by John Updike
SAMUELS: I was impressed by the contrast between the presentation of oral-genital contacts in Couples and its single appearance in Rabbit, Run.
Well, Couples, in part, is about the change in sexual deportment that has occurred since the publication of Rabbit, Run, which came out late in ’59; shortly thereafter we had Lady Chatterley and the first Henry Miller books, and now you can’t walk into a grocery store without seeing pornography on the rack. Remember Piet lying in Freddy’s bed admiring Freddy’s collection of Grove Press books? In Rabbit, Run what is demanded, in Couples is freely given. What else? It’s a way of eating, eating the apple, of knowing. It’s nostalgic for them, for Piet of Annabelle Vojt and for Foxy of the Jew. In de Rougement’s book on Tristan and Iseult he speaks of the sterility of the lovers, and Piet and Foxy are sterile vis-à-vis each other. Lastly, I was struck, talking to a biochemist friend of mine, how he emphasized not only the chemical composition of enzymes but their structure; it matters, among my humans, not only what they’re made of, but exactly how they attach to each other. So much for oral-genital contacts.
RHODE: We’re talking about Couples as a book about sex. It’s something quite different, isn’t it? What astonishes me is that these descriptions are written with extraordinary delicacy and tact. You must have found them very hard to write.
They were no harder than landscapes and a little more interesting. It’s wonderful the way people in bed talk, the sense of voices and the sense of warmth, so that as a writer you become kind of warm also. The book is, of course, not about sex as such: It’s about sex as the emergent religion, as the only thing left.
BUCKINGHAM: I believe that one of the chapters of Bech originally appeared as a short story.
Several did.
BUCKINGHAM: Does that mean the book was conceived piecemeal?
It was indeed conceived piecemeal. When I returned from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in ’64 I had a number of impressions that only a writer could have collected. So, in trying to utilize some of them I invented Henry Bech, just to serve as a vehicle for my own impressions in a story entitled “The Bulgarian Poetess.”
Distrusting writers as heroes, I made Bech as unlike myself as I could. Instead of being married with four children, he’s a bachelor; instead of being a Gentile, he’s a Jew—of course, a Jewish writer is almost as inevitable as an Italian gangster. I made him somewhat older than myself and gave him, sketchily, a career; the book Travel Light was his initial success—probably I had most in mind Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
O.K., so there Henry Bech sat in this story, which The New Yorker took and published; and to my surprise the story had a degree of success. Friends said they liked it, and it got the first O. Henry Award of that year. So, never wanting to let a good thing go unflogged, I wrote another story, about Rumania this time, and made a third attempt, a story about Russia. I wrote a long journal, Henry Bech’s Russian Journal, which didn’t work out, though I salvaged parts of it for an appendix in the book. The little story “Rich in Russia” was done later—the bigger the country, the smaller the story, somehow.
Then out of quite a different set of memories or impressions I wrote “Bech Takes Pot Luck,” which is an American story and takes place on an island a touch like Martha’s Vineyard. (Is this boring you? How to build a coffin, nail by nail.) At this point I began to think that they might be a book. I wrote the London story and it was quite important that it work out—by working out I mean that The New Yorker take it. It did. And then I wrote two more, one to wind the book up and the other to sort of make a bridge—that is, “Bech Panics” takes us from the Bech of the Vineyard story to the somewhat older and rather hallucinating writer of London. And that’s how you cook up a book.
BUCKINGHAM: When did you do the fake bibliographies and things? They’re great fun.
They were kind of fun. Of course, the preface is very short, even though it took Bech eight days to write it.
BUCKINGHAM: And you?
It took me a day.
GADO: At the end of Bech, you supplied the reader with bibliographical appendices. I tried to make some sense of them but couldn’t. Is there a key? Or was it just the vestigial gagster in you wanting to play games with the magazines, critics, and writers?
