William Shawn

In 1975 – the year of her own death – Hannah Arendt published a heartfelt memorial essay about W.H. Auden in the New Yorker. It ranks, I think, as one of the finest tributes ever paid to the poet, that ‘expert in the infinite varieties of unrequited love’: a moving, tender harvest of 15 years’ warm friendship. The loveless Auden even wanted to marry Arendt after the death of the writer--philosopher’s second husband, Heinrich Blücher. Now turn to Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind: a much-acclaimed German ‘biography’ of the Jewish exile from Königsberg who, from her apartment at 370 Riverside Drive in New York, became one of the most influential, and sturdily independent, political and social thinkers of the postwar decades. Auden appears just once, in passing.

When John Updike died in 2009, aged 76, he left behind the last great paper trail. Novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist and art critic, he published with unstoppable fluidity in every genre. The sheer tonnage of his 60-odd books has now been augmented by A Life in Letters, a comparatively small sampling of the 25,000 or so epistles he sent out over the course of his life. This unwieldy volume serves up about 700 of them. I say he wrote with unstoppable fluidity (it was David Foster Wallace who dangled the question ‘Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?’), but I should add that the letters and postcards (Updike loved a postcard) contain more than just pretty phrases.