On October 1, 2015, Literary Hub published “The Life and Times of Alfred A. Knopf” by Chip McGrath, excerpted from a special edition history on the occasion of the company’s 100th anniversary. Since, as McGrath points out, Updike was “the last great acquisition of the Alfred era,” he is well represented.

John Updike once compared Alfred A. Knopf to “a cross between a Viennese emperor and a Barbary pirate,” McGrath writes.

“[Knopf’s] correspondence was hearty and businesslike and seldom ventured to make editorial suggestions. (A good example is the letter he wrote to Updike in 1967 after reading Couples. He called the novel a ‘lollapalooza,’ and then shrewdly suggested that at his own expense Updike hire a lawyer in case any of Updike’s friends or neighbors thought they recognized themselves in the book. Updike, incidentally, was the last great acquisition of the Alfred era, and despite their age difference, the two men hit it off immediately, not only because Knopf happily picked up Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair—after Harper dithered over it for months, suggesting first one revision, then another—but out of a shared love of typography.)”

“I love books physically,” Knopf wrote in his 1917 catalog, and “in 1965, when Knopf celebrated its 50th anniversary and was widely recognized for its distinguished record, it was Alfred who got most of the praise. The Typophiles, an organization that encouraged the appreciation of fine typography and bookmaking, published a two-volume Festschrift in his honor, with tributes from writers like John Hersey, Paul Horgan, John Crowe Ransom, and Updike.

Photo:  Carl van Vechten.

They say it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, and the often decorous John Updike probably wouldn’t have had anything negative to say about the recent death of E.L. Doctorow. But Updike is no longer among us and Bruce Weber, writing for The New York Times, quoted Updike’s comparatively nasty assessment of Doctorow’s historical novels in the obituary “E.L. Doctorow Dies at 84; Literary Time Traveler Stirred Past Into Fiction”:

“Perhaps the most telling review came from John Updike, who was prominent among a noisy minority of critics who generally found Mr. Doctorow’s tinkering with history misleading if not an outright violation of the tenets of narrative literature. Updike held Ragtime in especial disdain.

“’It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game,’ he wrote in The New Yorker, going on to dismiss several other Doctorow books before granting their author a reprieve.

“’His splendid new novel, The March, pretty well cures my Doctorow problem,’ Updike wrote, adding, ‘The novel shares with Ragtime a texture of terse episodes and dialogue shorn, in avant-garde fashion, of quotation marks, but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts; it celebrates its epic war with the stirring music of a brass marching band heard from afar, then loud and up close, and finally receding over the horizon.

“’Reading historical fiction,’ Updike went on, ‘we often itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get to the facts without the fiction. But The March stimulates little such itch; it offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide. Doctorow here appears not so much a reconstructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.'”

The Telegraph today paid a 100th birthday tribute to “Saul Bellow: ‘American writer supreme.'”

The story is a round-up of comments culled from remarks that writers and critics have made about Bellow over the years, including John Updike:

“Saul Bellow was the American writer supreme . . . our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist.”