In
1966, when John Updike was first asked to do a Paris Review interview, he refused: “Perhaps I have written
fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me;
and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. Also, I really don't
have a great deal to tell interviewers; the little I learned about life and the
art of fiction I try to express in my work.”
The following year, a second request won
acceptance, but Updike's apprehension caused further delay. Should there be a
meeting followed by an exchange of written questions and answers, or should
this procedure be reversed? Need there be any meeting at all? (Updike fears
becoming, even for a moment, “one more gassy monologuist.”) In the end, during
the summer of 1967, written questions were submitted to him, and afterward, he
was interviewed on Martha's Vineyard, where he and his family take their
vacation.
A first view of Updike revealed a jauntiness of manner surprising in a writer
of such craft and sensibility. After barreling down Edgartown's narrow main
street, the author appeared from his beat-up Corvair—a barefoot, tousle-haired
young man dressed in khaki Bermudas and a sweatshirt.
Updike is a fluent talker, but obviously not a man who expects talk to bridge
the distance between others and his inner life. Therefore, the final stage of
this interview was his revision of the spoken comments to bring them into line
with the style of his written answers. The result is a fabricated interview—in
its modest way, a work of art, and thus appropriate to a man who believes that
only art can track the nuances of experience.
INTERVIEWER
You've treated your early years
fictionally and have discussed them in interviews, but you haven't said much
about your time at Harvard. I wonder what effect you think it had.
JOHN
UPDIKE
My time at Harvard, once I got by the
compression bends of the freshman year, was idyllic enough, and as they say,
successful; but I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment
a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make
him a butterfly. I remember the glow of the Fogg Museum windows, and my
wife-to-be pushing her singing bicycle through the snowy Yard, and the smell of
wet old magazines that arose from the cellar of the Lampoon and hit your
nostrils when you entered the narthex, and numerous pleasant revelations in
classrooms—all of it haunted, though, by knowledge of the many others who had
passed this way, and felt the venerable glory of it all a shade keener than I,
and written sufficiently about it. All that I seem able to preserve of the
Harvard experience is in one short story, “The Christian Roommates.” There was
another, “Homage to Paul Klee,” that has been printed in The Liberal Context but not in a book. Foxy Whitman, in Couples,remembers some of the things I do. Like me, she
feels obscurely hoodwinked, pacified, by the process of becoming nice. I
distrust, perhaps, hallowed, very okay places. Harvard has enough panegyrists
without me.
INTERVIEWER
Did you learn much writing for the Lampoon?
UPDIKE
The Lampoon was very kind to me. I was given, beside the snug
pleasures of club solidarity, carte blanche as far as the magazine went—I began
as a cartoonist, did a lot of light verse, and more and more prose. There was
always lots of space to fill. Also, I do have a romantic weakness for gags—we
called ourselves, the term itself a gag, gagsters. My own speciality was
Chinese jokes. A little birthday party, and the children singing to the
blushing center of attention, “Happy Birthday, Tu Yu.” Or coolies listening to
an agitator and asking each other, “Why shouldn't we work for coolie wages?” Or—another cartoon—a
fairy princess in a tower, her hair hanging to the ground and labeled Fire Exit.
And I remember Bink Young, now an Episcopal priest, solemnly plotting, his
tattered sneakers up on a desk, how to steal a battleship from Boston Harbor.
Maybe, as an imperfectly metamorphosed caterpillar, I was grateful for the
company of true butterflies.
INTERVIEWER
Have you given up drawing entirely? I
noticed that your recent “Letter from Anguilla” was illustrated by you.
UPDIKE
You're nice to have noticed. For years
I wanted to get a drawing into The
New Yorker, and at last I did. My first ambition
was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine
cartoonist. Newly married, I used to draw Mary and the children, and did have
that year in art school, but of late I don't draw at all, don't even doodle
beside the telephone. It's a loss, a sadness for me. I'm interested in concrete
poetry, in some attempt to return to the manuscript page, to use the page space, and the technical possibilities. My
new book, a long poem called Midpoint, tries to do something of this. Since we write for the
eye, why not really write for it—give it a treat? Letters are originally little
pictures, so let's combine graphic imagery, photographic imagery, with words. I
mean mesh them. Saying this, I think of Pound's Chinese
characters, and of course Apollinaire; and of my own poems, “Nutcracker,” with
the word nut in boldface, seems to me as good as George
Herbert's angel-wings.
INTERVIEWER
After graduating from Harvard, you
served as a New
Yorker staff writer for two years. What sort
of work did you do?
UPDIKE
I was a Talk of the Town writer, which
means that I both did the legwork and the finished product. An exalted
position! It was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who
went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make
impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you quit?
UPDIKE
After two years I doubted that I was
expanding the genre. When my wife and I had a second child and needed a larger
apartment, the best course abruptly seemed to leave the city, and with it the
job. They still keep my name on the staff sheet, and I still contribute Notes
and Comments, and I take much comfort from having a kind of professional home
where they consider me somehow competent. America in general doesn't expect
competence from writers. Other things, yes; competence, no.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about being associated
with that magazine for so many years?
UPDIKE
Very happy. From the age of twelve when
my aunt gave us a subscription for Christmas, The New Yorkerhas seemed to me the best of possible magazines,
and their acceptance of a poem and a story by me in June of 1954 remains the
ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life. Their editorial care and their
gratitude for a piece of work they like are incomparable. And I love the
format—the signature at the end, everybody the same size, and the battered
title type, evocative of the twenties and Persia and the future all at once.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to shun literary society. Why?
UPDIKE
I don't, do I? Here I am, talking to
you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary
demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world
seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a
bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in
my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of
Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years
old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.
The reviews, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place
the books on that shelf. Anyway, in 1957, I was full of a Pennsylvania thing I
wanted to say, and Ipswich gave me the space in which to say it, and in which
to live modestly, raise my children, and have friends on the basis of what I
did in person rather than what I did in print.
