Picked-Up Pieces: Essays Read online

  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 review
ing drawn up inwardly when 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 subord
inate to the angelic prerogatives 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.