Ten O'Clock News; Updike interview part 1

Our guest is the great American men of letters John Updike whose new book is called Just looking. And it's not about letters it's about art especially painting. And I say what I really love about this book is it's I feel connected not to the eminent John Updike but to the every man John Updike. I feel it's a book by little Johnny Updike in a certain way at home with his crayons and drawing as a boy. It is sort of about that I did draw a lot as a kid in fact my first my first hope was to be a cartoonist or an artist of some sort and it died slowly. I went to Harvard with I suppose the crucial mistake because it turned out not to be a very good school for training practical artists but is pretty good on writers so I merged more of a writer than an artist although I did draw up to about the age of 22 23 I even went to an art school so I had some training but yes I'm very mature and my enthusiasm may be is very amateurish. You mentioned the art school. Every one of your books seems to me

mentions out of the dust jacket that you spent a year at the Ruskin school in Oxford and I wonder why obviously that's something important to you. It takes a lot of words to say my wife who wonders why I keep saying it I don't know it's my education my education with the Tillington public schools Harvard College and the and the rest in school. I guess I'm amused that I went there and sort of pleased proud of the fact that I went for one year I've not a graduate. You brag about it. Well I don't really only on the dust jackets. Do you still draw. Really I've been it's Christmas season so I've been trying to draw a few cards but my drawing hasn't really advanced over what it looked like when I was twenty two and in fact is getting somewhat worse because my eyesight is worse and my hand shakes a little but yes I occasionally try to draw. Do you doodle. Does the ivy doodle doodle I do. I remember. And I've asked people about this sometimes nobody else remembers a sign drawing in The New Yorker

of a man's view of his own feet under a hot sun on a beach with a very modest remember in the corner. Yeah I was allowed to illustrate those two autobiographical pieces I also did the drawing for the Lincoln piece the name of that piece. The one you remember was at war with my skin it was about skin and sunbathing and there were three drawings to New York attended of mine actually I also illustrated a letter from Angola many years ago but I've never had the wit to submit any successful cartoon ideas. In fact that's why I became a writer is that you don't need as many ideas as if you're a cartoonist. What is it about you and artist though do you. Obviously you admired them some of them have led you by the hand artistically. But do you envy them too enough. I do sort of envy them it's the pictorial art scene in me to be the heroic modern arts somehow and also the most lucrative it turns out. What writer makes the money the Jasper Johns paintings bring now.

And what writer was quite as dashing and as endlessly productive as the Picasso. So yes it's the heroic art and I have myself in my attempts to be an artist and words have looked to. Museums and especially modern museums as some sort of example for what what art might do now that the little. Song or big free song. I get in the museum is something I hope to translate into my own writing. One of the interesting things about this book is that it begins as I say with a sort of little Johnny Updike in his drawings and his cartoons and comic books almost. And yet you very jointly make the leap into modernism and modern art. You pass through that looking glass rather easily and gracefully admirably I think enviably for a lot of people. You know this book is made up of pieces I had done plus three I wanted to write around that and the first one about my visit to the Museum of Modern Art is one that I wanted to write and that

does describe the transition of or the shock that a prevent child but interested comic book loving cartoon loving boy from Pennsylvania experienced when he went to the Museum of Modern Art at I think about the age of 13 and many of the things seem kind of funny the same way that comic drawings did so it wasn't such a big transition I was enchanted that these amusing things could be on the walls and also they and apparently were art. And I've always loved the museum for that. That gateway into the mysteries of of modernism What would you say to people who have never made it over that threshold into modernism. How would you how would you give him a hand. Well I would tell them to relax in front of the object instead of fighting it. We used to talk about modern poets you know what does it mean but meaning really dawns upon one or sneaks up behind one and I think you should try to as non-verbal as possible enjoy the color and the shape and the fun in the

energy of Modern Art I don't enjoy it all myself I sort of winked out about nineteen seventy but certainly between 1900 or rather be in 1880 let's say one thousand seventy. It's almost all light fall to me at least and should be to most people. Should we be surprised that you haven't written about painters. As far as I know you haven't imagined the minds of painters. The voice who narrates the sentence or the boy says that he's an abstract expressionist living in New York with a black mistress so in a sense he was a painter and the work is some kind of a painting he's doing with his voice and it's been a short story or two but you're right I've not been about painters very often I'm not I'm not a painter. But the carrot on the eye has and it has pleased me to try to imagine what it's what it's like or certainly the creative thrill as accessible to all of us painters

