Picked-Up Pieces (80 page)
Authors: John Updike
I wrote “The Sea’s Green Sameness” years ago and meant, I believe, that narratives should not be
primarily
packages for psychological insights, though they can contain them, like raisins in buns. But the substance is the dough, which feeds the story-telling appetite, the appetite for motion, for suspense, for resolution. The author’s deepest pride, as I have experienced it, is not in his incidental wisdom but in his ability to keep an organized mass of images moving forward, to feel life engendering itself under his hands. But no doubt fiction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people
do
. Insights of all kinds are welcome; but no wisdom will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, and a perhaps savage wish to hold, through your voice, another soul in thrall.
(
taken mostly from Jane Howard’s article in
Life)
There is a great deal to be said about almost anything. Everything can be as interesting as every other thing. An old milk carton is worth a rose; a trolley car has as much right to be there, in terms of aesthetics, as a tree.
*
Everything is infinitely fine and any opinion is coarser than reality.
*
I’ve never much enjoyed going to plays. The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they’ve said to each other for months is more than I can overlook.
*
The idea of a hero is aristocratic. You cared about Oedipus and Hamlet because they were noble and you were a groundling. Now either nobody is a hero or everyone is. I vote for everyone.
*
[My characters] go back to work; that’s the real way that people die.
*
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
*
A man has to build his life outward from a job he can do. Once he finds one he’s got eight hours of the day licked, and if he sleeps eight more, he’s two-thirds golden.
*
My own sense of childhood doesn’t come from being a father, it comes from having been a child. We’re all so curiously alone. But it’s important to keep making signals through the glass.
*
I’ve touched a kind of bottom, when I’ve felt that existence itself was an affront to be forgiven.
*
You can’t be satirical at the expense of fictional characters, because they’re your creatures. You must only love them.
*
My life is, in a sense, trash; my life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
*
HOWARD
:
If you could be an animal, which would you be?
A turtle. Turtles live quite long and can retreat immediately, and live very close to the grass, the smell of which I’ve always liked. I also like the sound of the rain on the roof, which a turtle must get quite a lot of.
*
What I had said to Jane Howard, as quoted, was: “There’s a ‘yes-but’ quality about my writing that evades entirely pleasing anybody. It seems to me that critics get increasingly querulous and impatient for madder music and stronger wine, when what we need is a greater respect for reality, its secrecy, its music. Too many people are studying maps and not enough are visiting places.”
TO ROGERS WHITAKER
AcknowledgmentsGrateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines and publishers, who first printed the pieces specified, sometimes under other titles:
THE NEW YORKER
: “Amor Vincit Omnia Ad Nauseam,” “The First Lunar Invitational,” “Letter from Anguilla,” “Voznesensky Met,” and fifty of the book reviews, including seven published as “Briefly Noted.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
: “On Meeting Writers,” “Bech Meets Me,” “Tips on a Trip,” “His Own Horn,” and “Coffee-Table Books for High Coffee Tables.”
THE NEW REPUBLIC
: “The Mastery of Miss Warner” and the poem in “P.S.”
THE NEW STATESMAN
: “Papa’s Sad Testament” and “Notes to a Poem.”
THE LISTENER
: “Notes of a Temporary Resident.”
THE SUNDAY TIMES
(London): “And Yet Again Wonderful.”
TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW
: “Cemeteries.”
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
: “Black Suicide” and “Talk of a Sad Town.”
HORIZON
: “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered.”
MOTIVE
: “Auden Fecit.”
LIFE
: “Mnemosyne Chastened” and “A Raw Something.”
PLAYBOY
: Comment on creativity.
MADEMOISELLE
: Comment on female sexuality.
BOOKS AND BOOKMEN
: “The Future of the Novel.”
THE AMERICAN PEN
(Vol. 2, No. 3): “Humor in Fiction.”
SOUTHERN REVIEW
(South Australia): “Why Write?”
GAMBIT
,
INC
.: Introduction to
Pens and Needles
, drawings by David Levine.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
co.: Introduction to
The Harvard Lampoon Centennial Celebration 1876–1973
.
SHEED AND WARD
,
INC
.: Introduction to
Soundings in Satanism
.
DELACORTE PRESS AND PENGUIN BOOKS
,
LTD
.,
LONDON
: Three translations of Borges poems from
Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems 1924–1967
, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Copyright © 1972 by Delacorte Press.
SUNTORY LTD
. (Tokyo, Japan): “Farewell to the Middle Class,” reprinted from
Suntory Fiction and Essays
.
TRIQUARTERLY BOOKS
(Northwestern University Press): “A Tribute,” from
Nabokov
, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr., and Charles Newman (1970).
UNITED STATES INFORMATION SERVICE
: Excerpts from “Reality and the Novel in Africa and America,” a symposium (Lagos, 1972).
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen
(1958) •
Telephone Poles
(1963) •
Midpoint
(1969)
• Tossing and Turning
(1977) •
Facing Nature
(1985) •
Collected Poems 1953–1993
(
1993
) •
Americana
(2001) •
Endpoint
(2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair
(1959) •
Rabbit, Run
(1960) •
The Centaur
(1963) •
Of the Farm
(1965) •
Couples
(1968) •
Rabbit Redux
(1971) •
A Month of Sundays
(1975) •
Marry Me
(1976) •
The Coup
(1978) •
Rabbit Is Rich
(1981) •
The Witches of Eastwick
(1984) •
Roger’s Version
(1986) •
S
. (1988) •
Rabbit at Rest
(1990) •
Memories of the Ford Administration
(1992) •
Brazil
(1994) •
In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1996) •
Toward the End of Time
(1997) •
Gertrude and Claudius
(2000) •
Seek My Face
(2002) •
Villages
(2004) •
Terrorist
(2006) •
The Widows of Eastwick
(2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door
(1959) •
Pigeon Feathers
(1962) •
Olinger Stories
(a selection, 1964) •
The Music School
(1966) •
Bech: A Book
(1970)
• Museums and Women
(1972) •
Problems
(1979) •
Too Far to Go
(a selection, 1979) •
Bech Is Back
(1982) •
Trust Me
(1987) •
The Afterlife
(1994) •
Bech at Bay
(1998) •
Licks of Love
(2000) •
The Complete Henry Bech
(2001) •
The Early Stories: 1953–1975
(2003) •
My Father’s Tears
(2009) •
The Maples Stories
(2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose
(1965) •
Picked-Up Pieces
(1975) •
Hugging the Shore
(1983) •
Just Looking
(1989) •
Odd Jobs
(1991) •
Golf Dreams
(1996) •
More Matter
(1999) •
Still Looking
(2005) •
Due Considerations
(2007) •
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
(2010) •
Higher Gossip
(2011)
PLAY
Buchanan Dying
(1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness
(1989)
CHILDREN
’
S BOOKS
The Magic Flute
(1962) •
The Ring
(1964) •
A Child’s Calendar
(1965)
• Bottom’s Dream
(1969) •
A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects
(1996)
PHOTO: © MARTHA UPDIKE
J
OHN
U
PDIKE
was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of
The New Yorker
. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.