INTERVIEWER
Do your neighbors—present in Ipswich,
past in Shillington—get upset when they fancy they've found themselves in your
pages?
UPDIKE
I would say not. I count on people to
know the difference between flesh and paper, and generally they do. In
Shillington I was long away from the town, and there is a greater element of
distortion or suppression than may appear; there are rather few characters in
those Olinger stories that could even remotely take offense. Ipswich I've not
written too much about. Somewhat of the marsh geography peeps through inCouples, but
the couples themselves are more or less adults who could be encountered
anywhere in the East. The town, although it was a little startled at first by
the book, was reassured, I think, by reading it. The week after its
publication, when the Boston papers were whooping it up in high tabloid style,
and the Atlantic ran a banshee cry of indignation from Diana
Trilling, people like the gas-station attendant and a strange woman on the golf
course would stop me and say something soothing, complimentary. I work
downtown, above a restaurant, and can be seen plodding up to my office most
mornings, and I think Ipswich pretty much feels sorry for me, trying to make a
living at such a plainly unprofitable chore. Also, I do participate in local
affairs—I'm on the Congregational church building committee and the Democratic
town committee, and while the Couples fuss was in progress, capped by that
snaggle-toothed cover on Time, I was writing a pageant for our Seventeenth-century
Day. Both towns in my mind are not so much themselves as places I've happened to
be in when I was a child and then an adult. The difference between Olinger and
Tarbox is much more the difference between childhood and adulthood than the
difference between two geographical locations. They are stages on my pilgrim's
progress, not spots on the map.
INTERVIEWER
What about your parents? They seem to
appear often in your work. Have their reactions to earlier versions had an
effect on later ones?
UPDIKE
My parents should not be held to the
letter of any of the fictional fathers and mothers. But I don't mind admitting
that George Caldwell was assembled from certain vivid gestures and plights
characteristic of Wesley Updike; once, returning to Plowville after The Centaur came out, I was upbraided by a Sunday-school pupil
of my father's for my outrageous portrait, and my father, with typical
sanctity, interceded, saying, “No, it's the truth. The kid got me right.” My
mother, a different style of saint, is an ideal reader, and an ideally
permissive writer's mother. They both have a rather un-middle-class appetite
for the jubilant horrible truth, and after filling my childhood with warmth and
color, they have let me make my adult way without interference and been never
other than encouraging, even when old wounds were my topic, and a child's
vision of things has been lent the undue authority of print. I have written
free from any fear of forfeiting their love.
INTERVIEWER
Most of your work takes place in a
common locale: Olinger. So it was interesting to see you say farewell to that
world in your preface to the Olinger
Stories. Yet in the following year you
published Of
the Farm. Why do you feel so drawn to this
material?
UPDIKE
But Of the Farm was about Firetown; they only visit the Olinger
supermarket. I am drawn to southeastern Pennsylvania because I know how things
happen there, or at least how they used to happen. Once you have in your bones
the fundamental feasibilities of a place, you can imagine there freely.
INTERVIEWER
That's not what I mean. What I meant to
ask is not why you keep writing about Olinger per se, but why you write so much
about what most people take to be your own adolescence and family. Numerous
critics, for example, have pointed to similarities between Of the Farm, The Centaur, and stories like “My Grandmother's Thimble.”
“Flight,” for example, seems an earlier version of Of the Farm.
UPDIKE
I suppose there's no avoiding
it—my adolescence seemed interesting to me. In a sense my mother and father,
considerable actors both, were dramatizing my youth as I was having it so that
I arrived as an adult with some burden of material already half formed. There
is, true, a submerged thread connecting certain of the fictions, and I guess
the submerged thread is the autobiography. That is, in Of the Farm,although the last name is not the name of the
people in The
Centaur, the geography is not appreciably
changed, and the man in each case is called George. Of the Farm was in part a look at the world of The Centaur after the centaur had indeed died. By the way, I
must repeat that I didn't mean Caldwell to die inThe Centaur; he
dies in the sense of living, of going back to work, of being a shelter for his
son. But by the time Joey Robinson is thirty-five, his father is dead. Also,
there's the curious touch of the Running Horse River in Rabbit, Run which returns in the Alton of The Centaur. And somehow that Running Horse bridges both the
books, connects them. When I was little, I used to draw disparate objects on a
piece of paper—toasters, baseballs, flowers, whatnot—and connect them with
lines. But every story, really, is a fresh start for me, and these little
connections—recurrences of names, or the way, say, that Piet Hanema's insomnia
takes him back into the same high school that John Nordholm, and David Kern,
and Allen Dow sat in—are in there as a kind of running, oblique coherence. Once
I've coined a name, by the way, I feel utterly hidden behind that mask, and
what I remember and what I imagine become indistinguishable. I feel no
obligation to the remembered past; what I create on paper must, and for me
does, soar free of whatever the facts were. Do I make any sense?
INTERVIEWER
Some.
UPDIKE
In others words, I disavow any
essential connection between my life and whatever I write. I think it's a
morbid and inappropriate area of concern, though natural enough—a lot of morbid
concerns are natural. But the work, the words on the paper, must stand apart
from our living presences; we sit down at the desk and become nothing but the
excuse for these husks we cast off. But apart from the somewhat teasing little
connections, there is in these three novels and the short stories of Pigeon Feathers a central image of flight or escape or loss, the
way we flee from the past, a sense of guilt which I tried to express in the
story, the triptych with the long title, “The Blessed Man of Boston, My
Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island,” wherein the narrator becomes a
Polynesian pushing off into a void. The sense that in time as well as space we
leave people as if by volition and thereby incur guilt and thereby owe them,
the dead, the forsaken, at least the homage of rendering them. The trauma or
message that I acquired in Olinger had to do with suppressed pain, with the
amount of sacrifice I suppose that middle-class life demands, and by that I
guess I mean civilized life. The father, whatever his name, is sacrificing
freedom of motion, and the mother is sacrificing in a way—oh, sexual richness,
I guess; they're all stuck, and when I think back over these stories (and you
know, they are dear to me and if I had to give anybody one book of
me it would be the Vintage Olinger
Stories), I think especially of that moment in
“Flight” when the boy, chafing to escape, fresh from his encounter with Molly
Bingaman and a bit more of a man but not enough quite, finds the mother lying
there buried in her own peculiar messages from far away, the New Orleans jazz,
and then the grandfather's voice comes tumbling down the stairs singing, “There
is a happy land far far away.” This is the way it was, is. There has never been
anything in my life quite as compressed, simultaneously as communicative to me
of my own power and worth and of the irremediable grief in just living, in just
going on.
