Jefferson
Lecturer John Updike shares his passion for American art
with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. Updike, a Pulitzer Prize-winner
and well-known novelist, has also written two volumes of
art criticism: Just Looking and Still Looking.
NEH Chairman Bruce Cole:
I think I may have told you that in my former life I was
an art historian. While there are many Ph.D. art historians,
the people I most enjoyed reading were the poets and the
critics who brought great language to their description
of art and were able to express the meaning of the art.
John Updike: I think
it’s a field where to be an amateur is not necessarily
a disgrace. Some of the best have been, in a sense, amateurs—Baudelaire
and Henry James, to name two.
COLE: Right, many
of my heroes in the history of art never had any art history
courses. From Berenson, who’s one of my great idols,
to Ruskin and John Pope-Hennessy. That was before the professionalization
of the field.
UPDIKE: It all reflects
our fascination with the visual in the last century and
a half. It’s one of the reasons, I’m sure, that
you’re getting such a good response to your program,
Picturing America. Schoolchildren these days are raised
on TV, they’re using their eyes from the age of six weeks
on.
COLE: I did some teaching
with these images in a school here. It was amazing what
those kids brought out of the reproductions—and really
gratifying.
What’s your earliest memory of actually coming into
contact with art?
UPDIKE: Well, comic
strips. And a reproduction of Gainsborough’s Blue
Boy that hung in the house. I was raised in a suburb
of Reading, Pennsylvania, which does have a rather small
but attractive museum erected, I suppose, by the money of
the mill owners in the region. It was within a walk of our
house. My father and mother—I’m an only child—and
I would take that walk on a Sunday fairly often. And so
I began to go to the Reading Museum.
It contained not just paintings, but all sorts of cultural
objects—things like Polynesian paddles and Chinese
carvings. There was an Egyptian mummy, which was morbidly
fascinating—all this on the first floor. It was the
story of mankind in the form of a grab bag. Upstairs, there
were paintings, which I looked at with kind of, you know,
a child’s partial boredom; but something got through.
COLE: How old were
you when you first started to go?
UPDIKE: I want to say
six, but I might have been maybe eight or nine.
COLE: It sounds like
a wonderful old cabinet-of-curiosities museum.
UPDIKE: It was. There
were tiny doll-like duplications of people building the
pyramids, living as cave people, or being ancient Mesopotamians,
and it was in its way very instructive and, well, fascinating.
COLE: Did you ever
think you wanted to be a visual artist?
UPDIKE: Yes. I don’t
know at what age I began to look at the comic strips, the
funnies so-called. I think my first coherent artistic ambition
was to become a cartoonist. It was also the era in which
the early Disney films were coming out—the animated
shorts plus Snow White. Snow White came
out, I think, in 1937, when I was five.
Anyway, all this imagery—these bouncy creatures,
irrepressible little animations without any of the Depression
worries that filled my household—all this seemed to
offer real escape from my life into a better world.
My mother—she was another only child, raised on
a farm—had artistic ambitions, literary ones. The
local public schools offered art instruction in those days;
there was no question of art not being one of the subjects
you were taught. Depression or not, school budgets kept
it in the curriculum. Not like now.
In addition to that, we happened to live across the street
from the only artist in Shillington, a man called Clint
Shilling; he was descended from the Shilling who created
the town. At my mother’s request, Clint gave me some lessons
when I was about eleven or twelve. All this was instructive.
It was instructive to try to look at something in terms
of line and color. I remember one lesson—and I’ve
written about this, and I don’t want to repeat what I’ve
already put in print—where Clint put an egg in the
sun on a piece of white paper and said to paint what I was
seeing.
What he could see was a little rainbow at the edge
of the shadow of the egg, which I couldn’t see until he
pointed it out. That art lesson has stuck with me maybe
more than any I’ve had since. The rainbow at the edge of
the shadow of the egg. You can find it in a poem of mine
called “Midpoint.”
COLE: That’s very interesting.
One of the things we’re trying to accomplish with Picturing
America is to show that to read a book is wonderful, and
to hear a lecture is wonderful. But to see a work of art
is different.
UPDIKE: Trying to see
and draw shows you how much there is to see and how,
as we proceed through our ordinary days, how oblivious we
are to the visual facts around us. The history of art demonstrates
how long it took artists to focus on what was actually there
before their eyes instead of what they knew was there—that
is, to move from the Egyptian way of putting down an ideological
notion of what, say, the human body was.
