A man of letters

American author John Updike, who died in 2009 at age 76, was one of the world’s foremost men of letters, a writer who mastered many genres — novels, short stories, essays, poems and critiques. Thanks to University of Cincinnati professor James Schiff, a large selection of Updike’s personal letters, nearly 900 pages’ worth, can now be added to his impressive output of over 60 books.

Schiff presents the letters in chronological order, leading off with some that Updike wrote in his teens, many showing his early interest in cartooning. When he was away from his rural Pennsylvania home, attending Harvard University, he wrote regularly to his parents, Linda and Wesley. Linda developed her own writing skills and eventually followed John into the publishing world.

Most of Updike’s letters in 1952, when the author was 20, are either telling his parents about Mary Pennington, his new girlfriend, or those to Pennington herself. She was two years older than John, and got along so well that he soon talked marriage. In one letter to her he wrote, “I intend to keep you a virgin until the wedding night (I am one too, you know).” They married on June 26, 1953, and a year later, after John graduated summa cum laude, they went to Oxford, England for a year, where he attended art school.

Meanwhile, after many rejections, Updike had a poem and then a short story accepted by the New Yorker magazine. He became a regular writer for the New Yorker while keeping his parents posted on such developments as Mary’s becoming pregnant. Elizabeth was born in England, the first of four children he and Mary would have together. The book includes Updike’s drawing of Elizabeth’s baby face. There are many such sketches, as well as 24 separate pages of photographs.

Back in the U.S., over the next four years children David, Michael and Miranda were born. Ironically, many of John’s letters during that time dealt with people’s concerns about the sexual content in his 1960 novel Rabbit, Run.

Not long after Miranda’s birth, John began to see other women, often friends of both himself and Mary. Over the next several years, he wrote to many of them, usually letters that are cheerful, sexy and flattering.

Spring 1968 saw the publishing of Updike’s novel Couples, which drew acclaim and controversy that resulted in his being featured on the cover of Time magazine under the banner “The adulterous society.” That fall, he and his family went to England for a year. He became a frequent traveller, often invited to countries such as Australia; his letters from afar are lively.

In the 1970s, his marriage began to founder as he grew more and more interested in a neighbour, Martha Bernhard. Updike’s frequent letters to her vividly show his increasing love for her and his worries about whether to stay with Mary or leave her. (Footnotes report that Mary too had affairs. A few letters suggest John and Mary might stay together and continue their affairs.)

Updike’s excellent Maples stories, about Richard and Joan Maple, capture much of what he and Mary experienced. In one letter to Martha, as he began to imagine their living together, he admits that, while in Australia, he expanded his lifelong list of mistresses from 13 to 15.

As he finally settled on leaving Mary (they divorced in May, 1976) and living with Martha (they married in September, 1977), Updike wrote to many writers who had become his friends, including Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, Philip Roth, John Barth, Erica Jong and Norman Mailer. The letters are entertaining, especially for anyone familiar with those popular novelists. Meanwhile, Updike continued to regularly turn out books and stories. When the editor of the New York Review of Books asked him for a comment on their negative review of his 1986 novel Roger’s Version, Updike responded “I don’t think fiction writers should respond to reviews, even when they’re as oddly ad hominem and as full of cheap shots and willful misreadings as (reviewer Frederick) Crews’s piece.”

To friends, relatives and other correspondents, Updike would regularly write some version of “I hope to pull up stakes in the real world and retreat into a new novel.” Indeed, his writing production was well-paced.

As he became famous and won awards such as the Pulitzer Prize (for his 1990 novel Rabbit at Rest), Updike received more and more requests for public appearances — as a guest speaker or a judge or a participant in a panel, often in a distant city. He gradually increased his rejection of these, but his letters are models of diplomacy and good nature. In answer to a fellow who was writing a book on style and wanted Updike’s view, Updike mentioned the present tense used in his Rabbit novels, which was rare in novels that became as popular as those did upon release.

Perhaps typical of his positive and gracious letters is a postcard message sent to his ex-wife in 2003 and included in Selected Letters: “Dear Mary: Just think, today would be our fiftieth wedding anniversary. I guess it is anyway. Thank you for being such a lovely bride. And for all the rest. Love, John.”

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg writer who met and chatted with John Updike on Oct. 11, 1989, at the University of Minnesota, Moorhead, where Updike was a guest speaker.