John Updike Interview (page: 7 / 8) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction	Print Interview

What influence do you think your drawing and art abilities have had on your prose?

John Updike: I think I try harder to visualize the physical setting. The room, the dress, the face. I'm not sure I always succeed, and there's a way in which you can suffocate an image under words by putting too many. You know, you can handle, say, "a pale, young lady with arched eyebrows," but once you start going into the eyebrows hair by hair and do the earrings on top of it, you get sort of no image. You get no image, so you have to watch this tendency to over-specify. But, I think it is good to -- Conrad spoke about helping the reader, making the reader see, see, televise the word, and I think there is that in my writing. A belief that seeing is not quite all, but seeing is a lot of it, and so I hope to see it in my own mind and then to transfer it to the reader's mind as best I can. But you know, readers are different and they all have different experiences. "Bed," the word "bed" means one thing to you, another thing to me, and where I would never have read exactly the word that you would have read yourself, but nevertheless we're all in the same rough human ballpark here, and I think communication can occur.
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You've reviewed many of your contemporaries. That can't have been an easy task since you must know some of these people. What do you think the reviewing has done for you?

John Updike: I didn't set out to become a reviewer much, but I did. I was a New Yorker writer and looking for any way in which I could appear in the magazine and sell, and I began to drift into reviewing by 1960, not very many at first. They had other reviewers, but as they died off, I became for a while almost the main reviewer. I did more reviews than anybody else, and you could say I was doing too many. I did try to avoid American contemporaries, many of whom, as you say, I knew, because who knows where envy or friendship enter in and distort the honesty of the book report. So, I tried to review foreign, dead or European or Latin American writers. There was a lot of ferment and magic realism. The novel in Europe was much more overtly experimental than I'm aware of it being now. So I thought there were things I could learn, just as a reader, from reading these books, so I tried to read books that would further my own education, as well as earn me the money of the book review and keep me up.
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It's very easy -- when you've written for those three or four hours -- your appetite for words is rather diminished, so it's all too easy to not read much, so the reviews did keep me reading and acquainted with trends. Trends in what do we do with this old dinosaur -- the novel. Because the novel is a very capacious plastic. It's sort of what you make it, and it's taken many forms. Ulysses is -- you can't repeat that, but that is an example of a novel that really tried to do everything. So we post-moderns are faced with this notion that maybe we're not taking it far enough. We're accepting the old conventions, quote marks and "he said, she said," when we had these experimental writers who have done so much. So anyway, it's good in a way to make yourself think about these basic issues. Why are you doing this at all? What are you bringing to it that's different? Are you just feeding the machine or are you in some way altering the machine? All these things are probably up to a point useful, but in the end you're left with your own intuitions and your own sense of -- whatever -- beauty or meaning or urgency.
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What writers do you enjoy reading? What novels do you read for fun or amazement?

John Updike: There are a number of contemporary writers whose work I used to try to keep up with faithfully. Anne Tyler was one when she was younger, before she became a best-seller. I thought she was really quite a magical writer, and a very sweet-natured novelist, no gripes. Just trying to show you what I tried to do, to show ordinary life as being worth writing about.

Philip Roth is, of course, a marvelous writer, and a great liberator of what could be said. I have fallen behind, after reviewing and admiring his earlier work a great deal. Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch were English writers that I tried to keep up with. I'm trying to think of what I'm reading now, and all I get is some proofs of my own book, but I know there have been some. I recently reviewed a book called The Master by an Irish writer called Colm Toibin. Very interesting in the attempt, but it was static in a strange way. But it was an honorable attempt to write a novel that had never been written before. I don't think Henry James has been the hero of too many novels!

I also reviewed a lot of classics that I would do well to reread, or else to read for the first time. I recently read Vanity Fair at long last. Here I am, 70-odd years old, and I never read Vanity Fair! In a way that is the most enjoyable, when you put yourself to school with an old classic.

You mentioned Conrad earlier.

John Updike: Yes. I read a fair amount of Conrad and there are still some left that I never got around to, but he's wonderful, amazing. Amazing that he did all this in a second language, or maybe a third language even, but he had the ability to make the novel seem serious. At the same time he had this backlog of exotic ports and sailing, being a ship master, so he had a lot of middlebrow experience plus this highbrow approach to what writing was all about. That makes for a very tonic kind of fiction I think.

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