The August 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine contains this letter from writer Lawrence Grobel telling of Updike’s refusal to grant him an interview for Playboy:

Rabbit, Refuse

In his review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike [“Agreeable Angstrom,” June], Jonathan Dee writes that Updike’s “life consisted of saying yes to everything, and of questioning nothing.” I read that with amusement, remembering how I tried, for years, to get Updike to agree to a Playboy interview with me. I corresponded with him about it and went to see him when he gave a talk at the Los Angeles Public Library. I had previously done interviews with James A. Michener, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Saul Bellow, and I thought just mentioning these writers would clinch the deal, but when I said to Updike, “Saul Bellow agreed,” he just looked at me and smiled wryly. “Yes, I read it,” he said.

Lawrence Grobel
Los Angeles

A blogger named Christy Potter shares a story about her visit to John Updike’s grave in Plowville and tells how she felt compelled to plant flowers:

“Christy Writes: Planting Sunflowers for John Updike”

In the letters section of the London Review of Books, Jeremy Bernstein responds to a Christian Lorentzen article that mentions Updike and the New Yorker‘s “bank” for manuscripts that were waiting for the right space or time to be published in the magazine:

In the Bank
Christian Lorentzen mentions that John Updike ‘took the precaution of having the New Yorker hold his stories for months and years if the episodes he was treating were still too raw’ (LRB, 5 June). Like all magazines the New Yorker had a ‘bank’ in which William Shawn deposited articles of all kinds until he could or could not find a spot in the magazine. It drove the writers crazy. We were consoled by a story about Updike. He joined the magazine in 1955 and began writing ‘Talk of the Town’. An early piece was called ‘Time on Fifth Avenue’ in which he looks for a clock. It was probably written around 1957. It was put in the bank and not published until 1963.

Jeremy Bernstein
New York

Christian Lorentzen writes: In his biography Adam Begley discusses the New Yorker’s bank, but also mentions that there was a ‘shadow bank’ for stories of Updike’s that veered too close to recent personal events. At the LRB, we have a ‘box’. I’m not aware of a ‘shadow box’.

Here’s the full Letters section for July 2014.

UPDATE:  Another LRB letter writer offers a correction:

In the Bank

Jeremy Bernstein refers to articles by John Updike and others being put ‘in’ a bank by theNew Yorker editor William Shawn until a spot could be found for their publication (Letters, 3 July). In My Mistake, a memoir of his time at the New Yorker, Dan Menaker refers instead to such articles being ‘on’ the bank. At first he thinks it’s a riverine metaphor: articles waiting to be pushed into the stream that will take them to publication. He later realises that the ‘bank’ referred to a compositor’s cabinet with a sloping top on which galleys were rested.

Anthony O’Donnell
Northcote, Victoria, Australia

Here’s the link.

Willard Spiegelman, in “Proust Goes to the Country Club,” an essay published in the Summer 2014 issue of The American Scholar, contemplates remembrances of things past after attending “a largely forgettable class reunion”—with the late John Updike’s help.

“As he lay dying of cancer in a Boston hospital,” Spiegelman begins, “John Updike composed a sonnet sequence, ‘Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth 12/13/08’ that ranks with his best work in verse and even prose. Clear-sighted, sober, but witty, unlike many deathbed works, the poems acknowledge feelings of wonder and gratitude. The poet looks at his surround—the equipment, the noise, and the doctors and nurses—and he also takes a backward glance at his early years as a schoolboy in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He thanks his classmates, childhood friends, a mere hundred, because they showed him, in miniature, all the human types he would make use of later on: ‘beauty, / bully, hanger-on, natural, / twin, and fatso.’

“And he continues, more self-consciously, to consider the possibility that ‘we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.’ He knew the town; the town knew him and it stayed with him forever, especially after he left it: ‘I had to move / to beautiful New England—it’s triple /deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets—/ to learn how drear and deadly life can be.’ Shillington gave Updike all he needed as an artist, nurturing him as a young man. And like Joyce, who fled Dublin but never truly escaped it, Updike had to get away to realize what he had been given.”

Later in the essay, which requires a login to access, Spiegelman anticipates his 50th high school reunion and writes, “Like Updike, I had always thought long and hard about classmates from early childhood and adolescence. I remembered most of them fondly, even the ones who may have been irksome at the time when I was a know-it-all baby Beatnik, a pesky intellectual who resisted football games, pep rallies, anything that smacked of mindless conformity.”

But, he learns, “not everyone shared my genial fondness for the whole, imagined group of us. I had hoped that some people who loomed large in my memory, the way Updike’s Shillington schoolmates did in his, would take a personal invitation from me as an occasion to demonstrate fellow feeling. Apparently I did not mean as much to them as they did to me. Or at least they didn’t want to meet and greet me at a big party. They maintained sangfroid invisibility. Did the objects of my affections feel the same about me? I’ll never know.”

He concludes, after noting that his reunion “flew by quickly . . . pleasant as it was brief, if nothing special,””Life eventually becomes for everyone ‘drear and deadly,’ as Updike put it, but for some—most? the lucky few?—it offers gratification as well. Looking back becomes itself a source of such pleasure, even as looking forward, as the end of life approaches, becomes the opposite.”

Spiegelman’s most recent book is Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness.

In an essay written for The Millions, Charles Finch considers the “genius of James Wood, the literary critic at The New Yorker, and how it influenced the novel I’m about to publish.” But he also references John Updike in praising Wood’s ability to closely read a text and to “re-describe” what he reads.

“In the last ten or fifteen years precision of language has become the password that marks out serious writers of fiction. (In this respect, though in fewer and fewer others, John Updike’s influence remains enormous.) There aren’t many literary novelists at the moment who are content to be plainspoken, and those who are, Kazuo Ishiguro for instance, have clear narrative motives for the choice. Instead, when you open almost any well-regarded novel today it will have long passages of precisely poetic prose, full of surprising and carefully curated language.”

Finch later writes, “Of John Updike, whom I mentioned earlier, Wood has written’he is not, I think, a great writer, and the lacuna is not in the quality of his prose but in the risk of the thought.’

“The risk of the thought. That phrase has settled in my brain. The Last Enchantments [Finch’s own novel] is a relatively conventional story about an American abroad at Oxford, where he makes a break with his past life, meets new people, and falls in love. These could be the elements of a radical book or a safe one, a good one or a terrible one. I don’t personally think it’s terrible, but it may be safe. . . .”

Here’s the full article:  “Winning Over James Wood”