{"id":1207,"date":"2012-07-03T16:09:57","date_gmt":"2012-07-03T21:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2012-07-04T13:49:39","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T18:49:39","slug":"updike-on-the-widows-of-eastwick-an-old-interview-surfaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2012\/07\/03\/updike-on-the-widows-of-eastwick-an-old-interview-surfaces\/","title":{"rendered":"Updike on The Widows of Eastwick; an old interview surfaces"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Former\u00a0Kansas City Star<\/em>\u00a0book review editor John Mark Eberhart interviewed John Updike on or around October 24, 2008 in conjunction with the publication of\u00a0The Widows of Eastwick<\/em>. An article based on the interview appeared in the\u00a0Star<\/em>, but not until January 4, 2009. That article was reprinted in Pop Matters<\/a><\/em>\u00a0on January 7, 2009. However,\u00a0the 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.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> I was a little surprised you decided to revisit your witches from \u201cThe Witches of Eastwick.\u201d But of course you\u2019ve revisited Henry Beck and, most famously, Rabbit Angstrom. Anyway, why these characters, and why now?<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> For lack of a better idea, basically. The first sequel to \u201cRabbit, Run\u201d came about because I\u2019d 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, \u201cI wonder how Harry Angstrom is doing now?\u201d \u201cRabbit, Run\u201d had been left up in the air. So there was an excuse there, and I discovered it\u2019s fun to write a sequel. It gives you a grip on time as it possesses the characters. Also, there\u2019s a certain layered richness that you rightly or wrongly imagine as you work on a sequel or even a sequel to a sequel!<\/p>\n

I never meant to write a sequel to \u201cThe Witches of Eastwick,\u201d 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).\u201d<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong>\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> 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. \u201cWitches\u201d was very much about the \u201860s as they sort of blew up and we became a very rancorous and bewitched country.\u201d<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> Are we still — or maybe the better question is are we again?<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> Getting that way. I find I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

The Iraq war has been fought by professional soldiers, whereas Vietnam was draftees. So in a way there\u2019s 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\u2019d say we\u2019re 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\u2019t know, not a real American. I really feel alienated from those people, and there are millions of them. I don\u2019t like, as an American writer, to feel alienated from any part of the country. I\u2019ve always been kind of an old-fashioned patriot. But my patience is wearing thin with this campaign. I\u2019d like to believe the polls are right and that Obama will win.<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> Back to your witches … I admit Alexandra\u2019s always been my favorite of the three, and in \u201cWidows,\u201d you really do let her grow. I mean, there\u2019s a physical enlargement … she has put on weight … but there\u2019s also an expanding of her presence and power. And all these characters … they\u2019re still very sexy characters, in a way, but they\u2019ve aged, and life has changed for them.<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> I\u2019m their age, more or less, so it was no great leap of imagination to try to write about the distinctly elderly. Although I don\u2019t think Sukie is quite 70 yet. Alexandra\u2019s 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\u2019s still true that she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> Henry James in \u201cThe Turn of the Screw\u201d really seemed to ride that line between truly ghostly vs. psychological, but are your witches more … I don\u2019t know … literal than that? Is their magic \u201creal\u201d?<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s real. There\u2019s less of it in the second book, but their power is real and these spells do work to a degree. In this book, they\u2019re more into white magic than black magic, but in a larger way, we all would like to cast spells, we\u2019d all like to eliminate our enemies and take vengeance on those who\u2019ve offended us. So it\u2019s no great psychological leap to imagine these things actually work.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m sort of a believer, or rather it wasn\u2019t too hard to project witchery of a sort.<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> In \u201cWidows,\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> And, of course, it makes possible the lesbian romance between the other two.<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> I\u2019m 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 …<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve discovered that once you make yourself do it there\u2019s a certain relish in it. It was a step for me.<\/p>\n

JME:<\/strong> You turned 76 in March. Are you having any thoughts about retiring?<\/p>\n

JU:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know what I\u2019d do with my mornings if I didn\u2019t write in them. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s still some market for what I have to say.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I notice some signs of mental deterioration. My memory isn\u2019t as good; I can\u2019t think of words. I might forget what color one character\u2019s eyes are. Maybe each novel might be the last — but no, I\u2019m not quite ready yet. There\u2019s still the illusion that I\u2019m still learning this curious trade, for which there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fun to be active, and it\u2019s a wonderful profession in that unlike being an athlete or an actress, you\u2019re not really age dependent. People don\u2019t care; they\u2019re as willing to review the book of an 80-year-old as they are that of a 20-year-old.<\/p>\n

(Editor\u2019s note: John Updike died of lung cancer three months after this interview was conducted.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2008 John Mark Eberhart\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former\u00a0Kansas City Star\u00a0book review editor John Mark Eberhart interviewed John Updike on or around October 24, 2008 in conjunction with the publication of\u00a0The Widows of Eastwick. An article based on the interview appeared in the\u00a0Star, but not until January 4, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1214,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}