In their aesthetic, you showed the body to the best advantage,
so the profile was the best way to look at the face, and
head-on was the best way to look at the chest. I was in
Egypt not so long ago, and our guide talked about the idealism
of the mode of representation, which was static for several
thousand years.
They always showed the feet sideways, with the big toe
outwards. You didn’t see the little toe, in classical Egyptian
paintings, which gave the figures, depending on which way
they were facing, two left or right feet. It’s only when
the Roman and Hellenistic influences came in that you began
to get little toes and anatomically correct knees and all
the other realistic details that are so triumphantly present
in Michelangelo and Leonardo and other Renaissance masters.
It’s not a natural thing to see what’s there.
What’s natural is to represent what you know
is there. And so this swinging back and forth now, between
literalism and stylization, between representation and abstraction.
When I was young, there wasn’t really much talk of abstract
painting. Malerich and Mondrian, and Arthur Dove had done
it, but it was still widely assumed that the duty of the
artist was to become highly skilled at giving the illusion
of thereness, of texture and space and perspective, and
so on.
COLE: Yes.
UPDIKE: And so, in
a way, it was easier to try to become an artist since it
was fairly clear what you were trying to do. Norman Rockwell
was reigning on the covers of the Post, and he was
sort of the ultimate—the ultimate at least in illustration.
And it’s taken some stretch of my own imagination to realize
that there’s more to art than just this illusionistic accuracy.
COLE: In the Renaissance,
you get the invention of one-point perspective, which also
is not really the way we see. We see much more, I think,
impressionistically, but somehow we think that we see
in perspective. It is amazing how these conventions work
on us as well.
UPDIKE: That’s so true,
isn’t it? Of course, the human eye moves all the time. It’s
unnatural for it not to move. To paint in the very precise
way of Holbein or Van Dyke is to freeze the seeing process
in a way that is highly unreal. Surreal, one could say—Dalí
and Max Ernst have this same uncanny precision, of the frozen
eye.
Visual art is very fertile ground for this kind of philosophical—existential—speculation,
especially now that the abstraction has spoken up so strongly
on its own behalf. Now, we’re not really sure what we’re
looking for. What is excellent—what is excellent about
this piece of abstraction as opposed to this other piece?
Why is Rothko so eloquent, for example, and Hans Hofmann
not? Hofmann is a thrilling theorist but his paintings look
like linoleum.
COLE: It seems to me
that we don’t have any guideposts anymore. And I think one
of the hallmarks of what we now call “modern art,” whatever
that means, is that we want originality. But when artists
are no longer bound by any kind of boundaries, when they
break them, it’s not obvious what is originality. So we
are kind of adrift, I think.
UPDIKE: In my own art
criticism, if I can dignify it with that term, I really
go kind of blank about thirty years ago. The last movement
that I felt I dug one hundred percent was, I suppose, Pop,
which was in the sixties. So it’s more than thirty years
ago that I became personally kind of numb as far as gut
response.
I recently read in the New Yorker a profile of John
Currin, whose paintings are very meticulous and yet cartoonish
and often bawdy. He’s terribly skillful. And yet I had to
read the article to really begin to understand why he painted
the way he did—why he would, you know, devote Holbeinesque
attention to these forms. In one painting there’s an uncooked
turkey, uncooked but prepared. And the shine of it and the
look of it, you know, the little pimples on it, everything
is there in this masterful way and yet . . .
COLE: A Holbeinesque
turkey?
UPDIKE: It was an actual
turkey; the people were a little weirder. At any rate, Currin
has all the old masterish devotion to what seemed to be
basically a very ironical and kind of off-putting subject.
Funny. But why not, in the post-abstraction era, have
all those old skills, you know, the underpainting and the
overpainting and the glazes and all that technique work
in his paintings? It has an element of a joke, saying, I’m
going to do all this, and yet you still won’t like the painting,
you bourgeois klutzes out there.
COLE: Well, that’s
always something that struck me about abstract art. What
it does is formalize art, removing all the annoying detours,
like figures and narrative and all that. You just basically
have the formal elements, light and color and the like.
But that’s it. When you talk about that turkey, that’s what
comes to mind.
UPDIKE: Yes, it seems
at some level, for the reasons you’ve just given, frivolous
to try to give a thing both formal qualities so that in
some way the color itself speaks to you, and yet at the
same time to make these accurate representations of real
things, real people, real furniture. You just feel that
some people did manage to do both things at once.