I really don't think I'm alone among writers in caring about what they
experienced in the first eighteen years of their life. Hemingway cherished the
Michigan stories out of proportion, I would think, to their merit. Look at
Twain. Look at Joyce. Nothing that happens to us after twenty is as free from
self-consciousness because by then we have the vocation to write. Writers'
lives break into two halves. At the point where you get your writerly vocation
you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind
of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into
honey—whereas when you're young, you're so impotent you cannot help but strive
and observe and feel.
INTERVIEWER
How does Mrs. Updike react to your
work? Time quotes you as having said she never entirely
approves of your novels.
UPDIKE
Mary is a pricelessly sensitive reader.
She is really always right, and if I sometimes, notably in the novels,
persevere without her unqualified blessing, it is because somebody in me—the
gagster, the fanatic, the boor—must be allowed to have his say. I usually don't
show her anything until I am finished, or stuck. I never disregard her remarks,
and she is tactful in advancing them.
INTERVIEWER
In your review of James Agee's Letters to Father Flye, you defend professionalism. Even so, are you
bothered by having to write for a living?
UPDIKE
No, I always wanted to draw or write
for a living. Teaching, the customary alternative, seemed truly depleting and
corrupting. I have been able to support myself by and large with the more
respectable forms—poetry, short stories, novels—but what journalism I have done
has been useful. I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles
if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into
words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me; the technical
aspects of bookmaking, from type font to binding glue, interest me. The
distinction between a thing well done and a thing done ill obtains
everywhere—in all circles of Paradise and Inferno.
INTERVIEWER
You write a fair amount of literary
criticism. Why?
UPDIKE
I do it (a) when some author, like
Spark or Borges, excites me and I want to share the good news, (b) when I want
to write an essay, as on romantic love, or Barth's theology, (c) when I feel
ignorant of something, like modern French fiction, and accepting a review
assignment will compel me to read and learn.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it helpful in your fiction?
UPDIKE
I think it good for an author, baffled
by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is,
how hard it is to keep the plot straight in summary, let alone to sort out
one's honest responses. But reviewing should not become a habit. It encourages a
writer to think of himself as a pundit, of fiction as a collective enterprise
and species of expertise, and of the imagination as a cerebral and social
activity—all pernicious illusions.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to ask a bit about your work
habits if I may. What sort of schedule do you follow?
UPDIKE
I write every weekday morning. I try to
vary what I am doing, and my verse, or poetry, is a help here. Embarked on a
long project, I try to stay with it even on dull days. For every novel,
however, that I have published, there has been one unfinished or scrapped. Some
short stories—I think offhand of “Lifeguard,” “The Taste of Metal,” “My
Grandmother's Thimble”—are fragments salvaged and reshaped. Most came right the
first time—rode on their own melting, as Frost said of his poems. If there is
no melting, if the story keeps sticking, better stop and look around. In the
execution there has to be a “happiness” that can't be willed or foreordained.
It has to sing, click, something. I try instantly to set in motion a certain
forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story or novel to
rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.
INTERVIEWER
When your workday is through, are you
able to leave it behind or does your writing haunt your afternoons and echo
your experience?
UPDIKE
Well, I think the subconscious picks at
it, and occasionally a worrisome sentence or image will straighten itself out,
and then you make a note of it. If I'm stuck, I try to get myself unstuck
before I sit down again because moving through the day surrounded by people and
music and air it is easier to make major motions in your mind than it is
sitting at the typewriter in a slightly claustrophobic room. It's hard to hold
a manuscript in your mind, of course. You get down to the desk and discover
that the solution you had arrived at while having insomnia doesn't really fit.
I guess I'm never unconscious of myself as a writer and of my present project.
A few places are specially conducive to inspiration—automobiles, church—private
places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church—little shivers and
urgencies I would note down on the program and carry down to the office Monday.
INTERVIEWER
Well, you're not only a writer but a
famous one. Are you experiencing any disadvantages in being famous?
UPDIKE
I'm interviewed too much. I fight them
off, but even one is too many. However hard you try to be honest or full, they
are intrinsically phony. There is something terribly wrong about committing
myself to this machine and to your version of what you get out of the
machine—you may be deaf for all I know, and the machine may be faulty. All the
stuff comes out attached to my name, and it's not really me at all. My
relationship to you and my linear way of coping out loud are distortive. In any
interview, you do say more or less than you mean. You leave the proper ground
of your strength and become one more gassy monologuist. Unlike Mailer and
Bellow, I don't have much itch to pronounce on great matters, to reform the
country, to get elected Mayor of New York, or minister to the world with
laughter like the hero of The
Last Analysis. My life is, in a sense, trash, my
life is only that of which the residue is my writing. The person who appears on
the cover of Time or whose monologue will be printed in The Paris Review is neither the me who exists physically and
socially or the me who signs the fiction and poetry. That is, everything is
infinitely fine, and any opinion is somehow coarser than the texture of the
real thing.
