by John Updike
Picked-Up Pieces is a work of nonfiction.
2012 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition
Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975
by John Updike
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1966.
Owing to limitations of space, all permissions to reprint previously published material may be found on this page–this page.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64586-3
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © DEA /A. DAGLI ORTI/Getty Images
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Views
THE LITERARY LIFE
On Meeting Writers
Voznesensky Met
Bech Meets Me
Farewell to the Middle Class
FOUR SPEECHES
Accuracy
The Future of the Novel
From Humor in Fiction
Why Write?
LONDON LIFE
Notes of a Temporary Resident
Notes to a Poem
AMOR VINCIT OMNIA AD NAUSEAM
CEMETERIES
LETTER FROM ANGUILLA
P.S.
FOUR INTRODUCTIONS
To Pens and Needles
To the Czech Edition of Of the Farm
To The Harvard Lampoon Centennial Celebration
To Soundings in Satanism
GOLF
The First Lunar Invitational
Tips on a Trip
Is There Life After Golf?
Reviews
THE FORK
RELIGIOUS NOTES
DOSTOEVSKY
A Raw Something
Polina and Aleksei and Anna and Losnitsky
KNUT HAMSUN
“My Mind Was Without a Shadow”
Half-Mad and Maddening
Love as a Standoff
JOYCE AND PROUST
Questions Concerning Giacomo
Remembrance of Things Past Remembered
BORGES
The Author as Librarian
Three Translations
NABOKOV
Mnemosyne Chastened
Mary Unrevamped
The Crunch of Happiness
Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van
The Translucing of Hugh Person
Motley But True
A Tribute
ENGLISH LIVES
A Short Life
Ayrton Fecit
The Mastery of Miss Warner
A Sere Life; or, Sprigge’s Ivy
Milton Adapts Genesis; Collier Adapts Milton
Auden Fecit
A Messed-Up Life
FRENCH DEATHS
Death’s Heads
Albertine Disparue
Saganland and the Back of Beyond
In Praise of the Blind, Black God
EUROPE
Two Points on a Descending Curve
The View from the Dental Chair
Snail on the Stump
Witold Who?
Inward and Onward
AFRICA
Out of the Glum Continent
Shades of Black
Addendum: Excerpts from a Symposium
Through a Continent, Darkly
THE AVANT GARDE
Grove Is My Press, and Avant My Garde
Infante Terrible
Satire Without Serifs
Bombs Made Out of Leftovers
Mortal Games
YOUNG AMERICANS
If at First You Do Succeed, Try, Try Again
From Dyna Domes to Turkey-Pressing
Jong Love
OLDER AMERICANS
Indifference
Papa’s Sad Testament
And Yet Again Wonderful
Talk of a Tired Town
His Own Horn
Remarks
A Citation
An Unpublished Book Note
An Interesting Emendation
Phantom Life
NON-FICTION
Black Suicide
Fool’s Gold
Sons of Slaves
Coffee-Table Books for High Coffee Tables
Before the Sky Collapses
A New Meliorism
Alive and Free from Employment
Appendix: ONE BIG INTERVIEW
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Foreword
SINCE THE PUBLICATION, ten years ago, of Assorted Prose, most of my pieces of non-fictional prose have been book reviews. And these were written mostly for The New Yorker. It has not been easy, I dare say, for the editors of “the kindest magazine in the world” (as Nabokov describes its pseudonym The Beau and the Butterfly) to locate books that might fall within my nebulous competence. When, circa 1960, I gratuitously volunteered to be a critic, humorous verse and theology were the only areas where a data-density map of my brain would have shown even a faint darkening. In this latter area my information appeared out-of-the-ordinary primarily because the ordinary, in those bad old materialist days, before the Beatles spiritualized us all, was nil. Out of deference to my curious hobby, Christianity, I was permitted to treat, at suitably anxious length, of Karl Barth (in the earlier collection) and (in this) of Kierkegaard. For a time, indeed, there was some danger of my becoming a kind of ad hominem Religious Department; those slim, worthy-looking volumes by Tillich and Heidegger that keep cluttering a book editor’s desk—what better disposal than to send them off to Updike for a “note”? The section “Religious Notes” remembers this epoch, a time of faith on all sides.
