John Updike Interview (page: 5 / 7) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction	Print Interview

You could be said to have pioneered the use of the present tense in American fiction. You used it in Rabbit, Run, and in several books since.

John Updike: Yes. It was a great liberator somehow. I loved writing in the present tense. It has become a bit of a cliché now among younger writers, but at the time it was a bit of a novelty, and certainly a novelty to me. There's kind of a level, a speed, you can get going without the past tense that was suitable to Rabbit and also suitable to me as a writer, because the books wrote themselves fairly easily. I say that now. I'm not sure it was always easy, but the combination of the present tense plus a landscape that was in my bones, this rural Pennsylvania, semi-rural, metropolitan actually.

I always felt at home writing about him, and didn't have much trouble having things for him to do and the other characters to interact. So I was happy to return the first time, and then having returned for Rabbit Redux, it seemed obligatory on my part to write at least two more. More than four I thought would be milking it unduly. People are mortal. That's one of the things about them that a fiction writer should be aware of, so I thought even though he was relatively young that I should kill him off while I was still writing well. Suppose I get sick and you're all left without a Rabbit wrapped up? Hmm. "Rabbit Wrapped Up" would not be a bad title

At any rate, I did that and then, since I was alive as it turned out ten years later, I wrote a novella about the two children finding each other and remembering their father and him kind of haunting the book. I wanted him to be there as a ghost, felt as a ghost.

Was it hard for you to let him go?

John Updike: Yeah. I think that's a good honest way to put it. It was hard for me. Also because he had been so good to me. The books won prizes, and they were fairly easy to write, so it was a step. At the time I wrote Rabbit at Rest I thought the time had come to put him to rest. It was not as if I was a writer who could only write about this guy. I had a good long run of it and it was time to let go.

His death was spectacularly realistic.

John Updike: Was it? I wasn't sure. It was almost corny to take him back to another street game, because you first see him in Rabbit, Run joining some kids around a telephone pole playing basketball, but that said, it felt good to me, that whole thing. I went down to Florida and did some research, walked around Ft. Myers, tried to get a feel for a Florida city, and it was fun to do the research and fun to write those scenes. You do get very wrapped up in these characters and care about them. You don't want to get sentimental about them, but yes. And the doctor he sees tells him he must find something to do. Rabbit's trouble is that he hasn't really had enough to do since he stopped playing basketball.

And there's his wonderful companion in these books. Janice, his wife, and Nelson, his son. They were the principals in the first novel. I had the pleasure not only of seeing Rabbit age, but of trying to turn Nelson from an infant into a man, and a man with a grudge, and yet a man with certain qualities, but it's a destructive capability that Harry can't match in the end, because Harry was destructive when young but he has become kind of a sweet old geezer towards the end.

A 56-year-old geezer?

John Updike: Yeah, a 56-year-old geezer. He feels old to himself, and of course he is overweight and he is kind of among the retirees down there, and if you'll remember he is banished for some sexual behavior, so he's kind of alone and he doesn't feel too wanted in the world.

You've said that it was fairly easy to write the Rabbit books. Do you write methodically? Do you have a schedule that you stick to?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Updike: Since I've gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So, I work three or four hours in the morning, and it's not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There's a lot of junk in your life as a writer and most people have junk in their lives. But, I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There's a danger if you don't move it along steadily that you're going to forget what it's about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I've been maintaining this schedule off and on -- well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in '57. It's a long time to be doing one thing. I don't know how to retire. I don't know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It's still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe abandon the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I've operated.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

We've spoken to a number of writers who said they wrote a certain number of pages every day. There's a lot to be said for having a routine you can't run away from.

John Updike: Right. It saves you from giving up.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. This present novel that will be out -- Villages -- I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit -- the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I'm married to here, and I'm going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it's good to have a certain doggedness to your technique. In college I was struck by the fact that Bernard Shaw, who became a playwright only after writing five novels, would sit in the British Museum, the reading room, and his quota was something like maybe five pages a day, but when he got to the last word on the last page, -- whether it was the middle of a sentence -- he would stop. So this notion that when you have a quota, whether it's two pages or -- three is how I think of it, three pages -- that it's a fairly modest quota, but nevertheless if you do it, really do it, the stuff will accumulate.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

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