John Updike Doesn't Know the Meaning of the Word "Quit"
Author John Updike was at Seattle Arts & Lectures this week. The upcoming SAL appearance of Annie Leibovitz (November 19) is sold out. Michael Pollan (January 12) is almost sold out.
Courtly, thin John Updike has lived long enough that he has now to spend interviews responding to years- and decades-old quotes as if he’s just said them. "I said that?" he asked once, not, we felt, entirely jokingly.
On the other hand, he’s still more than capable of throwing out new ones. Wednesday night’s Benaroya Hall talk turned into an extended sidebar on his art critic moonlighting, and he decried the omnipresent self-consciousness that leads to modern art to feel like an "ill-tempered debate" with previous eras and schools.
When SAM’s Patricia Junker asked if he liked anything contemporary, Updike volunteered the "shininess" of Jeff Koons’ works. "They are truly shiny," he added, perhaps to shore up the faint praise, and the audience burst out laughing.
Until he was 18, says Updike, he thought he might be a cartoonist. His parents encouraged his artistic talent—or "indulged it," as he put it—and even while attending "Harvard College" he drew for the Lampoon. His nine months studying at Oxford's stodgy Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art—he drew, painted still life oils, and finally got to paint "the nude"—was in a way a last test of what talent he had, but his time was far from wasted. Art taught him to see, gave him the concrete challenge of trying "to paint a thing to look like that thing."
While modern art once sparked his sense of what could be accomplished—he loved pop art’s appropriation of "humble Americana" as subject matter—he confesses to being less receptive now: "You take what you need at a time in your life. Once we ran out of movements that could be named, I fell away. Now I have grown a shell that’s hard to penetrate." His tastes run to the more representational, and he’s a particular fan of Edward Hoppers’ "remembrance of the America of my parents." He claims he can smell, even taste the mealtime scenes, feel the plush on the furniture.
When people talk about Updike’s "hymning of the mundane," it’s this impulse they’re referring to. It’s not a glorified materialism, but a glorifying materialism, his way of giving depth to the rush of present tense through artful reconstruction of it.
Updike’s stand-up response to projections of Hopper’s "Automat," "Chop Suey," and "Summer Evening"—there’s a show at SAM, Edward Hopper's Women (on view now through March 1)—illustrated how the carefully crafted set-piece extends beyond the frame; of the young woman alone in the automat, Updike noted that, at the time, a painting of a woman eating alone in public was to comment on women being able to eat alone in public.
A radiator crouches in the corner "like a toad," the painting cropping in on the warmth of her corner. Her story is unclear; the viewer is "eavesdropping on that wonderful Hopper silence."
Usually we envy John Updike. He’s had a full career in letters, much of it recorded in the the golden era of the New Yorker or in lists of literary prizes. But even he is finding that when you reach a certain age, conversation seems to turn around how old you are, rather than what it’s like at that age. It may sound a subtle distinction but we nearly picked up a case of sympathetic arthritis during his appearance.
Things kicked off with the reminder that Updike had inaugurated Seattle Arts & Lectures "20 years ago, almost to the day!" Then guest interviewer David Guterson, asking about Updike’s latest, The Widows of Eastwick, slipped up in pointing out it’s been almost "half a century—excuse me, a quarter of a century" since The Witches of Eastwick had come out.
Whether intentionally or not, Guterson’s line of questioning brought up Updike’s age or quantity of work remorselessly, prompting Updike to laugh apologetically near the end and say, "I know there’s something wrong with anyone who’s written 60 books…but some of them are quite short!"
Updike’s revenge was to offer most of his mischievous wit and wisdom to Junker, leaving Guterson to flounder, and close with the dreaded "How do you feel about the election?" question. (Short answer: "Hopeful.")
Still, Updike did offer Guterson some succinct pointers for aspiring writers that, while brief, pack a lot of weight: You can’t write fiction unless you’ve been moved by fiction, so read all you can. Write every day fueled by the belief that writing fulfills a need, that people want to hear what you’re saying.
It sounds nobly high-minded—"fiction brings us knowledge of others in unmatched detail"—but there’s also a glimpse of fiction’s shift to the margins in there, as readership steadily grays, as time for "indulgence" vanishes, as the belief that words matter devolves to a simple thirst for "content" in as digestible a form as possible.
He mentioned that the name Updike is what happens when the Dutch name "Op de Dijk" hits American shores. Maybe that’ll be our updated image of this writer who has never lost his boyish enthusiasm for fiction’s impossible task. There he is, in front of his earthworks, holding back the sea—though the sea of course will inevitably win.