Vermeer and Velázquez and others in which you can see, yes,
that this presents object—things, people, clouds. You can
also see the strokes; you can see the little pointilles
that Vermeer uses, the individual brushstrokes. A painter
was at work. At the same time, you’re moved—especially
Vermeer. The women standing alone with the window over on
the left and a letter or a delicate little scales in their
hands. The images speak in the way that religious symbolism
used to speak to believers.
COLE: I agree with
that one hundred percent. When I look at one of those Vermeers—and
I think that’s a great example, because it is almost abstract
in the way that the forms are manipulated. But it sanctifies.
UPDIKE: There is a
saintly feeling in Vermeer and some others—Rembrandt,
too, or Chardin—where you feel that the act of putting
down what you see in front of you at this point in history
had a lot of cultural momentum behind it. There wasn’t a
question of irony, but on the other hand it wasn’t a question
of doing the church’s will either.
I mean, you were off on your own in the seventeenth century
in a way that that hadn’t really been true before, because
the patrons had requirements. You were a craftsman who was
going to produce something to order. Christian art was almost
Egyptian in the rigor of its formulas.
So, to arrive at a cultural place where you could make
a living painting more or less what you wanted to is a liberation,
but there is also a scary freedom to it too. And we’ve been
living with that freedom for the last hundred years, ever
since Picasso—a dreadful freedom.
COLE: One of the things
that has struck me is that there is a great tradition of
art. And whether it’s Egyptian art, as you just described,
or Western art up to the middle of the twentieth century,
there was a canon, and the canon formed subsequent works.
And there was this tradition of art into art: You built
on the shoulders of your predecessors. You modified it,
you changed it, but there was always art into art into art
into art. But there was a huge gulf created with people
like Pollock who consciously broke that tradition.
UPDIKE: Pollock certainly
is the figure to reckon with. But a paradox there is that
he also was a news item. Life ran those dramatic
photographs of him painting, and he had a celebrity quality
that made you look at those big canvases of scribbles in
a different way. They weren’t just art; they were fashion,
the newest thing. There was a sexiness about Pollock the
person that made his painting sensational in the same way
that, around the same time, the topless bathing suit was
sensational. It was a shock but somehow muffled by the very
oddity of it. Pollock’s dripping was played initially as
a joke, as a kind of Dada.
COLE: I’m reminded
of that wonderful Rockwell cover where there is that man
in the gray suit, dove-gray suit with a cane, I think, looking
at a Pollock.
UPDIKE: It wasn’t a
bad Pollock. Who knew Rockwell had it in him?
COLE: I’m a big fan
of Rockwell.
UPDIKE: Well, he certainly
gave you what I was just describing in that turkey. Come
to think of it, there’s a memorable turkey in Rockwell’s
wartime poster “Freedom from Want.” It’s
a cooked turkey as opposed to Currin’s raw turkey, but i’s
still quite a turkey, with a crispy brown skin.
This is a turkey we’re going to eat, this is a turkey that’s
been processed and rendered safe for us to eat; and the
Currin is raw. You don’t like to look at it for too long.
But, yes, he gave a lot of value, Rockwell did, more than
was asked for, in commercial art.
He was an artist, a real artist in that he went beyond
the requirements. He could have painted with less loving
detail; he could have had fewer little anecdotal touches
and facial expressions in his work. But he went always to
fill the glass to the brim—fill the whole canvas with
warmth and enlivening details.
I think Rockwell is the standout in an age of great illustrators,
because he never settled for a formula, unlike many of them.
The late covers he did for the Post, just before
it folded were really very painterly.
COLE: Well, you could
see how he was trained in a classical tradition. I mean
he could really draw and he knew how to put paint on canvas.
I think he’s coming in for a little bit of a reappraisal,
don’t you?
UPDIKE: I think it’s
already come. He has his own museum. He was everything that
art critics used to hate. But now, with so many representational
artists, contemporary and old-time, coming into fashion,
it’s a little harder to dismiss Rockwell.
COLE: One of my pet
peeves is that there are a number of books on American art
that don’t include Rockwell. I don’t see how you can really
talk about American art without Rockwell. Most Americans,
if you ask them to name an American artist, they’d probably
say Rockwell.
UPDIKE: One artist
I know went to the Norman Rockwell Museum and he was struck
by how, as he put it, “horrible” the actual painting was.
The application of paint was very displeasing to his eye,
although, since it reproduced beautifully, he said it didn’t
matter. The purpose of a Rockwell painting was to be reproduced.
