Picked-Up Pieces (76 page)

The interviewers are as follows:

S
AMUELS
: Charles Thomas Samuels, who taped our conversations for several days in August 1968 on Martha’s Vineyard, and permitted me to revise the transcript for publication in the
Paris Review
the following winter as “The Art of Fiction XLIII.”

R
HODE
: Eric Rhode, whose radio dialogue with me for the BBC Third Programme was published in
The Listener
on June 19, 1969.

G
ADO
: Frank Gado, professor of English at Union, Schenectady, New York; for simplicity’s sake I have identified with his name not only his own questions but a few from his students, whose taped session with me in the winter of 1971 was printed as a special issue of
The Idol
, that spring.

B
UCKINGHAM
: Hugh Buckingham, a poet and critic then teaching at Harvard, who came and talked to me about
Bech: A Book;
the transcribed interview appeared in the Sunday
Herald-Traveler
(Boston) Books Guide supplement for January 19, 1971. His machine failed to record our first take; the second lacked much of the sparkle of the irrecoverable first.

S
RAGOW
: Michael Sragow, an undergraduate reporter for the Harvard
Crimson
, where this interview appeared on February 2, 1972, having been taped in Cambridge the preceding December.

O
GLE
: Jane Ogle, of
Harper’s Bazaar
, whose written questions about
Buchanan Dying
were answered by me, in exceptionally lavish detail, on December 18, 1972, on the typewriter, and were never published.

H
OWARD
: Jane Howard, who spent three days in Ipswich with the Updikes in September 1966, and whose sprightly and courteous account, under the somewhat discouraging title “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” appeared in the November 4, 1966, issue of
Life
.

ONE BIG INTERVIEW

SAMUELS
:
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
.

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 grateful 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 more warmly 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 O.K. places. Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

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

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 poems of the objects and overheard conversations.

SAMUELS
:
How do you feel about being associated with that magazine?

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.

SAMUELS
:
You seem to shun literary society. Why?

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 non-participants; 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 teen-aged 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.

RHODE
:
I don’t see any affiliation in your work to the French idea of experiment, or indeed to the kinds of experiment that go on in the States. It seems to me that you are much closer to the English novel: there is a very strong sense of the domestic in your work—of the world as it is
. [A pause.]

I’m just trying to think of the word “domestic.” I suppose this is true. It may be less a matter of conscious choice than of the fact that I seem to be a domestic creature. My first novel,
The Poorhouse Fair
, was, at least in my mind, something of a
nouvelle vague
book, particularly in the ending: that is, I tried to create a pattern of tension and then, instead of resolving
it, dissolved it. It ended with a kind of brainless fair: people come to a fair and you hear their voices and it all dissolves. In my mind it was a somewhat experimental book, and my publishers then, Harper, seemed to think it was, because the ending puzzled them so much that I took it away from them and went to Knopf, where I’ve been happy ever since. In each of the books there has been, in my mind at least, a different experiment, an adventure: in
Rabbit, Run
the present tense may seem a mild adventure. It’s more and more used now, but at that time it wasn’t.

RHODE
:
Coming back to
The Poorhouse Fair,
the most striking thing there, I think, is the fact that you have so clearly kept yourself out of the book, that you have created these very old men and women. This is an act entirely of the imagination, or so it feels. In fact Mary McCarthy said that she finds it a rather spooky accomplishment—like those boy actors who play old men—that you have created these characters so credibly. How far was it based on actuality?

Not very. There was indeed a poorhouse a couple of blocks from where I grew up, but I very rarely went into it, and there was a fair that must have impressed me as a child. I had written prior to this, while living in New York City, a six-hundred-page novel, called
Home
and more or less about myself and my family up to the age of sixteen or so. It had been a good exercise to write it and I later used some of the material in short stories, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized that this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many of the traits of a first novel. I did not publish it, but I thought it was time for me to write a novel. I was—what?—twenty-five, twenty-six. Getting to be an old man, as writers go in America. They were tearing the poorhouse down in Shillington, and I went over and looked at the shell. My grandfather, who is somewhat like John Hook in that book, was recently dead, and so the idea of some kind of memorial gesture, embodying what seems to have been on my part a very strong sense of national decay, crystallized in this novel. I wrote it in three months and then rewrote it in three months. It was my first real venture into what you might call novelistic space and it was very exciting. I haven’t read it since the last set of proofs, but I’d like to think that there was some love, and hence some life and blood, in these old people.

SAMUELS
:
But if I’m not mistaken, you once expressed a desire to write for the films and I think
Rabbit, Run,
in particular, is quite a cinematic novel. Do you have any such plans now?

Rabbit, Run
was subtitled originally “A Movie.” The present tense was in part meant to be an equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration. The opening bit of the boys playing basketball was visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits. This doesn’t mean, though, that I really wanted to write for the movies. It meant I wanted to make a movie. I could come closer by writing it in my own book than by attempting to get through to Hollywood.

