On October 21, 1978, John Updike was in Zagreb, Croatia, at the invitation of the Writers’ Association of Croatia and the American Information Center. In the afternoon, he gave a lengthy interview to Zvonimir Radeljković and Omer Hadžiselimović, professors of English who specialized in American literature at the University of Sarajevo. In it, Updike expounds on his writing process, his favorite novelists, and that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, which went to Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It was a surprising choice. The Nobel Committee, once again, has surprised us all”). Updike’s novel “Marry Me” had come out the previous year, and he had just published “The Coup.” He had completed two of his four “Rabbit” novels.
The interview, entitled “American Centaur,” was published in 1979 in a Zagreb literary magazine called Književna Smotra. The English version appears here for the first time.
Today, Hadžiselimović is an adjunct English professor at Loyola University Chicago; Radeljković still teaches in Sarajevo.
We interviewed John Updike in Zagreb, Croatia, on October 21, 1978. He had arrived a day earlier. Tall, gray-haired, tired, and suffering from a cold, Updike talked to us for an hour over coffee at the Palace Hotel. It was his third interview that day, and yet, as he said, it was the only one about literature, rather than about lost baggage or tourist impressions—or pornography.
Hadžiselimović: Mr. Updike, would you like to comment on this year’s Nobel Prize for literature?
Updike: I was surprised a lot by it, but then I’m surprised every year. I think it is a good award. I don’t know who Singer’s competitors were. In the United States, Singer is widely respected—I don’t think widely read. He is known but he certainly does not have anything like Bellow’s national presence. He, in a way, is a Polish writer who lives in the United States, and his best writing seems to me to be still out of the Polish-Jewish world that has long ceased to exist. But I admire what I’ve read and think he is a lovely man, and it’s nice to have a prize given to this particular kind of spokesman, I think, of the last of the Yiddish writers. But it was a surprising choice. The Nobel Committee, once again, has surprised us all.
Radeljković: Mr. Updike, I would like to ask you about your actual process of writing. Do you have a fixed schedule? How do you do it, actually?
Updike: Well, the schedule is semi-fixed. I try to write in the morning and then into the afternoon. I’m a later riser; fortunately, my wife is also a late riser. We get up in unison and fight for the newspaper for half an hour. Then I rush into my office around 9:30 and try to put the creative project first. I have a late lunch, and then the rest of the day somehow gets squandered. There is a great deal of busywork to a writer’s life, as to a professor’s life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don’t do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. But I’ve never been a night writer, unlike some of my colleagues, and I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. So, I try to be a regular sort of fellow—much like a dentist drilling his teeth every morning—except Sunday, I don’t work on Sunday, and there are of course some holidays I take. I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there’s this panicky feeling that this is me and I must make it better. A good deal of time is spent actually rewriting, rereading what you have written.
Radeljković: Do you do most of your rewriting in proof, or do you rewrite and reread before that a lot?
Updike: Not as much as some writers. I try to write in my head before I begin, enough so that at least a general shape is there. And I usually put a thing through two versions: the first, whether it’s typewritten or handwritten, and then a cleanly typed version, which I do myself. Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I’m a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. But the proofs I do take very seriously, as another opportunity to prove and to see with a fresh eye.
Hadžiselimović: What is your position vis-a-vis other modern, contemporary novelists in America; vis-a-vis the innovative or absurd fiction, as some have called it; guys like Sorrentino, Sukenick, Wurlitzer, Pynchon, Barthelme, John Barth? Do you feel your art and messages as being different from theirs, and if so, how?
Updike: I’ve seen myself critically opposed to this school. I don’t feel opposed to it. I’m very unevenly acquainted with the writers you mention. Barthelme is a fellow New Yorker writer whom I read faithfully and have learned a fair amount from. I think Barthelme’s stories of the sixties were really very liberating as far as what one could do with a short story, and I know that my own short stories have been influenced by his. Also, like Hemingway, he’s a great simplifier or stripper away of verbal nonsense. After reading enough Barthelme, your own stories tend to become a little shorter and cleaner and more spasmodic. John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don’t think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I’m saying. His last novel, Chimera, which is really a series of novellas, was essentially about the kind of marital breakup and re-synthesis that I have written about. Pynchon I do feel more alien to; I really find it not easy to read him; I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that he sets for us. I believe that life is frightening and tragic, but I think that it is other things, too. Temperamentally, I just have not been able to read enough Pynchon to pronounce intelligently upon him. Clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read.
