Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  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.

  RHODE: I wonder, in the case of The Centaur, why you related the immediate experience of the schoolmaster to myth.

  It seemed to me that there was something mythical about the events. It’s an experiment very unlike that of Ulysses, where the myth lurks beneath the surface of the natural events. In a way, the natural events in my book are meant to be a kind of mask for the myth. The genesis of it was reading in an old book of my wife’s this footnote to the Hercules legend. It is part of the comedy of Chiron’s plight that he is living in a town full of gods, and he’s not quite a god himself, hence this failure of communication all the time. In fact, my father, who came from New Jersey, did have this feeling about Pennsylvania, that he wasn’t quite clued in about what was going on. Secondly, there is a way in which to a child everything is myth-size: people are enormous and ominous and have great backlogs of mysterious information and of a life lived that you lack. I don’t think that without the myth you’d have a book. It seemed to me to fit a kind of experience that I’d had: my father’s immersion in the world of Christian morality, in trying to do the right thing and constantly sacrificing himself, always going off to church meetings, and yet complaining about it all the time. There was an ambivalence that seemed to make him very centaurlike. I think that initially art was tied in with theology and has to do with an ideal world: the artist is in some way a middleman between the ideal world and this, even though our sense of the ideal—and I’m speaking really of our gut sense, regardless of what we think we believe—is at present fairly dim. It may not always be so. And I find I can not imagine being a writer without wanting somehow to play, to make these patterns, to insert these secrets into my books, and to spin out this music that has its formal side.

  RHODE: Do you improvise or do you plot things out very carefully beforehand?

  I really begin with some kind of solid, coherent image, some notion of the shape of the book and even of its texture. The Poorhouse Fair was meant to have a sort of Y shape. Rabbit, Run was a kind of zig-zag. The Centaur was
sort of a sandwich. I can’t begin until I know the beginning and the end have some sense of what’s going to happen between. There are some hinges, but really a novel, even quite a bulky one—you think of Henry James’s eight hundred pages—has only a few hinges. I don’t make an outline or anything. I figure that I can hold the events in my head and then hope that things will happen which will surprise me, that the characters will take on life and talk. I keep a kind of loose rein on the book. I would not begin a book, I would not advise people to begin a book, without knowing where it’s going.

  RHODE: This image of the book that you have in mind is in fact a rather geometric image. It’s not, say, a visual image, an image of events in the book which you’re leading up to.

  It’s sort of an abstract sensation, but of course you have to have a lot of other things to begin a book. You have to have at least some of the people and have to be in some ways stirred by the central people. The main motive force behind The Centaur would be some wish to make a record of my father. For fifteen years I’d watched a normal, good-doing Protestant man suffering in a kind of comic but real way. I think it left me rather angry. There is a lot of anger in my books, really. Their secret ingredient.

  sAMUELS: If I’m right in regarding [The Centaur] as formally uncharacteristic, I wonder why you prefer it to your other novels?

  Well, it seems in memory my gayest and truest book; I pick it up, and read a few pages, in which Caldwell is insisting on flattering a moth-eaten bum, who is really the god Dionysus, and I began laughing.… The mythology answers to my sensation that the people we meet are guises, do conceal something mythic, perhaps prototypes or longings in our minds. We love some women more than others by predetermination, it seems to me.

  SAMUELS: Why haven’t you done more work in this mode?

  But I have worked elsewhere in a mythic mode. Apart from my short story about Tristan and Iseult, there is the St. Stephen story underlying The Poorhouse Fair, and Peter Rabbit under Rabbit, Run. Sometimes it is semi-conscious; for example, only lately do I see that Brewer, the city of brick painted the color of flowerpots, is the flowerpot that Mr. McGregor slips over Peter Rabbit. And in Couples, Piet is not only Hanema/anima/Life, he is Lot, the man with two virgin daughters, who flees Sodom, and leaves his wife behind.

  SAMUELS: Let’s turn from myth to history. You have indicated a desire to write about President Buchanan. Yet, so far as I can see, American history is normally absent from your work.

  Not so; quite the contrary. In each of my novels, a precise year is given and a President reigns; The Centaur is distinctly a Truman book, and Rabbit, Run an Eisenhower one. Couples could have taken place only under Kennedy; the social currents it traces are as specific to those years as flowers in a meadow are to their moment of summer. Even The Poorhouse Fair has a President, President Lowenstein, and if one is not named in Of the Farm it may be because that book, in an odd way, also takes place in the future, though a future only a year or so in advance of the writing—a future now in the past. Hook, Caldwell, the Applesmiths, all talk about history, and the quotidian is littered with newspaper headlines, striking the consciousness of the characters obliquely and subliminally but firmly enough: Piet’s first step at seducing Foxy is clearly in part motivated by the death of the Kennedy infant. And the atmosphere of fright permeating The Centaur is to an indicated extent early Cold-War nerves. My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than history books, just as there is more breathing history in archaeology than in a list of declared wars and changes of government.

  SAMUELS: What about violence? Many critics complain that this is absent from your work—reprehensibly, because it is so present in the world. Why is there so little in your pages?

