

John Updike, ca. 1968.

In 1966, when John Updike was first asked to do a Paris Review interview, he refused: “Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. Also, I really don’t have a great deal to tell interviewers; the little I learned about life and the art of fiction I try to express in my work.”

The following year, a second request won acceptance, but Updike’s apprehension caused further delay. Should there be a meeting followed by an exchange of written questions and answers, or should this procedure be reversed? Need there be any meeting at all? (Updike fears becoming, even for a moment, “one more gassy monologuist.”) In the end, during the summer of 1967, written questions were submitted to him, and afterward, he was interviewed on Martha’s Vineyard, where he and his family take their vacation.

A first view of Updike revealed a jauntiness of manner surprising in a writer of such craft and sensibility. After barreling down Edgartown’s narrow main street, the author appeared from his beat-up Corvair—a barefoot, tousle-haired young man dressed in khaki Bermudas and a sweatshirt.

Updike is a fluent talker, but obviously not a man who expects talk to bridge the distance between others and his inner life. Therefore, the final stage of this interview was his revision of the spoken comments to bring them into line with the style of his written answers. The result is a fabricated interview—in its modest way, a work of art, and thus appropriate to a man who believes that only art can track the nuances of experience.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve treated your early years fictionally and have discussed them in interviews, but you haven’t said much about your time at Harvard. I wonder what effect you think it had.

JOHN UPDIKE

My time at Harvard, once I got by the compression bends of the freshman year, was idyllic enough, and as they say, successful; but I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly. I remember the glow of the Fogg Museum windows, and my wife-to-be pushing her singing bicycle through the snowy Yard, and the smell of wet old magazines that arose from the cellar of the Lampoon and hit your nostrils when you entered the narthex, and numerous pleasant revelations in classrooms—all of it haunted, though, by knowledge of the many others who had passed this way, and felt the venerable glory of it all a shade keener than I, and written sufficiently about it. All that I seem able to preserve of the Harvard experience is in one short story, “The Christian Roommates.” There was another, “Homage to Paul Klee,” that has been printed in The Liberal Context but not in a book. Foxy Whitman, in Couples, remembers some of the things I do. Like me, she feels obscurely hoodwinked, pacified, by the process of becoming nice. I distrust, perhaps, hallowed, very okay places. Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

INTERVIEWER

Did you learn much writing for the Lampoon?

UPDIKE

The Lampoon was very kind to me. I was given, beside the snug pleasures of club solidarity, carte blanche as far as the magazine went—I began as a cartoonist, did a lot of light verse, and more and more prose. There was always lots of space to fill. Also, I do have a romantic weakness for gags—we called ourselves, the term itself a gag, gagsters. My own speciality was Chinese jokes. A little birthday party, and the children singing to the blushing center of attention, “Happy Birthday, Tu Yu.” Or coolies listening to an agitator and asking each other, “Why shouldn’t we work for coolie wages?” Or—another cartoon—a fairy princess in a tower, her hair hanging to the ground and labeled Fire Exit. And I remember Bink Young, now an Episcopal priest, solemnly plotting, his tattered sneakers up on a desk, how to steal a battleship from Boston Harbor. Maybe, as an imperfectly metamorphosed caterpillar, I was grateful for the company of true butterflies.

INTERVIEWER

Have you given up drawing entirely? I noticed that your recent “Letter from Anguilla” was illustrated by you.

UPDIKE

You’re nice to have noticed. For years I wanted to get a drawing into The New Yorker, and at last I did. My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. Newly married, I used to draw Mary and the children, and did have that year in art school, but of late I don’t draw at all, don’t even doodle beside the telephone. It’s a loss, a sadness for me. I’m interested in concrete poetry, in some attempt to return to the manuscript page, to use the page space, and the technical possibilities. My new book, a long poem called Midpoint, tries to do something of this. Since we write for the eye, why not really write for it—give it a treat? Letters are originally little pictures, so let’s combine graphic imagery, photographic imagery, with words. I mean mesh them. Saying this, I think of Pound’s Chinese characters, and of course Apollinaire; and of my own poems, “Nutcracker,” with the word nut in boldface, seems to me as good as George Herbert’s angel-wings.

INTERVIEWER

After graduating from Harvard, you served as a New Yorker staff writer for two years. What sort of work did you do?

UPDIKE

I was a Talk of the Town writer, which means that I both did the legwork and the finished product. An exalted position! It was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you quit?

UPDIKE

After two years I doubted that I was expanding the genre. When my wife and I had a second child and needed a larger apartment, the best course abruptly seemed to leave the city, and with it the job. They still keep my name on the staff sheet, and I still contribute Notes and Comments, and I take much comfort from having a kind of professional home where they consider me somehow competent. America in general doesn’t expect competence from writers. Other things, yes; competence, no.

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about being associated with that magazine for so many years?

UPDIKE

Very happy. From the age of twelve when my aunt gave us a subscription for Christmas, The New Yorker has seemed to me the best of possible magazines, and their acceptance of a poem and a story by me in June of 1954 remains the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life. Their editorial care and their gratitude for a piece of work they like are incomparable. And I love the format—the signature at the end, everybody the same size, and the battered title type, evocative of the twenties and Persia and the future all at once.

INTERVIEWER

You seem to shun literary society. Why?

UPDIKE

I don’t, do I? Here I am, talking to you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf. Anyway, in 1957, I was full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say, and Ipswich gave me the space in which to say it, and in which to live modestly, raise my children, and have friends on the basis of what I did in person rather than what I did in print.

INTERVIEWER

Do your neighbors—present in Ipswich, past in Shillington—get upset when they fancy they’ve found themselves in your pages?

UPDIKE

I would say not. I count on people to know the difference between flesh and paper, and generally they do. In Shillington I was long away from the town, and there is a greater element of distortion or suppression than may appear; there are rather few characters in those Olinger stories that could even remotely take offense. Ipswich I’ve not written too much about. Somewhat of the marsh geography peeps through in Couples, but the couples themselves are more or less adults who could be encountered anywhere in the East. The town, although it was a little startled at first by the book, was reassured, I think, by reading it. The week after its publication, when the Boston papers were whooping it up in high tabloid style, and the Atlantic ran a banshee cry of indignation from Diana Trilling, people like the gas-station attendant and a strange woman on the golf course would stop me and say something soothing, complimentary. I work downtown, above a restaurant, and can be seen plodding up to my office most mornings, and I think Ipswich pretty much feels sorry for me, trying to make a living at such a plainly unprofitable chore. Also, I do participate in local affairs—I’m on the Congregational church building committee and the Democratic town committee, and while the Couples fuss was in progress, capped by that snaggle-toothed cover on Time, I was writing a pageant for our Seventeenth-century Day. Both towns in my mind are not so much themselves as places I’ve happened to be in when I was a child and then an adult. The difference between Olinger and Tarbox is much more the difference between childhood and adulthood than the difference between two geographical locations. They are stages on my pilgrim’s progress, not spots on the map.