Way back in 2012, Mental Floss published a piece by Lucas Reilly titled “Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional.”  It’s a fun read, because Reilly gets his material from a 16-year-old boy’s query.

“It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work. Seventy-five authors responded.” Reilly includes 12 of them: Isaac Asimov, Saul Bellow, Ray Bradbury, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, Richard Hughes, MacKinlay Kantor, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Iris Murdoch, Ayn Rand, and John Updike.

In answer to the question “Do you consciously, intentionally plan and place symbolism in your writing?…If yes, please state your method for doing so. Do you feel you sub-consciously place symbolism in your writing?” Updike responds, “Yes—I have no method; there is no method in writing fiction; you don’t seem to understand.”

If that seems testy, consider Kantor’s dismissal of the student’s questionnaire: “Nonsense, young man, write your own research paper. Don’t expect others to do the work for you.”

Asked if readers “ever infer that there is symbolism” in his writing where he “had not intended it to be,” Updike responds, “Once in a while—usually they do not [see the] symbols that are there.”

“Do you feel that the great writers of classics consciously, intentionally planned and placed symbols in their writing?… Do you feel that they placed it there sub-consciously?” Updike’s response: “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.”

By the time he got around to answering the fourth question, Updike seemed to feel as Kantor did. Asked if he had “anything to remark concerning the subject under study, or anything you believe to be pertinent to such a study” Updike responded, “It would be better for you to do your own thinking on this sort of thing.”

Reilly’s story was a condensation of “Document: The Symbolism Survey,” written by Sarah Funke Butler and published Dec. 5, 2011 in The Paris Review.

You’ll need a subscription to access The Columbus [Ohio] Dispatch, but a story about an exhibition earlier this spring, “‘George Nick: Fresh Air, A Worldy Perspective’ at Hawk Galleries Features a nonagenarian for whom all subjects are fair game,” mentions that “The late writer John Updike was a friend and neighbor of Nick. For a 1993 retrospective of the painter, Updike wrote an appropriate comment: ‘Any subject will do, as long as the subject is not exploited for its anecdotal or picturesque qualities but is taken in good conscience as an occasion for pure painting.'”

From his website: “Nationally recognized as a leading realist painter, George Nick’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirschhorn Museum; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., as well as many others.”

Writer John Updike was such a commentator on American society that he’s often cited comparatively or as a cultural touchstone–especially at The New Yorker, where he was the Talk of the Town writer for many years and a frequent contributor of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews thereafter. The most recent comparison comes from Nikil Saval, who, in his essay on “The Impeccably Understated Modernism of I.M. Pei,” writes,

“In John Updike’s story ‘Gesturing,’ first published in 1980, the newly separated Richard Maple finds himself in a Boston apartment with a view of a startling new skyscraper. ‘The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,’ Updike writes, ‘famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from it) and disastrous because it was beautiful.’ The architect had imagined that a sheer glass skin would ‘reflect the sky and the old low brick skyline of Boston’ and would ‘melt into the sky.’ ‘Instead,’ Updike continues, ‘the windows of mirroring glass kept falling to the street and were replaced by ugly opacities of black plywood.’ Still, enough of the reflective surface remains ‘to give an impression, through the wavery old window of this sudden apartment, of huge blueness, a vertical cousin to the horizontal huge blueness of the sea that Richard awoke to each morning, in the now bone-deep morning chill of his unheated shack.’ Not too surprisingly, the distressed tower becomes an oblique symbol for the state of Richard’s life, soul, and dissolved marriage, slicing in and out of the story, much as its counterpart slices in and out of the Boston skyline.

“The skyscraper in ‘Gesturing’ is unmistakably the John Hancock Tower (officially renamed 200 Clarendon in 2015), designed by I.M. Pei and finished in 1976,” writes Saval, adding that despite structural problems the building “remains the single most beautiful object in one of the world’s most tedious, stuffy cities—on one of Boston’s handful of pleasant blue days, it reflects and multiplies the scudding clouds.”

David Heddendorf’s “Updike or Moses?” was published in the Lent 2019 issue of The Cresset: A review of literature, the arts, and public affairs, in which he writes,

“Updike and [Muriel] Spark professed their Christian faith openly, but spent most of their time, by all accounts, with other famous authors. They wrote for The New Yorker, went to swanky parties, enjoyed the pastimes their wealth and celebrity allowed. They squeezed church into the margins of their glamorous lives, when they went at all. They discussed Christianity in interviews, and sometimes dealt with theological issues in their books, but faith didn’t help determine their circle of acquaintance the way it does for me and many people I know. They soared high above the tacky music, the trite poetry, the innocently insulting questions.”

He quotes Updike (“I enjoyed the anti-bohemian gesture of my deadpan churchgoing,” with its “less than half-hearted” emotional involvement) and summarizes,

“Moses and Updike frame the dilemma I’ve confronted all my life—a dilemma I suspect many Christian artists and intellectuals share. We can fulfill, like Updike, the demands of our art or research, keeping among like-minded peers and neglecting the fellowship of believers. Or we can identify with the people of God, many of whom don’t understand or even respect what we [writers] do. Achievement and gratification apart from the Christian community, or an embrace of that community while living with the mediocrity and a kind of exile—is this the choice we face?”