  There has been so little in my life. I have fought in no wars, and engaged in few fistfights. I do not think a man pacifist in his life should pretend to violence in fiction; I feel a tenderness toward my characters that forbids making violent use of them. In general, the North American continent in this century has been a place where catastrophe has held off, and likewise the lives I have witnessed have staved off real death. All my novels end with a false death, partial death. If, as may be, the holocausts at the rim of possibility do soon visit us, I am confident my capacities for expression can rise, if I live, to the occasion. In the meantime let’s all of us with some access to a printing press not abuse our privilege with fashionable fantasies.

  RHODE: You are religious yourself?

  I’d say, yes, I try to be. I think I do tend to see the world as layered, and as there being something up there; certainly in Couples it would seem to be God who in a certain sense destroys that inoffensive Congregationalist church. My books are all meant to be moral debates with the reader, and if they seem pointless—I’m speaking hopefully—it’s because the reader has not been engaged in the debate. The question is usually, “What is a good man?” or “What is goodness?” and in all the books an issue is examined. Take Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run: there is a case to be made for running away from your wife. In the late Fifties beatniks were preaching transcontinental travelling as the answer to man’s disquiet. And I was just trying to say: “Yes, there is certainly that, but then there are all these other people who seem to get hurt.” That qualification is meant to frame a moral dilemma.

  RHODE: You see the institution of marriage, the institution of the Church, as something that carries you back to the past, which I think again is very important in your books. For instance, in The Poorhouse Fair the one moment that I felt that you emerged as a person was close to the end when you say something about how we go backwards, how we become our father’s opinions, and eventually our grandfather’s.

  True enough, there is this interest in the past, but in a way the past is all we have. The present is very thin, it’s less than a second wide, and the future doesn’t exist. I think that Of the Farm, say, is about moral readjustment, and the readjustment is of course in terms of harsh deeds done in the past; the mother and boy need, in a way, to excuse each other, or somehow to give a blessing. It’s a little hard for me to see my work from the outside, as it were, but I do notice a recurrence of the concept of a blessing, of approval, or forgiveness. The basic problem may be simply one of encouragement, because of the failure of nerve, the lassitude and despair, the sense that we’ve gone to the end of the corridor and found it blank. So the characters beneath the surface are exhorting each other to action. In Couples Piet is quite a modern man in that he really can’t act for himself because he’s overwhelmed by the moral implications of any act—leaving his wife, staying with her. While the women in that book are less sensitive perhaps to this oppressive quality, of cosmic blackness, and it is the women who do almost all of the acting. I don’t want to say that being passive, being inactive, being paralyzed, is wrong in an era when so much action is crass and murderous. I do feel that in the generations that I’ve had a glimpse of—I can see my grandfather at one end, and I can see my boys coming up—there has been a perceptible loss of the sense of righteousness. But many evils are done in the name of righteousness, so perhaps one doesn’t want it back. Nevertheless, I suspect that the vitality of women now, the way many of us lean on them, is not an eternal phenomenon but a historical one, and fairly recent.

  SAMUELS: In an interview you gave Life you expressed some regret at the “yes, but” attitude critics have taken toward it.* Did the common complaint that you had ducked large subjects lead to the writing of Couples?

  No, I meant my work says “yes, but.” Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our urgent inner whispers, but—the social fabric collapses disastrously. Yes, in The Centaur, to self-sacrifice and duty, but—what of a man’s private agony and dwindling? No, in The Poorhouse Fair, to social homogenization and loss of faith, but—listen to the voices, the joy of persistent existence. No, in Couples, to a religious community founded on physical and psychical interpenetration, but—what else shall we do, as God destroys our churches? I cannot greatly
care what critics say of my work; if it is good, it will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink, having in the meantime provided me with a living, the opportunities of leisure, and a craftsman’s intimate satisfactions. I wrote Couples because the rhythm of my life and my oeuvre demanded it, not to placate hallucinatory critical voices.

  SAMUELS: What do you mean by attributing the setting up of religious communities in Couples to God’s destruction of our churches?

  I guess the noun “God” appears in two totally different senses, the God in the first instance being the one worshipped within this nice white church, the more or less watered-down Puritan God; and then God in the second sense means ultimate power. I’ve never really understood theologies which would absolve God of earthquakes and typhoons, of children starving. A god who is not God the Creator is not very real to me, so that, yes, it certainly is God who throws the lightning bolt and this God is above the nice god, above the god we can worship and empathize with. I guess I’m saying there’s a fierce God above the kind God and he’s the one Piet believes in. At any rate, when the church is burned, Piet is relieved of morality, and can choose Foxy—or can accept the choice made for him by Foxy and Angela operating in unison—can move out of the paralysis of guilt into what after all is a kind of freedom. He divorces the supernatural to marry the natural. I wanted the loss of Angela to be felt as a real loss—Angela is nicer than Foxy—nevertheless it is Foxy that he most deeply wants, it is Foxy who in some obscure way was turned on the lathe for him. So that the book does have a happy ending. There’s also a way, though, I should say (speaking of “yes, but”) in which, with the destruction of the church, with the removal of his guilt, he becomes insignificant. He becomes merely a name in the last paragraph: he becomes a satisfied person and in a sense dies. In other words, a person who has what he wants, a satisfied person, a content person, ceases to be a person. Unfallen Adam is an ape. Yes, I guess I do feel that. I feel that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation. A truly adjusted person is not a person at all—just an animal with clothes on. So that it’s a happy ending, with this “but” at the end.