Former Kansas City Star book review editor John Mark Eberhart interviewed John Updike on or around October 24, 2008 in conjunction with the publication of The Widows of Eastwick. An article based on the interview appeared in the Star, but not until January 4, 2009. That article was reprinted in Pop Matters on January 7, 2009. However, the full Q & A that was the basis for the article has never appeared anywhere. We print it here by permission of Mr. Eberhart, with gratitude.
JME: I was a little surprised you decided to revisit your witches from “The Witches of Eastwick.” But of course you’ve revisited Henry Beck and, most famously, Rabbit Angstrom. Anyway, why these characters, and why now?
JU: For lack of a better idea, basically. The first sequel to “Rabbit, Run” came about because I’d wasted a lot of time doing research on President James Buchanan and I owed the world, I came to feel, a novel. The best thing I could think of was, “I wonder how Harry Angstrom is doing now?” “Rabbit, Run” had been left up in the air. So there was an excuse there, and I discovered it’s fun to write a sequel. It gives you a grip on time as it possesses the characters. Also, there’s a certain layered richness that you rightly or wrongly imagine as you work on a sequel or even a sequel to a sequel!
I never meant to write a sequel to “The Witches of Eastwick,” but the book was more of a commercial success than my books usually are. It sold well enough, and they made a movie of it. The movie, although attractive in its cast and its scenery, basically distorted or ignored the book itself. The main events of the plot as I conceived it was that the witches managed to put enough of a spell on one of the men in the town that he beat his wife to death and committed suicide, creating two orphans, and one of these became a kind of assistant witch, and she also was eliminated by a spell. Anyway, none of that plot got (in the movie).”
JME: The new novel is set in the George W. Bush years; he is referred to and Iraq is mentioned, so this is post-invasion, 2004 or maybe 2005. The original book was set in either the late 1960s or early 1970s, right? And written in the mid-80s.
JU: It was a retrospective novel, trying to write about that time when everything felt topsy-turvy, when everything we had lived by in the Eisenhower years was suddenly looked upon as … harmful, evil even. “Witches” was very much about the ‘60s as they sort of blew up and we became a very rancorous and bewitched country.”
JME: Are we still — or maybe the better question is are we again?
JU: Getting that way. I find I’m more involved in this presidential contest than in any since Adlai Stevenson ran against Eisenhower. Again, the battle seems to be a liberal and highly articulate against a somewhat stolid military man. But yeah, I feel very caught up in it. I wish it were happening tomorrow so I could move on.
The Iraq war has been fought by professional soldiers, whereas Vietnam was draftees. So in a way there’s been nothing like the protest, but there certainly is by now a mood of impatience with the conflict … and with Bush in general. So yeah, I’d say we’re rancorous. Not to reveal my own political bias, but I see these McCain supporters interviewed and they talk about Obama being not one of us, somebody they can’t know, not a real American. I really feel alienated from those people, and there are millions of them. I don’t like, as an American writer, to feel alienated from any part of the country. I’ve always been kind of an old-fashioned patriot. But my patience is wearing thin with this campaign. I’d like to believe the polls are right and that Obama will win.
JME: Back to your witches … I admit Alexandra’s always been my favorite of the three, and in “Widows,” you really do let her grow. I mean, there’s a physical enlargement … she has put on weight … but there’s also an expanding of her presence and power. And all these characters … they’re still very sexy characters, in a way, but they’ve aged, and life has changed for them.
JU: I’m their age, more or less, so it was no great leap of imagination to try to write about the distinctly elderly. Although I don’t think Sukie is quite 70 yet. Alexandra’s the oldest, and she was always somehow the most benign but also the one who had the most magic; the other two, in a way, depended on Alexandra, and it’s still true that she’s the leader. It is she who sets up the coven and tries to control it, runs it like a schoolteacher running a little class. She always was the least … bizarre of the three, and the most humane.
As I wrote along, though, I found myself depending quite heavily on the energies of the other two — the lingering sexual energy of Sukie but also the sardonic and naysaying energy of Jane.
Alexandra is an earth mother; she also seems to have a lot of doubts about nature. She feels the aging process working within her, and death drawing nearer every day. Witchcraft has always been about nature; according to some theorists, witchcraft was natural, an extension of paganism under the heavy weight of medieval Christianity. Alexandra is the most sensitive to nature — the moods, the weather, the way the trees look and so on. But all three are, in a sense, priestesses of the nature which we enjoy but fear.
JME: Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw” really seemed to ride that line between truly ghostly vs. psychological, but are your witches more … I don’t know … literal than that? Is their magic “real”?
JU: I think it’s real. There’s less of it in the second book, but their power is real and these spells do work to a degree. In this book, they’re more into white magic than black magic, but in a larger way, we all would like to cast spells, we’d all like to eliminate our enemies and take vengeance on those who’ve offended us. So it’s no great psychological leap to imagine these things actually work.
There are psychic forces. I was raised in a part of the country, eastern Pennsylvania, where witchcraft of a benign sort was actually practiced — spells, so-called hex signs. My grandmother, with whom I lived, firmly felt there were ghosts around, and I got from her this fear of ghosts and strange, clutching hands that would reach out from under the bed. For some reason I thought the whole area under the bed was very menacing. So I’m sort of a believer, or rather it wasn’t too hard to project witchery of a sort.
JME: In “Widows,” you choose to kill off one of the characters, and without revealing too much and spoiling it for readers, I must say I think you made an interesting choice. Why this character and not one of the others?
JU: She seemed the one who was the most responsible, or the least repentant, about the harm done by the witches in the first novel. She’s the most witchy and vehement in the way she talks. You could say that she had it coming. I, as the god of this particular universe, thought she the one who ought to be sacrificed.
JME: And, of course, it makes possible the lesbian romance between the other two.
JU: I’m very shy about killing characters, unlike many another author who kills them right and left. For me, it is kind of an awful thing to do. But death is real enough …
As a young writer, I figured my job was to imitate life, and at the time I had very little experience of death — no deaths in my immediate family or of my friends. So I was very ginger about killing characters. (But) I’ve discovered that once you make yourself do it there’s a certain relish in it. It was a step for me.
JME: You turned 76 in March. Are you having any thoughts about retiring?
JU: I don’t know what I’d do with my mornings if I didn’t write in them. I’ve set up a kind of shop up here; I report to work. And there are pleasures to writing — you kind of get out a lot of your bad secretions. You can purge yourself of them through writing. And there’s still some market for what I have to say.
On the other hand, I notice some signs of mental deterioration. My memory isn’t as good; I can’t think of words. I might forget what color one character’s eyes are. Maybe each novel might be the last — but no, I’m not quite ready yet. There’s still the illusion that I’m still learning this curious trade, for which there’s very little coherent instruction. I never once believed in writing schools; this is very much an amateurish endeavor, so that the chance of growing in it is still there for a 76-year-old.
It’s fun to be active, and it’s a wonderful profession in that unlike being an athlete or an actress, you’re not really age dependent. People don’t care; they’re as willing to review the book of an 80-year-old as they are that of a 20-year-old.
(Editor’s note: John Updike died of lung cancer three months after this interview was conducted.)
© 2008 John Mark Eberhart