most people, it wasn’t true. In 1964, while traveling in Bulgaria, he admits to Joanna Brown, an ex-lover whose good opinion he badly wants,
My purpose was, I suppose, to give me some perspective on myself, to strip myself of my usual armor of habit and work and family and survey my life from what may, more or less, be the mid-point. Alas, I am the same bundle of vague impulses and good-natured stupidity in Sofia as in Ipswich.
That’s telling himself!
To the very largest degree, there isn’t a sentence in these letters that couldn’t be read from the steps of City Hall. The bulk of them are the highly composed, newsy accounts of daily life he writes weekly to the family. Then there are the ones written to William Maxwell, his New Yorker editor, or Alfred Knopf, his book publisher, these essentially all business. Then there are those written to or about fellow writers—Philip Roth and Norman Mailer in particular—often playfully snarky, although sometimes not so playful. To Mailer in 1988:
I honestly don’t remember being on television in the last six months or saying that any of your work is trashy, but if it was and I did I must have had Tough Guys and the Monroe book in mind, as being trashy in a kind of cheerful and robust way.
Then again, in 1997 he writes Roth a letter of extravagant praise for American Pastoral, only to write the literary critic William Pritchard the very next day:
I read American Pastoral; it’s like some marvelously carved German public clock, all the apostles and devils rotating in and out of view on the limestone balcony, as the bells toll, melancholy and out of tune.
The letters you could not read from the steps of City Hall are those he writes in the 1970s to Martha Bernhard during the steamiest part of their illicit affair. It is here that we get a glimpse of the dirty-minded Updike. During this decade, suddenly famished for the satisfying sex life he’d never had with his wife, Updike sleeps with nearly every woman who comes his way, while documenting (with varying degrees of success) his erotic hunger in the sex-in-suburbia novels (e.g., Couples) that made him, in equal measure, famous and infamous.
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It was when he began sleeping with Martha that Updike hit pay dirt. Her body was “glorious,” and his spirits rose to heights of sexual boldness he’d never before imagined himself capable of. Here, in 1974, in answer to a raunchy letter of Martha’s, he writes:
I read [your letter] sitting there…and had I been a rooster I would have crowed. Your fantasy of having some of my sperm to lace your tea makes me wish I was all cock—all cock, balls, and prostate gland—instead of being only a tiny fraction cock. You, in truth, are all cunt—your mouth is a cunt and your eyes invite me in…. And your cunt is somehow your soul.
And this letter repeats and repeats itself for days and weeks and months, even a few years.
Interestingly enough, after Updike divorces Mary and marries Martha, there is not another word, at least in the letters in this volume, about either sex or Martha herself. Once she stops being all cunt, Martha becomes invisible. For the next 30 years, she is mentioned only through the phrase “Martha and I,” as in the innumerable letters that begin “Dear Jim, Martha and I were delighted to have dinner with you and your wife….” Never—ever!—a word about the marriage itself: What was it like? Was it happy? Unhappy? Were they actually suited to one another? Did Martha get along with her mother-in-law? What did she and Updike argue about? On all this, silence. To commit such intimacies to the written word was, it seems, beyond him; in fact, unthinkable.
However, one letter alone contains an invaluable moment of psychological openness, a letter he wrote to his good friend Warner Berthoff (a teacher of literature at Harvard) in 1989, when Updike was nearly 60 years old. His memoir Self-Consciousness had been published, and Berthoff had written Updike not once but twice about the book and the often negative reviews it was receiving—in particular, those that concentrated on the chapter called “On Not Being a Dove,” Updike’s account of his execrable anti-peace-movement position during the Vietnam War. In this letter to Berthoff, he writes condemning himself, while at the same time wondering about the “curious masochistic determination that led me to drag out of the buried past my discreditable views and feelings about Vietnam, and get them shellacked all over again by my dear liberal friends from you to Christopher Hitchens.” But “I was trying to express what I felt then, as best I can remember,” and yes, he sees now,
There was something irrational in my resentment of the anti-Vietnam movement, which I freely confess and try to explore. The ‘peace’ movement threatened me…. Heaven knows why. To the many reasons I offer I maybe should have added my sense of sibling rivalry when Shawn [the famed New Yorker editor William Shawn] turned the sun of his love toward [Jonathan] Schell and a number of other younger-than-I former schoolmates of his sons and away from (I felt) me…. In my letters to you and the Times I, of course, was trying to be as intelligent as my education and acculturation let me be; but underneath boiled a redneck hardhat rage. If a button nuking Dr. Spock and his mob had been placed under my thumb, I would have pressed it.
This letter was revelatory. Suddenly, I knew why the Rabbit books are the most authentic of Updike’s work; and in that moment, I felt both pity and pain for Updike and American literature alike.
John Updike was perhaps the last in a long line of writers—white, male, Protestant—who dominated American literature for a couple of centuries because essentially America remained a country that reflected their narrative experience. This wasn’t the experience that produced the dark profundity of a Melville or a Hawthorne; it was the experience that produced a William Dean Howells, that hardworking middlebrow novelist of the late 19th century whose subject was often the emotional power struggles that undergirded middle-class American life but whose deeply accessible prose assured his readers there was nothing much to worry about, no social revolution on the horizon.
In the main, Updike’s work belongs to the Howells class of American writers—these are definitely his people—but Updike himself, hardly a Protestant patrician, was something of an intermediary between the suburban liberals of whom he usually wrote and the working stiffs he incarnated as Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Readers long suspected that deep within, in a place he didn’t visit openly, Updike not only sympathized with Harry; he was Harry, possessed of those same primitive feelings of rage and resentment, scorn and deprivation, the same loudmouthed patriotism that drove the Rabbit. And, indeed, the Berthoff letter confirms the suspicion. Angstrom is that part of Updike that the rest of his work papered over, the part that allowed him to dive as deep as he could go as a writer. The bloodlessness—that is, the lack of felt life—that characterizes Updike’s New Yorker stories and suburban novels disappears in the Rabbit books, and the writing sinks to the level required for literary depth. Selected Letters of John Updike needed more of Harry Angstrom and less of William Dean Howells to become memorable.
Vivian GornickVivian Gornick is the author of, among other books, Taking a Long Look.