Interview from the Dead: John Updike on Writing

The Goins Review: Hello Mr. Updike. I just want to thank you for doing this interview. We all know your works Rabbit Run, The Poorhouse Fair, and Pigeon Feathers –A&P still seems to be discussed to this day—but you had the chance to speak at the Festival of Arts in Adelaide, South Australia to discuss a common and unoriginal question: Why Write? How hard was it to prepare for that speech?

Updike: My title offers me an opportunity to set a record of brevity at this Festival of Arts; for an adequate treatment would be made were I to ask, in turn, “Why Not?” and sit down.

TGR: It was that easy, huh? But you chose elucidate. That’s understandable. So I realize that you have also traveled to Kenya and were asked about the social usefulness of your writing—and the general betterment of mankind and improving the social conditions of your own U.S.A. was not the motivation for you as a writer.

Updike: …as a writer, for me to attempt to extend my artistic scope into all the areas of my human concern, to substitute nobility of purpose for accuracy of execution, would certainly be to forfeit whatever social usefulness I do have.
…We must write where we stand; wherever we do stand, there is life; and an imitation of life we know, however narrow, is our only ground.

TGR: A very solid ground, indeed! Now what is your fascination with writing? Where did it begin?

Updike: Think of a pencil. What a quiet, nimble, slender and then stubby wonder-worker he is! At his touch, worlds leap into being; a tiger with no danger, a steamroller with no weight, a palace at no cost. All children are alive to the spell of pencil and crayons, of making something, as it were, from nothing; a few children never move out from under this spell, and try to become artists. I was once a rapturous child drawing at the dining room table, under a stained-glass chandelier that sat like a hat on the swollen orb of my excitement.

TGR: So what are some of the effects of writing?

Updike: Writing, really, can make us do rather few substantial things: it can make us laugh, it can make us weep, and if it is pornography and we are rather young, it can make us come. It can also, of course, make us sleep.

TGR: So what do you believe the role of a writer is?

Updike: Is not the writer’s role, indeed, to speak for humanity, as conscience and prophet and servant of the billions not able to speak for themselves?

TGR: Thank you Mr. Updike for this wonderful interview.