Last night, the New York Public Library hosted a tribute to John Updike, who died in January. Ann Goldstein, who edited Updike’s book reviews, delivered the following remarks.

In 1987, I became the editor of John Updike’s book reviews. After I sent him the galleys of the first review I was to edit, I got a letter outlining the procedure of his previous editor.

Her procedure and that of Rogers Whitaker before her, was to send me as you have done a ‘styled’ but not otherwise edited galley with always useful notations of unclarity, repetition, and male chauvinism, giving me thus the benefit of her reactions and enabling me to reread myself in the cold light of print. I would send the piece back promptly (she even enclosed a stamped big envelope, but this courtesy is not necessary) and wait for it to be scheduled; by Monday or Tuesday of that issue’s week she would generally have the page proofs to me, sometimes marked but usually not, and on Thursday afternoon we would simultaneously go over checking findings, other readers’ points, and my own attempts at improvement…. If none of this fits with your schedule or accustomed methods, I can cheerfully adjust.

With some variations, as the pace of the magazine, and the technology of its production, changed, this was how we worked for the next twenty years. He sent in the review, it was put into galleys with minimal fixing up, I sent him a proof with various notations, and he sent it back with his responses.

From 1992:

My criticism inspires me with an increasing impatience—it seems simultaneously timid and reckless, a callow papering-over of an invincible ignorance. Toward the end, on galley 12, I wearily brushed your suggested revisions aside, unable to rise to the occasion and finding my own phrasing more succinct and natural.

From 1989:

I notice that somebody went through and deleted the “Miss” on I’m sure sound feminist or something grounds. It just seems a little discourteous, to an elderly fellow like me, to call her “Dillard,” like some androgynous housekeeper or gruff governess. The one beginning the paragraph on galley 9 seemed especially curt. It was our way, in the days of Shawn, to give all living female authors the courtesy of a Miss or Mrs. (Mrs. Spark, Miss Murdoch) but I am happy to go with the new ways if it seems important.

He was attentive to everything—to New Yorker style, to punctuation, typography, suggestions about sentences and points brought up by the fact checkers. In another letter: “It’s as if I write these things with mental mittens on, and then we all have to labor at scraping off the fuzzballs.” He had a great appetite for and interest in scraping off the fuzzballs, and sometimes the proofs went back and forth several times, especially in the days of computer revisions and FedEx.

It’s a thorny piece and I hope transcribing these changes doesn’t give you the headache it gave me to fiddle them through. I can’t trust my ear at the end—which is the snappiest punch line. Sorry, feel sorry, or regret?