I find it hard to have opinions. Theologically, I favor Karl Barth;
politically, I favor the Democrats. But I treasure a remark John Cage made,
that not judgingness but openness and curiosity are our proper business. To
speak on matters where you're ignorant dulls the voice for speaking on matters
where you do know something.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things I've always thought
would be difficult for famous writers is being constantly sent manuscripts by
aspiring amateurs. Do you experience this, and if so, how do you treat them?
UPDIKE
I tend to lose them. The manuscripts. I
remember myself as an aspiring writer, and you know, I never did this. I
assumed that published writers had worked at it until they became worth
publishing, and I assumed that that's the only way to do it, and I'm a little puzzled
by young men who write me charming letters suggesting that I conduct an
impromptu writing course. Evidently, I've become part of the Establishment
that's expected to serve youth—like college presidents and the police. I'm
still trying to educate myself. I want to read only what will help me unpack my
own bag.
INTERVIEWER
While we're on the subject of your
public role, I wonder how you react to the growing use of your fiction in
college courses.
UPDIKE
Oh, is it? Do they use it?
INTERVIEWER
I use it a great deal. What do you
think about it, as a writer? Do you think that it's going to interfere with the
reader's comprehension or feeling for your work. I mean, do you go along with
Trilling's idea, for example, that modern literature is somehow diluted by
appearing in the social context of the classroom, or are you not concerned
about this?
UPDIKE
No. Looking back on my own college
experience, the college course is just a way of delivering you to the books,
and once you're delivered, the writer-reader relationship is there. I read
Dostoyevsky for a college course and wept.
If what you say is true, I'm delighted. I do think it difficult to teach, as is
done so much now, courses in truly contemporary writing. (At Oxford, they used
to stop with Tennyson.) Of course, maybe I'm not so contemporary anymore; maybe
I'm sort of like Eisenhower or—
INTERVIEWER
You're over thirty—you're over the
hill.
UPDIKE
Don't laugh—most American writers are over the hill by thirty. Maybe I'm like Sherman
Adams and Fats Domino and other, you know, semi-remote
figures who have acquired a certain historical interest. We're anxious in
America to package our things quickly, and the writer can become a package
before he's ready to have the coffin lid nailed down.
INTERVIEWER
Well, let's think of another package
now—not the package by time but by country. Are you conscious of belonging to a
definable American literary tradition? Would you describe yourself as part of
an American tradition?
UPDIKE
I must be. I've hardly ever been out of
the country.
INTERVIEWER
Specifically, do you feel that you've
learned important things or felt spiritual affinities with classic American
writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, James, people of this sort?
UPDIKE
I love Melville and like James, but I
tend to learn more from Europeans because I think they have strengths that
reach back past Puritanism, that don't equate truth with intuition—
INTERVIEWER
In other words, you want to be
nourished by the thing that you don't feel is inherently your tradition.
UPDIKE
Right. I'm not saying I can write like
Melville or James, but that the kind of passion and bias that they show is
already in my bones. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts.
Far better to seek out models of what you can't do. American fiction is notoriously thin on women,
and I have attempted a number of portraits of women, and we
may have reached that point of civilization, or decadence, where we can look at women. I'm not sure Mark Twain was able to.
INTERVIEWER
Let's get into your work now. In an
interview you gave Life you expressed some regret at the “yes, but”
attitude critics have taken toward it. Did the common complaint that you had
ducked large subjects lead to the writing of Couples?
UPDIKE
No, I meant my work says, “Yes, but.” Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but—the social fabric
collapses murderously. Yes, in The
Centaur, to self-sacrifice and duty, but—what of
a man's private agony and dwindling? No, in The Poorhouse Fair, to social homogenization and loss of faith,
but—listen to the voices, the joy of persistent existence. No, in Couples, to a religious community founded on physical and
psychical interpenetration, but—what else shall we do, as God destroys our
churches? I cannot greatly care what critics say of my work; if it is good, it
will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will
sink, having in the meantime provided me with a living, the opportunities of
leisure, and a craftsman's intimate satisfactions. I wrote Couples because the rhythm of my life and my oeuvre
demanded it, not to placate hallucinatory critical voices.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by attributing the
setting up of religious communities in Couples to God's destruction of our churches?
UPDIKE
I guess the noun “God” reappears in two
totally different senses, the god in the first instance being the god worshiped
within this nice white church, the more or less watered-down Puritan god; and
then god in the second sense means ultimate power. I've never really understood
theologies which would absolve God of earthquakes and typhoons, of children
starving. A god who is not God the Creator is not very real to me, so that,
yes, it certainly is God who throws the lightning bolt, and this God is
above the nice god, above the god we can worship and empathize with. I guess
I'm saying there's a fierce God above the kind God, and he's the one Piet
believes in. At any rate, when the church is burned, Piet is relieved of
morality and can choose Foxy—or can accept the choice made for him by Foxy and
Angela operating in unison—can move out of the paralysis of guilt into what
after all is a kind of freedom. He divorces the supernatural to marry the
natural. I wanted the loss of Angela to be felt as a real loss—Angela is nicer
than Foxy—nevertheless it is Foxy that he most deeply wants, it is Foxy who in
some obscure way was turned on the lathe for him. So that the book does have a
happy ending. There's also a way, though, I should say (speaking of “yes, but”)
in which, with the destruction of the church, with the removal of his guilt, he
becomes insignificant. He becomes merely a name in the last paragraph: he
becomes a satisfied person and in a sense dies. In other words, a person who
has what he wants, a satisfied person, a content person, ceases to be a person.
Unfallen Adam is an ape. Yes, I guess I do feel that. I feel that to be a
person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation.
A truly adjusted person is not a person at all—just an animal with clothes on
or a statistic. So that it's a happy ending, with this “but” at the end.
INTERVIEWER
I was impressed by the contrast between
the presentation of oral-genital contacts in Couples and its single appearance in Rabbit, Run. Rabbit's insistence that Ruth perform the act is
the cause of their breakup.
