The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, November 22, 2025

Byblos: The mailman did not deliver a Library of America book yesterday, but Selected Letters of John Updike, an 875-page tome listed for $55, but that I got for free for some reason, because apparently Amazon owed me money. The book is published by Knopf, Updike’s lifelong publisher. I was disappointed that the binding did not follow Updike’s uniform style for the six decades he published his 60-some books, though the printed pages’ design and fonts does. Updike paid loving attention to all the mechanics of his books down to binding and paper quality. He had a printer’s instincts, and was briefly a newspaper copy boy while in college. (He indulges his affection for the trade with erotic abandon—typesetting is its own Song of Songs—in Rabbit Redux.) I am a bit hesitant to read the book because my 1980s and 90s infatuation with Updike began to wane after that, and in the last decade and a half turned to reserved admiration and frequent distaste. Not for the style, which never fails, but I could no longer stomach the mean, the demeaning, the endless sexism, the occasional Twain-like bigotry of the American abroad (certain American cities among his abroads), the Darwinian prism of the near-totality of his fictional characters’ relationships. I kept turning pages more impatient with their shallowness than amazed by the prose. But here are the letters–to editors, to wives and ex-wives, to lovers, I assume, because from the few pages I’ve gleaned, he is even looser with coarse language in his letters than he was in his novels, and it took nothing to happen on a blow job reference: an Updike obsession in and out of his novels, evidently. I never believed that his fictions were mostly fictions. Adam Begley in his admiring biography from 2014 confirmed that most of what he wrote was, not unlike Gide, basically journaling off his life, just as James Schiff, who edited this volume of letters, does in his warm and inviting introduction: “What is most telling, though, is the degree to which he mined his own life for material, and his belief that what made his fiction successful was something literal about its truthfulness.” Still difficult to resist, from the little I’ve gleaned so far. He’s 11 years old, and his letters to comic strip artists are germs of his later artistry as a book critic, by far superior to so many of his novels, his later novels especially. Here he is, at 15, writing Harold Gray, the cartoonist of Little Orphan Annie: “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.” Of course I’ll read the book. He is habitually lovely in his letters: “This is the land of wool, and I haven’t seen a single sheep yet,” he writes his younger daughter Miranda during a 1974 trip to Australia, the year he is hot and heavy into his affair with Martha Bernhard, though he’s waiting Miranda from Australia, on a trip that included a ménage à trois with two women. Martha is the woman he left Miranda’s mother for: “Guess my attempt to be lovable yesterday drew mixed reviews,” he writes Martha two weeks after his return from Australia. “I write this uncertain if my status is still loverly at all. Well, what can I say, except that you discouraged my timid and tentative offer to be true to you (and Mary), wanted the truth, and got it.” By which he meant that he confessed to both of them, clearly boasting, that he had slept with two women in Australia, at the same time. They were his roommates. “That throughout I had no doubt that my heart lay with that bundle of blue letters and the 35-year-old snapshot. That the curious quality of our physical encounters-I, rapturous but addled; you gorgeous and giving and serene—in a way bid me try my wings once more, so they could be better folded next time you and I met. And so they were. That I was struck, too, by your dancing in my arms telling me David was so fuckable but that after all we bring to each other a sexuality that is not exclusive. And that I loved your questions, which were specific but very much to the point, as only you could know-only you among women I have known, that is, know that lovemaking is not a shapeless warm muddle but has its degrees and stages, like the hierarchies of angels, and hence its levels of betrayal. That my failure to invite being blown may constitute, in this sad little saga of down under, a patch of beleaguered loyalty. Forgive me what needs forgiving; I am sorry mostly for your grief.” The letter goes on, with love declarations as he sleeps next to his wife in his children’s house, ending with: “Fact and fiction–help me to keep them straight.” He never did. But I still love–is love too strong a word? I still can’t get away from him. 

—P.T.

You’re going to spoil me rotten, with your generous post-opus letters, that so uncannily zero in on the point of it all, and so jubilantly rejoice with me over the sections that I liked as well. May I come all humbly to earn even a particle of your kind words and your hopeful prophesy of a long productive future. I feel, down deep, on my last legs, unless Martha gets me to Florida for senescence reversal. I used to wonder, gazing at my venerable grandfather, how people could stand being that close to death, and not scream all the time. The answer, I begin to realize, is (I) they don’t feel any closer to death than a baby, and (2) what can they do about it anyway? So glad you liked my two Anns, so different except in that they are both seen mostly in bed. So glad you noticed the changing shape of pussies as the single most quietly pivotal event of our times. [* Reference to characters and evolving grooming habits in his novel Memories of the Ford Administration.] What do women think about, while they studiously bend over their crotches, razor in hand, consulting the template of the newest high-thigh swimsuit cut?

–From A John Updike letter to Philip Roth, Dec. 14, 1992, in Selected Letters of John Updike (2025).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.