An aspiring American writer myself, I clearly could not be trusted to clip the tender new shoots of my competitors. The esoteric fiction of Europe, however, was an ocean removed from envy’s blight, and my practitioner’s technical side was glad to investigate imported gadgetry. Borges, Queneau, Pinget, van Ostaijen, Cortázar—I am happy thus to have made their acquaintance, and made note of their lessons. Sure enough, when an American (Kosinski, Piercy) or an Englishman (Ayrton, Collier) got mixed into my periodic dose of the avant garde, a brusquer assurance and a chummy impatience did creep into my tone, which when dealing with translated works assumed the even omnivorous rumble of a grist mill.
More lately, the Fates that spin The New Yorker’s “Books” Department have taken to testing my iron digestion with books about Brazilian Indians and body cells. Evidently I can read anything in English and muster up an opinion about it. I am not sure, however, the stunt is good for me. Among these reviews I am proudest of—though what I feel for my utmost favorites is still a step-emotion to the parent’s pride taken in the feeblest tyke of a story or poem—those most voluntary: essays of celebration and promulgation moved by a prior enthusiasm (Kierkegaard, Borges, Proust, Fuchs) or assignments that provoked me to read more, or think deeper, than was strictly called for (the pieces on Camus, Hamsun, Hemingway, Joyce, and Africans seem such). Apologies, if any, would be tendered to those authors, like Grass and Gombrowicz, who came to me coated with a muffling murk of missed nuances—dusty plaster replicas of statues whose pure marble glowed in an inaccessible museum. But even when the visibility was poorest I tried to give each book the benefit of a code of reviewing drawn up inwardly wh
en I embarked on this craft, or (“a man should have a trade,” my father used to insist) trade.
My rules, shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
Easier said than done, of course. Here and there filial affection for an older writer has pulled my punch. Fear of reprisal may have forced a grin or two. In a few reprehensible cases I may have dreamed of sleeping with the authoress. In other cases irritations of the moment added their personal pepper. A reviewer, unlike an ideal reader, is committed to finish the book; I read slower than I write, and sheer exasperation over time expended may have shortened my patience with the Cozzens novel and, even, Ada. The little Dostoevsky review was done for Life during a mysterious attack of tendonitis; I could not sleep, and sat up all one night, watching dawn infiltrate Menemsha Bight, my throbbing left wrist held above my head while my right hand confidently advised Dostoevsky to keep trying. “The Crunch of Happiness” was composed shortly after my leg had been broken, making me perhaps unduly sensitive to the hugs and crunches in Nabokov’s Glory. One of the oldest pieces here, on Sylvia Townsend Warner (who deserves, ten years later, an extended tribute to her vigorously continuing production), was hilariously fractured and mis-assembled when printed in The New Republic; this collection holds for me no greater satisfaction than that of getting its hexed text at last correct.
The fabled care The New Yorker takes with the texts it prints presides like Providence over most of these reviews. Many the untruth quietly curbed, the misspelling invisibly mended. My habit of ample quotation compels the “checkers” virtually to read the book through, a scrupulousness that amounts to sanctity. My editor for the “Books” pieces has been Mr. Rogers Whitaker (telephone operators, take note of the s). Gruff wise bear of a man, he has given most of these contents a lick and a spank, and in gratitude for his collaboration I dedicate this book to him. May he edit ad infinitum.
The “Views” section (which ends with a review) salvages some of the debris of a writer’s life. One is invited to do this and that, and one doesn’t always refuse. My year in London (1968–1969) was especially prolific of accepted invitations. Also while there I composed my decade’s one precious parody, and a necrotic meditation (“Cemeteries”) that didn’t quite make it into fiction. My four speeches, delivered on as many continents, serve as index of the itinerary that even a reluctantly public man can find himself undergoing. I have restrained myself from including a talk in Venezuela comparing Doña Barbara with movie Westerns, and a weighty speech on the American writer’s cultural situation that I kept giving as I moved across central Africa, shedding large chunks of it as I went. If there’s one thing the Third World does not want to hear about, it’s parallelisms with the United States. Henry Bech should write a story.
And I, no doubt, should write, in the decades left to me, in the highest forms I can reach, matter of my own devising. There was an educational value, for a man with lazy eyes, in accepting some review assignments; but my laziness is now such that I can scarcely read a book without a pencil in my hand, and without the expectation of being paid for a verdict. Innocence deserts one’s tryst with a printed page when a review has been promised and begins writing itself in the margin. Meanwhile, the classics languish, and even blank pages begin to look suspect. Let us hope, for the sakes of artistic purity and paper conservation, that ten years from now the pieces to be picked up will make a smaller heap.
