Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  OGLE: Do you think the Civil War might have been avoided if Buchanan had followed a different course in 1860 and early in 1861?

  Allan Nevins, by no means pro-Buchanan, in his history of this period says that a show of force or punitive threat against South Carolina would have precipitated civil war, rather than cow the Palmetto State as Jackson did in 1833. Earlier in 1860, Buchanan possibly might have exerted his leverage as titular head of the Democratic Party to urge a single nominee (Douglas?) upon the Charlestown Convention. But, even if this unlikely work of compromise were achieved, an analysis of the voting in that fall’s election suggests that Lincoln would have won even had his opposition been one united party instead of three splinters. And would another Democratic President have succeeded, more than Pierce and Buchanan, in reconciling irreconcilables, in solving the unsolvable question of fugitive slaves and making sense of the nonsensical question of the territories? It’s hard to imagine how. Would the North, growing in power and population, have indefinitely accepted a Washington controlled by Southerners and doughfaces? My point (which I make in the play, and giving it a human context I cannot give here in these answers) is that time was on the side of the North, and that by buying time Buchanan did all that the Union could ask.

  OGLE: Some passages in the play suggest that Buchanan, despite charges of rakery, might be called The Virgin President. Was he?

  In my play I say he was. I would bow to contrary evidence if there were any. The availability of sex in the 19th century is a mysterious variable. Since no rumors of his rakery ever developed substance, his enemies developed the opposite line, that of impotence, of an androgynous fussiness. He was surely not a rake; he was a gallant, very fond of female company in the ballroom and parlor.

  OGLE: Buchanan is a great quoter of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims in the original French. Is this historically correct or are you just very fond of La Rochefoucauld yourself?

  Buchanan learned French for his mission to the court of St. Petersburg as American ambassador (1832–1833), and he kept up a reading acquaintance with French the rest of his life. In a letter to Harriet from London, on January 25th, 1856, as strong indications of his nomination as President were coming to him, he wrote, “… I feel quite indifferent. There is profound wisdom in a remark of Rochefoucauld with which I met the other day:—‘Les choses que nous desirons n’arrivent pas, ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est, ni dans le temps, ni de la manière que nous auraient fait le plus de plaisir.’ ”

  Strange to say, in the edition of Maximes out of which I supplied other aphorisms to put into the mouth of Buchanan’s stage persona, I was not able to locate this particular saying. If any reader of Harper’s Bazaar can help me here, I would be grateful.

  [Stranger to say, the readers of Harper’s Bazaar never saw any of these painstakingly composed answers. However, Ms. Ogle herself supplied the correct source of the quotation—La Bruyère (1645–1696). I feel adequately recompensed.]

  SAMUELS: I wonder why, with few exceptions, you only write light verse.

  I began with light verse, a kind of cartooning in print, and except for one stretch of a few years, in which I wrote most of the serious poems in Telephone Poles, I feel uncertain away from rhyme, to which something comic adheres. Bergson’s mechanical encrusted upon the organic. But the light verse poems putting into rhyme and jaunty metrics some scientific discovery have a serious point—the universe science discloses to us is farcically unrelated to what our primitive senses report—and I have, when such poems go well, a pleasure and satisfaction not lower than in any other form of literary activity. Indeed my old poems give me more rereading pleasure than anything I have written. Especially the little ones—“Nutcracker,” with the word “nut” in boldface, seems to me as good as George Herbert’s angel-wings.

  GADO: Who are your contemporaries in terms of fiction?

  It’s in Salinger that I first heard, as a college student in the early Fifties, the tone that spoke to my condition. I had a writing teacher, Kenneth Kempton, who read aloud to us some of Salinger’s stories as they appeared in The New Yorker. They seemed to me to say something about the energies of people and the ways they encounter each other that I did not find in the short stories of Hemingway or John O’Hara or Dorothy Parker or any of that “wised-up” style of short-story writing. Salinger’s stories were not wised up. They were very open to tender invasions. Also they possessed a refreshing formlessness which, of course, he came to push to an extreme, as real artists tend to do. However, in those early short stories there’s a marvellous tension between rather random, “soft” little events which pulls the whole story together into the final image of, say, a dead Easter chick in a wastebasket.

  GADO: Are there others you regard as contemporaries?