Hadžiselimović: Has he turned up?
Updike: People know him. I’ve never met him, but Barthelme I know is a fairly good friend and he does have a physical existence. I think he lives in California and has lived in Mexico. Indeed, he attended my wife’s alma mater of Cornell, where I’m sure Pynchon scholars have looked up his examinations. Strange to say, he, like my wife, took a course with the late Vladimir Nabokov when he taught at Cornell, and Mrs. Nabokov remembered Pynchon’s handwriting. Evidently, she was the one who corrected the exams. So Pynchon, like Salinger, does exist. But he is hard to find. Even as I give one interview after another in Yugoslavia, I sympathize with the wish to not give interviews. I think it is not merely that these men are being perverse or playing games with their public, but there’s something polluting about expressing opinions beyond what you express in your fiction. In other words, I have opinions; every man has opinions. But they are really only opinions and they are of interest only because of what I have written. So, in a way, I don’t mind Pynchon’s staying out of public life. This is sort of a byway. I am not among those who has found much comfort in Pynchon. As to so-called black humor, which is maybe a passé phrase, it did seem to me at its best to be true enough and to
correspond with a quality of, at least, American life in the sixties. I think of some of my own themes as at least humorous and gray, if not black. Perhaps I can be enlisted as a gray humorist, not a black one.
Hadžiselimović: In an ironically intoned article in the Atlantic about ten years ago, Alfred Kazin wrote about the compulsion of the American suburban middle-class writer to be a performer, because he has to capture the reader, to keep him interested, to captivate him by some fresh impression of the shared experience. According to Kazin, the catastrophe in American fiction is still the breakdown of marriage as an institution. Thus, the prevailing themes are not the terrible non-being, or Sartre-like nausea, but suburbs, our relationships with children, minorities, mistresses, employers, illness, the social identity, loneliness, and divorce. This reminds one of Frost’s verses “How are we to write a Russian novel in America, as long as life goes so unterribly.” Would you agree to the diagnosis of these problems that the American writer has to face in writing, as indicated in this article?
Updike: Well, I think nothing that Alfred Kazin or Robert Frost says can be dismissed. It almost sounds as though he was reviewing “Couples” at the time. I remember he did review “Couples” rather adversely as a work of art. He thought that it was a good piece of sociology. He touches upon several problems. One, certainly, is trying to capture the reader’s attention, or, in other words, to find a subject of sufficient dignity and importance and universality to write a great novel about it. The theme of a breakup of a marriage is perhaps not only an American issue but a bourgeois issue, which begins with the establishment of the family as a crucial economic unit. “Madame Bovary” and “Ana Karenina” are both also novels of adultery and of marital estrangement. There must be more to say about America. I think, oddly enough, since Kazin said those words that divorce, along with the sight of female breasts, has become somewhat less surprising and shocking. Divorce seems almost to be part of the American life cycle as presently constituted, and as such is a little less traumatic, although it is traumatic still, and no one has described it more traumatically than myself. I wouldn’t minimize the trauma involved. But—from where I sit and try to write—my wish, especially at this stage in my writing career, having written amply about wives, children, marriages, is to find other subjects without falsifying the texture of life as it comes to me. I think there is a danger of just constructing a subject because it is apt to be important, and then writing a novel to that subject. There must be more to say, more to describe. Life is a very strange thing, in a way, compared to life in a novel. People in novels rather rarely eat; their health is not often of concern to them; earning money isn’t nearly as important to them as it is to those of us in the real world. In the very novel form there are distortions, variations, whereas the love life of novel characters and their personal interrelations. E. M. Forester somewhere says that people in novels are so sensitive to each other—we all kind of blunder through life, more or less dazed; yet people in novels are ever so aware of each other, and sharp. So, novels and life are not strictly equivalent. I’ve written about this. I think there is something romantic in the way we’ve constructed this art form. It needn’t be only romantic. I am looking for ways to write an unromantic novel. I’m sure others are, too. Somehow, even as a reader, though, I do find that when a love interest appears, my own interest perks up. I don’t know what else I can say about the Kazin quote. I think Kazin as a critic does suffer a little bit from an imperial manner. The American critic on the whole feels obliged not merely to respond to the work set before him, but to somehow become a prophet, a pronouncer on American society. Some of them are better than others. But what I resent in contemporary criticism is this taking a work of attempted, supposed art, as a text for a long sermon on something rather different. I tried as a critic to talk about the book. Perhaps I don’t always succeed. I know Kazin doesn’t always succeed.