UPDIKE
No. Janice's having the baby is.
INTERVIEWER
If you say so; but I'd still like to
know why an act that is treated so neutrally in the later book is so
significant in the earlier one.
UPDIKE
Well, Couples, in part, is about the change in sexual deportment
that has occurred since the publication of Rabbit, Run, which came out late in ’59; shortly thereafter, we
had Lady
Chatterley and the first Henry Miller books, and
now you can't walk into a grocery store without seeing pornography on the rack.
Remember Piet lying in Freddy's bed admiring Freddy's collection of Grove Press
books? In Rabbit,
Runwhat is demanded, in Couples is freely given. What else? It's a way of eating,
eating the apple, of knowing. It's nostalgic for them, for Piet of Annabelle
Vojt and for Foxy of the Jew. In De Rougement's book on Tristan and Iseult he
speaks of the sterility of the lovers and Piet and Foxy are sterile vis-à-vis
each other. Lastly, I was struck, talking to a biochemist friend of mine, how
he emphasized not only the chemical composition of enzymes but their structure;
it matters, among my humans, not only what they're made of but exactly how they
attach to each other. So much for oral-genital contacts.
About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as
needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's
take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of
human behavior. There are episodes in Henry Miller that have their human
resonance; the sex in Lolita, behind the madman's cuteness, rings true; and I
find the sex in D. H. Lawrence done from the woman's point of view convincing
enough. In the microcosm of the individual consciousness, sexual events are
huge but not all-eclipsing; let's try to give them their size.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to move on to The Centaur now. If I'm right in regarding it as formally
uncharacteristic, I wonder why you prefer it to your other novels?
UPDIKE
Well, it seems in memory my gayest and
truest book; I pick it up, and read a few pages, in which Caldwell is insisting
on flattering a moth-eaten bum, who is really the god Dionysus, and I begin
laughing.
INTERVIEWER
What made you decide to employ a mythic
parallel?
UPDIKE
I was moved, first, by the Chiron
variant of the Hercules myth—one of the few classic instances of
self-sacrifice, and the name oddly close to Christ. The book began as an
attempt to publicize this myth. The mythology operated in a number of ways: a
correlative of the enlarging effect of Peter's nostalgia, a dramatization of
Caldwell's sense of exclusion and mysteriousness around him, a counterpoint of
ideality to the drab real level, an excuse for a number of jokes, a serious
expression of my sensation that the people we meet are guises, do conceal something mythic, perhaps prototypes or
longings in our minds. We love some women more than others by predetermination,
it seems to me.
INTERVIEWER
Why haven't you done more work in this
mode?
UPDIKE
But I have worked elsewhere in a mythic
mode. Apart from my short story about Tristan and Iseult, there is the St.
Stephen story underlying The
Poorhouse Fair, and Peter Rabbit under Rabbit, Run. Sometimes it is semiconscious; for example, only
lately do I see that Brewer, the city of brick painted the color of flowerpots,
is the flowerpot that Mr. McGregor slips over Peter Rabbit. And in Couples, Piet is not only Hanema/anima/Life, he is Lot, the
man with two virgin daughters, who flees Sodom and leaves his wife behind.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, of course, the Tristan story is
like The
Centaur, but even if your other novels have
underlying mythological or scriptural subjects, they don't obtrude as they do
in The
Centaur. So let me rephrase my question. Why didn't you make the parallels more obvious in the other
books?
UPDIKE
Oh—I don't think basically that such
parallels should be obvious. I think books should have secrets, like people do.
I think they should be there as a bonus for the sensitive reader or there as a kind
of subliminal quavering. I don't think that the duty of the twentieth-century
fiction writer is to retell old stories only. I've often wondered what Eliot
meant in his famous essay on Ulysses. Does he mean that we are ourselves so depleted of
psychic energy, of spiritual and primitive force, that we can do little but
retell old stories? Does he mean that human events, love, death, wandering,
certain challenges overcome or certain challenges which sweep us under, have
already attained classic narrative form? I don't quite know what Eliot meant. I
do know that there is certainly for all of us some attraction in old stories.
Mine is a generation not raised on the Bible. The Greek stories seem to be more
universal coin, and they certainly have served to finance more modern creations
than the Hebrew stories. (Although do read sometime Kierkegaard's splendid
retelling of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling.) Freud, for one, named a number of states of mind
after them.
I have read old sagas—Beowulf, the Mabinogion—trying to find the story in its most rudimentary
form, searching for what a story is—Why
did these people enjoy hearing them? Are they a kind of disguised history? Or,
more likely I guess, are they ways of relieving anxiety, of transferring it
outwards upon an invented tale and purging it through catharsis? In any case, I
feel the need for this kind of recourse to the springs of narrative, and maybe
my little buried allusions are admissions of it. It's funny, the things you
don't know you're doing; I was aware of Piet as Lot and I was aware of Piet and
Foxy as being somehow Tristan and Iseult, but I was not very aware of him as
Don Juan. The other day I got a long, brilliant letter from a man at Wesleyan
describing the book in terms of the Don Juan legend, pointing out numerous
illuminating analogies. He thinks that Don Juans, historically, appear in the
imperialist countries just as the tide turns: the classic Don Juan appears in
Spain just as Spain has lost the Netherlands, and so Piet's activity somehow
coincides with our frustration in Vietnam. All this is news to me, but, once
said, it sounds right. I'll have to read the letter again. It elicited for me
certain basic harmonies, certain congruences with prototypes in the Western
consciousness that I'm happy to accept.
INTERVIEWER
Let's turn from myth to history. You
have indicated a desire to write about President Buchanan. Yet, so far as I can
see, American history is normally absent from your work.