There could have been a third section, “Interviews.” They are a form to be loathed, a half-form like maggots, but in some cases (notably my Paris Review travail with Charles Samuels) have benefitted from written revisions; and one is forced to say things sometimes true and not always said elsewhere. The only topic upon which my offhand opinions carry authority is, of course, my own works; so I have excerpted a few self-centered quotations from the six or so interviews I have saved, and closeted them in an appendix, where none but the morbidly curious, or academically compelled, need peek.
And, speaking of half-forms: hard-pressed magazine editors perpetually bombard a writer’s tenuous vicinity with questions, questionnaires, and quizzes. Most of these meteors from outer space burn up in the ionosphere of unanswered mail, but a few get through, coinciding with a moment of euphoria or efficiency in the inscrutable authorial rhythms, and receive an answer. Here are two Answers to Hard Questions that turned up in my files, which are hereby, as of October 25, 1974, exhausted.
MADEMOISELLE: What is female sexuality?
You ask me about this most wordless of subjects. I know nothing; but the “nothing” stirs, breathes, takes on a vague and vaguely inviting form. To begin, I would understand “sexuality” to be the subject and “male” and “female” to be adjectives, not polar opposites. In infancy both sexes enjoy an identical introduction to erotic sensation, so that fondling, sucking, teasing, cradling, crooning, tickling, rocking, stroking, and murmuring form a common base of amorous vocabulary. Somewhere before adolescence the male, that little hunter, tips his sexual curiosity with an optical point, whereas the female remains a blind snuggler, impervious to photo-pornography, dependent to some extent upon brute duration of contact. When the sexual functions ripen, the male assignment becomes penetration and distribution, the female duty acceptance and retention. Yet our insatiable minds, with their unique gift for empathy, seek to broaden sexual experience into the domain of the opposite (en face rather than inimical) number; the rapacious female and passive male are delightful variations. Harmlessly, insofar as any human transaction is harmless, they seek to appropriate sensations biology has only diffidently made possible for them. Again, our aspiring spirits drive erotic sensitivity outward from the monstrous and gummy organs of sex, which look like wounds, to the ethereal fringes of the body; the hands, the skull, the soles of the feet, the backs of the knees are where perhaps you, mademoiselle, begin to quicken. There is a poetry in sexual convolution that would bring the scattered centers of our being—the brain, the heart, the genitals—into a unity of juxtaposition. The sexual unpredictability of females must be, in part, an attempt to subordinate to the angelic pre
rogatives of choice and will the sexual function still bewilderingly mired in the ancient ooze of the involuntary. Perversion, like continence, would reclaim from our animal ore the gold of the purely human. In females, if anatomy is an adequate metaphor, sexuality is more central and more buried than in males. Love, then, becomes an exploration toward a muffled center, a quest whose terrain is the woman and the grail her deep self. The man who advances this exploration bestows a totality meagerly paid for with anything less than enslavement. The man who does not fails disastrously. Hence the extremes of fastidiousness and wantonness that perennially astound men, and the strange sharp note of bitter disappointment we hear whenever women offer to throw light into these warm shadows.
PLAYBOY: What is creativity?
For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist, and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. Out of my own slim experience, I would venture the opinion that the artistic impulse is a mix, in varying proportions, of childhood habits of fantasizing brought on by not necessarily unhappy periods of solitude; a certain hard wish to perpetuate and propagate the self; a craftsmanly affection for the materials and process; a perhaps superstitious receptivity to moods of wonder; and a not-often-enough-mentioned ability, within the microcosm of the art, to organize, predict, and persevere.
Views
THE LITERARY LIFE
On Meeting Writers
THE LUST to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. The county where I and my literary ambitions were conceived held only one writer, whose pen name, Mildred Jordan, masked her true identity as an unmeetably rich industrialist’s wife. At Harvard I stood with crowds of other students to hear, and to glimpse in the mysterious flesh, anthology presences like Eliot, Sandburg, Frost, and Wilder. After his lecture in Sanders Theater, Eliot, a gem of composure within a crater of applause, inserted his feet into his rubbers, first the right, then the left, as we poured down upon him a grateful tumult that had less to do with his rather sleepy-making discourse on poetic drama than with the fabulous descent of his vast name into an actual, visible, and mortal body. Whereas Sandburg, playing ballads in New Lecture Hall, rambled on into our dinner hour; as the audience noisily diminished he told us, his white bangs glowing in the gloom, that it was all right, that often in his life he had sat in hotel rooms with only his guitar for company.
