Blogger Mark Stevens published a Q&A with Updike biographer Adam Begley on May 13 in which Begley talks about the issues central to Updike’s work and life.

Among Begley’s responses:

“I think his misbehavior was very fruitful for him: he made hay out of his peccadillos—or his sins, really, if you want to talk about it that way. The key passage for [me] is in Roger’s Version, when Roger finally allows Verna—his half-niece, his half-sister’s daughter—to seduce him and they are lying on the soiled futon in a rundown housing estate and they have just committed quasi-incest and adultery, because he’s married, and at that moment he, this character Roger, has this great religious epiphany, which is that even in abasement you are subject to God. I think that is a crystallization of his attitude, if you will, of his attitude toward his own transgressions and his religious faith. Both were equally important to him. I don’t think John Updike could have been the artist he was without his philandering and I don’t think he could have been the artist he was without his faith.”

“Q&A with Adam Begley — ‘Updike'”

On May 5, 2014, Salon published an interview that David Daley conducted with Updike biographer Adam Begley,

“Adam Begley on John Updike: ‘He believed he was doing something more important than the feelings of the people around him.'”

In it, Begley talks about the hazards of writing a biography and shares his thoughts on some of Updike’s friends and harshest critics, among them:

“[Christopher Lasch and Updike], I think, egged each other on, and pushed each other to greater academic feats. It’s weird enough that they were roommates, what’s even weirder is that they then both graduate summa, that Kit Lasch gets the prize for best thesis, and Updike gets the No. 2 prize. I mean, I don’t suppose that’s ever happened before in the history of Harvard, freshman year roommates getting No. 1 and No. 2 essay prizes, and graduate summa. It’s an extraordinary coincidence.”

“Jonathan [Franzen] has very harsh words for Updike. And I remain convinced—and I admire Jonathan’s work and I’m fond of Jonathan personally—but I believe that he’s suffering from a bit of anxiety of influence here. That he feels the need to denigrate Updike because his project is really not very different from Updike.”

“Let’s go back to 1996, ’97. David Foster Wallace is the flavor of the month. He’s just published ‘Infinite Jest.’ John Updike has just published a novel set a couple years in the future, which is somewhat eerily like the future world of ‘Infinite Jest.’ . . . So yes, I got David Foster Wallace [to review the novel], but no, I was not involved in the attempt to assassinate Updike . . . . David Foster Wallace was not a full-blooded critic of Updike. He had in his collection a heavily annotated copy of ‘Rabbit, Run.’ He is an Updike fan. But ‘Toward the End of Time’ is not a good novel.”

Kirkus Reviews on April 9, 2014 published an interview with Adam Begley, who dished, “I spoke to people he’d had affairs with. He had a lot of friends, and there was a great deal of interconnecting there. If you’ve read Couples, you know exactly what I mean,” Begley said.

“The first time he wrote about adultery was a book called Marry Me that was published 10 years after he wrote it, and it’s the only book in his cannon that was published out of sequence,” Begley said. “That was a book about an affair that he had had in the mid-’60s and it wasn’t published until the ’70s. It’s a novel, but it’s very closely based on the facts of an affair.”

The interview was conducted by Scott Porch. Here’s the link.

The AWL today (April 21, 2014) published an interview with Updike biographer Adam Begley titled, “How to Write John Updike’s Deathbed.” Asking the questions was Elon Green.

In it, Begley is asked about the deathbed section in Updike, and whether family members saw the book before publication. Begley says that there were numerous corrections to the death scene and also answers questions about the book’s fact-checking, what he regretted leaving out of the book, whether Updike suffered for his art, and what women writers he admired.

Here’s the link to the article, “How to Write John Updike’s Deathbed.”

Brain Pickings, a self-described “cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces spanning art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, and more,” published a piece that features clips of Updike talking about his writing habits and offering advice to young writers.

“Try to develop actual work habits,” Updike says, “and, even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say, or more a day to write. Very good things have been written on an hour a day . . . . So take it seriously, set a quota, try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere . . . .

“Don’t try to get rich . . . . If you want to get rich, you should go into investment banking or be a certain kind of lawyer. On the other hand, I like to think that in a country this large and a language even larger, that there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.”

For the full article, click on “John Updike on Making Money, How to Have a Productive Daily Routine, and the Most Important Things for Aspiring Writers to Know.” 

Yesterday PBS Digital Studios posted a five-minute animated short titled “John Updike on Family Affairs,” part of their Blank on Blank series.

It’s animated from a previously unheard spring 2002 interview by John Freeman, in which Updike talks about his decision to live away from New York City and the impact of family on his writing life. Blankonblank.org is a nonprofit digital studio in Brooklyn, founded by David Gerlach, that transforms lost audio interviews with cultural icons into a new animated series for PBS.

Here’s the link, with thanks to David Lull for calling it to our attention.