UPDIKE
Not so; quite the contrary. In each of
my novels, a precise year is given and a president reigns; The Centaur is distinctly a Truman book, and Rabbit, Run an Eisenhower one. Couples could have taken place only under Kennedy; the
social currents it traces are as specific to those years as flowers in a meadow
are to their moment of summer. Even The Poorhouse Fair has a president, President Lowenstein, and if one
is not named in Of
the Farm, it may be because that book, in an odd
way, also takes place in the future, though a future only a year or so in
advance of the writing—a future now in the past. Hook, Caldwell, the
Applesmiths, all talk about history, and the quotidian is littered with
newspaper headlines, striking the consciousness of the characters obliquely and
subliminally but firmly enough: Piet's first step at seducing Foxy is clearly
in part motivated by the death of the Kennedy infant. And the atmosphere of
fright permeating The
Centaur is to an indicated extent early
cold-war nerves. My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more
history in it than history books, just as there is more breathing history in
archaeology than in a list of declared wars and changes of government.
INTERVIEWER
What about violence? Many critics
complain that this is absent from your work—reprehensibly, because it is so
present in the world. Why is there so little in your pages?
UPDIKE
There has been so little in my life. I
have fought in no wars and engaged in few fistfights. I do not think a man
pacifist in his life should pretend to violence in fiction; Nabokov's bloody
deeds, for example, seem more literary than lived to me. Muriel Spark's have
the quality of the assassinations we commit in our minds. Mailer's recent
violence is trumpery, just like Leslie Fiedler's cry for more, more. I feel a
tenderness toward my characters that forbids making violent use of them. In
general, the North American continent in this century has been a place where
catastrophe has held off, and likewise the lives I have witnessed have staved
off real death. All my novels end with a false death, partial death. If, as may
be, the holocausts at the rim of possibility do soon visit us, I am confident
my capacities for expression can rise, if I live, to the occasion. In the
meantime let's all of us with some access to a printing press not abuse our
privilege with fashionable fantasies.
INTERVIEWER
Well, one thing I'm sure must impress
everyone about your fiction: the factual accuracy. The way, for example, you
can provide data for Ken Whitman's talk on photosynthesis as well as Piet's on
architectural restoration. Do you actively research such material, or do you
rely on what you already know?
UPDIKE
Well, a bit of both, and I'm glad you
do find it convincing. I'm never sure it is. A man whose life is spent in
biochemistry or in building houses, his brain is tipped in a certain way. It's
terribly hard, I think, for specialists to convey to me, as I ask them more or
less intelligent questions, the right nuance—it's hard for me to reconstruct in
my own mind the mind of a man who has spent twenty years with his field. I
think the attempt should be made, however. There is a thinness in contemporary
fiction about the way the world operates, except the academic world. I do try,
especially in this novel, to give characters professions. Shaw's plays have a
wonderful wealth of professional types. Shaw's sense of economic process, I
guess, helped him (a) to care and (b) to convey, to plunge into the mystery of
being a chimney sweep or a minister. One of the minimal obligations a book has
to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and
more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do
at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and
dialogue.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to ask a question about The Poorhouse Fair. Many people have been bothered in that book by
Conner's foolishness. He seems a bit easy as the butt of satire. Do you think
there is much justification in that charge?
UPDIKE
I'd have to reread the book to know. It
could be that I was too little in sympathy with what I imagine him to be
standing for. Of course a writer is in no position to alter a reader's
reaction. Performance is all, and if I didn't really give you flesh and blood,
then nothing I can say now will substitute. But it occurs to me that Conner was
a preliminary study for Caldwell in The Centaur: the bulging upper lip and a certain Irishness, a
certain tenacity, a certain—they're both poor disciplinarians, I notice in
thinking about them. I wasn't satirical in my purpose. I may have been
negative, but satire, no. I'm not conscious of any piece of fiction of mine
which has even the slightest taint of satirical attempt. You can't be satirical
at the expense of fictional characters, because they're your creatures. You
must only love them, and I think that once I'd set Conner in motion I did to
the best of my ability try to love him and let his mind and heart beat.
INTERVIEWER
Isn't “The Doctor's Wife” an exception
to your statement that you never satirize one of your characters?
UPDIKE
You think I'm satirizing the doctor's
wife? I'm criticizing the doctor's wife. Yes, I do feel that in some way
she is a racist, but I'm not trying, I don't think I'm trying, to make her
funny because she's a racist.
INTERVIEWER
There's some satire in your poetry,
isn't there? But I wonder why, with few exceptions, you only write light verse.
UPDIKE
I began with light verse, a kind of
cartooning in print, and except for one stretch of a few years, in which I
wrote most of the serious poems in Telephone Poles, I feel uncertain away from rhyme to which something
comic adheres. Bergson's mechanical encrusted upon the organic. But the light
verse poems putting into rhyme and jaunty metrics some scientific discovery
have a serious point—the universe science discloses to us is farcically
unrelated to what our primitive senses report—and I have, when such poems go
well, a pleasure and satisfaction not lower than in any other form of literary
activity.
INTERVIEWER
You've published work in all the
literary forms except drama. Why haven't you worked in this form?
UPDIKE
I've never much enjoyed going to plays
myself; they always seem one act too long, and I often can't hear. The last
play I went to, I remember, was A
Delicate Balance; I
sat next to the wall, and trucks kept shifting gears on the other side of it,
and I missed most of the dialogue. The unreality of painted people standing on
a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I
can overlook. Also, I think the theater is a quicksand of money and people with
push. Harold Brodkey, a splendid writer my age, disappeared for five years into
a play that was never produced. From Twain and James to Faulkner and Bellow,
the history of novelists as playwrights is a sad one. A novelist is no more
prepared to write for the stage than a good distance runner is equipped for
ballet. A play is verbal ballet, and I mean to include in that equation some
strong reservations about ballet. Less than perfectly done, it's very tiresome.
