John Updike Wrote It All Down

Summary

It occurred to me last night, in bed by 10:30, that our sex is so important, my incompetencies bulk so large, because it’s what we do; in a marriage these ups and downs are easily absorbed in the business of making a household and being a couple in public.… Oh Joan, you put it so beautifully, saying that if we don’t make each other happy we should end it. Why did my heart quail at such simplicity? Perhaps because I am unhappy away from you in rough proportion to how happy I am with you, which is very; that I, who formally believe that life is dialectical, and lived in tension, seem to be the one having difficulty with our existence in secret, surrounded by blind gossip, interwoven with our spouses and their libidinous and physiological ups and downs, and now with our intermixed children—how strange and sweet and yet disquieting.From these samples of Updike’s sexual correspondence (they appear to have been mercifully truncated and selected), Updike wrote some of the most detailed, reasonably thought-out, and unromantic letters ever composed by a major writer; and placing them against those of, say, Flaubert or even Chekhov might make it seem as if he were both colder and more intrepid in his infidelities, as if he were simply punching out numbers on bingo cards. The biggest disappointment of the letters is that the writer himself is never quite so endearing as the many wonderfully selfish characters he created from his own cloth, whether it’s the candy-chomping Rabbit Angstrom or the sexually uninhibited witches of Eastwick. He managed to create memorable, even likable characters who suffered from the worst human frailties, from gluttony, selfishness, and unfaithfulness to a failure to live up to the best ambitions they harbored for themselves. While Updike’s life and creative work focused on the people, living rooms, bedrooms, and streets of the middle American towns and country clubs where he lived, he steadily reviewed for The New Yorker hundreds of books on a wid...