writers commentators as most people do in fact have some memory or experience of the kind of bliss that a painter must feel fairly often is the one painter that you refer to in your book you'd most want to meet any of you imitate. Well the painter who I admire I suppose most of all is for me or who might not have much to say I think the good painters probably did save what they had to say in the painting so I'm not sure I would like to meet them here except to thank him for for painting so terribly terribly well of living painters there was a painter called Richard Estes who paints he's a photo realist of a kind and I devote a little essay in this book to him and I would like to meet him to see what he's like because I love his his stuff. Well we love your stuff. Thank you very much John Updike. Thank you. You're right I find it with music all the time the first thing to do is to you. I don't use it I was

used to just to listen and get used to this and get used to the sound of shroom Berg and then eventually you may like it. Thing is to get to you. Yeah but it begins to feel unable to do. Did you stop drawing after your lessons. Yeah yeah you know I didn't like it you had no aptitude you. Well I had a little aptitude but not much. I actually had a course with them. You know I knew well over. Yes of course. Good painter. If the name is pater Jews of Albert had this had I had found it of course you know he was just retired and I got there called him and it was dots and spots and you started out with corks India ink and white paper notes on. And you're supposed to have fun with them. Again having Clive. Yeah yeah I did yeah. Trying to have fun. I guess that was the end of it.

How do you know what is good and my daughters are good looking over. Have you kept your Paxton's David their worth you know there were no money no. Sure there was a lot of money because those old not to lose the representation no papers all there's market now for them I think this is a very bitter. As you know fight within the painter community between the representation on when abstraction came in in a big way in the 40s. Oh Jack Levine Bostons on the still sore about I know a lot of people it's a very angry making but as time goes by it all sort of subside. Our guest John Updike in his capacity as book reviewer for The New Yorker magazine

discovered Eastern European writers before they were fashionable voile they started taking over governments in Eastern Europe. John I wonder if there is any one two or three books out of that crop you've been reviewing that you'd recommend as a last minute Christmas present to the person who has everything. I wonder if they could find them in the bookstores there's a Yugoslav writer who I met and who is very charming and Gary and I trust feels a little freer even though Yugoslavia is not directly involved cold dun dun yellow quiche. He's quite witty both in person and the books and I would recommend whatever quiche can be found I know a lot has been translated not say a lot perhaps four or five books. And there's a load in what style. Oh it's kind of sad for a society member it's semi surreal. A lot of them write in sort of a surreal mode partly to evade the censors and partly because that's how they feel there's a poll whose name I

remember as Nicky but I may be a little wrong in that he's a man of about 70. Has stuck with it describes the resistance of the dissident movement since the satirically that is suppose a dissident movement so long or. So long a kind of funny about it arrested to recall that sort of in a sad moment and this is all I was maybe five or six years ago I don't know. Things are changing so fast now. The best Polish writer that I've read is course dead has been those shorts who is sort of a demi god to many of us and European writers I've had both of these writers I've mentioned have praised Schultz and I think that particular mode of fantasy of. Magic realism as it were is one that. Many of us of course the poets the Polish poets have received Nobel Prizes in the last because non-American has received praise and all the prizes there

are and there are a number I'm told. Polish poets are exceptionally strong. It's a very strong suit. Poetry. My experience of. Oppression of this sort is that the poet can get away with more than the prose writer going to because it's a little. Little more obscure. So in general the poets do do a bit better. I don't know what they'll do. Frankly if the lid is really off as George Steiner has been rebuked for saying there's a certain advantage to having a lid on you as a writer it makes you feel important and it gives you a subject it gives you a reason to be clever and without you know having too much freedom goes thanks you very so you turn turn turn you into a kind of a couch potato would you tell people to begin with. I think a book called The joke which was his first novel is the place to begin and I found it supreme. I found and find it superior to the book of laughter and forgetting and the other.

Both of which are free are faintly arch. They're immensely clever but they're kind of. Cool. They're modernist deliberately modernist or maybe that part of me I guess or post-modern is what they are but the joke is kind of gritty and it's very much about. Not only the squeeze of the country but the music of it apparently is a very musical part of the world the temple's of Akio and he writes wonderfully about the music it has more stuff than gristle and facts and as in the later books. Do you feel as as a reader of these poets and novelists that you hadn't had a distant early warning of of all the politics that's erupted there this year. It was always there I mean you only had to travel a couple of days in a country like Czechoslovakia to realize how much how how how little loyalty the government commanded among at least you know tell against you and the artistic crowd so no I don't think there were too many surprises what is

surprising is the way the governments have suddenly said more or less you're right this is a lousy system of those changes who would have foreseen that not me. Thank you. John Updike.