On page 510 of the published correspondence of John Updike, the author is making a new will, after filing for divorce from first wife, Mary Pennington, and a year before his wedding to Martha Ruggles Bernhard. Writing to his editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, on 27 October 1976, Updike asks her to become a literary executor, issuing one direction: ‘My only thought on publication of unpublished material is that my letters are too dull to be dredged up.’ But the author’s literary trust – and now James Schiff, founding editor of the John Updike Review and editor of A Life in Letters – have judged him wrong about that. 

The note to Jones contains another failed prophecy, more poignant: ‘But I don’t intend to die for forty more years.’ That would have taken him to 2016; he fell almost seven years short, dying in a hospice on 27 January 2009, aged seventy-six, three months after suffering an annoying cough on a publicity tour for his final novel, The Widows of Eastwick. The cough led to escalating diagnoses of pneumonia and then lung cancer. Sixteen years is a long wait for the sorted mail of a writer – A Private Spy (2022), collecting John le Carré’s, came out two years after his death – and we must wonder if that ‘thought’ to Jones played a part in the delay, requiring both her death (in 2017) and that of her co-executor, Martha (in 2023), to circumvent the testament. 

We may also intuit other reasons why Martha and her predecessor, Mary (died 2018), might not have agreed to this volume. It contains a detailed user’s guide to his wives’ and lovers’ vaginas, referred to in the vernacular. The arguments in defence of free speech about sex and body parts