A play's capacity for mimesis is a fraction of a novel's. Shakespeare, and to a
lesser extent Shaw, wrote their plays as “turns” and exercises for actors they
knew—without Will Kempe, no Falstaff. Without this kind of intimacy, the
chances of life creeping into a play are slight. On both sides of the
footlights, I think the present American theater mainly an excuse for being
sociable.
INTERVIEWER
But if I'm not mistaken, you once
expressed a desire to write for the films and I think Rabbit, Run, in particular, is quite a cinematic novel. Do you
have any such plans now?
UPDIKE
Rabbit,
Run was subtitled originally, “A Movie.” The present
tense was in part meant to be an equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration.
The opening bit of the boys playing basketball was visualized to be taking
place under the titles and credits. This doesn't mean, though, that I really
wanted to write for the movies. It meant I wanted to make a movie. I could come
closer by writing it in my own book than by attempting to get through to
Hollywood.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the film has much to teach
the novelist?
UPDIKE
I'm not sure. I think that we live in
an eye-oriented era and that both the movies and the graphic arts, the
painterly arts, haunt us, haunt word people quite a lot. I've written about our
jealousy in my review of Robbe-Grillet and his theories. In brief, we're
jealous because the visual arts have captured all the glamorous people—the rich
and the young.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think there is a possibility of
the novelist feeling at a disadvantage, that the instantaneousness and
completeness of the image is making him somehow have to run to catch up? Have
you ever felt that?
UPDIKE
Oh, sure. I think we are covetous of
the success, the breadth of appeal. A movie does not really require much work.
It pours into us, it fills us like milk being poured into a glass, whereas
there is some cerebral effort needed to turn a bunch of mechanical marks on a
page into moving living images. So that, yes, the power of the cinema, the
awful power of it, the way from moron to genius it captivates us, it hypnotizes
us . . . What I don't know is how relevant attempts to imitate this
instantaneity, this shuffle of images, are to the novelist's art. I think that
the novel is descended from two sources, historical accounts and letters. The
personal letters, the epistolary novel, the novel of Richardson, which is
revived now only as a tour de force, does have this cinematic instantaneity;
the time is occurring on the page. But this is a minority current in the
contemporary novel; we are held captive to the novel as history, as an account
of things once done. The account of things done minus the presiding, talkative,
confiding, and pedagogic author may be a somewhat dead convention; that is, like
anybody who takes any writing courses, I was told how stale and awful it is
when authors begin to signal, as Dickens did, over the heads of the characters
to the reader. Yet I feel that something has been lost with this authority,
with this sense of an author as God, as a speaking God, as a chatty God,
filling the universe of the book. Now we have the past tense, a kind of a
noncommittal deadness: God paring his fingernails. We may be getting the worst
of both worlds.
Couples was
in some ways an old-fashioned novel; I found the last thirty pages—the rounding
up, the administering of fortunes—curiously satisfying, pleasant. Going from
character to character, I had myself the sensation of flying, of conquering
space. In Rabbit,
Run I liked writing in the present tense.
You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a
curious ease not available to the past tense. I'm not sure it's as clear to the
reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of
music you can strike off in the present tense. I don't know why I've not done a
full-length novel in it again. I began tentatively, but one page deep into the
book, it seemed very natural and congenial, so much so that while doing The Centaur I was haunted by the present tense and finally
wrote a whole chapter in it.
INTERVIEWER
You speak with some regret about the
present authorial disinclination to signal above the heads of the characters. I
am interested in your evaluation of the success of three contemporary writers
who seem to me to have maintained this willingness to signal to the reader
directly. The first one I'd like to mention and get your reaction to is Robert
Penn Warren.
UPDIKE
I'm sorry. I don't know Penn Warren's
prose well enough to comment.
INTERVIEWER
How about Barth?
UPDIKE
Barth I know imperfectly, but I have
read the first two novels and parts of the last two and some of the short
stories. I also know Barth personally and find him a most likable and engaging
and modest man. He and I are near the same age and born not too far from each
other, he in Maryland and I in southeastern Pennsylvania. His work is partly
familiar and partly repellent; I feel he hit the floor of nihilism hard and
returns to us covered with coal dust. We are very close to an abyss as we
traverse Barth's rolling periods and curiously elevated point of view. I guess
my favorite book of his is The
Floating Opera, which is likeThe Poorhouse Fair in
ending with a kind of carnival, a brainless celebration of the fact of
existence. As it stands now, Barth seems to me a very strong-minded and
inventive and powerful voice from another planet; there is something
otherworldly about his fiction that makes it both fascinating and barren, at
least for me. I'd rather visit Uranus than read through Giles Goat-Boy.
INTERVIEWER
What about Bellow?
UPDIKE
There is in Bellow a kind of little
professor, a professor-elf, who keeps fluttering around the characters, and I'm
not sure he's my favorite Bellow character, this voice. He's almost always there,
putting exclamatory marks after sentences, making little utterances and in
general inviting us to participate in moral decisions. This person—whom I take
to be the author—contributes to the soft focus of Bellow's endings. The middles
are so rich with detail, with charm and love of life; I think how in Henderson the Rain King he remembers rubbing oil into his pregnant wife's
stomach to ease the stretch marks. It's this professor, this earnest
sociological man who somehow wants us to be better than we are, who muddles the
endings, not exactly happy endings, but they are endings which would point the way. He cares so—the way Bellow can conjure up a minor
character and set him tumbling across the paragraph.
But the general question of authorial presence—I find it irksome when an author
is there as a celebrity. In Salinger's later works and most of Mailer's work
the author appears as somebody who counts, somebody who has an audience of
teenagers out there waiting to hear from him. This kind of return to before
Chekhov I don't find useful, although authorial invisibility is also a pose.
The proper pose may be the Homeric bard's one—he is there, but unimportantly
there, there by sufferance of the king.
INTERVIEWER
What about the cultivation of
pretense—playing around with it. I mean, what do you think of a writer like
Barthelme?
