An Adolescent Crush That Never Let Up

John Updike’s professional relationship with The New Yorker began in 1954, when he was twenty-two and the magazine published his poem “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” but his personal fascination began much earlier: he started submitting poems, drawings, newsbreaks, and other creative work to various magazines, including The New Yorker, at the age of thirteen. In his lifetime, Updike published more than a hundred and fifty poems and more than a hundred and sixty short stories in the magazine. In addition to working for the Talk of the Town section for two years in the mid-fifties, he contributed about three hundred and sixty book reviews. (The New Yorker was a family obsession: John’s mother, Linda Hoyer Updike, also published ten stories in the magazine, and his son David contributed six.) Updike’s final submission to The New Yorker was the poem “Endpoint,” which came out a few weeks after he died, of lung cancer, on January 27, 2009, at the age of seventy-six. These letters to and about The New Yorker are addressed to, among others, Updike’s family, in Plowville, Pennsylvania, a farming community near Reading; Mary Pennington, who was an undergraduate at Radcliffe when Updike was at Harvard, and whom he married in 1953; and the New Yorker editors Katharine White (whose husband was the writer E. B. White), William Maxwell, and David Remnick. The letters have, in most cases, been abridged. They will appear in full in “Selected Letters of John Updike,” edited by James Schiff, in October.

To The Editors of The New Yorker

Plowville, PA
March 21, 1949

Gentlemen:

I would like some information on those little filler drawings you publish, and, I presume, buy. What size should they be? Mounted or not? Are there any preferences as to subject matter, weight of cardboard, and technique?

I will appreciate any information you give me, for I would like to try my hand at it.

Sincerely,
John Updike

To Lilly March, columnist for the Reading Eagle, Reading, Pennsylvania

Plowville, PA
August 10 or 11, 1951

In her column of August 10, 1951, March had accused her “once-favorite magazine” of following a “party line,” injecting politics into its pages, and growing dull to the point that she was about to cancel her subscription. In her August 13th column, she printed this letter from Updike, prefacing it with: “We are honored to have on our summertime staff a Harvard undergraduate, one John H. Updike, who is majoring in literature, which he regards as highly impractical but fun. That it may turn out to be practical as well is nicely illustrated in a letter he wrote to me taking me to task for my stand on a well-known periodical, publishing under this heading last Friday. Mr. Updike, who flattered me greatly by stating that I was alive and THINKING in 1925, says”:

My Dear Miss March:

In a recent column you explain why you are dropping your subscription to a certain magazine. For reasons of policy, I presume, you neglect to name this unfortunate publication—I shall be equally coy. Even though you refer to it as a “little leopard” (hinting at a jungle-like quality) I have inferred that you speak of a metropolitan weekly with a modest but arrogant circulation. If this inference is incorrect, then you need read no further. You might have meant a ladies’ magazine which has a party line as rigid and sterile as that of, say, either the Communist or Prohibitionist parties; if that is the case, let me congratulate you upon this action and I can’t understand why you bought the thing in the first place.

If it is the one I have in mind, however, I think you are making a mistake. You were one of those people fortunate enough to be alive and thinking in 1925, when Eustace Tilley discreetly showed his face upon the newsstands for the first time. And I cannot help but think that part of your action is prompted by the gray might of nostalgia. You long for the good old days, that first golden decade when Soglow’s little king had not been demoted to the comic strips and Arno’s humor was not diluted by good taste; when E. B. White turned out “Talk of the Town” single-handed and Rea Irvin did every other cover; when Dorothy Parker lamented her love life and Alexander Woollcott spat upon the world in a prissy furor; when the Algonquin was more than a memory and Harold Ross entered the office one day to find a telephone booth overturned and in it James Thurber, a large lily in his hand. Many of the golden names—Woollcott, Parker, Robert Benchley, Ralph Barton—are gone now; many, tarnished—White writes scarcely anything any more. Thurber himself is getting nostalgic. And you are unhappy because a gay adolescence has passed. Genius is gone, leaving only talent. You have witnessed (heaven forbid this phrase) the passing of an era.

Is this so? Certainly the magazine is showing its age. Maturing is a mixed blessing, but failing to mature is an undiluted curse. Eustace Tilley is gray now about the temples, his walk is less buoyant, he pants slightly as he climbs the steep staircase to the humor he attained once without apparent straining. But he is not as ancient as you would have it; he is still wearing a contemplative sneer. Read for “violent impartiality” Wolcott Gibbs attacking a bad musical, John McCarten disdainfully brushing aside a mediocre film, or, specifically, Alfred Kazin’s panning of the over-touted treatise Worlds in Collision. And impressive indeed was the recent, snarling crusade against the blaring commercials in Grand Central.

