Selected Letters of John Updike - Hardcover

Updike, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593801547 ISBN 13: 9780593801543

Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

The arc of literary giant John Updike’s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.

As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually “express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer” before him, “Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat.” With his stunning rhetorical gifts—enabling him to thrive in both short fiction and the novel, criticism as well as poetry—Updike was also a consummate letter writer. When barely a teenager, he began submitting poems and cartoons to national magazines and soliciting famous cartoonists, with flattering requests, for a drawing. His letter writing only increased when he left the family farm in Pennsylvania for Harvard, where he composed more than 150 witty, substantive letters to his parents. The summer after he graduated, The New Yorker began accepting his work, and his exchanges with editors, publishers, and writers would stretch into a correspondence that, Schiff notes, “figures not as an adjunct to but rather an integral part of his astonishing literary output.”

The intimacy and lucidity of these letters brings to the fore all manner of subjects and situations, notably the ardent feelings for his first love and wife, Mary, and later the heartbreaking but honestly accounted breakup of their marriage; the uncensored passion for other women, including his Ipswich neighbor, Martha, who became his second wife; the concern for his children’s path to adulthood; and the conversations with many literary peers, from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth, as well as his Knopf and New Yorker editors, critics, translators, and others in the lit business.

Filled with comic observations, opinions, and personal news, told in the fluid first-person voice of the writer himself, these missives, taken together, create a page-turning “life in letters” like no other.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

To Harold Gray, American cartoonist from a 15-year-old John Updike
Plowville, PA
January 2, 1948

Dear Mr. Gray,

I don’t suppose that I am being original when I admit that Orphan Annie is, and has been for a long time, my favorite comic strip. There are many millions like me. The appeal of your comic strip is an American phenomenon that has affected the public for many years, and will, I hope, continue to do so for many more.

I admire the magnificent plotting of Annie’s adventures. They are just as adventure strips should be—fast moving, slightly macabre (witness Mr. Am), occasionally humorous, and above all, they show a great deal of the viciousness of human nature. I am very fond of the gossip-in-the-street scenes you frequently use. Contrary to comic-strip tradition, the people are not pleasantly benign, but gossiping, sadistic, and stupid, which is just as it really is.

Your villains are completely black and Annie and crew are practically perfect, which is as it should be. To me there is nothing more annoying in a strip than to be in the dark as to who is the hero and who the villain. I like the methods in which you polish off your evil-doers. One of my happiest moments was spent in gloating over some hideous child (I forget his name) who had been annoying Annie [and then] toppled into the wet cement of a dam being constructed. I hate your villains to the point where I could rip them from the paper. No other strip arouses me so. For instance, I thought Mumbles was cute.[1]

Your draughtsmanship is beyond reproach. The drawing is simple and clear, but extremely effective. You could tell just by looking at the faces who is the trouble maker and who isn’t, without any dialogue. The facial features, the big, blunt fingered hands, the way you handle light and shadows are all excellently done. Even the talk balloons are good, the lettering small and clean, the margins wide, and the connection between the speaker and his remark wiggles a little, all of which, to my eye, is as artistic as you can get.

All this well-deserved praise is leading up to something, of course, and the catch is a rather big favor I want you to do for me. I need a picture to alleviate the blankness of one of my bedroom walls, and there is nothing that I would like better than a little memento of the comic strip I have followed closely for over a decade. So—could you possibly send me a little autographed sketch of Annie that you have done yourself? I realize that you probably have some printed cards you send to people like me, but could you maybe do just a quick sketch by yourself? Nothing fancy, just what you have done yourself. If you cannot do this (and I really wouldn’t blame you) will you send me anything you like, perhaps an original comic strip? Whatever I get will be appreciated, framed, and hung.

Sincerely,
John Updike

[1] Mumbles, a recurring villain in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, made his debut in that comic strip in October 1947.



To Elizabeth Entwistle Daniels Pennington, Updike’s mother-in-law, often called “Danny,” was a graduate of Radcliffe and formerly a teacher of Latin and Greek
Caldwell Building, Ipswich, MA
October 27, 1960

Dear Mrs. P.:

Thanks for your letter, as warm and sprightly as always. I guess you just don’t like my ex-basketball players, and should be relieved to know, therefore, that, having passed them through a poem, a short story, and a novel, as far as I know I am through with them.[1]

Your reaction to Rabbit, while somewhat severe, is not inappropriate; I don’t think he’s especially stupid, but otherwise your adjectives seem fair, and in calling him a “grown-up child,” you have (unwittingly, I’m sure) described us all. I don’t attempt, as a writer, to control the reader’s reactions to my people, all I try to do is present them as truly as I can. I’m glad you liked Lucy and Ruth; myself, I liked them all, especially Kruppenbach the Lutheran minister.

As to your worry about Liz, I must confess that that is one aspect of my problems that hadn’t occurred to me. In general I think, looking back on my own childhood, that we should be allowed to read whatever we care to read; no doubt we get some nasty starts doing it, but better to get them than avoid them. Of course, I can’t picture Liz at 13 the way you can, having raised two daughters. I can’t even picture her reading my books; Marquand somewhere complained that his children never read any of his books. I don’t think that the book, if it is disturbing, would disturb her any more whether (if?) I or somebody else wrote it. After all, it’s not as if I ever had made the high school basketball team, or lived in Mt. Judge.

Anyway, I guess being a writer’s daughter has some disadvantages, just like being a minister’s daughter or a schoolteacher’s son. Although being a writer’s daughter is probably easier than being a writer’s mother-in-law. Even being a writer has its disadvantages—trying to tell the truth is not really a welcome service, but I haven’t figured out any other way to go about my business. 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. I don’t think that the moral of the book is very unexceptional, the moral being that pure self-seeking—pure following of the inner light, for Harry is in a sense a rigorous Protestant—does cause irruptions in the social web and, therefore, pain.

As to the sex, sex is important to Harry, as is it to many other young men of his age, and therefore, it is important in the book. I don’t see why sexual encounters should not be described as fully as any other sort of encounter between people; they contain just as much nuance.
I’m sorry that through the accident of marriage you have been thrown into close familial conjunction with a writer you don’t really like; 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.

Love,
Johnny Jump*↑

[1] Updike’s various attempts to write about an ex-basketball player include: “Ace in the Hole,” a short story that appeared in the New Yorker of April 9, 1955; “Ex-Basketball Player,” a poem that ran in the magazine of July 6, 1957; and Rabbit, Run, which will be officially published on November 2, 1960. Mrs. Pennington’s undated letter, apparently written on October 23, initially admits to the novel’s appeal, “it is a powerful and moving story and I can’t get it out of my consciousness.” Yet she quickly pivots to her distaste for Rabbit, whom she calls “a grown-up child, utterly self-centered, irresponsible, amoral, and stupid.” The novel, she writes, “is a terrible story, and I wonder why you had to write it.” What bothered her most, however, and kept her awake “was not your miserable Rabbit, but the sudden thought of Liz. What will happen to her when at 12 or 13 she naturally will want to read your books and she comes upon Rabbit, Run? What will it do to her relationship to you, to the boys she knows, to her mother?”
[2] Danny Pennington, aka Mom-Mouse, would sometimes use nicknames or add a word to one’s name, so it makes sense that Updike, in a relatively tense letter, would end with a reminder of their affectionate nature. In addition, Johnny Jump Up is a species of wild...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593801547
• ISBN 13: 9780593801543
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 800
• Herausgeber: Schiff James
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland