John Updike supersleuth Dave Lull dug up another interview for us to add to our resource page of Updike interviews and readings online, but it’s good enough to call people’s attention to on the blog. Eleanor Wachtel did a very fine interview with Updike in Toronto, 1996, for an episode of her CBC Radio One series Writers & Company. He covers old ground but in new ways.
Here’s the link.
John Updike famously hated giving interviews, but when his Ipswich dentist had his drill in his mouth and asked, “My son would like to interview you for his school paper. Would that be okay?” it’s tough to say no. Impossible, even.
Bob Waite, whose interview—“Column: Updike interview proved drill mightier than the sword (or pen)”—appeared in yesterday’s Ipswich News—recalled that 1965 interview and shared Q&A excerpts he found in a box. Among the questions:
What do you consider your major work up to this time? That is a very difficult question. Of the four novels I have written, each was the best I could do at the time. If I had to pick one it would probably be The Centaur. Of my short stories, my next book, Olinger which will come out next year, is my best.
I have read some of your books and have noticed a lack of endings. Do you have a special reason for using this style? I do not believe in artificial endings. A conventional ending doesn’t fit real life. (But) all of my books are written towards an ending I have in mind. I don’t just chop the end off when I get tired.
Do you find you often unknowingly use actual persons and occurrences in your writing? No. If I do it, I do it knowingly. In general, I try not to translate real things into fiction. But I find it almost unavoidable to refrain from mixing fact with fiction.
A few unkind things were said about your last book, Of the Farm. What is your general opinion of critics? I don’t have a general opinion of critics. It all depends on the critic. Being a critic is a very difficult thing to do well. I think there’s a lot of propaganda going on about books. If a book cannot defend itself, then it cannot be defended.
Do you have any favorite authors or persons who have influenced your writing? Many, beginning with my parents and my wife. As for authors, I would have to say James Thurber, Henry Green, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway all influenced me.
Read the whole interview.
In the recent Rolling Stone feature “Year in Review: So, How Was Your 2020, Rufus Wainwright?” the musician responded to a series of questions, including whom he’d want to quarantine with (“Carrie Fisher—mainly because I miss her so much”), an old album he turned to for comfort (Randy Newman’s Trouble in Paradise), and his favorite TV show to stream while in isolation (Victoria. Good old family Royal fun without the drugs and divorces).
And the best book he read during quarantine?
“Rabbit, Run by John Updike.
Photo: Tony Hauser
John Updike’s writing tips appear in a nearly two-minute video published by Melville House: “John Updike’s Writing Advice is Something All Writers Should Try,” by Stephanie Valente.
Updike offers young writers insight and advice for the writing process: “Develop actual work habits. Reserve an hour or more a day to write,” Updike says.
Updike advises writers to simply “read what excites you. Even if you don’t imitate it, you will learn from it.” He also points out the bitter-sweet reality: “Don’t try to be rich,” Updike says. “Writers work to entertain and instruct a reader.”
Watch the full video here.
We’re just learning about it now, but the podcast series Christian Humanist Profiles interviewed Michael Farmer last year about his book, Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction. Nathan P. Gilmour asked the questions for the podcast “Christian Humanist Profiles 115,” which he introduced by talking about the philosophy of religion:
“Immanuel Kant famously distinguished between things, existing as they are, impervious to our mental probings, and objects, those pieces of our world that only come to us as organized and mediated by senses and understanding and concepts. Later on, philosophers who would come to be called existentialists–whether they liked it or not–came to regard the imagination, our mental power of organizing and even shaping our world, as one of the core realities of human existence. Michial Farmer, in his recent book Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction, follows the course of imagination as a weapon, an escape, and sometimes even as a mode of redemption in John Updike’s novels and stories and poems, and today he’s joining us on Christian Humanist Profiles not as interviewer but as author” (In “Christian Humanist Profiles 195: The Watchmen” Farmer interviewed Gilmour and David Grubbs about Alan Jacobs’ essay by that title).
Echoing Updike himself, Farmer says that “the work of art is an act of seeing” that “creates a new world.” He says that Updike’s writing depicts a world where “humanity wrestles with the material world and ritual longings.”
Farmer describes the “mechanized universe” as both attractive and repelling. “Updike is fascinated by science, and he’s terrified by it,” Farmer says. “He sees a universe that is meaningless, but he can’t accept that, and something deep within him revolts against it.”
Farmer suggests that Updike’s philosophy aligns, to some degree, with atheist existentialism. “Updike conceives of faith as an act of the imagination where you’re imprinting meaning on an apparently meaningless universe,” Farmer says. “Whatever meaning you’re going to find in the universe, you’re going to put into the universe.”
The theory of “parents forming a mythology for their children” also comes up. Farmer wonders whether Updike’s mother served as a “mythological figure” in both life and fiction as she “dominated his early life and central trauma of his childhood.”
Farmer emphasizes the dependence of the mind in forming the fundamental meaning for life. He concludes, “the only solution to the loss of faith in the modern world is to increase the imagination.”
Listen to the podcast here.
The John Updike Society will hold its 5th biennial conference in Belgrade, Serbia the first week of June 2018, and all are welcome to attend (registration information). The conference celebrates Updike abroad, Updike in translation, and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Couples. This interview on “Where the Couples Are Today” covers all three of those bases: it was conducted in Belgrade, it’s newly translated, and it focuses on Couples.
Updike gave the interview to the daily Politika while he was in Belgrade in October 1978, and it was published on the 19th. The interview was translated recently by Jasna Todorovic, a doctoral student of John Updike Society board member Biljana Dojcinovic. Below are the pages as they were published. Here is the translation: WHERE THE COUPLES ARE TODAY
Vogue magazine interviewed British singer-songwriter Tom Odell before he embarked on a two-month European tour, and one of the questions was What book are you currently reading?
“Rabbit, Run by John Updike. I read it once before when I was a lot younger; it’s about a very brilliant sports star who just sort of gets up and leaves his family. It’s very gritty, it’s somewhere between John Steinbeck and Charles Bukowski,” the 26 year old said. That, by the way, was Rabbit’s age in the first book.
Odell’s debut studio album, Long Way Down, was released in June 2013 and his second album, Wrong Crowd, was released in December 2016, along with the Christmas EP Spending All My Christmas with You.
The John Updike Society invited Garrison Keillor to be the keynote speaker at the Fourth Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Columbia, South Carolina last October because of his love of John Updike. So there won’t be much suspense for Updike fans when Martha’s Vineyard Times interviewer Connie Berry asks Keillor, “Whom do you like to read these days?”
“I am still reading John Updike,” says Keillor. “It will take me about five more years to finish with him. And then I’ll turn to Faulkner and Turgenev and go back and reread War and Peace, and then if I’m still alive I’ll take another run at Moby-Dick.”
Read the full interview: “Minnesota invades Martha’s Vineyard”
In 1963, a 16 year old was tired of hearing about symbolism from his English teacher, wondering, as many students still do, if teachers read too much into a literary work. So he mailed a four-question survey to 150 novelists asking them about symbolism in their work. Exactly half of them responded, among them John Updike. Had young Bruce McAllister sent that survey just three years earlier, he could have included Ernest Hemingway, who famously once remarked, “All symbolism is shit.”
Specifically, McAllister wanted their opinion of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, which his class was reading, but some of the responses were more general . . . and eye-opening.
MacKinlay Kantor (Andersonville, Gettysburg) was the most blunt: “Nonsense, young man, write your own research paper. Don’t expect others to do the work for you.
Jack Kerouac offered the briefest response to the question of placing symbolism in his work. “No,” Kerouac wrote back.
“Consciously?” Isaac Asimov responded. “Heavens, no! Unconsciously? How can one avoid it?”
Normal Mailer defined the best symbols as “those you become aware of only after you finish the work,” while Ralph Ellison seemed more reflective and representative of the writer’s method: “Symbolism arises out of action. . . . Once a writer is conscious of the implicit symbolism which arises in the course of a narrative, he may take advantage of them and manipulate them consciously as a further resource of his art.”
John Updike, meanwhile, spoke along the lines of writer-as-mystic, answering “Yes” to the question of whether he consciously, intentionally places symbolism in his writing, adding, “I have no method; there is no method in writing fiction; you don’t seem to understand.”
To the question of whether readers ever infer what is not intended, Updike responded, “Once in a while—usually they do not (see the) symbols that are there.”
Asked if he feels the great writers of classics consciously put symbols in their works, Updike wrote, “Some of them did (Joyce, Dante) more than others (Homer) but it is impossible to think of any significant work of narrative art without a symbolic dimension of some sort.”
As for the last question, whether he has anything to add that’s pertinent to a study of symbols, Updike sounded like Kantor: “It would be better for you to do your own thinking on this sort of thing.”
Read the full Mental Floss article.
Rosanna Greenstreet of The Guardian recently played 23 questions with novelist Ann Patchett, whose novels The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, and State of Wonder were shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), and this interesting exchange popped up:
What was the best kiss of your life?
I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award. It wasn’t the best kiss as far as kisses go, but I hold the fact that I kissed John Updike, that he kissed me, very close to my heart.
Well, there’s a new spin on the old phrase kiss-and-tell. . . .
The rest of her responses are below:
“Ann Patchett: My best kiss? I kissed John Updike as he presented me with an award.”