Hadžiselimović: So, you assume a certain humbleness about the art of writing?
Updike: Against the background of the immense claims that have been made for the novel in America in the last twenty years—and it is often spelled with a capital “N,” Novel—we do believe in it as the ultimate vessel for truth-telling and artistic expression. I think a writer who’s been unable to follow a successful novel with others of equal success is tormented. I think Mailer has been bothered by his failure to produce novels lately. I think we might produce better novels if we slightly reduced our expectations of it. Even Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” seemed to me to be longer than it had to be. Most books are longer than they had to be. We give honor to length as though it’s some virtue. I tried to think of myself as a writer instead of as a novelist. I write a variety of things, novels among them.
Radeljković: How important is tradition for you? Who would be your intellectual or artistic predecessors, European or American?
Updike: There have been a number of the mighty dead who have affected me. I guess an English-language writer begins with Shakespeare as some kind of a model of a career. The man who was able to tackle hack assignments and adjust himself to all sorts of temporary currents, both in fashion and economic need, and of historicity, and who was able to make all of the compromises that inferior artists make, and yet it fused the product with truth and wonder … Also, what one likes about Shakespeare is that he wrote masterpieces of different kinds. He didn’t peak and then subside, but somehow continued to advance, and with a wonderful sense of freedom you feel, and unselfconsciousness. Maybe no modern artist can be that unselfconscious. He was working in a form not highly regarded at the time, which may have been a help. The academics were doing very different things: they were reading Latin and writing long poems, so Shakespeare was in a way freed from the illusion of importance that generally is not helpful to a writer, I would say.
Writers who have moved me to the point that I wish to emulate them vary from James Thurber, the humorist, to Proust, to Italo Calvino, to Nabokov, actually, whom I discovered by myself, kind of, and who amazed me and still amazes me: the man really tried to make language do several things at once. I think it’s nice since we have limited time—it’s nice to read a page that is truly intricately worked. It rewards attention. So much doesn’t reward attention; you wish you could read it faster. In the American vein, I think I am pretty ragged in my education. I continue to be greatly moved by Hawthorne, who seemed to me to have the American shyness and limitedness, and yet a sort of beautiful man talking, a beautiful sense of breathing. I’m not doing it quite right, but I was amazed by “The Scarlet Letter,” and what a good woman this was. American fiction does not have many good women in it. Melville, I think, is a writer I admire for his wit, his ambitiousness, and again for something very masculine. Recently, I found myself giving a lecture on Whitman and very much enjoying reading the early poems. I think he began to repeat himself, but this is a common American disease. Among moderns, I’m in the opposition of seeming to prefer Hemingway to Faulkner, perhaps because I haven’t read enough Faulkner. But I find that Faulkner, even in his best novels, just goes on too long and has something kind of uncontrolled. I found that the people who by and large really enjoy Faulkner are fellow Southerners and, since I’m not a Southerner, I seem to be outside the club of ardent Faulkner lovers. But, all these men are not great names for nothing. It’s just that I … Dreiser, I think, is another writer who, at least in his early books, really grabbed the bull by the right horns somehow. He has a wonderful ease of a frontal attack on a situation. He cut through a lot of sludge and I think that’s one of the perennial artistic problems—to cut through sludge, cut through the accretions of tradition and of convention and see freshly what the living reality is. So, I try to be alert to the masterpieces or even the semi-masterpieces that exist; on the other hand, I’m different from those men, my times are different. To a large extent, we have to make our way alone, and often by lesser stars. That is, I think we’re often influenced by a lesser writer who happens to catch at something we need than by a greater writer who doesn’t.
Hadžiselimović: Who do you admire among contemporary writers outside the United States?