UPDIKE
He was an art director of some sort
and, just as Kerouac's work was a kind of action writing to answer action
painting, so Barthelme's short stories and the one novelette seem to me to be
an attempt to bring over into prose something Pop. I think, you know, on the
one hand of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans and on the other of the Chinese
baby food that the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White are making. Then again you do get a hard-edge
writing in a way. In one of his short stories he says that the hard nut-brown
word has enough aesthetic satisfaction for anybody but a fool. I also think his
stories are important for what they don't say, for the things that don't happen
in them, that stand revealed as clichés.
Yes—I think he's interesting, but more interesting as an operator within a
cultural scene than as a—oh, as a singer to my spirit. A quaint phrase that
possibly betrays me.
INTERVIEWER
What of writers who've influenced you? Salinger?
Nabokov?
UPDIKE
I learned a lot from Salinger's short
stories; he did remove the short narrative from the wise-guy, slice-of-life
stories of the thirties and forties. Like most innovative artists, he made new
room for shapelessness, for life as it is lived. I'm thinking of a story like
“Just Before the War with the Eskimos” not “For Esmé,” which already shows
signs of emotional overkill. Nabokov, I admire but would emulate only his high
dedication to the business of making books that are not sloppy, that can be
reread. I think his aesthetic models, chess puzzles and protective colorations
in lepidoptera, are rather special.
INTERVIEWER
Henry Green? O’Hara?
UPDIKE
Green's tone, his touch of truth, his
air of peddling nothing and knowing everything, I would gladly attain to, if I
could. For sheer transparence of eye and ear he seems to me unmatched among
living writers. Alas, for a decade he has refused to write, showing I suppose
his ultimate allegiance to life itself. Some of O’Hara's short stories also
show a very rare transparence, freshness, and unexpectedness. Good works of art
direct us back outward to reality again; they illustrate, rather than ask,
imitation.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned Kerouac a moment ago. How
do you feel about his work?
UPDIKE
Somebody like Kerouac who writes on
teletype paper as rapidly as he can once slightly alarmed me. Now I can look
upon this more kindly. There may be some reason to question the whole idea of
fineness and care in writing. Maybe something can get into sloppy writing that
would elude careful writing. I'm not terribly careful myself, actually. I write
fairly rapidly if I get going, and don't change much, and have never been one
for making outlines or taking out whole paragraphs or agonizing much. If a
thing goes, it goes for me, and if it doesn't go, I eventually stop and get
off.
INTERVIEWER
What is it that you think gets into
sloppy writing that eludes more careful prose?
UPDIKE
It comes down to what is language? Up
to now, until this age of mass literacy, language has been something spoken. In
utterance there's a minimum of slowness. In trying to treat words as chisel
strokes, you run the risk of losing the quality of utterance, the rhythm of
utterance, the happiness. A phrase out of Mark Twain—he describes a raft
hitting a bridge and says that it “went all to smash and scatteration like a
box of matches struck by lightning.” The beauty of “scatteration” could only
have occurred to a talkative man, a man who had been brought up among people
who were talking and who loved to talk himself. I'm aware myself of a certain
dryness of this reservoir, this backlog of spoken talk. A Romanian once said to
me that Americans are always telling stories. I'm not sure this is as true as
it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the tv
and receive pictures. I'm not sure the younger generation even knows how to
gossip. But, as for a writer, if he has something to tell, he should perhaps
type it almost as fast as he could talk it. We must look to the organic world,
not the inorganic world, for metaphors; and just as the organic world has
periods of repose and periods of great speed and exercise, so I think the
writer's process should be organically varied. But there's a kind of tautness
that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you're spinning
out the reel.
INTERVIEWER
In “The Sea's Green Sameness” you deny
that characterization and psychology are primary goals of fiction. What do you
think is more important?
UPDIKE
I wrote “The Sea's Green Sameness”
years ago and meant, I believe, that narratives should not beprimarily packages
for psychological insights, though they can contain them, like raisins in buns.
But the substance is the dough, which feeds the storytelling appetite, the appetite
for motion, for suspense, for resolution. The author's deepest pride, as I have
experienced it, is not in his incidental wisdom but in his ability to keep an
organized mass of images moving forward, to feel life engendering itself under
his hands. But no doubt, fiction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we
look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do. Insights of all kinds are welcome; but no wisdom
will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, and a perhaps savage
wish to hold, through your voice, another soul in thrall.
INTERVIEWER
In view of this and your delight in the
“noncommittal luminosity of fact,” do you think you're much like the “nouvelle
vague” novelists?
UPDIKE
I used to. I wrote The Poorhouse Fair as an anti-novel, and have found Nathalie
Sarraute's description of the modern novelistic predicament a helpful guide. I
am attracted to the cool surface of some contemporary French novels, and, like
them, do want to give inanimate or vegetable presences some kind of vote in the
democracy of narrative. Basically, though, I describe things not because their
muteness mocks our subjectivity but because they seem to be masks for God. And
I should add that there is, in fiction, an image-making function, above image-retailing.
To create a coarse universal figure like Tarzan is in some ways more of an
accomplishment than the novels of Henry James.
INTERVIEWER
As a technician, how unconventional
would you say you were?
UPDIKE
As unconventional as I need to be. An absolute
freedom exists on the blank page, so let's use it. I have from the start been
wary of the fake, the automatic. I tried not to force my sense of life as
many-layered and ambiguous, while keeping in mind some sense of transaction, of
a bargain struck, between me and the ideal reader. Domestic fierceness within
the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social
existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind
of evolution—these are some of the themes. I have tried to achieve objectivity
in the form of narrative. My work is meditation, not pontification, so that
interviews like this one feel like a forcing of the growth, a posing. I think
of my books not as sermons or directives in a war of ideas but as objects, with
different shapes and textures and the mysteriousness of anything that exists.
My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something
into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying
something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still
seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.
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