COLE: Right.
UPDIKE: But there wasn’t
any of that pleasure in brushwork, the sense of palpable
paint, that you get from many painters—from all of
the Impressionists, for example.
COLE: I am curious
to hear your thoughts on Jackson Pollock and this shattering
of tradition and also the importance of celebrity to art.
But, for starters, could Pollock’s explosive rise
have happened in any place but New York?
UPDIKE: I suppose it
was tied in with the Manhattan ethos of buzz—even
though the word “buzz” wasn’t coined, my impression is,
when the Abstract Expressionists appeared. As far as I know,
none of them got very rich in their prime. Pollock struggled
for money when he was alive.
But the notion of the painter as a romantic figure was
certainly achieved in the New York School. You didn’t feel
that way about Pollock’s onetime teacher Thomas Hart Benton,
who was also in his way an interesting man, a cantankerous,
violent guy. But he was not a gorgeous creature the way
that Pollock was, or Rothko, who, remember, committed a
very bloody suicide, or Franz Kline, who drank himself into
an early grave.
These men—and the movement had a macho side—were
romantic, heroic. Their art was so unexpected, although
there had been abstraction around for decades. They made
art glamorous. They made American art glamorous to the rest
of the world, which had not happened hitherto. They were
the first American artists really, as you know, to be global
trend setters and to influence European artists.
American art, for all the charms it has, especially for
Americans—and it certainly speaks to me—until
Abstract Expressionism didn’t speak much to anybody who
wasn’t American.
COLE: Do you think
Americans have an inferiority complex about their own art?
UPDIKE: I think that
has been the American condition. Somebody like Copley paid
great deference to the English and their dashing style.
And then later in the century the French were the ones to
imitate.
And rightly so. There was an establishment, a culture establishment,
in Europe that didn’t exist in the U.S. The Founding Fathers
tried to separate government from religion, and in the same
spirit I think they didn’t underwrite art. The artist was
unsponsored to a marked degree. He had to make his way on
his own. Copley complained that the artists in Boston were
merely tradesmen. Portrait painters, anonymous or not so
anonymous, early on scratched out a living almost travelling
house to house.
The American sense of an artist casts him as an outlaw,
an outsider. The ones we love are outrageous in some way.
They don’t all have to commit suicide or drink themselves
to death, although that can help a posthumous reputation.
Look at the poets—all those hardworking, nineteenth-century,
learned, respectable poets boil down now in the modern consciousness
to Whitman and Emily Dickinson, who were both terrifically
eccentric citizens. And so, in the same way, we tend to
like painters who were hermits, as Winslow Homer became,
or somewhat disgraced, as Eakins was, or pugnacious fops
like Whistler or naïfs like Ryder.
We’re drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult
to do, and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still
puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
We don’t really want to think that the artist is only very
skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting
a certain set of intelligible skills. Sargent misses getting
top marks because he made it look easy.
COLE: That’s interesting.
Of all those hardworking poets, only two of them really
remain. Yet we continually rediscover figures in American
art who have now come into prominence. Last summer, I interviewed
Bill Gerdts for our magazine. And when he was going to college
in the forties, hardly any American art was being taught.
And there weren’t many retrospectives and the like. But
now the story is totally different. It is amazing, I think,
the depth and quality of some of our lesser known American
art and these artists nobody has actually ever heard of.
UPDIKE: Like Martin
Johnson Heade. He was a painter who was known and had a
studio in New York, and he somehow made a living, and went
down to Brazil and painted orchids. But, yes, it took a
hundred years for him to be seen as a great image-maker,
in The Coming Storm, in his salt marshes. The
entire Luminist School—Kensett, Lane, Gifford—they
look awfully good now, at least to me. These were real painters,
pre-Impressionist and yet somehow fresh in the same way
that the Impressionists remain.
For me, the mid-century American landscapes are better
than the European landscapes. Because they’re just—I
don’t know—they had less junk to paint. They had fewer
ruins; they just had a beach, the sea, cliffs, trees, mountains.
COLE: There is something
I think wonderfully American about someone like Albert Bierstadt.
It’s the frontier, it’s the West, it’s the rising sun, a
kind of hope and optimism about it that you don’t see in
European painting.
UPDIKE: Somewhere I
read that Bierstadt made the mountains look taller than
they actually are. And that was somehow helpful to me to
realize he was a showman. He wasn’t just painting the Rockies
as he saw them, but painting the Rockies as an epitome of
splendor and drama. He was in a way selling the Rockies.