It was meant two ways: first, as a light-hearted attempt to give Bech a concrete bibliographical existence as a writer; second, as a means of reëstablishing a distance between Bech and myself. He’s nine years older than I, and partly for that reason, his career is quite different from mine. In this respect, the bibliography was intended to be a specimen history of an American literary career of the period. He began as a kind of war correspondent, a soldier who wrote stories with gung-ho titles for magazines like Liberty and Collier’s. He was intellectualized in New York in the post-war period. And now he has fallen into silence. There are careers like this. Salinger? Irwin Shaw?
To be candid, the bibliography was also a matter of working off various grudges, a way of purging my system. I’ve never been warmly treated by the Commentary crowd—insofar as it is a crowd—and so I made Bech its darling.
And then, I don’t know, it just seemed to help make it a book.
BUCKINGHAM: You say Bech was written piecemeal, not on firmly drawn lines like Couples?
Mm hmm.
BUCKINGHAM: And yet at the end I find the final chapter just as serious, as poetic, just as heavyweight.
I’m always at the same weight; I mean, I may be groggier some days than others, but I tend to be equally serious about everything. Of course, Bech is a serious book. I never thought of it as satirical, really; it was never really a concern of mine to poke fun at the Jewish writer, or the New York–Jewish literary establishment in this country. I hope I always gave Bech my full sympathy, my full empathy.
BUCKINGHAM: What drove him toward the literary life, that gallery of immortals?
In the London story he has this hope that one more woman, one more leap up the falls, will bring him safe into that high, calm pool of immortality where Proust and Hawthorne and Catullus float, glassy-eyed and belly-up. (I love that sentence.) He wants to be lifted out of flux, the way that literary immortals are. Also, Bech is one of the last “moderns.” He believes in Eliot and Valéry and Joyce and Rilke and those others who were convinced of the sacred importance of the written word. They believed themselves custodians of the language and therefore of the values of their society.
I think we’re all attracted toward excellence of this sort, wishing to associate this very mixed deteriorating bag of our physical and egotistical selves with something fine, and Bech was drawn to literature out of that, and for a while found it, perhaps, but his success has thrown him into a very baffling world of the wrong kind of praise, or being used by younger people as in the London story, or being asked to join dead people, as in the last story, or of women constantly trying to lure him out of his monkhood.… It’s all rather sad. Think of Mailer. He began as a war novelist, a novelist in the Steinbeck sense; and so he arrives and finds the party is breaking up. The novel couldn’t be for his generation what it was for the generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We’re not going to get anybody like Hemingway for a while, who so intensely and instinctively cared about language. When he died there was nobody around who cared so much, cared so much he killed himself because he couldn’t do it as finely as he thought it should be done. Instead you get showmen and professors. Bech becomes a showman against his will. A display piece. A toy.
SRAGOW: [Rabbit Redux] has been hailed for its portrait of “Middle America.” Did the necessity to get that close to a man who is inarticulate and guided by mass culture to as great a degree as Rabbit require a … leap?
Intellectually, I’m not essentially advanced over Harry Angstrom. I went to Harvard, it’s true, and wasn’t much good at basketball; other than that we’re rather similar. I quite understand both his anger and passivity, and feeling of the whole Vietnam involvement as a puzzle, that something strange has gone wr
ong; but it’s no great leap of the imagination to do that.
There may be something also in the novelist’s trade which shades you towards conservatism. Things exist because they evolved to that condition; they cannot be lightly or easily altered. It is my general sense of human institutions that they are outcroppings of human nature, that human nature is slow to change, that in general when you destroy one set of institutions you get something worse.
SRAGOW: You’ve written that “an easy humanism” pervades the land. Given the fact that you deal on a very personal basis with human stress, how do your distinguish your …
Difficult humanism? I feel that, as a writer, I put into practice a set of democratic assumptions. Just as in a democracy anybody can be president, so anyone can be a character in a novel, at least in one by me. Every human being who is more than a moron is the locus of certain violent tensions that come with having a brain. In fact there is an easy humanism that insists that man is an animal which feeds and sleeps and defecates and makes love and isn’t that nice and natural and let’s all have more of that. But this is omitting intrinsic stresses in the human condition—you foresee things, for example, you foresee your own death. You have really been locked out of the animal paradise of unthinking natural reflex.
