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.