Church also was a showman. With these painters, there’s
an element of the spectacular, of something that has never
been seen before in paint. They are panoramic, with marvelous
little details are worked in—a little cross in the
corner of the huge canvas of the Andes, like God’s signature.
What is art supposed to do except make us say, Wow!—to
strip the skin of dullness from what we see? And that’s
showbiz, to get back to your point about the Abstract Expressionists.
They were showmen in their fashion. They thought of themselves
probably as, I don’t know, struggling, neglected, underappreciated
artists, but then there is this boldness and their daring.
You mentioned Rothko, and he still looks good, unlike some
of the Abstract Expressionists; he is still spoken of reverently.
Every museum of any size has to have a Rothko. One wonders,
will there ever come a moment when people will look at a
Rothko and say, Well, what’s so great about that?
COLE: A question you
dare not ask. Talking about Bierstadt and Church, and their
exaggeration and the like, I love Picasso’s definition of
art, which I’m sure you’ve heard before: “Art is a
lie that tells the truth.”
UPDIKE: Of course it’s
a very accurate description of fiction, too, isn’t
it? A lie, a set of lies that tries to tell the truth. And
that was the excitement of fiction, when I was setting out
to write it. There were still areas of life, as I had experienced
it, that hadn’t yet gotten into print. There were
things in life that fiction could still disclose—sex,
for example.
I mean, it had been done here and there, but there was
more to explore—how it fit in to the rest of our social
intercourse. And the way people interrelate in general.
And the fact that life isn’t an adventure the way you’re
taught as a child that it’s going to be. It’s another kind
of adventure.
Offhand, people don’t know that they are living the adventure,
though the author does. Take the stories of Raymond Carver,
all these ordinary people sitting around getting drunk together.
Or the early stories of J. D. Salinger, which were a revelation
to me when I was starting out—the Zen of the mundane.
There was so much of life waiting to be turned into fiction,
and now you wonder if journalism and television dramas have
lapped it all up and left almost nothing to say.
COLE: Does art, I mean
visual art, affect you at all when you’re writing fiction?
UPDIKE: Yes, at a certain
level. Having tried to draw the rainbow at the edge of the
shadow of the egg taught me how much there is to see. And
I’ve been blessed with fairly good eyesight. So the visual
element plays a larger part maybe in my narratives than
in many.
But beyond that, well, I think painting remains the heroic
modern art. I can’t speak for music. Musicians are very
mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don’t know how
they do it. I can’t imagine ever sitting down and writing
a symphony, picking your keys, scoring the instruments.
But as far as writing goes and wondering what’s been done,
or overdone, or stale, or what is really potentially exciting
that I could bring forth, going to a museum is what excites
me. Going to MoMA when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-fifties
really liberated and stimulated my sense of what was possible
in writing. Modern art gave me courage. I would leave feeling
buoyed up.
A painting you can absorb in a couple of minutes of looking
and get most of it. Whereas a novel requires about ten,
twelve hours to read. There is an instant quality to pictorial
art that makes it I think popular among people who feel
they should absorb culture. The artists in slower mediums,
that unfold in time, look to it to lead the way.
COLE: Just to shift
gears a little bit: Who do you like to read on art?
UPDIKE: Well, reviewers
like Michael Kimmelman in the Times and Peter Schjedahl
in the New Yorker. I marvel at somebody like Schjedahl
who almost every week confronts what the Met, MoMA, or the
Guggenheim offer him in New York. He is with an old master
one week, and the next week he’ll be presented with an artist
who is still very problematic—I mean, for whom there
is no consensus, so the reviewer has to gamble on his own
nervous reactions, his gut feelings. I think of Currin again,
in this regard, and how his work does not just displease
people, but makes them angry. This angry-making quality
tells me that the art is alive and the artist is pushing
the envelope, is trying to do something new. Anyway to be
able to handle all that weekly I admire.
I read a few books about art that meant something to me.
Herbert Read wrote a lovely book about the art of sculpture
in which he talks about the haptic sense—we don’t
really see a sculpture, we feel it with this sense
of weight, of volume.
And I read André Malraux’s Voices of Silence when
it was a fashionable book. I read it and thought it was
really an amazing survey about the basic issues we are talking
about. He writes beautifully, and in this grand geste covers
all of art from Scythian belt buckles and cave paintings
up to now. It really gave me my framework insofar as I have
a framework.
