At Harvard, Updike’s freshman roommate was Christopher Lasch, who would become the author of “The Culture of Narcissism” (1979). It was a competitive, uneasy friendship. At Harvard, Updike met his first wife, Mary Pennington, to whom he would remain married for more than 20 years. It was their social set in Ipswich, Mass. ”” the cocktails, the games, the gamboling adultery ”” that he would describe so lovingly and so wickedly, deploying the full sensorium of his prose, in “Couples” (1968) and in so many short stories.
That Updike had affairs, sometimes with his friends’ wives, is not news. “I drank up women’s tears and spat them out,” he declared in one late poem, “as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.” Mr. Begley charts some of the details while naming few names, in order, he says, to respect privacy and promote candor.
“It was a matter of certain pride to be sleeping with John,” one friend comments. Mr. Begley suggests that Mary might have been the first in their marriage to have an affair. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” he wrote in “Couples….”
Looking forward to reading the book. I met Mr. Updike once. His stepson was one of my fraternity brothers at Penn. Jason never once mentioned who his stepfather was, but on graduation day he came back to the fraternity house early (too hot in the sun, and he had already seen Jason ‘walk’). He introduced himself as “Jason’s stepfather” and after a few minutes of chatting over cocktails I asked, “what do you do for a living?” and he said “I’m an author, my name is John Updike.” I was stunned and I had 15 minutes to speak with him privately about being an author (I had recently read “Rabbit, Run” and he spoke of his the next Rabbit book he was writing which would be “Rabbit at Rest”).