You are born into one political contract or another, whose terms, though they sit very lightly at first, eventually, in the form of the draft, or taxes, begin to make very heavy demands on you. The general social contract—living with other people, driving cars on highways—all this is difficult, it’s painful. It’s a kind of agony really—the agony vents itself in ulcers internally, rage externally.… In short, all of our institutions—of marriage, the family, your driver’s license—everything is kind of precarious, and maintained at a cost of tension.
SRAGOW: Easy humanism, then, lies in the belief that these individual problems can be ignored for the sake of larger panaceas.
Or taking humanity as some kind of moral index, saying that to be human is to be good and our problems all arise from not being human enough. I think I take a rather darker view. We must of necessity lose our humanity all the time.
When asked about what my philosophy was I tried to write it down in Midpoint in handy couplets and discovered that of all my books it is the least read, and it was hardly reviewed at all. I concluded that nobody really cared what my philosophy was. That’s all right. The novelist is of interest only for what he does through empathy and image-producing, image-arranging; the more consciously a theorist he is the more apt he is to become impotent or cranky or both. Like Harry, I try to remain open. Revolt, rebellion, violence, disgust are themselves there for a reason, they too are organically evolved out of a distinct reality, and must be considered respectfully. I try to love both the redneck and the flower child, the anarchist bomb-thrower. People are basically very anarchistic. Harry’s search for infinite freedom—that’s anarchy too. He loves destruction. Who doesn’t?
SRAGOW: At the end of Rabbit Redux, Rabbit talks of going back to a farm. Are you thinking of bringing him back again?
I left the book open, I even dangled a few threads that could be picked up. Janice talks about how he never should have had that awful indoor job. I already have a title—Rural Rabbit. That’s going to be their next stage. I couldn’t write that book now. Maybe in 1979 enough will have happened to both him and me that I can, but if it doesn’t, that’s all right. Maybe I should stop while I’m ahead—at least as far as The Times Book Review goes.
These two complement each other well enough. Anybody who really cared could get some interesting formal things out of the two books together. Certainly Janice bringing Stavros back to life is some kind of counterweight to the baby’s death in the first book. She too had to make a passage—go through something to return. All that’s there, I’m not sure that a third book could do it again. It would have to be a different kind of a book—a short book, a pastoral book, an eclogue.
[The interview with Sragow transpired before I broke my leg in December of 1971, as the handsome full-length photograph in the Harvard Crimson attests. After my release from the hospital, Lee Wohlfert of Women’s Wear Daily gouged from me the following drug-dazed utterances:] “Like Harry, I’m hog fat, reactionary, passive. I’m a plugger. Even the way Rabbit sits in front of his Linotype machine day after day reminded me of myself, of the way I sit in front of the typewriter.… I decided to write it a while back when I couldn’t get started on another book I was trying to write and the Sixties pressed heavily upon me. And I got sick of people talking about Rabbit, sick of them asking me what happened to him. So I decided to revisit my old friend.… [I appeared surprised that among the critics] no one’s given serious consideration to the idea that Skeeter, the angry black, might be Jesus. He says he is. I think probably he might be. And if that’s so, then people ought to be very nice to him.”
OGLE: You describe Buchanan Dying as a final homage to Pennsylvania, whose “mild, misty doughy middleness, between dangerous norths and souths,” remains “your first taste of life, the authentic taste.” Do you think of Buchanan as a typical Pennsylvanian?
