John Updike: A Life in Letters Review – The Man Who Couldn’t Write a Bad Sentence | books

John Updike had the mind of a middle-class American man in the postwar era and the prose style of a literary genius. He was such a master of language that Vladimir Nabokov, famous for his eloquence, gave him a measure of praise. One reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s novels, likened it to a lobster with a single greatly enlarged claw. It was a comparison Updike should remember—for all his gentle civility, on display from beginning to end in this great volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and he did not disdain irreverence.

As a novelist he aimed, as he once said, “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” Aside from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into exotic matters – the court in Elsinore, Africa, the future – his constant subject has been the daily lives of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of World War II and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the twentieth century.

Born in 1932 in Pennsylvania, he lived for 13 years in Shillington before moving with his parents and grandparents to a farm in a rural heartland called Blueville. He was an only child, and loved and cared for his father, especially his mother, until the end of their days.

Updike Sr. was a high school mathematics teacher, and in the Depression years, he supplemented the family income by working as a road laborer. The writer’s mother, Linda, was a writer who, after years of refusal, finally succeeded in publishing a number of stories in The New Yorker magazine, her son’s literary home from home.

In 1950, Updike escaped rural life when he entered Harvard University on a scholarship to study English. In college, he wrote home diligently, addressing long collections of descriptive prose to his mother specifically—two thousand letters, diaries, and postcards—and to the “Flowians” in general. From the beginning he is incapable of writing a bad sentence, although the cheerful tone and frequent length of the early letters test the reader’s patience. However, his energy, perseverance and visual acuity are remarkable in someone so young.

Also remarkable is his ambition and application, not to mention his brass neck. He was barely out of childhood when he began to put his name down. “At the age of thirteen, Updike began submitting poems, drawings, and other unsolicited pieces to various magazines, including The New Yorker,” says James Schiff. Two years later he was recommending a short story by James Thurber for the Ellery Queen’s Mystery magazine. He also courted cartoonists—he was drawn to graphic art from his early days—publishers, newspaper and magazine columnists, Life magazine editors, and even the Pentagon. And here was a boy in a hurry.

The tone in these hundreds of letters was consistently even, except on those few occasions when the writer had to object or defend himself from intrusive, abusive, or arrogant correspondents. There are constant feuds – critics Frederic Crews and Alfred Kazin attack him, while Gore Vidal is a thorn in his side that Updike has never been able to remove – but his fondness far outweighs his dislike.

No doubt some readers will crave a more frequent and more active presentation of the spleen. In his introduction, Schiff allows, perhaps unwisely, that “there is little tragedy, shock, or pain in these letters—Updike lived a good, accomplished, and satisfying life,” though he is quick to add that “there is drama, as well as conflict and trouble.”

However, the issue of censorship was very problematic in his early years as a published writer. His second novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), the first in a series of four novels and a novella about the common American man Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, was in danger of not appearing at all because of the objections of his publishers, Alfred A. Knopf in New York and Gollancz in London, to what was considered obscene language and descriptions.

In the struggles that followed, the 28-year-old Updike displayed admirable courage and strength. On July 2, 1960, he writes to Victor Gollancz: “There is only one honorable and proper thing for me to do, which is to insist that the book be published as I have written it, or not at all.” He added: “If I start faking it, I have no moral ground to stand on.” But in the end, he had to give in and accept the changes recommended by the lawyers. He did so with characteristic stoicism, writing to Gollancz that since “compromise is the only possible way… I will deal with it to the best of my ability.”

Updike’s style of depicting and discussing sex in his novels is remarkably lively and logical. He did not write to shock, let alone confirm his masculinity. He simply did not understand why intimate relationships between men and women – as a writer who had no interest in homosexuality – should not be described precisely and with the same intensity as any other human interactions.

Nor does he seek to incite the wrath of heaven, or imagine for a moment that he might do so. In middle life he was a serial and sometimes multiple adulterer, but he held on to his Episcopal faith to the end, albeit with some lapses. In a letter to “Dear Ploughmen” dated 9 July 1960, he detailed the dispute over the censorship of Rabbit, Run, and a little more about how he was helping out at his local Bible school – “very interesting, except it takes up… the morning.”

Then there are the women in his life and in his work. Martin Amis remarked of Updike that he was not embarrassed, both on the page and in bed. In Husbands (1968 – of course), his most successful and highest-grossing novel – he received $400,000 for the rights to a film that was never made – the sensational content almost overwhelms the narrative. He was living at the time in Ipswich, a small town in Massachusetts, and the characters in the novel were closely modeled on members of “Updike’s group,” although he denied their existence, which led to him calling in a libel lawyer. When a journalist asked her about her reaction to the book, the author’s wife, Mary, said she felt as if she was choking on her pubic hair.

At the heart of this volume is the correspondence, from the first half of the 1970s, surrounding Updike’s separation and divorce from Mary, and his relationship with and marriage to Martha—the epigraphic echoes of the names are almost too similar. These pages make painful reading: Updike can be cruel—to Martha: “Mary’s body (her breasts!) would still please me, if I could separate it from her compressed monotheistic spirit…”—but mostly they are either pained, with Mary, or sentimental, with Martha. At the same time, of course, he was enjoying other loves, old and new.

Are you reading his books now? In the end, he made a bleak self-assessment: “I have fallen to the status of a foolish old man whose tales of sex in American suburbia are hopelessly yawn-worthy pieces of history.” Perhaps it was so; But he wrote prose that made envious seraphim sigh.