GADO
:
How do you react to the idea of a film being made of one of your books?

I had the eerie experience the other day of sitting in an empty theatre looking at a movie made from
Rabbit, Run
. The picture fails in a number of ways, but one of the ways was in trying to be faithful to the book. They’d been faithful to it in a literal-minded way, but by not being so to the underlying spirit, they produced an enigmatic version of what is very clear in the book.

And yet certain things, like the furniture in the people’s apartments, had been done with a richness that I had never even approached. I couldn’t have imagined all these things they found to put in those sets: these identifying kinds of calendars, the style of furniture, all just for a few seconds on the screen. How incomparably more solid and entertaining the physical environment became, and yet, curiously, the inner story of the book became thin and even nonsensical.

Funnily enough, when they made a movie out of this book, they didn’t see that it was written as a film in my mind. They didn’t put the titles over the opening with the kids playing basketball. Instead they made a little box out of it and surrounded it with the titles. The big hands, the ball bouncing on the ground—it would have been a natural thing for an overlay. Which goes to show.…

GADO
:
Haven’t I read that someone is making a movie from
Couples?

I doubt if he’ll ever do anything with it. An enterprising fellow called Wolper, who made a good thing of various television documentaries, got hold of
Couples
. He had quite ambitious plans for it. In writing to me, he kept using the word “important” all the time. “Most important book,” and then, “Make an important movie.”

At one point, I intended to say to him, “Would you like me to come out to Hollywood and write the movie for you?” I can see it as a film, and I know I could do it. I understand the book; I understand that it is a romantic book, a book written by a boy who went to a lot of movies. It has a happy ending. It’s about a guy meeting a girl and the guy getting the
girl. But I know that they don’t see it that way. You know, they were talking about it as satire! Satire—this elegiac story. It’s a loving portrait of life in America. No, I don’t think I will write the screenplay, even if they were to ask me out there. They’d just break my heart.

One of the advantages of the kind of writing I do is that you are your own boss. You shoot your own stock, choose all the scenes, cast all the characters. You’re your own everything really—and the product, then, is yours. If it plays, great—and if it doesn’t, there are no alibis.

SAMUELS
:
Why do you write so much about what most people take to be your own adolescence and family? Numerous critics, for example, have pointed to similarities between
Of the Farm, The Centaur,
and stories like “My Grandmother’s Thimble.” “Flight,” for example, seems an earlier version of
Of the Farm.

I suppose there’s no avoiding it—my adolescence seemed interesting to me. In a sense my mother and father, considerable actors both, were dramatizing my youth as I was having it, so that I arrived as an adult with some burden of material already half-formed. There is, true, a submerged thread connecting certain of the fictions, and I guess the submerged thread is the autobiography. That is, in
Of the Farm
, although the last name is not the name of the people in
The Centaur
, the geography is not appreciably changed, and the man in each case is called George.
Of the Farm
was in part a look at the world of
The Centaur
after the centaur had indeed died. By the way, I must repeat that I didn’t mean Caldwell to die in
The Centaur;
he dies in the sense of living, of going back to work, of being a shelter for his son. But by the time Joey Robinson is thirty-five his father is dead. Also, there’s the curious touch of the Running Horse River in
Rabbit, Run
which returns in the Alton of
The Centaur
. And somehow that Running Horse bridges both the books, connects them. But apart from the somewhat teasing little connections, there is in these three novels and the short stories of
Pigeon Feathers
a central image of flight or escape or loss, the way we flee from the past, a sense of guilt which I tried to express in the story, the triptych with the long title, “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island,” wherein the narrator becomes a Polynesian pushing off into a void. The sense that in time as well as space we leave people as if by volition and thereby incur guilt and thereby owe them, the dead, the forsaken, at least the homage of rendering them. The trauma or message
that I acquired in Olinger had to do with suppressed pain, with the amount of sacrifice, I suppose, that middle-class life demands, and by that I guess I mean civilized life. The father, whatever his name, is sacrificing freedom of motion, and the mother is sacrificing in a way—oh, sexual richness, I guess; they’re all stuck, and when I think back over these stories (and you know, they
are
dear to me and if I had to give anybody one book of me it would be the Vintage
Olinger Stories
) I think especially of that moment in “Flight” when the boy, chafing to escape, fresh from his encounter with Molly Bingaman and a bit more of a man but not enough quite, finds the mother lying there buried in her own peculiar messages from far away, the New Orleans jazz, and then the grandfather’s voice comes tumbling down the stairs singing “There is a happy land, far, far away.” This is the way it was, is. There has never been anything in my life quite as compressed, simultaneously as communicative to me of my own power and worth and of the irremediable grief in just living, in just going on.