You tell the reader of the guilt complex that led you to sacrifice eight out of 11 magazine subscriptions to aid the war effort. Was it not this same feeling that led this magazine to devote an entire issue to Hersey’s Hiroshima, that led a so-called “adult comic book” (a railroad official so called it) into some of the best reporting of the last World War? Is this not the “sense of mission” that, even though you share it, you condemn in a publication that, like yourself, is vaguely troubled? This spirit, this anxiety has forced the irresponsible magazine that once announced it was not for the old lady from Dubuque into formulating a party line, and hewing to it.

I am not sure what you mean by party line. You talk as though it permeated the publication cover to cover, but can it affect the short stories, the cartoons, the columns on tennis and horse racing, the Parisian letter from Genêt, the poetry of Morris Bishop and Phyllis McGinley? Does this party line assert itself in a political essay by Richard Rovere or a thoughtful paragraph in “Talk of the Town”? Does it make one bit less funny a Charles Addams study of the grotesque, an iota less powerful an O’Hara fragment of modern America, a smidgeon less wistful a Thurber dip into the Columbus of his childhood?

Your “party line” can mean but one thing: an occasional tendency to take things with seriousness. Not a function of a humor magazine, perhaps, but this one has long ago ceased to be just that. It is above all a timely magazine; and now is not the time for continuous laughter. It has recognized that this is not 1925 but a time when the nation is as sensitive and as jumpy as an exposed nerve. It is to the credit of a magazine when it recognizes the necessity for anxiety.

You speak of dullness. Dullness is a relative quality. I, for example, found the poet Lucretius quite dull, not because he was, but because I thought he must be. Study of Latin was a repugnant idea. Perhaps equally repugnant is the thought that a magazine that once thumbed its nose seems to have shifted its hand and sadly scratches an ear. But however tired it makes us feel, we must acknowledge the integrity of the magazine that has allowed itself to express a very unurbane, unsophisticated, even unfunny sense of mission. I do hope that you and the weekly will not part company. You never needed each other more.

With lamentable haste,
The Office Boy

To Mary Pennington

Plowville, PA
June 28, 1952

Dear Moparopy:

I am now heading into the eighth hour of my nice shiny seventeen-hour day at the Reading (Pa.) Eagle. Last night I got in at two o’clock, found my parents up in their nightclothes on the verge of starting walking into town to retrieve me from the gutter they fondly imagined I had been left in. . . . I went into Shillington [the Pennsylvania town where Updike lived until age thirteen and attended high school] under the impression that I would make some progress with the impending class reunion, and instead became involved in a beer brawl and charade-fest that lasted into the monodigital hours. . . . I succeeded in infuriating one waitress at the Shillington Diner. Method: tossing lumps of sugar in all directions, spilling coffee on things, shouting, and finally making an elaborate apology for what I termed “the ill-advised conduct of my friends.” My head has been bumping softly all day. . . .

The ice with the old New Yorker has been broken: they snappily returned my first story of the summer with a strangely reassuring rejection slip. I always feel happier when I’ve received one, for some damn perverse reason. A rejection slip represents a response, an acknowledgement, and a sort of accomplishment in itself. I love them. It also means that I still have a good way to go, but never reflects on my lack of ability to make it eventually. It should, surely. I am on the verge of being overdue. I am conscious of something lacking in me; a tenseness that refuses to admit any kind of general vision that makes a poor bedfellow with my refusal to submit entirely to the view of creation as a craft. However, there are a few things I am groping for. None is as dangerous as a too keen awareness of critical response. I think that this age is one in which criticism has outdistanced creation; artists are desperate in their attempts to equal the subtlety of modern critics; the quality of a piece of writing is judged by the number of academic statements that can be made about it. This is not merely a creative “sterility” we hear so much about. The term “sterility” tends to make art a bitch in heat. It is not. In fact, it is not anything. Everyone has a right to define the artist in special terms, and to attempt an epigram that will make a reality out of a convenient term. But the fundamental notion to be grasped is one of purpose. And every human contrivance is oriented toward an increase of human comfort. And only until I really believe that writing is a phenomenon of humanist activity that derives reality and dignity not from any personal concepts of nature or abstract notions of function but from its simple-minded purpose: diversion, only when I have recognized all else—primarily, the notion that it is self-expression—as either fallacy or ornamentation, can I hope to be professional. And this sort of realization is one that requires a weary mind and a realism seldom found in the young.