Now Watch This Drive

We find this passage in a letter written by John Updike to his girlfriend Mary Entwistle Pennington on April 1^st, 1952, sent from the farmhouse he was visiting in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where he had lived with his parents and maternal grandparents during high school before he went off to Harvard where he would meet Mary, a Radcliffe student, in a course on medieval sculpture. They would be engaged by the end of the year, with just over 20 years of marriage and four children ahead of them. In these tender letters to her, before the logistics of marrying obtrude, we can hear Updike’s music, as in this description of Jolson, the Plowville dog: “His hair, cultivated with a diet of raw eggs recommended by the sturdy veterinarian, is luxuriant, curving, gleaming, switching back upon itself in the triumph of brownness and blackness and whiteness.”