Updike: Of living or recently dead, let me try to think. I think I have mentioned Calvino. I’ve read rather a few works by the French writer called Robert Pinget, but I have read one or two that seem to me to be the best of the French school, that is, a little more vigorous. Robbe-Grillet I find somehow chic, whereas Pinget seemed to be, as well as playful, to be in love with reality. I guess that’s what I look for in writers, is the sense of being in love with the real. There are several English women who constantly do things that no American writer could do: Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. Some other ones, like Margaret Drabble, who I admire … I haven’t read the latest of Graham Green, but I suspect I would admire and enjoy it if I could. I seem to be reading Günter Grass right now and don’t have a verdict. I’m not sure I would be reading it if I didn’t have to review it. I’ve tended to look to the French somehow as offering a way out, a way of combining fiction with ideas. There are a number of very fine Latin American writers now: Márquez, I’ve long been an enjoyer of Márquez … and I’m sure there are some that I’m neglecting to mention. Years ago, I was in the Soviet Union and became fairly well acquainted with Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. I can’t say I’ve been much influenced by their work, but I was sort of influenced by their total performance. I’m interested in the very different sense of himself that a Russian writer has than an American. The American writer, until at least recently, has been a sort of an escapee from the society he is trying to observe: Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, but even Melville with his silences, and Henry James, coming and then leaving the whole shebang for a house in Rye. It’s a rare writer who’s immersed himself in the national life. I guess you could say Mark Twain did, but even in Twain there’s a kind of an unreachable, shy something. Anyway, certainly, I think this is another un-Russian, maybe un-European sense of what a writer is. They seem to wear their honors with great pleasure. The French love their honors, love their position as sort of popes and prophets. An American feels uncomfortable, I believe, when asked to be more than a witness. At least I do.
Radeljković: You did mention Hemingway among the moderns you liked. But in one of your poems, “Meditation on a News Item,” you are dealing with Hemingway, or rather with a meeting between Castro and Hemingway. You end the poem by comparing this meeting to the contest between the Queen of Hearts and Alice, in which Alice wins. Now, why would Hemingway be Alice?
Updike: That poem was perhaps the longest piece of light verse The New Yorker ever printed, and it is a poem I’m proud of as representing a certain phase of my productivity. I was just struck by the bizarreness of Castro actually winning a fishing contest that Hemingway had sponsored. Did he really win it, or was it a kind of an honorary victory? The Queen of England winning a chess tournament or something would be equally surprising. So my meditation ended with this image of strangeness, of that to me very disturbing croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the mallets turn to flamingos—or they are flamingos—and kind of get all rubbery in your hands. I find Alice in Wonderland, by the way, one of the truly disturbing books. It’s that very dreamlike slipperiness of it. I didn’t mean it to be especially satirical vis-a-vis Hemingway, although I do think he deserved some satire in his Cuban Papa phase. He’s a supreme study of the writer as public figure and the hazards thereof. Perhaps one hesitates to say that he would have been a better writer had he stayed out of the newspapers, because maybe he needed to be in the newspapers somehow and it was intrinsic, but he is the last American writer who was a celebrity in the same way that a movie star is. I have almost said nothing about the man himself and his sad end and the many foolish kind of … there’s a sort of cruel and crazy streak in him from the very start, in a way. Yet, those early stories and the first two novels are just like drinking that bubbly water you drink here. It’s so clean it makes your mouth sort of tingle. Wonderful stuff. And the sadness of it, the sadness of those Michigan stories … He says something about the American wilderness that’s always been there to say and others have said, of course, but the whole American world view must be, may be, understood as taking place not against the background of little red-roofed villages with a church on every hilltop, but against this endless woods full of no men—no men, just rotting leaves and animals you don’t quite see. That was still there in Michigan, and this awful no, this no that breathes through the American landscape to men. Hemingway kind of said it for a lot of us.
Radeljković: I’d like to ask you another textual question. In one of your well-known stories, “The Blessed Man of Boston,” you—is it you or your protagonist?—say that you would like to write an immense novel, giving all the details of the man’s life and his surroundings, etc. You say, “Thousands upon thousands of pages; ecstatically uneventful; divinely and defiantly dull.” But then you add, “But we would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins. From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm.” Would you care to comment on this statement and explain whether it has any connection with your fictional message or your literary ideal?
Updike: Well, it’s a statement of a younger man than I am and perhaps a more radical and ambitious one. I do think it states the problem of any imitation of reality and especially the verbal imitation of reality. A painter can put before us what seems to be a very authentically close image of a real thing. A sculptor can do better than that: he can almost make a copy of the real thing. Words are never going to resemble you and me and this table … Robbe-Grillet was even describing tables in centimeters and giving you the exact angles of the shadows, and expressing this frustration of never being able to quite get it down. There’s also something religious, I believe, in what I was saying: that every man’s life is infinitely precious, at least to him, and somehow infinitely interesting. This Buddha-like Chinaman I saw in Fenway Park seats reminded me … he became sacred. Maybe the wish to write is somehow connected with … I wish to say that life is sacred. I do think that such a book would be, as I say, very dull, but it is annoying that our novels, as we do write them, are very selective, spotty, tied to a story and slightly mechanically worked-up climaxes and issues as you do attempt to generate suspense, you do attempt to resolve it. There’s beneath even the noblest novel a certain ignoble carpentry that one’s would-be saintly self resents. Some of my stories have tried, for at least a few moments of a given life, to do that, that is, to examine the details, the texture of time, the texture of a little experience in such a way as to make it yield all-new meaning, like turning a sock inside out or something.