  Some, about my age, are not very well known: Harold Brodkey, a writer who is a little more than a year older than I, is a contemporary. His writing seems to go deeper into certain kinds of emotional interplay than the things written by older writers. Were I to try to make all this into an essay, I’m sure that I could find more ways in which writers now in their thirties and forties resemble each other.

  Kerouac I would also claim as a contemporary. Clearly, he is not a man of Salinger’s intelligence, but there is something benign, sentimentally benign, in his work. He attempted to grab it all; somehow, to grab it all. I like him.

  GADO: That’s strange. Kerouac and Updike! I couldn’t propose two writers who I thought were more unalike in their approach to literary art. Kerouac, with his binges at the typewriter, dumping the words down onto a continuous roll of teletype paper and leaving the cutting of it into pages to a more sombre moment.… That’s not the picture I had of you at work at all.

  No, I don’t agree. I don’t use teletype paper, but there isn’t an awful lot of revision when I’m writing—things either grind to a halt or they keep on moving. I think he was right. Kerouac was right in emphasizing a certain flow, a certain ease. Wasn’t he saying, after all, what the surrealists said? That if you do it very fast without thinking, something will get in that wouldn’t ordinarily. I think one tends to spoil not only the thing at hand, but the whole art form, by taking too much thought, by trying to assert too much control.

  SAMUELS: What is it that you think gets into sloppy writing that eludes more careful prose?

  It comes down to, What is language? Up to now, until this age of mass literacy, language has been something spoken. In utterance there’s a minimum of slowness. In trying to treat words as chisel strokes you run the risk of losing the quality of utterance, the rhythm of utterance, the happiness. A phrase out of Mark Twain—he describes a raft hitting a bridge and says that it “went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.” The beauty of “scatteration” could only have occurred to a talkative man, a man who had been brought up among people who were talking and who loved to talk himself. I’m aware myself of a certain dryness of this reservoir, this backlog of spoken talk. A Rumanian once said to me that Americans are always telling stories. I’m not sure this is as true as it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the TV and receive pictures. I’m not sure the younger generation even knows how to gossip. But, as for a writer, if he has something to tell, he should perhaps type it almost as fast as he could talk it. We must look to the organic world, not the inorganic world, for models; and just as the organic world has periods of repose and periods of great speed and exercise, so I think the writer’s process should be organically varied. But there’s a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you’re spinning out the reel.

  SAMUELS: I’d like to ask a bit about your work habits if I may. What sort of schedule do you follow?

  I write every weekday morning. I try to vary what I am doing, and my verse, or poetry, is a help here. Embarked on a long project, I try to stay with it even on dull days. For every novel, however, that I have published, there has been one unfinished or scrapp
ed. Some short stories—I think offhand of “Lifeguard,” “The Taste of Metal,” “My Grandmother’s Thimble”—are fragments salvaged and reshaped. Most came right the first time—rode on their own melting, as Frost said of his poems. If there is no melting, if the story keeps sticking, better stop and look around. In the execution there has to be a “happiness” that can’t be willed or foreordained. It has to sing, click, something. I try instantly to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story or novel to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.

  SAMUELS: As a technician, how unconventional would you say you were?

  As unconventional as I need to be. An absolute freedom exists on the blank page, so let’s use it. I have from the start been wary of the fake, the automatic. I tried not to subdue my sense of life as many-layered and ambiguous, while keeping in mind some sense of transaction, of a bargain struck, between me and the ideal reader. Domestic fierceness within the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind of evolution—these are some of the themes. My work is meditation, not pontification.

  SAMUELS: Are you bothered by having to write for a living?

  No, I always wanted to draw or write for a living. Teaching, the customary alternative, seemed truly depleting and confusing. I have been able to support myself by and large with the more respectable forms—poetry, short stories, novels—but what journalism I have done has been useful. I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me; the technical aspects of bookmaking, from type font to binding glue, all interest me. The distinction between a thing well done and a thing done ill obtains everywhere—in all circles of Paradise and Inferno.

  SAMUELS: In “The Sea’s Green Sameness” you deny that characterization and psychology are primary goals of fiction. What do you think is more important?

  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.

  Sayings

  (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

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful 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).

  Books by John Updike

  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) • R
abbit 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)