COLE: Have you read
Kenneth Clark?
UPDIKE: Yes, on Leonardo
and the nude. And of course I followed his television series
on civilization. It was in the days when there were some
things in television we really didn’t want to miss, and
his series was one of them. Like Malraux, he knew it all
and got it all in. Clark is one of the few very wellborn
people who has amounted to anything in the arts.
COLE: That may be true.
UPDIKE: I think it’s
a matter of the kind of discipline and the kind of daring,
the kind of patience that an artist needs; it’s not something
that people who are aristocrats are often equipped with.
COLE: Do you collect?
UPDIKE: My wife and
I have a few paintings, but they’re basically ones that
have fallen to us. I don’t collect. I used to collect comic
strips. As a boy, I used to write away to comic-strip artists
and cartoonists and beg them to send me an original strip,
and I had quite a little collection, actually; a number
of artists would do it. It shows what an innocent world
it was once.
COLE: If you were equipped
with absolutely unlimited funds, who are a couple of artists
you would buy?
UPDIKE: Homer, Hopper,
Klee. I’d love to have a Pollock, and it wouldn’t have to
be a big Pollock either. Some of the smaller things he did
between finding himself and losing himself, in a rather
brief window in the late forties and early fifties, when
you see them are just exquisite, in the same way that Chinese
porcelain and calligraphy are.
Speaking of Pollock, it’s odd there hasn’t been another.
He has no followers. Nobody has been able to do what he
did, and we think of him as this ill-educated, neurotic
alcoholic. But he did know somehow when to quit on the canvas.
It was a gift, a real talent that didn’t get enough credit.
Sure, I’d like to own a Pollock.
COLE: It seems to me
one of the great challenges that faces any visual artist
is knowing when the work is finished. You can’t go look
that up anyplace. That must be true also in your work. I
mean your criticism and your fiction. How do you know when
you’re finished?
UPDIKE: Donald Barthelme,
I think it was, talked about the capacity for being bored
as one of an artist’s assets. For a writer, there is nothing
like the problematical quality I would think stopping is
for a painter. You look at Lucian Freud and ask when has
he put enough paint on paint, when is it crusty enough?
COLE: Right.
UPDIKE: It’s all too
subjective, isn’t it? With abstraction, how do you know
when you’re finished? How did Pollock know that it was time
to stop dribbling? The Abstract Expressionists put the emphasis
back on spiritual rightness: you knew when to quit because
you were in a way with God, with the god of art. There was
a kind of unanswerable rightness that you were looking for,
and could get, although you could lose it too. An artist
has to change, has to grow, and often you grow away from
what you do best. Pollock certainly did. Pollock stopped
dribbling and was revealed again as a very modestly gifted
painter.
COLE: What are you
working on next? More criticism?
UPDIKE: My mother didn’t
raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.
As I’m approaching my seventy-sixth birthday I would like
to do less. But I must say that it’s nice to write something
that you’re almost certain is going to be published. And
there’s a kind of cheap comfort in acting the judge, instead
of putting your creative work out there to be judged. And
for me it involves leaving a kind of secluded, suburban
New England life. It’s bracing to get on the shuttle and
go to the Met or MoMA and look at something with an objective
in mind, and to have your little notebook as a sign that
you’re a serious person. It’s like taking a quick seminar.
I suppose I enjoyed college enough to make the rest of my
life somewhat like going to college. You read a book, you
write a paper, you write a review of it.
COLE: It must be nice
to know that it will get published too.
UPDIKE: You know, it
makes it real. One trouble with writing poetry or fiction
is that you can be kidding yourself. Or the air can be leaking
out of your balloon and you don’t know it. There is always
a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary.
But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope
walking, race-car driving . . .
COLE: . . . and doing
criticism and . . .
UPDIKE: writing novels
fun, interesting. You’re one level out, though, when you’re
writing fiction. I called one of my collections Hugging
the Shore. When you’re writing out of your head—imaginary
stuff—you are alone out there, but you’re also the only
person in charge. In this kingdom of one, you’re the boss.
And the slave, too. You are the workforce.
You asked about what I was doing. I have a novel coming
out in the fall, and I’m trying to write a story or two
to round out a collection beyond that novel. That takes
me into the year 2009, and that’s about it on my immediate
desk. You get to the point where you should be wrapping
up and delivering, you know, last words. At the same time
you secretly hope you never reach that point.
Photo © Rick
Friedman / Corbis |