It really takes us back to Pynchon and all those—John Barth as well—who would write the massive novel, because the massiveness is some kind of a statement about completeness: to get it all in somewhere. In “The Magic Mountain,” Mann says that only the exhaustive is really interesting, and there is that feeling that the less-than-the-totally exhaustive is somehow false. that it’s cutting off the evidence, and certainly many of our novels feel like very manipulated evidence.
Not to go on, but the story then goes on basically to try to meditate upon my grandmother: somebody whom I did know and whose life was mostly unknown to me and yet who shared my life for a while, and this hunger to capture another life, to understand another life. I once wrote a novel on an actual historical figure, President James Buchanan, in the faith that here was a life, a real life, and if we could somehow get enough facts we would divulge the hidden pattern. My attempt to do that is a printed book, but at any rate, I do have this notion that our lives show, if not a pattern, at least a kind of compulsions or recurrent events worth examining. I’m trying to think of a book that sort of does this, and I suppose “Ulysses,” in making so very much of that one day in Dublin, is the closest approximation to the exhaustive. He confuses the issue in a way, Joyce, by being so frightfully clever, by injecting all those parodies, and in some way the lives in that day seem very distant. Even at the end of the book we don’t feel we’ve gotten very close to these people, especially Stephen. Stephen is a very cold, dim sort of fellow, withdrawn, and so on. At any rate, that remains the model for exhaustiveness of a kind.
Radeljković: What about “Moby-Dick”? “Moby-Dick” is the same type of book.
Updike: The wish to say all there is about whales is certainly very much there, and one puts the book down convinced that Melville has said a great deal about whales. I kind of like that because it is infused, those catalogs of information, it all has the mobility and energy, and it is all animated by this abiding obsession with evil and terror. I take “Moby-Dick” to be about the terror of the universe and the implacability of what is other than us. I read it with pleasure. I’ve met people who haven’t read “Moby-Dick” with pleasure. Tolstoy, in a way, also tried to sum up and say everything at the end of “War and Peace,” not uninterestingly, indeed, sort of fascinatingly. However large the book, though, one can’t help but notice that it fails to do what I wanted to do for the “The Blessed Man of Boston,” that is, we are stuck with just glimpses, guesses, fragments.
Hadžiselimović: We would hate to keep you much longer, but would you just tell us if you’ve read any Yugoslav authors?
Updike: I’m pretty bad about that. I am reading Danilo Kis. I met him—most charming and vivacious he is—and he gave me several translations of the books. I’m reading the first one about the boyhood, “Garden, Ashes,” I think, is the title. I like it quite well. But I regret that I’m not better acquainted with Yugoslav writers, some of whom are world-famous and have won Nobel prizes. There is, by the way, more and more Eastern European writing being translated into the United States. I think there’s a good deal of interest in it. Philip Roth, my contemporary and fellow writer of domestic … singer of the sexual man, has taken it upon himself to promote a series of Eastern Europeans. So, I think, were I to come ten years from now, I’d probably answer that question more affirmatively than I have. I’m struck, in just the little time I’ve been here, by how important, in a way, in the general scheme of things, the literary profession is. The love of one’s own language may be a distinguishing feature of smallish languages. I find it rather hard to love English because there are so many kinds of it, and it kind of sprawls all over the world now. Although it is basically a very lovable language, it is not the center of selfhood in a way that perhaps some of the smaller languages are.
Hadžiselimović: Mr. Updike, thank you very much and we wish you a very nice stay. How long are you staying in Yugoslavia? Leaving soon?
Updike: Leaving all too soon; I’m just getting used to it, as a matter of fact. I’m just learning how to order in a restaurant. I’ve been in Belgrade, I came to the Writers’ Conference and have made these two trips: one to Vienna and one to Zagreb. I’m not in Zagreb nearly long enough: I must leave tomorrow morning and expect to be in Greece late tomorrow night. So, you’re seeing me at the end of my brief sojourn. But now that I know where the country is, perhaps I can find it again.
Hadžiselimović: We hope your cold gets better.
Updike: Better already!
Hadžiselimović: Thank you very much again.
