John Updike at UCLA LIVE: one of the last of the Mohicans

By at 14 November, 2008, 11:36 am

John Updike was at Royce Hall in conversation with David Uhlin as part of UCLA LIVE. Updike was there to promote and talk about his new novel “The Widows of Eastwick” a sequel to “The Witches of Eastwick” — and the evening was really a pleasure.

Updike read a passage from the new novel which gave one a taste of his distinctive ability to load humor, attitude and insight into a sentence that just speeds you along to the next image.

Updike, dressed in a grey suit and a yellow tie, was still very much the writer that he dreamed of being at 18, the way a generation dreamed a writer should be.

Updike talked about that, how much he aspired to be what he described as a writer who wore those tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbow, who lived in Connecticutt, and whose work was published in The New Yorker.

In fact, Updike said that magazines including long missing titles such as the The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Liberty, were so much a part of what he aspired too that he developed this addiction to being in print — so much so, and perhaps at times to the detriment of writing a novel, that if a few months went by and he wasn’t in print it bothered him.

He still writes reviews for the New Yorker and he still feels like as long they are still willing to publish him, he better take it on.

Updike also told of how when he started out the position of the writer in society was such that he and his work mattered and that over the course of his career, sometime in the 70s or 80s “the writer’s position in society eroded,” –although he said Norman Mailer didn’t seem to get that memo (Updike didn’t literally say it like that –he said it better and funnier — and it was wicked and true).

Updike had various funny things to say about “The Witches of Eastwick” and “The Widows of Eastwick”  — that he thought the movie had very little to do with his original novel, but he conceded that Michelle Pfeiffer in the guise of Suki who had a [and here I’m forgetting the right word? poisoned? infernal? toxic?] womb, which he thought was a powerful idea that did not appear in his novel.

“The Widows of Eastwick”Updike said allowed him to write about one of the topics he knows something about, aging, getting old — and to discuss one of the ways old people spend their time — travelling — and to talk about making amends or having some regret or some mulling over the actions of one’s youth — and also to talk about how as one ages one needs to “Create a shield against loneliness”

–which I thought of as interesting –particularly in light of the currrent phenomenon of social networks. Will today’s facebook generation ever be without friends, at least online — will having so many “friends” keep them from loneliness in old age — or will it make the reclusive even more so.

Updike mentioned how his mother, as she aged, became more of a shut-in, with Television as her companion. I was struck by how much Updike, now in his seventies, talked about his mother, and his father. Updike explained that one of his earliest novels, The Centaur was inspired by a stretch of time when the family had moved to a new home, a farm and he and his father were both commuting together to and from work and how during this period he developed a very special relationship and love for this father beyond what he had before — that they were adventurers together and that he had turned to a mythological construct to fictionalize it).

Updike spoke of his mother who was a writer as well, and he said nice things about her, mentioning — or really starting to say but not quite saying that she had not had the success with her writing that he did.  I have always been struck by Updike’s relationship with his mother. He has written in memoirs and about as a boy listening to her typing late in the night. And to some extent one imagines his success as a desire to please her, to fufill her dreams and ambitions. But I do recall that once when asked how she felt about her son’s success Updike’s mother answered, truthfully, something to the effect of “Would that it were me.”

Although it is easy to picture Updike as one of the last of the Mohicans of American Fiction and Literature, It’s not quite fair or true. Updike is one of the last of a generation for whom writing and being a writer was a noble calling, something that you did not merely out of your own ego (although that was part of it) but that you did because you had something about society you wanted to illuminate. That is probably still true, much more in a niche way, but it just that society and media itself seemed to have moved on from assigning cultural importance to such novels and writers.

Updike said that he sees a writer as a “distinguished and useful person” who is “illuminating society” and who “adds something to the world, a little light, a little amusement.”

It was a great nightand we have UCLA LIVE and of course Updike himself to thank for reminding us what a writer can be.

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