Well, yes, indeed I do, insofar as this large area, transected by the Alleghenies and ranging from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, would admit of having a state character. In his fondness for good living and his distrust of radical solutions, in a certain comfortable fudging talkativeness, he seems familiar to me. Buchanan must have also seemed to his contemporaries representative, for he never lost a state election, and his Presidential victory hinged on his carrying the Keystone State. He could have been governor, also, but that his advisers, John Slidell foremost, felt that the governorship would have forced upon him a stand vis-à-vis slavery that would have marred the perfect ambiguity that did, in the end, win him the Presidency. My own muddled, middly sense of the metaphysical essence of Pennsylvania-ness has been often expressed in my fiction, and indeed is evoked one more time in my Afterword. I have often wanted to write about Wallace Stevens and John O’Hara, as Pennsylvania artists; their work, in some ways so different, shares a splendid leafiness, no? You may say that Thaddeus Stevens, the super-radical Representative, was a fellow-Lancastrian and nodding acquaintance of Buchanan’s; my answer would be that Stevens came from Vermont, and was a New Englander at core. The only other President with claim to be a Pennsylvanian was, of course, Dwight Eisenhower, another lover of the middle way and the opportune evasion. Pennsylvanians tend to take the fascinating form of clouds. If the Middle Atlantic states have a psycho-history, it is that Puritanism skipped over them on its way west.
OGLE: In recent years, there has been a lot of controversy about Presidential powers and how they are used. Are there any similarities or dissimilarities between Buchanan’s Presidency and Nixon’s that strike you?
Both men were on surest ground in foreign affairs, both were surrounded by subordinates who committed dubious acts, neither projected much moral authority or personal charisma. The Covode Investigation of 1860 bears some resemblance to the Watergate inquiry of today; and the shadow of impeachment hung over Buchanan also, as the letters of the youthful Henry Adams jubilantly confirm—though why Adams would have wanted John C. Breckinridge in the Presidential chair instead, I can’t imagine. But for me the parallels run out there: Nixon is decried for riding roughshod (and blindly) over the Constitution; the main criticism of Buchanan was that he took the Constitution too seriously, and too circumspectly argued the exact limits of his powers and of such legalities as slaveholders’ property rights and the federal government’s right of coercion. He was too much the lawyer and conciliator, Nixon is too much the loner. Buchanan’s White House was the most socially brilliant and active it had been since the days of Madison; contrast that with today’s Kremlin on Pennsylvania Avenue. Most crucially, Buchanan’s crisis, whatever he made of it, was a mighty and genuine one, it was the divergence between North and South that had been growing upon the nation since 1820; whereas this Watergate mess is thoroughly petty, comic o
pera with some sinister bass notes. It is a crisis strikingly devoid of tragic inevitability. A more worthy analogy to Buchanan’s travail would be Johnson’s Vietnam. But the correct spirit of historical inquiry and dramatization, surely, is one that seeks out, not facile analogies or contrasts, but what was unique to this moment, this predicament, this set of decisions, this man. My play is not about the Presidency but about a man who was President for four of his seventy-seven years. In attempting to understand him sympathetically, to a degree I attempted sympathetic understanding of every President, including the present beleaguered specimen.
OGLE: Buchanan seems to have gotten a raw deal from at least some historians. Would you say that Lincoln has been correspondingly overrated?
Not overrated, but deified. The accident of his assassination, and the happy chance of his literary genius, ennobles him beyond appraisal, at least in the popular impression. We are taught that he freed the slaves, without being reminded that the Emancipation Proclamation was a military maneuver, or that the slaveholding states on the Union side were exempted. And we are invited to invest the cause of the “Union” with the mysticism of war propaganda, without inspecting the legal case for secession, or weighing how much cosmic virtue resides in the determination to keep a big country big. In the crucial four months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, while Buchanan desperately sought to prevent war, Lincoln himself said nothing, either in the way of reassurance to the border states or by way of warning to the seceding states. Demagoguery and fear went their way unchallenged, and while the Lincoln administration, once in office, heaped blame upon its predecessor, it initially pursued identical policies. But my purpose, insofar as it is historical, is not to bury the immortal Lincoln, but to revive the forgotten Buchanan.